When Dimple Met Rishi

A month ago, I became an aunt to an adorable and winsome boy named Rishi.  Around the same time, people started telling me about the book When Dimple Met Rishi, and I thought I would read the book and then maybe give it to my sister to read and imagine a fun future for her child.

When Dimple Met Rishi is about two Indian-American kids who go to an app development summer camp the summer between high school and college.  Rishi and Dimple's parents are friends and want their children to meet and get married.  Rishi is totally on-board with this, and he goes to Insomnia-con just to meet Dimple and propose (with his grandmother's ring, no less).  Dimple has no idea; she's at Insomnia-con to develop an app to help people deal with diabetes.  They meet, Rishi basically proposes, and Dimple freaks out.  But then they get to know each other, and Dimple realizes that he's not all bad.

In general, I veer away from young adult romance because I find it too angsty and dramatic.  I would never want to return to the period of my life when I was an overly-dramatic teenager, and it is hard for me to read books centered on characters at that age without rolling my eyes multiple times.

But I also grew up Indian-American, and I love that this book exists.  There's an Indian girl on the cover, there are Hindi words in the text, there are Indian narrators on the audiobook (who pronounce all the names and words correctly!!!).  All of these things are so great.  It is like the YA romance version of Hasan Minhaj's Netflix special.  I also appreciate that in this book, it's Dimple who is ambitious and driven and totally into being a techie, with big dreams on how to make it happen.  And that Rishi loves art but feels like he needs to go to engineering school to make his parents happy.

Much about this book rings true, as someone who grew up here to Indian parents.  One of my favorite parts, a tiny detail, was when Rishi explained to Dimple's friend that he speaks Hindi, but that he speaks a version of Hindi that is from Mumbai, where locals speak Marathi.  And his parents went to Mumbai from elsewhere, as did many other people, and so the Hindi they speak is not often understood outside of Mumbai.  This is so 100% true.  My parents grew up in Bangalore, which is a Kannada-speaking city.  But their families are both originally from Andhra, which is Telugu-speaking.  But so many people from Andhra go to Bangalore that the version of Telugu they all speak is completely different than the Telugu spoken in Andhra.  It's a small detail, but many Indian people live through it, and I loved that it somehow made its way into this book.

I also appreciate that the author, Sandhya Menon, made cultural pride and knowledge such a positive thing in this book.  Rishi in particular is very well-versed in his heritage and has no embarrassment at all about fully embracing it.  I think that is a really great lesson.

But there were also many things in this book that bothered me.  Putting aside my general annoyance with young adult romance (and this book had many of those same tropes and bothers), there were things that just were too much for me.  Granted, I am 100% sure that I would notice these and judge these more as an Indian than probably other people would.  But they still grated.

For example, Rishi.  He's this really perfect guy.  He's extremely rich and goes to private school with other rich kids, but somehow he's not spoiled or bratty or entitled, even though all the other rich kids in this book totally are.  This is never explained.  Also, he is really smart and funny and kind.  And he is an AMAZING artist who tells his dad that his "brain just doesn't work the same way" as an engineer's brain does.  But... he somehow managed to get accepted to MIT, anyway, and is going there to major in computer engineering.  Because THAT's an easy thing to just swing.  Also, as a 17-year-old, he just shows up somewhere with his grandmother's engagement ring to propose marriage to a complete stranger and this strains credulity to me.

Also, Rishi had this whole encounter with this other Indian guy, Hari, that annoyed me.  Hari was a jerk in the book, but there was one point when Rishi asked him where his parents were from (meaning, where in India) and Hari very pointedly said that his parents were born in the US.  And then Rishi somehow "won" this competition by talking about how he was so happy and proud to go back to his family's home in India and really connect with his culture and background.  This seemed to imply that somehow Hari was less Indian or less whatever than Rishi.  This really bothered me because, personally, I despise when people ask me where I am from and then act as though my answer ("Chicago") is incorrect, as though they assume I am from somewhere else just because I am Indian.  I realize that this question is different when asked by one Indian to another, but I completely understood Hari's anger in the situation, and I found Rishi's "I love my heritage and go to India all the time" holier-than-thou attitude pretty grating in that instance.

And then there's Dimple's relationship with her parents.  Apparently, Dimple's mom wants her to wear Indian clothes all the time, even at school.  (And Dimple does this, as there are multiple comments on her kurtas and odnis).  And her mom wants her to wear a bunch of make-up and get married stat.  Whereas Dimple wants to wear her glasses, no make-up, and focus on school.  This part just never really rang true to me because it seemed like the author really wanted to set up this weird misunderstanding/antagonistic relationship between Dimple and her mom, but it was hard to believe in (as an adult, anyway) because her mom didn't come off that way at all, really, when you encountered her in the story.  Maybe that's the way an adult would read the story, though, whereas a teenager would read it quite differently than I do :-)

The other thing about this book that just was off to me was the relationship between Rishi's brother, Ashish, and Dimple's friend, Celia.  It felt like a waste of time and space to me, and I don't really think it needed to be included at all.  Especially as I felt like the book dragged a bit at times with the plotting, and getting rid of that would have made it a bit tighter.

I think what frustrated me most was that it didn't quite rise as high above the Indian stereotypes as I would have liked.  You still have two really good kids who do not rebel much at all against their parents.  They both somehow get into Stanford and MIT (because God forbid they go to a place like UC-Berkeley or something).  They watch Bollywood movies and, conveniently, perform in a talent show with a Bollywood dance number.  And their parents want to arrange marriage for them at 18.  Honestly, I'm surprised there wasn't a mention that Rishi had won the Scripps spelling bee as a child.

But!  This book exists, and it is so proudly Indian-American, and it owns that culture, and I love that.  I'm so glad that Dimple was going after her coding dreams and that Rishi had a great love for art,  but I wish that it could have gone a bit further.

The Best We Could Do

Sometimes I'll Google phrases like "best diverse comic books" and come across titles I've never heard of, such as this gem by Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do.  Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and left the country with her family as a refugee during the war.  They eventually made it to the United States, where Bui met her husband and they started a family.  While raising her son, Bui reflected upon her relationships with her own parents and how little she knew about their lives before she entered the world.  This graphic memoir is her attempt to tell their story and her own, and it's a beautiful one.

As I get older, it becomes more and more clear to me that my parents are human, and that they are humans who age.  As I see my friends with their (still quite young) children, I can also see just how exhausting parenthood can be.  There are few relationships in life that can remain as inherently selfish and self-absorbed as that of a child towards its parent.  Even now, as an adult who is capable of doing adult things like cooking her own dinner and doing her own laundry, every time I go to my parents' house, I regress 100% and expect there to be food waiting for me when I arrive, and food ready for me to take back with me when I leave.  I call my dad and complain of medical symptoms so that he will call in prescriptions for me.  I call my mom and ask if she'll come over to oversee work on my house so that I don't have to take a day off of work.

Bui reflects upon this as she takes care of her son and compares her childhood to those of her parents' and her son's.  Her parents came of age in vastly different circumstances; they met in college, got married, and then their world imploded.  They raised children in the midst of war, and then left the country on a boat (while Bui's mother was eight months pregnant) to get to Malaysia.  They arrived in America, still chased by their personal demons, and raised a family the best way they knew how.  Bui struggled with her relationship with her parents, particularly her father, and only began to understand why when she learned more about their childhoods.  The empathy that comes through in the way she describes her family history is so moving, and the title of the book works so well.  Her parents weren't perfect, and they made mistakes.  But they did the best they could do, and their children grew up with better lives, and their grandchildren grow up with even better ones.

The Best We Could Do is a beautiful story, particularly at this time when so much of the world is turning away refugees.  Accepting refugees not only changes the lives of the refugees, but of generations to come.  The book is also a truly heartfelt memoir about family and the deep love that you can have for people you don't always understand and who are far from perfect.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

I have lived my whole life by the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Michigan.  I love the vastness of these waters, like interior freshwater oceans.  I grew up visiting the beaches and now walk along the waterfront quite regularly; I live only a mile away from the shore.  So as soon as I heard about Dan Egan's book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, I knew I would read it.  I don't think I realized just how depressing and stressful the book would be, though.  (That said, it ends on a semi-happy note!)

The Great Lakes were a bastion of glorious fresh water and bountiful fish for many, many years.  They were difficult to navigate, so they were mostly protected and allowed to grow and thrive as they wanted.  And then the St. Lawrence Seaway was built and things have been going downhill since then.

The lakes have been under attack by invasive species constantly since then.  The first attack by these really, really scary looking sea lampreys, which are basically blood-sucking eels that came from the Atlantic Ocean and attacked our poor, unsuspecting lake fish.  I do not recommend googling images of the sea lamprey because it is not something you'll be able to get out of your head any time soon.  It is ghastly and will likely show up in a nightmare.

Luckily, with some great work (that still continues to this day, at a cost), scientists were able to get the sea lamprey population way down by finding a poison that worked on them and only them.  BUT THEN, someone came back to Michigan from out west and was like, "What the Great Lakes need are sporting fish, not boring fish!" and so then he imported salmon to the lakes and then brought a bunch of species for those salmon to eat, and AGAIN the native fish populations dwindled.  (But recreation on the lakes SOARED into a very lucrative industry.)  And people were happy but the lakes were not really a great place.  AND THEN came the mussels, the true villains of our story (and the villains of lake stories all over the country, I think).  And they ate all the phytoplankton and starved out the salmon and the other fish, and there is NO GETTING RID OF THEM.  Really, I heard a Science Friday podcast with Dan Egan and some other scientists recently, and they were basically like, "Hopefully something will come and solve the mussel problem, but it's not likely to be humans."  Because there are just trillions of them.  If you were to drain the lakes, they would be full of these quagga mussels, cleaning the water and eating all the food and being complete menaces.

Also, asian carp has infested the Chicago River and is likely to already be in Lake Michigan and who knows what will happen then.

Suffice it to say, things do not look great for the Great Lakes.  Not only are there the many invasive species, but the lakes are bordered by eight different states, and two countries, and they have all these river tributaries, and people travel from the lakes to other parts of the countries, and the EPA seems to really not care that much about the lakes (to an appalling degree, really), and Chicagoans really want to keep taking from the lakes without giving a lot back, and the fishing industry really wants the salmon back, and other groups really want the trout and perch back, and it is very disheartening to read about.  Very important and fascinating, but fairly disheartening.  People can understand a forest fire or can see glaciers receding, but they don't care nearly as much about things happening underwater.  They don't understand just how different the lakes are now than they were 50 years ago, or 100 years ago.  There has been an incalculable loss to the whole world, and we seem not to notice.

Egan goes into excellent detail not only about the many rounds of invasive species in the lakes, but also about the people who depend on the lakes but also hurt them, the many government agencies that seem pretty ineffective in managing the lakes, and the people who are trying valiantly to help the lakes as much as they can.  I noted many quotes about the lakes that I was going to share in this post, but they are fairly sad and long, and I don't know if that's the best.

Instead, I'll leave you with the uplifting fact that Egan gave me at the end that made me feel a little better.  Native fish species in the lakes may be learning how to eat and digest the evil quagga mussels!  They never did before, and they were starving because the mussels ate all their food.  But now, since the mussels are so plentiful and the fish food is not at all plentiful, the fish are going after the mussels.  This is glorious.  I hope this continues and helps put the lakes in a little bit of a better balance.  Of course, this could all be of no help if more invasive species come in and wreak havoc on the system, or if we continue to pollute the lakes at the same rate that we do now.  But it's a story of resilience and adaptation and rooting for the underdog, and I think that's grand.

If you live by the Great Lakes, or any lake, I highly recommend reading this book!  If you enjoy books about environmental impact, or even if they cast you into despair, but you like to feel well-informed, I recommend this book to you, too.  I plan to do some research to see how I can help the lakes!  If only to go and clean up the beaches sometimes.

And if nothing else, I recommend a listen to the Science Friday podcast I linked to above!  It's excellent.

Rita Williams-Garcia's One Crazy Summer

I first heard about the book One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia, on Ana's blog in 2014.  Me being me, I read the book in 2017.  So I'm a little late to the party, but the party is still excellent!

One Crazy Summer is set during the summer of 1968.  Delphine and her sisters are shipped from their home with their father and grandmother in Brooklyn, New York to stay with their mother (who emphatically did not want them) in Oakland, California.  Their mother, Cecile, is pretty eccentric and hands-off, so Delphine and her sisters spend much of their time in a summer camp run by the Black Panthers, learning about civil rights, strength, and unity. 

Williams-Garcia's note at the end of the book emphasized that there were children also involved in the fight for civil rights, and this book is a brilliant way of showing that involvement.  It's also about as complex as a children's novel can be about familial baggage. Cecile left her family and took off for the other side of the country.  She isn't motherly or very caring at all in the book, to the extent that the resolution at the end felt a little forced to me.  But as an adult reading the book, it's easy to empathize with her and her desire to make her own choices and live her own life.  Serious kudos to Williams-Garcia for making Cecile a complex, complete person with her own struggles and motivations, some of which are unrelated to her role as a wife or mother or caregiver.

And Delphine and her sisters are wonderful.  I loved the way they stick together and then bicker and then come together again.  I love how they all know each other so well but continue to surprise and challenge each other.  I love that they all just got up and went to San Francisco together for a day on their own.  I loved the sweetness of Delphine letting herself go one moment to scream with joy as she goes down a big hill, instead of always being the grown-up.

One of my favorite things about this book is the way it portrayed the Black Panthers.  This is not the paramilitary, extremist organization that many people learn about in school.  It's one that provided free meals in neighborhoods and organized summer camps that taught children that they were important and valued.

 I read this book for a bit of lighthearted fun after so many heavy, difficult books over the past few months.  It was so easy to read and so lovely, but it certainly has depth and more heart and kindness than you would expect in such a slim, quick read.  I can't wait to continue the series!

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

I read Sam Quinones' Dreamland:  The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic for a new book club I'm joining.  I have had it on my radar since it came out, but I admit that I was wary of reading it.  I've read a lot about the trials and tribulations facing America's rural and forgotten towns and cities since the election, and I no longer want to read about them in a vacuum.  I would rather read about the country as a whole, finding ways to work together.  I am sick of reading about how every single group feels forgotten and left behind (well, mostly how one group feels left behind just because everyone else is starting to catch up).

What I wanted from Dreamland was a meaty account of the way our country has approached drugs from the past to the present, from procurement to addiction to prosecution to rehabilitation.  I wanted Quinones to look frankly at how drug use and abuse channels into our prison system, but he didn't really touch that at all.  And, honestly, he never implied that he was going to touch it.  The book is about the opiate epidemic, and about how it became an epidemic.  It is not about our law enforcement or prison system.  It is about the drug, what it does to you, and how it became so easy for so many people to get addicted to it.

Which is an important story to tell, absolutely.  But did not feel that different to me than other stories about how drugs come into the country and get people hooked.  And so the story felt fairly repetitive and even within the book, it felt repetitive.

The book also made me feel uncomfortable.  The premise of the book is basically that white, suburban, and fairly well-off Americans are addicted to opiates, and the fact that it's people from "good families" that are addicted that this is a story worth telling.  The phrase "good families" is used multiple times.  The flip side of this, of course, is that people who are not white or suburban or rich but become addicted to drugs are somehow less.  That even within addiction, there is a hierarchy, and these opiate addicts are at the top.  This was particularly frustrating because all of these white people seemed to hardly ever go to prison, or if they went to prison, they soon got out, and then they were at it again.  They seemed to get so many chances whereas many other people who did less never get out.  Quinones never even hints at this disparity.

Most of the "black tar heroin" that people graduate to from prescription painkillers comes from dealers that connect back to a small town in Mexico, Xalisco.  Quinones details their operation in  great detail (fairly repetitively), talking about how the key difference in their approach is to deal with heroin like a business that grows quickly, stretching across America.  They value product integrity and quality, just-in-time inventory, and customer satisfaction.  They work hard to keep their clients (meaning they work hard to ensure no one tries too hard to get clean), and they have a very vast, complicated network.  They are also very polite and well-behaved and don't ever use.  So they aren't like most drug dealers, who are also addicts.  They're just there for the money, and then they want to go home to Mexico and live better lives.  They want to take care of their families and impress their neighbors.  That's why they come to America.

The dealers also don't ever sell to black people.  They only sell to whites.  That's part of the reason why they target the smaller towns and suburbs, not the cities.  They don't go anywhere too white, because they need an immigrant population to blend into.  But they also don't go anywhere near black people.  This is stated unambiguously, and again, Quinones does not go into this.

Quinones does go into the herculean efforts put forth by the pharmaceutical industry to get opiate painkillers on the market and approved for any sort of pain medication, and the (very flawed) study they cited over and over again that claimed opiate painkillers were not addictive.  (Spoiler:  They are.  Very.  Addictive.  For some people.)  These were the most informative sections of the book to me, mostly because they highlight just how unscrupulous people can be when they are incentivized to focus on profit and sales, and when they are given information that aligns with what they want to hear.  It was horrifying to read about the lengths to which companies would go to get doctors to prescribe their drugs, and to ensure that they kept prescribing their drugs, and to combat even the slightest idea that their drugs could have very negative side effects.  It's scary, and the more I read about things like this, the more I want strong government oversight of the free market.  The market may force companies to self-correct when they go too far, but how far can they go, and how many people [from "good families"] have to suffer before they get to the tipping point?  Also, how much money are companies able to make from people suffering overall vs the small amount they then pay out in damages?  Generally, the pay-out is way less than the profit, so... we are not really incentivizing them to do anything different in future.

Quinones also goes into detail about the difficulties the medical profession faces in trying to deal with the guidance first for and now against opiates.  This I found particularly good reading, mostly because my father is in general practice, and he's dealt with a lot of patient demands and these patient satisfaction surveys that are both really useful and really horrible.  It's really hard to be in general practice these days, and it's only getting harder, and people still trust their general practice doctor more than any other doctor, so it's REALLY hard to imagine these poor doctors trying to help alleviate their patients' pain, and then these patients trusting their doctors and getting addicted to painkillers and then to heroin.

There were many things about this book that made me sad and angry.  I don't personally know anyone who has dealt with opiate addiction in their family, so I can only imagine the hurt and bewilderment these families must deal with as they grapple with addiction that starts from something as seemingly innocuous as lower back pain.  Addiction is hard to understand.  Pain is also extremely hard to understand.  Understanding pain and addiction together is really hard.  I think it's very valuable that this book was written to bring these things to light.

But, I also think Quinones could have done much more here in bringing up the disparities in the way we treat addiction in this country.  People in the suburbs who are addicted to heroin that they buy on the street from drug dealers are "suffering a disease" and deserve "treatment."  People in the city who are addicted to anything else are "dangerous criminals" and are locked up.  I feel this book was lacking for missing that whole piece of the puzzle.  Granted, it's a big piece of a huge puzzle and well worth its own book.  But it could at least be acknowledged.

Detroit: An American Autopsy

Charlie LeDuff's Detroit:  An American Autopsy is a book I've had on my list to read for a while, I think since I finished grad school.  As is typical for me, I bought the book on Kindle and then promptly forgot about it.  I finally read it while I was on a work trip.  I never got over my jet lag, so I stayed up late several nights in a row with Charlie LeDuff.

Detroit:  An American Autopsy is a pretty good title for what this book is about.  LeDuff is a reporter who moves back to his hometown of Detroit in the early 2000s to write for the local paper.  In his reporting and in this book, he writes about how Detroit went from being one of the biggest cities in the United States, with a population of almost 2 million people, to one of the most hollowed-out; today, it is home to less than 700,000 people.  It is one of the most rapid declines in population of a city ever.  A lot of this is due to the rise and fall of the American auto industry, but a lot of it is due to other factors as well.

If you've followed this blog for some time, or at least since the last presidential election, you know that I've been reading several books in an attempt to better understand the current state of our country and world.  I did not read Detroit for this reason specifically, but on reflection, I think it does an excellent job of explaining why someone might vote for Donald Trump.  Michigan is one of those states that used to be strongly Democratic and then swung right for Trump in this past election.  LeDuff's book gives a very compelling case as to why that might be, even though it was written in 2013.  To LeDuff, as Detroit goes, so goes America.  Detroit paralleled the country's rise and fall more than any other city, tied so closely to the auto industry.  As America rose in prominence and people bought more cars, the city went sky high, with beautiful (seriously stunning) architecture, world class museums and strong worker's rights.  Then came the 1960s and white flight.  And then came the 1980s and all the decades that followed - foreign competition in the auto industry, corruption and incompetence in government and industry, and a rapid decline in the power and influence of labor unions.  Jobs moved elsewhere.  But, as one person in the book put it, "I guess when you get down to it, it's simple... The man took his factory away, but he didn't take the people with him."

LeDuff's book is excellently written in a Sam Spade, hard-boiled detective fiction fashion.  He writes in exactly the way you would expect someone from Detroit to talk - frank, no sugarcoating.  His deep love for the city and its people is obvious, but so, too, is his anger and frustration with the way its leaders keep taking and don't give anything back.  Detroit is a city that has been decimated and abandoned by those who claim to work to improve it, and LeDuff is sick of it.

While reading this book, I often wondered to myself whether LeDuff voted for Clinton or Trump in this past election.  He spends a lot of time with police and firemen and union workers who are fed up with what their jobs and lives have become.  The firemen in particular are angry because arson happens regularly in Detroit; they risk their lives for other people to get the benefit of fraudulent insurance claims.  And their anger seems very well-justified, they don't get much support from the city at all, as the city has no money.  Similarly, both of LeDuff's brothers work blue-collar jobs that pay hardly anything at all.  They struggle to support their families.  You can see very well how people in situations such as this one would be excited by a promise to Make America Great Again.  (Especially if you are able to push aside/ignore all the horrible things Trump said about anyone who is not white/male/straight, etc.)  In fact, I would say that this book made me understand a person's decision to vote for Trump and his message more than any other book I have read on the topic (or around the topic).  The desperation and frustration and anger that people feel, their depression that they'll never get out of a cycle, that no one sees or cares about their problems - it's all palpable.   "Desperation," he quotes someone saying, "feels like someone's reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts."

LeDuff has a lot of scorn and derision for the American auto industry and many people in Detroit's government (all of whom deserve derision and scorn).  And he comes across as quite cynical and jaded and rightfully angry.  For example:

When I had arrived back home the previous winter, Local 235 here was on strike.  It was a cold, bitter dispute, complete with old-school fires in the oil drums.  The unionized workers, numbering nearly two thousand at the time, lost  They gave in to deep wage cuts, in some cases from $28 an hour to $14, in exchange for keeping their jobs.  Apparently it was not enough.
In contrast, Dick Dauch, the CEO and chairman of American Axle, was given an $8.5 million bonus by his board of directors after the strike and gave assurances to the workers and the city of Hamtramck that he would keep production there.  It was lip service.

And this is where many Americans are frustrated, including the "liberal elites."  No one thinks that math is okay, but no one seems willing to actually do anything about it.

LeDuff also has a great capacity for kindness and compassion and empathy that comes through just as clearly.  He writes beautiful stories about people, he cares so much for his city, he wants so badly for the world (particularly America, and especially Detroit) to be a fairer place.

I really loved reading this book and recommend it very highly.  It focuses on Detroit, but I think it would appeal to anyone who lives in America's Rust Belt or anywhere now where people are desperate for jobs and money to come into the region.  I'll leave you with this (long-ish) quote that had me close to tears, and that I suspect will have the same effect on you:

It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons.  But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can't keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist's match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children's milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn't manage a grocery store, or Wall Street gifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation's children with a burden of debt while they partied it up in Southampton?
Can she be blamed for that?

***
"I know society looks at a person like me and wants me to go away," she said.  "'Go ahead, walk in the Detroit River and disappear.'  But I can't.  I'm alive.  I need help.  But when you call for help, it seems like no one's there.  It feels like there ain't no love any more."

Are you interested in learning more about this subject?:
I put up loads of links at the end of my reviews on Strangers in their Own Land and The Unwinding.

It is tangentially related, but this Freakonomics podcast episode "No Hollywood Ending for the Visual-Effects Industry" is excellent to get an understanding of how cities/states/countries fight each other through tax breaks for companies, which usually ends up with shareholders winning and taxpayers (and anything funded by taxpayers) losing.

Planet Money's podcast episode "Mexico's Front Seat in the Global Auto Industry" is also worth a listen.

Michael Moore's movie Roger and Me is about his hometown of Flint, MI (currently home to a massive lead-in-the-water crisis that the local government lied about and the state government has basically washed its hands of).  Here's the trailer, you can also watch the full movie online if you do a search:

Dispatches from Dystopia, by Kate Brown

I heard about Kate Brown's Dispatches from Dystopia:  Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten on NPR's book concierge.  It's a series of essays about "the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history."  In this slim volume (excluding the notes, it is only 150 pages long), Brown goes to Chernobyl and Seattle and many places in between, trying to understand how humans form a sense of place.  She specifically chooses places that are forgotten, talks to people who stayed behind when everyone else moved on.

This book was a little different than what I expected, though I am not sure what exactly I expected.  It is really beautifully and empathetically written, though Brown herself has more of a role in the essays than I expected her to.  She acknowledges this at the very beginning, saying that it is difficult for her to be a third party observer when she is in the midst of the story herself.  So instead of talking about the places and the people themselves, she talks about her interactions with the people and places she visits.  In this way, Kate Brown reminds me of Rebecca Solnit.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it gives a new perspective on many different places.  Very real to me was the chapter on Seattle's Panama Hotel, where many Japanese-Americans left their belongings before they were sent to internment camps during World War II.  Brown talks about how some words were used over others to make the whole thing seem more palatable, how people were taken away quietly and away from others so that no one had to see what they had brought to bear:

White Seattleites in February 1942 voted overwhelmingly for the Japanese Americans' removal.  Imagine their reaction if Japanese American deportees had left their possessions in plain sight: rain-soaked laundry dangling from clotheslines, produce rotting on fruit stands, goods in shop windows fading in the sun.  The unrepressed possessions of suddenly absent fellow citizens would have told a story starkly divergent from newspaper accounts of "evacuation," safety, national security, and inevitable fealty to race.  The basement full of belongings underscores the myth of what was euphemistically called "evacuation," a term implying benevolence, a federal government seeking to remove Japanese Americans for their own safety.  Like the deportations - indeed, like the deportees - the stockpile was meant to be forgotten.  To me, the Panama's storage room of locked-away possessions served as an icon for the quiet banishment of Japanese Americans from American society.

Much of Brown's book revolves around multiple ways of looking at either the same scene or the same situation and acknowledging the different biases or assumptions that get people to those viewpoints.  For example, she describes how American scientists looked at the impact of radiation on people by first studying the environment and what the minimum exposure level of a person was to an environment; Soviet scientists looked at people, saw the symptoms, and made diagnoses based on the person, not the environment.  The approaches reached different conclusions and led to different pros and cons.  The American method has now encroached on how we view almost all environmental disasters and impacts - upon individuals, not upon a whole system.

One of my favorite things about this book was the way Brown insists that we change our perspective on people who live their lives differently than we do.  She visits Chernobyl expecting to see so many horrors, but she sees that some people do still live there.  She visits another town, Pripyat, that has since been abandoned because of a nuclear explosion but that was really quite a beautiful, idyllic place to live when things were going well.  Meaning, just because people lived in the Soviet Union, that doesn't mean they were all unhappy and miserable all the time.  They had good lives, too.

Brown's last chapter takes her to Elgin, Illinois, a town not so far from where I grew up.   She tells a story that is now familiar to many of us that grew up in America's heartland, the steel belt turned rust belt, the towns that many feel have been left behind as jobs and people and money go to the cities.  But Brown also tells the flip side of the story, of how those towns often made decisions that hurt themselves in the long run, choosing short-term profits and cost-cutting over longer-term investment.  When workers at the main employer in Elgin went on strike to fight for better wages, the company response was fierce and immediate.  "For the following century, the company suffered no more strikes, and Elgin leaders enticed other manufacturers to town with tax breaks, land grants, and arguments that Elgin was 'a poor field for the agitator.'" 

And so, even though unemployment was low, people continued to work well past the age of retirement, and 40% of married women continued to work after marrying and having children to support their families.  And then the factory left, anyway, to find even cheaper labor.  Brown talks about how, for such a prosperous country, America has many towns that look abandoned and left behind, almost ghost-like.  "These are the muted smells and sounds of amputated careers and arrested bank accounts.  Looking at the chain of churches and shops displacing one another in quick succession, feeling something between depression and despair, I think about E.P. Thompson's question - who will rescue these places from the enormous condescension of posterity?"

In some ways, Dispatches from Dystopia has the same central premise as Strangers in their Own Land - we need to give people who feel forgotten and left behind a platform from which to speak and feel valued and empowered, rather than just telling their stories from our perspectives.  But perhaps because Kate Brown made the decision to go to multiple places, to draw parallels between towns in America and towns in the Communist bloc, the American approach to science and free will vs the Soviet approach, it felt much wider-reaching.  So much of what we believe is based on justifying acts, making ourselves feel better, like using the word "evacuation" instead of "imprisonment."  Talking about "diversity" instead of "equality."  And it's only when we really push ourselves to make those connections, draw the parallels, that we can fully acknowledge what we've done and what we can do going forward.

Are you interested in learning more about this subject?:
I put up loads of links at the end of my reviews on Strangers in their Own Land and The Unwinding.

If you would like to watch a documentary about the women who still live in the Chernobyl zone, check out The Babushkas of Chernobyl.

While there, you can listen to Holly Morris' TED Talk about the women and what happy, peaceful lives they are living, contrary to what all of us would generally believe.

Holly Morris' story about the Babushkas is also included in this episode of the TED Radio Hour, Toxic.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

I took advantage of having a big chunk of free time off work between Christmas and New Year's to tackle a big, meaty book.  I saw Isabel Wilkerson speak during the Chicago Humanities Festival after the election in November, and I had a feeling that her book would be a great one for me to read to start the new year.

The Warmth of Other Suns is about the Great Migration, the movement of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North over several decades in the 20th century.  Wilkerson conducted hundreds of interviews.  Her book compiles many people's stories, though she focuses on three people who left various areas of the South at different times and went to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to start new lives.

This book is excellent.  It is 540 pages of personal stories, which probably sounds like a lot, but it is not.  It feels like you are in the same room as these people as they tell you about their lives, the decisions they made, the regrets they have, the people they knew.  It's almost like a gigantic, written version of This American Life.

Like many people, I am struggling to come to grips with the way the world seems to be moving backwards to tribalism, distrust, and fear.  Reading Wilkerson's book was empowering.  When she came to speak at the Humanities Festival, she said something that I keep going back to.  I am paraphrasing, but the gist of it was, "The lesson of the Great Migration is the power of an individual choice.  They freed themselves."

Often, when reading books about minorities in the US, the general trend of stories is the same.  People who are different show up.  The people who are already there become angry.  They treat the newcomers badly (sometimes, really really badly).  The newcomers fight for their rights.  Sometimes they win.  It's an important story to tell because it happens so consistently, probably everywhere, but definitely in the United States.  But it's also just depressing and disheartening.  People are so frightened by anything that is different, no matter how superficial that difference might be, or no matter how ridiculous that fear is.  And they fight back in terrifying, brutal ways.

 But even against all that, a backdrop of hate and threats and physical violence, people fight.  And that's what was so, so wonderful about this book.  Even people with very little of their own, barely scraping by and with no rights of their own - they resisted and they fought and they made the world a more accepting and welcoming and equal place for all of us.  As Wilkerson said, "The Great Migration... was a step in freeing not just the people who fled, but the country whose mountains they crossed... It was, if nothing else, an affirmation of the power of an individual decision, however powerless the individual might appear on the surface."

A few snapshots from this book really stood out to me:
1.  Ida Mae Gladney coming to Chicago in the 1930s and realizing that she had the opportunity and the right to vote and that her vote would be heard and counted.  She had never even bothered trying to vote before.  Many, many years later, she would vote for Barack Obama for Illinois state senator.

2.  Robert Foster's desperate search for a motel to spend the night on his drive to his new life in Los Angeles.  He went from motel to motel and was denied a room at every single one.  Finally, he broke down and told one couple that he was a veteran, that he was a physician, that he meant no harm to anyone and just wanted to sleep.  They still refused.

3.  The story of a man who worked with the NAACP, was locked up in a mental institution, and then escaped with the help of a coordinated effort that had him in a coffin and traveling across state lines in different hearses.

4.  The store clerk who owned a dog and taught that dog many tricks.  One trick was for the clerk to ask the dog if he'd rather be black or dead.  The dog was trained to respond by rolling over and playing dead.

There were many more stories about oppression and resistance, the times people bowed to authority and the times they defied it.  The many ways that people faced indignities and swallowed the insults, turned the other cheek, and then came back to fight another round.  The consequences of leaving behind family and friends to start a new life.  The consequences of working long, hard hours to make a better life for a family that you rarely get to see.  The consequences of moving from the rural south to the industrial north.

I don't think I've done a good job of describing why this book is so moving.  But it's a huge book, and it covers so much!  It's hard to cover all of that in one post.  All I can say is that it is an excellent story of how much progress we've made and the cost of that progress, not only for the country as a whole but for so many individual people.  And it serves as an important reminder that individual decisions matter and can make a difference in the world.

George Packer's The Unwinding

from the political process

George Packer's The Unwinding:  An Inner History of the New America was at the top of the New York Times list "6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win."  I promptly went to the library to check it out.  (Will I spend the next four years attempting to understand what has happened to the world?  Probably.)

The Unwinding is an excellent book.  It is the sort of book that makes you angry and frustrated and believe that, yes, maybe the system is rigged, but not the way that Trump says it's rigged.  If you saw the movie (or read the book) The Big Short, then The Unwinding is the longer, less glamorous version of that story.  It shows just how many people lose when business and government work together and support each other, and that the people who lose usually have the least to lose.

The Unwinding mainly follows a few key people over a few decades.  There is a community organizer in Youngstown, OH, a Joe Biden staffer in Washington, DC, the whole city of Tampa in the midst of the mortgage crisis, a man attempting to create a small biodiesel company in North Carolina, and Peter Thiel.  There are also vignettes in which he profiles other people who have had either a positive or negative impact on the country - from Sam Walton to Alice Waters, from Newt Gingrich to Elizabeth Warren.

Packer's compassion for his subjects and his fury at the government come through loud and clear in this book.  Similar to those profiled in Strangers in Their Own Land, many of the people Packer interviewed have been neglected and they feel left behind.  Some of them don't trust the government because the government does not seem to care very much about them.  Some of them don't trust the government because they have seen just how little politicians will do when they depend on large businesses for money.  And some of them exploit people's feelings and fears to get further themselves.  (Ahem, Newt Gingrich.)

There were many staggering facts and figures and stories in this book.  One of the stories that stood out the most to me was about the Walton family.  At one point, six members of the Walton family held as much wealth as the bottom 30% of Americans.  Six people.

And it was only after his death...that the country began to understand what his company had done.  Over the years, America had gotten more like Wal-Mart.  It had gotten cheap.  Prices were lower, and wages were lower.  There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters.  The small towns where Mr. Sam had seen his opportunity were getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there, too.  The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company's bottom line.

 It is hard to read this book without feeling completely helpless at the end of it.  People talk a lot these days about how disengaged Americans are from the political process, how disenchanted they are with politicians.  This book explains very well why this is the case.

The establishment could fail and fail and still survive, even thrive.  It was rigged to win, like a casino, and once you were on the inside you had to do something dramatic to lose your standing...All at the top of their field, all brilliant and educated to within an inch of their lives, all Democrats, all implicated in an epic failure - now hired to sort out the ruins.  How could they not see things the way of the bankers with whom they'd studied and worked and ate and drunk and gotten rich?  Social promotion and conflicts of interest were built into the soul of the meritocracy.

In a way, reading this book makes you realize why Donald Trump doesn't understand all this hullabaloo about his many concerning conflicts of interest all over the world.    No one at any level of government seems to be free of lobbyists or special interest groups.  Even after a massive, world-crippling economic recession from which we have still not recovered (and which probably led, in many ways, to the current political situation), still we see very few government or business leaders who were punished for their actions.  In fact, many were rewarded with huge paychecks.  Robert Rubin, for example, moved between Wall Street and Washington, DC, influencing policy that netted companies huge amounts of money, and getting bonuses from those companies before all the risk they took on came back to bite them.  Even then, Rubin left with a very tidy sum of money.  He left multiple times with tidy sums of money.  It's no wonder that small business owners and everyday citizens get upset when the government comes after them for some seemingly small violation while letting the big guys get away with everything.  One man in this book admits that "he had always feared the power of government, almost as much as he had feared poverty."

So many things about this book felt prescient.  There was a section on Newt Gingrich and what a terrible person he is.  One on Andrew Breitbart and how he used the internet to reach people (and apparently started out working for Arianna Huffington, which I did not know).  Peter Thiel, who just took down the entire Gawker website for outing him as homosexual some years ago.  Elizabeth Warren, the only person profiled who seems to have earned Packer's respect.  Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Barack Obama.  But mostly, this book is about America and how difficult it can be now for regular citizens' voices to be heard. 

There were three thousand lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill, urging Congress not to do anything fundamental about the wreckage the banks had made.  Who stood on the other side?  An angry but distracted public that didn't know how to use the levers of power....Back in the eighties, a coalition of labor unions and trial lawyers and consumer advocates could put up a fight, but by 2010 they were largely spent.

In the weeks since the election, I have been trying to determine what I should focus my energies on.  I am still not sure what to do because it feels like everything is equally at risk and it's hard to know just how far people will go on some things.  But I am so sad about the loss of campaign finance reform as a viable platform going forward because I see now just how crippled ordinary people are from making their voices and demands heard, from presenting a compelling alternative argument for how to structure a system vs whatever other ideas come from the other side, with more money and people and support and think tanks.  I feel like we have become lax in requiring anything from our politicians because we no longer believe they work for us.  This is depressing on so many levels, but it is also very frightening because we are the ones who have to deal with the consequences.  From local to state to federal, we must hold our elected officials accountable.  This is extremely difficult at the local and state level because people seem not to care enough about the local and state politics that have so much more influence over their lives than national politics do.  Actually, that's not fair.  Many people do not even have access to information about what is going on at the local and state levels of government because we no longer have strong news outlets that can report at that level.

As a direct consequence of reading this book and following this past election cycle, I plan to be much better informed on local and state level news going forward.  I took the simple step of following my senators and congressional representatives on social media, though I would also like to keep track of important bills and debates.  I am not sure how to do that yet.

George Packer has written an excellent book that shows compassion to his subjects and justified rage at all the weak points in our current system.  Personally, I found this book much more rewarding to read than Strangers in Their Own Land.  Highly recommended.

Are you interested in learning more about this topic?  

I put up some links at the end of my review for Strangers in Their Own Land.

I would also recommend the On the Media podcast mini-series "Busted:  America's Poverty Myths."  The first episode is here.

PBS and NPR paired up and the result is this informative site about poverty in America, Chasing the Dream.

There are so many other topics and issues mentioned in this book that I cannot hope to cover with my related links.  So... just go read this book!  And then do some delving into the topics that interest and concern you most.

All the Single Ladies

I first heard Rebecca Traister when she was interviewed on NPR.  She spoke about her book, All the Single Ladies:  Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.  I have read (or tried to read) a few non-fiction books on women that just did not work for me - Bachelor Girl and Spinster being two of them.  Traister sounded much more up my alley, and so I put her book on my radar.

I mostly read this book after the election this month.  I thought it would be difficult and painful to do, but it was more like a balm.  Throughout history, people have had to fight, tooth and nail, for their rights.  And then they have to keep fighting to keep those rights.  It's exhausting.  It takes SO LONG to move forward even an inch, and then BAM! someone else comes into office and everything moves backwards again so quickly.

It's strange, admittedly, to describe knowing this as a "balm," but it kind of is.  Every time a group fights for recognition and respect and rights, there is another group that feels threatened and fights tooth and nail against it.  Often, the group that is threatened wins.  Sadly, fear is a huge motivator.

Thus, when you look at civil rights movements throughout history, there is always this back and forth motion.  This seems to be particularly true for women's rights, though it might just seem that way to me because I have read more about the women's movements than other ones.  I suppose I have  accepted that we are now in what appears to be a global backward motion on many civil rights.  When I say that I have "accepted" this, I don't mean that I won't fight for those rights.  What I mean is that I realize there are highs and lows, and I feel like this is our low.  It's our time to fight so that we move even further when we get to the next high.  Perhaps knowing that we are at the low and looking at history makes me realize that there are still highs to come.

Back to the book.

I listened to All the Single Ladies on audiobook, so I don't have a lot of quotes to share.  That said, there were many quotes in this book, not only from history but from very modern times, about how dangerous and selfish and horrible single women are.  This risk of women not reproducing to continue the species (or a very specific portion of the species) seems to threaten people at all levels and at all times and for all reasons.

What I really enjoyed about Traister's approach is that she looked at single women from many perspectives.  She talks about how life for women in cities is different than life in suburban and rural areas, about female friendship, about women living on their own.  She talks about why women choose to stay single (for work, money, independence, choice), not only rich women but also poor women.  She talks about how people assume single women live hugely promiscuous lives when the reality is usually quite different, single moms, and the families that women create for themselves when they are not married.

Right at the start, Traister admits that she has an urban, educated, white slant to her book.  That said, she does make some effort to meet and talk to people who have had different experiences.  She also cites a lot of evidence about people from many walks of life.

I have been single my whole life, and I have many single female friends, and this book really resonated with me.  Contrary to what many people think, I do not spend my nights desperately wishing there was a man in my life (though admittedly, there are some times, usually during engagement parties and weddings and showers, when I do).  I also don't go out with dozens of guys a year.  I'm not a shrew who is unkind to people (though I admit that I can be quite unkind to people I dislike strongly), and I'm not an anti-social, awkward person who stays at home every night with her books and wine (though I do enjoy evenings by myself just as much as I enjoy spending time with other people).  I would be happy to find a guy that I really love and get married, but if I do not meet one, I am pretty sure I will be happy and fulfilled in my life.  Except, of course, for everyone always wondering why I am single and what's wrong with me and when I'll finally stop being so picky.

Rebecca Traister understands all of this, and I felt so validated by this book.  I think many people would.  I love how Traister sets up historical "norms" as completely outside the norm.  For example, so many people look back on women getting married young and then having children as being the basis of so much economic growth and prosperity.  But even through history, many women have had to work outside the home to make ends meet.  And people make it seem as though women are being selfish and thinking only of themselves and putting the world at great risk.  But really, they're just making reasonable decisions for themselves, and people who complain about what they're doing should just get over themselves.

This book is not exhaustive by any means, but I don't think Traister is trying to be exhaustive.  She shares anecdotes about herself and from her friends, she tells us about the choices women have made through history and now, and what some of the numbers behind the trends mean.  I think this book would be a fantastic companion to Gail Collins' books about women in America and the long, winding path that the women's movement has taken.  Those books (referenced below) give a bit more breadth to the history whereas Traister's book has a personal and more "everyday woman" feel.

I've been reading a ton of non-fiction lately!  Sorry for all the heavy subject reviews.  Though really, this book is not heavy by any means - it's a very informative read, and I am glad to add it to my list of books that are refreshing and kind to women who make choices in life that not everyone understands.

Want to dig deeper on this subject?  Here are a few links:

Shorter reads -
"On Spinsters," by Briallen Hopper, which is a review of a different book but makes fantastic points
 "We Just Can't Handle Diversity," by Lisa Burrell, about how we all have biases and should acknowledge them instead of pretending we are totally objective about stuff

Long reads -
America's Women and When Everything Changed, by Gail Collins; I love these books about the history of women's rights and empowerment in America
Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine; also absolutely amazing

Have a listen - 
The Lady Vanishes episode of the Revisionist History podcast

Watch -
"We Should All be Feminists" TEDx video by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Jeff Chang on the Resegregation of America

Jeff Chang's Who We Be:  The Colorization of America was one of my favorite books of 2014.  When I saw his newest book, We Gon' Be Alright:  Notes on Race and Resegregation at the library a couple of days after the most recent election, I grabbed it as quickly as I could.  Chang excels at showing readers just how politicized race has become.  In Who We Be, he talked about the difficulty of living in both a "multi-cultural" and yet "colorblind" society (basically, you can't have both) and how that leads to erasure and exclusion.  In We Gon' Be Alright, he focuses a lot on violence and segregation.

This book was particularly poignant for me to read after this week's elections for many reasons.  As many, many people have mentioned, a lot of urban "liberal elite" Americans do not know or understand rural America, and this is an issue.  We have left them behind.  They are suffering and they see no great future ahead, and everyone else is "cutting in line."

Chang does not come right out and say it, but one of my main takeaways from this book was that rural Americans isolated themselves.  They were frightened of people who were different than them, so they made it really hard for people who were different than them to move in.  When people did manage to move in, the whites up and moved out again, taking resources with them.  And they kept doing that.  And continued to self-segregate.  Chang quotes Thomas Sugrue in his essay about white flight.  "Fear - not forward-looking optimism - shaped the geography of metropolitan America.  Sprawl is the geography of inequality."  Whites are by far the most segregated group in America, and they are that way because, quite often, they choose to be.

All of the essays in this book are excellent, just as I suspected they would be.  One that I found very interesting was the one on student protest movements on universities.  These movements have made the news a lot in recent months/years, mostly because people seem to think a lot of students are silly and coddled for demanding "safe spaces" and attention.  Chang points out that, after affirmative action was derailed, the percentage of minorities at universities dropped substantially.  There is very little representation at top schools, and even when there is representation, there is very little support.  So these universities decrease the number of diverse students they let in, provide very little support structure for them, ignore their legitimate complaints of racism and discrimination, and then everyone thinks the students are whiny, entitled brats when they make the news, asserting their rights to free speech and to be heard  Media latched onto the story that students were demanding certain speech codes and that trigger words be removed.  But almost always, what students were overwhelmingly demanding was more staff and faculty of color, emphasis on recruiting minority students (and retaining them), increased funding for cultural centers, counseling, etc.  All things that make a whole lot of sense if you feel marginalized, afraid, and lonely.  And if you are the victim of racism, which happens much more often than people realize or admit, and which is often ignored.

...while we are engaged in the culture wars, the most difficult thing to do is to keep the "race conversation" going, because its polarizing modalities are better at teaching us what not to say to each other than what to say, better at closing off conversation than starting it.  In this way those who believe that protesters are dangerous and those who believe they are merely misguided join together to end the necessary discussion the rest of us might want to have, in fact need to have.  If the choice is framed as one of silence versus noise, in the long run most people prefer silence.

One of the most interesting points that I took away from this book was the difference between diversity and equality.  My whole life, I have heard a lot about diversity, to the extent that people make jokes about "the token black/Asian/gay, etc. friend."  I have not heard nearly as much about equality.  I never even considered diversity and equality to be two sides of the same coin, two potential outcomes to one huge problem.  But they are very closely related.  And much of what we do, at the school level, at the government, at work, is a lot about diversity and not much at all about equality.  And so we have student protests because they feel underrepresented and alone, we have a limited pipeline of multicultural talent in government and companies, and we continue to live very segregated lives.

The central essay in this book was called "Hands Up" and focused on police brutality.  In the wake of the presidential election, I feel so many things.  But one of the main ones is fear of police violence and a lack of accountability for that violence.

I don't want to say that one essay spoke to me more than the others, but the last essay in the book, "The In-Betweens" was about the awkward and strange experience of being Asian-American.  It is something I have thought a lot about over recent months and years.  As an Asian-American, I am often shielded from the most virulent and violent racism, mostly because Asian-Americans appear invisible to many.  When Trump talks about deporting people, he is not referring to Asians.  When he talks about how people used to "take care of things" with regard to protestors, he is not referring to Asians.  When people fight affirmative action, they are not fighting Asians in their schools and jobs.

For much of their time in the United States, Asian-Americans have been in this weird "almost white" space.  We don't receive the full benefits of whiteness because, well, we're not white.  We don't receive the benefits that under-represented minorities receive because we are usually not under-represented.  And we don't face the racism that Blacks and Latinos face most of the time, either.  Racism against Asian-Americans is usually more subtle (but not always).  But we still face racism.  And we still are not white.  And we try so hard to work the system both ways to our advantage, which just feels very uncomfortable and wrong and horrible.

For example, Trump went out of his way to appeal to Hindu-Americans.  (Note that he did not try to appeal to Indian-Americans, because many Indian-Americans are Muslim.  And he does not want them.)  When I went to the Chicago Cubs victory parade, there was a plane flying overhead with a banner that said, "Chinese-Americans for Trump!"  Asian-American students are suing universities for discrimination, saying that they are being denied seats in schools that they earned through being seriously stellar students.  I understand that.  I get it.  Asian-Americans work so hard at winning by following all the rules, and then it is disheartening not to get ahead when you have followed all the rules.  It feels like discrimination.

But this has very real consequences for everyone.  Asian-Americans' anti-discrimination lawsuits have made it even more difficult for Blacks and Latinos to succeed.  On the west coast, all of these schools with disproportionately high Asian-American numbers - they tout their "diversity," but it's not really diversity if everyone is the same, and if it still results in other people being woefully under-represented. 

Chang speaks passionately and eloquently for integration, for a shared sense of responsibility and kindness to others.  He ends with a quote from James Baldwin, who wrote, "To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who think they hate us."

Are you interested in learning more about this topic?

BOOKS
Who We Be:  The Colorization of America, by Jeff Chang - the first book I read by Chang that really challenged a lot of assumptions
Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond - an in-depth look at segregation and housing policies and how those impact cities and people
The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee (I have not read this yet)

ARTICLES
"Racism on Campus:  Stories from New York Times Readers"
"Campuses Cautiously Train Freshmen Against Subtle Insults"
"With Diversity Comes Intensity in Amherst Free Speech Debate"

PODCASTS
The Uncertain Hour by Marketplace - about welfare and how differently it works vs how you probably think it works
More Perfect:  Object Anyway - an episode about how even the best of intentions can lead to very concerning outcomes

Strangers in their own land

Here I am again, everyone!  My country needs me.

I kid.  Kind of.  But not really.  I mean, my country doesn't need me, specifically, but it certainly needs people willing to cross some scary bridges.  There are so many scary bridges.

So.  Hi, again!  Let's get right to it.

In the midst of the US election campaign, and in the spirit of my ongoing search for empathy this year, I decided to read Strangers in Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild.  It is about, as the title says, "anger and mourning on the American right."  I first heard about the book in the New York Times, which gave it a very positive review and championed Hochschild's empathy for people who stand on the other side of the political divide than she does.

Hochschild, a sociologist known for her book The Second Shift about working moms in America, really does strive to "scale the empathy wall."  (In fact, she uses the phrase "scale the empathy wall" a LOT.  More on her language later.)  She is a left-leaning academic from Berkeley, but she's also a sociologist whose focus is on how emotions can shape our lives and beliefs.  So she's perfect for this task!  She's also white, which I suspect helped a lot, though she did not talk about this element of privilege directly.  It can be difficult to talk about race frankly and openly and inoffensively.

I read Strangers in Their Own Land because, like many "liberal elites" (a phrase that seems to have been coined in the past 72 hours), I rarely come into contact with rural Americans, let alone Tea Partiers.  I have many stereotypes and preconceived notions about them (those on the far right), which are just as unfair as any stereotypes and preconceived notions they may have about me.  This book was my first step in trying to understand them, their values, and their opinions just a little bit better.  I can't say that I feel fully enlightened now, but I do understand why they feel so abandoned and how that drives their choices.

Hochschild really wanted to get to the heart of what drives Americans on the far right to, in many people's minds, vote directly against their own interests.  They vote for less government support even as they depend on Medicaid and unemployment; they vote for less regulation even as they see the horrible effects of unbridled pollution around them; they vote for big business even as it abandons them.  What she finds is that they are driven by many real, concrete things that the rest of us have trouble understanding.  First, they have a deep and abiding and very concrete connection to God.  Even though this world may be polluted, Heaven will not be.  And Heaven is where they spend eternity.  Second, they really need jobs.  Any jobs.  Otherwise, their homes and their friends and their livelihoods will disappear.  You need to prioritize things, and jobs are prioritized over everything else.  Third, they value sacrifice.  Sometimes you need to sacrifice things that are important to you (like women's health and environmental safety) for things that are more important to you (like jobs and a comfortable home).  Also, they really love this analogy of "waiting in line."  They have waited in line for a really long time, and other people keep cutting in front of them.  Maybe those people have worked hard, and maybe they are good people.  But that doesn't mean they deserve to cut.

It was very difficult for me to read this book.  Not because I don't think the values above are important.  I do think they are important.  I understand that our culture values work and job titles over almost everything else.  It is embarrassing to not have a job and a title that reflects who you are and how smart you are and how hard you work.  I also understand prioritization.  And while I am not religious myself, I respect that people have a right to worship as they choose.

My main issue is that nothing in this book made me believe that Tea Partiers would extend the same courtesy to me.  I have difficulty extending empathy towards people that I don't believe would treat me and my beliefs with empathy.  For example, I believe very strongly in a woman's right to choose.  People in this book are very religious and usually very pro-life.  Therefore, they want to limit everyone's access to abortion, in line with their religious morals, regardless of the fact that it is not in line with my religious morals.  In contrast, they believe very strongly in the right to bear arms.  (The Bible tells you not to kill other people, but this does not come up.)  They get very upset by the possibility that people would take away their right to own guns.  But the connection between their right to bear arms and a woman's right to choose whether or not to bear a child... well, let's just say they don't see this connection.  They want less regulation over some things but are totally fine with regulation over others.

As Hochshild points out,

"the Great Paradox becomes more complicated... Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets - mainly white masculine pursuits - are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater...while the state boasts a reputation of an almost cowboy-style "don't-fence-me-in" freedom, that is probably not how a female rape victim who wants an abortion, or a young black boy in Jefferson Davis Parish see the matter."

It's these inconsistencies that I really wanted Hochschild to hone in on and explain to me (HELP ME UNDERSTAND, ARLIE).  But I felt like she just noted them and moved on.  She did not push anyone to justify this paradox, probably because her goal was "scaling the empathy wall," not changing anyone's mind.  I understand prioritizing some things more than others (such as jobs over the environment, I suppose).  But what about this stance on less regulation, except when it comes to women and minorities?

 Speaking of "scaling the empathy wall," this was somewhat more difficult for me to do because of the language Hochshild used.  There was a lot of jargon in this book.  "Scaling the empathy wall" was one phrase that was used [too] often.  As was "deep story," an articulation of another person's worldview that shows how emotions play into values.  The Tea Partier's "deep story" is that other people are cutting in line and getting ahead while he waits patiently for his turn.

But the thing is that Tea Partiers are not waiting patiently for their turn.  There is so much that is inherently sexist and racist in the whole idea of "waiting in line" that I don't even know where to begin with my objections.  But here's a sample.  Why were people like you the only people allowed in the line for so long?  What makes you think that you work harder than anyone else?  Why does my joining the line somehow imply that your wait has now become longer?  Why do you assume that everyone is in the same line?  Why are you willing to give people who look and talk like you the benefit of the doubt but you assume everyone else is trying to cheat the system?  Why are you willing to donate to your local soup kitchen but you think people abuse food stamps?

I understand that jobs are leaving rural areas, that communities are drying up, that drugs are coming in to fill the void, and that the path to education and forward momentum seems stagnant.  All of these are very real issues and I absolutely understand voting for your interests.  I think Hochschild did a really good job of showing this and how little choice and agency people have over their lives.

Where I think Hochschild fell short is that she doesn't make the connection between this prioritization and how this leads people to value their own way of life and their own privilege over other people and against everything that science and data and fact say are true.  She mentions right-wing news like FOX and talk radio only as it pertains to how people receive their information, not about how it directly impacts their worldview.  Maybe this is too much to ask from a book, but I think Hochschild focused a lot on giving us a window into the life of a Tea Partier and why we should have empathy for them, but she doesn't make many overtures to convince them to have empathy for the rest of us and our worldview.  And again, maybe this is expecting too much, but she also doesn't present readers with any ideas on how to bridge this gaping divide between us.  So while I think this really was a very enlightening and sobering book, particularly about the horrific policy decisions made by Bobby Jindal, I wanted much more from it.  I'll have to keep reading.  Based on the results of this past election, I feel certain that there will be many articles and books written about this soon.  If you know of any that I have not listed below, please share!

Are you interested in learning more about this topic?  

Here are some other books I have on hold but not read yet:
Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis, by JD Vance
The Unwinding:  An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer
What's the Matter with Kansas?:  How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank

And some articles that I did read and found very informative:
How Half of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Trump Won Because College-Educated Americans are Out of Touch
I'm a Coastal Elite From the Midwest:  The Real Bubble is Rural America

And this podcast series that is excellent:
The United States of Anxiety

A beautiful, troubled city

Hello again, friends.  Once again, it has been a while.  I have been very up and down over the past several months, and certainly since my last post.  Sometimes, I feel very optimistic about the future and really believe that good people doing good things can make good changes in the world.  And sometimes, I'm just exhausted and saddened.  I have been reading, though not as much as I usually do.  And not many books that I feel compelled to review.

I have been drawn to non-fiction of late, possibly in the hope that my reading facts will compel the rest of the world to trust in facts.  Or to help me make sense of how the world came to be the way it is now (though I do feel strongly that fiction can help just as much as non-fiction in that regard).

I recently read Natalie Y. Moore's The South Side:  A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.  As I think many of you know, I have lived in or around Chicago my whole life, and I love the city so much.  But it is a city with deep-rooted problems.  It's a city that can break your heart if you let it, from a legacy of corrupt politicians, gang violence, police brutality, and segregation.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said that he had never faced such virulent racism anywhere as he faced in Chicago.  The beautiful, striking skyline that locals love so much came at a huge cost to many communities and people.

Natalie Moore writes about her own life growing up on Chicago's south side (the historically black area of the city) and then settling back on the south side as an adult.  Her book is so many things:  an homage to her happy childhood, a guide to so many of the city's overlooked neighborhoods (and restaurants!), and an indictment of how little the government has done to invest in black neighborhoods.  The facts she shares about what it's like to be Black in America are pretty horrifying, not only because it's so obvious that racism is there, but because it just seems so endemic.  I know that a lot of racism is under the surface now, even sub-conscious.  But its consequences are just as real and impactful, and it's just so sad.

The chapter that most affected me was the one on gun violence in Chicago.  Some have given the city the nickname "Chiraq" due to how many people have been killed here (one year, more than the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq).  As someone who lives in the city, I would say the news of shootings and killings is absolutely constant, particularly in the summer.  It's unending.  It's horrifying.  It's such a tragedy I don't even know how to describe it without sounding trite.  And it makes Chicagoans themselves scared of their city.  People don't take public transportation after a certain time.  We don't walk in parks after dark.  We tell people when we reach home safely.  And there are some neighborhoods that people just won't go to.  Such as many, many neighborhoods on the south side.  We won't even stop for gas there, let alone think of shopping or eating there, or definitely not living there.

I have, of course, always been aware that violence in Chicago has an indelible impact on communities.  Kids who can't play outside, teens who can't go to school, family structures broken down.  But I don't think I realized just what a huge economic drain it is, too.  If everyone is too scared to visit a neighborhood or to even walk around outside, then business suffers.  And if businesses don't feel like they can invest in a neighborhood, then no one is ever going to move to them.  And property values decline, and people move out, and the city continues to shrink, to condense in the very gentrified central area.  And when you refer to a community as a "war zone," you automatically think about punishment and strong enforcement as the only means of solving the problem.  You don't think about how to work with the community for longer-term solutions or addressing the root of the issue because you're so busy scrambling to save lives in the moment, to stop that next gun from being purchased.  Its consequences are much more far-reaching than I ever considered, and it makes me even sadder for my city than I was before.

I also really enjoyed the chapter about food and access to food.  Whole Foods is opening a massive store in Englewood, one of Chicago's poorest (and most dangerous) neighborhoods, and it created quite a stir.  Were they trying to gentrify the neighborhood?  Were they trying to do good?  Would people be able to afford to shop there?  Were they going to bring some cheapened version of their store that wasn't as nice as the other Whole Foods in wealthier neighborhoods?  It was so fascinating to read multiple points of view on this.  The store is slated to open this fall, and I hope it helps the community.

Moore talks about many more topics in her book - public housing and public schools, her own childhood, property values, the pros and cons of integration vs access to the same resources, and so much more.  Her own love (and frustration) with the city comes through strong and clear.  Obviously, people who live in or around Chicago are probably most likely to be interested in this book, but I think much of what is true about Chicago is true around America, or at least the Midwest.  And if you are not American, and look at America now and wonder what is happening, I think this book would be a good primer to help you understand.  It's really well-written, very evocative of the city's highs and lows, and I am so glad I read it.  There's a reason that I came out of my semi-blogging retirement to write about it and urge you all to read it.  I hope you do.