Trevor Noah's Born a Crime

I don't watch The Daily Show very often, mostly because I don't watch TV all that often.  I didn't know much at all about Trevor Noah when he took over after Jon Stewart left.  I have only watched a few episodes since then, and Noah's style is very different.  He's much less angry, more willing to seek common ground.  That's not to say that Jon Stewart was too jaded for his job, but you could see it wear on him, every day talking about important topics but not seeming to make any real difference.

I became interested in reading Trevor Noah's memoir, Born a Crime, after listening to some interviews with him when the book came out.  I liked many of the things he said, and the very genuine way in which he said them.  He does want to connect with people and find the many ways in which we are alike and can share moments and experiences vs harping on details that can tear us apart.  I appreciate this kindness and empathy in him, particularly as he is someone who works in comedy and late night and news media that depends on ratings.

Noah's book is about his childhood and early adulthood in South Africa.  It's not exhaustive; there are clearly some episodes that are quite painful and he does not dwell on those.  It is more episodic in nature; the only people we get to know well and who feature prominently through the entire book are Trevor and his mother.  Noah's mother seems like an amazing woman.  She is deeply religious, and Trevor grew up going to multiple churches multiple days a week.  She is also fiercely independent.  She chose to live on her own in a dangerous city and have a mixed race child out of wedlock while living under apartheid.  She raised him to believe that he could do anything.  She worked and worked and worked, and when she married someone, she married an abusive alcoholic and the police never once helped to keep her safe.

Honestly, having read this book, the only word I can possibly use to describe Trevor Noah and his mom is resilient.  Noah grew up in a very, very difficult environment.  His family was extremely poor, he often went hungry, he was a mixed race kid in a country that was obsessed with race, and there seemed to be very little stability in his life.  And yet he seems never to have lost his kindness and gentleness.  This book makes me want to watch The Daily Show because I want to support empathy.  It makes me respect religion and deeply religious people more because when religion is done right, it really can make people strive to become better, kinder versions of themselves.

I don't think I finished this book knowing Trevor Noah any better than I did going into it.  I understand his background and his life better, but I do think he holds the reader just a little bit away.  I think he has a lot of painful memories, and I don't think he wants to revisit them or dwell on them too deeply.  Instead, he writes about events that shaped his thinking and who he became.  He talks about the help he received and how grateful he is for that help and acknowledges that a lot of people don't get help.  He talks about his mother and the moment he realized that women are often much more vulnerable than men in a situation.  He talks about the time he realized that the police aren't always great people, that they are human and come into situations with their own histories and biases. And through it all, he shows readers (as kindly and diplomatically as possible) why he believes what he believes.

A quote that exemplifies what I am trying to explain above about Noah's approach:

People love to say, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."  What they don't say is, "And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod."  That's the part of the analogy that's missing.  Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, "Okay, here's what you need, and here's how it works."  Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer.  People say, "Oh, that's a handout."  No.  I still have to work to profit by it.  But I don't stand a chance without it.

This was an excellent book, and I bought a copy for my keeper shelf.  Highly recommended.

Women Culture and Politics

Women Culture and Politics is the first Angela Y Davis book I've ever read.  For those of you who may not know, Angela Davis is a hugely influential feminist communist activist.  She was very active in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement, fought hard against Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California and when he was president, and continues to serve as a voice of resistance and strength.

Women Culture and Politics is a collection of Davis' essays and speeches from the 1980s and 1990s.  I am not sure if it is the best book to start with, but I think this is mostly due to the format.  I admit that my grasp of history from the 1980s and 1990s is not quite as extensive as I would like, and Davis' essays are very much commentary on the times.  I wish that there was an introduction to the collection as a whole or to each specific essay so that I had a better grasp and understanding of the context in which she was writing the essay or delivering the speech.  That would have helped me a lot to fully understand Davis' points.

[Side note:  That said, I really need to learn more about the entire Reagan presidency.  Does anyone have a book they recommend for that?  I feel like Reagan comes up a LOT these days, and I would like to understand more of our history with Russia and Latin America and all the rest.  So, please let me know if there is any book you think would be a good one to get some background!]

While some of the context of Davis' points was lost on me, a concerning number of points were still very relevant.  I suppose in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is not so long a time in which to make real change in society.  But it still feels depressing. 

One thing Davis talked about in her essays comes up a lot in liberal discussion these days.  And that is identity politics.  I have been very up and down on identity politics and the impact of identity politics on our election and on the way people describe themselves now.  I 100% believe that people should feel comfortable being their truest, best selves, and that they should feel safe enough to be open about who they are.  But I also can feel exhausted by the number of identifiers everyone feels the need to use these days.  And I am very concerned by the way identity politics has led to white nationalism and supremacy.  Davis' approach to this is that everyone should come together. 

"...we must begin to merge that double legacy in order to create a single continuum, one that solidly represents the aspirations of all women in our society.  We must begin to create a revolutionary, multiracial women's movement that seriously addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women."

This comes up again and again in Davis' writing, this idea that rich, white women seem to fight a completely different battle than working class women of color, and that they often forget to fight for the rights of people who are not as well off as they are.  This is still relevant today, and it came up a lot with the Women's March on Washington and it continues to come up with women's rights now when we talk about Planned Parenthood (which we seem to talk about all the time).  It continues now as people obsess over the rural white vote.  I feel like there must be a way to talk about the issues in ways that are less divisive but that doesn't make people feel left behind.  But do we all just jump too quickly now to take offense, to say, "What about me?  You mentioned everyone's suffering but mine!"  And instead of giving a person the opportunity to go back and consider and grow, we assume the worst and shame the person and then the person gets so nervous about saying anything wrong, but doesn't actually change his/her inner thoughts.  Just hides them.  And then we are where we are.

There is a LOT in this book that is amazing.  I folded so many pages down to note down quotes.  It would be too much for me to share them all with you, so I recommend that instead, you just read the book and feel all the feels and become a Davis fangirl.  I plan to read much more by her, and I look forward to the way she will challenge my thinking.

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

"This anxiety of non-belonging."

As soon as I read the New York Times' book review of Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom, I knew I wanted to read it.  I immediately put it on hold at the library, and I went to pick it up the same day my hold came in.

I have struggled a lot with my reading this year.  But this book brought back so much of that enjoyment to me.  Every day after work last week, I would finish my dinner, pour myself a glass of wine, and then settle down on my sofa for some quality reading.

I set myself the task this summer of being more outgoing, of inviting a lot of different people to do a lot of things with me, and of trying to form true friendships with new people.  It has been a lot of work (and I wouldn't say it always feels particularly rewarding), but it's also been pretty fun and kept me extremely busy.  I have a feeling the people I have gotten to know over the past few months probably think that I am far more extroverted and social than I would probably ever describe myself as being.

For whatever reason, last week, I made no plans.  I had no plans for ten days in a row.  It was the perfect time to settle down with a good, meaningful, beautiful book.  And I'm so glad that In the Darkroom was there because it is one of the most moving books I have read in a very long time.

I almost hesitate to share a summary of the book because I think it will frighten some people away, and that would be sad.  At a high level, the book is about a grown woman coming to know her father after many years of estrangement, after he has undergone a sex change operation to become a woman.  She goes to meet her father in Budapest and the story unwinds from there, from his childhood growing up in a very wealthy Jewish family to the horrors of the Holocaust and the many re-inventions he underwent before this final one - choosing to live as a woman at the age of 76.

[Apologies if I am misusing pronouns here; Faludi refers to her father as "him" before the operation and as "her" after.  I will try to do the same.]

Faludi is a staunch feminist, and as she talks to her father and others who have undergone the male-to-female operation, she is struck by their adherence to traditional (stereotypical) gender norms.  Her father says troubling things like, "Now I can communicate better, because I'm a woman... It helps that I'm a woman.  Because women don't provoke."  She reads memoirs of women who talk about their experience, and none of them sound very feminist at all.  Take this quote from Jan Morris.  As Jim Morris, she had climbed Mt. Everest.  And yet, as a woman:

"I was even more emotional now.  I cried very easily, and was ludicrously susceptible to sadness or flattery.  Finding myself rather less interested in great affairs (which are placed in a new perspective, I do assure you, by a change of sex), I acquired a new concern for small ones.  My scale of vision seemed to contract... It is, I think, a simpler vision that I now possess.  Perhaps it is nearer a child's."

It's difficult not to be offended by the comments above.  And yet, most men who want to undergo sex change operations to become women have to pass a horrible test that dates from mid-century and very much requires them to conform to stereotype.  In order to be approved for the operation, they are expected to say that they don't mind putting their careers on hold or not being the bread winner, etc.  I had no idea this was the case.  The way that all of these memoirs are written with this assumption that women are inherently different than men in their approach to the world, and that feminists are stupid to want to change things because being a woman is just such grand fun, is very hard to take.  For Faludi, whose father fetishized womanhood prior to her operation with costumes and posed photos and then became much more conservation after her operation (this happens a lot, it seems), it must have have been overwhelming.

Faludi doesn't only tackle feminism, though.  She also talks a lot about Jewish identity.  Faludi is not very religious, but she doesn't have to be.  "I was someone with only the vaguest idea of what it meant to be a Jew who was nevertheless adamant that I was one."  Her father's relationship with religion was much more up and down.  Born to affluent but negligent parents who didn't even attend his bar mitzvah, Istvan Friedman shed his Jewish identity during World War II when Hungary became extremely anti-Semitic.  The many stories he recounts over the course of this book are amazing; he saved his parents' lives and the lives of many others, often by pretending to be a Nazi.  He escaped Hungry with friends on a fantastic lie.  He moved to Brazil, changed his name to Steven Faludi, and then moved to America, got married and had a family.  It was only when Susan said she was considering becoming a Christian that he informed her, quite violently, that she was Jewish.  "I remember exactly what I said.  That they exterminated the Jews.  And how could you do this?"

There are many stories like this in Hungary.  After World War II, there was Communism.  Many people hid their religion just to get by.  Only now are people (ironically, some of them ultra-right-wing politicians who denounce Jews) coming to know their family history and religion.  Faludi shares some of these stories in a beautiful chapter in which she attends Rosh Hashanah services and dinner with her father.  Temples that were built to hold hundreds now cater to groups of twenty or fifty.

In the Darkroom is one of the most moving books I have read in a long time.  The way Faludi weaves her own story with her father's and Hungary's, and that thorny issue of identity, is beautiful.

I studied my father's face, averted as it so often had been in life.  All the years she was alive, she'd sought to settle the question of who she was.  Jew or Christian?  Hungarian or American?  Woman or man?  So many oppositions.  But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought:  there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death.  Either you are living or you are not.  Everything else is molten, malleable.

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.

Slumlord Millionaires

It cannot be said that Matthew Desmond's Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City is an uplifting book.  Amazon has given it the dubious distinction of being "#1 Best Seller in Poverty."  The book follows eight families in some of Milwaukee's poorest neighborhoods from mid-2008 to late 2009 and shows how their struggles to pay the rent each month can create insurmountable challenges in every other aspect of their lives.  A snowball becomes an avalanche.  And then they are evicted, and it becomes even worse.

I did not realize just how often people are evicted from their homes.  I have always had a vague idea that laws favor the renter over the landlord, perhaps based on the whole "possession is 90% of the law" idea.  But I think that whole notion is predicated on the idea that both sides are equally educated and have the same access to resources.  When the two sides are not balanced, things can go south very quickly.

Desmond states that "If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women.  Poor black men were locked up.  Poor black women were locked out."  In Milwaukee, black women make up less than 10% of the population but more than 30% of the evictions.  Eviction wreaks havoc in so many ways - parents have to scramble to secure housing, they often lose their material possessions in addition to their homes, their kids are taken out of school, no one feels connected to or committed to a neighborhood, and they now have an eviction on their record, making it even harder to find another home.

It is hard to read Desmond's book without feeling a little sick or hoping that maybe he is exaggerating the situation.  Can landlords really be so cruel?  Is it true that they make the most profit off their poorest tenants?  This must be a pretty one-sided presentation of the information, right?

And maybe it is.  After all, there are eight families profiled, but only two landlords, and the two landlords are disturbingly unkind and mercurial.  Even with that caveat, though, this is a very bleak picture of America.

The tenants here have all made mistakes in their lives, some of them have made really big ones.  It is tempting to think - well, they messed up.  They deserve this.  If they just worked more/tried harder/stayed clean, then they wouldn't be in this situation.  I think we all want to think that because we need to believe that we live in a fair world, and that those of us who are being dealt a better life got that life because we work more, try harder, and are smarter.  Not just because we were lucky.  Because if any of this is based on luck, and luck can change, then any one of us could be struggling.

But even people who make mistakes have children who deserve stability.  They have families that need financial and emotional support.  They need help but are afraid to ask for it.  They don't know their rights.  They pay a very high price for their mistakes, and with the snowball effect that just one crisis can have on someone in poverty, they keep paying that price, over and over.

Desmond uses the word "exploitation" to describe the relationship between landlords and their tenants in poor neighborhoods.  I was aghast at the conditions he described.  Landlords often charge tenants very high prices (really, not that much lower than rent in much better neighborhoods) for apartments that are in really bad shape.  And, since they can threaten these tenants with eviction at almost any time, they don't feel any obligation to do maintenance work or upkeep on their units.  They nickel and dime tenants, make them do work for free, kick them out, and then begin again with someone new.

It took me a very long time to read this book, mainly because it was so sad.  It was hard to pick it up after a long day of work.  But I live in a very large and very segregated city, and I think it's important for me (and everyone else) to understand how housing policies can impact Chicago.  For that reason, I'm really glad I read this book and better understand the economics and politics at play here.  It was a tough one, but it's important.  You may not think that housing policy has any effect on you, but it does - it is your taxes, your neighborhood, your school, and your city.  So pay attention.

If you would prefer to read about Desmond's book and the issues he brings up rather than reading the full book, I highly recommend the New York Times review.

Delicious eats and food for thought

I really love the food documentaries on Netflix.  I enjoyed The Chef's Table, I really liked For Grace, and I am sure I will eat up (haha, pun intended) whatever else Netflix recommends in my queue.

I don't actually do a lot of food-related reading, though.  I am not sure why.  Maybe I miss the visuals of the beautiful dishes or the sounds of pots clanging, meat sizzling, knives chopping.

I have never been to any of Marcus Samuelsson's restaurants before, though I have used his recipe for a garam masala pumpkin tart for Thanksgiving over the past few years.  I really like Samuelsson's cooking in theory, though I have not experienced it in practice.  Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, grew up in Sweden, worked in restaurants around Europe and on the sea, and then moved to New York.  His cooking style draws from all of his global experiences and tastes; hence, he has a recipe for garam masala pumpkin pie, melding the tastes of traditional American home-cooking with Indian spices.  I love taking tastes that don't often go together and making them work, making something new and different.  In a dorky and idealistic way, I feel like if people can see how their tastes are not so different and can complement each other to make stronger whole, then maybe it will help people see past their bigger and more philosophical differences, too.

Yes, Chef is Marcus Samuelsson's book about his life.  In many ways, it's pretty typical of what you would expect from a chef.  He didn't like school, he preferred being in the kitchen with his grandmother.  He went to culinary school and worked harder and longer and better than anyone else.  He was lucky enough to get a big break at a well-known restaurant, and from there he was off, with a few bumps and bruises along the way.

But in addition to that, Samuelsson shares some personal insights as well.  For example, he grew up very dark-skinned in a very light-skinned environment.  He faced overt and more subtle racism in the kitchen almost everywhere he went.  A couple of times, he would be offered a job on paper but then show up for work and be told that there was no place for him.  He talks a lot about how few minorities are in the kitchens of high-end restaurants, how few women, too.  And how he is doing his part, working very hard to give people the opportunities that he often did not receive while he was training.  Samuelsson never makes race or racism the dominant part of his narrative, but it clearly had a huge impact on his training and the way he learned to cook, and I think he addresses it really well.  It's also clear just how much it has influenced every aspect of his cooking; he draws from so many different food cultures to create his recipes.

What's also obvious in this book is that being a chef is really hard and a ton of work.  It takes a huge personal toll on people.  Samuelsson missed both his grandmother's and his father's funerals because of work.  He does not spend a lot of time being introspective about this, but it is hard to imagine.  He also has a daughter, and for about the first 15 years of her life, he never made any attempt to contact her or get to know her.  Obviously, Samuelsson had to deal with a lot of personal things and decisions as he grew and matured; while readers don't get a huge amount of insight into these very personal motivations and decisions, it's clear that he still struggles with them.

Samuelsson makes no secret that he enjoyed going out, having fun, meeting people and spending time with women.  He also clearly has a ton of confidence in his skill and his decisions.  He can sometimes sound arrogant, but I think it is just honesty.  And it's hard not to love anyone who serves a meal at the White House and then comes home to Harlem and makes the exact same meal for his teenaged next-door neighbor and all her best friends.  That was just lovely.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and now I really want to visit Samuelsson's restaurant in Harlem the next time I am in New York City!  Here's a link to Red Rooster's website in case you want to see the fusion menu he has on there, too.

Growing up Black in America, continued

Back in September, I posted a review of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.  The book is often compared to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, so I took the opportunity recently to read Baldwin's work.  While I can certainly understand the parallels between the two books, I think they are absolutely complementary and having read one only makes your experience of the other even better.

James Baldwin's book was written in 1963, a response to the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.  It is deeply personal, a call to action to all Americans to accept that this has always been a multi-cultural, multi-racial society.  Baldwin has so many strengths in the way he writes, but the one that most draws me in is the passion that he puts into every word.  You can almost imagine him sobbing as he writes about his difficult relationship with religion, clenching his fist as he tells us about the many times he's been treated badly.  And yet, through it all, he stresses kindness and compassion over anger and revenge.  This is a deeply intimate book, and I can only imagine how much it took out of Baldwin to write it, to share his own story and his own misgivings and so much of himself.

Some quotes that stood out to me while reading this book:

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.” 
- To his nephew

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

“It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.” 
- On his struggles with religion and the way people use religion

It truly is a thoughtful, articulate, and beautifully written book, and I hope you will read it.

Immediately after finishing The Fire Next Time, I read a recently-released young adult novel called All-American Boys.  The novel is written by two authors, Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, and has two narrators, Rashad and Quinn.  Rashad is the victim of police violence when a cop assumes that he was trying to steal a bag of chips.  Quinn witnesses his best friend's older brother beating up a kid outside a convenience store.  In case you didn't already assume - Rashad is black, and Quinn is white.

 I first heard about this book in the New York Times Book Review, and honestly, the review is pretty much spot on.  I highly recommend you to just go read that one.  It convinced me to immediately request this book from the library, and I hope it convinces you to read it, too.

What I appreciate most about this book is that it takes both Rashad's and Quinn's journeys seriously.  While Rashad lays in a hospital bed recovering from a broken nose, broken ribs, internal bleeding and more (which, even when you give a cop the benefit of the doubt, is a terrifyingly extreme reaction to someone getting a bag of chips), he feels vulnerable and scared.  One scene that especially stood out to me was when Rashad's father was grilling him about the incident, demanding to know why he would steal, why he would resist arrest, why he would fight.  It's clear that he wants so badly to believe that if you just follow the rules, if you are a good person, then you will be safe.   But Rashad did all of that and still ended up in the hospital.  And it could happen to him again.  And it made his father feel so powerless and frightened to know that he could not protect his son from that.

Quinn, on the other hand, has to come to terms with his own privilege.  He saw a beating and walked away from it.  He could continue walking away from issues like this his whole life and his life would be fine.  He worries that someone saw him at the store, that maybe he was caught on video, that the incident will mess with the dynamics of the school's basketball team and his chance at a scholarship.  Finally, his friend points out that he's not the victim here, that it's not about him, and something clicks.

I love that this book is out there for people to read and consider and use as a way to broach what can be a difficult discussion topic.  There are so many vignettes and conversations that can be used as jumping off points for discussion, so many useful questions and comments that people can use as they consider their own lives and decisions.  I especially think if you have middle school or high school kids who are aware of everything happening in the US right now but don't really know how to process it or how to respond, this is a great book to give them.  And then talk to them about it, too.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his own words

I don't need to say this, but we've had a tumultuous several years in this world, haven't we?  So many steps forward and so many steps backward, and it's hard to appreciate all the good in the midst of so much that is bad.

Police brutality has been in the news all over the United States and recently, my beloved Chicago has (deservedly) gained national attention due to the practices of its police department.  There is not a federal investigation into the police department and there have been many protests in the streets, people demanding the mayor to step down.

Perhaps I have become very cynical lately, but I don't really see the point of protesting without very concrete demands; if you want the mayor to step down, then you should have someone ready to step up to the plate, take on the role.  Otherwise, it feels incomplete and less compelling.  This is happening all over America and probably the world.  A lot of people are protesting and are 100% justified in protesting.  But it's hard to understand what the next step will be.

All of this really made me want to learn more about leaders for positive change.  And, given the environment and the country I live in, Martin Luther King, Jr. seemed the obvious choice.  The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is not technically an autobiography in that MLK did not sit down to write his life story.  But the book is comprised of his notes and letters and speeches and truly succeeds in bringing him to life.  I highly recommend the audiobook version, which includes audio clips of MLK himself, so that you can truly understand what a charismatic and passionate speaker he was.

It is impossible to read this book and not think about the current climate in America.  So many things that MLK brought up and fought for are still issues today.  Clearly, police brutality still exists.  Schools are still highly segregated, even if they are not meant to be.  There are still slums, still low-paying jobs, still a disproportionate economic impact of recession.  In the book, Martin Luther King is quoted as saying that he never faced such racism and hatred anywhere in America as he faced in Chicago, and while I hope that's changed, I don't know that Chicago has done much to earn accolades.  The city is still segregated, many people refuse to even drive through certain neighborhoods, and there are more victims of gun and gang violence here than probably anywhere else in the country.  Most of those victims are black.

Living through the most recent political and social movements in the world, from Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring to all the other protest movements that ebb and flow, the success of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement are even more striking.  It is very difficult to make the status quo into an issue that people will care about, that they will fight for, that leaders will take notice of.  I am truly amazed at what they were able to do.  It is inspiring to read about and listen to and think about where we are now vs where we were then, and where we want to be in another fifty years to continue to progress and become the people, the society, the world that we want to be.

This is an excellent read for anyone who wants to learn more about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.  And for anyone who needs to believe that a small group of people can make great big changes in the world.  Highly recommended.

Growing up Black in America

In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live - specifically, how do I live free in this black body?  It is a profound question because America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' letter to his son, published as the book Between the World and Me has justifiably garnered a lot of attention since its publication.  As Americans struggle to understand their racial legacy, Coates' book provides us with a glimpse of what it was like for him to grow up Black.

For that reason alone, I think as many Americans as possible should read this book.  I am lucky enough to have a diverse group of friends with whom I can frankly and honestly discuss race and gender issues.  I realize that many people do not have that luxury, which is yet another reason why reading diversely is so important.  Between the World and Me offers those people with an idea of just how terrifying it can be to be Black here.  And it serves as a reminder to everyone that fear runs both ways.  As frightened as a middle-class white man can be to see a black guy walking the streets of his neighborhood, it's pretty much guaranteed that the black guy feels just as frightened, except add in the fact that he probably doesn't trust the police to protect him, either.

There are so many parts of this book that made me so very sad.  Coates is such an emotionally charged author.  He pushes you and challenges you, and it was such a good lesson.  Soon after finishing this book, I took a trip to Charleston, SC, and I think because the stories were so fresh in my mind, I found myself constantly telling myself and my friend, "Do not forget that these beautiful houses were built by slave labor.  Do not forget, do not forget, do not forget."  Of course, it's easier to remind yourself when you are a Northerner visiting the South, as Northerners love to think we have some sort of moral superiority to the South.  We like to forget so much of our own horrifying history.  Or the fact that when half the country uses slave labor, the entire country benefits from slave labor.  I hope that all my reading about the black experience in America will help me to flush out my own biases, and constantly remind myself that my experience of America is not universal.

Other quotes that really stood out to me and the reasons why:

I have no desire to make you "tough" or "street," perhaps because any "toughness" I garnered came reluctantly.  I think I was always, somehow, aware of the price.  I think I somehow knew that that third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things.  I think I felt that something out there, some force, nameless and vast, had robbed me of ... what?  Time?  experience?  I think you know something of what that third could have done, and I think that is why you may feel the need for escape even more than I did.  You have seen all the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you understand that there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he could never terrify me.  You have seen so much more of all that is lost when they destroy your body.

 That one had me in tears, really.  The possibility of a life well-lived, lifelong friends, the potential and opportunity to do something extraordinary, so much of that passes through Chicago schools every day, and so much of it is lost to horrible schools, violence, and issues at home.  Think of all the amazing, brilliant, artistic, world-changing people that our country has lost.

You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras.  These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them.  The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.

Many times in this book, Coates reiterates the point that no matter how successful, how polite, how friendly, how un-confrontational a black man can be in every moment of his life, it can all fall apart so quickly and so easily because someone else can just see you and feel frightened and take action.  Many people move out of unsafe neighborhoods as quickly as they can, put their kids into excellent schools as early as they can, give them experiences and gifts that expand their minds in hopes of helping them become good, successful, happy people.  But black men have to work so much harder for that to happen, and the possibility that it can all be taken away is ever-present.

"And one racist act.  It's all it takes."

Gloriously diverse Regency era fantasy

If you remember my post about Zen Cho's short story collection Spirits Abroad, you'll know that I was super-stoked about Cho's full-length novel coming out, Sorcerer to the Crown.  I got an advance copy of this book through the help of fate and magic and pure luck, and so now I can tell you ALL OF MY FEELS about the novel!

I am probably the prime target for this book because:
1.  It is set in late 18th/early 19th century England.
2.  It is a fantasy novel.
3.  The main female character is half Indian, and that half is from southern India.
4.  The main male character is a former slave.
5.  The other kind-of main character is an old Malaysian woman.

Actually, now that I review the list, I feel like those are five things that would probably make ANYONE want to read this book, though I understand some people don't love fantasy and some people don't love historical fiction, and even though that is my ideal combination of all sorts of books, I know that is not the case for all of you.  In general, I feel sorry for all the amazing stories you are missing, but I get it!  I am probably missing BOATLOADS of awesome stories because I veer away from "literary fiction" and women's fiction.

Anyway, back to Sorcerer to the Crown.

The story centers on Zacharias Wythe, a freed slave with super-impressive magical abilities who, much to everyone else's chagrin, becomes Sorcerer Royal of England.  But magic seems to be leaving England, and Zacharias faces opposition and threats from everywhere, not least from some tiny island nation in the Pacific where vengeful female ghosts are attacking the populace.  Luckily, he meets a beautiful and amazingly talented woman, Prunella, who technically shouldn't practice magic but is really good at it, and the two set off to make everything better.

I admit that if I had a slight problem with this book, it was in the character development.  There are just a lot of people in this book.  And while I enjoyed spending time with both Zacharias and Prunella, and I think they were both awesome, I wouldn't say that they were fully fleshed out, complex people.  I would have liked to dig a little deeper with them.  But maybe Cho just had so much going on in terms of setting the scene and introducing the magical elements and explaining the class/gender/race relations between everyone that there just wasn't enough time to also develop the characters that well.  What I knew of Zacharias and Prunella I liked, but I hope that in future books, they are more full-fledged oil paintings than pencil sketches.

But seriously, I liked so many other things about the story!

One of my favorite things about Spirits Abroad was the way Cho infused all her stories with Malaysian culture, from using dialect to describing food to incorporating folklore and so much else.  She does the same thing here, even though the book is set in London and the main characters are not Malaysian, and I love that.  THIS IS WHY DIVERSITY IN PUBLISHING IS SO IMPORTANT.  How many people would think to combine Indian history with Malaysian folklore, add a healthy dollop of English Faerie, and then make light but awesome references to equal rights for women and people of color?  Not many.

And the feminism, it is awesome.  There so many different women, most of whom wield different sorts of power that complement and contrast with one another.  And Cho doesn't just hit you over the head with the feminism, she really just kind of pokes fun at history and pokes holes in its rules, and it's a lot of fun.  And then she also shows how women in different cultures (English, Malaysian, Indian and, er, faerie) push against their boundaries even while working within their cultures.

And then there's the race stuff, too!  I think Cho maybe could have gone further on the race component than she did, but this is a pretty light book, so I can understand why she didn't.  Suffice it to say that Zacharias (and, to a lesser extent, Prunella) never forgets that he is different, and so much of his personality and actions are informed by that fact.  He's always a complete gentleman, and utterly polite to everyone, so that no one knows just how frustrated and angry he is.  All because he doesn't want to give them any reason to remember how different he is.  It's subtly done but so powerful when you catch on.

All in all, this book is great!  I think you should read it.  And then tell your friends to read it!  Perhaps for A More Diverse Universe :-)

Note:  This review is based on an advance reader's copy.  I received an e-galley of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Joint Musings: The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagahira

Ana and I read The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagahira, together a few months ago, and then spent quite a bit of time writing to each other in ALL CAPS and with lots of exclamation points.  Then Eva joined in and added a whole new level of complexity to our discussion, and the result was that we dissected this novel to a huge extent and the below discussion is full of massive spoilers.  You will probably only want to read it if you have already completed the book, or if you, like me, don't really care about spoilers.

The People in the Trees is based on real events.  The main character is Norton Perina, a brilliant but disturbing doctor who goes to a far-off, isolated island and discovers the secret to incredibly long life.  But long life comes with a price, as so many things do.  The novel explores Perina's life, the impact of colonization, the politics of power, and so much more.  All with the help of two extremely unreliable narrators.  It was one of the best books I've read this year and by far the most disturbing one to date.

Below is our detailed discussion.  We hope you weigh in with your thoughts, too!

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yangihara is written in the form of the fictional memoirs of Dr. Norton Perina, a once renowned scientist who won the Nobel for seemingly uncovering the secret of eternal life, but who has now fallen into disrepute. Perina has been convicted for sexual abuse; in the introduction, written in the voice of Perina's friend and defender Dr. Ronald Kubodera, we're told he's writing his memoirs in prison. The narrative then goes back to young Norton's life, particularly focusing on his expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu, the discovery that followed, and its far-reaching consequences for the islanders.

In the discussion that follows, we try to make sense of this novel's fascinating horrors. Be warned that some spoilers will be inevitable.

Ana: The People in the Trees has not one but two unreliable narrators, and I found it as troubling as it was accomplished and difficult to put down. I've seen it compared to Lolita on more than one occasion, and now that I've read it I can see why that's apt. Shall we start by talking about the two narrators, Perina and Kubodera, how their biases show, and what they might be hiding from the reader?

Aarti:  Yes!  I’ll start with Perina, since his narration is more apparent to the reader.  It’s always tricky with an unreliable narrator as you don’t know what he’s misconstrued or left out completely.  What was interesting to me about Perina was what he chose (I assume) not to leave out or misconstrue.  For example, he had no concerns about sharing with readers his treatment of his children because he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.  He also seemed to feel no guilt about his treatment of the original Ivu’Ivuians that he brought to the US, even though their treatment was horrific.  It all ladders up to him coming across as a complete sociopath, so I wonder if there were any key scenes that he did present to us inaccurately (the gang rape ones immediately leap to mind, particularly as Esme reacted so differently to them).

Kubodera is a tougher nut to crack because so much of his work is invisible to us.  He claims that he only made grammatical changes and removed that one section near the end (which was then provided to readers later).  But is that true?  Considering the hero worship, I think it unlikely.  But, again, if Kubodera wanted to show us Perina in a positive light, then he probably would have edited more heavily.  What was his motivation?  Perina never once mentions Kubodera in his whole narrative, and Kubodera admits that he only recently learned that Perina had a brother, and yet Kubodera claims to have known Perina very well.  And, based on the way the book ends, the two clearly had a strong enough relationship to elope together.  So did Kubodera edit himself out of the story?  Or is Perina just so self-absorbed that he would leave out someone so integral to him?  Or is Kubodera just not that important to Perina except as an escape mechanism?

Ana: I do wonder if Kubodera's feelings for Perina are meant to echo Perina's feelings for Tallent, the anthropologist he follows in his first expedition to Ivu’Ivuians.

Aarti:  Oh, that’s a brilliant suggestion!  I never thought of that but it would be a nice parallel.  The aloof, just out of reach mentor.  Though Kubodera was more successful in pinning his unicorn down vs Perina losing Tallent forever.

[I do think Tallent would include Perina in his narrative (not very positively).  We’ll have to talk about Tallent later, too.  So many things to talk about.]

Ana: The fact that Perina never mentions his most ardent defender in his narration suggests that he's far more important to Kubodera than Kubodera is to him, and I wonder if there's a side of unrequited love in there along with the hero worship. At the end of the book I almost felt sorry for Kubodera -- his rape apology is of course horrifying, and in his own way he's as unpleasant a character as Perina. But it does seem to me that Perina is using him to escape, and I can't imagine they have much of a future together.

To go back to your earlier questions, I do wonder if Kubera's lack of heavier editing is as much a reflection of his worldview as Perina's casual admission of his atrocities towards the Ivu’Ivuians or his children (or his recurrent misogyny, which I'm sure we'll discuss in more depth later). I wonder if, because he's a contemporary man, he's more aware than Perina of how those admission would be judged by the world at large. But his decision to include Perina's descriptions of how he sexually assaulted Victor in the end makes it clearer than ever that he still thinks he's in the right. The fact that these two men don't see much wrong with what they admit to shows readers how pervasive their worldview is, and how convinced they are that treating people as things is simply your prerogative if you're a supposedly brilliant man.

Aarti:  Yes, exactly!  This whole belief they justified that science must move forward regardless of any associated costs was just horrifying to me.  The guiding principle of medicine is “do no harm,” and yet all Perina ever did, to everyone he came across, was harm.  For example, note how he completely skims over the work he was doing with pharmaceutical companies to achieve immortality, so that it comes across like he was only ever after the science (even though he clearly had enough money to adopt so many children).  And the way he withheld the information about long life being accompanied by a complete degradation of mental faculties, which I assume is the main reason he kept the Ivu’Ivuians imprisoned.  

And when you think about it, really, what impact did Perina have on the world?  Kubodera describes him as a genius, almost too good for the world at large, but nothing he did had a positive lasting impact.

Ana:  I remember reading in a comment somewhere that it was interesting that Perina was the only one to report the Ivu’Ivuian rape ceremony. We have Esme's reaction to his account of it, and then he takes her to see it another night, but he claims that afterwards she "refused to talk about it" and made no mention of it in any of her books about the island. So all we have is Perina's word that Esme was there at all. For a while I was convinced that what would happen in the end would be that Perina would use the ceremony to "break" Victor, and justify his sexual abuse to himself to his readers that way. But he doesn't even feel the need to justify it -- and to be honest, I can't decide which one of the two would be worse.

Aarti:  I was expecting that, too.  That he would say he was keeping the culture alive for his children in as many ways as he could and ignoring the fact that he was not, in fact, part of that culture, and watching one event with zero context does not make him an expert in it.

I disagree with your comment that Perina didn’t feel the need to justify his behavior, though, at least for that one moment.  To clarify, I agree with you that he didn’t feel at all guilty.  But I feel like the way he described the incident (and I’m going from memory, so I may be off), he talked about how much fear and resistance the boy (what was his name?) put up against him, and then how he covered the boy’s mouth to stifle his screams and explained how much he loved him.  Based on that behavior, he knew he was doing something evil, and that by sharing the story, he had to account for why.  From what I recall, it was almost like a corruption of the white man’s burden - he was trying to tame this boy, and the only way he knew how to do it was with this savage, brutal behavior.  Kind of like Heart of Darkness, instead of sharing the polite, civilized world of western civilization with the boy, he had reverted and become more beastly himself to establish his own superiority.  Does that make any sense?

Ana: Yes, I see what you mean, though his account of it is so horrifying that it takes a sociopath to think it could come across as anything other than what it is. Of course, that's exactly what Yanagihara is doing -- to give readers a glimpse of what the world looks like through the eyes of a sociopath like Perina by making us engage with the story from his perspective, and then read between the lines for what he left out.

For example, all through the novel I wanted to get a better sense of what the other characters might be like without the mediation of Perina's perspective, and without his no doubt countless omissions. To go back to Esme, Perina makes it sound like her view of the Ivu’Ivuians is shaped by "Noble Savage" ideas, which in the end are of course as racist and dehumanising as his own. He strongly implies that this is why she leaves the rapes out of her books and refuses to discuss them -- they don't fit with her preconceptions of a peaceful and idealistic "primitive" society, and so she edits them out of her reality. But of course we don't know whether that really is the case, because all we have is Perina's word. Perina's perception of Esme is distorted by many things, particularly his possessiveness towards Tallent and his blatant misogyny. Here's his description of Esme at one point during their first excursion:

I did not look at her, but around her seemed the sickening scent of menstrual blood, a tinnily feminine smell so oppressive that it was a relief finally to begin the day’s climb and to find it vanishing slowly into the odors of the jungle. And from then on I was unable to look at her without thinking of oozing liquids, as thick and heavy as honey but rank and spoiled, seeping from her every hidden orifice.

That right there tells us everything we need to know about his worldview, and about how much his assessment of a woman anthropologist's work can be trusted.

Aarti:  Yes, I completely agree.  It’s frustrating that we don’t get a sense of the facts at all, just his interpretation of them.  It’s like trying to drive in a heavy fog; you really have no idea of the context.  I wish there were more women in the book that we could use as a gauge, but of course, there are none because Perina pretends they don’t exist.  The only one we get is his mother, and he was quite cruel to her, too.  

His relationships with Esme and Tallent was very difficult to unravel.  Esme completely disappears from the narrative after that first trip to the island (except for that brief meeting back in California), and Tallent is more present in Perina’s dreams than in the flesh.  But then, everyone seems to disappear from Perina’s narrative.  We never hear about the original Ivu’Ivuians except for their horrible mistreatment, we barely know the names of any of the children Perina adopted (and I doubt that the adoption stories happen at all in the way that he describes them), Kubodera is not mentioned at all, and Perina’s brother is just a voice on the phone more than a tangible being.  It’s almost as if the further Perina goes into the science, the more he forgets about the human element and just leaves it behind.  I don’t know if I am explaining this well at all, but at the beginning of the book, many more characters had distinct personalities and physical descriptions; by the end, that seemed to be hardly the case at all.

Ana: Yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I think that's something Yanagihara is probably doing deliberately, because one of the key themes of The People in the Trees is dehumanisation and what happens when it's taken to its final consequences. Perina sees his co-workers, the Ivu'Ivuians and ultimately his children as things he can use and then cast aside; as tools as his disposal to help him achieve his goals rather than as human beings. For example, here's a revealing and disturbing passage about his adoptions that I bookmarked:

Shall I tell you how with each new child I acquired, I would irrationally think, This is the one. This is the one who will make me happy. This is the one who will complete my life. This is the one who will be able to repay me for years of looking.

Shall I tell you how I was always wrong--eighteen, nineteen, twenty times wrong--and how although I was always wrong, I didn't stop, I couldn't stop, I was searching, searching, searching.

Even his choice of verb -- "acquire" -- is immensely revealing. You acquire things, not children. He describes the growth of his family as a shopping compulsion, and that alone tells us everything we need to know about how he sees his children.

We haven't yet said much about how the novel deals with western imperialism, though there's plenty to discuss. There are the consequences of Perina's discovery on the island and what he sees as he goes back year after year; there's Victor's rejection of his westernized name; there's the horrible fate of the Ivu'Ivuians when they're forcibly removed from their home. Do you have any thoughts you want to share?

Aarti:  Oh, I have so many thoughts, but I probably can’t share them all!  Probably anyone who reads my blog or knows me will know that I have pretty strong opinions on imperialism and its effects on cultures and lifestyles, both good and bad (but mostly bad).  I don’t know that I can say much that is new except that Yanagahira makes her views on imperialism pretty obvious in this book.  Not only is there the destruction of an entire culture and way of life, there’s the extinction of a beautiful and peaceful animal, all the vices and problems that come when one person becomes very, very rich at the expense of other people, and all the rest of the horrible baggage that comes along with imperialism.

But I think what was most telling for me (and is particularly relevant now, especially given recent events in the US) was Perina’s COMPLETE lack of accountability.  He refused to accept that he had anything to do with the the stampede on Ivu’Ivu, even though he was a pretty direct cause, and he kept setting himself up as some sort of savior rather than a culprit.  It’s as though he was telling a very different story than the one I was reading, and I think that explains colonialism in a nutshell.

What do you think of Yanagahira’s strategy in doing this?  She seems to have set up Perina as the human embodiment of colonialism - a man who thought only of the benefits to himself and not of the consequences to other people.  Do you see anywhere that she gave Perina (and perhaps western Imperialism) the upper hand or the benefit of the doubt?  Or was everything just completely corrupted?

Ana: I really couldn't see anything about it that wasn't awful: what we see in what happens Ivu'Ivu is a perfect example of unshackled greed at work, be it for money (in the case of the big corporations who come in search of the turtles) or, in Perina's  case, greed for glory and recognition.

Since we started this discussion, Eva shared an interview with us that possibly casts Yamagihara's authorial intent in a different light:

Gajdusek’s story fascinated me. Here was an indisputably brilliant mind who also did terrible things. It’s so easy to affix a one-word description to someone, and it’s so easy for that description to change: if we call someone a genius, and then they become a monster, are they still a genius? How do we assess someone’s greatness: is it what they contribute to society, and is that contribution negated if they also inflict horrible pain on another? Or—as I have often wondered—is it not so binary?

What do you make of her statement, particularly in relation to how Perina is portrayed in the novel?

Aarti: Ohmigoodness, so much inner turmoil after seeing that statement.  I agree with Yanagahira that nothing is binary, but I also don’t think Perina had any redeeming features, so for him, I think monster is a pretty accurate term.  He did nothing to improve anyone’s lives, and did much to ruin many people’s lives.  As Eva said in our offline discussion:

“What’s weird to me is that her fictional scientist *doesn’t* help millions of people. Like, if his research had provided a cure to Alzheimer’s or dementia or cancer or something, that would provide a bit more of an argument the other way. But my impression from reading is that the island was wasted, and the people destroyed, and nothing came of it.”

Which, YES, exactly.  Personally, I see nothing redemptive there to tip him into the “genius” category.

Ana: Yes, it's a challenging one to make sense of. I don't want to dismiss the ambiguity Yamagihara hints at entirely, because I know it's possible to have a meaningful relationship with the work of someone whose actions you absolutely don't condone. My experience of this is in the arts more than in the sciences, but it's fundamentally the same thing: there are books that were important to me before I found out awful things about their authors. My relationship with their work continues to exist, even if I choose not to support them in the future (and that's always going to be a very personal decision -- different people draw the line differently). It's not so much that I separate the two in my head, but the two sets of feelings can exist side by side.

However, like you I had trouble seeing it here, for a few different reasons. First because I was also at a loss when it came to identifying a positive side to Perina's work; secondly and even more importantly, because his work is impossible to separate from the colonial impulse that does so much damage to Ivu’Ivu. It's not that the latter was an unintended consequence of his intellectual curiosity and quest for knowledge -- it's that the two are one and the same.

So to me this was one of those cases where I reminded myself that books belong to their readers. I don't know what Hanya Yanagihara intended when she wrote The People in the Trees, but to me it reads like a chilling denouncement of a worldview that costs people their lives, and of all the internal justifications that accompany. That's what I found so powerful, and that's what's going to stay with me.