Angela Tung | Oversharing on the internet since 2005.

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18
Nov 12

Writing Update

Updated.

My latest writerly shenanigans!

Work

I had fun writing How to Talk Like Jane Austen for Talk Like Jane Austen Day, and people seemed to like it too. First, the always awesome @ElectricLit tweeted it. Then somehow it ended up in the November 1 headlines of The Morning News. Then curator goddess Maria Popova, aka @brainpicker, tweeted it too! The post also made an appearance on the fun site, Yes and Yes, as a November 11 Web Time Wasters.

For Halloween, I wrote about ghostly words, and for Election Day, words on politics and campaigning. For Diwali, I thought it’d be fun to write about English words that are derived from Indian languages,which got a mention in the language blog of The Economist. Nice!

The Beautiful Anthology

Some exciting news here as well! The Beautiful Anthology made the list of The New York Times‘ Best Bathroom Books of 2012! These books “stock the ideal bathroom library,” and the anthology is described as mostly featuring “good writers you’ve never heard of.” Like me!

The day after I posted this update, I learned that The Beautiful Anthology had also been included in the Daily Candy’s Best Books of 2012. Woot! So many great books on that list. I loved The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac and Where’d You Go Bernadette?, and there are several more that I want to read.

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15
Nov 12

Aftermath

Hurricane Sandy hit the very day that my parents were scheduled to return from Taiwan into JFK. My mother called from Taiwan that night, but for a whole week afterward, I had no idea what their status was. They don’t have a smart phone, and while my father emails regularly from home (and even, briefly, joined Facebook, quitting after he realized how “boring” and “stupid” it was), I doubted he’d be able to figure out how to email from abroad. So I waited.

Finally, the night I wrote that Survivor Guilt post, my mother called. They had returned the night before at midnight to a house with no power, and that day still had no power. Then my mother said, “We had a bad trip.”

“What happened?” I asked, expecting her to talk about the nightmare of flying into JFK so soon after Hurricane Sandy. But that wasn’t it.

“Your dad broke his leg!” she said.

“Oh no! What happened?”

My mother explained: on their second day in Taiwan, my father tripped and fell. This has happened before. While he walks three miles a day, I think that when he’s someplace unfamiliar, he has a tendency to trip easily. On a different China trip, he fell but only got a little scraped up. At my grandmother’s funeral, he tripped over a curb and got some abrasions on his face. This time he fractured a pubis bone. A fracture, not a break, but my mother didn’t make this clear.

The fall and injury happened two weeks earlier, but my father insisted my mother not tell my brother and me, for fear we would worry over nothing. So when I talked to my mom that night she called from Taiwan, they had already been holed up in the hotel for six days. (Luckily at least my parents had a problem-free week in China first.)

“He can’t move!” she said. “And we have no power.” Luckily they had a friend nearby with power so at least my mom could drive there and charge their phones. But no power also meant no running water or heat. “And it was so cold last night.”

“Oh, no,” I kept saying. I pictured my father flat and immobile on the couch, as he would have to remain for six to eight weeks. “I think you should go to the emergency room! He should be in the hospital!” An ambulance could come get him, I thought, and he’d at least be in a place with power and where he could be taken care of, without the whole burden being on my mom.

“We went to the emergency room in Taiwan,” Mom said. “The doctor said all we can do is wait six to eight weeks.”

Painfully, slowly, I got it out of my mother that my father’s regular doctor would be calling him the next day and would advise him about what to do. My mother kept saying “the doctor,” referring to the doctor both in Taiwan and his regular doctor, making no distinction.

She also told me not to worry (imagine that! the Queen Mother of Worrying), but I couldn’t help but be worried sick. What I was most anxious about was that they had no power. I wanted to do something but there was nothing I could do. So I tweeted. I tweeted at my parents’ electric company that “my elderly parents still have no power or running water,” and their road and the cross street. I searched on Twitter for the name of my parents’ town, and saw that some people had power and some didn’t.

I went to bed around two, but couldn’t turn off my brain. If only they had power, I kept thinking. Then my dad’s injury wouldn’t be so hard so deal with. Then, If only my dad weren’t injured, then the power outage would be nothing. They could go to a friend’s house to shower and hang out. But they couldn’t. The image of my dad trapped and immobile in the cold and darkness kept replaying in my head.

I finally fell asleep around 3, and was up again at 7. The first thing I did was check my email, and lo and behold, there was an email from my dad. They had gotten their power back just that morning, and he very calmly gave the details of his injury. He had a fracture not a break, and it was his right pubis bone. He had spoken with his regular doctor, who confirmed that all he could do was rest right now and let the fracture heal naturally. In six to eight weeks, he should make a follow up X-ray appointment and an appointment to see the doc.

Holy shit, I felt so much better after that.

Of course I wanted to fly out to New Jersey right away, but I didn’t know how feasible that would be in the aftermath of Sandy. Finally, I decided a week should suffice, and found a reasonable flight.

But then came word of an impending nor’easter. I sort of ignored the warnings, and hoped that it would pass the east coast, or wouldn’t be so bad. But two days before my flight, my dad asked me to postpone my trip. The idea of my dealing with bad weather was too stressful for him. So I canceled my flight (again luckily in time for a full refund).

Then I found another flight for the week after, which flew into Newark rather than JFK (which was my original flight’s destination), and was even slightly cheaper. Hooray!

Then I got a cold. No biggie. But when I talked to my mom on Tuesday, she tried to convince me to change my flight again. I really didn’t want to. This would be just getting ridiculous now. Then it turned out I’d have to call to change. Forget it. I can survive a flight with a silly cold. Leave it to my mom to stress me out over nothing.

Anyway, so I arrived last night with surprisingly no problems. In fact my flight was kinda great. It helped that I forked over $60 to upgrade to “economy plus.” The only regular seats left by the time I checked in were middle seats, or an aisle in the very last row. An aisle seat with more leg room was worth it to me. Gonna do it again on my way back.

My cold also didn’t bother me. I had a cough, but I was more worried about grossing out the people around me. I read, worked on my novel, and watched Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was so very good but so very sad. We landed 10 minutes early. I had a 20 minute wait for the train, but at least there were trains going to my town. And an express no less!

It’s been good to see my dad in person. While his mobility is pretty limited, he sounds and looks like his regular self. He can stand for short periods of time, but can’t walk much yet. And my parents are bickering as usual.

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08
Nov 12

Asians for Obama: Why?

I love the story that Asian Americans overwhelmingly voted for Obama. Apparently, “exit polls show that 73% of Asian Americans backed Obama, an 11-point increase since 2008.”

I keep wondering why. Asians, at least those of my parents’ generation, tend to be more conservative. My parents were fans of Reagan, and when Clinton ran the first time back in 1992, my mother threatened to disown me if I voted for him (I did anyway; she didn’t).

Then I remembered Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s wonderful piece about her Asian dad and Mitt Romney, and how although her father, who has passed away, had always been a Republican, he would have been appalled at the idea of Romney eating only the tops of muffins, which Romney said to make himself seem like a regular joe, ironically. Lee writes, “Will muffin-top-gate cause other immigrant parents to join their Democratic-leaning children?”

My parents are pretty apolitical now. I don’t think they know much about Obama and Romney’s policies. But when I told my mother that Romney only eats the tops of muffins, she immediately scowled.

“What a waste!” she said. “That guy is pretty naive.”

I think by “naive” my mother meant out of touch. He had never understood what it was like to be poor, like my parents were as children during World War II in China, and as refugees in Taiwan. My mother tells stories of how they ate meat only a few times a year, and how when there wasn’t enough to eat, her two brothers ate first while she and her sisters went hungry.

I have my own theories as to why older Asians might like Obama better. He, like them, like us, is the other. His father wasn’t born here. To the ignorant, he seems foreign. His citizenship has been questioned. He’s intelligent and slightly nerdy. He seems modest. These may be Asian stereotypes and not everything all Asians are, but they are qualities that are valued in many Asian families. I grew up surrounded by scientists and engineers. I would never not date someone because he was one of those things, which, apparently, for some women is a dealbreaker. (A smart guy with a steady job? What a fucking loser!)

My belief is that Romney is simply not relatable to older Asians. He’s too slick. He’s not like anyone they’ve encountered in real life. He’s a rich white guy who throws away half his muffins.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad the Trekkie and not the dressage-enthusiasist is in office. Now let’s hope the Trekkie does better this time around.

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04
Nov 12

Voting Confessions

Well, it was yesterday, but who cares.

My regular polling place is actually quite convenient. It’s at a school less than a block from where I live. But I didn’t want to be in a rush on Tuesday, and the early voting place wasn’t far from where I was getting my hair cut on Saturday, so I thought, Why not!

I was wondering to myself why I never voted early in New York, and I found out not all states have early voting. I don’t know why not. They totally should. Early voting, especially on the weekend, is great if you can’t fit it into the work day on Tuesday.

Anyway, I was surprised by the long line. I don’t know why. It was less than hour before the doors closed so everyone was trying to get in at the last minute. The line snaked down one side of the hall, and up the other. However, it moved at a fast clip. We were told the wait would be over an hour, but it was more like 45 minutes.

What I noticed was that it was mostly white people.When I first moved to San Francisco, one of my first thoughts was, Where are all the black people? According to the 2011 Census, only 6.3% of the San Francisco population is black. That is freaking tiny. In New York, it’s 17.5%, which is still really small, but almost three times the number here. There are a shit ton of Asians in SF – 33.9% – and 54.5% whites, while New York is only 7.8% Asian and 71.5% white. I don’t think I realized how white New York actually is, and how few Asians there are.

The people in line at early voting were not just mostly white, but also aging baby boomers, at least the people right around me. You know, those sometimes clueless liberals who came of age in the ’60s. What do I mean by clueless liberal? I mean someone like Democrat Andrew Cuomo saying of Obama, “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference,” although he claims he wasn’t referring to Obama. (Riiiight.) These boomers were studying their lists of how they’d vote on the zillion California propositions like it was the SATs. I wanted to say to them, “You know you don’t have to memorize them, right? You can even look them up on your phone” (which is what I did while I was waiting on line).

I know, I know, I’m sure they were perfectly nice, and they were being all responsible and shit, but I couldn’t help but get annoyed by them, and at the woman who was freaking out that she was in the wrong line, despite the fact that 1) three different people told her it was the same line broken into two halves, and 2) she was in the half closer to voting.

Then it was my turn! Suddenly, it did feel like the SATs. How the heck did I select who I wanted? Ah, fill in the broken arrow. Okay, kinda weird. Almost would have preferred bubbles and a number two pencil. Check, check, check (a little random, I confess, on the smaller political offices). Prop this, prop that. Oh, so this would be against this bad thing, right, not for it? This would reduce another bad thing, and increase a punishment for bad people. Okay, okay.

And I was done. But I hadn’t voted for president. What the fuck?

Oh, TWO SIDES. Well, fuck me.

(The same thing happened to me once in college. For my American Literature final, I didn’t realize I had to turn the test sheet over. Me and many of my classmates. I was apparently the only one who called the professor at home and begged to take the rest of the test. It was just me and him in an empty classroom. I still did shitty. It was an incredibly boring class.)

Out went all the cards from the envelope. Okay, whew, there were Barry and Joe (and let’s not forget, Roseanne Barr for the “Peace and Freedom” party, whatever the fuck that is). NOW I was done. I handed in my envelope.

Afterward, I kind of felt like I deserved a cookie or some juice, like after giving blood. I would have gotten a sticker, but forgot. Oh well.

I’ll leave you with this message from Chris Rock to white voters:

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02
Nov 12

Survivor Guilt

Part of me wants to be in New York right now.

Before the storm hit, I sort of wanted to be part of, not the fun, but the experience. Afterward I could say, “I was there.” I could bond with friends, family, and fellow New Yorkers. We would remember together, how tough we were, how we got through it. How we told ourselves, like we did during the 2003 blackout, “At least it’s not terrorists.”

But at the same time, I was glad I wasn’t there. During my visit back in May, it rained terribly one day, which fucked up everything. What should have been a ten minute door to door trip from SoHo to the Upper East Side became an hour. I was glad I didn’t have to deal with the weather, with trying to get to work, of getting soaked and, worst of all, possibly losing power.

Then the storm hit, and there was one day of no power, then two, three, and four, and my desire to be back in New York morphed into guilt.

I admit I don’t feel the same way when disasters hit in other parts of the world. I suppose this is natural. New York was my home for ten years,. I was there during 9/11 and the blackout of 2003. Not being there now, during Hurricane Sandy, seems wrong somehow. Me and New York disasters, likethis!

I keep imagining what it would be like if I were there. If I still lived in my old ‘hood, the Lower East Side, MB and I would definitely be without power. But my old workplace, on East 42nd Street, is above what Anil Dash has called the No Power Zone, or NPZ, and what others have dubbed SoPo (South of Power), so I would have been able to bathe and charge my electronic devices (what many are calling showering and powering).

If I still lived on the Upper East Side, it would be a different story. I’d still have power. It would seem no different, especially if I still worked on East 42nd. I would open up my home to friends who lived in the NPZ. They could shower and watch TV and sleep over. I would be helping, unlike now.

Friends keep putting up pictures of pitch-black SoPo, and I can’t imagine what it’s like. The closest I can come up with is something like China, where my town was so dark at night, I was scared to leave my house. Even my parents’ New Jersey neigborhood, which is in what used to be farmland, no more light. There are bright streetlamps (powered by solar panels, they probably still work now, unless damaged by the storm), and blinding anti-theft spotlights from too big houses set far from the road.

As for my parents, they may still be in Taiwan. They were supposed to fly back Monday of all days, and I had to assume that their flight was canceled. That night my mother bit the cheap Chinese bullet and called me from the hotel. That was almost five days ago, and I haven’t heard from my parents since. It seems JFK is open, but I have a feeling they’re playing it safe and waiting several days before attempting to fly back. I wish I knew for sure. Dammit, Dad, get on the internet!

This piece on the WNYC site made me think of my parents. “A long time ago,” the author writes, “I was in Calcutta, walking down the street, and it starts raining, and in less than an hour, I’d say, we find ourselves wading through thigh-high water,” and “of course, for the locals, they’re all blasé, like hey, it’s just another day in Calcutta — what’s the big deal?” My parents had the same experience growing up in Taiwan, home of the typhoon (or taifeng, as my Twitter friend reminded me, a transliteration of typhoon but also, literally, “too much wind”). Ironic that that’s where they are now, safe and relative dry, while New Jersey and New York almost drown.

Reading all the tweets and news stories about people with lack of food and water in parts of Manhattan, Staten Island, and New Jersey are making me sadder and sadder. I worry that it’s going to get worse, that people will die, that riots will start. I worry basically that it will turn into another Katrina. Please don’t let this turn into another Katrina. Please, whoever is out there, help these people. The elderly, the handicapped, and whoever isn’t mobile. Those in Staten Island and New Jersey. Everyone.

UPDATE: I just saw a tweet that the power is starting to come back on in SoPo.

Thankful but snarky, totally New York.

Now I’ve a bit of hope.

nanowrimo / writing — Comments Off
01
Nov 12

How I’m Doing NaNoWriMo This Year: Cheating

I’ve done NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month) several times. I’ve completed two bad novels, got partway through another, and spent one NaNoWriMo revising my memoir. Last year I started NaNoWriMo, then decided to do NaNoPlanMo instead, planning my novel, the same novel I’m still working on now, a year later.

Little by little I’ve been adding to it, and I’m finally in the home stretch. I have about 80,000 words, and just two or three chapters left write. But it’s been slow-going. I write between 200 and 300 words, five or six days a week. Once in a blue moon, I’ll write between 500 and 1,000 words. Better than nothing, but not a lot. So this year I thought I’d do NaNoWriMo, not to write a whole new novel, but to up my word count toward 1,667.

The thing is I don’t want to write that many words a day for my novel. Number one, I write a lot for work, and after doing a blog post, I’m kinda burnt out. Two or three hundred words is doable, but not much more.

Number two, I don’t want to write shit. In the past, I’ve written a lot of shit just to get in my word count. Not that every word in my current novel is gold, but I don’t want to be typing and not knowing where the story is going. I want to stop when I feel like I’m pooping out. I want to be able to research and revise.

So this is how I’m cheating: I’m counting everything I write in the 1,667 word count. Not emails or anything like that, but blog posts and shorter pieces (though I don’t think I’ll start any new stories or essays until the novel is done). The post I wrote for work earlier today counts (566 words) and this post right here counts (over 300 words).

And the total? About 1,200 words, which means I’m still short.

On the upside, I blogged for the first time in a while, and I added 374 words to my novel, which is slightly more than I usually do. Hopefully I can make up the difference on another day.

TNB book club / what i'm reading now — Comments Off
31
Oct 12

The Stockholm Octavo, by Karen Engelmann

rant and/or rave — 2 comments
27
Oct 12

The story that could have been: Radio Lab’s “Yellow Rain”

I didn’t want to listen to the Radiolab “Yellow Rain” podcast.

People were upset about. I saw this story from Hyphen magazine being tweeted a lot. I didn’t read the story. I knew that if I read the story and listened to the podcast, I was going to get upset too.

I was right.

I listened with an open mind. I usually like public radio shows, and wanted to walk away thinking, People are being defensive. The show starts out innocently and interestingly enough. Basically, it’s about the controversy around Yellow Rain, a supposed chemical weapon that was dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War and caused death and destruction among the Hmong people. President Reagan claimed the Yellow Rain was developed by the Soviet Union.

A Harvard scientist has claimed that the yellow droppings were nothing but bee poop.

Then how do you explain all the death? Coincidence. People were dying from dysentery and other diseases at the same time these bees pooped.

Nothing but bee poop! Can you believe it?

And then the scientist laughed.

Right after all the description about what the Hmong people went through, they presented this theory about the bee poop, and the scientist laughed.

Dear Radio Lab, do you know what tone is? It’s if I’m telling a heartbreaking story, I don’t suddenly start joking and laughing about fucking bee poop.

The truly upsetting part of the show was when the hosts basically ambush their guests, Hmong refugee Eng Yang and his niece, award-winning author and activist, Kao Kalia Yang. They had gone in thinking they would have a chance to tell their story, but instead they got grilled about whether or not the Yellow Rain was truly a chemical weapon. Yang gives an impassioned response and says that the interview was over. There’s silence, and then the host saying, “But it wasn’t. They kept talking.”

Those annoying people just kept yakking!

I can easily imagine another story. You start with the idea, “Yellow Rain is only bee poop,” but then there’s this other, more important story: the Hmong people. One of the hosts, Robert Krulwich, went on about how “the woman” didn’t care that President Reagan accused the Soviet Union of using chemical weapons.

If I had to choose between caring about the death of my people or a pissing contest between two governments, I’ll pick the death of my people.

The story could have been, “Yes, Yellow Rain may not have been poison. The Cold War might have been started over bee poop, but does any of that matter? What about the Hmong?” That would have been an interesting, well-rounded story.

los angeles / writing — Comments Off
18
Oct 12

Book Soup: Reading from The Beautiful Anthology

As I mentioned, I was lucky enough to participate in a reading for The Beautiful Anthology at Book Soup in Los Angeles.

Not only did I get to share my work, I finally had the chance to meet a few fellow TNB writers in person, including Brad Listin, Rachel Pollon Williams, and Rich Ferguson.

Plus! I got to hang out with my brother.

Get yourself a copy of The Beautiful Anthology if you haven’t already.

TNB book club / what i'm reading now — Comments Off
17
Oct 12

Angela Tung Oversharing on the internet since 2005.