Lilith’s Brood, Xenogenesis 1–3, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.

2012 was a year of firsts. It was the year I first ventured outside academia for a life, the first time I forayed into science fiction, and the year I first found Octavia Butler. I was late to the game having discovered OB six years after she died, but ahead of the curve for her renaissance in the academic/activist circles I occupied. Two years later, OB became the patron saint of radical academics intent on destablizing racial capitalism and U.S. imperialism through dissertation chapters, cultural studies, and conversations in my university’s humanities center. A year after that, The Parable of the Sower became a household title for movement organizers everywhere.

In 2012, I read Lilith’s Brood because it was the only OB book available for borrowing at my public library. In 2012, I was spellbound. I had expected something completely different. Foolishly, I expected something easy.

I did not expect OB to write about grotesque aliens with tentacles and sensory arms. I didn’t expect her to make Oankali predisposed for collecting, fixing, and integrating new materials into their future generations. I didn’t expect them to journey across space to a dying Earth. I didn’t think they’d capture Lilith. I certainly didn’t foresee the choice they offered: stay alone or participate in the end of humanity. Help Oankali convince humans to breed themselves out of existence.

Unimaginable. Quietly horrific — and it didn’t stop there.

Lilith capitulated. By the end of the trilogy, Lilith had mothered the next phase of human evolution. The reluctance and anger at her lack of choice had dissolved. She no longer appeared the subject of coercion. Instead, Lilith thrived, occupying an honored place in a large, established Oankali family. She had many kids, whom she loved, protected, and readied for a Oankali-human world. Lilith seemed happy. Content. Even though the alien takeover never fades, only grows.

Easier writers would have pandered to my instincts. I wanted Lilith to fight. I wanted her to be forever resistant. I wanted Lilith to develop an aversion to Oankali so great she’d take it to her grave. I’m sure OB expected this because that’s how she depicts other humans. At best, they regard Lilith and her choices with suspicion. At worst, they are openly hostile, murdering people who take her side and forming resistor factions that choose sterility and certain death over health and long life with Oankali mates.

Ten years ago, I asked myself this: What was consent anyway? Is it truly consent when Lilith’s choices are made against a backdrop of coercion? And what of companionate marriages when religion, colonialism, and Western feminism baked partner-choice as a hallmark of modernity into our collective psyche? We purport our desires, tastes, and relationship choices to be our own, and yet we make them in the context of white heteropatriarchy. Can we, then, say that we are free? What complicated, “compromised” forms of agency arise under these conditions for women of color — for Black women like Lilith — situated among multiple axes of oppression but expected to thrive?

When I read the Xenogenesis trilogy ten years ago, I was neck-deep in Third World feminist theory and coming out of a breakup. I devoured the books on winter break and wrestled with OB’s depictions of love, violence, and sex between humans and the most alien of aliens. It was challenging. I was forced to embrace the vagaries of life in a vastly unequal world, disquieting as it was. I loved it. Lilith was no superhero but neither was she abject.

This time around, I prepared to cycle through the mixed emotions that accompanied my first reading and stayed with me for ten years. Would I feel the same shock when OB unveiled the Oankali’s plan? Would I regard Lilith and her choices with disappointment, dismay, and sympathy? What would I think of her children— Akin and Jodahs — who assume vastly different roles in propelling forward the human species?

Again, I was thrown. A host of obligations prevented me from reading so quickly, and that was just as well.

This time, I luxuriated in OB’s world. Her premise was no less unsettling and Lilith’s predicament still unenviable. Earth continued to be destroyed and humanity’s future continued to rest on Lilith’s shoulders. Yet, ten years later, I found myself reveling in Lilith’s Brood’s unforgiving complexity. All OB’s humans made choices they believed would let them navigate the end of the world, on their own terms. I couldn’t hate them, even if they hated Lilith.

Lilith, too, continued to challenge me. She forged a family amidst coercion and the thinly veiled disgust of other humans (and perhaps readers, too). Despite acclimating to Oankali life, she herself couldn’t bear the enormity of her decisions at times. Then again, what’s consent anyway? I wrestled with this question ten years ago. Ten years later, I’d say I’m still not sure. It’s not as unmediated as we’d like, but I guess it can be created. Lilith’s decisions give her hope and control, two freedoms against vast uncertainty and an overarching lack thereof. Against bad odds and great sacrifices, they’re calculated exercises of discretion that yield a future of family and companionate negotiations.

A final note: in grappling with OB’s hardened world the first time around, I had completely overlooked the fact that it extended to space. It took me ten years to realize that Dawn took place exclusively on a spaceship and the jungle where Lilith took humans for survival training was housed in an elaborate dome. There was an entire scene when Nikanj takes Lilith to a viewing deck to take in a devastated Earth from the blackness above. All the transports shuttling Oankali and humans to and from Earth, from one corridor to another, were giant Catbusses! How did I miss this? It must not have registered the first time. I must have been too absorbed drawing definitive lines to render Oankali sinister, humans good, and Lilith righteous.

2022 is here and I’m feeling adventurous. I want to set some real resolutions. Not the concrete, practical ones I know I can keep. I’m in the mood for far-reaching, aspirational goals that are bound to be broken. The ones that are poorly articulated and call for changes in deep-seeded habits. The ones that are impossible to keep for 365 days, 52 weeks a year after the rush of turning a new leaf wanes. (What does it mean to be more present in relationships anyway? How can you measure that and would you remember to do this in, say, June?) This time next year, I want to laugh at how far off the mark I fell.

“Why would you do this to yourself?” you ask. Wouldn’t it be better to make promises I can keep? Like the year I said I’d take a first-time homeownership course so I could better imagine a future of stability. Or the year I promised myself an overseas vacation to a place I would not have gone had I stayed in academia. Or the year I vowed to join the ranks of people who put one space after a period, not two. These resolutions were finite and concrete. They were things I could manage even when I got busy because it was the single project I had to complete in twelve months. I could avoid the pitfall of disappointment to feel accomplished instead. My resolutions could be fun.

But 2022 is not the year to be restrained. Not after 2021 and 2020 ground our lives to a halt and left us, at best, dangling over endless uncertainty, if not outright doom. For two years, we slogged through an earth-shattering pandemic and volatile cycles of storms and forest fires. This is the year to aspire, to stretch our spirits because it’s awfully hard to stretch our legs when highly transmissable, airborne viruses are afoot.

To aspire is especially appropriate if you’ve traveled down the road of adulthood. This year, I had the fortune of taking a break with pay, without work. How I got there was devastating and traumatic, but now that I was there, my partner and friends pointed out the silver lining. When in anyone’s adult life is it possible to breathe? When can we take a step back from the daily grind, reassess the lessons we’ve learned, and reposition ourselves in a self-determined direction? When do the workers of the world have time to play, to do things we like that have nothing to do with professional identities and day-to-day obligations? Dreaming is a luxury for the privileged or young— unless I reclaim it.

So 2022 is the year for hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I am going to set multiple goals. I don’t expect to accomplish them all, but gosh darn it, I will try. Here’s a list of what I hope to do this year and the likelihood of my following through rated on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being the most likely to fall by the wayside.

1. I want to write more.

Likelihood of follow through: 4. I’ve had this goal since finishing my doctorate and I haven’t been able to get into a good groove. I love writing. There’s something satisfying about giving birth to an idea so consuming I could see it, for which the only relief was to commit it to paper and see where it took me as I developed it here and edited it there. How I felt about the finished product was a reason for going to and getting through higher ed.

But I’m not in academia. I didn’t stay, and so I don’t have access to the institutional supports that make it possible for me to publish more of my dissertation or conceptualize a new project. How can I write and what do I write about if not the things I studied for nearly a decade with which I can’t engage?

Enter this blog. After years of hesitation, self doubt, and some scattered, unsatisfying efforts to write for work, a couple of friends pushed me off the edge. “Why not a blog?” they said. “It can be about anything you want, and it doesn’t matter if you’re not an expert. This is yours — and no one can take that away.” I’ve already started on this goal to give myself some runway. In 2022, I plan to write at least 10 posts.

2. I’d like to send more letters.

Likelihood of follow through: 3. A friend I see quite regularly makes a habit of sending me mail. Two or three times a year, I get cards with handwritten messages that could easily have been communicated via text but wasn’t.

I love it. It’s such a treat. More so as an adult than when I was a kid. As a kid, I wrote to my cousins and had pen pals. I collected stamps and decorated the envelope with stickers. As an adult, mail is little more than bills and circulars until the end of the year when we receive holiday cards that then force us to think up meaningful messages to scrawl in handwriting we haven’t used. This year, I enjoyed my round of sitting at the kitchen counter with a stack of blank cards and morning coffee. So much so that I’d like to make this a 2022 practice.

A part of me feels like I might not be alone in my letter-writing campaign. This could very well be a larger trend towards collective nostalgia. Kind of like bread-baking and watching the 6-part Michael Jordan documentary at the beginning of the pandemic. Or when typewriters and handlebar mustaches were suddenly “in.” Nevertheless, let’s try for 6 non-holiday messages sent by mail. Bonus points for cool stamps.

3. I’d like to get into lap swimming.

Likelihood of follow through: 3. One of 2021 accomplishments was to run a half-marathon. With gyms being off-limits for most of the year, I wanted motivation to make sure I was getting off my butt several times a week to exercise. Despite the cold or in the heat.

I did it this November, but I also discovered my age. My body took a beating. My knees felt the pounding more and my head asked “what’s this all for anyway?”

Nothing will replace running outdoors, but I decided to mix it up after the half-marathon, especially after gyms reopened. Let’s try new exercises and see what happens. I love the water so much so that I moved to Hawaii in my early 20’s to learn to surf. Though the beaches here will never compare, maybe swimming can replace some of my running while rekindling old joys.

4. I’d like to start a garden.

Likelihood of follow through: 2. I’ve wanted this for quite a while but have always settled for houseplants because I’ve only ever rented. Everyone says tending the soil is relaxing and with dystopian futures coming more into focus, the ability to grow seems a necessary skill to acquire in order to survive in our respective failed states.

Now I own a home with some outdoor space for gardening. I cleared the backyard of weeds and trash and snagged some seeds at an end-of-season sale. I keep them tucked away in a kitchen drawer and have already Googled “how to make a raised bed.” I’m counting down the days to breaking soil and this goal will be a true test. Will I make enough time to get two by fours and dirt? Will I put the boxes together and do the plantings at the right time in the season? Will I weed and water them throughout the summer and into the fall? It’s a lot of time to allocate, which is why I imagine folks find gardening relaxing and why this goal is a personal challenge. When it comes to work, I tend to burrow and plow. I like to keep things moving and produce, produce, produce. But work isn’t life. It won’t love you back. With this garden, I hope to find better balance.

5. I’d like to take a trip (or two)— on a plane!

Likelihood of follow through: 2. Before the pandemic, traveling brought me joy. In fact, I’d say it was part of my identity. As a kid, I moved around a lot. It was highly disruptive and sucked a lot, but as an adult, I found I couldn’t quite kick the habit. Being on the move is fun. It’s an adventure that exercises my adaptive abilities and invites me to think in the broadest possible terms. Or not. There’s value to turning off my brain to enjoy creature comforts too.

Pandemic be damned. I’m feeling this itch. I need to travel on a plane to somewhere far, far away. The only question is when and where will I go? That is if travel restrictions don’t stop me.

6. I want to read The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Likelihood of follow through: 4. Boy what a difference a pandemic makes. Plowing through books was my equivalent of cultivating a sourdough starter. What could I do in 2020 but lose myself in science fiction and fantasy for hours on a porch after work or over the weekend?

2021 only had me double down. I read a whopping 43 books, and learned a thing or two about myself in the process. One was simply that I could read this much. Another was that I might be too dumb for fantasy.

And so why not reattempt The Lord of the Rings. What better way to see if fantasy’s my jam. I’m a fan of the movies, but never got past the first 100 pages of the first book. Maybe, now that I’m older and wiser, with tomes like Dhalgren under my belt, I can sit through the pages of elves swing through trees and Tom Bombadil. Who the fuck is he anyway?

7. Last but not least, I want to color more.

Likelihood to follow through: 4. In my period of serenity, I decided to try coloring. It would give break up the monotony of reading, running, and writing, and exercise creative juices I rarely use. A friend had bought me an adult coloring book for Christmas several years ago that I had never tried. She said she found coloring calming, and the Mayo Clinic seemed to agree. Coloring relaxes the amygdala, the part of the brain controls fear and produces anxiety. It’s another way to meditate because it draws focus away from preoccupying thoughts towards a low-stakes activity. I could stand to meditate more.

And so here I am with coloring pencils, a sharpener, and a coloring book about birds. They’re tucked away on a cart near the kitchen so it’s easily accessible. If I ever want something to do while I’m hanging out in the kitchen, I can color. Let’s see if I can keep this up for at least 15 minutes a week. Let’s not be too ambitious. Let’s set goals I can meet.

Or maybe not! There are seven resolutions here after all and setting the intent was more the point anyway. 2022 here we go.

S.A. Charkraborty’s The City of Brass is fun! Set in a Middle East inflected with the fantastic, the first book of the Daevabad Trilogy romps through 18th-century Cairo to a mystical kingdom hidden away by spells under Afghanistan. It’s a sprawling adventure that weaves folklore, palace intrigue, a plucky heroine, and hot love triangle with traditional elements of the fantasy genre. Will the protagonist Nahri choose dangerous Dara or introspective Ali? With more magic, you’ll see.

You’ll get a heavy dose of world-building for sure. What seems like a streamlined narrative about Nahri’s journey from con-artist to princess is set to the backdrop of ancient myths about magical races at war, forbidden unions with humans, broken rules of the universe, and brutal punishments meted out to ensure the continuation of an uncomfortable peace.

Critics loved The City of Brass as did average readers. It was short-listed for four awards and made it onto five books-of-the-year lists with a Goodreads rating of 4.11 stars. After reading a treatise on grief and some heady science fiction, I was ready to love it too. More than ready. It took me three months plus to inch my way to the top of the library hold line. All I had was to dive in. A simpler pursuit awaits.

I remember bracing myself. Methodically, I charged my Kindle all the way, settled into bed, and set my intention. 2021 was the year I vowed to expand my literary taste beyond Afro-futurism. I would read more BIPOC authors and here was a book set in the Middle East where I had little experience. The City of Brass would challenge my worldview, consume my life for three or four glorious days as I forgo opportunities to socialize for a life in PJ’s on my comfy chair with an electric blanket and tea.

Unfortunately, my humble aspiration was not to be. Despite the accolades and alluring elements, I just couldn’t get it — and there wasn’t anything objectively bad. This was a classic “it’s not you, it’s me.”

Believe me, I tried — I really did. I examined the Daevabad map that centered the Indian Ocean and the lands between Cairo and Afghanistan where Nahri supposedly traversed. I dutifully did-not-skip “The Six Tribes of the Djinn” so that I could soak in the history of magical beings before my eyes peeped the first page. I flipped to the glossary at the end — many times — most especially when I felt lost so that I could reorient myself to Chakraborty’s universe. I remember pausing during chapters to recite the basic rules framing Nahri, Dara, and Ali’s travails. When that didn’t anchor me, I thought “Well, maybe just keep going. This is probably like grad school where the trick is to keep reading so you get the broad picture of what you know.” It’ll come into focus. It always does. You know how you read.

Except it didn’t. I couldn’t keep track of who’s who. Not even basic characters, and no one’s motivations stuck. 300 pages in I started to feel more comfortable — hit my stride so to speak — but even then that was because I resigned myself to this: Maybe I’m not built for fantasy. With all the responsibilities of adult life, remembering this and that, perhaps I couldn’t handle more remembering. Maybe fantasy is for people whose brains are, in fact, calculators. They can hold all the different due dates of their bills and the specific myths governing fantasy characters — at the same time. Maybe my busy mind handles a single storyline and a handful of characters. They can engage a fanciful world, set in the future, in the past, in space, or in some hellish present. Whatever the world was, its rules were concentrated. Not too complicated a world guided the protagonists from beginning to end.

And so I Googled it: “best fantasy books of all time.” The elements of The City of Brass I couldn’t grasp were staples of the fantasy genre. I had similar frustrations reading Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings. Despite enjoying the writing and premise, I found myself asking, “Who are these people?” With this Google search, I could see a list that would help me determine: Do I just not like fantasy? Maybe I need to try one more, crowd-pleasing fantasy book to be sure.

Interesting. N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy is there. Of course. That’s fantasy! It has three books and a sprawling world of magical humans demonized for their super powers. Though it’s not listed, her Inheritance series is probably fantasy too. With all the rivaling gods, Inheritance is hardcore fantasy, I’ll bet

Hmm. Game of Thrones. I should have known that was fantasy. I read the first two books and thought they were fun. Page-turners for sure. I stopped because I found myself skimming. I’d read the first couple pages of a chapter to meet the character and then skip to the end. That’s how I knew I was tired of the handwringing. I’d rather cut to the chase.

Dune. I haven’t read it but am curious because of the movie. Ursula Le Guin. Always a favorite. Her other books were fun.

And then there’s Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings. The trilogy of movies were hallmarks of my youth. I watched them more than once in theaters packed with opinionated crowds and countless times with friends or by even myself as I graded or cleaned. Yet, I never got past the first 150 pages of The Fellowship of the Rings. “Too much singing, and why do I care about Tom Bombadil?” I thought before quitting to reach for The Hobbit, a children’s book it must be said.

But 2022 is a new year, and I’ve changed since high school. If adult life has taught me anything, it’s to grit my teeth and bear it. Maybe I will read The Lord of the Rings. It can be the final test to see if fantasy is my thing.

One final note for The City of Brass readers. Aside from struggling with the fantasy extras, I honestly didn’t care for Nahri and Dara. I did not care that Nahri was finding herself and that Dara had a tortured past. I didn’t care that they were in love. At the end of the book, I found myself rooting for King Ghassan and I don’t think that’s intended. For all Chakraborty’s twists and turns, I’m pretty certain she only meant for Ghassan to be ruthless, of the empty eyes/quiet evil variety no less. Yet, here I am. Go Ghassan… Maybe this speaks to other facets of adulthood, and that books two and three are not for me.

Michelle Zauner and I are AAPI and share an H-Mart. How about that? The H-Mart where Zauner goes to cry is the same one where I go for rice, kimchi, and dried shiitake mushrooms. I know the cramped aisles. I know the tanks of live fish and lobsters that somehow fit into a corner so small. The aunties working the registers and bagging groceries have helped me out. I’ve gone to the “pseudo-French bakery with weak coffee, bubble tea, and an array of glowing pastries that always look much better than they taste.” It’s a Paris Baguette — and their stuff is pretty good.

The second floor food court is ours too. That’s right. I’ve been to the “beautiful, holy place.” I’ve waited for food with Zauner’s Chinese international students, Asian families, and white foodies who’ve wandered off the beaten path. I’ve sat among the “cafeteria full of people from all over the world who have been displaced in a foreign country, each with a different history.” I’m one of the people whom Zauner says eats silently, “searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.”

Except I’m not. I know these places — I only live a couple of blocks away — and I’ve never experienced the melancholy Zauner describes. I don’t feel the forlorn longing for faraway homes and families when I shop for an ingredient or order a dish. To me, the shopping center is what happens when immigrant communities find the means to build infrastructure and institutions in America. For us by us.

I started going to the Elkins Park H-Mart when I first moved back to Philly from Seattle. I was finishing up my dissertation and was working long hours at a consignment shop for $9 an hour. From my time in Hawaii and having grown up the way I did, I knew my dollar could last longer at Asian groceries. I also knew H-Mart restaurants had hot meals that wouldn’t cost me more than an hour of work. This is where I ate if I was too tired to cook after a shift or if I was killing time while waiting for retail friends to get off so that we could grab beers.

Today I go to the H-Mart because it’s my closest grocery store and its shopping center has restaurants that aren’t fast food. It’s one of the few in West Oak Lane, a middle-class Black enclave so far up North Philly it’s managed to escape re-development. The upwardly mobile young professionals who’ve flocked to Philly for its affordability, quirk, and “grit” haven’t trained their sights here. In the H-Mart complex, I have what I need: a Japanese cafe, a Taiwanese drink store, a Korean restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a karaoke bar, plus the H-Mart food court if I’m short on money and time. It’s my respite from post-industrial facades and woke people who cultivate homogenous social circles, who’d never not buy in a hip neighborhood even if they’re against gentrification. All the store signs are in Korean, a fact I like. All except the handwritten ones taped to the H-Mart doors asking for help in the kitchen. Those are in Spanish.

By chance, a friend put me on to Grace Cho’s Tastes Like War around the time I finished Crying at H-Mart. I was ready for it. I was a fan of Cho’s Haunting the Korean Diaspora when I was in graduate school, and I generally welcome opportunities to engage works about U.S. militarism. This is the subject that captured my imagination for nearly a decade, that motivated me to sit through meandering seminars, withstand a less than supportive department, and to write, write, write my way to graduation. No longer in academia, I rarely encounter spaces where discussion about U.S. wars and colonialism are the thing. I also have less ways of supporting anti-military causes. A memoir written for general audiences by an author attune to injustice and complexities, Tastes Like War would scratch my itch.

Then I read the book’s description.

“Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details — language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.

Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like Waris a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her — but also the things that kept her alive.”

This must be a thing. This sounds an awful lot like Crying at H-Mart with schizophrenia instead of cancer and a greater emphasis on the international conditions prompting Korean migration. If I had to guess, it’s likely another quest for identity by a second-generation AAPI who grew up around white folks in a middle-class suburb. Her immigrant parent was probably alienated, as was the author, and so neither talked. The author also grew up rejecting her past until she entered college where she encountered a generation of people like her and accessed the tools to produce media and assert a narrative. She’s going to be unabashedly Asian — but what does that mean? “We’re not Asian, not Black, not white? What are we??” These questions will launch a thousand ships for Asian American everywhere. Inevitably, we’ll answer them through food.

Of course, this is all conjecture based on a book blurb. I will read Tastes Like War and will likely be wrong in the specifics. My outline of AAPI themes isn’t off the mark, however. If you identify as AAPI, some of you might have cracked a smile because the navel-gazing excavation of Asian American-ness resonated. These questions preoccupy Jay Caspian Kang and undergird Marvel’s Shang-Chi. It’s basically the plot of The Joy Luck Club, which was published thirty-two years ago in 1989.

Isn’t it time to write about something else? Though the suburban life speaks to many AAPI, a good number also grew up speaking another language or lived in neighborhoods with people who look like us or were simply not white. Some find more familiarity in seeing help wanted signs in Spanish than plunging the depths of our identity while eating noodles. If others asked about our origins, it could be benign inquiries rooted in curiosity, from one Asian to another, not hostile microaggressions intended to exclude. We’re not adults agonizing over why our parents are the way they are, why they want us to be this and not that, and why we can never seem to know them (even though we rarely ask). Don’t get me wrong: there are definitely Asian Americans who find themselves in Asian foods, who decide as adults that being Asian is totally awesome. It’s just not all of us, all the time, and even when we get there, we might move on. Thirty-two years is a long time for those experiences to dominate a genre anyway.

What I liked about Crying in H-Mart had very little to do with being Asian American. This is probably the most intimate portrayal of terminal illness, carework, and grief I’ve read. It’s not pretty. Zauner’s mom deteriorates at a rapid pace. She’s wracked by seizures and sometimes loses consciousness. Zauner, meanwhile, struggles with her need to control and feelings of inadequacy. She obsessively logs her mom’s calorie intake. She hates Kye, her mom’s friend from Korea who cooks dishes her mom eats and tells secrets that make her laugh. She forces marriage on her partner to distract her family from the disease, and rages at her father after her mom passes. All this in between passages about Zauner bathing her mom, changing her bedpan, and wiping her butt.

My uncles, aunts, and parents have cared for my grandparents. I’ve seen my aunt and mother take my grandmothers to the bathroom. My dad stayed with my grandfather in a Japanese-style farmhouse with no plumbing during his last days. This, still, is the first time I put two and two together: it’s love, and what I, too, will be doing when my parents are old. That’s what I learned in Crying at H-Mart. That’s what’s there when we’re not hostage to our identities. We just are, and then we move on.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

By the same token, if a book’s themes are universalist, but does not touch on differences related to race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, is it then by default a mediation on whiteness?

Conventional thinking in ethnic studies says yes. Society is birthed, structured, and reproduced by white supremacist conquest. It limits what resources people have at hand in their lifetimes, and through culture, itself reinforced by law and the market, informs our personal tastes. Left unquestioned, what most consider normal, acceptable, profitable, or desirable uphold systems and relationships that leave white supremacy unchallenged. Most insidious is how white supremacy erases its own unequal distribution of power. Its discourses claim to be objective, equal, and universal even though a person’s experience can materially be different due to their race, gender, and class. This is why it’s maddening when accusations of “politicizing a matter” or “a difficult personality” follow critiques of racism big and small. Even as it inflicts harm, white supremacist culture papers over injuries by absolving the perpetrator and demonizing the target. (Talk about gaslighting.)

This is also why the ethnic studies response to claims of universalism is to historicize the discourse, to elevate the injustices and differences submerged beneath any and all assertions of sameness.

I am a proponent of ethnic studies and histories of colonialism. I have a doctorate in this stuff, and all those years of study have honed in me a healthy skepticism for grand propositions about human nature. Feel-good books and movies that touch on the human will to survive or love despite all costs because beneath it all, we are all the same — no thanks. Give me stories about struggle, contestations, or joy in the face of dispossession any day.

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation didn’t ping my ethnic studies b.s. detecter even though it had all the trappings. A technical writer for a software company in Bellevue, Washington, Chiang brings his knowledge of cutting-edge scientific fads to bear on short stories that pose age-old questions designed to reveal the basic characteristics of human nature. What does it mean to love? Do we have free will or are our paths predetermined? What good is faith (in God) when scientific discoveries disprove miracles ascribed to higher powers?

The stories are good. They are expertly executed with surgical precision only writers steeped in day-to-day assignments to unpack software jargon have. Readers are immersed in new worlds in our near future governed by intricate rules about artificial intelligence, online communities, and branching timelines. It can be dizzying, but Chiang does this for his living — “this” being thinking through the scientific implications of a given problem for explication to a wider audience. His worlds are fully realized, and they make sense to even readers (like me) whose strengths are words and not numbers.

The stories are also gentle and uplifting in ways I wasn’t expecting. Going by the genre, I was anticipating existential dread and nihilism. Some robots-taking-over-the-world or humans-altering-the-future-to-worse-ends type shit. That’s what typically happens when humans meet advanced technology. Our takeaways are 1) to never trust machines no matter how lonely we are, and 2) to watch where we step if we ever go back in time. In sum, the present might be hard, but it’s always better than what it could be if we, in our hubris, interfered with intelligent design.

Not so with Ted Chiang. There are some dark parts to his stories, some turns where I expected things to go south. But, every time I thought we’d plunge into sordid territory that, say, explored the ethics of robot sex work or the manipulation of time for purposes of petty crime, Chiang pulls the reader out. The digients in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” for example, might mature like human children in slightly sinister ways, but their artificial development say less about creepy computer programs and more about the human desire to nurture or parenting to societal expectations. Likewise, just when I thought the parallel universes of “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” would reveal an unchangeable baseness to human inclinations, Chiang introduces another interpretative framework. His answer for why it could be that a person’s decisions can have negative consequences across different possible futures is not that the characters’ choices don’t matter. Nor does it mean that they’re doomed to be bad. In Chiang’s universe, futures do not preordain the past, and decisions can make a difference. A good choice creates potential scenarios that encourage a person to continue down this path. In the words of one character, “none of us are saints, but we can all try to be better” (328).

This is where I hear critiques of liberal ideology in ethnic studies echo. If inequalities are institutional, is it enough to simply think good thoughts or do good things? And what’s considered “good” anyway? For whom is it good? That these questions aren’t broached probably says something about the intended audience and aims. We’re supposed to feel good in the end because, underneath it all, we are all the same.

Still, hearts and minds have to rest, even the most critical ones. Feel-good stories with ideas like good actions now influencing good outcomes later are useful to consider, especially if you’re in a tough spot. From the bottom looking up, Exhalation can be a heartening read.

What a weird fucking book. The wackiest thing I’ve read in a while — and my go-to genres are science fiction and fantasy!

Was this about the Cultural Revolution? Alien invasion? Intergalactic communication? Or was this a good, old-fashioned multigenerational family drama? What!

Let’s parse this out. Let’s attempt, here and now, to describe The Three-Body Problem. Be forewarned: there will be spoilers, but then again, maybe they won’t make any sense and so they won’t be spoilers after all.

The Three-Body Problem is about the human impulse for revolutions. The book opens in 1967 China at the height of the Cultural Revolution when revolutionary zeal equals political power and social capital. Rival Red Guard factions battle it out on college campuses with guns. Neighbors snitch. We meet hapless physicist Ye Zhetai at Tsinghua University as young revolutionaries commence his “struggle session.” Zhetai’s teachings are relics of the upper class. Too abstract and without practical applications, his science is a pursuit that only those with wealth can partake. The student revolutionaries want Ye Zhetai to renounce his science. If not, they would consider him an elite, a person who extracted their status from the working class. Ye Zhetai does not, and the Red Guards kill him in front of his daughter.

Tied to her disgraced father, Ye Wenjie is brought to a labor camp in Inner Mongolia to remedy her counterrevolutionary roots. She keeps her head down, but eventually her education catches up. Wanting to help a comrade, Wenjie copies a letter to Beijing that references a book from the West. The materials are intercepted, Wenjie is blamed. She is banished to Red Coast, a military base more secluded than the camp as further punishment.

There, however, Ye Wenjie flourishes. Her crime is severe and her mission a secret. Yet, for some reason, her skills are needed. Following the footsteps of her father, she is a theorist, an astrophysicist whose basis in science is far above the everyday realities of earth. She thinks about stars — and that is value enough for her superiors Commissar Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining. They let her roam. She marries Yang Weining and has a daughter Yang Dong.

Forty years later, we meet Wang Miao, an unwitting scientist studying nanomaterials, whatever they are, who knows where. One day, a mysterious military contingent asks Wang for help. His solicitors are basically our “Men in Black,” and like our “buddy cop movies,” one in particular is excessively uncouth. Shi Qiang (Da Shi for short) is common police. Unlike the military, he is concerned with run-off-the-mill civil matters. Instead of elaborately planned operations, he takes a combination of street smarts, detective skills, and ample drink to his cases.

Wang’s mission is to infiltrate the Frontiers of Science, a shadowy group that has veered from scientific fervor to scientific fanaticism. They study the unknown, most fantastical, abstract phenomena to drive human progress to new and better extremes. In the last two months, a string of scientists had committed suicide. They’d all been associated with the group. They’d also been in contact with Wang before their deaths. One happened to be Yang Dong, daughter of Ye Weijin, and the Wang’s new bosses want him to figure out why.

Here’s when things go off the rails, and for the sake of staying on the rails, I’m skipping ahead.

At the bottom of Wang’s mystery are an imminent alien invasion and two factions within Frontiers of Science battling for ideological supremacy: the Adventists and Redemtionists. Though they both celebrate the discovery of extraterrestrial life for its implications on human development, the Adventists welcome the destruction of humankind by alien forces. To them, human civilization is a failure. It cannot be saved, and progress is best achieved if humans sacrifice themselves to higher beings with higher causes. According to a particularly gross Adventist comparison, humans are to the aliens what the Aztecs were to the European colonists.

What’s more, the leader of the Adventists is Ye Wenjie! Belying a serene, elderly exterior is a hardened zealot. She has gleaned no empathy, no lesson about the perils of revolution despite her tragic life of hard labor, isolation, and loss. She thinks humans are corrupt, and so welcoming the aliens presents a relief. Only when the world falls can a better vice-less life grow.

Sound familiar? This is a revolution within a revolution. The Three-Body Problem is about our need to remake and revolt.

Or maybe it’s about gaming culture. By far, the wackiest parts of the book are when Wang Miao plays the Three-Body Problem computer game. What starts as a benign recommendation after Wang sees a colleague playing, turns to a mindless hobby Wang tries on for size to relax after a stressful day. Soon after his first log-in through a humble internet browser, the game becomes Wang’s full-on obsession. Wang buys a virtual reality suit to have a more immersive experience and agrees to join a meet-up, where he communes with other experts. In this closed community of game enthusiasts, he learns the game’s purpose: to implant humans with sympathy for Tri-Solarian civilization.

Thus, the gaming plot thread doesn’t simply show Wang taking on a gamer identity, it becomes the vehicle by which the reader (through Wang) engages the alien civilization. In the Three-Body chapters, Wang engages a half-silly, half-sinister world where the presence of three suns throws the clockwork of seasons and time into chaos. Wang, as the player, starts in the earliest stages of civilization on this alternate universe. He stands in empty desert planes, explores the expansive world, and meets famous philosophers, kings, and religious figures from bygone eras. At times, these figures regard Wang with the same wonder and curiosity as we the reader do the situation. At other times, the three-body characters are threatening.

Through these cartoonish interactions, we learn that this world’s advancement is ephemeral. When there happens to be one sun, the world experiences a Stable Era with climate temperate enough to sustain human advancement. When three suns appear, a Chaotic Era ensues with weather so extreme it wipes clean all vestige of human progress and forces the gameplay to end. To protect life, the people in the game dehydrate at will. Like dried shiitake mushrooms, they flatten themselves at the onset of a Chaotic Era to be stored for a future time. When conditions become favorable, they “rehydrate” ready to build and flourish, but only within the scientific paradigms available to their time. Thus, we (with Wang) progress through historic eras like the Scientific Revolution the Industrial Revolution, alongside a hodge pode of figures like Mozi, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, and Pope Gregory. They posit fantastic theories about the suns and eras but ultimately reject Wang’s answer to their three-body problem. Grounded in our present-day reality — not theirs — the notion of magnetic poles and gravitational pulls is practical to us but heretical to them. Exceeding even the alien civilization’s wildest imagination, it calls for Wang’s death — but as his impulse for self-preservation kicks in, he realizes he wants to know more, which leads him one step closer to a closed-door secret society bound by a shared belief in alien civiliations.

A brain trip to be sure. The lines between our science and theirs, the fantastic, blur as the story progresses. Like a good game, the question of “what the hell is going on?” becomes more immersive. Like Wang, we’re basically all gamers.

Or is The Three-Body Problem an intergenerational family drama? Asian American writers love intergenerational family dramas that unpack issues of identity. Liu Cixin is Chinese and writes science fiction, but could this book have shuttled in those themes too? Is this why he has acclaim among American audiences?

Indulge me. Let’s see.

Well, we do have three generations of characters here: Ye Zhetai, Ye Weijin, and Yang Dong. Check.

And yes, they are defined by unspoken trauma. Weijin witnesses Zhetai’s death as a child because of the Cultural Revolution. Her desire for retribution, then, pushes her to court the Tri-Solarians, whose interactions with Earth subvert Yang Dong’s grasp of reality, pushing her to suicide. Check.

This unspoken trauma continues to haunt. Though she learns to be quiet and play along, Weijin’s brush with the Cultural Revolution also inculcates in her an indomitable revolutionary spirit. It is her unshakeable faith in the good of science and corruption of man that drives her to drastic measures. Notwithstanding her initiation of the alien invasion, she kills her companions Commissar Lei and her husband Yang Weining when they come close to uncovering her plot. When Wang meets the older Weijin, she is meek and marked by tragedy. When the story ends, we see Weijin, alone and somber, pondering the implications of her decisions. All we need are family dinners — so, um, check.

So what is this book about? I had three theories, which I tried working out here. All of them equally fun. Like a “Choose Your Own Adventure.” But, maybe none of them are right. And maybe that’s the point. Reading The Three-Body Problem for the first time, for enjoyment, feels like plunging off the deep-end. Be prepared to go “huh?” Be prepared to go with it. Will I read the sequels? Probably. Because in retrospect, this trip was fun.

I’m a sucker. I like, appreciate, or at least don’t mind the Obamas. I know.

The Obamas. The “Deporter in Chief.” The Obama machine. A White House tenure that proclaimed the triumph of multicultural liberalism to the backdrop of highly-publicized killings of Black men and the birth of Black Lives Matters.

I get all that, and I don’t mind ’em. Even though I know they used race to peddle deeply neoliberal, militaristic, bootstrap-y, assimilationist ideas. Even though I know their target audience are fans of the Oprah Book Club and that they cultivate an image of accessibility despite being some of the highest paid public speakers around.

Why? Well, sometimes you need to relax. And the Oprah Book Club is just fine.

Becoming (the audiobook) is that kind of book. Narrated by Michelle, it was interesting enough to keep my mind off my legs while I ran, and not so dense that I could never catch up if my thoughts strayed. It was relaxing. Meditative. And I discovered a thing or two about Michelle.

The first thing I learned was that Michelle Obama could have Michael Jordan genes. You know, those genes that make a person intensely intense, that compels them to be number one at all costs for competitions that have very low stakes or were probably not competitions at all. In her early years, she skipped ahead in her piano book against her Great Aunt Robby’s wishes so that she could play more advance songs like Robby’s advanced students. In kindergarten, she forced her teacher to redo a reading test in front of her peers the day after she came in second. She wanted to get everything correct and be awarded a gold star. When she went to Princeton, Michelle would dump her high school boyfriend who rode with her and her dad from Illinois to New Jersey because he himself wasn’t going to Princeton. During college, she’d dump another boyfriend because he decided he wanted to pursue a career as a sports mascot.

That was Michelle, the self-professed “box checking” extraordinaire. I realized that the Michelle people love — the relatable, down-to-earth, working-Mom-dresses-like-us Michelle — is probably more curated than we’d expect.

To an extent, Michelle had to be, which was the second thing I learned. Politics is a man’s world and it kinda sucks to be the wife of a good politician. As Michelle told it, she really held down the house, caring for the children while Barack pursued his political career. It wasn’t that Barack wasn’t a good dad. It was just that he had to stay late in Springfield for dinners with colleagues, wait around for unexpected votes, fly back and forth from D.C., or traverse the nation to campaign for President. If Michelle and the kids came along, it was because Michelle brought them, dressed them, coached them, and cared for them. Despite her Princeton education, law career, background in municipal administration, and leadership role at the University of Chicago, she couldn’t break all the rules when she became First Lady.

First Ladies, for one, can’t do policy. That’s what Hillary said when Michelle sought advice on navigating her position. Unlike other political wives who cultivated their image as caretakers and comforters, Hillary chose healthcare as her requisite First Lady campaign. Yes, healthcare. The healthcare that’s a major topic in every presidential debate for the last 40 years. The healthcare that’s stymied both parties and all of Congress. By Hillary’s own admission, it was a mistake that America would neither forgive nor forget. Regardless of her intentions, aptitude, or actions, both politicians and the public thought she overstepped. She meddled in affairs only her husband could handle. She undermined, rather than supported, him. “Don’t do policy,” was Hillary’s lesson, and so Michelle tackled childhood obesity and girl’s education through White House gardens, Sesame Street, Ellen, and scholarship funds.

Which is all very gendered. And in the mold of early feminists too. Wanting to make a case for their importance to society, feminists from the early Republic to the Progressive era of the 1920s imagined women as mothers — mothers of children who carried the values that undergird healthy societies and, by extension, prosperous nations. Without women who mothered, who passed notions of caretaking, household management, and civic duty from one generation to the next, society writ large would crumble. Hence, when women ventured beyond family to enter the male spheres of politics and public life, they became social workers and teachers, professions that imbued accepted values of how to think and how to act to the wayward and young.

Early feminism was a restrictive concept. Very raced and very classed, it extracted its definition of advancement from the experiences of women who could afford to caretake biological families. They could occupy prescribed roles in public when slavery, colonial conquest, and industrialization robbed others of such ability. It would also set the framework that future feminists would both occupy and expand.

Enter Michelle. As an informal rule, I believe that when anyone from the BIPOC community breaks into rarefied spaces white folks occupy, he/she/they can only push the boundaries of two identity categories. At most. That is if you want to be safe and stay sane. The first Black First Lady, Michelle challenged race and gender by definition. It probably couldn’t be class because the pressures of her post were already quite high. Her transgressions as black and woman already cost her and her family more death threats than what other first families endured, at least two assassination attempts, and a barrage of racist, transphobic epithets.

That’s quite a price. America wasn’t ready. It could barely tolerate Michelle blowing through two identity categories. Her best option was probably to craft an image that repurposed a safe but limiting version of feminism. Would I have done any differently had I occupied those same constraints of the presidency? I don’t know. *Shrug* I probably would have been just as vexed.

Even though audiobooks have been around for a while, I only started listening this year. Finally. I started training for a half marathon, and because I can’t move like I used to, I needed something to take my mind off grueling runs.

Honestly, I’ve never been an audiobook person even though I’m an avid reader. They always intimidated me. If I already had trouble reading long, vivid sentences packed with detail, I figured I’d make I’d struggle just ask much, if not more, if I listened. I’d miss key details and would have to concentrate more?

Well. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I had a half-marathon to run and something had to get me through training.

My first audiobook was Michelle Obama’s Becoming. Narrated by Michelle herself, it was perfect to run to: interesting enough to keep my mind off my leaden legs, not dense enough to warrant a quiet study and a pencil to mark key passages. I’ll save my thoughts on Becoming for another post, but in my listening, I realized how far removed I am from storytelling.

It used to be that people told each other stories or read each other books or listened to the radio for serials. People were probably trained to receive lots of information presented by word of mouth. Now, I am not. I had to read, to see something, pore over the sentences and words, re-reading paragraphs I didn’t understand and taking in every little detail to make sure I 100% understood and remembered. Reading, I guess, was an exercise in perfectionism.

Listening, however, was different. I had to focus, of course, but I could also relax. I didn’t have to grasp all the words, just the overall meaning. It was impressionistic, and it seemed to stimulate another part of my brain.

And how I experienced audiobooks and podcasts was different. I often had to concentrate with a podcast. If I missed a detail, I’d be lost for the rest of the podcast. With Becoming, I could generally sit back, empty my mind, and soak in the story. Even when I lost focus, I realized that I didn’t lose all that much when I re-trained my thoughts.

I wonder why this is. Podcast vs. audiobook. Listening vs. reading. Will I get through my runs? We’ll see. With audiobooks, I’ve got as far as mile 6.