some reading
May. 14th, 2025 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thistleingreyAli Wong with an afterword by Justin Hakuta, Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life (2019): memoir by stand-up comedian with penchant for viscerally attention-grabby content, plus afterword by now-ex, both addressed ostensibly to their two small children. Spoiler: generally, Wong's chapters aren't kid-appropriate reading.
Being almost invisibly mixed isn't easier week to week than being visibly mixed; one still lacks a default community as a kid. I had inklings of the former from an undergrad friend who, similar to Wong, had one Viet immigrant parent and one Chinese-heritage parent. My friend's main complaint was being disregarded as a generic Asian except amongst either parent's default communities, where (inter alia) the common "Why is your grasp of heritage language so weak" critique landed much harder. I mean, consider.
Somehow, Wong's chapters reminded me of a clip by Charlene Kaye and colleagues, and not only because the clip omits a Viet-heritage contributor. That may be part of the "joke," since it's otherwise finely balanced. Viewing notes: an industry auntie (Margaret Cho), a comedian who parodies hit songs (Kaye), a visibly mixed comedian (Dylan Adler), and a comedian roughly twice the age he looks (Sam Oh).
.
Also reading: though one of my current classes is finished as of this week, two other classes have shoved twice the usual volume of material into the final moments of the term. Of those latter two, the first is by prior laziness of the instructor (a change announced last week after the schedule slipped and slipped), and the second is by design (though announced late), to get a semester's worth of stuff into half as many weeks. That is a lot of unplanned reading atop exam prep. In order to meet a requirement, I've registered for an intersession class to follow them, and it'll wedge a semester's worth of stuff into one-fifth the usual weeks. Should be interesting, not only rather unpleasant. Still not finished with the other books I mentioned a fortnight ago, still no embroidery, and only the simplest knitting currently.
Being almost invisibly mixed isn't easier week to week than being visibly mixed; one still lacks a default community as a kid. I had inklings of the former from an undergrad friend who, similar to Wong, had one Viet immigrant parent and one Chinese-heritage parent. My friend's main complaint was being disregarded as a generic Asian except amongst either parent's default communities, where (inter alia) the common "Why is your grasp of heritage language so weak" critique landed much harder. I mean, consider.
Somehow, Wong's chapters reminded me of a clip by Charlene Kaye and colleagues, and not only because the clip omits a Viet-heritage contributor. That may be part of the "joke," since it's otherwise finely balanced. Viewing notes: an industry auntie (Margaret Cho), a comedian who parodies hit songs (Kaye), a visibly mixed comedian (Dylan Adler), and a comedian roughly twice the age he looks (Sam Oh).
.
Also reading: though one of my current classes is finished as of this week, two other classes have shoved twice the usual volume of material into the final moments of the term. Of those latter two, the first is by prior laziness of the instructor (a change announced last week after the schedule slipped and slipped), and the second is by design (though announced late), to get a semester's worth of stuff into half as many weeks. That is a lot of unplanned reading atop exam prep. In order to meet a requirement, I've registered for an intersession class to follow them, and it'll wedge a semester's worth of stuff into one-fifth the usual weeks. Should be interesting, not only rather unpleasant. Still not finished with the other books I mentioned a fortnight ago, still no embroidery, and only the simplest knitting currently.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
