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The Angsty Trials of First Love: A Review of Sally Rooney’s Normal People

Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney.

Within the first couple sentences of the novel, we met Marianna, who had taken off her sweater when she opened the door for Connell, her classmate and the son of her family’s cleaner. I took a double-take of the back cover of the book to make sure that Sally Rooney is indeed Irish. Then, a third-take when the words ‘soccer team’ appeared–I found it so strange that Rooney had chosen American vernacular to describe the jumper and the football team. Oh, and the fact that she used no quotation marks for dialogues also confounded me.

Marianna and Connell’s story began in Sligo, a coastal city in western Ireland. Despite their differences in social class and within the hierarchy of their school, Marianna and Connell started a romance. However, unwilling to break some imagined social rank at school, Connell asked another girl to their school’s Debs (the American equivalent of the prom). Marianna, though upset with Connell, couldn’t forget him. They reignited their complicated friendship at Trinity College in Dublin, where they attended university.

Despite my initial confusion, Rooney drew me into the world of Marianna and Connell. Even the lack of quotation marks stopped bothering me–by embedding the dialogues into the narratives of the story, I was able to get closer to Marianna, Connell, and their friends.

Even though the book is poignant and well-written, there are frustrating moments, too. At one point, as Connell attempted to advance their romance, Marianna put up a barrier, pretending that she didn’t care. (“Imagine how bitter I am going to be when you meet someone else and fall in love,” she said.) When Marianna realized what she had done, Connell had already started dating someone else. The emotional games between Marianna and Connell were threaded throughout the novel, which made reading Normal People both an aggravating and engaging experience. Their relationship is relatable because many people in my generation have had angsty and turbulent affairs teeming with insecurities and neurosis.  Some of us become more self-aware as we grow older and allow ourselves to be vulnerable with our lovers; some of us do not.

While I was reading Normal People, I was also watching Sex Education on Netflix. The show is another school-based drama that involves a contentious friendship between Maeve and Otis, who started a business offering sex-advice to their classmates. Like Marianna and Connell, Otis and Maeve also had difficulties admitting their feelings for each other and overcoming their innate tendencies to pull back when their feelings were threatened. I can’t help but wonder: Is this what defines modern-day romance?

Through Marianna and Connell’s on-again, off-again relationship in Normal People, we see ourselves and our romantic hopes and despair.  Like Jane Austen had depicted the romantic expectations of Victorian England through novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, with Normal People, Rooney illustrated the angst of finding and keeping love in the globalized and technology-saturated 21st century. Like Austen before her, Ronney’s work will continue to resonate with readers in the 21st century and beyond.

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The Abortion Conundrum: Murder or Women’s Right to Choose–A Review of Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks

Red Clocks (2019) by Leni Zumas

Ladies, can you imagine standing trial for medical malpractice because you helped out another woman? Perhaps you may have taken a niece to the pharmacy to purchase topical cream for a yeast infection. Or, you might have given your friend some Advils for period cramps. To be potentially prosecuted for helping to ease the discomfort and pain of another woman may seem absurd to you, but in Leni Zumas’s new novel, Red Clock, this scenario has become the new normal.

Red Clocks takes place in the fictional town of Newville, Oregon, in the not-so-distant future. Zumas, in her poetic language, tells the stories of four women in a society in which the lawmakers overturned Roe v. Wade and fetus gained equal rights as full-fledged humans. In this world, abortion is illegal in all 50 states, and IVF has also been banned because the unborn fetus cannot give consent to being born. Additionally, under the “Every child needs two” act, a single parent can no longer adopt a child.

The laws affect the four women in the novel in different ways. Ro/The Biographer is a history teacher who desperately wants a child but could not conceive, Mattie/The Daughter is a promising high school student who is seeking an abortion. Gin/The Mender is a mysterious woman who lives in the forest and provides alternative health care with her knowledge of herbs and roots. Susan/ The Wife is an unhappy housewife and mother who desperately wants to flee. All their stories interconnect to paint a devastating picture of womanhood in a world where women have no reproductive rights and the rights to their bodies.

When I was younger, I enjoyed dystopian novels like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951). To me, these books describe scenarios that could happen in a technologically advanced but ambiguous future or some imagined post-apocalyptic world that would never be realized. My favourite books are more metaphoric than literal, a way to illustrate the consequences of unchecked power or greed. Either way, the scenarios described in these books are relatable in a far-stretched kind of way and comfortably removed from my reality. They are more like tell-tale signs of the demise of humanity if we as a species aren’t more careful. Red Clocks, on the other hand, is not so removed from our reality–it is grounded in the United States of America in the year 2019.

This novel is poignant in a time when lawmakers are making strides in abolishing abortion rights across multiple states. There are clashes between those who identify as pro-life and those who are pro-choice. Neither side will listen to each the other because abortion, more than anything, is a moral question. Is it an act of murdering an unborn child, or a choice a woman could make for her body and her family? The answer to this question depends on what one might think is a human, or rather, when a group of cells becomes a human. Some people believe that it happens right at conception, while others at the time when the fetus exits the woman’s womb. Then there are the people in between who think a group of cells become a human at some undetermined point between conception and birth. No matter how you slice it, the abortion question is a conundrum: It’s a battle between life and choice. Whose belief should rule the court of law?

There are people who argue that killing an unborn life is unnecessary when the child can be given up for adoption or cared for within the community. It is true that there are women who ended up finding good homes for their unplanned babies. Others may come from supportive communities with resources to take care of them and their babies. However, for many, especially those from less privileged backgrounds, many of whom are women of colour from a lower socio-economic class, this is not an option for them. Yes, carrying a baby full-term is an option for many women, but it is also the least beneficial option for many more. Banning the right to abortion effectively become a punishment for women: for their promiscuity, or their lack of education or for their ethnicity or social economic class.

Recently, over the phone, my mother shared a piece of news about one of our pregnant family members. Her pregnancy seemed normal until she went for an ultrasound during a routine check-up. Afterward, her physician informed her the fetus appeared swollen and give her the diagnosis of hydrops fetalis. According to MedlinePlus, hydrops fetalis “occurs when abnormal amounts of fluid build up in two or more body areas of a fetus or newborn.” It is a symptom of underlying problems, and the survival rate of the fetus is low. According to Healthline, “Only about 20 percent of babies diagnosed with hydrops fetalis before birth will survive to delivery, and of those babies, only half will survive after delivery.” With these facts in hand, my relative made the painful choice to end her pregnancy at 16 weeks.

Though my heart broke for my relative who ended her pregnancy for the health of herself and her family, I am more thankful that she has the ability to make that call. I am a firm believer that abortion should be an option, regardless of one’s idea about human-ness and at what stage a fetus is considered a person with rights. At the end of the day, I want to live in a society with fewer moral judgments where we have the space to have our beliefs. I want all of us to be free to make choices that may be contrary to the beliefs of others. Most of all, I want to live in a more compassionate world where we have dialogues, rather than tearing each other down to prove that one’s belief is more superior. My question is, how do we get there?

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New Category: Art Writing and an Introduction to Dewey Punk Pickles

Guy Rose, The Green Mirror (1911). This painting shows my quest for learning to look at art objects, as well as myself, from different angles and perspectives.

Sometimes I feel uncomfortable and threatened at art exhibitions and gallery openings. I feel like a poser, pretending to enjoy something I don’t understand.

“I didn’t study art,” I think to myself, “I don’t know what I am looking at.”

Other times, I feel downright rejected by an object, but don’t know why. I am looking and trying to figure it out, but I always fail. I feel anxious, looking around at other people who seem to know exactly what they are looking at.

“This sculpture doesn’t want me to understand it. It’s an asshole.”

Lately, the works of Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories inspired me. I have also been reading a lot of other writers, such as Bruno Latour, Kathy Acker, and Chris Kraus.

These writers have challenged the way I look at art objects and how I write about them. As a writer, my instinctive inclination is trying to understand something and to write about it. In my In the Shadow of the Middle Kingdom thread, I explain things through storytelling. However, this strategy doesn’t seem to work with art objects.

Instead of trying to understand them, I decided to do an experiment and just let it be. Instead of asking, what is this supposed to tell me, I pose new questions. What is this making me feel, and why? What’s around it? Who’s looking at it? How is it displayed?

Lynne Tillman, a fiction writer, was asked to review different art exhibitions and cultural events. She created a fictional character, Madame Realism, and sent her to these exhibitions and events. The result is a collection of dazzling, humorous fictional essays that chronicles American culture.

Taking a cue from Tillman, I’ve created a character, Dewey Punk Pickles. For those of you who know me personally, you know that Dewey is the name of my beloved feral cat that I picked up on the streets of Dubai ten years ago. In my stories though, she is a person–she has a part of my history and my sensibilities (she is a writer who used to be a librarian at an art and design university), but she also has feline characteristics, like she curls up and goes to sleep, she purrs, she hisses, she might be bitey with her words.

This thread is an experiment, in my attempt to write about art in a way that is accessible and fun. I would love to hear about what you think. My first post in this thread is where Dewey Punk Pickles goes to see the Cao Fei’s A hollow in a world too full at Tai Kwun, a cultural hub in Central, Hong Kong. Please leave a comment or message me if you want to have a conversation! You can chat with me via my Facebook page.

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Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win: The Story of a Strong Women in the Trump Era

Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win by Jo Piazza.

Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win by Jo Piazza is particularly poignant in the age of Trump and the #MeToo Movement. It’s a story of Charlotte Walsh, an ambitious and capable woman, and her quest to achieve her agenda: to run for Senate while maintaining her marriage and raising her children. It asks an important question that’s on the back of our minds when we see someone like Charlotte, or in real life, Hilary Clinton running for political office, “Do men want ambitious women in their lives as their partners and their government representative?”

Charlotte Walsh was a COO of Humanity, one of the fastest growing companies in the world. She implemented a progressive family planning package, allowing employees the flexibility of having and raising children. Furthermore, Charlotte also had an aspiration to serve the public as a Senator. She believed “that politicians were failing Americans. Corporations were failing Americans. She hated the hate she saw every time she read the news. She felt terror and anger when she scrolled through Twitter. Americans were at each other’s throats and it was disgusting. She was scared to death of raising her daughter in this country.” Her reasons to run for office echo what many of us are thinking as we witness mass shootings, police brutality, and racist, inflammatory rhetoric on a daily basis.

Charlotte took a leave from her lucrative career in Silicon Valley. She moved back to her hometown in rural Pennsylvania along with her husband Max, their three young daughters, and her trusty and feisty assistant Leila. She hired Josh Pratt, a brash albeit competent campaign manager to ensure her victory.

Throughout the campaign, she worked insane hours and lost all sense of privacy. Her Trump-like opponent, Ted Slaughter, threw misogynistic insults from all directions in trying to sway the election. Instead of paying attention to Charlotte’s campaign speech, the media was more captivated by the shoes she was wearing. Instead of paying attention to issues she had brought forth, her personal life, the ugly mistake she had buried from the past was threatening to resurface, potentially obliterating everything she had worked for: her campaign, her marriage, and her perfect life.

Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win is an engaging and gripping read. Piazza’s prose is accessible and witty. The characters, though flawed, are likable. As a reader, I couldn’t help but cheer for Charlotte, though she had made some unforgivable decisions that impacted the lives of many.  I love the scrappy and loyal Leila, who also committed a betrayal during the campaign that almost cost her relationship with Charlotte, who was her mentor and best friend.

One of the elements I enjoyed the most about the book is how accurate Piazza depicted how our society treats powerful women. Josh, the campaign manager, played the role of preparing Charlotte for the brutal campaign ahead of her. In doing so, he represented the voice of men who fear powerful women:

“You can be a strong female candidate, but not a feminist candidate. There’s a difference. The subtle path is the surer one. It’s all in the nuance. And the hair… Thank God you didn’t chop off your hair when you had kids.”

Powerful women are often accused of emasculating men. They are often put in a position where they have to choose between a happy marriage and a successful career. Early on in the book, Josh commented on the power dynamic between Charlotte and her husband Max, who also worked at Humanity:

“I’ll bet that was though on Max, having his wife as a boss, the big dog at one of the most powerful companies in the world.”

Her reply to Josh: “My husband is a very evolved man, not a dinosaur.”

Charlotte’s statement was telling, especially for the final chapter of the book. What would Max do, in the midst of Charlotte’s quest to the Senate while their marriage and lives are under scrutiny?

For many millennial women, we have been raised with the idea that as girls, we can do anything we wanted, as long as we work hard for it. However, there is a definite gap between what our mothers taught us and the reality in the technology-obsessed, consumer-driven, and still-patriarchal 21st century. It saddens me, that despite all that women had fought for in the last hundred years, from women’s suffrage to sexual liberation to the #MeToo movement, many of us still believe: “only let the world see half of your ambition. Half of the world can’t handle seeing it at all.”

 

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Though I Get Home: Interconnected Short Stories From Malaysia

Though I Get Home by YZ Chin.

Though I Get Home is YZ Chin’s debut book, a collection of interconnected short stories that illustrate the Malaysian post-colonial experience and modern-day political dissidence. I picked it up because as a writer, I am interested in post-colonialism, diaspora communities, and activism.  Furthermore, I would like to experiment with Chin’s use of interconnected narrative with my current project, In the Shadow of the Middle Kingdom.

The book centers around Isabella Sin, known as Isa, an aspiring writer-activist who was imprisoned for writing obscene poetry. The government arrested her he along with others who participated in a protest in Kuala Lumpur. Her grandfather, Gong Gong, had worked as a butler and a nanny for a British family during colonial times, had told her stories that ignited Isa’s fascination with England. After his death, Isa spent a year in London, which led her mother to blame her lack of marital prospects on her Anglophone speech and attitude. There is also the story about her friend K, who at the opening of Starbucks in Taiping, pondered whether or not to leave her ex-boyfriend who had already broken up with her.

There are other characters in the book who aren’t directly related to her, like Howie Ho, a Chinese Malaysian studying in New York, who dated an American girl who was sympathetic to Malaysian activists and had a penchant for writing poetry. There’s also Ibrahim, a member of the RD, who acted as the moral police. His job was to make sure that their fellow Malays, who are all technically Muslims, are preserving their purity and not engaging in sexually deviant behaviors, such as sex before marriage and cross-dressing. They knocked on the windows of parked cars and broke into hotels to make sure that everybody was behaving themselves.

Initially, I didn’t care for the book. I didn’t connect with the storytelling and felt that the book was messy overall. I didn’t always understand how each story related to one another. There was a story about a concubine that seemed out of place. Furthermore, while reading  “A Malaysian Man in Mayor Bloomberg’s Silicon Alley,” I was frustrated reading about this Howie Ho, a seemingly unrelated character who went away to the US for college, dated an American girl, and went back to Malaysia to vote for an election. It is the longest story in the book, and at first, I didn’t understand why he even mattered. Chin does reveal the relevance of this character at the end, but I wish there was some foreshadowing in the earlier stories. Also, there is a thread in the story where Howie Ho witnessed an incident of abuse and violence in his college dorm room but chose to do nothing. That annoyed me—not only because I thought he was a coward, but I also didn’t understand how the incident added to his character.  I just felt appalled and disliked him.

Having said that, I enjoyed some of the stories, such as “The Butler Opens the Door.” After the daughter of the British family he was working for had gone missing, Gong Gong staged a funeral to help his employer grieve properly. The British people who attended the funeral were appalled and fascinated at the same time, which reminded me of my own grandfather’s funeral that I attended as an eight-year-old. It was an open casket funeral, and Mama had led me to see him, despite my unwillingness. I saw him through a glass sheet over a fridge-like thing— I jolted at how cold it felt when I touched the surface. He looked like he was sleeping, but he also seemed strangely hollow and weird. I didn’t like it. On the same day, I also got yelled at for playing with the joss papers, the money for the dead, by folding them into cranes and other origami animals before feeding them to the fire. There is a lot of burning at a Chinese funeral: I watched in awe as flames engulfed an entire paper home that looked like a dollhouse and a paper car. All these memories came rolling through my mind as I read about this funeral with no corpse.

Initially, I didn’t like the book. However, after reading parts of it a few times to write this review, I grew to appreciate it. It’s like a bottle of good, vintage wine that takes time and patience to enjoy. I learned a great deal about Malaysian history, politics, and how similar Chinese folk religion is wherever people practice it.

 

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Motherhood: Should I, or should I not?

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

I picked up Sheila Heti’s Motherhood because like the narrator of the book,  I am in my mid 30’s, a writer and often ponder whether or not I want a child with my loving and supportive husband, Derek. I had no idea what to expect when I started reading it, and the book is something beyond my imagination—it is not a conventional work of fiction.

The book is an intriguing journey of a woman talking herself out of motherhood. The narrative is generally plot-less and follows the stream of consciousness of the unnamed narrator, who I believe might be the Heti herself. Heti blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction, and the result is a poignant work that made me think about my attitude towards having children.

Throughout the book, the narrator obsessively tackles and reasons with herself about having children with Miles, her long-term boyfriend. She tosses her coins, which is a technique used by people who consult the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination system, used to help people with their life problems. Through the coin tossing, she addresses her uncertainty such as whether or not she is truly deserving of Miles, whether her anxiety is ever going away, and visualized her fear (a kitchen knife with a black handle) that cuts away hope and optimism out of her.

At one point, Heti tries to reason logically, at why having a child is narcissistic. She writes,

“The egoism of childbearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country—both carry the wish of imprinting yourself on the world, and making it over your values, and in your image.”

Then she follows up by comparing her religious cousin who has six children and herself, who has six books. Then she muses, “maybe there is no great difference in our faith—in what parts of ourselves we feel called to spread.”

I think I would rather have six books too.

Deep down, the narrator has never wanted a child, but often feels pressured by society. She thinks perhaps she might be sorry for not having a child, and therefore, should have one to prevent future regret. Furthermore, there are unrelenting expectations people have over women, to fulfill their “biological destiny.”She writes,

“It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties—when you finally have some brains and some skills, and experience—from doing anything useful with them at all. It is hard to when such a large portion of your mind, at any given time, is pre-occupied with the possibility—a question that didn’t seem to preoccupy the drunk men at all.”

It is true—men don’t think about having a child in the same way because men aren’t expected to be the primary caretaker of the child. This responsibility squarely falls on women, to feed, clothes, and love the child while the man is away in the big world earning a living.  Heti criticizes our contemporary world— after all these years of feminism, the structure of our society hasn’t changed much at all. It is still patriarchal, and women are the ones judging other women when they choose not to have a child.

Heti, through her narrator, also criticizes how women are conditioned to have children to find fulfillment, instead of pursuing their interests and careers. She writes:

“All this wondering about children is just evidence of how much a person can give up what they know is right. It would be easier to have a child than to do what I want. Yet when I so frequently do the opposite of what I want, what is one more thing? Why not go all the way into falsehood, for me? I might as well have kids. Yet that is where I draw the line. You can’t create a person dishonestly.”

This passage was a bit of a revelation for me. I never really thought that it would be easier to have a child than to pursue one’s dreams. I’ve always thought to have a child would be so much harder, and the stakes are so much higher because once I am a mother, I’d be responsible for another person’s safety and well-being. There will be no more time to write, to travel, or do anything. That seems daunting to me.

I have nothing but respect for all the mothers of the world, and glad that their children bring them satisfaction and fulfillment. But I can’t help but think, how many women fell into the trap of motherhood because it’s too scary to say, pursue a new career at age 35?

At the end of the day, the question of motherhood is emotional and illogical. Logically, I understand all the reason against having children. However, as I get older, emotions are slowly clouding my logic. I can’t help but wonder: what would it be like to have a child?  I think Derek and I would make a pretty and bright child. We would teach her (I want a girl) to be kind, and she will make the world a better place.

As I sit here in front of my computer writing this book review, I ask myself, would I rather do this than say, comforting a screaming baby? The answer is, I would rather write.

But, I still think I might want to have a child.

 

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My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Vapid, Spoiled Brat Took Pills to Sleep for the Whole Year

 

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. The premise of the book is pretty far-fetched— a thin, pretty, and rich young woman, our unnamed narrator, decided to check out from life for a year by sedating herself with an array of pills. This was made possible with the assistance of the world’s most unethical psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle.  She was the impersonation of the pharmaceutical industry who touts that there is a pill for every illness and cure for every ail. If only life was that easy.

When not in a drug-induced sleep, our unnamed narrator watched movies on VHS, ate animals crackers while taking Ambien and Nembutal, and eventually drifting off into a deep somber on the couch. Instead of having her laundry picked up and dropped off like a civilized person, she opted to throw away her dirty underwear and orders tacky lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. The only time she left the house was to get coffee and cigarettes from the bodega at odd hours of the night. Meet our spoiled, vapid, and entitled narrator—who despite all that she had, went into “hibernation” in June 2000, when she was 24-years-old. At this time, she had been fired from her cushy job at an upscale art gallery for sleeping in the supply closet. Her on-again-off-again boyfriend Trevor treated her like a disposable piece of trash. Her only friend, Reva, was a whiney, insecure woman who was jealous of the narrator’s beauty, wealth, and her size 2 wardrobe.

This is the starting point of the book, and needless to say, none of the characters seemed likable. Yet, I couldn’t put down the book. In some ways, reading the book is like witnessing a trainwreck— it is horrifying, yet fascinating in a morbid way—how will this unnamed narrator destroy or redeem herself?

I’d like to be clear: the trainwreck metaphor only applies to the characters in the book. The book itself is flawlessly written— it is engaging and funny in a despondent way:

“You’re so needy,” I said. “Sounds frustrating.”

“And there’s Ken. I just can’t stand it. I rather kill myself than be all alone,” she said.

“At least you have options.”

In some ways, whether I like to admit it or not, I can relate to Reva, or even the narrator herself, living in a world consumed by vanity. As women, we are always told to strive for the size 2 body, the rewarding career, and give all that up when we meet the perfect man. When we don’t achieve what is expected of us, we are made to feel bad about it. Ironically, the unnamed narrator seemed to have it all, and instead of living it, she chose to sleep her life away. What does this say about ourselves and the values we hold dear?

This book took place in the year 2000, right before the boom of smartphones and around-the-clock tweets.  And yet, little has changed since then. Like 18 years ago, women are still subjected to ridiculous expectations, and we continue to allow men to treat us badly (in the book, the narrator’s boyfriend Trevor would come over to have sex with her like it was a favor for her, and Reva was involved with a middle-aged married man who just “loves” her on the side.) Many of us are still afraid to die alone and would do anything to avoid this fate. The #MeToo movement brought some awareness to women’s plight, but, has it achieved a lasting impact on how women view our worth?

Through My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh is holding up a mirror for us to examine ourselves, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. It’s an intriguing and refreshing read, perfect summer book for the beach.