Alienation and a Promised Land
Seeking a Promised Land
Last year, at Worldcon, I was lucky enough to meet Akiva Hoffman—the first person ever to pick me out of a crowd and compliment my work. Later in the con, we had a great conversation, during which I learned they'd included Kalyna the Soothsayer in an essay that would be published in a for real, no foolin', book of academic literary criticism.
That book—Jewish Fantasy Worldwide—is out now, and features Akiva's essay, "Seeking a Promised Land: Estrangement and Belonging in Queer Jewish Speculative Fiction." As someone who craves validation in all things, I love that my weird novel is mentioned in something like this.
(Inadvertent) Studies in Alienation
Recently, I've been reading two very different books that ended up having some unexpected points of intersection: Younghill Kang's East Goes West[1] and Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar. The former is arguably the first Korean American novel, detailing its protagonist's arrival and adventures in the U.S. after escaping a Korea under Japanese occupation; the latter is a personal history of the author's experiences in gay bars across three major cities, threaded through with the larger histories of those same queer spaces.
Both books are drawn from, but not entirely about, their authors' personal experiences of being adrift and alienated, while looking back at differently obliterated histories. From afar, Kang's stateless protagonist watches Korea's scholarly world being destroyed by fascist invaders[2]; Atherton Lin describes floating around the US and UK looking for gay belonging and gay ancestry that is often hidden, forgotten, or dead.
At this point, I should point out that neither of these are dour books. Each is an absolute joy to read: funny, insightful, and fascinating.[3] Though very different in style, both Kang and Atherton Lin definitely have style, and each book features prose good enough to make me jealous.
But statelessness, alienation, otherness, and obscured histories are some of my favorite themes (if you haven't noticed), so I thought I'd present a few of my favorite quotes from each book along those lines.
"It was my destiny to see the disjointing of a world. ... And I felt I was looking on death, the death of an ancient planet, a spiritual planet that had been my fathers' home."
—Kang 4
"The Los Angeles I moved to was a city of vacancies. ... AIDS was all around, but the visible symptoms—and the mourning—were shuttered away. There is no particular way to describe what I was intuiting around me. Maybe there isn't a term for a sense of loss when you don't know what you're missing."
—Atherton Lin 52
"One could not tell from my outside that I had lost touch with dew and stars and ghosts."
—Kang 12
"Cruising was once called haunting, and the men who participated were referred to as ghosts."
—Atherton Lin 112
"I felt that nothing lasts. Where was the ancient habitation of my fathers, where were its ordered ways and everlasting laws? Gutted by time."
—Kang 116
"[I] was beginning to feel like part of a lineage. I didn't know how else to learn history but to try it on."
—Atherton Lin 86
"Lin failed to arouse my patriotism; he merely italicized my loneliness and lack of nationalist passion, my sense of uncomfortable exile even among my fellow countrymen, where the homeland was constantly before my eyes."
—Kang 66
"When populations that have been marginalized for very different reasons intersect in the same location, everyone walks on an edge."
—Atherton Lin 208
And finally, less intense, is this bit showing the good of being a wanderer among wanderers. Kang's protagonist is on NYC's Lower East Side, working for another Korean immigrant to the U.S., named Hsun. (Some of the transliteration here is old-fashioned—the book is from 1937, after all.)
"Hsun himself fixed our lunch and dinner. He usually made something that was his own invention: it was a sort of Chinese chop-suey, Korean kimchi, Japanese skiyaki, Italian ravioli, and Hungarian goulash, all combined. To pour over this, he always kept some red hot pepper sauce."
—Kang, page 61
That sounds fucking delicious.
Nebula Conference Panel
If the Nebula Conference is something you take part in, I'll be doing a virtual panel this Friday, May 12, at 4pm PT!
My Nails?
After last month's inspiration, this month... I had nothing. So I went with a reserved (for me) bit of red and gold.
(If you're wondering, that's an issue of Jewish Currents. Of course.)
Ed Park (the writing professor who made the greatest impact on me) reviewing the book for NYRB: "To a modern reader, the most dated thing about Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, published by Scribner’s in 1937, is its tired title. (Either that or its subtitle, 'The Making of an Oriental Yankee.')"
This, of course, hits me right in the Ashkenazi Judaism.
Gay Bar is also, uh, pretty hot. Hugh Ryan in NYT Book Review: "Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex."