Show notes
AAWW, Kundiman, & Kaya Press combine to bring acclaimed novelist Ed Lin together with pioneering YA author of FINDING MY VOICE and co-founder of AAWW Marie Myung-Ok Lee, in conversation to celebrate the release of Ed Lin’s YA debut, DAVID TUNG CAN’T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND UNTIL HE GETS INTO AN IVY LEAGUE COLLEGE (Kaya Press, October 2020). Moderated by Ruth Minah Buchwald, Ed Lin and Marie Lee’s dialogue will orbit themes, such as: Asian American study culture; the pitfalls of the “model minority” myth and how to challenge it; multiple standards and (mis)representations of Asian Americans in literature and the media; and coming-of-age in the Asian American diaspora while navigating relationships through race, class, young love, not to mention the confusing expectations of immigrant parental pressure. https://sohopress.com/books/finding-my-voice/ Live Transcript: Neela Banerjee: Hi everyone! My name is Neelanjana Banerjee. I'm so excited to invite you all to our event tonight! This is also the launch event for Ed's YA novel, David Tung Can't Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College published by Kaya Press. I'm the managing editor for Kaya Press and we're so excited to publish this next month. I'm also excited to be collaborating with two other organizations on this presentation. Kundiman is dedicated to nurturing Asian-American writers and readers of all ages. Their programs include a mentorship lab, food writing workshops, and more. I've been noticing all of these organizations have pivoted gracefully during the pandemic. We're excited people have been able to tune in from across the country today. This is also part of the Brooklyn Book Festival's Bookends event. I wanted to call out the copy of David Tung Can't Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College, which has a shiny cover. I'm really excited, please check out this book if you can on the Kaya Press website. There's links to buy this book and other books in the chat. We'll hear excerpts from Marie Myung-ok Lee and Ed Lin tonight. Then we'll have a conversation with Ruth Minah Buchwald and the authors. David Tung Can't Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College comes out October 28th and you can preorder it today as well as get some swag. You can also order Marie's book that will be rereleased this year as well. Let me introduce our speakers tonight. Marie Myung-ok Lee was born in South Korea and was raised in South New Jersey. She lives in Brookline. She is the author of Finding My Voice, Necessary Roughness, and Saying Goodbye. Her books have won a number of awards. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and she was one of the first American journalists welcomed into North Korea. Ed Lin is an all around stand up kind of guy. His published books include a mystery series set in Taipei and various others. I'll be back after the readings with a few more announcements, enjoy! Marie Myung-ok Lee: Hi everyone. Thanks Neela, for that great introduction. I'm so happy to be here with some of my favorite people and organizations. Thank you to all of you as well as Ruth for moderating and congratulations to Ed on his book. What's fun for me is my novel, which I'm going to be reading from -- Finding My Voice -- is actually almost as old as the Asian American Writers' Workshop. It's gone out of print, but I'll be reading a bit from my new old book. It's pretty much being republished the same way it was more than 20 years ago. It's considered to be the first contemporary Asian-set YA novel. I'm going to read a little bit from the beginning from Chapter 1 and a little bit from Chapter 2. [Reading excerpt.] ““Moooo!” It is still dark when I reach to shut off the Holstein-shaped alarm clock that my best friend, Jessie, gave me for my sixteenth birthday. To shut it off, you have to pull down on the cow’s enormous plastic udder. Mom wanted to throw it out. I told her it was just humor, Jessie-style. I step into the steamy shower and let the warmth coax me awake. I shampoo, shave my legs, and let the conditioner sit in my hair for exactly five minutes, just as it says on the bottle. After toweling off, I put on deodorant, foot powder, perfume, and then begin applying wine-colored eyeliner under my lashes. Do boys have to go through all this trouble day in and day out?? How about Tomper Sandel, the football player who appears to be naturally cute with his shaggy blond hair and cleft chin—does he worry about how he smells? I put on extra eye shadow in a semicircle around my top eyelid. According to Glamour magazine, this will give Oriental eyes a look of depth. I’ve always known that I don’t have the neat crease at the top of my lid—like my friends do— that tells you exactly where the eye shadow should stop. So every day I have to paint in that crease, but I don’t think I’m fooling anybody. “Hurry up, Ellen,” Mom calls from downstairs. I throw on my new Ocean Pacific T-shirt and jeans and run down. Mom is standing in the kitchen, quietly spreading peanut butter on whole wheat bread. She turns to look at me, and her eyebrows dip into a slight frown. “Is that what you’re wearing to school?” “Yes, Mom,” I say. We go through this scene every year. “What about all those good clothes we bought in Minneapolis?” “Those dresses are great,” I say. “But no one wears a dress on the first day of school.” “Oh,” Mom says, as if she’s not convinced. She turns to finish packing my lunch. As usual, Father has already left for the hospital so he can get an early start on patients with morning-empty, surgery-ready stomachs. “Goodbye, Myong-Ok. It’s your last year here,” she says. I look up at her upon hearing my Korean name. To me, it doesn’t sound like my name, but to Mom, I think it means something special. Sometimes I think she has so much more to say to me, but it gets lost, partly because of the gap separating Korean and English, and partly because of some other kind of gap that has always existed between me and my parents.” Here's just a little bit from chapter 2. “It is dinnertime at the Sung household, and although she’s absent, the presence of my sister still dominates. “She was very disciplined,” Father says as he begins slurping his Korean soup. “Even when she was getting all As she still studied hard because she knew that being at the top of her class in a public school like Arkin wouldn’t guarantee her getting into Harvard.” I tense my back against my chair. What good will it do for everyone to keep parading all of Michelle’s accomplishments in front of me? Today in calculus class, Mr. Carlson, the teacher, delightedly shambled over when he saw me. “How’s Michelle doing?” was the first thing that popped out of his mouth. “Boy, she was a whiz at math,” was the second. I sat there wondering if he knew what my name was. I look down at my lasagna. Its tomatoey, garlicky smell mingles with the smell of seaweed from Father’s soup. Since Mom has always cooked something Korean for Father and something American” for her, Michelle, and me, the smells are always clashing, usually ending up in weird, cloying odors. “How was school today?” Mom asks. “Okay. Not much new,” I say, although there’s so much I want to say, that I wish I could say, that I can’t. I mentally close my eyes and envision a different conversation. “A boy called me a ‘chink’ on the bus today,” I would say. Mom’s mouth would open. Father’s chopsticks would drop, sinking unnoticed into the murky depths of his soup. “You poor thing,” Mom would say. “What did you do?” “I totally ignored him,” I would answer confidently. “How terrible to have to go through that,” Father would say, and he’d take off his thick spectacles so that for once I could see the tenderness in his eyes. “With all this stress I think Ellen should worry less about grades and more about having a fun senior year and making friends,” Mom would add. “I agree,” Father would say, and he’d resume slurping his soup. Slurp, slurp.” Thank you for listening. Ed Lin: Thank you so much, Marie, for reading that. You know, I'm an east coast kind of guy. I've always lived in New York/New Jersey/the Tri-state area. The midwest has always been kind of an exotic place to me. When I went there, I felt like I had to eat like a cheese contest at every meal to fit in. I'm going to read a little bit from David Tung Can't Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College. I don't have the really pretty, shiny copy that Neela has, I only have this ugly, uncorrected proof. One thing you should know is that there's mention of Harmony Health, which is a hospital internship that David Tung has applied to. Even though he's been told he can't have a girlfriend or date, he is forced to have to ask his mother for help in renting a tux. He's planning on going to this dance. Okay, here we go. [Reading from book.] My heart was pounding in fear when my mother picked me up as usual at the bus stop. I was full-on terrified to lay out all my plans in full, which I needed to do to even have a shot at her giving me the tux money. “How was school?” she asked. “Fine,” I said. I saw her mouth twitch. She was suspicious when she didn’t hear grades. “No tests or quizzes?” “No, nothing today.” “What about Harmony Health?” “Still nothing.” Whenever I didn’t have a clear marker of success to report to her, she liked to go fishing for a deficiency. “When are you going to hear?” “Soon, I think.” We rode in silence a little bit. I couldn’t tell if she was in a good or a bad mood, but figured I could go fishing, too. “Mom?” “Yes?” “Do you think every Saturday night is going to be busy at Tung’s Garden?” She actually laughed. “Hope so! Don’t you hope so, too, David?” “Yeah, I guess.” I couldn’t muster the courage to bring up the dance. Once we got to the restaurant, I went into work mode. Every time I thought I was going to get a break for a few minutes, another task presented itself. Soon the night was almost over. We were cleaning up. It was now or never. I’d already decided there was no way I was going to tell my mother about the dance once we got home. She’d said numerous times that when she gets home, she just wants to sleep. Plus, here at the restaurant, there was always the chance I could rally up some backup support from Auntie Zhang or my dad. At the very least, my mother would think twice before really lashing into me, if it came to that. My newly found level of social acceptance—and the potential for a real-life girlfriend—was riding on being able to go to the dance. I could be as cool at Shark Beach High as I was at the Chinese school in Chinatown! But in order for that to happen, I needed to go to Nordstrom. This week. There was no way to put it off any longer. “Mom!” I said hoarsely. She was stapling receipts near the cash register. “Yes?” “Can you help me rent a tuxedo?” “Tuxedo? What for?” “I want to go to a school dance.” She put down the stapler and curled her hands into fists. “You want to go to a dance?” My shoulders involuntarily shrugged out of fear. “A girl asked me to go, and I said yes.” “A girl!” said my mother, like a TV detective announcing she’d found the murder weapon. I heard my father moving somewhere behind me, possibly taking shelter. “Who’s this girl?” “Christina Tau.” My mother flared her nostrils. “Is she your secret girlfriend, David?” “No,” I said. “I don’t have a girlfriend much less a secret girlfriend.” “‘Tau,’ she said venomously, “It sounds like a Cantonese name.” My mother sometimes expressed distaste for Cantonese people for no explicable reason. “How many times have I told you? You’re not allowed to have a girlfriend until college! And you’d better get into an Ivy League school!” It was the end of yet another long day of work, but my mother didn’t seem tired at all. She was as mad as I’ve ever seen her. “You’ve said that enough times,” I said. I looked around for some silent show of support. Auntie Zhang’s English wasn’t great, but she could probably understand what was happening. Yet she was diligently wiping down a tabletop, her head bent. My father suddenly found that something in the kitchen required him. After a brief pause, my mother was on me again. “You’re not even number one, are you?” She pointed at my nose. “All the way down at number eight! You spend too much time thinking about girls!” That was a complete lie. It angered me into a fatal mistake: talking back to my mother while she was still fired up. “I spend too much time working at this restaurant!” I protested. “You know how long I work here? How long your father works here? You want to run around with girls while we’re spending day and night here making money so we can live?” Oh no! Don’t let her start talking about money when she’s this angry. “Okay, look,” I said, attempting to calm her down. “It’s just one dance. It’s not a big deal. Christina’s parents are Chinese, too, and they think it’s OK.” But there was no calm eye to this storm. “They’re not your parents! And that’s not my child!” “Why can’t you understand?” “No! You don’t understand!” Actually, I truly didn’t. “A lot of kids are going.” “Not you, David!” my mother thundered. “You tell this girl you don’t want a girlfriend! And you don’t want to talk to her anymore!” “I already told her I would go,” I said. “Tell her you can’t! You’re in school, and school is for learning, not for girls!” She closed her lips and wiped her front teeth with her tongue, considering something. “Give me your phone, David!” “What!” “Give me your phone! I don’t want you talking and sexting with this girl!” “I’m not sexting with her, Mom!” “Who knows what you’re doing!” I handed over my phone and half a second later it was zipped up in her purse. Nothing ever escaped from there. Not even light. Thank you so much. Ruth Minah Buchwald: Thank you both so much. Thank you for speaking with me. I love your contributions to the canon so much. AAWW is the first place I ever interned at a few years ago. It feels extra special to represent and work with people who have been continuously kind and generous to me. Thank you to Lily, Rob, and Neela for arranging this. I'm excited to be part of the commencement event for Ed's book tour. Ed, since this is your YA debut, I wanted you to talk about the transition from writing for adults to young people, if that even was a conscious choice. Ed Lin: I never really have an audience in mind when I'm writing. I just write to me. In the course of writing about Chinatown mysteries, and then moving on to Taiwan, I was in the research of looking at the history of Chinatown, and I started to question my own family's personal history. That led to Taiwan, of course. My father is from a long line of Taiwanese settlers. There have been waves of people who have emigrated from China to Taiwan over millennia. His family came over when the Ming Dynasty collapsed. In the course of all that research and making things more personal, I thought about the YA books that were out there. I feel like none of them really spoke to the terror that I had, being in high school and being really, really scared that my grades weren't good enough, my SAT score wasn't high enough, etc. to achieve. A lot of second-generation Asian Americans are proxies for their parents, battling with other relatives and friends. They only got so far, but my kid is going to beat your kid, and he's a piano player going to Harvard, going to play for the Knicks undrafted, etc. All these books are really for me. I guess when I'm thinking about writing for a younger me, I had fewer reservations and really, really wanted to push things, because I was being squeezed so hard in this box. It wasn't like, how was your day? It was like, show me your grade, and then I'll tell you how your da…
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