Rope of Ash, Shahnon Ahmad, 1965
The Last Days of the Storyteller, Anwar Ridhwan, 1979
Sejarah Melayu, Tun Seri Lanang, 1612 (approx), trans. John Leyden
I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a quandary about this blog. I started out behind–I was writing about books roughly a year after I’d read them. I thought I would catch up, but I remained about a year behind for nearly four years, through moving to the US and having my first kid. But then we moved again, had a second child, the pandemic hit, and for a little while I didn’t read very much and wrote almost nothing at all. When the dust settled, I found that I remembered very little about the books I had been reading when this blog timed out. I’ve continued to read–I’m currently on Taiwan, which means I have almost all of Southeast Asia to write about, as well as Macau and Hong Kong. I have told myself that I should just write about what I’ve read most recently and come back to the other stuff later at some point, but I find that I am constitutionally incapable of moving on out of order. I did it once, with Laos, and it just didn’t feel right.
Continue readingThis week I finished Sightseeing, Thai Tales, and The Night Tiger. I’m still plugging away at Contes Populaires de Cambodge, du Laos, et du Siam—in fact I’m still reading the same story that I was last week (“Vorvong et Saurivong”), but I feel better about it because I realized this story makes up the entire second half of the book. So when I finish it, I’m done (thank God). I’ve gotten to the point where I’m assigning it to myself, like homework, and am only sticking it out because I’m so close to the end that I might as well finish it.
There are many ways in which America tells you you don’t belong. The eyes that slide around to find another face behind you. The smiles that appear only after you have almost passed them, intended for someone else. The stiffness in the body as you stand beside them watching your child and theirs slide down the pole, and the relaxed smile when another white mother comes up to talk. The polite distance as you say something about the children at the swings and the chattiness when a white parent makes a comment. A polite people, it is the facial muscles, the shoulder tension, and the silence that give away white Americans’ uneasiness with people not like them. The United States, a nation of immigrants, makes strangers only of those who are visibly different, including the indigenous people of the continent. Some lessons begin in infancy, with silent performances, yet with eloquent instructions.
Around the World in 2000 Books 