https://jamesyeh.cargo.site James Yeh Fri, 10 May 2024 02:16:40 +0000 https://jamesyeh.cargo.site en https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Nonfiction-Bianca-Giaever-for-the-New-York-Times-2024 Fri, 10 May 2024 02:16:40 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Nonfiction-Bianca-Giaever-for-the-New-York-Times-2024 Nonfiction “She Wanted to Help Strangers. Would They Take Her Up on It?”By James Yeh, originally published in the New York Times (2024) <img width="2048" height="1365" width_o="2048" height_o="1365" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0133c7cfa9e843d1febbd8a12a1a00ed4a3eb5495caa422ac94f5ba516787d7/FREE-HELP-zjwf-superJumbo.jpg" data-mid="210633003" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0133c7cfa9e843d1febbd8a12a1a00ed4a3eb5495caa422ac94f5ba516787d7/FREE-HELP-zjwf-superJumbo.jpg" />Photo by Maansi Maansi Srivastava On an overcast morning in April, Bianca Giaever was anxiously loitering outside the Union Square subway station. She scanned the New Yorkers rushing along on their weekday commutes and tried to psych herself up to go talk to them. She was dressed rather noticeably, and perhaps slightly humiliatingly, in a red jumpsuit and a white sandwich board she had assembled the night before, writing the words “FREE HELP” in red marker. It was the first day of a project by Ms. Giaever, 34, a filmmaker and radio producer whose work, inspired by performance artists like Sophie Calle and Tehching Hsieh, often involves personal journeys and interactions with strangers. She planned to offer no-strings-attached assistance to whomever she could, for about a month or so. No ask would be too small, thankless or absurd — “ANYTHING! (Except sex!)” she noted wryly on the business cards she printed up. While seemingly straightforward, her mission had already opened up plenty of room for uncertainty. Would the strangers in this supposedly cold and impersonal city accept her help? And if they did, how much could she really help them? Over the course of the four days I spent with Ms. Giaever, things would get more complicated. But at the moment, she was focused only on finding her first client. “Partly the motivation is not feeling helpful in my day-to-day life,” Ms. Giaever told me&nbsp;as she made a lap through Union Square. Helping people, she said, was not her natural instinct: “I feel guilty about that. So I feel like I needed a project to push me to be more generous.” Read more in the New York Times. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Fiction-I-Eat-It-All-the-Time-in-McSweeney-s-Quarterly-Concern-2022 Mon, 18 Apr 2022 15:46:54 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Fiction-I-Eat-It-All-the-Time-in-McSweeney-s-Quarterly-Concern-2022 Fiction “I Eat It All the Time”By James Yeh, originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (2022) <img width="1065" height="1520" width_o="1065" height_o="1520" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eeaf6d67d8b622062b149721bed07aa731f9297f075b3abbeb0418c8e93168d5/McSweeney-s-art.jpg" data-mid="163662310" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eeaf6d67d8b622062b149721bed07aa731f9297f075b3abbeb0418c8e93168d5/McSweeney-s-art.jpg" />Image by Wesley Allsbrook One day at the café, Charles is absorbed by a small drama going on at the table next to him. A father around his age sits frustrated with his little girl and a woman who, based on her sparkly ring and secondary role, he assumes must be the stepmother. The dad ricochets between hectoring and hugging the little girl; at one point, he gives her a stern talking-to. In response, she crosses her arms, turning her back to everyone in a precocious, diva-ish way, and this amuses the father—he pulls her close. Watching this all play out, Charles feels not unlike the little girl: wounded and wound-up, wounded and wound-up. He catches her, while the father is away, burying her face in her hands. Then rapidly wiping her eyes, before his return. Asks the wife: Is the sauce a chipotle sauce? It’s a ginger sauce, answers the man. I eat it all the time. Suddenly, his brow furrows violently. So you’re going to just sit there and not eat? He yanks the little girl’s seat so she is right up next to him. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen, he goes on. You’re embarrassing us in the restaurant. Here’s the thing: Charles can’t stand to hear it, but it’s also none of his business. He’s not the hero of this story, just some guy at the table beside them, listening in. So what that he too has a kid, a son who lives with the mother, which is why Charles now cares about children? This little girl and her dad, and to a lesser extent the stepmom—now speaking quiet Spanish to the little girl—they’re the ones who this is really about. If the stepmom is secondary, Charles is tertiary, more or less last. The little girl looks over at him, this curious stranger next to them, and the friendly stranger squeezes a smile. Rueful but, he hopes, reassuring. When the father goes for forks, his daughter chases after him, anxious. When they get back, she feeds him a fry. She holds out her hand, patiently, painterly, as though finishing her masterpiece. He takes it. Originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Fiction-Untranslatability-in-the-Drift-2022 Wed, 09 Jun 2021 21:48:22 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Fiction-Untranslatability-in-the-Drift-2022 Fiction “Untranslatability”By James Yeh, originally published in the Drift (2022) <img width="786" height="480" width_o="786" height_o="480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ee0e6b5da1a69019b0d1cbc1a74aab4ef0aacb3d0ffc07d45f275e98efdfb4af/Eis.png" data-mid="129452091" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/786/i/ee0e6b5da1a69019b0d1cbc1a74aab4ef0aacb3d0ffc07d45f275e98efdfb4af/Eis.png" />Image by John Kazior 1. It’s an old story. Two people together, simple, straightforward. She’s a translator; he is, I am sorry to say, a writer. Emily’s more successful, Charles more embittered. He hadn’t meant to end up like this — who does? But that’s life sometimes. Let’s say they’re in their early thirties, have been together a while, weathered the storms to emerge more or less intact, stronger even, when Emily receives a grant from the Swiss consulate to translate a novel by T—, the country’s greatest and most eccentric writer. She’s offered two months at a residency in Berlin, where T— had written the book. Charles supports this, of course. He’s an MFA graduate, not a troglodyte. Let her shine. Besides, he reasons, it reflects well on him. Her connection to T— was something he cherished and couldn’t keep from bragging about to his friends, and occasionally some of hers, as if he himself were the one translating the book. 2. So Emily takes off while Charles stays put. She chips away at the T— translation while Charles spins his wheels on his own manuscript, but that’s no surprise. He is, as I said, a writer. But really he’s an editor, toiling at a large media company in New York that gobbles up all his time and attention. You do what you do: field the emails, publish the posts, monitor traffic. They set aside an hour each day to skype, as he’s getting ready for work or she’s getting ready for bed. Not ideal, but they’re trying. Their growing rift won’t occur to him until later, though the signs are there, for instance, in the curious photos Emily sends from the residency. The images are less erotic than he would have liked. The first is of her along the riverbank, a somber look on her face. In the second, she’s at her work desk with enormous crazed eyes, seaweedlike hair as though she’s just emerged from the unmade bed partly visible in the background. And then there is the postcard from T—’s sanitarium up north, where the great writer had spent his final two decades on earth willfully rotting away, as the story goes, not writing but “being mad” — gluing bags, sorting twine. On the back of this card, Emily regrets not being more thankful for the concert tickets Charles bought them last Christmas. Continue reading in the&nbsp;Drift. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Nonfiction-Percival-Everett-Can-t-Be-Pinned-Down-for-New-York-2024 Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:14:25 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Nonfiction-Percival-Everett-Can-t-Be-Pinned-Down-for-New-York-2024 Nonfiction “Percival Everett Can’t Be Pinned Down”By James Yeh, originally published in New York (2024) <img width="1400" height="1400" width_o="1400" height_o="1400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cb2b0f237720fdad5a9a01692f7ce5310b24f040a768ed1c4bc32f1e15cc15ba/f5a32dcb8b32bc3b24d738eda1835e45c8-Percival-Everett.1x.rsquare.w1400.jpg" data-mid="208990497" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cb2b0f237720fdad5a9a01692f7ce5310b24f040a768ed1c4bc32f1e15cc15ba/f5a32dcb8b32bc3b24d738eda1835e45c8-Percival-Everett.1x.rsquare.w1400.jpg" />Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio In February 2023, the news broke that Percival Everett would be publishing his 24th novel, James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from enslaved Jim’s perspective, for an advance of more than $500,000. Some Everett devotees (myself included) wondered if, after years of inventive, philosophical, and absurdist work displaying a dizzying range — mute baby geniuses, nutty heist plots, post-westerns, and metacommentaries on race and publishing — he was finally selling out. After all, though Everett has increased in stature recently — he’s been a Pulitzer and Booker finalist for 2020’s Telephone and 2021’s The Trees, respectively, and his breakout, 2001’s Erasure, an incendiary publishing-world satire, was recently adapted into the comparatively defanged Oscar-winning film American Fiction — his books have not sold in great numbers. His subject matter can be eclectic. The cast of characters over his 35 books and counting includes an orphan named Not Sidney Poitier, a sociopathic rhino hunter who wants to turn the Grand Canyon into an amusement park, and, in multiple works, testy English professors named Percival Everett. Continue reading in New York. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Fiction-So-Much-Winning-in-Dissent-2018 Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:58:29 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Fiction-So-Much-Winning-in-Dissent-2018 Fiction “So Much Winning” By James Yeh, originally published in Dissent (2018) <img width="666" height="305" width_o="666" height_o="305" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e53a4b8cad08a8e9485334a789aa0038c832756ecec702f55d11364ea8e3c6f1/1530047175YehLee_statue_sun666.jpg" data-mid="26918431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/666/i/e53a4b8cad08a8e9485334a789aa0038c832756ecec702f55d11364ea8e3c6f1/1530047175YehLee_statue_sun666.jpg" />Image by Joe Campbell I first notice it a few weeks after the election. The swastika has been spray-painted onto preexisting spray paint, fresh lines of red atop faded ones on the curb kitty-corner from my parents’ house. I show my father, but he’s already seen it. Some people like to fool around, he says, continuing to prune the shrubs. Do you know how long it’s been there? I ask. A couple months, he says, still focused on the task. Just leave that junk alone. Not yours. But people will see, I say. Not yours. He grips the shears and looks me in the eye. Don’t touch it, he warns. Online, a friend suggests turning the symbol into the logo of an old computer operating system, with its wake of little black squares. Another friend suggests turning it into a bird. Neither feels right—too jaunty, too whimsical—but I buy the canister anyway. Its rattle like a promise, or a threat. Continue reading in Dissent.&nbsp; https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Essay-Watching-Minari-with-my-immigrant-parents-for-Mic-2021 Sat, 06 Mar 2021 17:29:39 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Essay-Watching-Minari-with-my-immigrant-parents-for-Mic-2021 Essay Watching 'Minari' with my immigrant parents showed just how little we know one another<img width="1020" height="576" width_o="1020" height_o="576" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/221df21da8cb772de7d2b184cd6c9cd13567c2fa4591b7855e71f602ad1f8931/b1c86dd8-80a1-463f-bb0b-022fcab4e6d3-pjimage-4.jpg" data-mid="101070605" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/221df21da8cb772de7d2b184cd6c9cd13567c2fa4591b7855e71f602ad1f8931/b1c86dd8-80a1-463f-bb0b-022fcab4e6d3-pjimage-4.jpg" />Screenshot by the author (L) ; Courtesy of A24 (R) By James Yeh,&nbsp;originally published in Mic (2021). Selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2022. A couple years ago, I tried watching Game of Thrones with my parents — made them watch it with me, I should say, as a kind of experiment. My ostensible goal was to write about it for work, but the real goal was to connect in some vague yet meaningful way with my mother and father, who’d left Taiwan for graduate school in the American South in the 1960s, after the U.S. eased immigration restrictions, and ended up sticking around to raise a family and then sticking around quite a bit longer, to retire and host their adult children and grandkids several times a year. No surprise, my parents did not take to the show. “Too many evil,” said my mother, “and too many scam.” My father summarized it thusly: “Stupid people watch stupid movie.” Still the story turned out fine. More than that, I felt a germ of new appreciation for my parents, who were so willing to help me, simply because I had asked — that was all they needed to hear. After giving the best years of their lives to supporting my sister and me, what was another few hours of nudity and dragons? Still I was left with a nagging, hollowed-out feeling: We weren't any closer to the shared revelation that “so closely approximates the truth,” as Kafka wrote, in Letter to His Father, “that might reassure us both a little and make our living and our dying easier.” (Never mind that Kafka didn't actually send the letter — he’d passed it off to his mom who deemed it undeliverable and gave it back to him. So much for easier living and dying.) Anyway, I hadn't bothered to wonder whether my parents even wanted such a thing — maybe they would find it stressful, or confusing — who could tell? Some months later, I made my mother watch something else with me, Edward Yang’s sublime Taiwanese family epic Yi Yi. I remember feeling let down afterward. Rather than appreciate the film’s majestic form and quiet sense of drama, or its painterly shots of Taipei, where she’s from, my mother fixated on minor details: the eight-year-old son’s encounters at school, what he’s up to with his camera. (Taking photos of the backs of people’s heads, it turns out, which amused my mother: “Ah, shǎ guā!” — Mandarin for dumdum.) It brought to mind my father’s reaction to the “Parents” episode of Master of None (another example of these gently coerced viewings). Unmoved by the spectacle of adult sons wanting to bond with their immigrant parents onscreen and off, he’d scoffed at the inaccuracy of an actor’s Cantonese accent in rural Taiwan. “I prefer more realistic shows,” he declared. “Like Madam President and Blue Blood.” And yet here we were in 2021, with me employing that same tactic, expecting different results, like Charlie Brown and the football. Could Minari, the celebrated film about a Korean American family’s struggle to eke out a life of their own in 1980s Arkansas, be the one to bring us together? In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director Lee Isaac Chung described screening his semiautobiographical film for his father, who tersely responded, “Good movie” — then walked out to gather himself. “He came back and we hugged for five minutes,” said the filmmaker, apologizing for his cracking voice. “I think he felt that I understood him.” Steven Yeun, who plays the film’s resolute protagonist, a chicken sexer turned farmer-slash-father of two, spoke of a similar moment with his own Korean immigrant dad: “Every time I talk about it, I’m just, like, crying about it, you know? Because I think my dad felt seen,” he confessed to Jay Caspian Kang, writing for The New York Times Magazine. It was a distance, Yeun said, “that took 36 years to bridge.” * * * That was how, over a series of frigid nights in February, with COVID-19 keeping us 750 miles apart — me in half-shuttered New York, them in not-far-from-usual South Carolina — I found myself repeatedly on the phone with my own Asian immigrant father, trying to arrange a distanced viewing with him and my mother: because I wanted us to all cry together. I had gone in expecting more administration than usual, but I hadn’t expected a month of Sisyphean hassles — obtaining a screener from the helpful, patient publicists; obtaining refreshed screeners from other helpful, patient publicists; calling and texting to check if my father had received said screeners (“I don’t have the movie link anymore,” he texted); devising how to “Chromecast” to his gewgawed TV — when one night my father called to say they had finished dinner and decided to start the movie early and that he and my mother were now 10 — no — 30 minutes in. I rushed to my laptop and asked him what time it showed on the video player. “No time,” he replied. “…” I suggested we switch to video, so I could observe their reactions, then asked if he could adjust the camera. The unpopulated video darted around as the audio rustled and rattled. “OK,” I said. “What do you see onscreen?” “The mother and the boy are talking,” he said. Then: “Little boy and Grandma at the creek.” I slid the button on the video player, trying to sync up the dialogue. Again the video from my father’s phone skittered. I saw their ceiling followed by an up-close gray nothing as the phone transmitted a series of increasingly loud squawks. “You don’t have to keep adjusting the phone." “Nobody’s adjusting anything,” he said, peevishly. “Phone move by itself.” The thumping and juddering grew.“I can’t take it anymore!” I blurted out, instantly regressing decades. I wondered, not for the first time: Are there people out there with normal, functional families able to spend any amount of time together, and not, to quote Frank O’Hara, bear the fruit of screaming? I suggested we try again after I got some food in my system. “No,” he said. “Phone about to die.” “Why don’t you charge it then?” “No,” he repeated. “Take six hours.” “Are you joking?” My father, a retired chemist with nine patents to his name and whose philosophy on life could be distilled into “some things you just have to,” grunted out repeatedly through the years, did not take the bait. Instead he remained calm, a new occurrence. “No,” he offered, simply. * * * So it goes. The days pass — there’s a terrifying snowstorm in Texas, TikToked into my feed at work. A nationwide surge of attacks against people who look like my parents and me and the actors we keep trying to watch. A lawyer is turned into a cat on a Zoom call. Our next couple viewing attempts are no more successful: one or both of our screening links is expired, or it’s too late, or my mother’s hearing aid’s battery has again died. On these calls my father and I end up discussing other things: the weather, work, hearing aid logistics — these hardly remarkable everyday chats undertaken as if we were a pair of coworkers, assigned to the same thankless task who, despite their differences and without recognizing it, become friends. One Sunday night he texts me: “Are you going to watch super ball today?” Of course I know what he means. And for about an hour — sports, ads, people talking about sports and ads — we take it in. * * * The helpful, still-extremely patient publicists again freshen our links, but when I text my father, he says he hasn't received anything. Another exchange ensues: I ask if it’s in the old email; he says maybe he deleted it; I suggest searching the distributor’s name, A24; he says back, “80 what?” Eventually he lets me root around his NetZero account and I unearth the link, ten or so emails down, marked “already read." Getting ourselves synced up is just as satisfying as you would imagine. Onscreen we are shown the film’s serenely observed details, its naturalistic pacing and dialogue, its striking golden light and unexpectedly religious tones. Shrewdly, the movie plays an immigrant’s imperfect grasp of language for both laughs and pathos. When the assimilating young son (played by a charming Alan Kim) is doted on by his foul-mouthed FOB grandmother (an irresistible Youn Yuh-jung) — “pretty boy, pretty boy,” she coos in a thick accent — he wrenches himself free with the outburst: “I’m not pretty, I’m good-looking!” And the grandmother is left cross-legged on the carpeted floor. It's a beautiful, layered moment. She laughs yet her mouth stays open — she's a little stunned. But is it pain, or is it insight, or is it something escaping words? Although my mother is especially given to talking at the TV, here she’s been unusually quiet, absorbed in the narrative, except for when she exclaims, “Ai yō, she take money from there!” during a scene where the grandmother pulls from the church donation basket — an affront to my mother’s devoutly Catholic sensibility. My father, on the other hand, goes in and out of the frame — I can hear his voice from the other room. He’s distracted — tidying things up, wiping down the counters, tossing some papers into the cardboard box he’s saved for recycling. At one point, he crouches down to use the mini-vac. But even then I note the convergences: how his grunts and groans overlap with Steven Yeun’s Jacob’s as they perform various physical tasks, how my mother’s clanks and clinks while eating intermingle with Yeri Han’s Monica’s as she washes the dishes and sets the table. A soundscape of dutiful domesticity, grit-teeth grit. Their fighting sounds familiar to me, too. * * * Afterward, I want to interview my parents together, but my father says, “Ask your mother,” and when I bring it up to her, she says I should talk to him “by himself.” So I call them up them, one-by-one. I put it to my father first: how’d you like the movie? “It’s OK,” he says. “You know. It’s watchable.” I try a different tack. “You don’t think it’s interesting that they made a movie about an Asian American immigrant experience?” “It’s OK,” says my father, still unimpressed. “You know there are many of those kinds of movies. I haven’t seen a real good one. You know, there’s sisters from China, I think. First or second generation — then they have a third generation. Pot Luck...?” “You mean Joy Luck Club?” “Yeah, Joy Luck Club. That was rated pretty high,” he says. “I didn’t think it was that good. It was OK.” I ask, “Was there anything that reminded you of your own experience as an immigrant in the South?” “No, not really,” he says. “It’s different. He worked for himself; I worked for somebody else. You know, I didn’t have too much up and down. It’s more just steady work. The only thing remind me is he has the confidence in himself. I have confidence in myself.” Laughing, I continue to press. “Do you think that’s common to being an immigrant who moves to the U.S.?” “I don’t know,” he says. “Most people I know, very few have confidence in themself.” I tell him about Chung and Yeun and their fathers, how the film helped them all to relate. “Really?” he asks, voice softening. “Yeah. Isn’t that interesting?” “Yeah,” he allows. “Maybe they have different experience.”I get my mother on the line. “Well, it’s a good movie, but it’s sad,” she says. “Everybody try so hard to do their best. When I look at it, I just feel sad. Because the immigrant people have lots of adjustment to do.” She adds, with some approval: “I think religion is good for them.” I ask whether she saw herself at all in the movie. “Not really,” she says, a bit pensively. “Because I can speak English. And I was in good health and I can hear and I was not ugly. Not like now. So I was fortunate. No one discriminate against me. I was a professional,” she says, a reference to her job as a librarian that she left four decades ago to raise my sister and me. “I thank God I stay home, take good care of you and Rosa,” she continues, returning to the subject she always returns to. “You two are very good from the beginning. People think you’re very smart. You know, so you have good start. Don't you feel that way, too?” * * * Shuffling between rooms in Brooklyn and Queens, replaying our conversations, I felt uncertain. Here I was, thinking of Minari as a film more akin to my parents’ lived experience in the American South than any I’d come across, but they refused to see it that way. What Tolstoy wrote about happy families being alike and unhappy ones being distinct, felt true — and, like many true things, painful. Yet I was surprised by the extent to which my parents sought to distance themselves from the characters onscreen — emphasizing the class divides in particular. Was it because they could all too easily see themselves in these roles, burdened with sacrifices and unimaginable homesickness, traversing the gulfs between them and everyone around them, including, especially, one another and their all-too-Americanized children? I wondered whether they felt compelled to point out how these characters still failed to capture them, so that their lives could remain elusive and, because of that, dignified, and free. Maybe it was a need for autonomy, the freedom to make their own narratives outside of Hollywood representation — or anyone else’s representation, including their writer son’s — that flung them so many thousands of miles and time zones away from where they were from and, paradoxically, kept them locked together. * * * There is, I almost forgot, one other movie: Crazy Rich Asians, which my cousin took us to see in 2018, at a multiplex outside San Francisco. It hadn’t been my choice or my father’s, just something to pass the time before we all met up for the big family dinner, and the movie itself was fine — flawed but fun, and good as hell to know people everywhere, Asian and non-Asian, were actually watching it. During the climactic scene, when our plucky heroine wins over her fiancé’s disapproving mother with some expert mahjong, I was startled by a ragged sound coming from the seat beside me, halfway between coughing and gagging, when I realized I was hearing the violence of my father’s weeping, the only time I have ever heard him cry, and I was crying too. The catharsis I’d been seeking was, of course, right here all along. But we said nothing. Before, it hadn’t been enough; now, it was too much. When the movie was done, we silently exited the theater. * * * “Minari is about a family,” the director Chung said in a winner’s speech after taking home the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, an iffy categorization that raised questions over who gets to be considered American — and, implicitly, who doesn't. As Chung spoke, he cradled his elated young daughter while his wife hid offscreen. “It’s a family trying to learn how to speak a language of its own,” he said to an audience of millions. “It goes deeper than any American language, and any foreign language. It’s a language of the heart.” For me, watching movies and TV shows with my parents was less a way of trying to speak a language together than trying, and failing, to impose my own language on them. I had tried and failed to share in a cinematic experience with them, not dissimilar to how they had, like so many well-intentioned first-generation parents before them, tried and failed to nudge me into each of those by-now-familiar archetypal roles: doctor, lawyer, engineer. Some things we just didn’t see eye to eye on, divergences in the DNA. (“Nowadays I like a good comedy,” reflected my father, on one of our many, many calls. “Or Western. Like Shane,” he said, pronouncing it Sean.) And, really, wasn’t this fine? If Minari is in the end about any one thing, maybe it’s about accepting life as it is and not as you want it to be, and sometimes — often — that’s not what you planned or what you would have even wanted. But there it is. You can pour effort and water into the ground, but that doesn’t mean the crops will grow or you’ll sell them if they do. Likewise you can pull and tug at a person but that won't get you any closer, necessarily. But you can choose to keep trying, and to keep listening. And, if you’re lucky, sometimes that’s just enough. Read the original article on&nbsp;Mic. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Profile-Percival-Everett-for-the-New-York-Times-2020 Sun, 03 May 2020 12:45:27 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Profile-Percival-Everett-for-the-New-York-Times-2020 Nonfiction “Percival Everett Has a Book or Three Coming Out” By James Yeh, originally published in the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;(2020) <img width="1536" height="2048" width_o="1536" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cd625611403933a7e974265214296cd0bd2627160707db0f7a41a2783b2465e3/merlin_171937182_531b36e6-6b16-4f5e-9f63-1412c03515b7-superJumbo.jpg" data-mid="69461651" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cd625611403933a7e974265214296cd0bd2627160707db0f7a41a2783b2465e3/merlin_171937182_531b36e6-6b16-4f5e-9f63-1412c03515b7-superJumbo.jpg" /> Photo by Joyce Kim Once you’ve finished ‘Telephone,’ the latest book by Percival Everett, you may be talking about it with another reader and finding that you disagree on what happened. That is intentional. “There are three different versions of this novel, they’re all published identically, and you can’t know which one you’re getting,” Everett said during a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. With an apologetic chuckle, he added: “It’s going to piss a lot of people off, I’m afraid.” Continue reading at the&nbsp;New York Times. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Profile-Robin-Wall-Kimmerer-for-the-Guardian-2020 Fri, 15 May 2020 00:27:34 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Profile-Robin-Wall-Kimmerer-for-the-Guardian-2020 Nonfiction “Robin Wall Kimmerer: ‘People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how’” By James Yeh, originally published in the Guardian (2020) <img width="1260" height="630" width_o="1260" height_o="630" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9765b3edb36b07f1a9baee0c6e6496d62e702ec1b20662876a7518f4a69ffcf1/8499_Kimmerer_Robin_Wall_widescreen_credit_Dale_Kakkak.jpg" data-mid="72154284" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9765b3edb36b07f1a9baee0c6e6496d62e702ec1b20662876a7518f4a69ffcf1/8499_Kimmerer_Robin_Wall_widescreen_credit_Dale_Kakkak.jpg" />Photo by Dale Kakkak “This is a time to take a lesson from mosses,” says Robin Wall Kimmerer, celebrated writer and botanist. Her first book, published in 2003, was the natural and cultural history book Gathering Moss. She grins as if thinking of a dogged old friend or mentor. “What is it that has enabled them to persist for 350m years, through every kind of catastrophe, every climate change that’s ever happened on this planet, and what might we learn from that?” She lists the lessons “of being small, of giving more than you take, of working with natural law, sticking together. All the ways that they live I just feel are really poignant teachings for us right now.” It’s the end of March and, observing the new social distancing protocol, we’re speaking over Zoom – Kimmerer, from her home office outside Syracuse, New York; me from shuttered South Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where the constant wail of sirens are a sobering reminder of the pandemic. The occasion is the UK publication of her second book, the remarkable, wise and potentially paradigm-shifting Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which has become a surprise word-of-mouth sensation, selling nearly 400,000 copies across North America (and nearly 500,000 worldwide). In January, the book landed on the New York Times bestseller list, seven years after its original release from the independent press Milkweed Editions – no small feat. “This is a time to take a lesson from mosses,” says Robin Wall Kimmerer, celebrated writer and botanist. Her first book, published in 2003, was the natural and cultural history book Gathering Moss. She grins as if thinking of a dogged old friend or mentor. “What is it that has enabled them to persist for 350m years, through every kind of catastrophe, every climate change that’s ever happened on this planet, and what might we learn from that?” She lists the lessons “of being small, of giving more than you take, of working with natural law, sticking together. All the ways that they live I just feel are really poignant teachings for us right now.” It’s the end of March and, observing the new social distancing protocol, we’re speaking over Zoom – Kimmerer, from her home office outside Syracuse, New York; me from shuttered South Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where the constant wail of sirens are a sobering reminder of the pandemic. The occasion is the UK publication of her second book, the remarkable, wise and potentially paradigm-shifting Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which has become a surprise word-of-mouth sensation, selling nearly 400,000 copies across North America (and nearly 500,000 worldwide). In January, the book landed on the New York Times bestseller list, seven years after its original release from the independent press Milkweed Editions – no small feat. Continue reading at the Guardian. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Oral-History-Remembering-Giancarlo-DiTrapano-for-the-Believer-2021 Tue, 06 Apr 2021 21:14:07 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Oral-History-Remembering-Giancarlo-DiTrapano-for-the-Believer-2021 Essay“He Trusted the Author”: Remembering Giancarlo DiTrapano <img width="1952" height="3264" width_o="1952" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cd01373566d7d8253dea06036b8e558f3ba8458923684144cc87b83c44b3c3d0/Hell-s-Kitchen--July-2012-photo-by-Brooks-Sterritt.jpg" data-mid="104460712" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cd01373566d7d8253dea06036b8e558f3ba8458923684144cc87b83c44b3c3d0/Hell-s-Kitchen--July-2012-photo-by-Brooks-Sterritt.jpg" />Hell’s Kitchen, July 2012 (photo by Brooks Sterritt) By James Yeh, originally published in the Believer (2021) Independent publishing is, I don’t have to tell you, kind of a shit place: first you lose your time, and then you waste your money, to paraphrase artist and ex-publisher Paul Chan, who would know. But it’s people like Gian—otherwise known as Giancarlo DiTrapano, the intrepid editor, publisher, writer, rabble-rouser, and West Virginian who founded New York Tyrant magazine and its imprint Tyrant Books and succumbed prematurely, monstrously last week at forty-seven—who remind us why it matters. A lot of people online have mentioned how cool he was (which he was, effortlessly, real-deal) and how generous (which he also was) and charitable (that too)—all rarities, of course, in this life and this industry, especially. As a cofounding editor of a—is the word rival?—literary outfit, Gigantic, we didn’t always align on aesthetics or approach, but we certainly shared more than most, particularly, our mutual interest in language and ever-belief in literature’s unimpeachable value, despite all the spent time and blown money, and I could never knock the full-throated way Gian stumped for his writers, and the integrity with which he carried himself and brought to all his projects. Tyrant Books’ ultimate success, without bowing to orthodox industry norms, was a joy to behold. Like the best editors, Gian was someone who brought a lot of interesting people and ideas together and then spun the parts into something greater—more forceful, bold, memorable. But he was so much more than that, too: a mensch and a sweetheart and a tireless advocate for so many outside the traditional walks of literary life. He was unabashedly not to the manner born, but through sheer will claimed a place in contemporary American letters for himself and others he felt compelled to usher in, the unloved, underdogs and outsiders. Gian wasn’t a gatekeeper so much as a gatecrasher, the benevolent trickster who sneaks past security, then slices a hole in the fence to let a bunch of others in, because why shouldn’t we be so generous? He was the grand Dionysian older sibling who hipped teenage you to the best books, art, bands—then got you drunk when your parents were out of town. Maybe he checked in on you the next morning, maybe you checked in on him. Either way, you felt lucky, affectionated upon. Gian was, it must be said, a world-class shit-stirrer. Our first emails, from 2010, had to do with the storied editor and lecturer Gordon Lish, arguably a spiritual forebear to Gian, whose marathon writing classes our friend found “interesting as hell,” gushing: “Never witnessed another human being so passionate about writing and who can talk about it for eight hours and be entertaining. It’s a spectacle.” Other parts of the class, though, Gian liked less. “A lot of the lecture is about how to live (kinda),” he griped. “For example, he has this thing where he says, ‘If a car pulls up and the door opens and someone tells you to get in, then get in.’ “And I’m like, ‘No shit.’ I don’t need any more of that kind of advice.” That was Gian: He got in. Nobody had to teach him that; he knew. Here is another email he sent me, also from 2010, which I will include in its entirety: Hey Yeh, What’s up? You heard from those Vice faggots yet? I just finished Richard Yates and loved it so I’m doing a small post for them online. I made it clear to Thomas that if this were to any way interfere with them publishing your interview (like too much Tao) that they should please not publish my piece. Just wanted to run that by you so you don’t think I’m cock-blocking you when the post comes out. Cool? Anyway, wow, I really liked Richard Yates. What are your weekend plans? G This too seemed to me classic Gian: profane, outré, beyond tender. Moreover, there was also an uncommon respect, a generosity of spirit that guided him—Gian always sided with the little guy; that interview, if accepted, would have paid far more than I’d ever been paid for my writing. And here was Gian, willing to pull his own piece, so he wouldn’t “cock-block” mine. Who else would have been willing to offer that, and to offer it so freely? Writing these words I find myself thinking of, of all things, Game of Thrones, which Gian must have despised for countless reasons, number-one its mass appeal, which he, like a true Gen X-er, instinctively distrusted. But there’s this one character, played by Pedro Pascal, an irresistible debaucherous stylish prince, lover of beauty, sex, and partying, who you aren’t sure is necessarily noble or even serious. But then, when it’s a matter of life or death, he of all people is the one who steps up. “I will be your champion,” he declares with drama and courage. That was like Gian—for so many of us, Gian was that prince, and that champion. Gian also knew how to throw a good party (another rarity in this industry). In this spirit, we asked thirty-three writers, editors, and friends to share their remembrances of him. They include writers he published, Tyrant colleagues, old friends, former students, and fellow travelers in the literary world. Here’s what they had to say. A livestream service, held by Gian’s family, will begin on April 6 at 1:50 PM. —James Yeh He Would Give You the Last Fuck off His Back NADXIELI NIETO: I met Gian sometime in the late ’90s or early 2000s. Hard to remember. Those years were a blur, and frankly, it feels like I’ve always known him. He had that way about him. I loved him immediately. He felt like an essential element. He gave absolutely no fucks and all the fucks in the world. He would give you the last fuck off his back. He would divide that fuck into three fucks and make sure there was enough to feed everyone at the fucking table. In my many lean years in indie publishing, he was always someone I could turn to. When I was hungry and needed extra cash, he would find a publishing odd job for me (proofreading or calling up bookstores for Eugene Marten’s Firework). Undoubtedly, the men of indie lit will remember the loudest; he had a way of making everyone feel special and, well, cooler. But what drew me to him was how much of myself he encouraged me to be with him. He did that for women. He encouraged us to be as big as we could, as big and weird and loud as we wanted. It sounds like a small thing, but it’s not something most men are good at, never mind editors. When he started New York Tyrant, I was running a reading series called PEEL out of a Brooklyn bar with a mutual friend, Ellen Moynihan, and we hosted his first readings. And so began the literary side of our friendship. He published my first prose poems in the third issue of Tyrant, still some of my favorites. I was young and unsure of my voice, newly in an MFA program. I came back with a new version of one of the poems edited within an inch of its life by a professor. Should we use this one? I asked—the “official” one, the MFA-sanctified one. Do you like it? he asked. No, I said, I like the first version. And so we ran that one. A small thing, sure, but that was Gian. He was both extremely opinionated and extremely interested in your opinion (fuck the establishment). He loved and championed writers, especially us weirdos, in a way that was and is exceptional. He was the best person to argue with. A true ballbreaker. As I look back over decades worth of emails, the most common feature is our shared affection for scatalogical humor. We called each other fartface, and ugly, and talked about ripping big ones in each other’s faces. He knew I hated to be called Nodge, and so he called me that relentlessly, and I loved it. A Hero of Feeling SAM LIPSYTE: I don’t really have anything artful to say about the life or death of this unique man. I’m just very sad. I met him about twenty years ago at a workshop I taught in Queens. I don’t think he came to many of the sessions, and I’m not sure he actually wrote anything, but we hit it off right away, both of us confessing to too much knowledge of certain Steely Dan lyrics. He seemed to me from another planet, a better, kinder, bolder one. It’s fun to romanticize his excesses, but over the years he told me about his struggles, and I saw pain in his eyes. I never knew him well enough to know what really drove him, but the scope of what he accomplished—as a publisher, an editor, as the person who carved out an abundant space in which so much superior writing (and conversation about writing) could flourish—isn’t really even understood yet. Sometimes he seemed like a shambling—if stylish—mess, but he saw and heard everything, at the frequencies that mattered, with phenomenal clarity. He loved language viscerally, the way you would expect somebody who devotes a life to literature would, and so few in that world do. He was a hero of feeling. He was also a very sweet and funny guy, whose glow could obliterate the general shittiness. Once, at a bar, this person, some friend of Gian, got in my face and started hassling me, insulting me, my work. Gian walked over and pulled his friend away. He came back and put an arm around my shoulder, comforted me in my jangled state. Others might have made excuses, or spoken ill of their friend, or tried to spin things. But Gian just smiled. “It’s OK, man,” he said. “He just really doesn’t like you at all.” Something about the way he said this filled me with an inexplicable golden warmth. It was Gian’s warmth, which never shrank from the truth, but wouldn’t surrender to its coldness, either. Read the full article at&nbsp;The Believer. https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Profile-John-Lee-Clark-for-Inverse-2020 Wed, 09 Dec 2020 23:04:11 +0000 James Yeh https://jamesyeh.cargo.site/Profile-John-Lee-Clark-for-Inverse-2020 Profile New Kinds of Contact: A DeafBlind Poet's Push for a Radical Language of Touch Award-winning poet and educator John Lee Clark is building a more connected world <img width="760" height="581" width_o="760" height_o="581" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f34f69fd8c71fabe3d4bbba340c8d34367e7f9c114223cd824562f9891423b1d/JLC-Inverse.png" data-mid="91623982" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/760/i/f34f69fd8c71fabe3d4bbba340c8d34367e7f9c114223cd824562f9891423b1d/JLC-Inverse.png" /> Photo courtesy of John Lee Clark By James Yeh, originally published in Inverse&nbsp;(2020) “A DeafBlind poet doesn’t like to read sitting up.” So begins John Lee Clark’s magnificent 2018 poem, “A DeafBlind Poet,” which could function as a kind of personal statement for its author. The narrator, by turns bold, mild, cranky, willfully ordinary, and wryly insouciant, taps out his list: “A Deaf Blind poet likes to read Braille magazines on the john . . . A Deaf Blind poet is a terrible student … A Deaf Blind poet has yet to be gainfully employed. A Deaf Blind poet shares all his trade secrets with his children … A Deaf Blind poet doesn’t believe in ‘contributing to society.’” Yet the poem’s author, Clark, is contributing, if not to “society,” then to the world. Most crucially, he’s doing it on his own terms. “I am a typical DeafBlind person in that I’ve never held a salaried position,” Clark, who is 41, writes in an email to Inverse from his home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Nonetheless, this unsalaried, non-gainfully employed poet’s star is quickly rising. In May, he won a National Magazine Award for his profound, horizon-expanding essay on tactile art in Poetry. Then, in October, he was named one of 20 recipients of a prestigious — and, at $50,000, not ungenerous — Disability Futures Fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which aims to “increase the visibility of disabled creative practitioners across disciplines and geography and elevate their voices individually and collectively.” Now he’s putting the finishing touches on a yet-to-be-titled collection of essays along with How to Communicate, a collection of poems including three that have appeared in the Paris Review and another in the New York Times. “His poetry is astounding,” praises Jillian Weise, an author and disability rights activist who published his poem in the New York Times last year (which she has also published as a Braille bookmark). Because most contemporary poetry loses its line breaks, stanza breaks, and even indents when digital services such as Bookshare convert books into blind-accessible formats, Clark has three options when it comes to reading poetry: Project Gutenberg (housing older works in the public domain), the Braille Library’s list (which he describes as “limited”), or to have it transcribed, which is costly.“Think about that for a minute,” says Weise. “And yet, he is one of the most exciting poets writing right now.” Consider further: Poetry and prose may not even be Clark’s most vital contribution to, let’s call it, Not Society. In addition to his work as a writer, he is a leading practitioner, teacher, and all-around herald for Protactile, a groundbreaking language of touch. Founded in Seattle in 2007 by two DB educators Jelica Nuccio and aj granda, Protactile shares elements in common with American Sign Language (ASL), with the significant innovation of what’s known as tactile back-channeling or reciprocity, through which a user indicates her response — agreement, disagreement, laughter, and so forth — and makes words by applying taps, tugs, rubs, and other motions on her correspondent’s hands and body. “If you don’t have feedback, it is harder to keep on ranting or rhapsodizing,” writes Clark, whose first language as a deaf child in an all-deaf family was ASL. “What we all agreed on was that standard, visual ASL was no good. Only 30 percent of it is decipherable by touch. We had been following ASL by placing our hands on the speaker’s hands for centuries. We should have known that what we were doing was tantamount to visual lipreading, a slippery endeavor at best, impossible for most.” So what did Protactile change? Clark gives the example of telling a story about chopping down a tree in PT. “When my hand-axe starts to chop against your arm, you are proprioceptively receiving this message,” he explains in an unpublished essay on Protactile’s history. “This is no longer a merely tactile experience. What is being utilized is dynamic, ‘depth’ perception — you are the tree, and you feel the axe on both of its sides, the back end that your hand there is following as its front edge as it collides against your arm.” Indeed, Protactile (PT) is forging new linguistic ground. In a 2019 study, Drs. Terra Edwards and Diane Brentari, whom Clark assists on their research, writes that “PT DeafBlind language-users are, for the first time in their history, communicating with one another via reciprocal, tactile channels” and “creating an emerging grammar.” Clark, who assists on two additional National Science Foundation grant projects related to the DeafBlind experience, goes further: “Subtle though the shift at first seemed to us, it is what has flooded us with language. It has given birth to poetry.” He adds, “We are turning toward increased connection in a world where so many people are being isolated and separated from one another and forgetting what human contact is all about.” Nuccio, his closest DeafBlind colleague in the field, agrees. “We need PT as a part of our empowerment in order to live our life and make decisions for ourselves,” she expresses in a 2016 video blog with granda. “Language is key to our quality of life,” the English transcript reads. “In order to achieve autonomy, we need access to language to thrive. PT is not touch signals. PT is and includes” — Nuccio raises granda’s hand and she wiggles her fingers — “philosophy, attitude, language, and techniques.” She high-fives with granda, who then taps her leg with understanding: uh-huh, uh-huh. It’s hard not to be wowed by Clark’s incredible output. He is also, among other things, the author of a book of essays (2014’s Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience), editor of two anthologies of Deaf literature (2009’s Deaf American Poetry and 2013’s Deaf Lit Extravaganza), translator, Braille instructor, architecture consultant, swimmer, homeschooling father of three, partner, Bruce Lee buff, cooking enthusiast, and “lap for our two cats.” Several times a year he teaches a popular month-long seminar, conducted entirely via an email listserv, called “Introduction to Protactile Theory.” Such versatility, Clark explains, is not uncommon among his DB peers. Because of the relative novelty of the Protactile language, “it means many of us in the movement are Leonardo da Vincis,” he writes over email, a medium at which he’s uncommonly prolific. In these emails, he is a warm and animated conversationalist, sprinkling listserv slang like “LOY” (laughing on you) and “PT cheers” just as I imagine he does in the hundreds of messages he shoots off a week to other correspondents on and off the multiple listservs he moderates for the DB community. (Indeed, during our two weeks of emailing, I was consistently amazed — and buoyed — by his voluminous, rangy replies.) “It’s not the time to be a specialist,” he writes. “You’ve got to be an artist, you’ve got to be a scientist, you’ve got to be everything.”Yet, he cautioned in that email, “it would be a mistake to say, ‘Whoa, you’re all geniuses! You’re all superheroes!’ Okay, we ARE geniuses and we ARE superheroes, insofar that ALL human beings are.” (“Can’t I pick my nose,” he complains in one poem, “without it being a miracle?”) “John is a thought leader in the DB/PT communities, and his writing reflects that,” noted Cristina Hartmann, a DeafBlind fiction writer whom Clark helped to bring into the DB fold last year. This included entry into an email listserv called DeafBlind Studies, which she describes as “a safe space and an essential link between all of us.” In recent days the listserv, which is DB-only, has fostered lively discussions on politics, Braille reading speed, and even puzzles. “So many popular hobbies and games require sight or hearing, so it’s tough to find DB-friendly diversions,” relays Hartmann. Members on other listservs, like DBMinn, provide weather reports, Covid updates, and secrets for delicious Thanksgiving dressing. As distance-learning has become the pandemic norm, text-based formats such as the listserv offer an alternative to the Zoom-mediated classroom. Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michele Friedner, a social and medical anthropologist at the University of Chicago who took Clark’s Intro to PT Theory course, notes that despite its “pared-down, bare-bones perhaps” quality, the minimalist, text-based class “led to the creation of new kinds of contact, touching, and close engagement.” New kinds of contact could be Clark’s DB MO. Still, he describes his own journey as “rather complicated.” As he became blind from Usher Syndrome as an adolescent, he felt alienated by his sighted Deaf classmates. "Books became my friends and provided me shelter.” He considers his role as a poet within a lineage of DeafBlind forebears. “Virtually . . . every significant DeafBlind historical figure was a poet,” he related in a Poetry International roundtable. Inventor Morrison Heady, educator Laura Bridgman, Richard Kinney, Robert J. Smithdas, Geraldine Lawhorn — “poets all of them, in addition to the things they were more famous or tokenized for.” This vast knowledge and understanding of the DB community, its history, and Protactile is recognized by Hartmann. “He has spent years collecting writing from DB people throughout history, all over the world, for an anthology,” she enthused in an email. “Hell, I suspect he has the biggest private collection of DB writing in the world.” Jillian Weise speaks admiringly of his aesthetics and his “audacity as a disabled poet who is doing really futuristic work.” One such example is the slateku, a form he invented and is based on the Braille slate. Another series, she told me, are “erasures that are interventions on extremely ableist, audist poems from the past. I asked him once, ‘Now John, why are you doing these erasures from the 19th century? Because, like, no one's reading these people.’ And that is when he told me, ‘Jillian, how would I have access to the 20th century? I am in the 19th century, because it is what I have access to.’ Conceptually, the fact that he's doing erasures from the 19th century, at the same time as he as an artist himself is erased from reading the 20th century, just points to the problem.” Most striking among these erasures is “The Rebuttal,” which was drawn from Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s 1827 poem “On Seeing the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl, Sitting for Her Portrait.” In a 2019 video, Clark performs a Protactile version of the poem. Sitting with Nuccio and another PT language-user, Heather Holmes, he heart-pumps and tug-presses, lifting their quaking hands above their heads — the three grinning in a kind of hard-won, ecstatic triumph — as the English interpreter concludes: “Philosophy fails to / sway this future child.” You could be forgiven for having detected a thread of protest running through Clark’s works. But “rejection is a better word for me than protest,” he explains. “Often protest ends up reinforcing the legitimacy of what is protested. Banging on the closed door and shouting, “You have to let us in!” — well, if you manage to ram the door down and you gain access, one thing you are doing is saying that the room behind the closed door is so important. "You may replace people who were in that room, but you end up sitting behind their desks. Rejection is different. Rejection is, ‘Forget about that room.’ We go off somewhere else and build something new.” Read the original article in&nbsp;Inverse.