fussy rice seeds’s blog

Hotdog

i get frustrated by emails and people, and then i look at this. found on cuteoverload.com, a site i visit every night and should be the last site you see before shutting your laptop. 

W32nd_final3

sunday night, we went to the san francisco international asian american film festival (say that three times fast!) and saw a screening of michael kang's second film "west 32nd," a korean american gangster film. i've always wanted to go to the festival, and i'd met michael at the macdowell colony a few years back. 

wednesday afternoon, we were at the oakland airport waiting for our flight to board. because of southwest's new boarding policies (which i'm still waiting to pass judgement on) and cushy new waiting area design, i sat at one of their convenient laptop stations, where frenzied business travelers can plug in before boarding the plane. and because i refuse to pay for airport internet, i opened up word to my chapter and began writing. and i didn't stop. this kind of writing surge happens for me like once every two years. so i wrote on the plane to las vegas, during its layover, and from vegas to pittsburgh, when i was forced to stop because of limited battery power. i'm still working on the chapter here in ohio, and i'm hoping i'm not cursing the writing surge by blogging about it, but i'm just so happy it's happening. i feel like my writing brain has been on hold since i started the new job and once grades were turned in, it was set free. 

last night, while trying to drive through san francisco to get afghani food, we got stuck inside the city's critical mass. i'd heard about critical mass before, where on every last friday of the month, bicyclists in cities all over the globe take back the streets en masse, riding in joyous circles. there is no unified goal to any of this, though i'm sure if you stopped one of the cyclists, they could give you plenty they're protesting: unfriendly bike lanes, the price of gas, pollution, etc. all issues i understand and believe in as well. but you see, the thing with critical mass is that the poor cars stuck in this protest frenzy are screwed. terribly. and on the corner of broadway and third last night, we were one of those poor cars. it took us over an hour to get off one city block. and i was truly scared for those cars that dared to cross the intersection, to even attempt to weave through the bicycle flow, because they were inevitably swarmed over by dozens of cyclists who pounded and harassed their vehicles. i've never felt more yuppie-ish in my life. seething at these happy cyclists for keeping us from making our dinner reservation. they were in costumes no less, being halloween weekend, my favorite was a guy in a gray hoodie and strapped on matching shark fin. 

So I feel terrible for this actress in Vietnam, whose career has been ruined by the leaking of a sex tape. It's kind of infuriating that while Paris Hilton will still be celebrated and idolized in Vietnam, this poor girl, the local, will be ruined. 

on sunday, i participated in a vietnamese american authors' panel with lan tran, viet nguyen and quang x. pham. we each read for ten minutes and then answered questions from the audience. i thought this was going to go quickly, since the audience was pretty small. but the discussion soon turned to the responsibility of vietnamese american authors to the community, why we didn't read regularly in little saigon, and why we didn't do more to convince readers to pay attention to vietnamese voices from the war. well. i'm not sure anyone on the panel was prepared to offer an articulate, speedy solution to this oh so familiar generation conflict. lan tran made the insightful comment that she goes to read wherever she is invited, little saigon included. quang pham talked about the business side of publishing and how difficult it is for an english-language vietnamese book to do well in the community, since older vietnamese americans prefer to read in vietnamese. viet discussed the academic viewpoint of how most students know precious little about history (it's true!) including the vietnam war, and how teachers do everything they can to inspire deeper engagement of these events. but ultimately, it is up to the readers to determine what and who they will read. we can write the literature, but we can't make anyone read it if they don't want to. 

my sat oped ran in usa today over the weekend. but it's not a clean link, you can see reader comments right below it, which i always dislike, because there's bound to be someone who misreads your article or disagrees with you. but then you click on the reader's name and realize he/she attacks every other story in the paper, which makes you wonder how much free time this reader has on the internets.