Jen Sookfong Lee

I got this as an audiobook, and I would’ve found it less annoying in print as a Kindle book. I’m interested in the story of the author when she’s talking about her childhood and how her father died of cancer. Unfortunately, she keeps breaking up the narrative with insights and comparisons to the book Anne of the Green Gables. In fact, I learned from this book that there’s a whole series of Anne books. If this was a print book, I would’ve skipped past all the stuff about Anne of the Green Gables because I haven’t read the book and the book doesn’t sound like it would interest me at all. She also uses Bob Ross as part of pop culture and princess Diana, but none of these things are contemporary all of the things that she she is so far I would not consider them pop culture because they’re nostalgia culture. I can’t relate to the things that she idolizes because most people our age would idolize perhaps someone on a TV show that they could see every week and want to be like them. What she’s talking about is she uses celebrity culture for past celebrities that are no longer current celebrities so they’re now historical celebrities as a means of escapism but you could do that with anything you could do it with fiction it doesn’t have to be one thing or another there’s many things that people can escape into. I’m not really liking the book that much. Her mother sounds like a complete monster. I hope her mother is actually dead because her mother would never want to know that she wrote a book like this. I don’t even know if I’m gonna finish the book at this point because it’s so discouraging. I ran a little bit further, but I was really turned off by her bragging about her long list of accomplishments which she considers to be marvelous, considering the lack of support her mother gave her in her opinion. It doesn’t help that she’s a big supporter of Meghan Markle.… (mere)

Living in a world of his own making and escaping from a house in which he never belonged are his two successes. (p. 14-5)

Leaving was one of two choices. He could stay, and work in the curio shop for the rest of his life. He would marry a girl he barely knew or barely tolerated, and live in this house with his parents, eating the same food, staring at them staring at him. If he left, non one would notice him. He would be invisible, moving around this city or another one, one body among many - life unseen, life unplanned. If he left, he could be anonymous for a time, observing and quiet. And then he could create a new Danny, one who took the world's most famous photographs, one who never thought of his parents at all. (p. 95)

… (mere)

Through a series of essays with a loose theme of pop culture, Sookfong Lee talks about growing up in Vancouver, Canada as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. When she was 12 and her father died after a lengthy battle with cancer, she found comfort in watching Bob Ross with his soothing ASMR voice; when her mother disappeared into deep depression, she identified with the orphan [Anne of Green Gables]. Princess Diana helped her navigate the expectations of having to be the "good girl" that is expected of Chinese girls in Canada, and Awkwafina showed her that she could be herself and break out from stereotypes. The most interesting chapter for me was "The Boys on Film" and her early crushes on white boys in movies, such as John Cusack in Say Anything, and then growing up to date too many white guys who treated her as their fetish. I don't think of myself as someone who cares about pop culture (now as an adult), but she uses it in an interesting way to explain how she figured out how to fit into her surroundings and the overriding whiteness everywhere around her.

The recurring struggles she deals with are absent parents (father through illness and death; mother through mental illness), racism (lots of racism), fitting in and not fitting in, divorce, single motherhood, and life as a struggling writer. This memoir is raw, sometimes angry, and intimate.… (mere)