A Review of Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

Pamela: A Novel is Pamela Lu’s take on Asian American identity in the age of “poststructural” uncertainties; the book possesses an engaging darkly comic narrative voice. Indeed, she clearly pokes fun at lofty theoretical discourse that is the mainstay of academia (especially in the humanities and social sciences), while still investigating the problematic ways in which late-capitalist subjects attempt to find meaning in an increasingly chaotic landscape. Scholars and academics will really appreciate this book simply because they are one of its intended audiences, as she employs promiscuous terms such as diaspora and displacement as a way to interrogate various characters’ obsession with high theory as it clashes with everyday life and pop culture. Because my current work is so wound up in critical studies engaging the aftermath of 9/11, I wondered about how to approach the clearly solipsistic characters and their often randomly apolitical musings about love and life. All characters are only notated through initials (for instance, the narrator’s friends are called, C, L, R, etc) , but their individual identities become difficult to parse out because Lu employ’s a fierce stream of consciousness technique that never allows to reader to fall into a lengthy narrative trajectory. A characteristic passage appears here: “So we found it natural, if not imperative, to be assaulted and overwhelmed by memories which were not our own but which we nevertheless carried as though they had actually happened to us. In this sense, the history of our lives was always the history of someone else. We were forever displacing ourselves in the chain of events without knowing who exactly was doing the displacing, and our lifetime goal, if we desired success in the conventional sense, consisted not in getting to know ourselves, but in getting to know ourselves less” (33). While this statement seems interesting, what Lu does as a manner of course throughout the novel is to leave such statements primarily abstract. She does not provide that which perhaps the conventional reader might want, which is an example by which she can investigate this claim on memory, history, and displacement. As such, I don’t have many points at which I can say, such and such happened; I only have fragments and impressions (eg of the section set in Orange County at the “Anti-Mall,” a location I have eaten at myself!) and these tiny fragments and impressions are perhaps what Lu intends.

Kimiko Hahn's _The Artist's Daughter_

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

For my independent study on the meaning of history, spaces, and movements for Korean adoptees, I have been using two forms. Kimiko Hahn's experimental zuihitsu's and persona poems. The Artist's Daughter is fascinating for this project because Hahn really explores the issues surrounding her mother's death and her own memory through personae that remind me of Ai's persona pieces in Vice. The stand-out piece in Hahn's book is her huge zuihitsu, "Exhume," which begins with the epigraph: "I should like to wallow in corpses." It's interesting how she brings in other voices within the piece. She tries to get inside the minds of people who abuse corpses, and engage in necrophilia and exhumation as ways to feel and live again using texts, emails, and discussions that analyze her own interest in these subjects within the piece. In fact, life, memory, exhumation, and necrophilia are recurring themes throughout the book making it a rather dark collection of poetry. While it's not my favorite of Hahn's, she is using writing and imagination in interesting ways, and I found the book quite good overall. One of the more uplifting poems is called "In Childhood" and it is the first poem in the book. It sets the tone:

In Childhood

things don't die or remain damaged
but return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.
Later this vision is not True:
the grandmother remains dead
not hibernating in a wolf's belly.
Or the blue parakeet does not return
from the little grave in the fern garden
though one may wake in the morning
thinking mother's call is the bird.
Or maybe the bird is with the grandmother
inside light. Or grandmother was the bird
and is now the dog
gnawing on the chair leg.
Where do the gone things go
when the child is old enough
to walk herself to school,
her playmates already
pumping so high the swing hiccups?