Being a Sunday after a lot of dizzying changes--drastic ones that I've been unable to wrap both head and arms around--it wasn't far from my thoughts to spend the weekend to decompress with a lot of old hats like the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Cream and other rockers of by-gone eras for company.
To compliment the time travel, been meaning to get my hands on and finally get started on my Maxine Hong-Kingston book, "Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book," a 1960's take on trippy San Fransisco based Chinese-American who's own life bears ties with the Monkey King of Chinese ancient Buddhist fables in "Journey to the West."
Prixie's influence at the English Department, and her extended loan of Hong-Kingston's "Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts," a collection of short talk-stories (whose return I had continuously deferred having read and re-read the darned book) are to blame.
Her writing was a sympathetic and unapologetic take on the ABC (American Born Chinese) life.
Even before multi-cultural literature became hot stuff, she was already one of the few women writers who took a stab at the largely syncretic and very confusing life of nth-generation Chinese youth on paper. Charlson and Danton had been right to recommend it in early 2005--but I had no idea how right they were then.
A visit to a second-hand bookstore after a heart-to-heart father-daughter dinner revealed gems hiding among the troves written by fiercely honest female writers.
"Wilderness Tips: Stories" by Margaret Atwood and "Raisin in the Sun" a play by Lorraine Hansberry were both steals at under a hundred pesos, peaking through the tons of pulp-fiction paperbacks, gorgeous dream-like eureka moments enough to make a book-lover giddy.
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