meikuree

title = bad Mandarin pun, a play on 'fool's spring' and 愚蠢 (yu2 chun3, 'foolish/stupid') + 春 (chun1, 'spring'). see the actual seasons of Britain:



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1000xRESIST is another one in the line of canons that have made me feel like I need a drink and a depressing book about grief to process it immediately after finishing it. it actually has an uplifting ending by a few metrics and it's also extremely funny, but it still puts the audience through the wringer and I respect it for that.

quick summary: it's a narrative game about a far-future sisterhood of clones cloned from a HK Chinese-Canadian teenager called Iris Kwan, but I'd alternatively call it a commentary concerned with the violence of parent-child relationships/abuse/memory/heritage/familial legacies. alternative alternative summary: this game is filled to the brim with women with mother issues, and clonecest that's both subtextual and not. and multiple matricides, because why not? party emoji. 

I'm going to put my cards on the table and say that I'm usually thoroughly lukewarm about the majority of Chinese(-North American) diaspora stories, for reasons I'll sum up at the end so I don't start this on a hypercritical note. this game, though, has an interesting and un-solipsistic premise and while I don't think its treatments of certain topics resonated (understandable! it's a me problem), in that they hewed close to familiar narrative grooves in that genre, it sticks the landing and I was taken with the clone society by the end.

fun fact: this isn't the first show/media/canon I've watched about a sisterhood of clones. Orphan Black was another one, and it was similarly concerned with genetic/personal autonomy, responsibility, and ethics.

I don't have the brainspace to write any meaty commentary, unfortunately so I'm just going to note some linguistic (foot)notes on the Cantonese lines and hilarious moments that stuck out when I watched Welonz's playthrough on Youtube (minor spoilers):

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and a few reasons I don't gel (broadly) with the genre of Chinese diaspora stories:

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very 'overdue' reading round-up of interesting articles/books/marginalia I've come across. in the spirit of "good is better than perfect":

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alternative title: i've forgotten how to write book reviews

note: not a spoiler-free review. also, can someone teach me how to create dreamwidth icons that won't get massively lossy in resolution after posting? I wish I could create a crisper jenny holzer slogan icon, but I'll take what I can get.

(  language (re)acquisition in 3... 2... 1... )

didn't read much, but here's what I've been up to!

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(a simple list for now due to time constraints, although I do want to review some of these sometime and add thoughts. feel free to reply if you've heard of any of these or want to chat about them!)

short stories

• Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead by Carmen Maria Machado
• Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong

and a bunch of stories I discovered from chocochipbiscuit's rec list -- thank you for the good fiction!

• Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills
• Unname Me at the Altar by Ashaye Brown
• Skin by Isha Karki
• The Storyteller by Rhea Roy

books/novels

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
• Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews
• The Old Capital by Kawabata Yasunari
• Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto

journal articles and essays

• The Class Origins of Zionist Ideology by Stephen Halbrook (1972), published in Journal of Palestine Studies
• This Concerns Everyone by James Butler (on the UK care crisis)
• The Luddites of Hollywood by Gavin Mueller (on the WGA strikes)
• brief Brandon Taylor and C Pam Zhang interview in The Guardian
• the virtues of the boring draft from brandon taylor's substack, a craft essay where he discusses balancing disclosure and mystery and the principle of trying to bore your readers
• This article on earthquake adaptation in Tokyo, which I found interesting largely for how normal(ised) life with earthquakes is there and all the ways people adapt to the possibility of disaster
• Humbert Humbert and the Kids These Days: On Teaching Lolita in a High School Classroom by Benjamin Seigle (2017): read this months ago, actually, courtesy of firstroad; adding it anyway because it was a thought-provoking gem

immediate want to read list:

• Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu
• Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
• Severance by Ling Ma
• Affinity by Sarah Waters