From Portland, Maine’s Holiday Inn: Please Reuse The Towels. . .Or I’ll Shred You With My Talons!

Yes, I got back to New York super early Saturday, but I’ve been too overwhelmed by everything until now to recount my travels.  It also didn’t help that the Greyhound I was taking from Cambridge, Mass., to New York arrived for boarding an hour late (11:30 pm instead of 10:30 pm), meaning we’d get back into Da City at 3 am instead of 2 am.  And it really didn’t help that the two women sitting in back of me chatted away on their phones like their minutes wouldn’t carry over.  At one point I had managed to fall asleep but then incredibly one of the women reached over and shook me.  “Do you know where we are?” she asked.  “I was sleeping!” I snapped.  “How was I supposed to know you were sleeping?” she countered.  At that point it was 2 am and everybody on the bus was asleep apart from those two women.  Argh!

Minneapolis

They have bunny rabbits running wild downtown!

This city was so clean it made me wanna puke. But I loved the light rail that runs from downtown to Mall of the Americas!  I totally had to go to that mall, you know, just ’cause I’ve never been there.  I ate 1/3 pound of chocolate in about 30 seconds, thoroughly disgusting myself.  Then the guy at the counter suggested I get a chocolate-covered Twinkie.  “You mean a Chocodile?” I asked him.  “What’s a Chocodile?” he said.  Nearly exploding with shocked disbelief, I commanded him in a menacing and even voice to look it up on Wikipedia.

Readings are a piece of cake, nyuk nyuk nyuk!

Yeah, Bryan Thao Worra totally got this cake decorated with the covers of his On the Other Side of the Eye poetry collection, my This Is a Bust and the No Regrets chapbook from the beautiful and talented Saymoukda “mo0ks” Vongsay.  The reading was totally cool, at the Loft Literary Center.  The most amazing thing about Minneapolis: I never met another Chinese/Taiwanese American.  Dude, the Asian community is strong in Lao and Hmong representation!  Yes! Bryan and mo0ks, thank you so much for showing me that good ol’ Midwestern hospitality!

Exeter, N.H.

 Isn’t that Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws?

I was kinda bummed that only one person in this beautiful town showed up for the reading.  I didn’t know who he was at first, but the fact that he showed up late and popped open a soda noisily in the middle should have clued me in.  It’s Brian LaRaia!  From college, man!  Jesus, I got details on this brutha!  I’ll never starve so long as I can blackmail him, ha ha ha!  We went to a Mexican place (in New Hampshire?) that was probably pretty awesome if you were drunk off your ass.  Thank you so much for having me, Water Street Bookstore and Sarah Onufer!

Portland, Maine

Boo-yah!

I had good press going in and I also had the backing of The Man Who Loves Books, Chris Bowe.

Chris Bowe of Longfellow Books, one of the most beautiful men in the world.

People there were very cool and I loved reading for them.  Check out this blog entry on the reading that includes me in my Sonics shirt!  Portland has an awesome museum of art and I loved how so many people, both men and women, had tatts. This is a tough fucking town with heart, I said to myself. I was sad to leave, but I’m definitely coming back.  Thank you so much Longfellow Books, Chris and Phyllis!

Cambridge, Mass.

Damn, how come I didn’t take no pictures?  Luckily, this dude’s blog entry tells it all!  I love the low-light picture of me reading (well, shoot, what picture of me don’t I love?).  It looks like a back-of-the-album photo from like a Mott the Hoople record or something.  I was psyched that my pals David Yoo and Alex Luu showed up.  Thank you so much for having me at East Meets West: Eugene Shih, Van Lee and Ash Hsie!

I had gotten into Cambridge from Portland at 5 pm.  The reading was at 8 pm.  I got to the bus station at 10 pm.

You know what the hell happened next.  Grrrr….

Yeah, that’ll work!

I’m reading in Minneapolis!  The land of Husker Du and the Replacements!  Soul Asylum! And the seldom-heralded Man-Sized Action!

I’m also going to Exeter, N.H., which is probably best known for the Phillips Exeter Academy and for this infamous UFO account.

After that, it’s Portland, Maine, and then Boston.

Although I’ve been to Boston many times, these are my first visits to the states of Minnesota, New Hampshire and Maine!  So show up, or be abducted by a UFO!

Monday July 14, 2008, 7:00 PM

The Loft Literary Center
Suite 200, Open Book, 1011 Washington Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55415
612-215-2575
With Bryan Thao Worra and Saymoukda Vongsay.

Wednesday July 16, 2008, 7:00 PM

Water Street Bookstore
125 Water Street
Exeter, NH 03833
603-778-9731

Thursday July 17, 2008, 7:00 PM

Longfellow Books
One Monument Way
Broadway & 117th Street
Portland, Maine
207-772-4045

Friday July 18, 2008, 8:00 PM

East Meets West Bookstore
934 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, Mass.

Damn, did I milk this doorway for photos, or what?

Yo! Three things to announce.

1) “Super Hero Blues,” a short film by the amazing Greg Pak that I did a voice character for, has won a PBS award! It’s airing tomorrow (June 7) on TV or watch it here. Featured: amazingly transcendent actor Brian Nishii.

2) Looking for a writing class this summer in New York City? I highly suggest you enroll with me in what will surely be the class that ends all classes at the Asian American Writers Workshop and sets you on your way to being an independent and confident writer:

Saturdays, June 21-28, July 12 & 26, Aug 2-9, 12 - 2pm (6 sessions)
Summer Fiction Workshop with Ed Lin

It’s easy to bat around issues about character, plot, point of view, description, dialogue, setting, pacing, voice and theme (whew!) in terms of writing. But Ed Lin promises to spend as little time as possible talking about those concepts. The author of Waylaid (Kaya, 2002) and This Is a Bust (Kaya, 2007) supports the idea that writing is akin to playing a musical instrument that no one else has ever seen or heard before and that the authors are generally right, even if they aren’t sure of what they are doing. Lin believes the best thing that can come out of a class is a group of colleagues who can continue reading each others’ work outside the class environment. If you don’t love and respect writing or are focused only on getting published, Lin doesn’t want you in his goddamned class. Ed Lin is the author of the novels Waylaid (Kaya Press, 2002) and This Is a Bust (Kaya, 2007).

@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Cost is $175/$150 for members

3) Also, I am now set to read in both Minneapolis and Exeter, N.H., in July! I can’t think of two cities closer to each other!

Monday July 14, 2008, 7:00 PM

The Loft Literary Center
Suite 200, Open Book, 1011 Washington Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55415
612-215-2575

Wednesday July 16, 2008, 7:00 PM

Water Street Bookstore
125 Water Street
Exeter, NH 03833
603-778-9731

And how was your Saturday night? (photo by author)

Laugh if you want. If you’re a snorin’ mofo like me, this could soon be you.

I spent Saturday night not in the arms of my lovely wife but in room 909 (anybody else know that Beatles song ‘One After 909′ by any chance?) of the sleep lab of the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary.

My snoring has been out of control. So I’ve been told. I saw an otolaryngologist a few weeks ago and he said that tissue just sags as one ages, causing drooping breasts, wrinkles and snoring.

“Isn’t there anything good about getting older?” I asked him.

“Well, you gain wisdom,” he said.

“But then you go senile and then you die.”

He had been pretty humorless up until that point, but he found that funny.

Ahead of my appointment at the sleep lab, my wife had found this video on the Internet. It’s a sleep lab demo from Rachael Ray’s show.

Look at all the crap on me and look at how relatively unburdened Mr. Colby “Smiley” Donaldson is. He probably would have shit a brick if he knew he had to put on what I had on.

Colby Donaldson, for this misrepresentation of what being monitored in a sleep lab is like, I will kick your ass any day of the week! You snore because of your mis-healed broken nose. Well I can fix that, handsome!

But enough of my hate-mongering.

In actuality, I am amazed that I was able to sleep. Two devices that felt and looked like plastic cocktail forks were shoved up my nose. I also had six electrodes connected to my head with putty that unfortunately hardened into light lumps of concrete — they hurt like hell when the lab technician pulled them out. Christ, I even had a device attached to my index finger that read the oxygen level in my blood via a light-emitting diode.

Actually, that’s kinda cool. But it felt like a mild pinch all night.

Oh and by the way, testing ended at 5:30 AM and they woke me up.

I staggered home, drank a cup of coffee and then slept four more hours.

Have an awesome Memorial Day Weekend, everybody!

Yeah, I took lotsa pics in this doorway. . .

Check out my Shuffled! feature over on boston progress radio. I talk a leel ’bout six songs picked randomly from my vast music archive.

Artists covered include: Billy Bragg, Asobi Seksu, Taiyo Na, Bad Brains, Asian Dub Foundation and Yellow Rage. I speak of all of them in a rather irreverent tone meant to amuse more than inform.

I will actually be in Boston in July to do a reading, too, man!

I’d figured this would happen sooner or later.

During the Q&A at the Asia Society reading, I was called out by an elder stateswoman of Chinatown for being merely “an observer” not only of the place, but the time (1976).

Sure, I hadn’t grown up in Chinatown. Sure, I don’t understand Cantonese and my Mandarin sucks. But apart from that, she wanted to know when my parents and grandfather came over! Shit, my whole family was under attack for not having street cred!

So far, I had shown the manuscript people who had grown up in Chinatown during that time and got their OKs. Not that I was looking for approval. This Is a Bust is a novel — not a history of Chinatown and far from a sober, objective account.

I completely understand where this elder stateswoman was coming from. “You didn’t live through it, you didn’t experience it, so you can’t understand it.” Moreover, “You have no right to tell it!”

Ah, but if we live with the conceit that no one else can understand our experiences, our culture, our struggles, then we put up these protectionist walls and in turn we stop trying to understand other people. That attitude leads to wonderful things such as homophobia, segregation by sex, ethnicity and race, colonization and wars.

My aim as an artist is to forge understanding. I believe people can find themselves in the stories of other people, no matter how radically different the observer and subject seem to be.

I try to compromise as little as possible and I’ve rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in the past. I remember one woman standing up, asking me why I tried so hard to offend people with my book Waylaid. I don’t remember exactly what I said (something like, “the purpose of an artist isn’t to please”) but I do remember thinking, “Gee, I didn’t try that hard. . .”

In any case, the audience at Asia Society was great, and Helen Koh, Associate Director of Cultural Programs, rocked like an angel. John Woo, acting director of Asian Cinevision, was his wonderful self. Thank you so much for having me!

Me very funny.

Everyone in the New York City area has had many chances to see me read from This Is a Bust free of charge.

But if you want to see me read at the Asia Society on May 2nd, you’ll have to fork over at least $10.

The reading will be followed by what will likely be an extremely lively Q&A session.

Friday May 2, 2008, 7:00 PM

Asia Society
Friday Literary Salon
Asia Society and Museum
Auditorium
725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)
New York City
Cost: $10 members; $12 nonmembers; $10 students and seniors
212-517-ASIA

This campus looked like crap when I was here. Now it’s all clean!

I had been by before to walk through campus, hit up Koronet for a jumbo slice and some bad service attitude, but Tuesday was my first day back in an undergrad class in 17 years.

I got things going right by stopping at Tom’s Restaurant for a Broadway Special, an off-the-menu shake they make with coffee ice cream, some mint (I think) and other stuff. You order one of those and they know right away you’re an old-timer, pre-Seinfeld, maybe even pre-Suzanne Vega!

I walked into the class and introduced myself to Gary Okihiro. “Oh,” he said slowly, looking at my face like it was melting, “You’re here today?”

“Gary, don’t do this to me, man!” I thought. Turns out he had been sick, recovering from a cold, was a little disoriented.

The class seemed a little sleepy off the bat, so I hit ‘em with a selection of Waylaid that was chock full of F-bombs. That loosened them up. Then it was a few chapters of This Is a Bust, followed by a fun and fancy-free Q&A.

I mentioned how this asshole professor at Barnard claimed that I was making mistakes in my papers that a “native English speaker” wouldn’t have made. That was 20 years ago, but I heard from a number of students that similar incidents happened to them or people they knew just last year or this year.

I was psyched that there were three engineering majors there, but no Taiwanese or Taiwanese Americans. Why? “Are you Taiwanese but you buy into Chinese propaganda that you’re really Chinese?” The only responses were snorts.

It was strange being back as a lecturer to a school where I was such a lousy student (attitude-wise, not grade-wise). While I enjoyed talking with the eager participants in the class, I think I related best to the grumpy dude off to the side who slouched in his chair.

I’m coming back to Columbia, this time on the Barnard side, on April 30 for this thing.

Hey, this is kinda cool. Check out this short film, “Dry Clean Only,” done by my pal J.P. Chan. The dude behind the counter, played by the wonderful Aaron Yoo (who’s been in “21″ and “Disturbia”) is reading Waylaid in the beginning! How cool is that? It’s very cool. The dude in bloody clothes is played by the endlessly fascinating Debargo Sanyal.

The film was a part of the PBS Independent Lens Online Shorts Festival.

No, not here, the original site by Wall Street and ground zero. The one uptown.

Next week, on Tuesday, April 8, I’ll be heading back to my alma mater, Columbia University, to talk to Gary Okihiro’s class, which is called something like “Introduction to Asian American Studies.” Class is a little over an hour long, so I’ll just read for like 40 minutes or so and take questions from the students.

Tell ya something, when I was there (class of ‘91, mofo), a lot of the Asian clubs such as Asian Students Union and Chinese Students Club were totally run by conservative right-wing, asshole pre-med and pre-law jerks. I wonder if that’s still the case.

But two things tell me that Columbia’s way less whack now than when I was there: 1) There’s an Asian American studies major; 2) There’s a Taiwanese student group. Bring on the dou jiang and sao bing yo tiao!