Eric Lau

Ever since my seventh grade history teacher showed me Lin-Manuel Miranda performing Alexander Hamilton at the White House Poetry Jam, I’ve wanted to be in the room where it happens. Hamilton was my introduction to rap music. Daveed Digg’s apperance in the original cast led me to explore his experimental work in clipping. Lin’s nods to Biggie and Mobb Deep gave me starting points for rap from the 1990s. While I did play trumpet and guitar in middle school, I had not deeply listened to or appreciated music before Hamilton. The show itself was wonderful. I was initially uncertain. Having listened to the original cast recording countless times in the past decade, I had certain expectations about the annunciations and voices. I was able to enjoy the show after letting go of those expectations. I appreciated the more conversational, awkward and whimsical moments that were not particularly conveyed in the original recording. I loved how versatile the rotating floor was. I cried through much of the second half.

A funny, self-aware musical about living forever. Colorful, abundant, physically impressive.

I felt that Zevin touched on a couple of political topics (gun violence, LGBTQ rights) but did not explore them in much depth. I think the writing itself was fine, but explaining things like what an NPC is felt pedantic. Perhaps gamers (or people who are at least somewhat familiar with gaming culture) are not the target audience. In what seems like a story meant to be about how people change over time, Sam and Sadie did not grow very much as individuals. They learn to forgive each other (over and over again). But what else? Maybe I am missing something.

Nguyen explores many facets of storytelling, perspective and duality in his novel. The story is told first (and mostly) through the narrator’s written confessions, then through first and third person reprecussions of how the confessions were written to omit certain details or forgotten memories. How should one narrate their own life, or live at all, when they have sympathies to so many thoughts or people? What does it mean to live and breathe in the institutions one wants to revolutionize, to complete a mission at the expense of your kin? Is all at expense for the revolution? If so, what is left afterwards? The novel expanded my limited understanding of the war from a non-military, non-American perpsective. Yes, I had been familiar with at least some of the atrocities the United States military committed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Nguyen told a horrifying story of the war and its aftermath in an intimate and critical manner that implicated not just American soldiers but American media, the French, the West more generally as well as the Vietnamese people themselves. The narrator is (or narrators are) left in an uncertain state by the end of the novel, quite literally drifting through the water and open to a new beginning. I am quite excited to read the sequel.

Cheng presents a thingness—personness spectrum in Asian American women through legal, satorial (i.e., fashion or style), culinary and technological lenses. The vision of the “yellow woman” stirs a particular image in the mind, often one ornamented in one way or another. The book is guided by analyses of various media including historical photos, movies, a short story and museum exhibit. While I was able to follow the movie-centered (Anna May Wong and Piccadilly, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina) and short story (Bottles of Beaujolais) analyses, I was not familiar with any of the original media discussed and felt I lacked the proper frame to think more critically about the ideas Cheng offered in those parts. The analyses of the historical photos and museum exhibits were easier for me to think through with the photo artifacts themselves helpfully provided inline with the text. While there were photos and screenshots of certain scenes discussed from the movies, I felt this insufficient to fully grasp the totality of the film.

Said provides a critical lens into Orientalism by analyzing centuries of texts and characters. I struggled to retain all of the detail, but I did grasp the broad strokes of how Said characterizes the development of Orientalist ideas, from “objective” European observer-scholars journeying through the Middle East to Anglo-French colonizers to the “liberal” American foreign affairs apparatus. It’s disturbing how malleable we (not just the West, but the East as well) have been to centuries-old racist and essentializing narratives — that the “Orientals” are stuck in the past and need their own history written for them, that Islam is an all-controlling deviant religion, that the exotic East ought to be dictated by the superior West. The passages relating to Marx’s defense of Indian colonization is a prime example of how pervasive and mainstream Orientalist thought had became in the West. I do feel the sense that I had already encountered many of the overarching themes of the book in academic settings or other modern pieces of cultural critique, a testament to the long-lasting and wide-ranging influence Said has had on discourse around Orientalism.

Milian expands upon the common linguistic and gender discourse on LatinX. She talks of “the X” as it relates to unknowability, transition and fluidity beyond gender into themes around climate and politics.

Klein and Thompson remind us that supposedly progressive government bureaucracy can become burdensome despite good intentions. Certainly, the emphasis on housing affordability is timely.

In the midst of the many acute disasters we give our attention to, we often forget about the chronic, persisting tragedies that play out over decades or centuries. Green puts tuberculosis back in focus by telling the history of the disease alongside the story of Henry Reider. The book serves as an advocate to Western audiences for funding tuberculosis treatment, especially as the United States cut USAID programs for the disease around the time the book was released.

The “Asian Diaspora” framing is compelling, but I do not completely resonate with it as someone who does not have particular attachments to the motherland with respect to language, travel or culture. I do value the narrative on how Mabute-Louie grew up in a religious community and “ethnoburb.”

I enjoyed the fluidity of Didion’s writing.

In relation to Black beauty standards that I read about in The Message, hooks discusses the “Black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s that rejected Eurocentric beauty standards. Yet, because of robust Western programming and lasting white prejudice against “looking Black,” only those who looked white could climb the American social ladder. Black Americans who chose to straighten their hair or wear wigs said they did so out of personal preference, rather than an attempt to appeal to white America. The dissolution of radical movements during the 1960s was not limited to Black beauty. hooks contends that other movements, particularly ones based on economic and racial communalism, fell apart as young radicals realized the difficulty of living communally in a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. hooks views race through many intersections: that Black liberation is undermined by outdated patriarchal modes of thought where Black men will silence Black women to align closer with white men, that middle class Black Americans will perpetuate caustic stereotypes and pimp Black culture to appeal to white American taste.

hooks offers a useful definition of love in romantic, familial, parental and communal contexts. I carry the definition — the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth — with me. The spiritual essense eludes me. But I agree with the active nature, that love is not a situation to fall into but a process to continue. In the familial context, hooks argues that rearing a child should not just be the responsibility of a mother and father, but of an entire community of adults who can provide a breath of advice and perspectives.

I appreciated the connective tissue that linked the essays on Africa and Palestine. Following the end of slavery in the United States, some white and African Americans began the back-to-Africa movement on the basis that white and African Americans could not coexist. Many African Americans did migrate, particularly to Liberia, despite no clear history of where in Africa they originated. As with many settlement projects, African Americans settling in Liberia was done at the expense of the native African population — African Americans necessarily took land, brought Christianity, and spread a related but distinct culture. African Americans also brought a different beauty standard to Africa (through settlement and later global media) of straight hair and lighter skin. Coates contends with this when he ponders beauty in his visit to Senegal. Beauty aside, the African American settlement project has narrative similarities to Zionism. Jews fled Europe after the Second World War to establish the new state of Israel, on Palestinian land. The United States is implicated in rejecting both African Americans (by promoting the black-to-Africa movement and centuries of systemic racism) and Jews (by rejecting Jewish refugees after the Holocaust).

I’ve read several chapters for different university courses, but have yet to read it in full. The chapters I have read give guidance on how to work with data in ways that surface humanity, challenge power and retain context.

I thought the scene of Juan teaching Chiron to swim was beautiful — the colors, the camera positioning, the act itself.

I think it was fine. The musical numbers were less memorable than the ones from the first part.

I dresssed as Elphaba (yes, with green face paint) on Halloween.

As a whole, I did not immediately love Sinners after seeing it. Michael B. Jordan’s dual role, the musical elements and historical worldbuilding were impressive. I also enjoyed learning about the Asian American presence in the early 20th century South. The vampire plot caught me off guard, and parts of the second half felt rushed. I can still appreciate the larger themes of the movie, some of which I admittedly did not fully understand until consuming media about the film such as F.D Signifier’s video on the movie and Black art.

A raw film from Baker and Tsou about Ming, an undocumented Chinese immigrant working as a deliveryman in New York City during the early 2000s. I don’t know much about my father. Certainly Ming’s story is not my father’s. But I felt a certain lineage and bond to it all as the child of Chinese immigrants who built a life through struggle at a Chinese restaurant in New York City. The early childhood sensations all flooded back to me — the cigarette smoke, the neon light, the claustrophobic restaurant kitchen, the delivery bike, the torrential downpour.

What an awful thing: to forget a past life. A lovely soundtrack.

Sparse, pleasant. A lovely soundtrack. Is ambition the thief of joy? For Hirayama, stability and routine seem to be the key to a perfect day.

Hilarious and absurd.

Really a gorgeous movie.

This page unfortunately no longer works due to digital decay, but I remember spending a lot of time typing my own (in hindsight, nonsensical) multisyllabic rhyme schemes into the interactive element at the end of the page. I often attribute the start of my interest in pursuing a journalism career to interfacing with COVID-19 coverage in 2020, but perhaps I should really be attributing this piece.