Gods Rush In Again: My Latest for Taiwan Scene

You might remember that I had a short non-fiction story published in an anthology of stories by expat women in Asia, all the way back in 2014.

Well, with the King Boat Festival coming once again - it kicks off on October 28 this year and ends one week later - Taiwan Scene has excerpted my original story and published it here:

Gods Rush In at the King Boat Festival

Although a few sections are lost - an exploration of the cultural issues surrounding being a female spirit medium, a longer discussion of my own (continued) atheism despite the peculiar and perhaps somewhat chimerical events I experienced on the beach that day in 2012, the fact that my own wishing plaque on the King Boat was for Taiwanese independence - I'm excited that the story might now reach a wider audience.

Until now, it was impossible to read unless you bought the whole anthology (which you can still absolutely do, and which I recommend, but may be difficult for someone without a Kindle device or app in Taiwan), so having a section of it available to all Taiwanese readers is great news!

I'm back! And the anthology my work is included in has arrived!

I haven't posted this month because I spent most of it in the US, attending a friend's wedding and visiting family. 

I came home to a keyboard that won't type the letter "f" (I have to copy-paste), dead plants, two healthy but upset cats, a destroyed paper lamp, stuff otherwise taken care of. But overall I'd say more bad than good. 

But I also came home to this! My paper copy of "How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia". I've already read it, of course, but it's nice to have a real paper copy of a book you're included in, in your hands, in real physical print. 

"How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Strories of Expat Women in Asia" launches today!

Guess what!

I'm currently in Seoul - not permanently, just for a short vacation - on the way to the USA to attend my friend's wedding. After our tour of the DMZ, we took refuge from the afternoon rain in a traditional hanok (think like an old-school courtyard house of the similar type found in many East Asian countries, but this one is Korean)-turned-coffeeshop. I'd post photos, but blogging on an iPad is not easy, and I'll have to skip that for now.

And guess what else!

"How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia" launches today! It's available on Amazon as an e-book and paperback, through Barnes&Noble, Apple and several other outlets (check the editor's blog for more information) and coming soon to select bookstores in Hong Kong.

If you're interested in knowing more about the anthology, and my contribution to it, check out Taiwanxifu's review of the anthology focusing on my contribution, titled "Gods Rushing In". 

It's not available in paperback in Taiwan unless you want to pay preposterous shipping charges, so if any Taiwan based folks want a copy in paperback - if e-books just don't do it for you or you want to show off to your friends by having it on your bookshelf - let me know (you can leave a comment with your e-mail address here. I won't publish it, because I bet you wouldn't want your e-mail address broadcast to the world as a spammable or hackable account, but I will get back to you and can arrange a paperback copy).

I'm really excited about this - I'd known it was coming for awhile but it's something different for it to be real, for the book to be available. Even one story in an anthology is something, especially as it is the first thing - other than job reporting on local issues in a regional newspaper in high school - I'd ever really submitted for publication. I saw the call to submissions on a lark, I thought about writing something and put it off for weeks...then on the day submissions were due I sat down in a coffeeshop and hammered mine out. I didn't even proofread it - I gave it to Brendan to read, made a few adjustments as per his recommendations and sent it off...as a first draft. What the hell, right? May as well see what happens.

One always imagines writing as a career - or a side hobby, or freelance gig - as something that you have to toil at for years, submitting manuscripts, stories or pitching ideas, and facing rejection after rejection before you get one fateful acceptance. And I know that while I can write, I'm not the most talented writer ever to walk the earth - I can write, but so can millions of other people. There is nothing particularly unique about my writing ability. So, given all this, I certainly did not expect that my first draft "what the hell" submission would be accepted. I was, frankly, surprised to be proven wrong. What the hell indeed!

I may have written all of that in a post before - I can't remember - but it's what I'm thinking now.

So, I hope you'll check it out. Everyone who contributed to "How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit" put a lot of work and a lot of heart into their contribution, and I do believe - after having read it myself - that it is worth your time.

Happy reading!

"Review" if you can call it that: How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?

Of course I'm bringing up the book again because, hey, my story's in it. So obviously I'm going to do that.

And I always intended to write a review, although of course you know the review will be positive. So think of it more as "nice things I want to say about this anthology my story is in".

So, here are some nice things.

When I received my advance copy of the anthology, of course I began reading it immediately (OK, honestly, I flipped right to my own story, "Gods Rushing In", and read that first, then I went back to the beginning to read the others. I think more people do that than would admit it).

And I have a lot of great things to say for the collection overall:

First, that it includes a range of voices and experiences. One issue I have with writing by and for women is that, probably unwittingly, a lot of it tends to cover the same ground: romance, marriage, children, family, "finding yourself", "happiness", maybe travel (if it involves romance, marriage or "finding yourself"), and works directed at female expats - as not very many works are actually by female expats - tend to focus on the same kind of expat: do they think we're all just trailing spouses, going to coffee mornings and planning Christmas bazaars, while our husbands work? (Not that there is anything wrong with being a trailing spouse who goes to coffee mornings, not at all - just that that's what people, even people who market to female expats, seem to think we all are.) That was probably the one critical flaw of one of the few other books I've reviewed on this blog. How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? avoids this nicely, and includes experiences of all sorts of women on all sorts of adventures: older, younger, married, single, settled expat, wanderer, hippie, careerist, trailing spouse, equal breadwinner.

Second, that that range of voices is also diverse. One thing I actually don't like about travel writing (or expat or backpacker communities in general) is this feeling that a lot of travelers unwittingly view the world as the playground of white people. I don't think anyone does this intentionally, but somehow the feeling is still there. Including diverse women's voices helps the anthology easily avoid that fate.

Finally, I appreciated that the pieces chosen all carefully avoided the "I came to Exotic, Mystical Asia to find myself" cliche. That's perfect - because that tired trope plays far too well into the idea too many people subconsciously have that the world is their proving grounds, the colorful backdrop full of ethnics and tribals all set up nicely to make travelers look cool, enlightened and worldly. For myself, although I wrote about a colorful Taiwanese festival, I took great pains not to make it all "I had this mystical experience", because I didn't. And honestly, Asia for me is a lot less of the "dignified man in a white Chinese cotton suit doing tai chi looking out over a gorgeous view studded with mountains and bamboo" (cue gong music) and a lot more of, say, Hsinchu Science Park. It's not mystical, it's a continent where several billion people live. I stay because I enjoy language immersion, the food's amazing, the city is convenient (After living in Taipei I feel that if you have to walk for more than one minute to get breakfast, your city sucks). And, okay, I like the festivals, but not because I feel like I need something "exotic" to "find myself", but just because I like them. Compare a folk Daoist temple parade to, say, some Veteran's Day Parade in East Surburbia, and I'm sorry but the folk Daoist parade wins.

As for the pieces I liked best, well, I liked all of them, but a few stood out. The Weight of Beauty, because it absolutely hits the mark when one looks at the intersection of beauty ideals and cultural ideals. (Although when Dorcas expressed surprise that the company would send a sexy sales rep, thinking she would be a man, I did smile...of course they did. Using female sex appeal to sell things is even more notorious in Asia than the West, and we're certainly not innocent of it in the West.) Bread and Knives, because it so beautifully uses a small experience, a moment in time, to capture so many uneasy feelings about both expat life and new parenthood. Finding Yuanfen on a Chinese Bus because it was well-written and perfectly descriptive, and conjures a type of expat a lot of people don't imagine exists: a fierce young solitary woman who has, and is not embarrassed by, a sex drive. Huangshan Honeymoon for taking a situation that most expat women and people in an intercultural marriage would balk at, and turning it into something beautiful, that made perfect sense (my only quibble is that good old Dad-in-law doesn't get off scot-free - not for thinking all foreign women are easy, although that's no good, but for thinking that it is wrong to be "easy". Some people are inclined to a libertine lifestyle and it's not OK to judge them - not me, really, Old Married Jenna is surprisingly stodgy. That said, it's not like my opinion has any impact on the Laobas of the world...so okay). The Truth About Crickets because it was both balanced and jarring, jejune in its storytelling just as something told from a child's perspective should be, with a well-constructed narrative. Waiting for Inspiration because it captures every fear I've ever had about what it would be like to be a "trailing spouse", and Charting Koenji because it perfectly captured the blend of loneliness and curiosity that mark my first few months in any new place.

...and more, I actually have like five more that I want to mention, but at that point I may as well just say something nice about every single work, so suffice it to say that even the ones not mentioned here were fantastic to read, and not mentioning them doesn't mean I didn't enjoy them just as much, for different reasons.

And obviously "Gods Rushing In" was fantastic, amazing, life-changing...the feel-good short personal narrative of the year! Hehe.

So, this is to say that you should buy the book and read it. :)