Victorian Obsessions Blog Tour with Y.S. Lee

I am a day late with this post which is mortifying. I will do better! Anyway I am ecstatic to re-introduce the wonderful author Ying Lee. Her The Agency trilogy, is one of my favorite trilogies and her final book, The Traitor in the Tunnel keeps the awesomeness rolling. In fact it's my favorite book in the series (but I said that about the second book too and I love the first book so don't listen to me ;) Y.S. Lee has written guest posts for me before and I love them because they are about history but it's history that probably won't be in your textbook (unless you have a really cool textbook that talks about notorious Victorians, Victorian obsessions and weird facts about Victorians). Read on!

Victorian Obsession: Opium

What do you think of when I say, “opium”? Poppies, addiction, maybe the British Empire or hookahs? Well, what about babies? Let me explain.

Opium was, of course, one of the great money-spinners of the British Empire. The British grew opium in British East India and sold it in China, where there was huge demand for it. That’s why the stereotype of the opium-addict is often that of a gaunt Chinese man lying beside a hookah. But, as with all stereotypes, that’s only part of the picture.

Opium use was totally unregulated in England until the Pharmacy Act of 1868. This means that the first half of the nineteenth-century was basically a free-for-all in terms of drug use: anyone could sell it, and anyone could buy it. And as in China, opium merchants in England did a roaring
trade.

One of opium’s most popular uses was in an alcohol tincture called laudanum, popularly used to calm the nerves, help sleep, and generally soothe the user. It was considered totally respectable, so ladies as well as gentlemen felt free to take it – and that’s what the British did, in vast quantities. And since opium was so effective and pleasant for adults, they also gave it to children.

Some of the widely marketed “soothing syrups” for infants in the early nineteenth century were mixtures like Godfrey’s Cordial, which was made of opium, water, treacle (a sweetener), and spices. Other brands included Steedman’s Powder and Atkinson’s Royal Infants Preservative. These were immensely popular for use with ill babies. It makes sense: when children are ill, parents want them to feel better. Opium lessened the pain, and the sweetness of the syrups made sure the babies accepted them.

Obviously, opium syrups were not good for babies. Even ignoring questions of addiction and brain development, babies given frequent doses of these syrups tended to be small and stunted, and were often described as “wizened”, or looking like little old men. The reason? They were too sleepy to eat, and became malnourished as a result.

It’s impossible to know how many babies died of starvation as a result of opium syrups. But during the mid-nineteenth century, doctors suspected this was the case. Opium syrups were popular not just with parents of sick infants, but also unscrupulous nurses (who wanted children in their care to sleep a lot) and working-class parents (who were too exhausted from long working hours to deal with fussy babies). These are the most difficult deaths to trace, although it didn’t stop people from speculating.

And this is the double standard of Victorian opium use: you could sit in your elegant drawing-room and denounce the sinful ways of Chinese opium addicts, lazy nurses, and the working poor, all while sipping a glass of sherry-and-laudanum to help you get a good night’s sleep. It’s a bitter irony. Rather like the taste of laudanum itself.

Depressing topic? Um yes. Fascinating? Very! Thank you so much Ms. Lee

Azael's Secrets: Guest Post from Ashley Hope Perez

Today I am thrilled to share a guest post from YA author Ashley Hope Perez. You may not remember but I loved her debut last year, What Can't Wait. I interviewed her last year. Welcome back Ashley!!

Unfortunately I was unable to review The Knife and the Butterfly but I am looking forward to following the rest of this tour and reading the great reviews it's getting, such as this one from Forever Young Adult (giveaway included)! Plus reading the book ASAP

Chapter 1 of The Knife and the Butterfly
I’m standing inches from a wall, staring at a half-finished piece. Even though I’m too close to read what it says, I know it’s my work. I run my hands over the black curves outlined in silver. I lean in and sniff. Nothing, not a whiff of fumes. When did I start this? It doesn’t matter; I’ll finish it now. I start to shake the can in my hand, but all I hear is a hollow rattle. I toss the can down and reach for another, then another. Empty. They’re all empty.

I wake up with that all over shitty feeling you get the day after a rumble. Head splitting, guts twisted. All that’s left of my dream is a memory of black and silver. I sit up, thinking about snatching the baggie from under the couch and going to the back lot for a joint before Pelón can bust my balls for smoking his weed.
Except then I realize I’m not at Pelón’s. I’m on this narrow cot with my legs all tangled up in a raggedy-ass blanket. It’s dark except for a fluorescent flicker from behind me. I get loose of the covers and take four steps one way before I’m up against another concrete wall. Six steps the other way, and I’m bumping into the shitter in the corner. There’s a sink right by it.• No mirror.• Drain bolted into the concrete floor. I can make out words scrawled in Sharpie on the wall to one side of the cot: WELCUM HOME FOOL. I turn around, already half-knowing what I’m going to see.

Bars. Through them, I take in the long row of cells just like this one. I’m in lock-up. Shit, juvie again? It’s only been four months since I got out of Houston Youth Village.• Village, my ass.
I sit back down on the cot and try to push through the fog in my brain from the shit we smoked yesterday. Thing is, I’ve got no memory of getting brought in here. It’s like I want to replay that part, but my brain’s a jacked-up DVD player that skips back again and again to the same damn scene, the last thing I can remember right.
We’re cruising through the Montrose looking for some fools who’d been messing with Javi’s stepsister. We’ve got this ghetto-ass van that Javi bought off his aunt, and the whole time he’s driving he’s hitting a bottle of Jack and trashing the punks who called his sister a ho. Pelón’s in the front seat, and me, my brother Eddie, plus Mono, Cucaracha, Chuy, Greñas, and three other homeboys are smashed in the back. We’re sitting on top of bricks and chains and bats and all the other shit Javi keeps there. All the way, I’m thinking that by the time we get out of the van I’m going to have chains imprinted on my ass from sitting on them so long. There’s a knot in my guts. Don’t matter how many battles I’ve been in, I get it every time. But I know as soon as we hit the ground it’ll turn into a rush.
“Where the hell are these fools?” I call up to Javi.
“Tranquílo, culero. We’ll find them soon,” he says, passing the bottle to us in the back.
“Watch for the red and brown,” Pelón says, all businesslike.
Greñas lights up a fat joint, sucks on it hard. Everybody’s joking and taking hits when Javi sees the beat-up green Caddy his stepsister told him about.• He floors it and noses the van right up to the tail of the car. Three dudes in the back throw up their hand sign.
The Caddy flies through stop signs, swerving like a dog with an ass full of wasps.
“Come on, let’s ride them bitches!” Mono says.
Javi floors it, and we lurch through a red light.
“Easy, cabrón!” I shout over the horns. “We can’t kick their asses if we’re dead!”
Javi laughs crazy. “Stop being a pussy, pussy!”
The Caddy pulls through a CVS parking lot, then takes off down another street. Javi tries to keep up. He scrapes over a curb when we make a turn, throwing all of us in the back on top of each other.
“Shit, Javi, you made me spill the Jack!” Cucaracha moans. Javi just throws his foot down on the gas again.

We catch up after about a block, and this kid in the back of the Caddy drops his pants and presses his ass up against the glass. That sets Javi off again.
The Caddy swings into a big empty lot by this run-down park.• Javi plows through the patchy grass and dirt to the other side.• Before he even stops, the rest of us grab our shit.
“Let’s school these fuckers!” Eddie calls as we pile out.
“Hell, yeah!” I shout, swinging a chain.• On the other side of the park, a big Chevy Tahoe pulls up with more of the Crazy Crew kiddies.
Now that I’m outside and I can move, I’m feeling good, strong. We roll in a kind of whacked dance, pushing across the field toward them, throwing our signs up.• Our blue and white is on our tats, and maybe on our undershirts and rags. Eddie and a few of the boys are wearing blue and silver jerseys. But these fools are decked out like it’s dirty Valentine’s Day, brown and red popping out everywhere--shoelaces, pants, hats, sunglasses, even. Pinche posers.
They walk toward us looking cocky since they’ve got us outnumbered.• But these are soft midtown boys. We’ll whip them fast.
We start throwing our bricks and chains at them. They dodge and shout shit. Their guys have pipes, but I can tell they don’t know how to fight. Babies. They’ll be running scared soon.
Chuy hits this tall, fat dude with a brick. I start smacking another guy’s legs with the chain. •He yelps and runs without even throwing a punch.
We keep pushing toward them, pitching our stuff, then going after it again.
I’m smacking around this one dude when I see a light-skinned punk going hardcore after my brother Eddie. Eddie’s older than me, but I’m stronger, so I go bail him out.

“Chinga con mi hermano, and you mess with me!” I say. I block the dude’s blows and whip the chain around his legs. He crashes to the ground.
Eddie kicks him in the gut and slaps my hand. “La Mara Salvatrucha controla!” he shouts. He spits on the fool lying there, whimpering like a puppy.

Eddie goes after another punk, and I look around there’s a bat lying in the grass not far off. I jog over to it, feeling like a fucking king now that the fight is rolling. I’m reaching for the bat when I see something red flash out of the corner of my eye. I look, but there’s nothing. A second later, I think I see it again. I shake my head in case something ain’t right in there. I turn quick and catch sight of the red again. And then--
——
The opening chapter of The Knife and the Butterfly pushes the reader into Azael’s rough world and sets up a key tension in the novel: now (Azael’s in some kind of messed-up facility) and the then (what happened before he got there). The rest of the novel shifts back and forth between the two times, giving glimpses of Azael’s life and what brought him—and the other main character, Lexi—to this place.

In the first chapter, I wanted to throw down the gauntlet—no easing the reader into Azael’s world. But don’t worry: it’s not all gangs and violence and cussing. If I let Azael’s bravado come on full force here—he definitely thinks he is one macho badass—it’s precisely so that the reader can see that stereotype undo itself in the rest of the novel.

Azael is much more than a gangbanger.


Maybe you can’t imagine him cutting his little sister’s fingernails… or buying groceries for his friend’s mom… or cutting a picture out of National Geographic… or reading a girl’s journal… or praying… or saving an enemy. But by the end of the novel, you’ll see that Azael can do all these things and more. He’s a complicated character, one you’ll learn to care about, I swear.


Ditto for Lexi, the other character who’s central to The Knife and the Butterfly. I’m not going to lie; I hated her at first. I couldn’t stand how she throws herself at boys, how disrespectful and ungrateful she is, how her attitude is so big it casts its own shadow. But it turns out she has her own secrets and fears and memories that—even if they didn’t stop us (and Azael) from wanting to roll our eyes—make us see how she got to be who she is.




Making my characters dig around in the past has other bonuses, too. Because Azael and Lexi have to face where they’ve come from and how they got where they are so that they can move forward, each in their own way.

Interviews, excerpts, guest posts, and secrets (including two truths and a lie) coming throughout Ashley’s The Knife and the Butterfly blog tour. See the full tour schedule here

Ashley lives in Paris with her family at the moment, but she’s as close as a message. She loves hearing from readers! Check out her blog, follow her on twitter @ashleyhopeperez or find her on facebook

That was a very exciting passage, I was crushed when I realized Chapter 2 wasn't included ;D And food for thought: how many of us judge gangbangers or people who "look like gangbangers" in one second? Chew on that. Thank you so much for stopping by once again Ashley!

Blog Tour Guest Post: Malinda Lo on Changes

Last night I finished Huntress. I had been reading it very s-l-o-w-l-y and that pace was oh so worth it. You need to in order to better appreciate Malinda Lo's fantastic worldbuilding and her phenomenal way with words.

My question to Ms. Lo was on the book of Changes aka the I Ching. In following that theme I wanted to know what changes she wished to see in publishing. As you will soon see I took the 'Changes' in the Book of Changes literally but that's not exactly correct. Regardless, I'll let the much-more eloquent and fabulous Malinda Lo explain.

My new novel, Huntress, is a young adult fantasy inspired by many aspects of Chinese culture, including the I Ching, which is a foundational work of Chinese philosophy. The I Ching (or Yijing, as it is romanized in pinyin) is often translated into English as the Book of Changes, and for this guest post, Ari asked me to write about some changes I'd like to see in the publishing industry.

While the I Ching is indeed about change, it's not exactly about change in the way that many people in our society think about it. So I'm going to ask you to bear with me for a minute while I briefly explain what the change in the Book of Changes is about.


Here are a couple of quotes from An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy by JeeLoo Liu, which I found to be a great resource for the basics about the I Ching as well as Daoism and Buddhism, which were also key influences in the world I created in Huntress:


“What Yijing teaches is that we need to adapt our conduct in accordance with your changing relations to the environment. Even if we do not change, other people and other things are constantly changing. Therefore, adapting to changes is far superior to ignorant persistence.” (Liu, page 31)

“Nothing is fixed forever. Neither the good nor the bad will last long. What one needs is a keen perception of the incoming development. If one sees where one is in the whole progression of events, then one can take appropriate action either to enhance the trend when it is auspicious, or to alter it, at least to slow it down, when it is inauspicious.” (Liu, pages 33-34)

What this means is that change is inevitable. Your task as an actor within the world is to adapt to that change, and to make decisions on how to act given the broader context. An individual does have freedom of choice, but that freedom is situational; it is limited by the situation the individual is in.

Now if that's not too confusing, let me explain how I fit into the grand scheme of publishing within this philosophy!

I am one person — one agent or actor — within a web of other actors that include editors, publishers, literary agents, other authors, booksellers, librarians, readers, book printers, ebook manufacturers, and any other actors that have anything to do with book publishing. I can certainly make choices about what I do within this industry. I can choose to write about lesbians, as opposed to straight people. I can choose to write about people of color, as opposed to white people. I can choose to be frustrated by the lack of diversity on bookshelves in general, or I can choose to co-found Diversity in YA (www.diversityinya.com) with my friend Cindy Pon.



A lot of people are upset about the lack of diversity on book covers in the YA department. A lot of people are angered by those who seek to remove books that include queer people from libraries and schools. A lot of people feel like they're up against a monolithic corporate giant (the book publishing industry); they see it as a David vs. Goliath situation (to borrow an analogy from an entirely different faith).

I absolutely have been upset, angered, and made to feel like I can't make a difference. But I also know that change will always happen. It is inevitable.

Your hair grows without you even noticing. Once I was terrified of saying "I'm gay," and now I can say it easily. Once the United States was predominantly white; now, it is 35% non-white, and it's estimated that by 2050, whites will be a minority.

There are changes happening within the ecosystem of the publishing industry, too, which is part of the broader web of human society. In addition to adapting to changing technology, the publishing industry will have to adapt to the changing demographics of its readers if it wants to stay in business.

Every actor within the industry can make decisions about how he or she will act in their situation. I want to see an industry that invests in stories about people of color and LGBT people, so I am choosing to act in ways that will contribute to that. I am hoping that projects like Diversity in YA can raise awareness of the fact that readers exist who are diverse, and who want to read about a diverse world.

I want to enhance the trend of diversity in YA publishing, because I believe it truly is auspicious. Everybody reading this post can help enhance that trend, too. I hope you'll join me in taking action that does exactly that.

Thank you so much Ms. Lo! And stay tuned for my Huntress review later this week.

Guest Post: To Kill a Mockingbird 50 Years Later

Today I have a guest post from My Dog Ate My Blog: An Almost Educational College Blog. The posts are informative and fun and I highly recommend you check them out. They talk about topics that I might not normally think about it, but I feel a tiny bit smarter after reading them ;) It's a group run blog and each perspective is unique.



To Kill a Mockingbird: 50 Years Later

Edward Stern is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Online Schooling for Guide to Online Schools.

To Kill a Mockingbird can easily be considered one of the few films that can rival a classic source novel in terms of power. The film, which stays true to Harper Lee's literary classic, tackles racism and prejudice in the deep American South head on. It features the greatest hero in film history according to the American Film Institute, the resolute and just lawyer Atticus Finch, as well as a young Robert Duvall as Boo Radley. The film is so renowned that AFI again recognized it, this time as their pick 25th best film all-time and the #1 courtroom film in history. Celebrating its 50th Anniversary, it is truly a testament to the film that it is still shown in classrooms today as required viewing and is still so greatly appreciated by film buffs and casual movie-goers alike everywhere.

But with all the accolades, does To Kill a Mockingbird still ring true today? So much has changed since the film's premiere in 1962, at the very start of the Civil Rights Movement. Since then, the United States has seen a legal end to the discriminatory Jim Crow laws of the time; has seen the Black Power movement of the 70s, one in which African-Americans sought equality "by any means necessary;" has seen the inner cities decimated by drugs and gang violence; and has seen the election of the nation's first black president, an amazing and previously unthinkable milestone.

Set in the 1930s in Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird is absolutely a product of its time. The injustice and prejudice that suppresses the African-American community of the film is blatant and a cultural norm, one of the "separate but equal" doctrine that was level only in name. The close-knit small town of Maycomb County has a wholesome exterior only tainted by racist social constructs that override all forms of justice, including those in a courtroom setting. The hero of the film is white, a white man fighting for an African-American out of a belief of what is right and what needs to be changed in Maycomb County.

If the film were shot today, it would have to incorporate all those aspects of current life as we know it. The Maycomb County of the movie is rather idyllic compared to the often harsh realities of the present. Plus, racism is not state-sanctioned anymore. It more frequently shows itself in much subtler ways, ways that can be less obvious to the untrained eye but are still hurtful and impede social progress.

Still, racism and prejudice persist today. This kind of ignorant intolerance is ingrained in many, and still rears its ugly head. As such, the message of the video, to stand up against these ills and fight for what is right, is still as relevant as ever. It always will be, and society will always need the Atticus Finches of the world to show that injustice will not go unchecked.

Thank you so much Mr. Stern! I love To Kill a Mockingbird but I have yet to see the movie :( It would be really interesting to see the film shot in the present day because racism is so subtle. It would even be cool to see a documentary of the modern-day Atticus Finches.

Guest Post: Let Us Write Our History

Today I am super excited to host Ah Yuan from Gal Novelty. She is beyond amazing. Her reviews always bring a new insight to the book blogging world (A great example is her review of Eon. Everyone loves it but she points out some troubling things about the Asian fantasy aspects of it). A great introduction to Ah Yuan (besides her blog) is the Blogger Spotlight interview I did with her. Enough of my ceaselssy chatter, take it away Ah Yuan!

As any reader passing by this most esteemed blog by Ari will figure out, we all know that she is very dedicated to promoting YA/MG POC books. A long-time reader may also discern the fact that Ari’s favourite genre is historical fiction. She has in fact already written a brilliant post on the lack of POC in U.S. history, which everyone should of course read immediately if you have not yet done so. In honour of this, I thought I would give some of my thoughts on this historical fiction discussion.

Here is one thing I ought to confess right off the top of the bat: I am not the biggest fan of the historical genre. I will not bore the readers here on my long-winded reasons for my general distaste of the genre as a whole, but I thought I would at least admit this bias before delving further into my post. I mean, I do enjoy learning history, how people have lived in the past and, more importantly, how it connects with our future, but short of it is that I’ve often been let down by how historical fiction and how it chooses to depict the past and the people of its time.

I’ve been particularly disillusioned by how the English (language) Literature has chosen to depict the past of Asian people and our history in our ancestral lands.

I’ve struggled with articulating all the reasons for my distaste, and I think, I will start with a cover image of a fairly recent book out in the YA market called Spirit Hunter by Katy Moran

This book? Is set in Ancient China.

I have contacted the publisher (@WalkerBooksUK) through twitter before about this, and I was assured that the female lead in the story was of European descent. Thus as it’s showing a female on the cover, who would quite logically supposed to be depicting the female lead, no foul has been done….???

Now, you may be wondering, but Yuan! The cover girl is supposed to be European! No whitewashing here. What is the problem here?

If we see this book in a vacuum, then sure, no foul done. The publisher has every right to make the decision to put a female white lead on the cover as oppose to the Chinese male lead in the story, it is all perfectly legitimate. But here’s the implicit consequence of this cover decision: the face of a white person is once again considered to be capable of representing the histories of Asian people.

No story exists in a vacuum. This novel is only singled out for the simple fact that this is the most recent example I can think of, to show that privileging a white perspective on Asian cultures and histories is not a thing of the past, but that of an ongoing problem that still rears its head in 2010, and probably will continue to be the trend year after year unless the attitudes of entire book industry changes.

For every copy of Memoirs of a Geisha made widely available in the stores and winning award after award for the author’s (white, male) achievement in masterfully depicting the ‘way of the Geisha’ and praise lauded for his supposed sensitivity towards the female sex and otherworldly culture, the real story of Mineko Iwasaki is left by large unheard and unread, no awards, no offers of movie adaptations for her story from her own mouth. Because a white man can always, always tell our stories better than ourselves, see? Don’t you see?

For every story like The Painted Veil and Empire of the Sun, for every movie like The Last Samurai, Hildalgo, The Conqueror and Lawrence of Arabia, we are told over and over that same damnable narrative, that our histories are convenient backdrops and stage props to draw out the white lead’s story, that we can not star in our own stories, that we are deemed to have nothing worthy to say beyond serving the needs of our white hero, teach him or her valuable enlightening exotic ways of our culture and have them speak for us.

In essence, these stories which chooses to use a white person as a stand in, a representative of a historical context in whatever exotic Asian country’s locale of the day, rob us of our own abilities to tell our own stories.

When we engage with these stories we are robbed of our voices.

I have seen praise for a new recent turn in the dominant historical regency romances, as the new 21^st century Regency authors start branching out their settings outside of London, England to the vast colonies of the British Empire. But I cannot rejoice when I am told to cheer for the memsahib entertaining her romance with the latest British visitor under the heat of the Indian sun, I cannot rejoice every time I see the ladies and gents of Great Britain sip their damn tea with their damn sugar without the text ever acknowledge the blood shed for their happy consumption, I cannot rejoice when we can have movies like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland wherein our lead can find emancipation from the restrictions of a 19^th Century British woman’s life by making trade with China and we the audience are supposed to cheer the fact that our lead essentially will win her fortunes in her glorious future through the ruinations of a country in the remote exotic Far East. I cannot be satisfied with these stories insistently repeated to this day that refuse to acknowledge the ugly parts of their history, the devastation their colonizing ways wrought upon numerous Asian countries, I cannot be satisfied when there is blood on the ground and no one will acknowledge the deaths of millions for the simple fact that we are Other, we are not part of that shining white umbrella, our stories, our histories are not worth the acknowledgement we ask for.

No, if our stories must be told, they are loudly told in those wretched stories you call musicals like Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon, stories set in an exotic Asian land wrought with war and a forbidden tragic love we Asian women have towards the white men, those soldiers who come bringing war to our shores. Because we can’t help but love the white colonizer, and we will die tragically for it and all the audience will cry and mourn and go back home telling themselves what a great story that was without ever having to think about any real true consequences of war and what it means to the people of that distant land. In the popular girl’s series The Princess Diaries starring princesses all over the world, Kathryn Lasky can wax poetic about how Repressed and Confined our princess Jahanara suffers from a Muslim dominated Moghul India without ever giving Jahanara a glimpse of a future beyond confinement and no thought of her own agency until she meets a white man and falls in a tragic unrequited love that can never take off. As if this narrative of our backward culture repressing our womanhood and needing the white hero to come save us from our backward men is not tired and beaten to hell and back with a stick, and if I never ever have to see this crap of a narrative troupe employed ever again, it wouldn’t come close to being soon enough.

Engaging in the English language literary canon will always mean that I am participating in a literary phenomenon that mostly erases my ethnic identity, and when the rare piece of fiction that comes along that does engage with some form of any Asian culture or history, I will often find it descends into caricature making and stereotypes that make me recoil from the book in disgust. I must learn to pick and choose, to ask myself how much fail I must accept in order to enjoy a what is otherwise well written or engaging story, I must learn where to stop when a book goes too far for me to emotionally handle, and I must learn to get used to the idea that if ever I drop a book or a story because it offends me to the point of sickness, voicing this opinion may well and have indeed already invited me ridicule, accusations of just Not Getting It, because a body of work being offensive is never ever a good enough reason to stop reading, my feelings be damned. I have learned all these things, I have thought hard about these acquired lessons and I will speak out and insist on my right to say that these types of works offend me anyways, and you will have to forgive me about being sceptical on the latest widely touted Asian!historical novel because if your hand has been burned too many times, you become weary, you do not jump towards what experience has taught you that this may give you great pain. If I am judged to be irrationally judgemental against this genre for these feelings of mine, I can only say that experiences have helped shape my perceptions and will make do with shrugging off criticisms of my character.

I have spoken on and on in this soapbox not to say zomg Asian!Historicals suck--because despite bad experiences I have indeed enjoy the rare Asian!Historical that manages to not hurt or demean, and besides, such statements are hardly conductive to a public discussion—but to lay out narrative troupes of this genre I find distasteful and anger-making, and ask, no, demand for a representation that doesn’t demean or dehumanize us. For people who choose to write in such historical contexts to think about all the implicit messages within their works, that when you create fiction on a historical time period not familiar to your own that there is history in that, years and years of others telling our stories for us and hurting us for it. How many times has our histories been distorted, maligned, silenced, and continue to be so, there’s a history in that too.

We cannot strive to make changes for our future without recognizing the wrongs of our past, the persistence of the harmful status quo in our present, and I truly want change for the historical depictions of Asian peoples. I do, I truly do. It is for this--underneath all my rambles, underneath all my words fuelled by cold rage and hurt and pain in my heart--that I speak now.

I say all this not because I truly expect change to occur from these words of mine, when so many times I tried whispering my discontent I’ve been shut down and my concerns drowned out by the laughter and indifference of others, but because I am not okay in remaining silent. Even if no one listens, I will not be deemed as complicit in my approval of such bullshit narrative troupes by upholding silence on my part.

I will end this post linking to an elegantly written blog post, far more eloquent than what I have said here, by a blogger I deeply respect and admire. (I do highly, highly encourage everyone to read the whole of the article though, and to please think carefully about the topics presented, checking your privilege in your responses to these articles before choosing to engage, please.)

ephemere’s haunting No Country for Strangers is an article that speaks directly to white authors wishing to depict the Philippines in their works.

So (and I address this now to the theoretical audience of those on the other, privileged end of the inequality) if you, as a white person, are afraid of writing about us: then be afraid. Carry in your heart the fear of doing further injustice to a people into whose blood oppression has become so incorporated that our institutions and our media echo with the dual strains of self-loathing and adulation for those who are not us. Live with the anxiety of questioning your assumptions about a people that is not more American than America, not a race composed only of tourist guides and call-center agents and overseas foreign workers and shoe-crazy society matrons and celebrity politicians, not your "little brown brothers and sisters"; whose richness and diversity and pursuit of individual identity all too often escape the surface view to which most observers are confined. Confront your blind spots and your privilege in having the luxury of overlooking this inequality because you aren't disenfranchised by it. Cast away the viewpoints that tag our similarities as proof of the good points of the Philippines and relegate our differences to the status of "disadvantage" or "compensation for..." in those instances when you do choose to acknowledge that we aren't "just like you". Grasp the difficulty that comes with having to ask yourself whether you are condescending, whether you are offending beliefs that are not held without reason, whether you are perpetuating a mindset that plays at well-intentioned assistance while diminishing fundamental freedoms to choose our own goods. We've had 'well-intentioned assistance'; the Americans called it benevolent rule. Delve into our history, the blood of our politics and our wars; soak yourself in it, in the grit and the grime of our daily living, until you understand why we rage and why we have cut out our tongues.

Guest Post: Y.S. Lee on Notorious Victorians

Today I am honored to take part in a Traveling to Teens blog tour in honor of the release of Y.S. Lee's second book, The Body at the Tower. I loved the first book in the series and the second one doesn't disappoint. Read my review

Now I turn the floor over to Y.S. Lee :)

Welcome to the 4^th installment in my series of Notorious Victorians, written to celebrate the publication of my second novel, The Body at the Tower. Yesterday, I talked about Charles Darwin as a reluctant revolutionary; today, I want to focus on Lady Caroline Norton, an author and society beauty who, despite her deeply conservative tendencies, became a high-profile campaigner for women’s legal rights.

Caroline Norton was born in 1808 to an aristocratic family with important connections but without a great deal of money. Despite this, Norton and her two sisters were much admired for their beauty and social accomplishments, and were nicknamed “the Three Graces”. (Norton’s sisters went on to make powerful marriages.) At nineteen, Norton married a well-connected barrister and Member of Parliament, the Hon. George Chapple Norton. This was a disaster: George Norton was jealous, violent, and a heavy drinker who abused her physically and mentally. Money was a constant problem.

After nine years, Norton left her husband. She earned enough through her writing (poetry and prose) to support herself, but despite their estrangement, George Norton successfully claimed all her money for himself. This was entirely legal: Caroline Norton was her husband’s property within the law, and everything she owned and earned belonged to him. Next, George Norton kidnapped their children and hid them with relatives. Again, Caroline Norton had no legal recourse against him and was denied access to her children for years. Finally, George Norton accused her of adultery with her good friend the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, and demanded a large payout. Melbourne refused and the case went to court. Although Caroline Norton and Melbourne were found not guilty, the scandal still destroyed their reputations and almost brought down the government.

Norton spent the next two decades campaigning for the extension of women’s legal rights – specifically, for mothers’ right to custody of their children, and the right of married women to inherit and control property. She was largely successful. While these were radical notions in themselves, Norton was never an advocate for equality. She opposed women’s suffrage (the right to vote) and believed that “the natural position of woman is inferiority to man”.

Norton’s activism clearly grew from her own experience; where her sufferings ended, so did her desire for political change. It’s easy to wish that Norton had had a less personal understanding of justice and equality. Yet the fact that she was politically active is itself remarkable. As a daughter of the aristocracy, raised to be a wife, mother, and society hostess, Norton’s life forced her to abandon the script. It’s fair to call her a revolutionary of sorts, even if a reluctant one

Thank you so much Y.S. Lee!

Follow the Notorious Victorians blog tour to A Reader's Adventure on August 9th (Monday). The tour stops on the weekend.

Check out the author's website. You can also follow her on twitter

This guest post was brought to you by Traveling to Teens blog tours. You can find a full schedule of all the stops here

Guest Post: Opening Doors

People are different. There's no escaping/dodging/evading that fact. I find it kind of puzzling when people try and pretend that "Hey, we're all just the same."

Um, sorry. We're not. When I hear someone say they don't see color I always have to restrain myself from calling them out. Of course you do! You're just not comfortable with the fact that you see it! But confronting someone with a truth that they really don't want to own is near impossible. It's been my experience that there are some truths that a person has to come to in their own time.

I'm not saying I don't nudge – I do. Sometimes my nudges turn into actual pushes. Today though, I'm discussing some of the more gentle ways to lead people to and through sticky truths in a relatively pain free manner. How? Educating through books.

I will tell anyone and everyone I can get to stand still long enough that I adore reading. Books are addictive for me; through books I've lived thousands of years in the past and future. I've been different ages and genders. I've died and been resurrected. I've even lived in places that have never existed outside the imagination of some terrifically creative mind.

You know what the best thing is about all of that? It's an experience that everyone can share – all they need to do is pick up a book. Reading a well-written book can literally transport a person and let them live life as someone else for a brief moment. Reading can help bridge the gulf that lies between Different and Understanding. It can demystify the Other (the Other can be defined as anyone outside an individual’s immediate experience. Other does not denote bad).

I am by no means saying that by simply reading a book that a person can understand all of the complex human experiences that another person lives. What I am saying is that

books can open a door, allowing a glimpse into something previously unrealized. Quite often, all it takes is a glimpse to know that we are more alike than different in how we love, hurt, and learn.

We are blessed to live in a time when so many different options are available to readers. There are books written by authors of every race, creed and orientation imaginable and these books are available for every genre and age group. You just have to look around. Ari's blog is a terrific place to start but it's by no means the only place to find books that can help bridge the gulf. If you are reading this then you have at your disposal one of the greatest tools of all time: the Internet. Do some searches, be experimental, read some excerpts.

What you discover may just surprise you.

Kathi Wallace is the author of Assiniboin Girl, a Young Adult book released by Drollerie Press and available from Amazon. She has two more books that will be released shortly. Kathi can found most days on her blog or on Twitter as Kathi430.

Read an excerpt from Assiniboin Girl

Thank you so much for this guest post Kathi! I too scoff at the notion that people don't see color. We aren't there yet and even so, seeing color can be a good thing. I think all readers love books for the doors they open. What do you think?

*I will be out of town July 24-August 1st with not computer access. I have some good posts scheduled to run while I'm gone (hopefully they will post!), so be sure to check back here :) I look forward to reading your comments and emails upon my return.

Guest Post: White Privilege

Today I have an amazing guest post from Maggie who blogs at Bibliophilia-Maggie's Bookshelf. You remember Maggie? I gave her the spotlight yesterday

Take it away Maggie!

I don’t really remember not being aware of the white privilege. I think I was five when I read my first book on Martin Luther King Jr., the same year I started public school kindergarten in the suburbs of Richmond, VA. Not to disparage Richmond, VA, because it’s a beautiful city, but in Richmond, people wave giant Confederate flags in the middle of the road. It’s kind of hard not to be aware, even in kindergarten, that as a middle-class white girl you are being treated differently than your black peers. To be fair, I should say treated by some, not all. To be fair, I should also say PoC peers, but I honestly don’t remember any “colors” besides black and white in my admittedly narrow experiences that year.

Two months into my first semester as a public school kindergartner, I transferred to private school. There was one black kid in my class, who I remember really rubbed me the wrong way. But I remember feeling guilty that he rubbed me the wrong way, because as a black person, wasn’t he entitled to some standard of better five-year-old behavior from me? Yeah, I know. I was a messed-up, anal-retentive five-year-old.

Now that I’m ten years older, and hopefully wiser, and have spent those years in a very different social position from my peers—after kindergarten, my mom started homeschooling me—I’ve realized that this was a somewhat counterproductive reaction. I spent the next four years that I lived in Virginia paralyzed with guilt, obsessed with studying the Civil War, the civil
rights movement, and the seizure of lands from Native Americans by the U.S. government, and constantly worried that I would make some kind of racist or ignorant remark around my friends and neighbors. (Not many of whom were black, and none of whom were of Native American descent.)

I read novel after novel about the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, and the Trail of Tears. If a book had anything remotely PoC related in it, I devoured it. I was dead set on becoming the most racially open-minded kid my age. And in trying that hard, I became so politically correct that I’d feel terribly awkward in any social situation involving someone who was not white. I don’t remember being too freaked out at my bi-racial godmother’s wedding, where I was the flower girl—I think I was distracted by my pretty dress and the blister the
shoes gave me—but I do remember looking back on the pictures and thinking, what did they think of me? Did I say something insensitive? Did I?

When my parents decided to move back to their roots in small-town Minnesota before their divorce, my obsession sort of died. I had emotional trauma to deal with, and besides, there aren’t that many people of color where I live. It became a moot point. Until very recently, when I suddenly realized that I live 30 miles away from a prominent Ojibwe Indian reservation, and a whole new kind of cultural history.

I visited the excellent Indian museum there, and started doing my own research. And even though the tone of the museum certainly wasn’t an accusing one, I could start to feel my old, buried guilt creeping back to me. I found myself hunching over while I walked around the museum with my friends in the homeschool group I was part of at the time, like I was being invited into something sacred that I didn’t deserve to be a part of. I just about melted into a puddle of mortification on the floor when my Minnesota history “teacher”—another homeschooling mom—decided to read the essay on the Ojibwe I’d written for her class to one of the employees of the museum, part-Ojibwe herself.

Then I realized: What am I achieving by feeling guilty? I haven’t enslaved anyone, or stolen someone’s land, or exploited their cultural heritage. So why do I feel so bad? I decided that, every time I started feeling guilty about being entitled to the white privilege, I’d do something to help stop it instead. That way, maybe, I wouldn’t feel so ashamed of my blond hair, green eyes, and pale skin every time I walked into a room with someone different than me. It’s
been a tough decision to hold to. It is so much easier to feel guilty for the actions of your ancestors than to take an action that you and your descendants can be proud of.

But really, those actions are not so tough to take. They can be small. They can be as simple as reading a good book about someone different than you, giving it the same weight you give a book about a protagonist with a racial and cultural background you share, and then sharing your honest opinion with others. Spread the word about PoC lit, especially YA PoC lit, where colorful
protagonists are notoriously difficult to find. Especially after finding Ari’s blog and those like it, it’s what I intend to do as often as I can! Demand accurate cover portrayals of the characters in your favorite novels, and make sure that publishers and bookstores understand that it’s just as profitable to sell books about PoC’s as it is to sell books about white people. Then, maybe, we’ll be a little bit closer to a world where no person of color has to face discrimination, and no white person has to feel guilty for being the beneficiary of that discrimination.

Thank you so much, Ari, for giving me the opportunity to guest post here! =)

Thank you Maggie for sharing such a thoughtful post on the sometimes uncomfortable and ignored issue of white guilt and white privilege. I completely agree that if every white person, acknowledged their white privilege and then did something positive to help change it, the world would be a better place. It would lead to a huge step in understanding between people.

Author Guest Post: Varian Johnson on Saving Maddie Playlist + A Giveaway

Today we have the wonderful author Varian Johnson (whose most recent book is Saving Maddie) visiting us at Reading in Color on the 2nd stop of his Saving Maddie blog tour. Welcome Varian!

Today is an important day for two reasons

1) Today is the release day of Saving Maddie! Read my review here, everyone should go buy the book, there's something in it for everyone :)




2) More importantly today is Varian's birthday. Happy birthday Varian! We wish you continued success as an author (and engineer) and thank you for gifting us with your stories.















I will now let Varian speak

Saving Maddie Playlist

Summary:

Joshua Wynn is a preacher’s son and a “good boy” who always does the right thing—until Maddie Smith comes back to town. Maddie is the daughter of the former associate pastor of Joshua’s church, and his childhood crush. Now Maddie is all grown up, gorgeous—and troubled. She wears provocative clothes to church, curses, drinks, and fools around with older men. Joshua’s ears burn just listening to the things she did to get kicked out of boarding school, and her own home.

As time goes on, Joshua goes against his parents and his own better instincts to keep Maddie from completely capsizing. Along the way, he begins to question his own rigid understanding of God and whether, as his mother says, a girl like Maddie is beyond redemption. Maddie leads Joshua further astray than any girl ever has . . . but is there a way to reconcile his love for her and his love for his life in the church?

My thoughts on the Saving Maddie Playlist:

Some people laugh when I say this, but I consider Saving Maddie my first true love story.

My other novels include elements of romance, but I’m not talking about romance. I’m talking about real love, built on friendship and trust. I’d even call it a story based on sacrificial love—a love so deep that you’re willing to give up the very thing that you want to alleviate someone else’s pain.

Of course, these are teenagers were talking about—you can’t talk about love without bringing up sex. And maybe that’s okay—attraction and desire go hand in hand with love.

Basically, Joshua both loves Maddie and is in love with Maddie. He wants to save her, and he wants her. And he doesn’t know how to reconcile this. (But Joshua’s not alone in this—Madeline feels the same way.)

As this book is all about love (and lust), many of the songs on my playlist are love songs—though I wouldn’t consider them happy love songs. Like Joshua and Maddie’s relationship, my playlist is a mix of seduction and despair, love and loss. Here are a few of my favorites:

Hello, Like Before by Bill Withers

The first version of Saving Maddie wasn’t about Maddie nor Joshua—it featured characters named Peter and Cassie. Unlike Joshua and Maddie, they were strangers thrown together due to circumstance.

When I restarted the novel, this time with Joshua, the good preacher’s son, and the wayward Madeline, I knew I wanted them to be friends—old friends…best friends—which made me think of this song, which is about childhood friends seeing each other after a long absence. Wither’s voice is powerful, but the song feels more like a folksy, laid-back soul song than traditional R&B.

Call Me (Come Back Home) by Al Green

This song, like the entire album, drips with southern soul. In the song, Green implores a woman to come back home—like Joshua does with Maddie. Also, Al Green famously battled between the religious and the secular—at one point he gave up singing R&B music entirely and became an ordained minister.

Let Me In Your Life by Bill Withers

“I only want to love you / please don’t push me away / Let me in your life.”

Plain and simple, this song is all-Joshua. Like with “Hello, Like Before”, the song captures Wither’s folksy, laid-back vocal style, which jives with Joshua’s demeanor.

What Would Happen by Meredith Brooks

Right before Maddie leaves Conway for the first time, she and Joshua almost share a kiss—they’re interrupted before it could actually happen. Fast forward five years, and the echo of that failed kiss still hangs between them. Like in this song, I think both Joshua and Madeline wonder what would have happened if they had kissed five years ago…and what would happen if they kiss now.

Scared Money by Kelis

This song is from Kelis’s second album, Wanderland, which was never officially released in the US. The idea of scared money is that you have to be fearless in order have success, or as Kelis says, “scared money don’t make none.” Like Madeline does throughout the novel, Kelis’s words skip between the playful and the seductive throughout the song. With its driving, synthetic beat, this song makes me think of Madeline at her naughtiest—with purple lips, a tequila-flavor tongue, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

I Want You by Marvin Gaye

This song is actually a bit…explicit, but still, I love the passion Marvin Gaye sings with. “I want you / the right way / I want you / but I want you to want me to.” Like Al Green, Marvin Gaye also struggled to balance the religious and the secular. Unfortunately, Gaye died before fully being able to tame his demons.

Prayer Dance by Rachelle Ferrell

This song actually reminds me of an alternate ending of the novel, where we see Madeline dancing in the Sanctuary. I cut this part long before it got to my editor after realizing the true ending of the novel had occurred 40 pages previous to that point. However, maybe we’ll see Maddie dance in the companion novel….

You Do What You Have to Do by Sarah McLachlan

This might possibly be the saddest song in existence. I basically put this song on repeat after I “broke up” with best friend during college. She wasn’t a girlfriend in the traditional sense, but in the emotional sense, we were a couple. More than a couple. And due to hundreds upon hundreds of reasons, it didn’t work out, and we eventually decided to stop seeing and talking to each other for a while.

Relationships like the one that Joshua and Madeline share remind me so much of that old friendship from my youth, which is why I always turn to this song when things get rough for my characters. The song is simple yet haunting, with just McLachlan’s voice accompanied by her piano, an upright bass, and percussion. I love so many lines from this song, especially the refrain, “But I have the sense to recognize / that I don’t know how to let you go.” I tried to capture this emotional struggle throughout the novel as Madeline constantly pushes Joshua away, yet he doesn’t quite know how to let her go.

Other Songs on the playlist:

Come Live With Me Angel by Marvin Gaye

Make Ya Feel Beautiful by Ruben Studdard

Elsewhere by Sarah McLachlan

In the Land of Make Believe by Dusty Springfield

Rainy Days by Shuggie Otis

Can We Pretend by Bill Withers

My favorite songs on the playlist (and they are all good) are Hello, Like Before by Bill Withers, and Make Ya Feel Beautiful by Ruben Studdard. I also really liked Scared Money by Kelis and I'm glad Varian brought the song to my attention. all the songs completely fit the book and I love the combination of spiritual and 'secular' music. I have some iPod updating to do!

Follow the rest of the tour

Wednesday, March 10th – Gwenda at Shaken & Stirred

Thursday, March 11th – Melissa at Book Nut

Friday, March 12th – Edi at Crazy Quilts

Thank you so much for stopping by Varian and have a great birthday!



A Giveaway

The publisher has kindly supplied me with 3 ARC copies of Saving Maddie to give away. So if you want to win one, just leave a comment here with your email address. You don't have to be a follower to enter but you will get an extra entry if you are an old follower or become a new one.

To enter: Leave a comment answering either
1) Why do you want to read Saving Maddie? (I'm just curious)
OR
2) What's your favorite spiritual song? (You can say Jesus Walks by Kanye West) Even if you aren't spirtual there has to be an inspirational song of some sort that you like, it doesn't have to be religious in nature.

ETA: OR you can say something about the actual guest post. Just a thought.

Extra entries:

+2 New follower

+3 old follower

Ends: March 17, 2010

Open: Internationally (there will be at least one 1 U.S. winner and 1 international winner, the 3rd winner could be either).

Traveling to Teens: Y.S. Lee Guest Post

Everyone please welcome Y.S. Lee to Reading in Color! She wrote The Agency: A Spy in the House which will be a trilogy. Read my review here. You can follow the rest of the Traveling To Teens tour by going here (and I highly recommend you do, the guest posts on Victorians are fascinating! I've learned so much).

Hello! This is the 3^rd of 8 guest posts I’m making as part of the T2T blog tour. As an ex-professor and writer of historical fiction, my theme is Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About the Victorians. Yesterday, I talked about Extreme Child Labour at Books by Their Cover. Today’s topic is Victorians of Colour.

First, off, breaking news: Victorian England was not lily-white! Not in major cities, at least, and especially when those cities were port towns like London, Bristol, and Liverpool. Regular readers of this blog may be rolling their eyes at this point: “Um, OBVIOUSLY.” The problem is, you’ll have to read very carefully, and for quite a long time, before the fiction of the Victorian age starts to reflect that reality.

Exceptions: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair features a handful of very minor characters with brown skin; there’s a much-abused servant in Dickens’s Dombey and Son who’s known only as the Native; and there’s the theory that Heathcliff might be Romany (because he’s found in Liverpool, and kind of swarthy, and yeah, that’s it). But there ain’t much else. And the POCs you see in these novels are either incredibly minor characters (practically throwaway lines), or else objects of abuse or ridicule. They’re the victims of the authors’ racial, and frequently racist, assumptions.

So when I started to imagine my novel, The Agency: A Spy in the House, I included a population I’d stumbled across in my PhD research: Lascars, aka sailors from the Asian subcontinent. Some were simply passing through London between ocean voyages; others chose to settle down, marrying English women and having families; others still were stuck in England, unable to find passage back to their home countries. For this last group, there were actually specific charities that aimed to help them (and convert them to Christianity at the same time). The “Imperial Baptist East London Refuge for Destitute Asiatic Sailors” mentioned in Spy is parody of their usual tone.

Now, London is actually a network of tiny villages: you could grow up in the East End and never leave it for years, so it’s quite possible that a sheltered girl (like Angelica in my novel) could grow up five miles from all these South Asian and Southeast Asian sailors and never realize they existed. But some of them – or their wives, and especially their children – must have journeyed through the city at some point. And Spy is a novel about those possibilities, too. But enough said, for now. I hope you enjoy the book!

I always thought of Victorian England as lily-white so it was super interesting to hear that it did actually have some color and different cultures! Thank you Ms. Lee :)

Visit the author's website and everyone needs to go pre-order the book. Also the author is having a launch party in Ontario, check it out for more details.