Guest Blogger: Cherry Cheva March 27, 2008

Besides the fact that it is seriously funny, one of the things I like best about Cherry Cheva’s She’s So Money is that it’s about a girl who just happens to be Asian-American. Maya is a high school senior, a waitress at her family’s restaurant, a tutor, the co-mastermind of a cheating ring, and, oh yeah, Thai-American. It’s part of Maya’s identity, not the defining characteristic of her or the story. Race and ethnicity are almost never mentioned specifically (the only time I recall it discussed explicitly is the brief cell phone conversation between Maya and her mother after Maya lies about being in the library after school—”She says there are no Asians in the library right now.” “There are always Asians in a school library; that’s where most of us live.”) and racism is not an issue. I was curious as to how this came about, so thanks to Cherry Cheva for guest blogging and answering my question.

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WHAT’S UP PARTY PEOPLE!!!!!!!

I had no idea how to start this off so I just randomly decided to do it that way. Thanks to Trisha and The YA YA YAs for inviting me to guest blog! They wanted to know how and why, in my recently-released novel “She’s So Money,” I wrote about an Asian character without making a big deal about ethnicity. And the answer is: uh, it just happened.

Okay, that’s a little glib, but seriously, that’s pretty much the best way to describe how I went about tackling (or not tackling) the race issue: it never occurred to me to make a big deal of the main character being Thai, because the book wasn’t about that—it wasn’t a race story, it was an opposites-attract story, an “I love you/I hate you” story, a story about two people bitching at each other all the time even though you just know they totally want to make out. Basically, you could’ve taken the story and switched the races all around, and it would’ve shaken out almost exactly the same way. Do I think racism and racial stereotypes are important topics worthy of being written about? Absolutely. Was “She’s So Money” the place to do it? Not so much. Maya’s race, in the context of the story, is a small thing next to the very huge fact that she’s got to make a whole bunch of money fast. That’s her pressing problem, not the fact that she’s Asian. Hell, I’m the only Asian chick in the writers’ room at “Family Guy” but that’s not the problem there, either—the problem is trying to come up with new jokes every day, or a story that hasn’t already been done to death, or a less offensive but equally funny alternative when the Fox standards department inevitably shoots something down. “She’s So Money” just wasn’t meant to be about problems stemming from ethnicity, just like it wasn’t about Cheez Whiz or carnivorous plants or aliens who really like hats, so none of those topics got hit up very hard (or at all, in the case of the last three, if I’m remembering correctly).

Now, I guess I could have written a book with a huge emphasis on race and addressed the topic in a serious manner instead of the throwaway jokey manner that I did it in, but first of all, yeesh, what a downer (there’s a reason I’m a comedy writer) and more importantly, I think it’s possible to use humor to acknowledge that racial differences and stereotypes exist, while at the same time not necessarily hitting anybody over the head with it. We do this all the time on “Family Guy.” Likewise, “She’s So Money” was never meant to be a super-serious textbook read, so if important issues were addressed, they got churned through the joke filter first.

You know what, though? This is pretty much the first time I’ve even thought about all this stuff. Ultimately, I wrote what I wrote because that’s what I felt like writing-there’s no real backstory, it wasn’t brain surgery or rocket science, I was just doing what I felt like doing, in the way that came most naturally to me. So I guess yeah, it really did just happen.

THANKS, PARTY PEOPLE! Can you tell I couldn’t figure out a way to end this either?

Food for Thought — Cooking, characters and cultural diversity February 21, 2008

A guest post by Sherri L. Smith

Take a minute to answer this question: If you had one last meal, what would it be? This is one of my favorite dinner party questions. The answer can tell you a lot about someone. Sure, people will ramble, name a dozen items, some of them gourmet dishes from a favorite restaurant, some of them once in a lifetime treats from a vacation overseas, but in the end, if they are like most people, they will end up naming something from their childhood. Something their mother used to make. You can understand, of course, the desire for comfort food if it is indeed your last meal. But, I think it is more than that. It’s an assertion of self, of our origins.

My latest book, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, is founded on the two great loves of my life—my husband, and food. In the book, 14-year-old Ana Shen struggles to bring two sides of her family—African American and Chinese American—together to make the perfect meal to celebrate her eighth-grade graduation. Like Ana’s mother, I am black, like her father, my husband is Chinese. The idea of Ana was born from my own daydreams of our future children. As a biracial couple, we faced a few hurdles from other people, but we each knew who we were, who we wanted to be. How different would it be for our children, with a foot in each world? How would they assert who they were? These were uncomfortable questions. So, I looked for comfort, and found it in food.

Food is a mother language. Like Latin, it shares its roots with a hundred different cultures. The ingredients are the same—it’s how we express them that is different. Beans and rice is a very southern American dish, if the beans are red and the rice is long grain. Change the beans to black beans, season it with lime and garlic instead of onions and parsley, and it’s a Cuban dish. Fry those same beans twice, remove the lime and add tomato paste, and you have a Mexican dish. Use mung beans and you could have a Caribbean or Chinese meal. Grind the red beans into a paste, and ground the rice into flour for mochi, and you have the makings of a sweet Japanese or Chinese dessert.

This alchemy of food reduces the degrees of separation in a culture, and shows the migratory paths of our ancestors. Chinese workers who built the Pacific railroad tracks from California to Mexico settled in Mexico and changed the way a region cooks. African slaves brought through the Caribbean to the port of New Orleans for sale added their flavors of pepper and okra to the Spanish fish stews and French bouillabaisses to create gumbo and Creole cooking. If Hot, Sour, Salty Sweet was born out of a desire to glimpse the future of what a child of mine might be like, then food was a natural backdrop on which to let it play out. Ultimately, it’s not just the meal they prepare, but the legacy of the food itself that brings Ana and her family together. Each dish in the book tells us a little about the character who made it, who they are today, who they used to be. It is literally what her family brings to the table to share with Ana.

So, if you had one last meal, what would it be? Write down your answer, and then trace back to the beginning of that meal’s family tree. When did you first eat it? Who cooked it for you? Who taught them how to make it? Even if you think the story is short and simple, you will find that it isn’t, and that who “you” are is much bigger than you ever knew. And that is the lesson every child should learn.

Other stops on Sherri L. Smith’s blog tour:
February 11, 2008 @ Finding Wonderland
February 18, 2008 @ Bildungsroman
February 26, 2008 @ Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
February 28, 2008 @ The Brown Bookshelf

About Sherri: Sherri L. Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent most of her childhood reading books. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she has worked in movies, animation, comic books and construction. Sherri’s first book, Lucy the Giant, was an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults in 2003. Translated into Dutch as Lucy XXL (Gottmer, 2005), her novel was awarded an Honorable Mention at the 2005 De Gouden Zoen, or Golden Kiss, Awards for Children’s Literature in the Netherlands. Sherri’s second novel, Sparrow, was chosen as a National Council for the Social Studies/Children’s Book Council Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People. Hot Sour Salty Sweet (Random House, 200 is her third novel. She is currently at work on Flygirl, an historical YA novel set during World War II.

Guest Blogger: Paula Yoo February 5, 2008

Hi. My name is Paula Yoo. I am a 15-year-old white suburban punk rocker video game-playing boy trapped in the body of a 30something female Korean American.

That was my politically incorrect joke for many years. I grew up in the ’80s, obsessed with the late ’70s punk and early ’80s New Wave scenes of London, New York, and LA. Today, I own an Xbox 360 instead of an Atari.

But… I was also a teenager ashamed of her Asian heritage.  I was born in America and spoke perfect English.  My parents were born in Korea and spoke with a slight accent.  They loved kimchee.  I loved Big Macs.  Part of this embarrassment and shame stemmed from being one of very few people of color in a small conservative town in Connecticut.  I remember being made of fun – and judged unfairly – because of the color of my skin.

Fortunately, I later attended a more diverse college setting where I learned to embrace my Korean heritage. A lot of my Asian American friends have shared similar ethnic self-hatred and coming-of-cultural-age experiences.

So I lived happily ever after, right?

Not really. What I hadn’t realized was all those years of unfortunate racial self-hatred would still have an effect on my writing.

See, ever since I devoured E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web in the 1st grade, I have always wanted to be a writer. When I finally wrote my own stories, all my characters were white. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that – the greatest privilege about being a writer is that you can write about anything and anyone! My characters ranged from a medically depressed and unhappily married young mother living in New Orleans to a stoner college freshman in love with his roommate’s girlfriend.

These short stories received much praise from my creative writing professors. But they also told me something was missing… where was my voice? There still has to be some truth in fiction – but in my fiction, the truth was nowhere to be found.

Maybe I needed to live life first in order to become a better fiction writer? So I studied the human race through the lens of an objective journalist for the next nine years. I then received a prestigious fellowship to study creative writing at an MFA program. Upon graduation, ironically, I became a TV drama screenwriter instead of a novelist because I had a gift for writing dialogue… and being a TV junkie didn’t hurt! I wrote everything from NBC’s Emmy-award winning political drama “THE WEST WING” to FOX’s cult sci-fi series “TRU CALLING.” I was adept at imitating other people’s voices – I could easily capture and mimic the show creator’s writing style and voice, which is a necessary skill required for TV writers.

But I still didn’t have my own voice!

In April 2004, several writers and I were laid off from a soon-to-be-cancelled TV series thanks to low ratings. I had two choices - wallow in unemployed self-pity or take advantage of the rare free time and write.

So on May 1, 2004, I sat down in front of my laptop and wrote: “You’ve heard the joke, right? Why is a viola better than a violin? It burns longer.” I wrote until 4 a.m. about a violin audition I had in high school. (I studied the violin growing up and am still an active professional freelance musician today.)

I couldn’t stop. I wrote EVERY SINGLE DAY for 16 hours straight. I’d stumble into bed around dawn and wake up around 11 a.m. and just plop myself down in front of my laptop and start typing.

This continued for five weeks. During the first week of June, sometime around dawn, I wrote the final sentence at the bottom of page 300 of my completed novel and burst into tears.

I realized this was the first time I had ever written anything featuring a Korean American female character. GOOD ENOUGH’s main character, Patti Yoon, was ME. Okay, so she’s not 100 percent me – I’m nowhere nearly as smart as Patti and she can play circles around me on her violin! And who knew Patti’s Korean immigrant parents would play such a huge role in the novel? I had always scoffed at the “Joy Luck Club” phenomenon of Asian American authors writing these weepy tragic novels about how they suffered racism in intolerant small all-white towns and how their parents suffered even worse tragedies in fill-in-blank-Asian-country-here.

All joking aside, of course I respect these novels! We need these experiences, unique perspectives, and multicultural voices to keep our literature alive and vital. But I never thought I would write an “Asian American” novel. I thought my Great American novel would be about a migrant family of farm workers escaping the dustbowl of Oklahoma to pick grapes in California… oh wait. Sorry. Steinbeck already wrote that!

Clearly GOOD ENOUGH was inspired by my life growing up as a geeky violin-playing outcast who didn’t go to Prom. But instead of focusing on teen angst, I had found myself laughing at my own memories and realizing how funny high school really was. So that’s what I ended up writing. I never approached the book with a multicultural mission. I never intended this to be a novel preaching about the stereotypes of the Asian American model minority myth or about the cultural difficulty in communicating with immigrant parents.

But at the same time, my novel is not solely about cultural issues. In the end, it’s just a story about a girl named Patti. She could be any ethnicity/race. The book’s universal theme is… what makes us happy? Who can’t relate to that?

As for my happily-ever-after ending? I finished the revisions and submitted my novel to my literary agent. Three weeks later, he sold it to HARPERCOLLINS. And today, February 5, 2008, my YA novel GOOD ENOUGH debuts in bookstores across the country.

And sure, sometimes I still feel like a 15-year-old white suburban punk rocker video game-playing boy. One day I will write a novel about that mischievous boy and the troublesome scrapes he finds himself in!

But you know what? I had to write GOOD ENOUGH first. By discovering the truth hidden inside myself and unlocking my own authentic voice, I became a better writer. Now I can truly explore the lives of other characters with confidence and compassion. They say, “Write what you know.” I say, “Figure out what you know first before you start writing.” And then you can write about anyone… and anything. Trust me – once you find your own voice, there’s a whole world out there, just waiting for you to discover it!

About Paula: Okay, I admit it. Like Patti Yoon, I play the violin. Yes, I was concertmaster of my Connecticut All-State High School Orchestra. And I snuck out occasionally to see a couple of cool bands (sorry, Mom & Dad). But this novel is a work of fiction. Although I too was forced to undergo a really bad home perm, it burned my left ear, not my right. And there was a cute guy in my homeroom who played rock guitar and asked me to work on a few songs with him, but his name was not Ben Wheeler. When I’m not writing novels that allegedly have nothing to do with my personal life, I also write TV scripts. I was born in Virginia and grew up in Connecticut. I’ve also lived in Seoul, Korea; New York; Seattle; and Detroit. I now live in Los Angeles with my husband, who plays guitar—and yes, we jam occasionally, just like Patti and Ben.

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A few weeks ago, Paula left a comment on my post comparing the description of her brand new (out today!) book Good Enough with She’s So Money by Cherry Cheva. I found her comments interesting and thought-provoking, especially when she said, “this is the first piece of fiction I have ever written where the character was Korean American.” I asked if she’d like to write a guest post for us, and she agreed. Thanks, Paula, for taking the time to share this with us.