Shanghai Noir

Category: California

  • Tap tap tap

    My grandpa loved his typewriter. He used it to tap out notes to his children, share thoughts with his US immigration lawyer and conduct church business. Luckily for me, he preserved all his correspondence using carbon copies. Even better, he wrote in English so that his ABC granddaughter could read his letters a century after…

  • Homeward Bound

    Last month, I went home to California. It’s an odd word to use, home, given that I’ve lived in Amsterdam for 30 years. But what else can you call the place where you were grew up or your parents still live? Home is not so much a location as a spot on the space-time continuum.…

  • Treasure

    Whenever I go to Los Angeles, my Mom has a list of things for me to do. I’m not complaining. My brother’s list is much longer. This time my task is to clean out a bedroom closet. Not all of it, just a few designated eyesores. One of those items is a beauty case Grandma…

  • Angel Island

    Angel Island is a patch of grass and woodland flung into the middle of San Francisco Bay. The native Coast Miwok once used it as a fishing and hunting site. The United States government chose to deploy this bit of land variously as a Civil War garrison, a 19th century quarantine station and a processing…

  • Model Minority

    I have been a minority all my life. As the only girl in a neighborhood of boys, a downtrodden East Los Angeleno in a fancy-pants law school or a Chinese-American expat in the Netherlands. As minority experiences go, however, I can’t really complain. My kind doesn’t make trouble and so trouble rarely rains down on…

  • 2017 in Words & Pictures

    This so-called Chinese proverb is actually the brainchild of American adman Fred Barnard, who dreamed it up in 1921. He wanted folks to take him seriously, hence the fake Chinese source. Madeleine Thien is no huckster though she is a novelist. In Do Not Say We Have Nothing, she says the Chinese ancients believed that…

  • Martial Arts

    This is me, age 14, on Judo Award Night. Notice that my brothers have already advanced to a yellow belt. I remain in white: the lowest possible level in judo. It seems to me that I got hurt a lot. I didn’t like throwing myself onto the mat. The award in my hand was probably…

  • California Dreaming

    In the aftermath of the wildly successful launch of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle, I thought I might run a serious risk of post-partum depression. What better antidote than to embark on a book tour? Or, as The Mamas and the Papas would say: I’d be safe and warm, if I was in LA. And…

  • Christmas Chinese-American Style

    Christmas in Los Angeles is a contradiction in terms. The plastic icicles taped to the roof. The electrified snowman set among the cacti. But Christmas Chinese-American style takes weirdness to a whole new level. Not that my family was strange. We were like others at Christmas, Chinese-American or not. For Christmas Eve, we invited all the relatives,…