This one is actually about a book.

Two things that are strange to do together: Watch men's Olympic figure skating and read Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters . The reading started out as self-defense; the NBC iceskating commentary team was using their ca. 1985 scripts when judging Evgeni Plushenko (A sample remark: "That was no program! That was just arm movement and jumping. Of course, being Russian, he never got to have a childhood." [Poignant pause].) But, the book is compelling enough (and Johnny Weir's "transportation crisis" lame enough) that reading quickly won out.

I'd start by saying I enjoy the book, except that's true for all the books I read; I have so little time that I don't read anything I'm not fairly certain I'm going to like (or hate in a good way). It's interesting to compare this book to the last one I read in which the Philipines featured prominently, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. There the Japanese and U.S. presence in the Philippines was given tangible form, in the shape of a hidden cache of bars of gold left behind during WWII; here the destructive legacy of these global powers is manifested in structure as well as plot. The content is fragmented and relayed by multiple narrators whose fractured personal identities mirror their country's instability.

To give full disclosure, I'm reading the book partly because I unwisely agreed to give a lecture on Asian-American literature for an Honors course on diaspora literature of the Americas. I want to figure out how to defuse the inevitable critique of this work: its lack of racial uplift, beginning with the titular slur. And also maybe the more sophisticated corollary of this critique: well, if things are so fractured, then what's going to be the solution?

And given the terrible news about yesterday's landslide and the BBC's suggestion that the root cause was the area's history of over-logging, this clearly is an important question. But why is it a question we want fiction to solve for us?

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