Mambo Taxi

I have many books. So does dan. We have moved them all a number of times, and they are rather heavy. We've moved together from Ithaca to Boston to Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. We bought a house with lots of room for book-shelves. Both of us come from families with lots of books, and whenever I'm in New York City I always come home with bags from the Strand Bookstore, the most overwhelming used bookstore in the world. Since then, we moved into a condo with fewer bookshelves, and the count of books went down somewhat, but there are still a lot.

I like science fiction. I really enjoy Greg Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed The Dazzle of Day by Molly Glass, a Quaker sci-fi story set light-years from earth. Also, I very much enjoy Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson. If you like offbeat sci-fi I recommend checking out They're Made Out of Meat, a quick short story.

My favorite regular fiction author is Paul Auster; I particularly enjoy re-reading "Mr. Vertigo" and "City of Glass." I'm a big fan of Toni Morrison.

I have a complete collection of Dykes to Watch Out For, not only because their publisher, Firebrand Books, was located across the street from us on the Commons of Ithaca, NY; (and then I was Firebrand's website editor, after we moved to Canada). I like Edward Gorey books too.

In the realm of non-fiction, I read a bit of science, history tending toward history of cities and gay and lesbian history, and more recently, Indigenous studies- historical and modern.

Since I first wrote this section (back in 2002), I significantly reduced the amount of reading I did for fun. But I've gone back to reading a bit more, again, because it makes me happy. If you're interested, I track most of my reading on goodreads.

[where did this post go? I thought it got posted last night, but here it is in the unsaved cache. Fortunately!]

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a breezy read through the world of American Chinese food. The main takeaway (sorry) is how the American Chinese food experience is so... actually... American. She examines nearly every facet you might imagine, and many I have never considered (those awful "soy sauce" packets without any soy at all: where do they get made?)

In the end, I was entertained, though I skimmed here and there. Will this become a cinema verité documentary? Maybe. Should you read this? Maybe.

So, what did I learn?

General Tso is a real figure from history. In China, he was a General known for his military prowess, a sort of William Tecumseh Sherman of Hunan Province. However, in China nobody eats his chicken. The most famous recipes from the part of the province he comes from are actually with dog meat.

Ms. Lee follows the exodus of workers illegally leaving Fuzhou, a region in southeastern China in the province of Fujian; which she says for the past two decades has been the source of the vast majority of Chinese restaurant workers in the US. She follows one man's travels over-land, on a barely sea-worthy ship, to the shores of New York City and then to jail for a number of years, then eventually freedom in the US. She spends a while discussing restaurant workers, how they have made new lives in big cities (the impression she gave was what a large fraction start in New York City), and some of them have fanned out to settle across the country, buying restaurants in tiny towns and trying to make a go of it.

And in the process she more or less explains how it came to pass that there are 43,000 Chinese restaurants in the US; more than McDonald's, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.

She has an obsession with fortune cookies. That obsession led her to visits to San Francisco, China, Japan, and back to her back yard in New York City, explaining the history of who currently writes the fortunes, who invented the style of cookie (they were Japanese) and how they became a so-called Chinese tradition. She even gets into the history of the fortunes, visiting the Japanese shrine which originally folded a fortune into a cookie.

She might have the best job in the world, given her interests. The New York Times has flown her world-wide to produce these stories; she even gets a chapter out of "what is the best Chinese restaurant in the world?" Which involved yet still more travel, to try world-wide Chinese restaurants which are neither traditional Chinese nor cheap Americana. I will give her credit for determining criteria for choosing the best, not an easy task, but I don't feel enlightened from the reading of the experience.

She visits "the lost Chinese Jews of Kaifeng," a destination during the Jewish diaspora, and site of a synagogue from 1163 until the 1860s. There are a small number of Jews still living there. She asks the oldest living resident of the old epicenter of Jewish life in Kaifang why American Jews like Chinese food so much. "With a glint in her eye, she slapped the wooden table. She knew. I leaned in. This was the insight for which I had travelled thousands of miles, walked along a highway at midnight, and scoured alleyways. Her Buddhist koan-like response was profound in its simplicity: 'Because Chinese food tastes good.'"

The most interesting chapter for me was the history of the delivery restaurant in New York City. She says before the 80s, there were basically no delivery restaurants, period. Anywhere. One enterprising Chinese restaurant figured out the formula, and within a few years, the entire restaurant culture had changed. (The last time I was in Manhattan, I had a diner deliver to my hotel. Which, in the end, I should thank that Chinese restaurant for. Even if in the process, innumerable apartment owners may have been thoroughly teed off by sheaves and stacks of restaurant menus left in their lobby...)

This is not a cohesive review, for which I am sorry. But I have an excuse: melted_snowball has taken my copy of the book. Perhaps I will take it back to revise the review later.

I finished the audio-book version of Stumbling on Happiness on the drive back from my parents' place.

I wrote about Daniel Gilbert last August when he was interviewed on Tapestry, the CBC radio program on faith and spirituality (and so did d., which I link to from that post). Re-reading my impressions at the time, I conclude his book made a much better impression on me than it appears his radio-interview and TED lecture did. In no small part because he was able to set out his arguments completely, not constrained to 30 or 20 minutes. (Good gawd, he sounds strident and pressed for time in the TED talk.)

I took out of the library both his book and the unabridged audio version (read by Gilbert). The book copy was recalled so I only read a few chapters in print. I recommend either, or both. It made a fine accompaniment to driving many hours on the 401.

The book is pleasantly engaging, with a very accessible style that I only occasionally wish had been more terse. He mixes in with his psychology research a smattering of jokes I actually found funny- occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

I'm torn on how much I'd like to say about the content. Others will have written better than I can. I think Gilbert writes most effectively about unexpected psych research results. For example (and this isn't an exhaustive list of the good stuff, it's just off the top of my head) :

* People overestimate their emotional reactions to future events. Our psychological "immune system" kicks in when awful things happen, making them feel... bad, but not as bad as you'd expect them to.

* However, the psychological immune system won't kick in under a certain threshhold. So a slightly bad event can fester in your mind worse than a really bad event.

* We, obviously, edit our memories; and we do so in a way to self-validate our beliefs. The fascinating thing to me is that we also edit our predictions of our feelings from before-hand, so we can self-validate the way we ended up feeling. "We remember feeling the way we thought we would feel, whether we felt like that or not." We're really a mess when it comes to accurately remembering feelings, and Gilbert mentions a few "emotional blind-spots" which consistently trip us up.

I liked this interview with him; it gives a fair sense of his writing style.

Something else I appreciate: when I got to the end, I wished I had a study group to help hash out my thoughts on the book. It turns out, and I think I read this last year, that Gilbert posted a study guide to go along with the Harvard frosh class he teaches based on the book. I can probably get access to most of the articles he cites.

So I'm pondering whether to try and find a dozen other people who just read this book and see what we might do with it.

The author of Unlikely Utopia: the Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism spoke here last night.

[...and I'll fill in the details later.]

[and I suck. I didn't get to this until today, Sunday the 18th, and I barely remember any of the talk's details.]

Michael Adams is an engaging speaker (as well as a good writer, judging by Fire and Ice.

The point to the talk was that pluralism has been successful in Canada in the second half of the 20th century in a very different way from in the US or Europe; and it has been surprisingly successful at integrating immigrants in important ways. Case in point: you might judge first-generation Canadian integration by their civic involvement- as a measure of how strongly people feel connected to their new communities.

Measuring foreign-born members of Parliament is interesting- because not only do they need to *want* to run for office, they need to successfully *win* office, and the statistics usually describe highly mixed-ethnicity MP ridings, so they're not winning solely among their own ethnicity of voters. One example was a Toronto riding with a Chinese-Canadian MP, where the majority ethnicity is Italian.

Anyhow: 13% of MPs are foreign born; first-generation Canadian; versus roughly 20% of the population being first-generation Canadian.

Or in the United States, where 4% of the House of Representatives are foreign-born, versus something like 11% of the population are foreign-born.

This review covers a small wedge of the talk's topics. I might've taken more complete notes, but I didn't. I hope to eventually read the book, and I can review it properly then. But don't hold your breath.

http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com is great.

I've read one of her stories, "The Swim Team" in Harpers (Jan '07). It was clever, but I need to re-read it before I decide to buy the book.

Now I want to see "Me and You and Everyone We Know."