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howyoutalktostrangers · 4 years ago

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This interview was originally published by the Humber Literary Review

So,

Yasuko Thanh is an acclaimed short story writer and novelist from Victoria, B.C. After winning the Journey Prize for her short story about an island leper colony, “Floating like the Dead”, she went on to gain wide acclaim for her historical Vietnam-based novel The Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains. Her work often features spiritual or fantastical elements, as well as brutality and violence, and fixates on those who exist just outside the margins of polite society. Her latest is a memoir called Mistakes to Run With that details her upwards ascent from teenage prostitute to literary icon.

The Humber Literary Review’s Will Johnson caught up with Yasuko to talk about George Orwell, what it’s like to leave Christianity behind, and how it feels to be truly naked in public.

HLR: George Orwell once said “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying.” I thought about his words while reading your book, where it seems like you’re relentless about unearthing all your past foibles and sins for everyone to see. I admire your dedication to the truth, to introspection, but I wonder what compelled you to complete this public moral inventory.

Why share your darkest secrets and shames with such a huge audience?

YT: When I started writing this memoir, I was still in therapy after a stay in the psych ward. It was Christmas of 2016, and in a six months period I’d won the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Prize and been abandoned by my husband of nine years. Now it was Christmas and my new anti-psychotic meds were addressing the worst of my mental illness symptoms. I no longer spent each day contemplating how to take my life, so I stopped going to therapy, and convinced myself that the writing of the memoir could serve as a replacement for Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. All my life, writing has been a sort of processing mill for experience so this idea, of writing as pseudo-therapy, was nothing new.

I used my experiences to shed light on certain issues. I wanted to examine the stigmatization of street-workers, and its contribution to a social milieu in which violence against sex workers has flourished. The experiences didn’t have to me mine per se but they were the ones I was most intimate with. Stories come from everywhere but the best ones often come from our own lives, what we think and feel, who and what we care about.

At the time of the Pickton murders, the city of Vancouver propelled a harmful myth: that street workers were less valuable than other people. This thinking, this stigmatization of a group, was an obstacle to safer working conditions for them, and created the kind of environment on Vancouver’s downtown eastside from which nearly 60 women went missing.

Various studies have looked at why adolescents start selling sex. At the time I was working the streets, I often felt that Social Services and the legal system had driven me to it. I’d been denied Independent Living – welfare for youth under eighteen – I’d been jailed for shoplifting and could no longer maintain my career as a "booster." I had seen friends arrested and forced by the police to violently choke up whatever acid or hash they had stashed in their mouth. The sex workers I saw wore fur coats and red pig skin boots.

Money was the trade off for the conflicts I would experience with the law and abusive customers and pimps.

I spent much of my career in the sex trade in Vancouver.

From the age of fifteen onward, my life included prostitution, arrests, drugs, an abusive relationship, and struggles with mental health. In 1998, when I realized I was pregnant with my first child, I began to examine my past and consider what I wanted my future to be like. What would I tell my child about the kind of person I was?

The seeds for the memoir were planted back then.

My hope with this book was to begin a dialogue about the continued criminalisation of street-imbedded youth. A new model for understanding is needed, because their criminalisation entrenches them further in street life without addressing the social issues that put them there in the first place. I’d love for this book to spur a dialogue between legislators and the people for whom the skills and attitudes of the streets are logical means of survival. I’d love to contribute in some small way to the struggle for tolerance and open-mindedness.

HLR: In an interview with the Vancouver Sun, you said that you hate the “role of victim into which the sex-traded are often cast — because of all the accompanying pity”. I thought one of the most striking and refreshing elements of your memoir was that you never moralized about sex work, or wrote condescendingly about the people you met during that time. It was simply a choice you made, and a milieu you existed within, before moving on. That being said, the danger and violence associated with that lifestyle clearly took its toll both on you and others you love.

With all the stigma and misunderstanding surrounding the industry, is there something you’d like the average citizen to understand about that world?

YT: During the mid-1980s, right when I was entering the sex trade, working in both Victoria and Vancouver, I remember being chased from sidewalks with a garden hose, and men and women marching with placards. I hid behind dumpsters and waited for the mobs to clear. I was engaged with a profound feeling of puzzlement that people could be so self-assured without even knowing me or my name.

One night, when I was about eighteen-years-old, I was sitting with my friend Frances in a diner called the Korner Kitchen, on the same corner where we caught dates, the corner of Richards and Helmcken. We drank coffee in the vinyl-seated booth; she stirred in her sugar and licked the spoon before laying it on the table. Neither one of us could see ourselves turning tricks forever, and we shared the conviction that we’d be good at a multitude of things, if we only had a chance to try them. She wanted to be a teacher, could see herself in that role.

“But I wonder about a criminal record,” I said.

Both of us had one.

“With the kind of work you want to do,” she said, knowing I wanted to be a writer, “it won’t matter, anyway.”

The British philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch said that the goal of every writer was to cultivate what she called “true sight,” the ability to recognize other people really exist. I’m currently reading The Wisdom of the Body by Sherwin B. Nuland. In his chapter on “Biology, Destiny, and Free Will” he quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Without imagination of another’s mind there can be no understanding of the other and therefore no love, and without love there can be no morality.” To be good, he says, is to imagine intensely and comprehensively the pains and pleasures of others. The great secret is love, or a going out of our own nature, an identification of ourselves with the other.

The intimate tone of a memoir made it the ideal genre to negotiate such intensely personal material, and I hope it gives people the means to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

I guess what I’d like people to understand is that we/they have names. We have parents, siblings, spouses, children. To understand that “there but for the grace of God, go I.” That everyone has an identity outside of the roles we play even if, or maybe especially if, that role is dealer, junkie, prostitute, panhandler, street kid, etc.

HLR: You were raised within an evangelical Christian context, but left the church and your faith behind as a teenager. This is a painful and confusing process, one that I went through, that often leaves people without something to replace their beliefs with. Have you ever been successful at filling the God-shaped hole? And is there any sort of spirituality you embrace?

YT: The spirituality I embrace is my personal religion of honouring anything and everything that spurs my writing. I deal with any number of doubts on a regular basis. Will I be good enough? Is what I have to say worth saying? Will anybody care?

It’s enough to stop you in your tracks.

But stopping isn’t the same as quitting.

And what keeps me going, and writing, is, at its core, akin to religious faith.

Writing is what helps me battle the daily truth that people are separated by vast distances. And one of my main motivations, one of the reasons I write, is because it helps me capture something from the inexorable, outward flow of time. It’s nothing less than a fight against my own mortality, and a balm against my sadness at the transience of all things.

“No man writes except to get out of hell,” Antonin Artaud wrote from an insane asylum.

I have to strongly believe in what I’m doing or I can’t do it.

Toni Morrisson, expressing a similar dichotomy, wrote that love “is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” That sums it up nicely.

I write all chips in, plunging ahead confidently, blindly, without real proof that anything will come of it, though maybe being published is a little bit like proof that one is on the right track -- but you can’t wait for signs. My belief or practice is based more on a type of apprehension: that, if I don’t write, something bad may happen.

I’m not sure what.

Maybe I’d stop being me. Or I’d go insane. Or the sky would fall. Not-writing is my version of hell.

I love the Wallace Stevens quote that goes: “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

Reading can be a spiritual act, in the way it affects the soul. Writing, for me is a way of expressing my hopes and wishes, and in that sense, it is a form of prayer.

HLR: I’m working on a memoir at the moment, and one of the constant concerns is whether or not I’m honestly depicting the people involved—especially if the truth is less than flattering. I know you’ve changed some names, and utilized a composite character, but I’m sure there are people from your past who could potentially read your work and take issue with what you’ve written. How did you navigate these concerns while writing Mistakes to Run With, and how did you decide what to include and what not to?

YT: As you’ve pointed out, the people who share our lives may have very different opinions from us about what is appropriate and what is not to include in a work on nonfiction. I did ask one of my children about a specific episode in their life and whether they would feel comfortable with me sharing the story. They didn’t. So, out of respect for them, I didn’t include it in the book. However, the rest of my family and friends were fair game.

That said, my aim was not to vilify anyone, because that’s bad writing, and I even pulled some punches with the intent of creating well-rounded characters. Good writing portrays character with all its complexity intact. Though, I’m sure there are people out there who are angry about things I wrote about. My answer to them is, Write your own book. I knew well in advance that I wasn’t going to let friends or family read it before it was published. I didn’t want to be swayed by their comments. I didn’t want to censure myself. I think writing by consensus is kind of a terrible idea. Post-publication, I’m happy to talk to anyone who takes issue, but the idea of being vetted beforehand?

I think the prospect of allowing friends and family to sound in with their evaluations and appraisals of the work would make me too nervous to write at all.

HLR: I love how diverse your work is, and how you seem to effortlessly jump genres. Your next novel is about Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century woman born with a genetic condition that resulted in abnormal growths of hair all over her body. I’m curious whether you’re purposefully challenging yourself to try new things, or if inspiration just happened to take you there. How did you land on this particular premise?

YT: That particular idea came about at a time I was reading a lot of books on so-called “freaks.” One book I remember in particular was A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities but Jan Bondeson. I came across Julia Pastrana’s story in there. What intrigues me about her story is the fact that she married her manager and toured across Europe and North America, even meeting royalty according to some versions. The hook (for me) is the way the story can be read one of two ways: her manager was just another kind of pimp who married her and told her he loved her to keep his paycheck close to home, or he was a man who, despite her unlikely appearance, was able to look past her outer shell and see her, love her, for who she was...I like the idea of playing with both versions, and having portions of each stand in for the truth. I like the idea of, perhaps, the truth being unknown even to Pastrana and her manager.

We’re, all of us to varying degrees, mysteries to ourselves, often acting on our feelings whose origins lie in conflicting places. In these apparent dichotomies is where people come most alive for me. These contradictions in ourselves -- that’s when characters come most alive for me.

But here’s where I’m going to burst your bubble. That project has been put on the back-burner. Right now I’m working on two other projects. One is a collection of short stories with the working title, Death Rituals for a Modern Age. The other is a novel set in the present day, tentatively called, The Administration of Elementary Hopes. They share common themes of love and death (what else?) and I’m trying to lighten the load of the material through the use of dark humour, and in the case of the novel, the structure and tropes of the Gothic tale.

HLR: Quill & Quire once quoted you saying “a good scream is worth a whole couple of months of therapy.” You were speaking about your musical projects, including your neo-punk band 12 Gauge Facial. I imagine the artistic impulse involved in creating your music is different than the much slower-paced process of writing a book. How does music fit into your artistic practice?

YT: The artistic impulse involved in creating music is different than the much slower-paced process of writing a book. Music fits into my artistic practice like a really good chocolate bar between meals. It’s one of the things I do between writing different works, or to jog something loose.

It also gives me a chance to express in greater depth things that continue to haunt but that were glossed over in the memoir. You can’t fit everything into the pages of a book. If I had it would have made a better doorstop than a book. The original plan was to release an album at the same time as the memoir. My idea was that it could form a kind of soundtrack for the book -- but, alas, money and time conspired against me. That said, the project hasn’t been abandoned. Only postponed. I have sixteen original tracks that I’m hoping to release at some point in the near future.

HLR: I really appreciated the conclusion of your book, though I won’t share any spoilers here. What I appreciated about your approach was that you didn’t tie things up with a tidy bow, claiming your life issues are resolved, but rather acknowledged that you continue to be a work-in-progress (as we all are) with problems to face. Life doesn’t have endings, really, and neither does your book. Did you have to resist the urge to include a “What I’ve Learned” passage to the end?

YT: Resisting the urge wasn’t hard — in fact, I fought against this type of ending. Initially, the memoir ended many years earlier than the version which iI published. Both my editor and agent urged me to look at the material again, and consider extending the narrative up to the present day. In the end, I agreed to have the ending of the book coincide with the Rogers Writers Trust prize, and I’m happy I did so. But rather than have the book end with a Frank Capra-esque moment, where we know that everything from here on in is going to be rosy, I wanted to convey the sense that, as you said, life doesn’t have endings and we all are continuously working on ourselves by squarely facing our problems. I attempted to do this structurally, in terms of chapter headings, and through repetition of certain key lines or phrases.

I’m glad you think it worked.

The Literary Goon

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lovequotescom · 5 years ago

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The wedding challenge: Can the trend of decreasing wedding prices in East Asia be reversed?

HONG KONG: decreasing wedding prices are increasingly being seen across the world, however it is possibly within the aging communities of Asia that the growing wide range of singletons is stressing moms and dads – and governments – the absolute most.

In Asia, moms and dads have actually taken fully to offering leaflets in matchmaking areas, often minus the younger generation’s knowledge; in Japan, blind relationship cafes make an effort to create busy experts over some coffee and dessert, and when they find no chemistry, there’s constantly going back into slogging away at the office.

A preference for baby boys has resulted in a massive gender imbalance and men who can’t find a wife at home, so they’ve turned to marriage migrants: Foreign women are now getting married to Korean men to escape poverty in South Korea. In Hong Kong, guys finding lovers in mainland Asia has resulted in a surplus of females into the town and an agency that is dating regional ladies US$600 for the blind relationship supper which international males could go to free of charge.

Yet absolutely absolutely nothing appears to assist. Wedding prices continue steadily to slump across East Asia. It’s a pressing problem because in Confucian communities, no wedding can indicate no young ones, which may jeopardize a country’s economic leads and, perhaps, its success.

MARRIAGELESS IN JAPAN

While parallels of moscowbrides login less marriages and plunging delivery prices are available in all eastern Asian societies, the broad trends almost always were only available in Japan.

Based on Japan’s nationwide Institute of Population and personal protection analysis, because of the time they turn 50, one out of four men that are japanese solitary, as does one out of seven females.

But that’s perhaps maybe maybe not when it comes to lack of attempting. Studies additionally claim that numerous singletons that are japanese would like to get hitched.

Therefore Arata Funabara, four times hitched himself, started a rate cafe that is dating Ginza to aid. Workers in offices can drop set for an hour or so in the center of a single day to chat within the opposite gender.

In real Japanese fashion, most come in pairs or trios. Funabara provides them a range of 3 wristbands that are coloured. Many choose “not searching” blue, although the cafe owner claims that doesn’t suggest they have been actually uninterested.

“Japanese individuals, our company is extremely bashful. ”

But anthropologist Yoshie Moriki states this hasn’t been the truth. She recalls when you look at the 80s and 90s when Japan experienced quick financial development, males had been more excited about courting females. Nevertheless, 2 decades of financial stagnation changed the video game for teenage boys.

“These teenagers within their 20s and 30s now are making less cash compared to the generation that is previous. But nevertheless the ladies are searching for similar amount of financial capability, ” she said.

“At the time that is same teenage boys by themselves nevertheless think it is their obligation to give you, thus I think the financial framework is actually extremely hard. ”

To be certain, Moriki’s perhaps perhaps not blaming females for seeking economic protection in a wedding. In mainland China and Hong Kong too, females frequently desire to “marry up”, an activity made harder given that they’ve been better educated and better paid by themselves. However in Japan, wedding, or simply the perception of planning to get hitched, might take a cost on a woman’s job.

“There’s plenty of businesses, ” says Prof Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies at Temple University. “Companies assume ladies are likely to get hitched and possess young ones, so they really wear them the alleged mommy track, in less responsible roles. ”

Even in the event a female can skirt that trap at the beginning of her profession, getting married and children that are having often requires her to just take a lifetime career break.

“Gender division of functions continues to be quite strong. Raising kiddies and care that is taking of family members is observed as being a woman’s work, ” says Kingston. “If they sacrifice either child care or senior look after their professions, they’ve been accused to be selfish. ”

As soon as from the workforce, the majority of women believe it is impractical to come back to a job that is fulltime. This means the quick profession break would find yourself costing a Japanese woman US$2 million in life time profits.

“Naturally whenever ladies think of wedding, these are typically very careful in Japan, ” claims Zhou Yanfei, A senior researcher during the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training. “They need to set money degree for his or her lovers. ”

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

When Asians don’t marry, they tend to not have kiddies.

In Britain, near to 50 percent of the latest children are now actually born away from wedlock. The figure is simply 2.3 in Japan, 1.9 in Korea.

For all your efforts made towards halting the populace decrease, few Asian governments, including Japan’s, allow it to be easy for males and females to possess kiddies by themselves.

“Politicians are reluctant to get here because their concept of the Japanese identification is associated with the original family” which is comprised of a daddy, a mom and two kids, stated Kingston.

“By 2040, they estimate 40 percent of Japanese households will undoubtedly be solitary individuals, and so the family that is traditional currently departed, but federal federal government policies continue to be assuming that it is a powerful pillar of culture. ”

Solitary mom Masami Onishi together with her two young daughters at house in Osaka. (Picture: Wei Du)

For the women that are few decide to be solitary mothers, difficulty awaits.

Based on Zhou of Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, 51 percent of solitary moms in Japan reside in poverty, plus one in seven states she cannot afford necessities that are basic food at the least every once in awhile.

Masami Onishi, 24, works nine hours a time, six days per week to help make us$800 per month. Having a full-time task is additionally a necessity on her to get some federal government welfare.

Though never married, she wears a marriage band.

“once I didn’t wear the band, strangers would show up and tell my girls that they had no dad. It hurt them badly, ” she stated.

The insurance policy of requiring mothers that are single work befuddles specialists.

“The rate of poverty does not alter quite definitely even though the moms will work, due to the position that is weak occupy when you look at the labour market, ” said Zhou. “The federal government has to boost welfare paying for these families now, because poor moms raise kids who carry on become bad. ”

The inter-generational transfer of poverty is maybe perhaps not news to Yasuko Kawabe whom operates a meals bank for solitary moms and kids. But she feels politicians are intentionally searching one other means.

“If we assist these kids now, they’ll grow up become taxpayers for the united states, ” she states. “Just consider exactly just just how wonderful that might be. ”

WE HAVE BEEN NOT SPECIAL

An extra problem for Korea and Asia in nudging their visitors to marry is just a choice for infant guys, that has resulted in gender that is skewed, and today statistically a percentage of the guys won’t ever look for a spouse in the home.

Enter Vietnam, nation that stocks their Confucian culture. Beginning within the 90s, commercial wedding agents took Korean males here to take into consideration a partner.

For Korea though, it had been an affront into the national country’s identity.

“We have traditionally been convinced that Korea is a uni-race, pure country that is blooded” said Prof Choi Hyup, a study teacher in anthropology at Chonnam University.

Into the hastily arranged unions, the mismatch of objectives often resulted in tragedies.

“The ladies arrived right right here since they wished to assist their own families in Vietnam. The males are usually really disabled or old. They covered the ladies become right here to simply help their own families, ” said Yoo Si Hwang who counsels Vietnamese migrants in a Seoul church.

The korean government tightened rules for cross-border marriages, setting a minimum income requirement for the men after a slew of high profile abuses and a few murders of Vietnamese brides in the 90s and early 2000s. Moreover it launched multicultural household facilities round the nation to greatly help the foreign spouses incorporate.

Pham Minh Chinh is amongst the tens and thousands of young Vietnamese girls who married Korean men significantly more than a decade their senior. She’s now proficient in Korean, adapted well towards the lifetime of a strawberry farmer and raised two kids along with her spouse in Korea’s rural Chonnam province.

Kiddies of mix-race wedding though tend to struggle in school. Because their moms frequently speak restricted Korean, they develop language abilities later on than their peers.

The theory that being Korean that is pure-blooded is nevertheless lingers, and sometimes means they become objectives of bullies.

“We have to show our kids it’s just one of the many cultures in the world that we are not special, ” says Choi. “That the Korean culture is not special. Because exactly just what option do we’ve? ”

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