Taxes, Reading and Mui Wo

Taxes...

It is late. I am finally doing the U.S. taxes for 2010. I am staring at a pile of receipts and pieces of paper and thinking OH MY GOD. HELP. Yeah, I have an accountant. That doesn't make the pile go down any faster.

Books...

OKAY, I read a great book I HOTEL by Karen Tei Yamashita. I highly recommend it.
I think it is her best book. It is also a welcome antidote to these tiresome stories about Asian American immigrants who become successful a) doctors b) lawyers c) bankers d) engineers. This is a story about Asian American political activists, radicals, union organizers and artists.

Then, I read a truly TERRIBLE book for my chick lit research called China Dolls. But it shows it takes all kinds--sincere and vapid, to make a community, I suppose...but geez, talk about bad writing. Then I think to myself, it is really true, if you can just remove some of that gray matter, life is probably a lot easier. When you don't understand how inane your perspective is, you're a lot happier than those who understand the impossible reality of the entire absurd universe we live in. I would have to conjecture that there would be some difference in the Chinese American and Korean American community chick lit. Haven't read any Korean American chick lit. But I would guess that Koreans would discuss church a lot more, in-family fighting, and Confucian hierarchy. There would be some intense lie involved. A big theft or sleazy act. And a cheating spouse or boyfriend somewhere. Maybe this is why Korean dramas are popular. Nothing like dysfunctional Confucianism combined with capitalism to make for some interesting TV serials. The Chinese American chick lit book I read seems fairly simplistically happily capitalistic and consumer oriented with a few food references and mother headaches...

Mui Wo

As for recent developments. We have agreed to share the bananas from the tree in front of our house with our neighbors. The property line goes between the banana trees. Some difficulty communicating this, but all is now friendly with a delivery of banana muffins from yours truly.

Stephen remains the crazy white guy who unearths building rubble with the shovel all weekend long. Seeing him out there takes me back to those fixer-upper Tucson, Arizona days. I have few fond memories of my actual MFA experience, but I made some good friends in Tucson, was broadened intellectually, actually, mostly by the women of color I met in other programs, and learned to love the desert. That old house looked great, Stephen worked like a dog on it (as did I, but I wasn't clipping electric wires, so can't claim endangering my life to fix the house) and we sold it within four hours of it being listed. We enjoyed the finished product one night, or if you get down to it, just about 1 hour because he screwed in the electric light plates right before we drove out of town to Los Angeles.

Nothing much new in our 'hood other than CLP adding to the light pollution and obscuring our night sky. While many are concerned about conservation of energy and light pollution, CLP and others are hell-bent on having bright yellow lights glaring into people's homes all night long.

As we have said before, we are enjoying the very last of Mui Wo as a nice village. Ten years from now it will look like...TST...