How to Read Now E-Book

Elaine Castillo

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 406

Beschreibung

'I cannot say enough about How to Read Now... Check it out' Roxane Gay 'A red-hot grenade... One of my favourite books of the year' Jia Tolentino 'Energetically brilliant, warmly humane, incisively funny' Andrew Sean Greer 'I gasped, shouted, and holler-laughed . . . Phenomenal' R.O. Kwon 'A wake-up call. A broadside. A rich and brilliant war cry' Chris Power How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words - beautiful, aspirational - are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, she moves to wrest reading away from the aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work. How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico. At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman's reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy - within ourselves, and with each other.

Leseprobe

HOW TO READ NOW

‘Castillo is hugely talented’ Observer

‘Exciting, important and energising, How to Read Now is the book we need now: a clarion call for decentering whiteness and for a truly decolonised publishing, critical and reading culture. It reaffirms that writers of colour are here; we are here to hold power to account; we are here to read each other and cheer for each other; we are here to stay. I am so grateful for Elaine Castillo’s beautiful mind, and for this vital and moving book.’ Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

‘How to Read Now is a powerful punch in criticism’s solar plexus: Castillo’s take as the “unexpected reader” is what literature needs now, both an absolute bomb and a balm – a master class in the art of reading. Her art is a corrective and a curative but also just a joy – humorous, insanely erudite and absolutely necessary for our times.’ Gina Apostol, author of Gun Dealer’s Daughter

‘Funny, smart, brilliant, How to Read Now is a tour de force. Castillo skewers popular thought around reading, suggesting a new way forward, in sharp and incisive prose. I’ll never read Didion the same way again.’ Kasim Ali, author ofGood Intentions

ALSO BY ELAINE CASTILLO

America Is Not the Heart

First published in the United States in 2022 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Elaine Castillo, 2022

The moral right of Elaine Castillo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 492 5

EBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 494 9

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

I said, “All along I have been wondering how you got to be the way you are. Just how it was that you got to be the way you are.”

JAMAICA KINCAID, LUCY

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE, OR A VIRGO CLARIFIES THINGS

HOW TO READ NOW

READING TEACHES US EMPATHY, AND OTHER FICTIONS

HONOR THE TREATY

THE LIMITS OF WHITE FANTASY

MAIN CHARACTER SYNDROME

“REALITY IS ALL WE HAVE TO LOVE”

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN ASIAN FILM, OR WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT REPRESENTATION

THE CHILDREN OF POLYPHEMUS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WORKS CITED

HOWTOREADNOW

AUTHOR’S NOTE,OR A VIRGOCLARIFIES THINGS

In the years since my debut novel came out, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to read. Not about how to write—I wouldn’t trust a book about how to write by a debut novelist, any more than I would trust a book about how to swim by someone who’d accomplished the exceptional achievement of not having drowned, once. But reading? Most days when I look back at my childhood, it feels like first I became a reader; then I became a person. And in the postdebut years of touring, and traveling—in hotel rooms in Auckland and East Lansing, on festival stages in Manila and Rome, in bookstores in London, and in the renovated community library of my hometown, Milpitas—a thought came back to me, again and again; a ghost with unfinished business, a song I couldn’t get out of my head: we need to change how we read.

The we I’m talking about here is generally American, since that’s the particular cosmic sports team I’ve found myself on, through the mysteries of fate and colonial genocide—but in truth, it’s a more capacious we than that, too. A we of the reading world, perhaps. By readers I don’t just mean the literate, a community I don’t particularly issue from myself, although I am, in spite of everything, among its fiercest spear-bearers. I mean something more expansive and yet more humble: the we that is in the world, and thinks about it, and then lives in it. That’s the kind of reader I am, and love—and that’s the reading practice I’m most interested in, and most alive to myself.

The second thought that has come to my house and still won’t grab its coat and leave is this: the way we read now is simply not good enough, and it is failing not only our writers—especially, but not limited to, our most marginalized writers—but failing our readers, which is to say, ourselves.

When I talk about reading, I don’t just mean books, though of course as a writer, books remain kin to me in ways that other art forms—even ones I may have come to love with an easier enthusiasm, in recent years—aren’t. At heart, reading has never just been the province of books, or the literate. Reading doesn’t bring us to books; or at least, that’s not the trajectory that really matters. Sure, some of us are made readers—usually because of the gift (and privilege) of a literate parent, a friendly librarian, a caring kindergarten teacher—and as readers, we then come to discover the world of books. But the point of reading is not to fetishize books, however alluring they might look on an Instagram flat lay. Books, as world-encompassing as they are, aren’t the destination; they’re a waypoint. Reading doesn’t bring us to books—books bring us to reading. They’re one of the places we go to help us to become readers in the world. I know that growing up, film and TV were as important to my formation as a critical thinker—to the ways in which I engaged with “representation” in any real sense—so I can’t imagine not writing about them, even in a book supposedly about reading.

When I talk about how to read now, I’m not just talking about how to read books now; I’m talking about how to read our world now. How to read films, TV shows, our history, each other. How to dismantle the forms of interpretation we’ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen. How to understand that it’s meaningful when Wes Anderson’s characters throw Filipinx bodies off an onscreen boat like they’re nothing; how to understand that bearing witness to that scene means nothing if we can’t read it—if we don’t have the tools to understand its context, meaning, and effect in the world. That it’s meaningful to have seen HBO’s Watchmen and been moved and challenged by its subversive reckoning with the kinds of superhero tropes many kids, including myself, grew up on. Books will always have a certain historical pride of place in my life—but it’s also because of books that reading can have a more expansive meaning in that life, both practically and politically.

In a more personal sense, as a first-generation American from a working-class / fragilely middle-class upbringing, most of the people in my life simply don’t read: aren’t sufficiently confident in their English, or don’t have the leisure time, or have long found books and reading culture intimidating and foreclosed to them (for all my love of independent bookstores, I’ve also been glared at like a potential shoplifter in enough of the white-owned ones to temper that love). I don’t want a book called How to Read Now to speak only to the type of people who read books and attend literary festivals—and in the same vein, I don’t want it to let off the hook people who think they don’t read at all. I can’t write a book about reading that tells people there’s only one type of reading that counts—but equally, just because you don’t read books at all doesn’t mean you’re not reading, or being read in the world. Of course, How to Read Now runs off the tongue a little easier than How to Dismantle Your Entire Critical Apparatus.

I’ve been an inveterate reader all my life, and yet I’m writing this book at the time in my life when I have the least faith I’ve ever had in books, or indeed reading culture in general. (The fact that this sentiment coincides with having become a published author doesn’t escape me.) For my sins, I haven’t lost faith in the capacity of books to save us, remake us, take us by the scruff and show us who we were, who we are, and who we might become; that conviction has been unkillable in me for too long. But I have in some crucial way lost my faith in our capacity to truly be commensurate to the work that reading asks of us; in our ability to make our reading culture live up to the world we’re reading in—and for.

When I first began writing this book, I was in Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand, as a guest at the Auckland Writers Festival. Much happened in between those stolen, heady moments of writing on hotel room couches in the spring of 2019 and the (not quite) postpandemic world we now find ourselves in—worrying about the nurses in my family still working on the front lines; supporting loved ones who’d lost their jobs; mourning loved ones who’d lost their lives; joining the many marches here in the Bay to protest the anti-Black police brutality that took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, among so many others, as well as the rise in anti-Asian hate, fueled by Trump’s virulently racist coronavirus rhetoric. I’d also rolled into lockdown after already being essentially confined at home in convalescence for over two months: in December 2019, just before Christmas, I’d been hospitalized for emergency surgery due to the internal hemorrhaging caused by an ectopic pregnancy, in which my left fallopian tube was surgically removed in a unilateral salpingectomy. This was my second pregnancy loss, after complications with a D&C for a miscarriage at twelve weeks left me in and out of King’s College Hospital over the summer of 2017, back when I was still living in London and editing my first novel, America Is Not the Heart.

All this to say, when I look back at the inception of this book, I can’t help but feel that I’m looking at it from an entirely different world. In 2018 and 2019, the things I’d witnessed and experienced in the publishing industry during those early first-novel book tours and festivals made it distressingly clear to me that there was also something profoundly wrong with our reading culture, and particularly the ways in which writers of color were expected to exist in it: the roles they were meant to play, the audiences they were meant to educate and console, the problems their books were meant to solve. It started to feel like it would be impossible to continue working in this industry if I didn’t somehow put down in writing the deep-seated unease I had around this framing.

I wanted to write about the reading culture I was seeing: the way it instrumentalized the books of writers of color to do the work that white readers should have always been doing themselves; the way our reading culture pats itself on the back for producing “important” and “relevant” stories that often ultimately reduce communities of color to their most traumatic episodes, thus creating a dynamic in which predominantly white American readers expect books by writers of color to “teach” them specific lessons—about historical trauma, farflung wars, their own sins—while the work of predominantly white writers gets to float, palely, in the culture, unnamed, unmarked, universal as oxygen. None of these are particularly new issues; Toni Morrison’s landmark, indispensable Playing in the Dark remains the urtext on the insidious racial backbone of our reading culture. But I was occasionally alarmed during book tour events when I would make reference to Playing in the Dark, and realize that many in the audience had not read it and, indeed, seemingly hadn’t ever had a substantial reckoning with the politics, especially racial politics, of their reading practices.

That was then. I still believe in reading, and I still very much want to write this book; I have written it, after all. But there was the intellectual idea of writing a book called How to Read Now, in a critical attempt to contend with the racial politics and ethics of how we read our books, our history, and each other—and there was the actual lived practice of writing that book, in the midst of the historic social upheaval brought to us by a global pandemic whose grotesquely racist coverage and criminally incompetent mismanagement under Trump’s America has not only utterly upended the daily lives of everyone I know, but has laid bare the outrageous truths many of us have always known, in particular regarding the true value of Black and Brown lives in this country, where systemic injustice and government neglect has meant predominantly poorer Black and Brown communities have borne the brunt of COVID-19’s destruction.

When I was working on this book in 2019, there were things I believed stridently about the politics of reading and writing. I know the twenty-first-century pose of literary personality in late capitalism is usually one of excoriating selfdoubt and anxiety, but I am a bossy Virgo bitch, and I have generally always been irritatingly sure of myself and my convictions, occasionally to my detriment, certainly to the chagrin of those who have chosen to love me. But I would be lying if I said that the events of 2020 and 2021 hadn’t profoundly affected me, and begun to permanently transform how I think about the world, and how to make art in it. I think most of all it’s become clear to me that when I named the book How to Read Now, I must have subconsciously meant the title both as a bossy Virgo directive and as an inquiry: a question, openended. I, too, want to know how to read now.

But what I thought then, and what I still think now, is this: the way we read now is, by and large, morally bankrupt and indefensible, and must change immediately, because we are indeed failing not just our writers and ourselves, but more pressingly our future—which will never look any different from our current daily feed of apocalypse if we don’t figure out a different way to read the world we live in. I’ll paraphrase the hackneyed quote by the equally hackneyed George Santayana (who was often a pretty piss-poor reader of the world himself, and who believed, for example, that intermarriage between superior races—his own—and inferior races—hi—should be prevented): if we don’t figure out a different way to read our world, we’ll be doomed to keep living in it.

I don’t know about you, but I find that prospect unbearable. Anyone who is perfectly comfortable with keeping the world just as it is now and reading it the way they’ve always read it—is, frankly, a fed, cannot be trusted, and is probably wiretapping your phone.

HOW TO READ NOW

White supremacy makes for terrible readers, I find. The thing is, often when people talk about racists, they talk in terms of ignorance. They’re just ignorant, they say. Such ignorant people. I’m sorry, my grandpa’s really ignorant. That was an ignorant thing to say. What an ignorant comment. We’re besieged on all sides by the comforting logic and pathos of ignorance. It’s a logic that excuses people—bad readers—from their actions; from the living effect of their bad reading.

Most people are not, in fact, all that ignorant, i.e., lacking knowledge, or simply unaware. Bad reading isn’t a question of people undereducated in a more equitable and progressive understanding of what it means to be a person among other people. Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity. Most people are in fact highly advanced in their education in these economies, economies that say, very plainly, that cis straight white lives are inherently more valuable, interesting, and noble than the lives of everyone else; that they deserve to be set in stone, centered in every narrative. It’s not a question of bringing people out of their ignorance—if only someone had told me that Filipinos were human, I wouldn’t have massacred all of them!—but a question of bringing people out of their deliberately extensive education.

When I say that white supremacy makes for terrible readers, I mean that white supremacy is, among its myriad ills, a formative collection of fundamentally shitty reading techniques that impoverishes you as a reader, a thinker, and a feeling person; it’s an education that promises that whole swaths of the world and their liveliness will be diminished in meaning to you. Illegible, intangible, forever unreal as cardboard figures in a diorama. They don’t know how to read us, I’ve heard fellow writer friends of color complain, usually after a particularly frustrating Q&A in which a white person has either taken offense to something in our books or in the discussion (usually the mention of whiteness at all will be enough to offend these particularly thin-skinned readers), or said something well-meaning but ultimately self-serving, usually about how their story made them feel terrible about your country.

White supremacy is a comprehensive cultural education whose primary function is to prevent people from reading—engaging with, understanding—the lives of people outside its scope. This is even more apparent in the kind of reading most enthusiastically trafficked by the white liberal literary community that has such an outsize influence, intellectually and economically, on the publishing industry today. The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, communitydestroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.

Writers like me often do carry the weight of forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, and trauma. But how then are we read? And equally as important, how then are we edited? How is our work circulated in a marketplace that struggles not just to see all of its writers as equals, but to pay them as equals? For if our stories primarily serve to educate, console, and productively scold a comfortable white readership, then those stories will have failed their readers, and those readers will have failed those stories. All the “representation matters” rhetoric in the world means nothing if we do not address the fundamentally fucked-up relationship between writers of color and white audiences that persists in our contemporary reading culture.

I have no desire to write yet another instruction manual for the sociocultural betterment of white readers. I don’t know any writer who, if asked what they wanted their work to do in the world, would reply: “Make better white people.” Equally, I don’t see a sustainable way to continue in my industry without reckoning with the rot at its core, which is that, by and large, the English-language publishing industry centers the perspective and comfort of its overwhelmingly white employee base and audience, leaving writers of color to be positioned along that firmly established structure: as flavors of the month, as heroic saviors, as direly important educators, as necessary interventions (“classic American story / genre / historical episode, but now populated with brown people!” continues to be one of the most dominant and palatable gateways for white audiences to become accustomed to seeing Black and Brown bodies on their screens and in their pages), as vessels of sensational trauma—but rarely as artists due the same depth and breadth of critical engagement as their white colleagues; rarely as artists whose works are approached not just as sources of history or educational potential but specific and sublime sensual immersion: sites of wonder, laughter, opulence, precision; a place to sink into the particular weather of a particular town; a place to pang at the love of strangers, thwarted or salvaged.

At heart, my issue with how we read is as much an existential grievance as it is a labor dispute: the industry is simply not serving its employees equally. And it asks, repeatedly, for uncompensated overtime from writers of color who, often in lieu of engaging in detail about the actual book they’ve actually written, find themselves instead managing the limited critical capacity of mostly white readers, here offended by the appearance of a non-English word, there alienated by a conversation not translated for their benefit. Writers of color often find themselves doing the second, unspoken and unsalaried job of not just being a professional writer but a Professional Person of Color, in the most performative sense—handy to have on hand for panels or journal issues about race or power or revolution, so the festival or literary journal doesn’t appear totally racist; handy to praise publicly and singularly, so as to draw less attention to the white audience, rapt in the seats too expensive for local readers of color. Running the gauntlet of book promotion for my first novel, it became patently obvious that much of our literary industry functions as little more than a quaint pastime for its adherents, like Marie-Antoinette in the Petit Trianon’s Hameau de la Reine: a place to merely cosplay diversity, empathy, education. Not a place to truly be diverted from oneself; not a place to be made humble in one’s vulnerability; not a place to be laid bare in one’s unknowing.

IT WAS MY FATHER WHO FIRST INTRODUCED ME TO BOOKS. I grew up in what was once a small town—the tech boom of the Bay Area ensures it will never be a small town again—in which I was never a visible, singled-out minority. Instead, I was part of an exceedingly invisible and thus banal majority: what’s often called, usually with a faintly lurid dash of fearmongering, a “majority-minority town.”

I emphasize the demographic makeup of the community I came out of primarily because I’ve found that so much of our contemporary imaginings of minority lives, especially immigrant lives, always seem to posit the idea of the Only One: the only Asian, in the white town. The one minority, beset on all sides by white people. That narrative is often sold as the preeminent narrative of minority experience in America, and the people who sell this story often frame it as a story of typical American hardship: the difficulty of being the only Asian kid in a white class.

That this dominant narrative bears zero resemblance to my own experience doesn’t make it untrue, of course; I know there are plenty of people who grew up as the only kid of color in a white town. But it’s the way that narrative is deployed that matters here. It successfully centers whiteness in a minoritized person’s story—making their narrative about adapting or not adapting to “America,” which is always a code for adapting to whiteness. It also mistakes difference for oppression, which is not the same thing: to be the only Asian person in an otherwise white town is just as much an indicator of privilege as it is of oppression, because most economically disadvantaged minorities do not live in majority-white towns. In a place like the Bay Area, they more typically live, as I did, in the satellite suburban towns that house a larger urbanized area’s lower-income support workers—my town was made up mostly of Filipinx, Vietnamese, and Mexican working-class immigrant families (with pockets of wealthier immigrant families here and there) whose jobs as security guards, nurses, cooks, domestic workers, and subcontracted landscapers serviced the larger, whiter towns to which we all commuted, for work or school.

I’ve very often seen successful people of color framing their experiences of being the only person of color in their classrooms as narratives about struggle, rather than also being narratives about class and power; I emphasize often, because it seems to me that in fact many successful people of color in our mainstream media happen to be precisely the sort of people who grew up the only person of color in white towns. It is precisely because they grew up adjacent to whiteness and its social and economic privilege, precisely because they were well versed at an early age on how to adapt to and accommodate whiteness that they could thus use those skills as professional adults, living under white supremacy.

Like many other Filipinx people of a similarly workingclass, middle-class aspirational background, I grew up surrounded by a wide and diverse (it should not be a revelation that a minority community can itself be diverse) Filipinx community. It meant that I grew up with the assumed sense of my own centeredness, if not necessarily centrality or importance. I was not visibly particularly different, special, or unique from most anyone else I grew up with. And while there were of course conflicts mainly across class and colorist lines, whiteness was not the reference point or framework in my community, and so I did not learn early on to prioritize it in my psychic, intellectual, or sociopolitical life. That includes the way I read—the way, more specifically, my father taught me to read.

My parents had a mixed-class marriage, although on paper, by the time I was born, it wouldn’t have read as such. By then, my father was a security guard at a computer chip company and my mother was a nurse holding down at least two, sometimes three, different jobs at various hospitals and nursing homes. My mother came from abject rural poverty of the kind that has made her literacy shaky, not just in English but in Tagalog, the controversial lingua franca of the Philippines (her first language—and mine, now lost—being Pangasinan). Like many first-generation kids, I spend a lot of my time as my mother’s English safety net, language-checking everything from legal documents to her Facebook statuses.

My father, on the other hand, born in 1930 (and so twentytwo years older than my mother), came from a comfortable upper-middle-class Ilocano background—a dark-skinned boy descended from a mix of the indigenous northerners of Luzon and the merchant Chinese class—in which literacy and literary education were a given. He circulated with people who read widely in English, who discussed the literary and philosophical merits of Philippine national hero José Rizal (the only national hero I can think of who was also a novelist). It’s because of this that my reading life can never be disentangled from questions of class and power, as readership has always been not just a gift but a privilege: Would I have become the reader I became if I’d had a different father? He was making me read Plato’s Symposium when I was in middle school, a fact that none of my white teachers believed, and in fact actively and aggressively tried to disprove—another lesson familiar to many kids of color I know.

One of the first places I ever learned about bad readers was from white teachers in the Catholic schools I attended. (Catholic schools are the nearest thing to affordable private schools for working-class immigrant parents—not to mention the fact that my mother was and remains a devout if irreverent and syncretic Catholic, and wanted her children educated in the faith. In my case, my parents only had enough gas in them to send one kid to such a school—which means my younger brother had a largely public education. That, among other things, has created a palpable class difference that still affects us today.) Some people have great teachers growing up, and I truly envy them, but my great ones were very, very rare; for the most part, my memories of education are of sneering, condescension, and neglect. Teachers in the Mountain View / Los Altos region of the Bay Area where I attended junior high and high school—significantly whiter and wealthier than the Milpitas schools I attended throughout elementary school—often seemed threatened, occasionally enraged, by the idea of a smart, bookish, and vocally irreverent Filipinx kid. It was understood that if kids who looked like me were ever to succeed, we were meant to do so docilely, gratefully, quietly. Not confidently. Not proudly. And when I look back now, despite the casual cruelty of those days, that educational neglect also meant I never really got a successful education in the profoundly incurious way those teachers read books, the world, and me.

Instead, I got my father’s kind of reading. In the world of books that I lived in with him, I was in Plato’s world, playing in the cave; there was no difference between me and James Joyce, and darling, I should really read Finnegans Wake to experience what some people called modernism; ditto Rizal, and Bertrand Russell, and Kant, and Virginia Woolf, and buckets and buckets of Greek mythology, which I fell in love with and nearly became a classicist for in college, during my I-want-to-be-the-Pinay-Anne-Carson stage.

We read a lot of white people. But we didn’t read them with a white-centering view; we didn’t read them like those books and the worlds in them were the only ones that existed, or mattered. We read them like they were just books, and they had things to say, and they were sometimes very powerful and fragile and beautiful; just like I was a person, and I had things to say, and I was sometimes very powerful and fragile and beautiful. It was, I realize now, a deeply weird, genreless, freewheeling way of reading. It wasn’t decolonial exactly—I mean, we were still reading the jerks, and Kant obviously didn’t think we were human beings—but the motley, secular, antihierarchical, unacademic way we read this wide swath of books bore the seeds of the decolonial. Reading with my father taught me to read across borders, and to read in translation (he loved Thomas Mann and Goethe, and he loved that I loved Japanese and Latin American writers like Banana Yoshimoto or Manuel Puig). Our practice taught me most of all to read like a free, mysterious person who was encountering free, mysterious things; to value the profound privacy and irregularity of my own thinking; to spend time in my head and the heads of others, and to see myself shimmer in many worlds—to let many worlds shimmer, lively, in me.

So much of why that reading was truly liberating and lifeforming was that it went hand in hand with my father’s (and to a slightly lesser extent, my mother’s; lesser not in terms of intensity but only in terms of volume, since she worked so much that she simply wasn’t actually around to do this kind of ideological child-raising) frankly ferocious commitment to instilling in me what I know now to be a furnace of immutable and indestructible pride—its life-giving warmth buried so deep in my bones it must have belonged to someone much, much older than either of us, much older even than either of the countries we came from. An ancient life-source, evergreen.

My father died in 2006, after a long—too long, in his opinion—fight with lymphoma. When it became clear we’d do anything to keep him alive, even if that meant repeated trips to the ICU, repeated nights sleeping in hospital waiting rooms waiting for morning visiting hours to begin, he took the decision out of our hands: he took his oxygen mask off in the middle of the night, hours after insisting on seeing me, for what I didn’t realize was the last time I would ever see him fully conscious. He let himself go first, so we would have to let him go, too.

My father died penniless and indebted, and I inherited nothing from him—nothing but my entire life: the frequency at which my attention to the world resonates, and most of all, that bone-deep, soul-shaped pride, which to this day I feel move in me, like a chord that will not go silent.

Pride is not always one of the best qualities to be abundant in, and it got me into a lot of trouble as a kid; if you’re proud, but treated a little or a lot like shit by either boys in your class, or lighter-skinned wealthier Filipinx friends, or white teachers, you have a tendency to be constitutionally programmed to start rumbling the first person who blinks at you funny. I got into a lot—a lot—of fights as a kid, and the family mythos of my child self is one that alternates near-death fragility (I was also a physically sickly child) and a pugnacity bordering on the feral.

The only thing that prevented that pride from becoming my villain origin story—well, for now—was its steadfast companion, which was the gift of the town I grew up in: the unshakable knowledge of my own smallness, in both a terrestrial and a cosmic sense. I was never the Only One: not singular, not special, not different. My community showed me that I was not best understood by being contextualized against whiteness; I did not have to translate myself for its understanding or approval, which I had little experience with and was never told I needed. I did not have to perform or deform myself for the right to be myself. Growing up in a town like Milpitas taught me that my ordinariness to myself was a gift, and a root; that this ordinariness, uninterpreted, was enough. It did not have to be distilled or bleached to have value.

That I, too, am a full person who deserved respect in my wholeness seems now like such a basic lesson, and yet the enduring force and redemption of that lesson make it one that I’ve gone back to again and again, in my life and in my work. My father in the years I knew him—late in the long book of his life; that last, uneven, American chapter—was mostly a quiet, melancholy, and deeply internal person, who nevertheless had an indomitable sense of his own worth; a worth that was singular, unwreckable, and mysterious, like a diamond core inside a rock-shelter. It was a worth that resisted being misread, but was not diminished when misreading came knocking. He was, of course, misread every single day of his life in America. Old Pinoy security guard at a computer chip company, moreno, poor, taciturn, lives in the town near Newby Landfill, the one that famously smells like shit. What stories could he have to tell?

But the way he lived blotted out that misreading. He might have been foreign or exotic to others, but he was never foreign to himself—mysterious, yes, in the way that we are all mysterious to ourselves—but not foreign. His ordinariness to himself was a treasure, its precious scroll all there to read, for the people who could read it. And then he passed that treasure down to me, so I could read it, too. Moreover, so I could expect to be read like that, in my own life: like a scroll of worth poured out of me, and it was all mine—not something to be bartered or made palatable so I would one day have value in the world. But a gift; glorious, banal, and whole unto itself.

When I describe the way my reading life is inextricable from the way I was raised—built, really, to be a person in the world—and how my reading life now is committed not just to reading books, but to the world that those books helped me to bear witness to, what I’m really saying is that my reading life was also an inheritance; one that came in the form of an ongoing act of love.

Post-2020, it feels impossibly hard and incalculably stupid to say that you love the world. Why bother? Why does reading matter? Why does truly trying to know the world we live in, the history that makes us, matter? It feels impossibly hard and incalculably stupid to commit to that love, to bear it and be borne by it, but that is what I feel—it is the wellspring that reading leads me to, every time. Loving this world, loving being alive in it, means living up to that world; living up to that love. I can’t say I love this world or living in it if I don’t bother to know it; indeed, be known by it. It’s that mutual promise of knowing that reading holds us in—an inheritance that belongs to us, whether we accept it or not. Whether we read its pages or not. This book remains just one small part of that work: that inheritance, and that love.

READING TEACHESUS EMPATHY,AND OTHER FICTIONS

People often say that art builds our empathy. Reading, in particular. It’s one of those feel-good lines that gets trotted out at literary readings, writing festivals, panel discussions on diversity in fiction, in classrooms, on book jackets, book reviews, book blurbs, not to mention in uncomfortably long discussions with white people who’ve read your book and want you to know !!!for sure!!! that they’re not racist. When we read books about immigration, our exposure to the toil of good, hardworking immigrants makes us more empathetic to their plight—and so on, for books about queer people, and books about slavery, et cetera. Diverse books are empathy machines, or so the received wisdom would have us believe. Like Trinity in The Matrix, we can upload a book’s world into ourselves and feel our empathy skills powering up, juicing through the veins. I use the impoverished term “diverse books” deliberately here, because it’s the books that fall under the rubric of diversity that are the ones most often prescribed to us as empathy boosters; books built for purpose.

But the idea that fiction builds empathy is one of incomplete politics, left hanging by probably good intentions. The concept of instrumentalizing fiction or art as a kind of ethical protein shake, such that reading more and more diversely will somehow build the muscles in us that will help us see other people as human, makes a kind of superficial sense—and produces a superficial effect. The problem with this type of reading is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged—by well-meaning teachers and lazy publishing copy—to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things; which is to say, as a supplement for their empathy muscles, a metabolic exchange that turns writers of color into little more than ethnographers—personal trainers, to continue the metaphor. The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.

The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives—not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.

HOWEVER, THE ANNOYING PROBLEM WITH PUSHING BACK against the self-serving platitudes of fiction-as-empathy machine is that sometimes you run into people who disdain the value of empathy in art for entirely different, but equally selfserving reasons: the art-for-art’s-sake gang, here to rout out political correctness, save literature, and make sure we all have the right to keep reading the same white Europeans forevermore.

This squad has no time for diverse books as empathy machines, either—not because the practice bowdlerizes the work of minoritized writers, about whom the art-for-art’s-sake gang could generally care less, but because to this regime of thought, any consideration of identity or empathy, or indeed being in any way consciously political in one’s art making and one’s art consumption, necessarily diminishes and cheapens our relationship to that art. This particularly strident Hogwarts house protests against the relationship between fiction and empathy not because of the unequal distribution of burden it places on writers of color vs. white writers, but because prioritizing empathy through fiction gets in the way of a reader’s supposedly pure relationship to that author’s art; its apparently sacred nonpolitical storytelling force.

I’m reminded of a New York Times opinion piece by Bret Stephens, written after the controversial awarding of the Nobel Prize to casually fascist stylist Peter Handke, the Austrian writer known both for his spare epigrammatic texts and for his fervently pro-Serbian stance with regard to the violent collapse of the former Yugoslavia and his denial of the genocide of Bosnian Muslims at the hands of Serbian forces—showing his support by, among other things, famously attending the funeral of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, the first sitting head of state to be charged for war crimes. The New York Times piece defended those who would continue to read the Austrian’s work, with the passion typical of people whose commitment to art is such that it compels them to defend white fascists and their apologists:

What’s the alternative? Those who think that a core task of art is political instruction or moral uplift will wind up with some version of socialist realism or religious dogma. And those who think that the worth of art must be judged according to the moral and political commitments of its creator ultimately consign all art to the dustbin, since even the most avant-garde artists are creatures of their time.

This is the white liberal argument that characterizes much of our reading culture: that there is a fundamental binary between political art and the Real Art that transcends such dogma, such instruction, such moralizing. The panic here is that Art, True Art, our tragic and ever-far Dulcinea, may be under siege from the contaminating force of the polity and its concerns; that indeed we risk losing all art—throw it straight into the garbage bin!—if we ever dare to ask art to be more than it is; to do more than what it ought to do.

The problem is, this panicked defensiveness rarely seems to actually know what it wants the art to be; what it wants art to do. This paranoid Testudo formation rarely seems to have a handle on what reading, and in particular critical reading, actually consists of. Sure, critical reading is an intellectual exercise, an aesthetic exercise, and a profoundly private, emotional, and visceral undertaking—while also being an ethical act; a civic act. It is all these things at once. Books ask us to live this multiplicity every single time we open them. But there’s often a conservative, reactionary resistance to the expansive multiplicity (and specifically, inclusivity) of critical reading, which encompasses postcolonial readings, queer readings, what’s sometimes pejoratively called “anachronistic” readings. The argument usually goes something along the lines of: we can’t apply contemporary political worldviews onto older texts, because “the world was different then.”

Sure, it was—but it also wasn’t, is the thing. The lives of the characters in Jane Austen’s novels will always be entwined with Britain’s empire and slave economy: that was always the case. Slavery and the capitalist extraction of resources from Caribbean colonies were banal and foundational facts of life in Austen’s era, and that ubiquity does not erase the worldrending evil those practices represented, nor does it invalidate the minutely drawn humanity of the specific parts of her world Austen was able to recognize and bring to life. Although, as Montclair State University professor and scholar of British abolitionist literature Patricia Matthews has deftly pointed out, both in her Atlantic article “On Teaching, but Not Loving, Jane Austen” and her webinar “ ‘I Hope White Hands’: Wedgwood, Abolition, and the Female Consumer,” the canonization of Austen (“whose fiction played with, but ultimately conformed to, the social conventions of [her] time”) throws into relief the fact that many of Austen’s less-passionately-remembered contemporaries did, in fact, write about race and interracial marriages (“that were not tucked away in Charlotte Brontë’s attic”). Rejecting contemporary discussions of race when it comes to Austen’s work also masks the fact that political debates about abolition among wealthy educated whites, especially the white women who were both Austen’s subject and audience, were by no means exceptional: Austen’s (not to mention Elizabeth Bennet’s) contemporaries were known to have “circulated petitions, raised funds for the cause and boycotted sugar from the West Indies.” Even Wedgwood (famed purveyor of teacups to many a well-heeled character from Austen to Bridgerton, as well as any self-respecting cottagecore picnic bitch influencer) produced teapots and cameo medallions and sugar bowls decorated with abolitionist artwork and slogans, due to founder Josiah Wedgwood’s membership in the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade—while, of course, also producing tea services that celebrated Britain’s naval might and seafaring heroes, demurely declining to elaborate just to what purpose and laden with what cargo those great ships, immortalized in bone china and creamware, once sailed. In fine-combing the political nuances and limitations of the era’s gendered economies, Matthews draws our attention to a dynamic that echoes Toni Morrison’s diagnosis of the way white selfhood was necessarily illuminated by casting Blackness as its shadow: the Regency construction of white womanhood (the deliberate signals sent by its purchasing tastes, the nobility of its humanitarian and protofeminist endeavors) necessitated—literally served up—a subaltern Black object for the liberal white woman to save, consume, and ultimately absorb into the drama of her own political enlightenment. (TLDR: A contemporary Austen character would wear that Dior feminist slogan T-shirt.)

Thus the complicated political substance of an abolitionist teapot cannot be divorced from its time period (although Matthews notes that one antislavery teapot she was looking for in the Birmingham Museum was missing, conspicuously kept separate from both the museum’s transatlantic slavery and abolitionist section, as well as its creamware and pottery section; where are such things categorized, then?). Most of all, the Regency teapot cannot be divorced from its users, largely women, who not only cast themselves as righteous protagonists in the political theater accessorized by these objects (the better word here may be props), but also, crucially: delighted in the objects and the rituals they enshrined—in the complex seductions and pleasures of their material objecthood. Fundamentally, these objects were meant to be enjoyed as aesthetically beautiful, commercially desirable, and morally edifying, all at once. Not unlike some books. (When I lived in London, I once brought my visiting mother to afternoon tea at an upscale hotel, where towers of scones, sandwiches, cakes were served to us, as well as a great pot of lapsang souchong that came in a beautiful Wedgwood tea service I seriously considered buying—and still sometimes consider buying—had not the teapot alone cost one hundred and fifty-five pounds; marked up to three hundred and twenty-five dollars if bought here, unrepublicanly, in America.)

All this to say, continuing to read Austen’s work does not require the zero-sum feat of intellectual gymnastics that the art-for-art’s-sake gang seems to fear: acknowledging the truth of colonialism and the slave trade in Austen’s era is no vandalizing act of literary deletion, but an act of literary expansion and restoration, not to mention the barest concession to reality (if anything, it’s quite a politically radical reading to argue that race did not exist as a subject of contemplation in Austen’s world; as bizarre as arguing that it does not exist as a subject of contemplation in ours). To suggest that literary critique of Regency-era literature must, in order to evade the specter of anachronism, segregate the spheres of the domestic and the political, is simply to misread the Regency era, not to mention the domestic and the political; to have never seen a Wedgwood patch box circa 1800 with a supplicating Black figure in chains illustrated upon it, pleading, “Am I not a man and a brother?” If Austen’s contemporaries could bear storing rouge in these boxes and spooning sugar out of these pots, we can certainly bear talking about the fact that they existed—and what that existence might mean for us.

The museum Jane Austen’s House in the English village of Chawton recently announced plans, according to The New York Times