I'll begin with the story of YS Falls, a set of cascading drops and cool, clear pools set in a Jamaican rainforest. It’s in Saint Elizabeth parish, where for a few years now I’ve been taking my son on vacation. Saint Elizabeth is a beautiful part of the country, far off the beaten path; to reach it from Montego Bay or Kingston takes four or five hours on bad roads. There are few walled resorts here, no package tours of sunburned Americans and Europeans getting drunk at 10 A.M. The people are nice but not too nice; large stretches of the coasts remain undeveloped. I like it because it has yet to be ruined by people like me.
According to locals (and TripAdvisor), YS is one of the wonders of Saint Elizabeth. Last April, on what happened to be my son’s 15th birthday, I hired a taxi to take us there. Davey did not want to go; he wanted to “chill” and “sleep in.” But I wanted to “experience this natural wonder.” So my angry kid and I arrive at YS, which upon first impression is paradisiacal. We walk into the main building, where we must pay a fee (OK, fine), and we are assigned a guide. There is no other way to see YS; we can’t wander around on our own. The guide asks for Davey’s iPhone. I think he’s holding it to keep it safe and dry. But no. For the next hour, he herds us through the falls on a trip that is organized entirely around photo ops. We’re trapped in a conga line of tourists, each group with its own guide who’s holding their smartphones, taking Instagram-worthy shots. We are told to pose in front of one set of falls and—tap!—the guide gets the shot. We’re told to frolic in a pool and—tap!—we’re captured sheepishly frolicking. We are in a kind of hell.
The term “Asian American” is like a balloon: weightless, hollow, all skin. It seems ready to burst at any moment, and yet refuses to be tied down. Coined by UC Berkeley students in 1968 and inspired by the Black Power movement, “Asian American” was once a term of hope and revolution. Replacing words like “Oriental,” this new identifier was created to form a political coalition across Asian ethnicities. But in its contemporary usage, the term has instead consumed and smoothed ethnic and class differences among Asian Americans. What is left is an imagined monolith. To the extent that “Asian American-ness” is something that Asian Americans can experience at all, the term feels like a reminder of its own emptiness.
Melding criticism, theory, history, and memoir, poet Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings presents a fraught and considerate attempt to say what it means to be Asian American today. Borrowing a framework from filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha, she avows not to “speak about,” but to “speak nearby,” an approach that acknowledges the difficulty and folly of aiming to represent everyone.
“22 Minutes of Unconditional Love” is an arresting novel that explores the alchemy of contradictions that exist in all great works of literature. Observant and witty, Merkin makes each sentence pack a provocative wallop. So, come for the promise of a compulsively readable novel — “Obsession makes for good copy,” the narrator tells us — and stay for a fascinating lesson on the making of art.
This artful meditation on memory and identity centers on a woman who has just arrived at the Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research in 1999. Wendy Doe has no identification, no memory and no one looking for her — who is she?
For those who find themselves drinking more than usual in the era of Covid — especially women, who are more likely to become alcoholics later in life — “Quitter” is both a warning and a reminder: If you can stop drinking after one or two beers, you’re not better than Barnett and the more than 60 million Americans who binge drink. You’re just luckier.
In the past two decades, we have already given over much of our ability to navigate the world to black-box algorithms; as that journey accelerates into a smart machine future, we would be advised to look out where we are going.
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,