Besides reading through encyclopedias nowadays, there's another type of reading that's always caught my eye: memoirs, usually of celebrities but especially of people I find relatable or interesting. I picked up the David Chang (founder of Momofuku restaurants) memoir "Eat a Peach" today and just got hooked it; it marks the 3rd memoir of an Asian American cook I've read in just the last few years! (Previously Eddie Hwang of "Fresh Off the Boat" fame and Roy Choi of Kogi food trucks (big in LA) fame. "Surprise, surprise, an Asian American man likes reading about Asian American men!" Maybe, but I've also read memoirs by Amy Schumer, Chelsea Chandler, Ken Jennings, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Trevor Noah ("Born a Crime"), and others from different walks of life. No, I think it's more that I like the human aspects of stories and find real people's stories more compelling than totally fictional stories like Shakespeare and sci-fi. I find people's struggles with daily life fascinating and getting into their thought processes helpful; it's like having an omniscient narrator in every story telling you exactly what the main character is thinking. I'm also a big historical fiction fan, like I think Forrest Gump is a genius movie because it takes viewers back to different events in world history that most people can relate to and lived through; I like reading a memoir because I get to know what other people were doing in their little corners of the world while I was stuck in high school AP history class or trying to make it in L.A. David Chang, for example, was a child prodigy at golf (wouldn't have known it from his physique) and taught English in Japan where he was inspired to create ramen dishes. Also, I find cooking memoirs like that of Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential) really funny and easy to read through because working in kitchens is apparently one of the most difficult, grind-it-out, hate-your-life-for-a-few-years, smell-like-food-all-the-time jobs, but chefs and workers have a good time through all that hard work, making for some of the funniest stories (sure beats my stories of, "well went to the office to look at the computer screen and talked to my co-workers during break for 10 minutes." They also almost always intersect somewhere in New York (Culinary Institute of America) and since the biggest restaurants are in NYC.
Also, if anything, I like memoirs because I am actually completing my own memoir here. I guess nobody cares about the everyday affairs of people until that person eventually becomes famous, so my 15 years of blogging will never have a mass audience unless I make it big. It does bother me sometimes that only the ones who "made it big" get a book deal to make a memoir, as if their stories are so compelling just because they actually succeeded (with varying degrees of luck associated with that success). I'm sure others who didn't become famous also have great stories to tell and can express themselves in a funny way. This is what kind of bothered me about Simu Liu's tale, he didn't really give credit to luck or acknowledge that he could have failed had a number of specific things happened that really weren't in his control. How many of the same stories of actors who quit their day jobs and moved to Los Angeles without an established acting resume are there versus one person who became Simu Liu, Shangchi and the Seven Rings? Certainly, these memoirs aren't marketed as "ones to make it in life," so I'm not criticizing the authors for bragging and acting like if others just did what they did they would have succeeded, but I guess my biggest pet peeve about celebrities is how once they're on the other side they act like they always knew they were going to make it big, like it was natural and just a matter of getting there. I think that's too simplistic and a bit of hindsight being 20-20, but maybe that's why I'll never make it big and I won't ever have a best-selling memoir called "Eat a Banana!" (my ritual each morning and key to having energy every day).
No comments:
Post a Comment