Mel's Shopping Diary
BOING!!!!
August 07, 2007Hey, all!
There is still time to enter the GOODIE BAG CONTEST GIVEAWAY! Email your artwork, website, quiz, whatever that is inspired by any of my books to by this Friday!
The entries have all been so great!! And I have tons of goodie-bag goodies to give away. Remember, I used to be a fashion and beauty editor!
I have been reading a book called FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES by Min Jin Lee. It is a fantastic book about being an Asian (in this case Korean) immigrant and having hard-working immigrant parents who send you off to elite colleges and then graduating from these colleges where it seems, everyone has a trustfund or is related to the Rockefellers (or Mick Jagger) or whose mother hung out with Jack Kerouac back in the day, and your parents ran a dry-cleaning business (or in my case a Sears employees cafeteria) and you are exposed to all these people who think nothing of flying to the Caribbean for the weekend or spending a thousand dollars on a sweater from Bergdorf in one afternoon, and somehow you have to be able to be friends with them without completely hating yourself.
Anyway, I could relate so much to the book, especially since the character graduated from Princeton in 1993 (I was Columbia '93) and all her friends are Ivy League business school i-bankers (that's investment bankers) and she doesn't want to go to Law School (I didn't either! I almost went--good immigrant girls are supposed to be lawyers or doctors) and she spends way too much money on clothes and staying at the Carlyle. (YUM!)
My parents were nothing like the parents depicted in the book, however. My parents are the funniest people I know, and they were always really supportive of my writing career. They didn't even worry when I told them I didn't want to go to law school. They always told me to do what I loved to do, and the money would follow.
The book got me thinking, because in the story, the father comes from this wealthy Korean family who loses their estate in the war, and my family lost our fortune during the Philippine economic bust of the eighties, (my dad wasn't just an investment banker--he owned his own investment bank) and how hard it is to be so humbled in your own lifetime, and that a lot of Americans would never really know this kind of loss, or struggle. My parents always said they moved to America because what happened to them there could never happen here since the American economy is stable.
So I tried to picture it--these fat cat Beverly Hills princesses depicted in My Super Sweet Sixteen, what if suddenly they lost it all and had to move to a different country? Would they be able to survive? Hmmm....
What saved us, I think, is my parents' ability to retain a sense of humor about everything bad that happened. Like the other day, my dad found a letter my sister sent to him more than ten years ago when she was at Yale, about how he had to send the school another check to cover tuition since the first check he sent bounced. And my sister had written "BOING!!!" to illustrate how the check had bounced. And my dad just laughed so hard to read it. BOING!!! And the letter was on Garfield stationery no less, which I think, adds to the hilarity of it all.
Of course, it's easy to laugh now because everyone is doing well. But I also remember laughing back then too.
Anyway, my only small complaint about the book is that the dialog does not feel very real to me. Like who uses "preternaturally" in conversation??? But it is a small point and I am enjoying the book nonetheless.
xoxo
Mel
Comments
On August 9, 2007, casey had this to say:
I kinda have the similar problem of losing money and being in such a culture shock.
I got moved out of the beautfiul land of CALIFORNIA! ITS CALLED THE GOLDEN STATE FOR A REASON! To North Carolina. North Carolina is eeh pretty. BUT NOTHING LIKE THE LUXURY OF CALIFORNIA. Not being able to walk everywhere, hop right onto the freeway and having the best shopping in only a matter of 10 minutes?!
There were alot of people like me here; but its not the same. I was still super hard for me to make the transition.
That however would make a GREAT story. Who wouldn’t want to see those teenagers be put into the middle of no where where no one speaks english or gives a crap about their pink quilted chanel bags.
Haha funny stuff.
--Casey
On August 8, 2007, Vivian had this to say:
I can relate as well, and I think I will be picking up this book soon!
I’m a Chinese immigrant who moved from Hong Kong when I was about five. We actually moved to avoid loss, as the HK economy was about to fall due to the British to China handover in 1997.
My dad was a head set designer at a TV/Movie studio.
When we moved here, he resorted to working as cook at my uncle’s restaurant.
I was too young to notice, but later on my mom told me how hard it was for him to make the switch.
I think events like this give people character. Someone once told me that I should be proud to be able to tell stories like this one.
Let’s just say I’ve had deal with my identity crisis until I got to college, but thats another story to tell.