Cathy & the Immortals

So I got Cathy's Book in French as a present maybe 5-6 years ago and read it once, forgot about it, and put it on my shelf. It's been sitting there this whole time and last night I suddenly remembered that this is a book about a girl in San Francisco whose best friend and boyfriend are Chinese-American and who is plunged into this world of Chinese mythology, mainly to do with the Eight Immortals. It's weird because when I was first reading the book I wasn't fazed by the diasporic Chinese elements -- I kind of just read it as a story and then put it down. Whereas these days I know how rare it is to have Asian people in a book, so I get excited over everything. Six months ago, when I saw that the narrator of Murder Most Unladylike had the surname Wong, I almost cried. Anyway, so I picked up Cathy's Book again and speed-read it last evening and today. (I'm glad I read it so fast. So my French isn't awful after all.)

First of all, I'd just like to complain about the title. Cathy's Book? Really? That has got to be the lamest title ever. And for such an interesting book, it can be fatal. It's a shame! And they kept it in English for the French version? Why... I want to have a talk with Stewart and Weisman's editors.

So it's a very original book. The first thing you notice is the fact that there's a pouch at the front full of "evidence" –– letters, photographs, brochures, business cards –– that "prove" the story's authentic. That's very interesting and I like the effort they put into it, hiring a model to be Victor in the pictures and everything (though he's not as hot as he could've been...). The second thing you notice is how each page is full of drawings, which are meant to have been made by the protagonist who's an aspiring artist. They're little doodles that sometimes have to do with the plot and sometimes not -- very pretty -- sometimes they even cover some of the text. I was wrong when I thought the book had no impact on me because these doodles really did. I remember now I envied the skill of the artist, Cathy Brigg (oh wait... the illustrator's name is Cathy too! Wow. That's probably not a coincidence). She's very good with simple line drawings. I remember I really enjoyed the way she drew smoke (especially the drawings of the burning hell money), and also the pocketwatches. When I saw these drawings again I remembered that I had this brief phase where I really liked to doodle in the margins of books I liked (yeah, MAJOR REGRETS nowadays. I can't even open my copy of The Knife of Never Letting Go without cringing), and I actually drew a lot of pocketwatches for a while. I'd forgotten what inspired me. Even these days, when I draw smoke it's based on how Brigg did it. (Then again, there are really only so many ways to quickly draw smoke using sparse lines). So this book subconsciously gnawed at me without my even realising it.

I really enjoyed these quirky little details. Apparently you can call the phone numbers and leave messages for the fictional characters too. And it's a great story! I didn't take that much issue with the way they handled the portrayal of Chinese-Americans. Nothing jumped out at me as offensive. Emma Cheung, the Hong-Kong-raised heiress who's good at school, wants to go to MIT, and wants to be a multimillionaire businesswoman by 30 (by dominating the mobile phone market... but poor Emma... she did not predict the smartphone! I feel bad for her. This was in 2008. She's 26 now and either she's adapted really well and is working for  (WHAT THE FUCK. I CAN'T TYPE THE WORD "" WITHOUT IT AUTOCORRECTING TO THE  LOGO. WHAT THE FUCK. THIS IS WHY CAPITALISM IS BAD. I JUST WANT TO SAY . WHY CAN'T I SAY . A P P L E. STEVE JOBS DIDN'T INVENT THE WORD !), or she's washed-up and feeling terrible). Okay, maybe Emma's a bit of a stereotype, but I don't know... she was quite humanised. Plus she was seen from the eyes of the very ego-centric Cathy. You can tell there are sides to her Cathy doesn't know. And there's a whole collection of old Chinatown ladies, old origami men, sinister businessmen, tall slender warrior ladies, cute little girls... okay, so maybe they're a little stereotyped. But Victor really isn't. And I honestly don't find it that bad. (I read a review of the book Crazy Rich Asians where the critic complained of all the stereotypes in it:

Here's but a small sampling of Kwan's Asian stereotypes: Hennessy-swirling, cigar-puffing fat-cat Asian tycoons; fortune-hunting "Taiwanese tornadoes"; Hong Kong fashionista men ("dandies in the truest sense of the word"); ABCs ("overconfident and overfamiliar" types who "grew up drinking Vitamin-D calcium-fortified American milk"); Chuppies (Chinese yuppies); Henwees (high-net worth individuals); old amah kitchen hands; an assortment of marriage-scheming mothers, aunts and in-laws; bitchy shopaholic party girls; blinged out Hong Kong ladies who lunch; un-blinged out Singaporean ladies who lunch (they "wore less jewelry since they were always so scared of being robbed"); Japanese ladies who lunch (with "sun visors and fanny packs" who "looked like they were on the way to the golf course"); penny-pinching Asian immigrants; penny-pinching old-money overseas Asians; spendthrift old-money overseas Asians; spendthrift new-money mainland Asians; "self-hating" Asian-Americans who "feel that the ultimate act of assimilation is to marry into the dominant race"; and the Asian men who size them up, "quantifying every inch ... by a completely different set of standards than [they] would use for non-Asian girls".

In all honesty that's a huge list. I don't think that's stereotyping... there's a very diverse list of characters who are all different. It seems to me that a wide range of Asian (by which, of course, the book only means East Asian) archetypes are presented. Maybe the author was being sarcastic and I just didn't realise?)

Anyway. It was quite good! Very interesting. I still need to know more about Victor though. A lot of the stuff in the evidence pouch isn't addressed in the book. If Victor is the husband of Giselle... so he used to be Nathan? But he also married Penny, so his name was also James Wu? What... 

The book is actually the first of a trilogy but I'm too lazy to seek out the next ones.