|
The Woman Warrior
Monday, July 13, 1998 I brought Rainier cherries to work with me today, to share at our weekly program management group meeting. But the meeting was canceled! So I sent mail to the entire team, with the subject heading "Mmmm...Cherries" a la Homer Simpson, and invited folks to stop by and have some. They are so sweet, and so beautiful, yellow or orange with a red blush. A few folks did pop their heads through the red velvet curtains and grab a few. This evening was the latest book club discussion, of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. We met at Noble Court, a Chinese restaurant not far from the Microsoft campus. I actually had some qualms about a frank discussion of the book there, since I guessed we'd be ranking on Chinese cultural practices to some extent. and I worried about the restuarant workers listening to us. But it wasn't me who made the arrangements for the meeting. Of course I was the first one there. Our regular crowd of Joan, Christina, my former manager Valerie, Kim, her sister-in-law, and Ramesh and I, all discussed the book over dinner. We didn't get into it too deeply, though. Our first reaction was to thank our lucky stars that we weren't born girls in China! Ramesh thought that Kingston was exaggerating, and the author mentions herself that it's difficult to sort out what in her background was China, and what was just her family, or a universal immigrant experience. I liked Kingston's writing style, and she uses an interesting mixture of myth, memoir and story. The book is a collection of short pieces, sometimes from her own viewpoint, sometimes told as a legend, sometimes from her mother's viewpoint. I'd like to know more about her now: what did her family think when portrayed this way? Her father doesn't get mentioned as much as her mother does, but maybe he gets more play in her second book, China Man. Notable at dinner: Ramesh asked for Singapore noodles, but with no meat. The waiter didn't understand that that also included no shrimp! We were amazed when, instead of just taking the dish away and bringing a new one, the waiter and manager wanted to have a discussion about it. We weren't sure whether they ended up taking the noodles back to the kitchen and just picking the shrimp out, so Ramesh didn't eat much! We were very surprised, since we've had no trouble getting veggie dishes at another Chinese restaurant, the Shao-lin, at other bookclub meetings. We had restrained ourselves in the number of dishes we ordered, so we had room for dessert. In an unprecedented move, we walked several blocks to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream store, on the other side of Highway 520, to get ice cream and discuss what book to read next. We settled on Cold Mountain, which I've heard bits and pieces of on Radio Reader. It was a grand evening for a walk, and I got Valerie caught up on my latest adventures and current status.
After being gently prodded today by CSS list buddy Ellyn about dead links, I updated my Stylesheet resources page. Hoo-boy, it was so stale!
|
