ROMeANTICALLY CHALLENGED

Unexpected twist and turn

I struggle with the entire first half. I felt it dragged quite a bit. But the last third to half brought me in. I was emotionally attached snd felt for Anh and Emmit.

I’m only giving three stars because of the first half and because I struggled with picturing what the author wrote. Like talking about A covering them up and snoring at the same time. There were lots of little contradictory things that just jumbled the picture in my head. It was distracting even when I was crying for these characters.

I liked how this book explored transracial identity and unlearning toxic masculine behaviors. Research is evident in the writing and the author takes the time needed to really develop characters that readers can empathize with. Beckett’s Grumpy Cat shirt is a mood and I need it. However, I did notice a few important typos and the text images weren’t formatted with dark mode in mind, despite it being a common feature of eBook apps.

I wish Annie wasn’t attracted to Emmitt until after he stopped being toxic so it’d feel more authentic and less cliche. Also, Annie went to med school and understands relational power dynamics and the importance of communication, but for some reason thought simply going to a pot luck would magically fill the void within, not understanding that reclaiming her cultural heritage is a huge learning endeavor, and wasn’t already learning Vietnamese despite wanting to in this age of internet and smartphones.

It is also worth noting that the whole “Chinese isn’t a language” is misleading, and a lot more complicated. Whether you consider it a language or not depends on how you define or differentiate language and dialect when there is no hard and fast definition, which would entail at least a surface level understanding of differences and similarities between languages/dialects and their written language, which would likely not be considered “common knowledge” and thus justify ignorance. I.e. Cantonese and Mandarin are considered by some to be dialects because they share a written language, Chinese, whereas others consider them separate languages because they’re phonetically very different, and still others who believe Chinese isn’t a language because it isn’t spoken, completely ignoring the existence of sign language. The list goes on and ultimately boils down to semantics.

It is also my experience that asking if someone speaks Chinese isn’t weird, and whether they’re referring to Mandarin, Cantonese, either or, Toisanese etc is determined by context. I’ve been asked most if I “speak Chinese” by Chinese, often but not always because English is their second language, and I say all this as a product of Chinese diaspora who also struggled with their cultural identity and has been misidentified more than once, like Annie. Evidently enough this whole thing is highly variable from person to person and place to place. The stereotyping though was definitely ignorance.