Re: Judgement Is Nigh! Oh, and BOOK RECOMMENDATION!

YAWN!!!! Reviewer: briw "briw" (Los Angeles, CA) -

How much longer are the intellectual elite going to keep harping on the West with words like "hegemony" and "colonialism?" Or recycle the cliches about the West being male-centered, rapacious, domineering, etc.? The irony of it all is that Western culture is the only one that seems to a.) have this degree of self-reflection; b.) measure itself so self-consciously against other cultures; and now, thanks to pointy headed post modern academics, c) have adolescent self doubts about its own worth. I hardly need to mention examples of "brutal hegemony" or "male-centeredness" that color Asian history. As if all those warlords and emperors sat around drinking chai and doing everything their concubines told them to do! Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the symbol in Chinese for "China" mean "center of the world?" That's rather ethnocentric, don't you think?

In any case, tiresome as the politics of this book may be, the stories themselves do little to keep the reader awake. It reads much like a stack of assignments from a creative writing class, rather than, well, creative writing. One almost suspects they all partook of the same textbook on writing. It comes out feeling rather narrow-viewed, selfish, and without a whole lot to say about anything beyond the narrator's own experience. Which is to say, it adds little to the reader's understanding of nature, the universe, and his place in it.

Indeed the stories are so self-absorbed in their Asianness, and in their often peculiar concepts of sexuality, that the enterprise of expressing these very perspectives falls flat on its face. "I'm Asian!" or "I'm gay!!!" the story or poem screams. So what? Navel-gazing never got anyone anywhere - not the reader, and certainly not the writer.