From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement by Paula Yoo

★★★★★

This book is an incredible read.

With this book, specifically written for teenage readers, there is now a readily accessible way for all American students, Asian or not, to learn about this critically important piece of American civil rights and Asian American history. Chapters are short, concise, and very approachable. But even though it's YA, it does not pull any punches; every detail of the murder and trial is laid bare. Parents should know that this book uses the word "motherfucker" explicitly, as well as racial slurs like Chink, Nip, and Jap, but only because they are part of direct quotes related to the case. There's also a passing mention of prostitution.

I think the author choosing to tell the story interspersed with the experiences of Jarod Lew was brilliant. I didn't know about Vincent Chin until well after college, and the fact that Jarod didn't know about Vincent Chin until he was 25 was not only believable to me, but actually representative of my generation of Asian Americans.

Having read Asian American Dreams by Helen Zia, who played a major role in the activism surrounding the Vincent Chin case, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what happened. Still, this book presented a deluge of information that was new to me, including heartwarming and heartbreaking anecdotes about Vincent, his mother, his friends, and the activists demanding justice. As a mother myself, I bawled every time Lily Chin's part of the story was told; I could feel the weight of the enormity of what she suffered and how much she fought.

Given the target audience, I liked the occasional reminder of how events occurred before social media and even before personal computers were prevalent, e.g., the way flyers and press releases had to be typewritten, cut and pasted, and frequently hand-delivered to recipients. (p. 93-94, 130) I also appreciated how the author connected the behaviors of people involved in the case to relevant terminology that is used today but which was not yet coined in the 1980s, like "white privilege" (p. 239) and "toxic masculinity" (p. 241).

It's clear the author did an immense amount of research, getting perspectives from basically every person remotely involved in the case, on both sides. Paula Yoo impressively managed to walk the fine line of humanizing the killers without excusing their actions or defending their light sentences.   

Notably, the book is physically heavy. Each page is printed on glossy photo paper, which allows pictures to be displayed throughout the book according to their relevance to the text. I actually love this formatting because when photos are grouped together in the middle of a book, I always feel a little annoyed having to flip back and forth between text and related photos. I also liked that any time images with text were included, they were printed with enough clarity to actually be read.

Incidentally, there's an episode of the They Call Us Bruce podcast with the author, Paula Yoo, which I also highly recommend. It's an excellent conversation with even more behind-the-scenes tidbits.  

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

★★★★

My kids were at the exact right age for me to appreciate Glennon Doyle when her Momastery blog posts first went viral. Her "Don't Carpe Diem" post really resonated with me, and I also loved her post about how a teacher looked out for lonely students in her classroom. 

As my kids grew up, I drifted away from mom blogs. At some point, I heard that Glennon Doyle got divorced and married Abby Wambach the soccer player!? Well, I didn't follow the news, and I haven't read her previous two books, but a friend of mine gifted this book to me, so I read it.

Untamed is mostly short chapters that read like blog entries. It's part memoir, part self-help. Glennon shares the story of how she answered the question, "Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?" (p. 6). The title Untamed refers to the evolution by which she unlearned the expectations imposed by society and learned to know, trust, and be her true self. Using analogies and examples from her own life, she urges her readers to "search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval." (p. 60) I was impressed with her openness in sharing her personal story and journey from feeling broken to feeling whole. 

About halfway through this book, I was prepared to give it a 3-star rating. The ideas were not without merit, but as I have always been a self-reflective and thinking person, they were not new or revelatory to me. In fact, I had a little chuckle when literally the last line of prose in the book finally acknowledged that some people "never become tamed in the first place." (p. 333) Though this first half of the book wasn't exactly relatable for me, I could imagine that her target audience - women who felt "tamed", or caged - would have much to appreciate. Glennon's message is uplifting and encouraging and basically gives readers permission to do whatever is true to themselves, even if it flies in the face of convention. Maybe "permission" isn't the right word, because the whole point is that no one needs permission to control their own lives, but she does provide readers with reassurance that it's okay to do what's right for you, even if others think you are selfish or crazy or weak or a weirdo.

I was pleasantly surprised when my interest piqued as the book progressed, and I decided to bump up the rating to 4 stars. It felt like a bit of an epiphany when she laid out how women have been trained to believe in an elusive ideal of womanhood that actually erases us as individuals, i.e., how "[t]he highest praise [is]: She is so selfless... The epitome of womanhood is to lose one's self completely." (p. 116) She astutely wrote about how her philanthropy led her to understand that "[w]here there is great suffering, there is often great profit," (p. 254) and I also just liked one of her core tenets: "We can do hard things." (pg. 291)

Finally, I think it's noteworthy that Glennon devoted a lengthy, weighty chapter to racism. Again, she did not write anything groundbreaking or eye-opening to me, but she quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.'s views on white moderates and challenged her readers to take a good look at themselves and ask how they might be inadvertently contributing to white supremacy in America. I saw this chapter as Glennon planting seeds of antiracism in an audience of liberal white women who might not otherwise take the time to listen or engage in self-examination. Along the same lines, given her reputation as a Christian blogger, I liked that she used her platform to present LGBTQ and pro-choice perspectives to an audience that might typically lean anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice. In the end, the book seemed to have a "Come for the feminist self-care, stay for the introduction to social justice" kind of vibe.