As I stayed up to finish this, I wondered why I hadn't gotten to it earlier. I enjoyed How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and it has a meta structure to it while looking at generational relationships but reading Yu on the other side of being a parent definitely made me cry at about the 200 page mark (also my pausing to note quotes in the book, ha).

I'm SO curious about how this was adapted given it's written entirely as a script. 

The genre shift to children's programming made me cackle because I've spent a lot of time recently watching the varying quality of shows out there and yeah, Phoebeland is definitely the kind of thing my mixed race daughter would probably be targeted by. The moment where he ponders if all the stereotypical/generic roles he and his parents played culminates in this assimilated role of just getting to be an American child is the point, divorced from context and history was my breaking point because YES, it's a thing I think about constantly with my mixed race child as well as discussions of media portrayals of Asians. 

In online Asian America space there's often Discourse around roles and like, is this good portrayal or not (I'm of the opinion that it's unfair to pin an entire diaspora's hopes and dreams on one film/show because that's narrative scarcity and we should be able to have fun romcoms like Crazy Rich Asians next to serious meditations on family like Minari, etc.) and like, are we setting the culture back with bit part stereotype roles or are we reclaiming it by being the Kung Fu Guy (the Shang Chi-Iron First discussions in particular).

And then, we get a discussion of the historical context of Perpetual Foreigner and like, this book felt very specifically made for me (probably would be even more so if I were a guy, but this hits on a lot of my soapboxes lol). Short, but impactful for me.