Status Updates From The Minimalist

“...I had once defended it to Ryder as a hybridity born from my fractured Asian identity and he had replied, Ah, yes. Your so-called Asian heritage. You’re just as much of a WASP as that harpy who raised you. Sure, you’ve got it—in the face, in the eyes—but you’re as authentic as Ravel and the rest of us filthy Orientalists.”

Oh

Tempted to DNF bc there's nothing worse than a character study when you don't care about the characters 😐

“He laughed telling the story of how a literary-minded sorority sister, way back in college, had given him the Nabokovian sobriquet Humbert Humbert, though the significance of this was not clear to me at the time.”

This came out of nowhere wtf

“I thought of my race mostly as an inconvenience: I had a Chinese face, but I spoke no Chinese. I had never returned to China and would likely never do so in my lifetime. I was like a character in a Puccini opera, an Asian invented by a Westerner. Any gestures I might make at cultural authenticity in my music were fraudulent and hollow.”

Oh no

“When Ryder received so many consolation cards and flowers we had to move them into the sunroom, I came to the bitter realization that I was jealous of a dead man, jealous that he was the kind of genius whose absence people would mourn, whereas I was merely an acolyte in the house of his father.”

Yikes

Finally something interesting is happening