Dream: Friends, Yes, the TV Show

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INT. HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM
A brightly-lit large waiting room at a hospital.  ROSS enters, rushed and excited.  A DOCTOR is waiting for him.

ROSS

So doctor, you wouldn’t believe this, but I just met this guy, and he was like the biggest blowhard ever.  And he was eating breaded chicken feet, right there!  Who does that?  And he just kept going with his inane diatribe…

The DOCTOR listens patiently, but the audience can see he’s getting pissed.

ROSS

…and here’s the thing, his last name was the same as yours, Sauvage.  I mean what are the odds?

DOCTOR
(deadpan)

That’s because he’s my son.

STUDIO AUDIENCE LAUGHS.

INT. SOME PUBLIC SPACE IN NEW YORK CITY
A dimly-lit area.  People are walking about.

MONICA (V.O.)

I’m so glad Rachel is in New York City! I wonder what fun she’s having.

Rachel skulks about, not having fun.

END DREAM

So yes, I actually just had a dream that was an episode of Friends.  I was very sorry to wake up.  I got out of bed within a few minutes, but I should’ve arisen immediately, because it all faded away too quickly.  I believe Phoebe was there, too, but now I can’t remember what part she played in the story.  I know Chandler and Joey weren’t there, but Monica definitely had that voiceover.

Analysis

Last night we watched the first episode of The Undoing, which took place in New York City, and if you’ve seen this, too, you’ll recognize the same-name bit.  And earlier in the day, I remember seeing a photo of a woman wearing a F˖R˖I˖E˖N˖D˖S t-shirt.  But what about breaded chicken feet and Ross’s surgery?  I’m 99% certain Ross was there for some kind of surgery, though I no longer recall what for.  Wait, I did catch up on the latest episode of Warrior, and even though I may not have seen actual breaded chicken feet, there were a couple of scenes where people were eating, so who knows, maybe I did.  And oh, just for the record, it was early season Friends, all the cast members looking quite young.

11/3/2020 12:30PM ET: First Chapter Fun with Hannah & Hank

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So something momentous is occurring a week from today, November 3. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Of course you are. That’s the day that Hannah Mary McKinnon and Hank Phillippi Ryan will read from Skin Deep. You can watch it via Facebook Live or Instagram Live. I’ll be watching, too!

And yes, if you haven’t done so yet, VOTE!

Wed 9/23/2020 7PM ET: Virtual Visiting Authors Series @ WCCC

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How cool is it that I’ll be sharing the virtual stage with a fellow Washington, NJ author, Ysabel Y. Gonzalez, this Wednesday night at 7PM? Please come on by!

Wednesday, September 23, 2020 7PM ET
Virtual Visiting Authors Series
with Ysabel Y. Gonzalez
Warren County Community College (registration)

A Review of Skin Deep from Mystery Scene

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Grateful to Mystery Scene for a super kind review!

First in a promising new series, Sung J. Woo’s Skin Deep introduces Siobhan O’Brien—a 40-year-old Korean American adopted in infancy by an Irish father and a Nordic mother. For the past two years, the laid-off newspaper reporter has been apprenticing under Ed Baker, a private detective in the upstate New York town of Athena. Now that she finally has her PI license, Siobhan is eager to assume more professional responsibility—but when Ed dies of a heart attack and bequeaths her the agency, she suffers a crisis of confidence. Siobhan strongly considers liquidating the business’s meager assets and starting over, but then her dead best friend’s little sister, Josie Sykes, shows up at the office. Two weeks ago, the dean of Llewellyn—a formerly single-sex liberal arts college in nearby Selene, New York—called to advise Josie that her adopted 18-year-old daughter, Penelope Hae Jun Sykes, was taking a leave of absence. Josie has since been unable to contact Penny, and is deeply concerned for her welfare—especially given that the girl has a serious medical condition. Siobhan agrees to assist, enrolling as a continuing education student at Llewellyn to provide cover. Her investigation reveals a newly coed campus full of furious feminists, a suspiciously robust police presence, and a tight-lipped college president who has ties to a yoga retreat with cult-like roots. A diverse cast replete with vividly sketched characters—the majority of them female—elevate this fun take on the classic PI novel. Siobhan is a snarky, smart, and refreshingly relatable narrator whose burgeoning romance with a widowed lawyer adds to the tale’s emotional complexity without detracting from its central puzzle. Snappy dialogue complements the breezy plot, which, like Siobhan, never takes itself too seriously. Kinsey Millhone fans, this one’s for you.

Katrina Niidas Holm / Mystery Scene (https://www.mysteryscenemag.com/component/content/article/26-reviews/books/6934-skin-deep-2)

A Nice Shout-Out

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Thank you, Double Skinny Macchiato, for enjoying Skin Deep!

There’s a running joke in Skin Deep where its Korean-American narrator Siobhan O’Brien, who was adopted by a Norwegian mother and an Irish father, has to explain her Irish name to almost everyone she meets. It’s not really funny, of course, but Siobhan deals with it in the same droll fashion she does almost everything. As the novel opens, the owner of the private investigation company where Siobhan is training dies leaving the agency to Siobhan. There isn’t a lot of money or much in the way of assets, but an old friend soon hires Siobhan to search for her missing daughter, a student at the exclusive Llewellyn College. The college recently admitted its first male students, a move which has not been well received by all parties, and the more Siobhan investigates, the clearer it becomes that there is something rotten in the state of Llewellyn — and plenty of very strange characters. At times, the bonkersness of it all did get out of hand, but the mystery is complex and well-plotted, and Siobhan is a great character: funny, smart and independent. This is the first in a series of Siobhan O’Brien novels, so if you like her, stay tuned!

https://www.doubleskinnymacchiato.com/2020/09/top-five-books-august-2020-brit-bennett-tana-french-kiley-reid.html

Narratives of Adoption and San Francisco : New Geography of the Asian American Novel

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So here’s something that I don’t encounter very often — an academic paper on one of my books. This one is for Love Love, and it’s like…super academic. Like it’s got an abstract and everything. Here’s the gist:

Recently, new Asian American novels are using the trope of adoption in unconventional ways. Sung J. Woo’s Love Love and Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl both employ the motif of adoption in their plot, yet unlike the representative Asian American literary works featuring adoption such as Gish Jen’s Love Wife, Chang-Rae Lee’s Gesture Life, and Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood, they portray cases of homoracial, inter-country adoption. Instead of visiting the country of origin in Asia with questions of biological relatives and reasons for adoption, both protagonists travel domestically to San Francisco in order to explore their identity. San Francisco becomes an intriguing city of origin for both Asian American protagonists who walk the city as flâneur figures with a postmodern sensibility. Kevin Lee in Love Love observes San Francisco as a cosmopolitan city. Lee Lien in Pioneer Girl considers it a place of reinvention in the West. While the history of Kevin’s Korean American birth father belongs to the social and cultural history of 1970s San Francisco, and not to the ethnic histories of Asian America, the adoption mystery of Rose Wilder Lane beckons Lee Lien deeper into an American literary history. As San Francisco is marked as “origin” or “birthplace” on the map of Asian American itineraries, not as destination of Asian migrations, narratives of adoption offered by these novels suggest the changing mode of Asian American literature that interrogates and problematizes the ways in which Asian American identity and experiences are defined, represented, and imagined.

https://www.earticle.net/Article/A311021

The rest is written in Korean! The journal is titled “미국소설,” which translates to American Fiction. If you happen to read Korean and want to see the whole thing, go for it!

입양서사와_샌프란시스코__아Download