52 Favorite People, Places and Things
Vanity Fair runs its recurring question feature, “The Proust Questionnaire,” and I just recently learned the weekly online magazine Airmail runs a questionnaire of its own, featuring an alphabetical list of prompts for featured guests. I’m putting the question set to myself, and hoping you will do it, too, so I can learn more about you. It’s fun. It’s easy. Why not? AIRLINE: ANA…
LA Parents! Don’t Miss Performing Arts Workshop (PAW) Summer Camps this summer. My spawn have been going to this on and off over the past, gosh, six summers, and now I’m serving as an ambassador for the program because it’s such a worthwhile experience.
Over the 2024 summer, the kids will perform children’s adaptations of Barbie Dream Musical, Greatest Showman, Matilda the Musical, and Mary Poppins. On the last day of each session the children put on the show which is free and open to the family members of the campers. Performing Arts Workshops was even named BEST Summer Camp & BEST Children’s Live Theater in LA Parent Magazine. If you want more information on PAW, their number is (310) 827-8827 or check out the website at PerformingArtsWorkshops.com.
I largely moved my correspondence with you to my Substack newsletter, which meant going many months without posting on HeyElise last year. But I’ll keep this blog going indefinitely because blogging is near and dear to me. It’s a practice I began on LiveJournal in The Year 2000, moved over to Xanga in college (imported many of those Xanga posts here to HeyElise), and by the time I graduated from…
What a pleasure it is to curl up with a book, or take one with me on travels, or speed read a book because I can’t put it down. This year I began listening to audiobooks, after having so much fun narrating my own. I’m still not back up to the 52 books a year pace but managed to do a wee bit more reading this year than last. Focused on fiction in the back half of the year after many non-fiction…
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” ― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God On book release day at CNN in New York, reacting live to host Richard Quest in a Korean jimjilbang It was the year of Taylormania, the year of ongoing wars and displacement, the hottest year on record (and climbing), the year of Ozempic, the year artificial intelligence advances…
If I have to point to one daily dimension in which South Korea transformed my life, it’s wearing sunscreen. South Koreans protect their skin with a near religious fervor, and it rubbed off on me. (Hehe, pun intended.) Now I am militant about never leaving home without sunscreen on my face and am super serious about putting it on my kids, too. They are better at reapplying sunscreen than brushing…
TED 2023, By the Numbers
Interviewing the experimental artist Ersin Han Ersin Hours on the ground in Vancouver: 123.5 Talks watched: 71, but not all in the theater, more often I was watched from the various simulcast lounges all around the convention center “loop” Interviews with speakers: 7 Talks I really liked: 5 Bobas consumed in Vancouver: 2 Interviews in front of an audience: 1, with Misan Harriman, the first…
On Monterey Park, Parenting, and the New Year
Monterey Park, California, USA, is the heart of the Chinese/Taiwanese/Cantonese American diaspora in Southern California. I know it because my parents know it. Because they have friends there, or friends of friends there, because first generation immigrants either settled or found community there. As The Washington Post put it: “Here between the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains and downtown Los…
My 18 Books Of 2022
Some of my 2022 reads. I abandoned the book-a-week pace of earlier years once the pandemic came for us. 2022 was a year I spent writing and revising, revising, revising my own book, which is now ready for preorder. I hope you will reserve a copy, and if you do, please write me a note or comment that you have done so, if only to spare you my reminders to preorder. 🙂 Much like last year, work…
2022: The Write Life
This was the year the pandemic felt “over” enough that everyone I know began jet-setting again (curiously it seemed like the aforementioned “everyone” summered in Italy?). For me, as accustomed as I am to constant movement, I spent much of 2022 alone, writing from my bed. The deadline to turn in the book nearly flattened me and I wrote much of FLAWLESS in what felt like a semi-conscious state.…
People I’ve met in LA just going about my regular life, and not because I was interviewing them: The guy who did the movements for Lyle Lyle CrocodileThe guy who did the movements for Jar Jar Binks (Different guy)Someone who runs Dua Lipa’s foundationSomeone who runs Mandy Moore’s production companySomeone who slept with Flo from ProgressiveBruce Willis’s personal chef An editor who retouches…
The girls — Luna, Eva and Isa — on the beach with Yani, June 2022. There is a real tedium and grinding labor to parenting small children. It involves hassles like bottle washing, endless loads of laundry, or contorting your body to pick up the crayon that fell underneath the plane seat in front of you, again and again and again. For the past seven years, most of that labor has been borne by Yani,…
Upstairs at the convention center, a view of Vancouver Harbor Back from Vancouver, where TED hosted its first flagship conference since 2019, and what an event it was. We were greeted by anti-vaxxers who have it out for Bill Gates, one of this year’s speakers. Nearly 2,000 participants took part from all over the world, dozens of speakers and performances enchanted, empowered and enlightened us,…
Yevgeniy Fiks, Sovetish Kosmos/Yiddish Cosmos, 2018, prints on paper. Soviet space program monument photos overlaid on a Yiddish-language literary magazine published in Moscow, which couldn’t discuss Judaism. He added anti-Soviet slogans, invoking the stalled identity of Soviet Jews, and suggesting their embrace of space was a substitute. How many people have I interviewed in my lifetime?…
I’ve arrived! A puzzler let me know that I was a clue in today’s USA Today crossword. This might be cooler than getting that vegetarian sandwich named after me in 2020. The sentimental part is USA Today is the first newspaper that’s ever published my writing. I appeared in it in 5th grade, after my bestie Jes Ingram and I wrote a letter to the editor about saving the rainforest. It’s the first…
