Catherine Chung's "The Tenth Muse," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Tenth Muse: A Novel by Catherine Chung.

The entry begins:

When I was growing up, my white friends would sometimes ask each other who they'd want to play them in the movie of their lives. As a child, I was always at a loss: there were no Asian American child actresses I knew by name. I don't know when the first time I saw one was, but to be honest, it's not something I likely would have wanted to commemorate: the Asian American onscreen characters of my childhood were the foreign exchange students in the goofy clothes who spoke with accents, or the nerds everyone else made fun of and picked on, who carried calculators and protractors, whose noses were buried in giant books. It's not that these depictions didn't reflect my experience: they did, in the most painful ways. I wanted nothing to do with them.

When my first book came out, people would ask me who I wanted to play the Korean American family in my novel. "When was the last time you...[read on]

Visit Catherine Chung's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Tenth Muse.

--Marshal Zeringue