Lazarus, Home from the War is out!

So first off, today is the day that Lazarus, Home from the War comes out! I’m very excited. You can find the book on all the main sites here, on itch.io here, or on my website here. It’s on Goodreads here. For those looking to order the paperback through your local stores, that should be available to order now or very shortly using the ISBN, which is 979-8988394433.

Second off, today is Hmong-Lao Veterans Day in Wisconsin. I just found this out yesterday! The Hmong were deeply involved in the Vietnam War and came here as refugees afterward, so I wanted to commemorate this, given the topic of the book.

Now, for those with longer attention spans or nothing better to do, a little essay.

LHftW is a very personal book in a lot of ways. I lived in Vietnam for a year and I have a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies, so I have a weird and probably outsized attachment to the whole region. But my connection to VN goes farther back than an impulsive decision I made in college. 

(What, you didn’t decide on impulse to move to Ho Chi Minh City?)

When I was in college as an undergrad, I lived for several years at the corner of Bassett Street and Dayton, a block from the Mifflin Street Co-op. Mifflin Street was the originating location, in 1969, of the Mifflin Street Block Party, a political protest cum bacchanal that was where former three-time Madison mayor Paul Soglin got beaten by the cops and arrested. Or a place. These things as facts are all very well and good—and living in the area, I was relatively aware of them—but why choose Mifflin Street for the party?

Basically, this area was the heart of the hippie student neighborhood during the 60s/70s, and thus the heart of the antiwar movement in Madison. At some point, and I can’t quite work out the timing (except that it was before 1975), Bassett was nicknamed Ho Chi Minh Trail. I have no idea if this was a self-given title, or a bit of anti-anti war-movement vitriol; nevertheless, the locals embraced it, and put up a street sign.

Before I knew this was a real, actual street sign, my editor and I discussed whether the nickname was a dog whistle, and I removed a reference to it from the final version of Dionysus in Wisconsin because it was too difficult to explain all of this in passing. But I’ve since had it confirmed, not just by the photographs, but by long-time Madisonians as well.

In June 1975, following the fall of Saigon, the city council rejected an attempt to rename the street permanently “in a spirit of reconciliation,” and the sign came down.

(Click here to view a photo of the street sign and a newspaper article on Facebook.)

I still find the whole thing fascinating. But it’s also emblematic of how the US’s relationship with Vietnam has for many years been mediated by the war. I went to HCMC more than a decade after Clinton normalized relations with the country, and it was still such a part of the collective memory in the US that this fact—”Bassett used to be called Ho Chi Minh Trail”—was the main thing I heard from my peers when I announced I was going. (Maybe that says something about who I was hanging out with, too.)

Interestingly, learning about the war for the first time mostly from the Vietnamese side of things, where it’s often referred to as the Resistance War Against America, gave me a view that I now often see echoed in online discourse about it–that it was really a war fought between the United States and Vietnam. This was not, on the whole, a common view at the time–if anything, it was perceived to be not a war between South and North Vietnam that was not the US’s war to fight. It was also not the view of the South Vietnamese who came to the US as refugees. It’s interesting how the rhetoric has shifted.

That said, Vietnam is an amazing country. And so is Thailand, my other love, where Laz has also spent time. A few years later, after I’d been back in Madison for a while, I went back to school for library science and wound up also getting an MA from what was then called the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, wherein I mostly studied Thai.

So because of my own, uh, checkered past, Laz spent some time hanging around at Than Son Nhut (a base on the edge of Saigon, actually not far from where I used to live) flying Jolly Green Giants (search and rescue helicopters) before getting sent to a base in Northern Thailand, where he flew other things (the RF-4C Phantom, mostly) and also did some light espionage hung out with a monk he met.

And then he comes home, which is really where the novel begins. I can’t say anymore, because of spoilers. But I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I’ll catch you at the beginning of June with my normal newsletter!

On Paula Deen

That's "HA-yam," y'all.

One of the things that interests me about Paula Deen’s recent revelation that she has diabetes (and is now a spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk) is how personally people seem to be taking it. A number of people on my friends’ list on Facebook (I know, the source of all truth) seemed very upset and seemed to view her diagnosis as comeuppance for the way she lives her life/cooks. Anthony Bourdain, who can always be counted on to say something mean if he is allowed to speak, calls her cooking habits “in bad taste” in light of her diagnosis. A number of people have implied that by cooking dishes with high quantities of butter, sugar, and salt, she was somehow intentionally raising the diabetes rates in this country so that she and Novo Nordisk could cash in.

Well, perhaps that’s a bit drastic as a characterization, but I have to say I’m surprised for two reasons:

  1. Her cooking is, I think, getting slammed unfairly.
  2. These rants very much absolve her viewers/followers of personal responsibility. If someone got diabetes from cooking a la Paula Deen every day, “It’s not your fault, Paula Deen said it was okay.”

I have to admit I’m a bit of a cooking show junkie, so when I say this about point #1: Paula’s meals are quite fattening, but overall I don’t think the so-called “Queen of Butter” uses more butter than Julia “Butter is Better” Child ever did. In fact, while it’s true that Paula never met something she couldn’t deep fry, Julia certainly matches her with butter, heavy cream, and wine. The major difference between the two of them is in the sophistication of their cooking—Paula Deen gets paid to cook “traditionalesque” southern food, while Julia Child was doing French.

Put this way, the opposition to Paula Deen’s method of cooking smacks of snobbery. It’s okay to use cream and butter if you’re making quiche—Julia’s recipe calls for over two cups of cream, as it happens (a mere 1,642 calories—as Julia once said, “If you’re afraid of butter, use cream.”)—but if you’re making Twinkie Pie, go to hell (for the record, Twinkie Pie uses neither cream nor butter). Of course Julia Child practiced portion control (she talks about it in her book My Life in France, anyway; I don’t think I’ve seen her mention it on her show). Oh, but Paula Deen says she doesn’t suggest anyone should eat the way she cooks every day (or she’s said that in interviews, again I don’t think I’ve seen her mention it on her show). But certainly I think it’s difficult to tar one of them on this count without hitting the other.

As for the second point, well… There is the matter of personal responsibility, certainly, and freedom of thought. I rarely make a recipe without halving the sugar, replacing some butter or oil with margarine or yoghurt, and generally trying to lighten things up. (I make béchamal sauce with skim milk. Julia would be ashamed to be in the same room with me.) But my point is that no one is forcing anyone to make Deen’s recipes or to make them as written. If we are going to claim that cooking as she does is somehow irresponsible, then can we follow it by saying it is irresponsible for a restaurant to serve fried cheese curds (a Wisconsin favorite) to an obese person (there are plenty here)? Don’t people have a right to make their own choices on what they eat? In fact, isn’t this one of the earliest rights that people claim for themselves as children barely removed from infancy?

One thing that struck me as interesting about all these interviews Deen has done is that she mentioned that initially, she didn’t really understand what diabetes was or what it meant that she had it. Recall that we are talking about a woman who grew up in a small town in the South, a place that does not have an awesome educational system, and she did not go to college. I know about diabetes because my mother is an endocrinologist. It’s possible that Ms. Deen did not grow up with these privileges and actually didn’t know, or at least didn’t understand, that this could be the outcome of her lifestyle. From my understanding, it is not unusual for people to go through a period of adjustment and denial when diagnosed with diabetes. Plus, people should be allowed to keep their medical problems to themselves, even if they are public figures.

That said, signing on as spokesperson for Novo Nordisk is opportunistic. I have to admit I don’t like drug companies (because of patenting issues, primarily—I’m not a conspiracy theorist). But it may be the case that she genuinely thought she could help reach out to her audience—people who, like her, may not know much about diabetes—and educate them. And make a tidy sum in the process; she’s a shrewd businesswoman. But I don’t think anyone, least of all Deen herself, is suggesting that with diabetes you can do what you want, then take a pill that makes it all better. Novo Nordisk is suggesting that they approached Deen because they thought it could be cool “to change some of her famously tasty, and butter-rich, and really unhealthy recipes.”

I won’t imply that all cooking shows are created equal when it comes to matters of health, but look at some of the things on Food Network’s lineup:

  • Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives: The overweight Guy Fieri goes from place to place and is filmed stuffing his maw with giant piles of meat, cheese, and fried things.
  • Sugar High: Duff Goldman, much as I love him, is another chubby guy carting from place to place EATING, in this case, CAKE.
  • Hungry Girl: Lisa Lillien really rubs me the wrong way. Never has “healthy” eating seemed less appealing (probably because instead of cooking genuinely healthy food, she takes all kinds of shortcuts so people can still eat their greasy terrible meat by-products without the guilt).
  • 30 Minute Meals: Rachel Ray has a terrible smile, and smiling terribly is all she’s good at. But although her food doesn’t seem awful, she doesn’t exactly cook with the precision needed for really healthy cooking. Know what’s the difference between one tablespoon of “EVOO” and three? About 240 calories. That’s the difference between measuring things and approximating.
  • Pioneer Woman Cooks: Ok, I happen to like Ree Drummond, and I have cooked stuff off her website…usually cutting the sugar and butter by quite a lot. She lives on a cattle ranch and never met a stick of butter she didn’t love.
  • Robert Irvine: I only ever see him on Dinner: Impossible, and most of what he does is yell at people. I’m just pointing him out because he’s the only really ripped chef. In the world.
  • Sandra Lee: While Sandra’s Money-Saving Meals is usually fairly healthy, Semi-Homemade sacrifices that for convenience. And while she’s willing to cut calories in food, she spends them on alcohol. I’m convinced she’s not fat only because she doesn’t eat and lives on breath mints and water when she’s not being cryogenically frozen prior to her next taping.

And looking at non-Food Network cooking shows I’ve enjoyed:

  • Two Fat Ladies: Exactly what it sounds like. Two fat, elderly women drink and smoke their way across England on a motorcycle, cracking nasty jokes about vegetarians all the while. I love it.

So what’s my point? First of all, it’s not unusual for cooks to be both personally rotund and cook unhealthy food. Second of all, this industry is ALL ABOUT cashing in on people’s love for highly caloric, fried, cheesed, delicious food. Third, Paula isn’t alone in cashing in on the latest health scare: FN announced a new series called Fat Chef which premiers 26 January. I can only assume that this is a less abusive version of Biggest Loser.

Finally, to blame Paula Deen for advancing the cause of diabetes through her cooking is to miss the whole tragedy of the cooking show. While record numbers of people are overweight, and cookbooks sell well and cooking shows are super popular, most of these people don’t cook. As Michael Pollan puts it, the Average American spends 27 minutes per day on food preparation, and cooking from scratch is all but dead (officially, “cooking” means you have to assemble elements—heating up a pizza, for example, doesn’t count, though making a sandwich does). That makes me a statistical anomaly, since I cook from scratch (I make sauces! I bake things without mixes! I make non-instant rice and lentils!) at least 3-4 times per week. People are not getting fat off of Paula’s deep-fried ham (or haa-yam, y’all) because they are not cooking it. They’re watching her cook, then having dinner at McDonald’s.

So rage against Paula Deen all you want. Unfortunately, it’s not going to help anything.