On my radar: Celeste Ng’s cultural highlights
The author Celeste Ng was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1980 to parents from Hong Kong. She studied English at Harvard followed by a masters in creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, won the Asian/Pacific American award for literature and the American Library Association’s Alex award; it has since been optioned for the big screen. Her 2017 follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere, is a New York Times bestseller and is being adapted for TV by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. Ng is also a recipient of the Pushcart prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
1. Comedy
Ali Wong: Hard Knock Wife
‘Genuinely hysterical comedy’: Ali Wong in her standup show Hard Knock Wife. Photograph: Ken Woroner/Netflix
While watching this [on Netflix], I laughed so hard I sobbed. As did my husband – lest you worry that Wong’s comedy is only for women, Asians or Asian women. In a leopard-print dress that hugs her pregnant belly, Wong jokes about childbirth, raising children and identity. But her real topic is the messiness of human relationships. Her passionate call for social change and her genuinely hysterical comedy aren’t at odds: they’re flip sides of the same coin.
2. Theatre
Jagged Little Pill
‘I’m betting it’s heading for Broadway’: Jagged Little Pill. Photograph: Evgenia Eliseeva/American Repertory Theatre
I was 15 when Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was released, so the album was the soundtrack to my adolescence and a hugely formative influence. Recently, I listened to it while writing a novel set in the late 1990s and it holds up beautifully. So I was thrilled to snag tickets to this musical, which links the themes and the music of the album into an original story. I can’t wait to see it. It’s premiering right now in Cambridge [Massachusetts], my neighbourhood, but I’m betting that it’s headed for Broadway.
‘I wish I could press this book into the hands of every American – actually, every human.’
3. Book
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
I read Baldwin in college, but now seemed like a good time to read him again. Although Notes of a Native Son was first published in 1955, Baldwin could have been writing about today. The issues are just as relevant today and his words are just as powerful. To take a line almost at random: “It goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace… [But] one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.” I wish I could press this book into the hands of every American – actually, every human.
4. Art
Mark Dion
Mark Dion’s ‘Memory Box’: ‘I’m obsessed with his work.’ Photograph: courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. © Mark Dion
A curator friend took me to see Mark Dion’s Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; I’m now obsessed with his work. Dion raises fascinating questions about our relationship to the natural world and collecting: what we save, how we display it, and why. One of my favourite works is a wooden shed full of small boxes, all purchased by Dion at estate sales or flea markets. You can open the boxes and see what’s inside: seashells, a rubber spider, paper fasteners, chess pieces, medals. I spent hours there, imagining who’d saved these items and why.
5. App
Forest
The Forest app: ‘I take an inordinate amount of joy in seeing my little forest grow.’ Source: Forestapp.cc
Like most people, I spend too much time on my phone and the writer Jonny Sun recommended this app to me. Basically, it’s a timer: tell it how long you want to focus (say, 25 minutes) and if you work for that time, it plants a little virtual tree. But if you switch to another app before the time is up — and thus, stop working — the tree dies. What can I say: guilt works. It’s helped me put down my phone and get back to the desk and I take an inordinate amount of joy in seeing my little forest grow.
6. Film
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man: Homecoming: ‘The little guys and the little problems can matter just as much as saving the world.’ Photograph: Allstar/Marvel Studios/Columbia Pictures
I loved Tom Holland’s cameo in Captain America: Civil War and this solo Spider-Man movie was a delight. We rarely care about a superhero’s alter ego; usually, we’re impatient for them to shed it, don the mask and get to the ass-kicking. But here, Peter Parker’s life is as compelling as Spider-Man’s. For a teen, asking out a crush is as fraught as fighting bad guys, maybe more so, and the two lives dovetail beautifully at the movie’s climax. Homecoming argues that the little guys and the little problems can matter just as much as saving the world — and maybe are even part of the same struggle.