{"id":493,"date":"2009-12-18T19:57:38","date_gmt":"2009-12-19T00:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=493"},"modified":"2009-12-18T19:59:01","modified_gmt":"2009-12-19T00:59:01","slug":"event-coverage-breaking-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/18\/event-coverage-breaking-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Event Coverage: Breaking English"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Larissa
Larissa Min, reading from an account of her family's journey from Korea to Brazil and the United States. Photo courtesy of Maya Li.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to check out an event on December 4th called Breaking English<\/a>, hosted by Korean-Brazilian writer Larissa Min.\u00a0 Larissa moved to Seattle in 2000, where she got her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Washington.\u00a0 Since then, she has taught at local community colleges and begun work on a family history project mapping her parents\u2019 journey from Korea to Brazil, and several decades\u00a0later, to New York City.\u00a0 Her research, sponsored by the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, has taken her back to Brazil,\u00a0down the streets of her hometown, and into the archives of\u00a0her childhood library.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I arrived at the event\u00a0a little late, but found a great seat as Larissa assured the audience that she was running on \u201cLatino time\u201d and would be ready in a few minutes.\u00a0\u00a0I felt immediately gratified to be in the company of what seemed to me a different crowd than the one that usually\u00a0frequents Seattle literary events (where I am often the only person of color present!)\u00a0 The\u00a0unusual venue, a darkened second-floor dance studio in Seattle\u2019s Capitol Hill district (known for its arts community), was a lovely event space: floor-length mirrors, wood pillars, votive candles\u00a0flickering on the hardwood, white paper bags glowing luminously\u00a0along the back wall of the studio…\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Larissa established a wonderful rapport with her audience, at times reading from her manuscript-in progress, at times moving into a more conversational mode and talking through a\u00a0presentation of\u00a0images and newspaper clips.\u00a0\u00a0I appreciated the fluidity with which she transitioned from one\u00a0performance genre to the next; one moment she was crouched on the floor with a Korean drum, and the next she was laughing at a childhood photo of herself making faces at the camera.\u00a0 All throughout the evening, her wonderful and quirky humor (a photo of a prancing unicorn popped on the screen when she described her surprise at finding a fellow Korean during her travels to the\u00a0southernmost tip of Brazil), moved her audience to laughter and,\u00a0at more serious moments, tinged some of her family’s most painful experiences\u00a0with a poignance I found\u00a0tremendously beautiful.<\/p>\n

The selections Larissa shared from her manuscript-in-progress were excerpted from three different periods of her family’s life: first, her parents’ courtship and preparation for their move to Brazil, which they\u00a0undertook with\u00a0fifty other Korean families after negotiating an agreement with the Brazilian government.\u00a0 \u00a0Next, her family’s settlement in Brazil, and the strangeness of encountering a wholly new terrain and culture that, over time, became home.\u00a0 In her final selection, she narrated an episode from her family’s first few years in New York, allowing the quality of\u00a0the reading to take on a more personal tone as she wove story from the conflicted relationships of a family in transition.\u00a0 I thoroughly appreciated Larissa’s narrative adeptness, evident\u00a0not only in her written texts, but in the variety of voices, modes, and media she evoked over the course of the evening.\u00a0 What a fantastic event!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to check out an event on December 4th called Breaking English, hosted by Korean-Brazilian writer Larissa Min.\u00a0 Larissa moved to Seattle in 2000, where she got her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Washington.\u00a0 Since then, she has taught at local community colleges and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[86],"tags":[124,127,126,125,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":608,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions\/608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}