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BooksSeptember 13, 2024

The Friday Poem: ‘Beige Thoughts’ by Sherry Zhang

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A poem by 2024 Young Writer in Residence Sherry Zhang.

  1. My favourite beige activity is 2048. I started playing on a 12 hour long flight before my 24th birthday. These transient spaces become forced group meditation. I usually let my death anxiety spiral. This time, I let my arms cramp up while swiping those gobbling numbers.
  2. I think moons are also kind of beige. Long summer dusks, the wisp of sunscreen smudged against blue. The crescent in the space between a lover’s cheek and eyelash. Moon songs and love songs are two of the same breath (ah~)
  3. Beige foods include Harvest Pea Snaps. Good mouth feel. Tasty polystyrene. Sour Cream and Chives Pringles. Salted duck egg and pork congee. Fried tomato and seaweed soup. Umami. 
  4. I love listening to the same song on repeat for hours sometimes. Something with atmospheric doof doof beats, and wishy washy lyrics. 
  5. Beige friends are the ones you sit with. You talk and laugh with. You exist in silence and do life admin with. You lie on opposite sides of the bed, mindlessly scrolling Tiktok in an attempt to reset the nervous system with.  
  6. It’s not a flex but I’m currently at 16384. It is a flex. I want you to cheer for me. 
  7. I go soul searching, travelling up and down the west coast of North America by train. I’m not sure I found myself. I should have been meditating but I just spent hours playing 2048. 
  8. I’m a baby bay baby. But not like a nepo-baby. I’m just the youngest cousin, so baby beyblade baby.
  9. My favourite beige friendships operate exclusively at pools. We small talk while aqua jogging. If the conversation gets too deep, too soon, we’ll start racing laps. It’s hard to talk about your feelings when underwater. Panting tired, we’ll sit in the steam room. A festering space demanding singular focus. Finally, like mirror twins to the wrinkly Asian aunties in the spa pool, we’ll start sharing our woes.
  10. My psychiatrist keeps calling me intelligent, but it feels more like a back-hand insult than anything. My high school principal called us Asians: mysterious smart robots.
  11. Argh! You’re my shrink. I came to you because I wanted to be told my worth is more than my output. I’m not doomed or wrong or fundamentally fucked. 
  12. I know I’m intelligent. Yet I’m still infantilised in every space I occupy. I can’t seem to logic my way out of this. At some point, it becomes weaponised to racially subjugate others for the benefit of White supremacy. 
  13. You prescribe me exercise, vegetables and fish oil. 
  14. You say I’m a young queer girl stuck between two cultures. Guess I’ll wait to turn into a muscle-mommy-jock with powerful thighs to straddle this cavern for the rest of my life. My teenage back-ne transforming into dark purple duck feathers, so guilt/shame/filial piety glosses off. Cool cool cool, I’m waiting for my evolution. For the post diaspora-poetry era. 
  15. What I struggle with is rage. These days, I go straight to defeat. I haven’t learned how to hold rage in my veins and let it glow. Little girls who grow up with angry Dads and avoidant Mums go one of two ways. So I get acid reflux, turn my insides into stone, and survive. 
  16. I’m scared of my own anger. It is so large and big. But like a black wormhole, it had nowhere to go except back inside. I taught myself to flop and suppress. To punish thyself to feel something. To smile serenely, lobotomy. 
  17. Every report card states ‘she is an obedient, sensible, sweet Chinese girl.’ When does resentment transform into vengeance? My age is bigger than the size of my pink light up sneakers. Am I big and scary enough for my tantrums to save me now? 
  18. My body forgets I’m not in that house anymore. Phantom sun spots in the retinas spinning dizzy. 
  19. Once, a teacher put a sticker on my nose and told me ‘you are enough.’ It made me weep like an ancient earthen clay pot.  
  20. I’m probably burnt out. It’s listed on my medical records. 
  21. The antidepressants they put me on make me feel like I’m pinging, and it’s hard to go to work in a glass office building when it feels like you’re rolling. 
  22. I’m a girl with beige thoughts. Sometimes sad thoughts. But generally soft beige outlook and disposition. 
  23. I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince more these days, but it’s feeling less believable and more slippery. 
  24. I’ve deleted 2048. 
  25. I turn 25, and I install Pokemon Go. I want to fight. 

This poem was written for ‘Bad Apple – The Showcase’

The Friday Poem is edited by Hera Lindsay Bird. Submissions are now open. Please send up to three poems in a PDF or Word document to info@thespinoff.co.nz

Keep going!
Looks like Spring has well and truly sprung on the charts this week.
Looks like Spring has well and truly sprung on the charts this week.

BooksSeptember 13, 2024

The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending September 13

Looks like Spring has well and truly sprung on the charts this week.
Looks like Spring has well and truly sprung on the charts this week.

The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND

1 Make It Make Sense by Lucy Blakiston & Bel Hawkins (Moa Press, $37)

The bright brains behind Shit You Should Care About have pivoted to print! With chapters like “Phoenixing”, “How I make money is not the way I die”, and “Why we need to go far away from where we came from” we’re sure this very attractive (pastels, florals, faces in flowers) guidebook to living, loving (or not), and working (or not) will strike a path straight to the heads and hearts of many a Gen Z on the hustle in this tricksy day and age.

2 All That We Know by Shilo Kino (Moa Press, $38) 

“The book offers a well-crafted, neatly-cast story, with characters I already miss and would love to spend more time with. It offers opportunities too, for reflection on that which we critique but also continue to perpetuate, and our entanglements – conscious or not – with the very systems and behaviours we claim we do not abide.” Read more of Natasha Lampard’s review on The Spinoff.

3 Radical Respect: How to Work Together by Kim Scott (MacMillan, $35)

Previously known as Just Work, this is an update of a bestseller endorsed by “lean in” lady Sheryl Sandberg.

4 Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Viking Press, $38)

Plug it straight into my veins. The book in which Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton hang out.

5 Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi (Penguin, $70)

Mac & cheese but make it fancy.

6 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Viking Press, $37)

“Shafak asks us to think of water as not a resource but a companion, to imagine its precious, ancient story. She reminds us that the story of written language, from the counting of cereal crops to the first epic tale of a deluge, was born from the water feeding the harvests of Mesopotamia and used to mold the first cuneiform tablets. She reminds us, powerfully, of the material nature of human thought and culture, the continuity of time and the proximity of our ancestors.” Read more on the NY Times.

7 James by Percival Everett (Mantle, $38) 

“One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.” Read the full pithy appraisal on Kirkus Reviews.

8 We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida (Doubleday, $36)

For all the wannabe childless cat ladies like Taylor Swift.

9 Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (Fourth Estate, $38)

From the profile/review on The Guardian: “Despite the obvious parallels, Little Women was not Mellors’ ‘north star’ when writing the novel. “One of the things that struck me first was [Wes Anderson’s film] The Royal Tenenbaums, this feeling of different, very exceptional siblings within one family.” She was also inspired by the way Jonathan Franzen writes siblings in his novels.”

10 Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Head of Zeus, $25)

The stunning, time-spanning epic now also a TV show streaming on Apple TV.

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

WELLINGTON

1 The Little Witch Who Lost Her Broom! by Elaine Bickell & Raymond McGrath (Scholastic, $22) 

Cute! Very apt that a new picture book is number on in the same week that Picture Me festival is on in Wellington (and in Christchurch next week). Read all about the festival here. Hope she gets her broom back!

2 Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Maori, Honouring the Treaty by Avril Bell (Auckland Uni Press, $30)

This brilliantly instructive book is still going strong.

3 Make it Make Sense by Lucy Blakiston & Bel Hawkins (Moa Press, $37)

4 Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, $38)

Quaffable crime from a literary goddess.

5 The Invasion of Waikato / Te Riri ki Tainui by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, $40)

From the publisher’s blurb: “The Invasion of Waikato/Te Riri ki Tainui features short biographies of people and groups who have contributed to our contemporary understanding of the events. Building on Dr O’Malley’s comprehensive 2016 study, The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000, this concise account includes rich illustrations and detailed maps. Insights from recent research emphasise the roles of memory and place in shaping our understanding of this history.”

6 Radical Respect: How to Work Together by Kim Scott (MacMillan, $35)

7 Precipice by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, $38)

This World War I novel is getting rave reviews. This from The Guardian: “This is a novel about love and power, about the son of “dour, Northern nonconformists” risen to the highest seat in the land. It’s interesting that there is no sense that Harris seeks to censure the older man for what might, in the light of modern ideas about power dynamics, be seen as a predatory relationship with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Rather, Asquith is presented with great tenderness and sympathy, as is his hard-edged but vulnerable wife, Margot. It’s the character of Venetia, though, that turns Precipice from a very good novel into a great one. As the horrors of the trenches are revealed, she feels called upon to play her part in the war effort, but also begins to question her relationship with an increasingly desperate, doddering and lovesick prime minister. At the time when our minds are on another global leader overtaken by age, the ending feels particularly poignant, its message nuanced yet terribly moving.”

8 Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi (Penguin, $70)

9 Unsettled: Small Stories of Decolonisation by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, $40)

An absolutely brilliant book about excavating our settler pasts to recognise the truth in those narratives in terms of land theft and the structural advantages that theft enabled. Honest, compellingly written, and without hand-wringing or virtue signalling: a useful tool for anyone wanting to feel more settled with their own histories. Read an excerpt from the book right here on The Spinoff.

10 Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka, $35)

The runaway hit among essay collections this year! Feltham’s debut is a fascinating exploration of the fabric of life, from seagulls to literary forebears, to worms. Read Maddie Ballard’s review of the book on The Spinoff, here.

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