When we have full professors like Ms. BUH teaching our impressionable young, would-be teachers, it’s no wonder that children have to struggle once those teachers get a job. Learning how to read is already challenging. Let’s not tolerate teachers who, through ignorance, make it harder.
©2013 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
Shut Up You’re Welcome: Thoughts on Life, Death, and Other Inconveniences
By Annie Choi, c. 2013
Published by Touchtone/Simon & Schuster
Paperback, eBook, 270 pp.
Reviewed by Jill Norgren
In 1883 American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.” Her poem, “Solitude,” challenges us to consider the connections made, or severed, by happiness and sorrow.
Wilcox suggests that laughter has a universally appreciated quality. Humor, however, is not universal. Humor provokes laughter but not everyone relishes the laughter triggered, let’s say, by identity jokes. Humorous writing is built upon culture, context, and tribalism. Annie Choi, the author of Shut Up You’re Welcome, writes funny stuff. It is a measure of her talent that she is capable of crossing geographic, generational, and ethnic lines in essays that have broad appeal.
Photograph by Perri Pivovar
Choi is the daughter of Korean immigrants. She draws on family life for the stories in Shut Up. As the title suggests, Choi’s memories are not saccharine and she is not above a swear word or three. Shut Up employs love, barbs, and zingers to make us laugh. Will everyone be amused? Will every reader laugh? Ask Ella Wheeler.
Family is Choi’s field to mine. Bill Cosby, Joan Rivers, and David Sedaris have regaled us with stories drawn from family failings, foibles, and accomplishment; family, an unending source of mirth and self-evident truths. Now Choi has joined the ranks of these story tellers. In 2009 Choi, a graduate of the University of California-Berkeley and Columbia University’s MFA, program published her first book, Happy Birthday or Whatever. It won raves as a memoir about an American daughter’s life with a tiger mom. Shut Up follows that debut twirl, exploring her girlchild’s life in the promised land of Los Angeles as well as the bi-coastal gymnastics that accompany maintaining relations with the California contingent after Choi moves to the Big Apple.
Choi has written Shut Up as a series of first person essays each of which opens with a letter in which Annie grouses about something. Her writing voice is modern, indignant, and loving. Not infrequently she wants to know "what’s up here?" — "what makes these relatives of mine tick?"
In Shut Up Choi swims in a bigger pond, introducing us to stories of her father and brother. And because this is the United States, cars and highways are often in the mix. In "Road Rash" Choi floored me with her account of her family’s Great American Road Trip — mom, dad-the-driver, sibs, and Grandma in their battleship of a Ford station wagon in the western deserts with a failing air conditioning system. This is not the trip promised in the Sunday travel supplements!
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