AA in AA

Clarification: By "AA" the first time, I'm talking about "Asian-American." And by "AA" the second time, I'm talking about "Ann Arbor".

Yesterday I attended an author reading at the Shaman Drum bookstore. If you're looking for the best place in Ann Arbor to see and meet authors, I highly recommend this place. In fact, here's a link that will take you straight to Shaman Drum's calendar of upcoming readings. As you can see, it's packed.

The author last night was Bich Minh Nguyen who's just published Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a memoir of growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 80's after coming over from Vietnam in 1975 at the age of eight months. I haven't read the book yet, but from the selections she read last night, cultural disconnect plays a big role.

Hearing her read, I was reminded of my own experience growing up in Texas in the 80's and one incident in particular. In second grade our teacher, Ms. Aldrich, asked us to bring coffee cans so that we could grow bean seedlings in the window. Great activity, but at the time I thought, "What's coffee? And how do I get a coffee can?"

My parents didn't drink coffee at the time and still don't really. My mother will occasionally have a cup on the weekends, but so infrequently that a small jar of instant coffee in the cupboard meets her requirements and lasts for months if not years. And coffee, if it was ever mentioned in our household, was spoken of as slightly contraband, something adults engaged in because they had the right. We definitely had no coffee cans.

And so when the day finally came, I arrived at school with a metal can that formerly contained ground fried fish from China. (Hey, apparently you can buy something like it on Amazon. I'm impressed.) If any metal cylinder could be farther away from a coffee can, I couldn't -- and still can't -- conceive of it. I'm probably the only person in the class who noticed -- let's not forget how easily distracted second-graders are -- but this and a myriad of other memories that occurred before and since tell me there's legitimacy to having "Asian" as a separate category (or even more finely divided subcategories) on the U.S. Census form.

By the way, there are a couple of other places in Ann Arbor to catch author readings. Borders is one, and they host some of the better known authors (event listing here). But one place you may not have thought of is the English department at the University. Check out their listing here.