Jen Sookfong Lee - Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart
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- Book:Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart
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Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart: summary, description and annotation
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For most of Jen Sookfong Lees life, pop culture was an escape from family tragedy and a means of fitting in with the larger culture around her. Anne of Green Gables promised her that, despite losing her father at the age of twelve, one day she might still have the loving family of her dreams. Princess Diana was proof that maybe there was more to being a good girl after all. And yet as Jen grew up, she began to recognize the ways in which pop culture was not made for someone like herthe child of Chinese immigrant parents who looked for safety in the invisibility afforded by embracing model minority myths.
Ranging from the unattainable perfection of Gwyneth Paltrow and the father-figure familiarity of Bob Ross, to the long shadow cast by The Joy Luck Club and the life lessons she has learned from Rihanna, Jen weaves together key moments in pop culture with stories of her own failings, longings, and struggles as she navigates the minefields that come with carving her own path as an Asian woman, single mother, and writer. And with great wit, bracing honesty, and a deep appreciation for the ways culture shapes us, she draws direct lines between the spectacle of the popular, the intimacy of our personal bonds, and the social foundations of our collective obsessions.
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HOW POP CULTURE BROKE MY HEART
Superfan is a book you will want to simultaneously hug close to your chest and press insistently into others hands. There is such honesty, intelligence, warmth, and vulnerability to these essays that, when you finally put them down, youll feel breathlessa little sad its over, but ultimately full, invigorated, as if youve just ended an evening of deep, intimate conversation with your best friend. It takes a rare talent to pull this feat offand Jen Sookfong Lee is that talent. I love this book.
ALICIA ELLIOTT , author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
Superfan is about how deeply and, sometimes, disappointingly personal pop culture can be, even and especially for those of us for whom its not made. As she explores her identity through the books, movies, and movie stars who accompanied her along the path of self-discovery, Jen Sookfong Lee has written a memoir that is gorgeous and ugly, generous and petty, wild and self-conscious. In the process, she defiantly claims the right to be the good girl, the bad girl, and all the transitions in between. A thoughtful and exhilarating and brave self-portrait of a woman demanding to be seen and who, at long last, is able to see herself.
ELAINE LUI , author of LaineyGossip and Listen to the Squawking Chicken
Superfan vividly brings to life the joys and despair of obsessing over pop cultureboth feeling seen by it and being deeply hurt by it. Lees insights are devastating and tender, hilarious and profound. Superfans introspective meditations on familiar pop culture moments effortlessly turn them into relatable and heartbreaking vignettes. You know that thing when a scene in a movie destroys you, and you have to spend a week reassembling your life, but you dont know why? Lee has done the work to figure out why, and her writing about it is so vulnerable it might destroy you too.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD , author of Son of Elsewhere
Superfan is an extraordinary work of personal memoir and pop cultural criticism. Lees exploration of pop cultures impact on her as a child of Chinese immigrants is brilliant, absurd, and heartbreaking, and she shares her stories with so much warmth and generosity that by the end you will feel like her best friend. Each chapter had me laughing out loud and underlining her provocative takes on subjects like 90s heartthrobs, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Kardashians. Eye-opening and luminous and so much fun!
HEATHER ONEILL , author of When We Lost Our Heads
Superfan is a fresh reclamation of pop culture from an unexpected and exciting perspective. By juxtaposing her everyday life as an Asian woman with those of iconic TV characters and popstars, Jen Sookfong Lee spotlights how pop culture can be a mirror in which to both see and not see yourself, a gateway to somewhere else and a reminder of how stuck you are. Its this complexity that makes Superfan a fantastic read!
VIVEK SHRAYA , author of People Change
NON - FICTION
Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho (2017)
Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart (2023)
FICTION
The End of East (2007)
The Better Mother (2011)
The Conjoined (2016)
POETRY
The Shadow List (2021)
ANTHOLOGIES
Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life after Sexual Assault (co-edited with Stacey May Fowles, 2019)
Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood (co-edited with Stacey May Fowles, 2022)
Copyright 2023 by Jen Sookfong Lee
McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisheror, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN9780771025211
Ebook ISBN9780771025228
Book design by Jennifer Griffiths, adapted for ebook
Cover photograph: Kyrani Kanavaros
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_6.0_142264361_c0_r0
In memory of
Soon Chung Park,
Hyun Jung Grant,
Suncha Kim,
Yong Ae Yue,
Xiaojie Tan,
and Daoyou Feng
ALL THE NAMES OF PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS USED THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK , WITH THE EXCEPTION OF MY OWN , HAVE BEEN CHANGED .
I was born in 1976, into a noisy house in East Vancouver where there were never enough bathrooms, privacy, or salt and vinegar chips to go around. By the time I arrived, my four older sisters were between the ages of seven and seventeen, and I would, for many years, remain the smallest and most observant member of the household. I would often hide in corners and behind doors, where I could listen to the conversations swirling around me, and watch the teens and adults rush through their lives, slamming doors as they ran out to waiting cars or to catch the bus downtown. I patched together bits and pieces of gossip, old memories, and confessions, and wrote and rewrote the story of my family in my head, a circular reimagining that became a comfort as I grew older. During the years when it seemed our family was falling apart, picturing my grandfather stepping off a boat in Victoria in 1913 with his one bag and one Western-style suit was a balm, a reminder that he had launched himself into the great unknown for the children and grandchildren who had not yet been born. That kind of love felt supernatural, like a genetic prescience.
In our family, immigration from China was recent memory. My grandparents and parents spent much of their time outside the home using whatever tools they could to prove that they belonged in the country where they now lived. Popular culturethe soap operas, the fashion magazines, the celebrity gossip, and the hockey fandomwas how they found a way in, studying, learning, and parroting what the white people around them were consuming. For my grandfather, who paid the five-hundred-dollar head tax upon his arrival in Canada at age seventeen, it meant listening to CBC Radio all day long. For my father, who joined my grandfather in Vancouver after the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted in 1947, it meant listening to Chuck Berry and dropping his accent as soon as he could. For my mother, who married a man she had only met in letters and photographs for the opportunity to leave Hong Kong, it meant learning to bake the perfect sponge cake. For my older sisters, it meant perming their hair and never missing an episode of Dallas. And for me, it meant taping New Kids on the Block songs off the radio and, later, sending love letters to Beck. These were all ways that we engaged with popular culture. These were the things we talked about at school and at the office, and whenever we walked into new situations where we were visibly different. Maybe we were missing privilege and whiteness, but we could watch what everyone else was watching and try to close the distance between
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