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Cliterature - Burn

I love being racist. The lucky combination of belonging to a "minority group" + growing up as a TCK leads people to believe that I'm "wordly," which gives me license to shit on every race.

I love being racist. The lucky combination of belonging to a “minority group” + growing up as a TCK leads people to believe that I’m “wordly,” which gives me license to shit on every race. I even hate members of my own ethnic group. The one time I ventured into a relationship with an Azn, he demanded a son by the next fortnight and his cum tasted like wasabi. This only justified my long-held belief that stereotypes exist for a reason. The reason being that they’re always true.

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Which is why Crystal Hubbard’s Burn confused the shit out of me. Judging from its cover, I thought this week’s cliterature would be about a black dyke who falls for Fabio. AWESOME. Instead, this book features a diverse cast of seemingly arbitrary ethnic origins. It was hard to keep track of my complex racial hierarchies in such a milieu. Who do I hate more? Cinder Wyatt, the tough-ass black chick whose pussy is described as a “yearning darkness”? Giancarlo Piassanti, her Italian lover with a day job as a karate instructor? Kuriko, Giancarlo's Japanese-Ethiopian-Russian ex-girlfriend who loves giving happy endings with her feet? Or Sumchiat, Cinder’s Thai ex-husband who fought wars in Vietnam and Laos?

As if this kind of trendy hodge-podge multiculturalism isn’t annoying enough already, none of the characters would stick to definable stereotypes. The book opens with Sumchiat brutally attacking Cinder after she asks for a divorce. He rapes her—“deaf to her pleas to stop, he pounded into her, arching upwards to avoid looking at her tear-streaked face.” Then he slices off her skin, spraying blood “like red paint” (nice analogy, Crystal!) across the walls. Last time I checked, Asian guys are supposed to be emasculated pretty boys or vaudeville idiots.

Anyway, Cinder is saved at the last minute by Zebulon, some random dude who happens to be the great-great grandson of an escaped slave. Cinder then decides to move to Missouri and change her last name to the very appropriate pseudonym, “White.” She meets Aja, a Yoda-like martial arts master who yells battle cries “like on Ninja Turtles” and is described as an “oddly beautiful woman like a perfect piece of driftwood.”

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Aja introduces Cinder to basement fight clubs, which is where she meets Giancarlo, the head instructor of Sheng Li karate school and collector of Asian World of Martial Arts catalogs. Giancarlo’s open karategi exposes his rippling muscles, and before long they’re fucking as “thoughts of Heaven and eternity swirled through their minds, his swollen cap massaging her internal bed of precious nerves.”

It suddenly dawned on me that something very sly and very fucked up was going on here. Essentially, the writer had reversed the racial profiles of the two male characters. Sumchiat is Asian, but portrayed as violent, predatory, and lazy. Giancarlo is European, but also a karate master obsessed with traditional marriage and starting a family. Best of all, he’s filthy rich. At one point he says to Cinder, “You could seat seven in the tub of my master bath. Your whole bathroom could fit in it,” which is the exact line a Taiwanese investment banker tried to use on me once.

To be honest, I didn’t really finish this book because A) I ran out of a weed yesterday and B) 80 percent of the plot is made up of boring karate face-offs between Cinder, Giancarlo, and his other students. What’s really fucking ironic is that in the last chapter, Sumchiat comes back from prison and kicks everyone’s ass, despite their weeks of hard work and training. The police manage to take him down, and the scene closes with Giancarlo and Cinder crying and embracing while bonding over how they both pissed their pants during the attack (not kidding).

Rating: 1 dildo. Edward Said's Orientalism spoke the truth when it noted that non-Anglo-Saxons are dumbasses who "cannot walk on either a road or a pavement (their disordered minds fail to understand what the clever European grasps immediately, that roads and pavements are made for walking)." Miscegenation is macabre.

MICHELLE LHOOQ

Previously: Beg For Mercy