Author Archives: Anand Sarwate

two Chinese-American novels

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I read Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese last night — what a great graphic novel. It weaves together three story lines — a mythic tale of an arrogant Monkey King, a personal narrative of being one of a few Asian kids in grade school and high school, and a satire/sit-com of an All-American kid, Danny, who is embarrassed by a visit from his cousin Chin-Kee, a buck-toothed cariacture of the Chinese immigrant. Yang jumps from storyline to storyline and of course they all converge in the end. It’s a great piece of visual storytelling (or sequential art, or whatever you favorite term is). I checked this one out from the Morrison Reading Room, but I’m probably going to buy it the next time I go to Comic Relief.

Frank Chin’s Donald Duk is another book I read in the last year, and it deals with a lot of the same issues — it’s also set in San Francisco and deals with a kid named Donald trying to grapple with his identity. Chin also flashes between storylines; Donald has a recurring nightmare about building the transcontinental railroad. His dreams are also laden with epic storytelling, this time influenced by his Uncle’s Chinese opera stories. I knew Chin from his play The Chickencoop Chinaman, so I was excited to read his novel. It may be a bit tricky to find, since it’s published by a smaller press, but it’s well worth it.

If I was running an Asian American literature class, I’d definitely pair these two books up for discussion. The best thing about them is they got me thinking about my own writing again. Identity politics was starting to feel passé, but these stories still seem fresh.

Limited feedback achieves the empirical capacity

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For those who think writing in the blog precludes doing work, here’s a snapshot of something due in Sunday’s ArXiV update:

Limited feedback achieves the empirical capacity
Krishnan Eswaran, Anand D. Sarwate, Anant Sahai, Michael Gastpar
(Submitted on 2 Nov 2007)

The utility of limited feedback for coding over an individual sequence of DMCs is investigated. This study complements recent results showing how limited or noisy feedback can boost the reliability of communication. A strategy with fixed input distribution $P$ is given that asymptotically achieves rates arbitrarily close to the mutual information induced by $P$ and the state-averaged channel. When the capacity achieving input distribution is the same over all channel states, this achieves rates at least as large as the capacity of the state averaged channel, sometimes called the empirical capacity.

free speech and America-centrism

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Chris Bertram over at has a post on speech regulation with which I’m not sure I agree, but I do wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment:

The Americans have a long tradition of trying to discuss these things using the language of an 18th-century document. Given the difficulties of shoehorning a lot of real-world problems into that frame, that gives them a long history of acrobatic hermeneutics somewhere in the vague area of free speech. Some of it is even relevant. The trouble is that many Americans (at least the ones who comment on blogs!) can’t tell the difference between discussing the free speech and discussing the application of their constitution.

Not only true on blogs, but in person as well.

writing in the language of the dominant

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I went to the keynote for the Global Conversations conference, sponsored by the UC Irvine International Center for Writing and Translation, this morning. It was given by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose books I have always meant to read but never have. The theme of the conference is how to address marginalized languages, and his keynote made a number of points that I thought were interesting.

Firstly, he had to address the issue of the rich body of literature, especially postcolonial literature, that is written in the langugage of the colonizers. It’s not just a colonial issue, so the appropriate binary here is dominant/marginalized. The overarching point was that writing in the language of the dominant impoverishes the local — it enables the access to the world stage but disables the home culture by taking away new cultural products. “Visibility in the dominant becomes invisibility in the marginalized,” he said. What then, is the place of conversation between different marginalized communities? While not outright calling for an activism or solidarity movement, he posed a goal of the conference as to kickstart the interactions that might initiate.

A second smaller point had to do with paralleling the language of technology transfer from industrialized to developing nations to more general knowledge and cultural production. While it’s true that strategies for preservation and revitalization can be transferred, the “working together” is what’s really interesting. Can different marginalized linguistic communities work together without losing something?

Digs Bistro

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(Dwight and Sacramento). As I got off the bus the other day, I noticed that a new place, Digs Bistro, had moved into the location that Olivia used to occupy. I had never made it to Olivia, so I figured I’d eat locally and check out Digs. The dinner I had was delicious. Apparently it used to be an underground thing but they’ve gone legit. The atmosphere reminded me of this little place I went to this summer called Chez Grisette near Monmartre in Paris.

I had the oxtail raviolo with chanterelles, tomatoes, and braised greens (Kale? something bitter-ish). I thought the meat overwhelmed the mushrooms, which made me feel like the luxury of fancy mushrooms was unwarranted. But the pairing of the slightly bitter greens with the sweeter tomatoes and meat was spot-on. I also splurged and had the chocolate budino, a flourless cake that is setting my cholesterol-reduction plan back a week. Or two.

All in all, it was worth it, and I think this place may be my little “treat myself to something nice for finishing a chapter” in the upcoming Thesis Weeks. If you don’t want to spring for Chez Panisse but want a great California/French fusion meal in an intimate and cozy setting, then this is your place.

Hello world!

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This is a test to see if I would want to move my original blog over here. We want, you see, some semblance of \LaTeX support.  For example, here is the formula for a Gaussian density:

f(x) = \frac{1}{\sigma \sqrt{2 \pi}} e^{\frac{1}{2 \sigma} (x - \mu)^2}

Moving?

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I’m contemplating moving this blog over to wordpress.com for hosting, since they have nice features such as built-in LaTeX. I’d probably pay for the domain redirect (you have to pay for that???). I realized that I’m not using the extra flexibility of an external host, so it seems silly to pay for that. Does anyone else have any opinions or comments on feasibility/ease/worth of migrating?

Changing editor colors on TexShop

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A Pair of TeXShop Applescript Macros gives two scripts that let you change the font highlighting on TeXShop’s editor so you can get light text on dark backgrounds (for example). This was surprisingly difficult to locate, but might be of use to those who eschew Emacs.

(This link comes to you via Galen Reeves.)

UPDATE : I’ve been informed that the script will not change the text color on the latest version of TexShop. I’m not sure why that is…