Ive stolen alot of things, books and poems and movies (mostly movies) and papers. Here are some things I have stolen from.
In Wok there is a paragraph that goes:
It was cooler later in the afternoon, sure, but it wasn't really that much cooler. I just didn't want to be seen walking home, remembering my three years of car rides in front of everyone else. I loved that car, it was me. I was speeding ahead, I was turning left instead of right, I was pelting out of the driveway in a puff of smoke while the others walked home. That car was going to take me far away. Away from the school, and past my apartment, past the edges of Taipei, where the houses fell away into jungle. It was going to take me past the island, to somewhere different like Tokyo or New York.
This is stolen from the ideas of cars as vehicles of self expression and identity, taken from Anne Boyer who says in this interview:
For example, I am not sure that beyond the work of radical poets, I’ve ever seen much mention in literature that a car requires gas, that the gas requires the oil industry, the oil industry requires imperialist war, etc. Instead, people in books move via invisible fuel in machines that are visible only as reflections of character, like a Ford Fiesta is not a material fact but a mere symbol of selfhood, running on biographical oil. I sometimes imagine some alien reader picking up a contemporary novel and thinking that everything about our species in our time and place was feelings, self-identification, self-interest, self-fulfillment, self-determination, that humans were made from the inside out, instead of the outside in, and that the only relation to objects we had was our curation of them.
I really love this critique, which places the disconnect between the idealistic representations of objects and their materialistic realities. Its something that is so prescient in western society, which struggles to conceptualise its own sources of power and manufacturing, having outsourced production to the third world.
On writing Wok, I stole from a lot of films that depicted taiwan and japan during world war two. I was heavily influenced by Wang Tung's Strawman, a comedy about two farmers that find an unexploded bomb in their fields. I really loved its ability to satirize and bring forth the humor in the tragedy of the situation, I felt so much empathy in its insistence that people are not simply virtued victims, but rather are people with vulgarity, selfishness, crass disregard of others - and are still human. I really love this ability to divorce virtue from suffering. it is an inspiration for the kind of humor I want to write. I want to push the levers of tragedy and comedy as far as they can go at the same time.
I was also heavily inspired by Nobuhiko Obayashi's Bound For The Field's Mountain, and Seacoast, it is perhaps the largest