Adventures of a Gringa

Riogringa Reads: Immigration Tales

I've always loved stories about people moving to other countries, and I certainly appreciate those stories much more now. Here are some books I've read recently that I highly recommend.

Waiting for Snow in Havana: The best out of all of these, this is the memoir of a Cuban man who came to the US right after the Revolution, starting from his romanticized childhood as an upper class city boy to a penniless immigrant in Miami and Chicago. Though the story is absolutely fascinating, the writing is also amazing.

Shanghai Girls: I never really appreciated how much Asian immigrants have struggled in the US, and this book really opened my eyes. It tells the tale of two Chinese sisters who flee their upper-crust lives in Shanghai during World War II and end up in a slum in California in arranged marriages. 

Strength in What Remains: Though I think Tracy Kidder is incredibly overrated as a writer, he is a good storyteller, and this tells the story of a refugee from Burundi who escaped genocide in Rwanda and in his country. It also tells the story of his troubled, impoverished childhood and the horrors of war, and his miraculous adventure of an immigrant in New York.

No exilio: Written by Clarice Lispector's sister, Elisa, this is her heart-breaking memoir of escaping the pogroms in the Ukraine and ending up as a Jewish refugee in Brazil. The book focuses on the struggles of her family and of the Jews, though the overall theme is the universality of human suffering.

De Oiapoque a Chui: I actually read this awhile ago and probably wrote about it already, but it's my favorite book about Brazilians in the US. It's dozens of short stories about Brazilians living in New York City, from supermodels to illegal laborers. The author also happens to be a lovely Jewish Brazilian journalist who's lived here for awhile, and the book is a great read.

Monday Morning

This morning I got up before 6 to join my mom at NBC, for her first major TV appearance for her latest book, The Superior Wife Syndrome. It was a fun way to start the week, albeit a bit too early for my brain.

Fun fact: Natalie Morales, the anchor who interviewed my mom, studied Latin American Studies in college (like moi) and spent her childhood living in different Latin American countries, one of which was Brazil, and she speaks Spanish and Portuguese fluently. In fact, as it turns out, her mother is Brazilian!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Superior Wife Syndrome

So it's September and the pressure for Eli and I to get jobs and get out of my parents' house is mounting. It's not that we haven't been trying; we've been trying all summer. Luckily, we are on our way and hopefully, we should be in good shape soon.

This is the first time I've been home in the US in September and not on my way back to school. And it feels profoundly weird. I'm in a very strange limbo.

To make things more complicated, my mom's third book is coming out next week.

After she wrote her first book, back in the day, she did a whole book tour. For her second book, she did a lot of PR, but more local stuff. And with this book, in this economy, a lot of the responsibility to promote the book is now up to her--and to a lesser extent, to me, to help her with the social media aspect. Even though she's had official help for the mainstream media promotion (she will be on the Today Show in two weeks), she's very stressed and is projecting her book stress onto me in the form of Extreme Job Hunt Pressure. Delightful.

So in conclusion, you will actually be doing me a huge favor by pre-ordering or buying my mom's book, which comes out September 8th. It will make her happy, and in turn, she might stop nagging me. Just maybe.

Rio Gringa Recommends

I haven't done one of these in awhile, so I wanted to devote a post to some great things I've come across recently.

1. The Lost City of Z: A Deadly Tale of Obsession in the Amazon

Written by David Grann, this non-fiction tale is just as compelling, if not more, than a fiction thriller, and I could not put it down. It tells the story of three adventurers who set out to find "El Dorado," the lost city of gold, in the Brazilian Amazon: British explorer Percy Fawcett in 1925, a Brazilian father-son team in the 1990s, and Grann himself a year or two ago. It is a must-read for Brazil-philes, historians, escapists, and bookworms alike. I'd also recommend it to Brazilians, though you may find yourself twitching involuntarily, since the book largely focuses on gringos set on having their way in the Amazon. Though it's basically a historical account, the twists and turns would make for a great movie, and the ending is...well. You'll have to read it.

2. Moo.com

I ordered business cards from here awhile back, and while I've been interviewing and networking in New York, people have really loved them and always ask where I got them. You can get regular or mini-sized, and you pick from a variety of designs. Once you pick a design, you get a certain number of each pattern, so that you have a diverse group of cards that are mostly all different. I happened to love Sarah Green's designs the best, but there are a ton of other beautiful designs that make for really unique and eye-catching business cards. Also, they ship internationally so you can have them sent anywhere.

3. The Real Housewives of New Jersey

Ok, ok hear me out. Though it's definitely a guilty pleasure, this show is highly entertaining and provides a very eye-opening and bone-chilling look into New Money in America. I've never watched the other "Housewives" shows (they've had them in New York City, Orange County, and Atlanta), but I think this one really is the epitome of conspicuous consumption and the nouveau riche in the United States. It shows what people do with their money, what they do to compete with one another to show who has more money, and the sickening things that go on behind closed doors. It's certainly yet another warning sign as to how poorly Americans have handled money and buying habits, driving us into this Crisis. Thankfully, not all Americans are quite as bad as these women, but the show certainly offers some insights as to why we buy the things we do and parts of our culture that wouldn't exactly make our founding fathers proud. And how much more American does "the bigger, the better" mentality get? If you're not stateside or missed this season, you can watch online here. The last episode of the season airs this Tuesday.

Heavy Load

All of these are coming back to New York with me. I haven't started any of them so they should keep me busy for quite awhile, and should inspire some interesting posts.

The Book Every Gringo in Brazil Should Read

Gringos in Brazil, you must read this book.

Larry Rohter was one of the New York Times' main Brazil correspondents in the past several decades, and he knows Brazil better than most gringos I know or have read. The book, it seems, is a bit of a desabafo, a way to get a lot of things off of his chest and also a way to explain his vision of Brazil, Brazilians, and how things work in Brazil. He intersperses his war stories and vision with his articles from the Times, but unfortunately, the article sections largely dominate the book.

The book is divided into sections: Culture, Society, Politics, the Amazon, and Science/Economy. Though some of the topics were familiar, I learned a great deal about recent history, Brazilian companies, and politics.The best part of the book, undoubtedly, is the introduction and the part about culture. He could have written an entire book just explaining his experiences and his opinions, which would have made for even better reading.

One of the things I love most about Larry is that he put up with some unbelievable bullshit writing about Brazil, far more than I've ever dealt with, and did it with class. Any time he wrote a story that was perceived as negative, he was attacked with hate mail and sometimes even by the Brazilian media, but by far the worst thing was when he was nearly deported by the President of Brazil himself.

In 2004, Larry wrote a story about how top government officials were growing increasingly worried with President Lula's drinking habits, and essentially outed him as an alcoholic. The response was quick and brutal: Lula called for Larry to be expelled from the country. Luckily, a court order overturned the decision and the Lula administration soon backpedaled and decided it wouldn't be in their best interests to publicly demonstrate censorship of the international media, and Larry stayed and continued writing.

My only warning is that the book is written in Portuguese, and I haven't been able to find a copy in English. It's a little weird reading an American in another language, but in the end, his voice comes through just as clearly. I really admire Larry for his very clear-cut, honest vision of Brazil, one that encompasses the good, the bad, and the ambiguous, and how he manages to get this vision across while still demonstrating a great love and admiration for Brazil.

Click here to order the book and click here to read the VEJA review of the book.

reading up

I've been simultaneously reading two books for the past month or so: Against All Enemies, by Richard Clarke, and As memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, by Machado de Assis.They may seem random and unrelated, but they're not: I'm trying to understand Brazilian society and my own.

Against All Enemies is a rambling, incredibly poorly written account of modern terrorism against the US, written by a former high level government executive. I'm combing through it slowly, hoping to finish it before the elections to have a little bit of closure. And my mom's publisher sent it to her for free and she pawned it off on me.

The Posthumous Memories of Bras Cubas is one of Machado de Assis's greatest novels, a fictional, autobiographical account of a man's life as he speaks from the grave. It's written in ye-olde Portuguese so it's very, very difficult to read (like a Brazilian trying to read Shakespeare or Dickens in English), but I'm understanding most of it and really enjoying it.

If this name is new to you, check out this excellent, excellent article from the UK Times Online, which overviews Machado de Assis' greatest works and gives a lengthy, if not completely accurate biographical snapshot of his life. You should definitely try to get your hands on any translated Machado de Assis stuff you can find. In sum, he was one of the greatest writers in Brazilian history, if not all of Latin America, despite being a mulatto with little formal education during the last decades of slavery. He taught himself three languages and his writing has been compared to Chekhov and Tolstoy, despite the fact that he never left Brazil, let alone Rio de Janeiro.