Cry baby cry

I could not believe it. I was the first person to break down in class. I CRIED IN MY FICTION WORKSHOP. I'm an adult, and yet I started wailing like a f*ckin baby. Blame it on the birth control, as it makes me super emotional. But my instructor Leslie (who also persecutes me for having a slightly different political view from him) , started ripping on my short story, telling me how it was too much in the vernacular, about how he didn't understand why my Korean-American characters were talking in "assimilated language," even though they are all American. He thought the best dialogue was from the mother, who said things like, "You have same age, you play together. You have the good time," a la Margaret Cho's mother.

He told me my characters were uninteresting, that the dialogue needed to be cut because right now it wasn't interesting at all, and the one white dude who appears in the story was too much of a caricature. There basically was nothing redeeming about something I put my blood, sweat, and tears into doing. He said it was flat, and uninteresting, and there you have it.

I've taken countless workshops in the past, and I've NEVER started crying like that. I don't know whether the tears were out of indignation, that this old Jewish man who knew nothing about the Asian American experience, could just reduce the whole bit to "Otherized" language. Or maybe it was that my ego spontaneously combusted after attack after attack after attack. Or maybe it was because all of the other stories we've done in class have been praised to the high heavens by him, and my story was just torn to shreds. It was like, someone told you that the way you breathe is wrong, and that you either have to relearn it, or you won't cut it in this world. I know we "writerly" types are an overly sensitive bunch, but it still made for one hell of a sh*tty day.