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The act of adopting Chinese female babies has now crested to a point where the kids are becoming adults. I’m not sure when it all began, but surely it was after the One Child Policy in 1980 when families were allowed only one child making a boy was more desirable. What happens to a couple “needing” a boy and they give birth to a female? What if the female was born with a birth defect? Adoption. Somewhere Between is a documentary by Linda Goldstein Knowlton, who adopted her own daughter from China. She captures the lives of four Chinese adoptees living in America. Each are at a time where they’re interested in figuring out who they are. They’re all in their early teens and their time to do something becomes immediate.   Fang “Jenni” Lee is sure she’s from an ethnic minority and doesn’t know her background which will remain a mystery. She lives in Berkeley and her family is getting a divorce which affects her since her past is reliving itself in a way. While traveling back to China, she meets a child with Cerebral Palsy and needs help. She works with the child, and helps her and it becomes a story in itself. Jenna is a great student and actually volunteers time at the orphanage she comes from. Her story will unravel at a later date. Ann Boccuti seems like she’s fine with her life. She’s like any other white girl but she travels to Europe to meet other adoptees along with another “cast” member, Haley, and it pushes them to figure out their pasts. It appears that the kids shot their own camera that’s a bit shaky and lo-fi, but it captures what I’d think they’re seeing perfectly. It was perhaps some of the most important footage of the project.   Ann and Haley The cameras focuses for a segment on the ultra religious, Haley as she goes on a search for her birth parents. The most touching and telling part of the entire tale happens when she travels back to China and posts signs in her local town. It’s minutes later when a man comes up to claim her as her father. At first you might be unsure as to how legitimate he is. Is he seeking camera time? Support? Or is he real? They do a DNA swab and Haley returns to the States. It all seems too easy. The man turns out to be her father and Haley and her parents elect to go back to China to hear the entire story of her past. She meets her birth mother, father, sisters, and brother. You can see it in his eyes, which the camera captures without any special flare. The father loves her and explains his efforts to get her back when she was put up for adoption by her mother. Sad times and it’s obvious he’s broken by it. See Somewhere Between by finding dates on their website.
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Tales of Graces F is a port of a Japanese RPG that originally debuted on the Wii for the PlayStation 3, which includes extra hours of gameplay, High Definition graphics, and extra costumes and bonuses. For fans of the Tales series, this game delivers what you would expect in a Tales game, but for newcomers to the series, Tales of Graces F struggles to differentiate itself from other JRPGs in the market.

The game follows the story of Asbel, a boy from royalty who is on the verge of becoming the new king of his hometown, and his friends who meet a strange amnesiac girl on a hill near their hometown. You begin the game as a child and follow the story as an adult seven years later after a series of unfortunate events occur during Asbel’s child years. When you finally become an adult, the story starts to pick up, which became the prime motivator for me to continue playing, but takes a long time to get to the juicy parts of the game. You’ll have to endure about five to eight hours of tediousness before reaching the meat of the story.

But even with its slow start, Tales of Graces F gets better and rewards you for your patience. The story doesn’t become a predictable mess and won’t have you search for a bunch of different items to take down a final boss like in other games (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy). Instead, the story deviates into science fiction, which caught me by surprise, and becomes enjoyable and well worth enduring hours of grinding and repetition.

 

Battles can get intense later in the game.

When in battle, the game does enough to keep the player engaged. Instead of going through dozens of menus and issuing commands to party members like in other RPGs, you control the main characters on a 3D plane and hack and slash away at enemies using a lock on system that focuses on your opponent. You can move left and right, up and down, dodge and sidestep, and rush and evade attacks while performing artes, the game’s version of magic and special abilities, to create different kinds of combos and attacks. You perform different kinds of attacks depending on how you combine the control stick, the attack button, and your pacing between your attacks.

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WSJ reviews IQ84 by Haruki Murakami. I can’t think of a writer that a person of our generation might care about as much as he. His books haven’t all been made into huge block buster movies. There’s some arty ones, or at least one arty one, but for the most part, they haven’t worked out. Perhaps his novels are ones that can’t be made into film because they are created for the written experience. Murakami’s words are ones that are meant to be read, not said or visualized since the prose is special (at least to many). It’s what makes him popular and what makes his books sell even when they’re behemoths. It’ll take a special mind to make it all work on screen, but for now, a near 1000 page book is something you have to work through and endure as much as enjoy. Therefore, here’s a review of the book and it’s not by me. The illustration shows some age rather than the same old press photo that’s been used for a decade. He’s a special character and as much as he’s intriguing, he’s also a dinosaur in a way. A symbol. A person who isn’t the public rock star that he could be. A guy who stands out for his actual writing, rather than what he says publicly. While writing seems like it’s gone way of photography – digital cameras and blogs changing the face of what’s pro vs not pro, Haruki Murakami still stands up.
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Dive in. It’s a nightmare scenario and it’s unfortunately true. The controlling and menacing man you’ve married has cheated on you, but something even worse is waiting down the line. You’re already trying to resolve a working life with a writing life, never mind a marriage that feels like you’re being held under house arrest for charges never specified. Angela Tung’s Black Fish explores so many great themes. Trying to pursue art to the antagonism and mockery of your spouse and relatives. Spending time “in the homeland” and finding out you’re a foreigner there, too. Wondering why you’re so unlucky while others around you seem to find happiness so easily. All of this is shot through with Tung’s East Coast Asian American sensibility, a certain toughness to the voice even when enduring humiliations at the hands of her husband and in-laws. Black Fish is the kind of book you read with your mouth open as bad things inevitably turn worse. And yet, even with the threat of an ill-tempered and unpredictable husband always looming, there is hope. If you bring this book to the beach this summer, you won’t make it into the water. It’s that great a read.
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