I'm experiencing this phase where I get frustrated by my own words. I'm so fed up with them, they sound so...pretentious, pseudo-philosophic, fake, to me.
I don't know, I guess I really want to find that balance where I don't give too much away and yet really, really capture what I'm feeling in a simple, honest way. And it ends up being neither, maybe. Some entries I've made private...but they are the most raw, the most truthful of them. It's a shame we feel like we have to hide our own truths. Or dress them up until they are unrecognizable.
I'm starting to wonder if a blog is the best solution, but I really like typing things out, it keeps up with my thoughts better than the old fashioned way, plus I can edit them later however I want, though perhaps this is not a virtue so much as a way of deceit. What compels me later to change what I have written? Is it a drive to reveal what's underneath, or a desire to veil it?
**
Sunday, February 17, 2019
ramblings
We think we are the ones who know our life best. But when it comes to it, we are so blinded. What we like, how someone feels about us, how we feel about them. How important they are to us. What we see, what we don't see, what we remember, what others remember of us. All these relations to ourselves, yet we are more muddled than ever.
I thought maybe there was an arrow pointing to you, now there isn't, someday that arrow might come back, maybe not in the Form of Cupid's, maybe in something else. When conversation flows, gentle and easy, we are never in a better state of clarity, but these crystal moments are so rare, and when they come we don't do anything with them anyway.
That's not true. Maybe we do mold them in some way, hold them in our memories maybe, with our biased feelings tinging over, like a sticky syrup that never quite compares to the freshness of what was.
Looking back, (or is it looking forward, or looking at what is not here?), that is all I do. To live in the present is so hard. To truly live and not think, to think and not overanalyze, to do and not talk about doing. These are such struggles.
Struggles I've hoped to find elsewhere, yet when I do, find them so hideous, and they me. It's such an ugly mess. Turn yourself away from what is not Beautiful. Is that the solution to such a cycle? To what extent does the psychology of your actions matter in the face of such forces, forces that feel outside your power.
Or maybe they have always been in my power to stop, but somehow I've found something attractive in wallowing in it.
I wish these thoughts could articulate themselves better. (They take the action here, not me, because once they come here, their existence no longer belong to me.) These fingers just type, and the stream takes over when I'm not sure I make sense to a society outside myself.
That is all, I think, so for now, I turn away from nothingness.
When philosophers enter a forest, there are no more trees.
**
I thought maybe there was an arrow pointing to you, now there isn't, someday that arrow might come back, maybe not in the Form of Cupid's, maybe in something else. When conversation flows, gentle and easy, we are never in a better state of clarity, but these crystal moments are so rare, and when they come we don't do anything with them anyway.
That's not true. Maybe we do mold them in some way, hold them in our memories maybe, with our biased feelings tinging over, like a sticky syrup that never quite compares to the freshness of what was.
Looking back, (or is it looking forward, or looking at what is not here?), that is all I do. To live in the present is so hard. To truly live and not think, to think and not overanalyze, to do and not talk about doing. These are such struggles.
Struggles I've hoped to find elsewhere, yet when I do, find them so hideous, and they me. It's such an ugly mess. Turn yourself away from what is not Beautiful. Is that the solution to such a cycle? To what extent does the psychology of your actions matter in the face of such forces, forces that feel outside your power.
Or maybe they have always been in my power to stop, but somehow I've found something attractive in wallowing in it.
I wish these thoughts could articulate themselves better. (They take the action here, not me, because once they come here, their existence no longer belong to me.) These fingers just type, and the stream takes over when I'm not sure I make sense to a society outside myself.
That is all, I think, so for now, I turn away from nothingness.
When philosophers enter a forest, there are no more trees.
**
Today I saw a slow flurry out the window, it was sheer perfection. The kind of snowing you only see in films but never in real life, never so perfectly paced, in thick, fluffy chunks, spaced between each other just right. I debated drawing it to my companion's attention, then decided not to. Was I being selfish in keeping the perception to myself? Maybe. I just didn't want it to be ruined, I told myself. The thing about beauty is, at least for me, subject to change given the opinions of others. If others don't find much in something, then I feel silly for being drawn to it at all, and what was once bright dulls. You have to be really careful with who your audience is when it comes to sharing beauty. Happiness is more egalitarian. But the former is a less temperate mistress. If I so choose wrong, will the whole scene be shattered? Besides, was I really withholding anything from her by remaining silent? The picturesque reel was still playing outside, wasn't it? Would my comment even add or change anything about it? I decided to err on the safe side, and look down to gather my bags as my companion comes up behind me.
"That's really pretty." She says.
I look up in surprise. Someone told me that when someone else finds the same thing beautiful as we do, especially if it's a rare preference, we feel as if some deep heartstring's been tugged. It connects with us on a really personal level. And I had held my comment because I didn't think she'd share it, and thus ruining not only the white flakes outside but also the relationship between us somehow, cut one invisible strand among many between us. But it was said, and it didn't.
**
"That's really pretty." She says.
I look up in surprise. Someone told me that when someone else finds the same thing beautiful as we do, especially if it's a rare preference, we feel as if some deep heartstring's been tugged. It connects with us on a really personal level. And I had held my comment because I didn't think she'd share it, and thus ruining not only the white flakes outside but also the relationship between us somehow, cut one invisible strand among many between us. But it was said, and it didn't.
**
I want to post a caveat to these writings, in case anyone I've so carefully tried to mask should piece together more than I hope they would. The caveat is: sometimes I lie. For the lack of a more nuanced word.
Because it is not that we remember first, and then write it down. Rather, we write to remember. Sometimes we remember wrongly, in the bluntest sense of the word. The paintings of Monet are not the most realistic of paintings, but they capture an essence of the scene truer than a photograph could. I think that is the goal for me, and for all writers of memoirs. I realize that this rings dangerously close to a certain disgraced author, who said: memory is subjective. People flatfootedly rejected his work after that. I want to make a case for not being so quick to judge. Is the pursuit of accuracy in the details more important than the pursuit of light? Monet didn't think so. Neither did the writer of A Million Little Pieces. Neither do I. And neither should anyone else who felt touched by a work of art. Because the "truth" is not one-dimensional, to make it so would be to shut out a smidgen of inaccuracy, but also, the light.
**
Because it is not that we remember first, and then write it down. Rather, we write to remember. Sometimes we remember wrongly, in the bluntest sense of the word. The paintings of Monet are not the most realistic of paintings, but they capture an essence of the scene truer than a photograph could. I think that is the goal for me, and for all writers of memoirs. I realize that this rings dangerously close to a certain disgraced author, who said: memory is subjective. People flatfootedly rejected his work after that. I want to make a case for not being so quick to judge. Is the pursuit of accuracy in the details more important than the pursuit of light? Monet didn't think so. Neither did the writer of A Million Little Pieces. Neither do I. And neither should anyone else who felt touched by a work of art. Because the "truth" is not one-dimensional, to make it so would be to shut out a smidgen of inaccuracy, but also, the light.
**
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
life of him
If the night repeated itself later, will the life of them
Flash and dull, as when she first entered the life of him.
Somewhere in Oia, Greece, a blue dome under generous moonlight
And he could not feel awe or anything, for the life of him.
When she turned twenty-four, she blew out the candles
Made promises to be free, from the life of him.
Later the red and plum and gold leaves colored a sky
Blue as the dome, he sighed the bland, colorless life of him.
They snuck under a stingier moon, and reenacted the perfunctory kiss
She came home to write this poem--which later he could not remember--for the life of him.
**
this poem is an attempt at the ghazal, its form can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5781
*
Flash and dull, as when she first entered the life of him.
Somewhere in Oia, Greece, a blue dome under generous moonlight
And he could not feel awe or anything, for the life of him.
When she turned twenty-four, she blew out the candles
Made promises to be free, from the life of him.
Later the red and plum and gold leaves colored a sky
Blue as the dome, he sighed the bland, colorless life of him.
They snuck under a stingier moon, and reenacted the perfunctory kiss
She came home to write this poem--which later he could not remember--for the life of him.
**
this poem is an attempt at the ghazal, its form can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5781
*
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
cousin
When I first came to America, at the age of ten, an elderly American in our church asked me if I had any siblings.
“Yes.” I responded in one of the few words I could say in English.
“Well, where are they?”
“China.”
“Your parents didn’t bring them?”
“No.”
“They left them in China?”
I nodded silently, he had an appalled look on his face. I had an urgent feeling that there was a miscommunication. Yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. They were indeed my brother and my sister, but it was also okay that my parents didn’t bring them here, because they had other parents, truer parents. I tried to make all of this clear to him with an earnest expression, hoping something would translate. It did not work.
Beset by the guilt that I had somehow misrepresented my parents, I told my dad about the conversation. He taught me the English word “cousins”.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, it means cousins.” He said in Chinese this time.
“But what is a cousin?”
I was raised to call my two cousins “big sister” and “little brother”. Because of the only child policy, they were the closest to siblings that I could have, and I was theirs. The first time I went back to China, 8 years later, my “little brother” and I didn’t see each other much, but it was okay because he had a job and was making something of himself. The second time I went back, we didn’t see each other much, because he had fallen into such a pit of video game addiction and a level of indifference to his family and the outdoors, it was alarming, though we pretended it wasn't. Everyone in my family talked about it, yet no one talked about it in a way that did anything. We knew his parents had histories of gambling addictions. We knew his father was even jailed for reasons related to those addictions. We knew the addictions might be genetic. We knew he was behaving badly toward his mother, possibly verging on being abusive. And we talked and talked and talked about getting him a job, a therapist, and his mother a different apartment. But his mother didn’t move out, and he quit every job my uncles found for him.
Armed with my privileged upbringing and American ethos, I judged him and his apparent laziness for not picking up and fixing his life—it would be so easy, it seems to me. Stop playing the World of Warcraft-esque games, and come back to real life. Don’t spit on the floor while you chew sunflower seeds and play on the computer for the 14th hour in a row. Don’t scare your mother so much into silencing her. Get a job. Don’t quit a few weeks later, not tell anyone about it, and sneak off to internet cafes instead, only to be found out one winter day when our grandfather decided to trail behind you as you went off to “work”.
The thing is, I don’t understand his addiction and its complexities. And I don't want to understand. It's so helpless when I face it head on. And I’m so far away. And I can’t help him even if I weren’t far away. I think of him now in two distinct images: as a gangly, tall young man sitting in front of a computer, with one foot propped up on the seat and his protruding knee pressed into his chest, his glazed eyes bugging out slightly; and as a small boy who played and fought with me and saved snacks until the weekends so he could share them with his two “big sisters”, with a deep-set dimple and a smile that was magic to the cameras. I can't reconcile the two images.
There was a time when I couldn't reconcile the two languages in my head either. I solved the problem by expelling my fluency in Chinese from my head almost completely. Nowadays, I think in English, not in Chinese—and when I think of him, I think “cousin”, a word so foreign, I learned it in English before I learned it in my native tongue.
**
“Yes.” I responded in one of the few words I could say in English.
“Well, where are they?”
“China.”
“Your parents didn’t bring them?”
“No.”
“They left them in China?”
I nodded silently, he had an appalled look on his face. I had an urgent feeling that there was a miscommunication. Yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. They were indeed my brother and my sister, but it was also okay that my parents didn’t bring them here, because they had other parents, truer parents. I tried to make all of this clear to him with an earnest expression, hoping something would translate. It did not work.
Beset by the guilt that I had somehow misrepresented my parents, I told my dad about the conversation. He taught me the English word “cousins”.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, it means cousins.” He said in Chinese this time.
“But what is a cousin?”
I was raised to call my two cousins “big sister” and “little brother”. Because of the only child policy, they were the closest to siblings that I could have, and I was theirs. The first time I went back to China, 8 years later, my “little brother” and I didn’t see each other much, but it was okay because he had a job and was making something of himself. The second time I went back, we didn’t see each other much, because he had fallen into such a pit of video game addiction and a level of indifference to his family and the outdoors, it was alarming, though we pretended it wasn't. Everyone in my family talked about it, yet no one talked about it in a way that did anything. We knew his parents had histories of gambling addictions. We knew his father was even jailed for reasons related to those addictions. We knew the addictions might be genetic. We knew he was behaving badly toward his mother, possibly verging on being abusive. And we talked and talked and talked about getting him a job, a therapist, and his mother a different apartment. But his mother didn’t move out, and he quit every job my uncles found for him.
Armed with my privileged upbringing and American ethos, I judged him and his apparent laziness for not picking up and fixing his life—it would be so easy, it seems to me. Stop playing the World of Warcraft-esque games, and come back to real life. Don’t spit on the floor while you chew sunflower seeds and play on the computer for the 14th hour in a row. Don’t scare your mother so much into silencing her. Get a job. Don’t quit a few weeks later, not tell anyone about it, and sneak off to internet cafes instead, only to be found out one winter day when our grandfather decided to trail behind you as you went off to “work”.
The thing is, I don’t understand his addiction and its complexities. And I don't want to understand. It's so helpless when I face it head on. And I’m so far away. And I can’t help him even if I weren’t far away. I think of him now in two distinct images: as a gangly, tall young man sitting in front of a computer, with one foot propped up on the seat and his protruding knee pressed into his chest, his glazed eyes bugging out slightly; and as a small boy who played and fought with me and saved snacks until the weekends so he could share them with his two “big sisters”, with a deep-set dimple and a smile that was magic to the cameras. I can't reconcile the two images.
There was a time when I couldn't reconcile the two languages in my head either. I solved the problem by expelling my fluency in Chinese from my head almost completely. Nowadays, I think in English, not in Chinese—and when I think of him, I think “cousin”, a word so foreign, I learned it in English before I learned it in my native tongue.
**
Saturday, October 19, 2013
flip side of hope
More than a year ago I wrote about an event that left a mark on me, and made me hope. The mark disappeared all too quickly and without even a whimper. The hope turned out to be ill-placed. Unlike its companion at the inception however, the hope never quite completely left me, though it faded just the same -- I hoped for smaller, for different, and eventually, I hoped for it less often.
Now my small, changed, and forgotten hopes have morphed their way into reality, better than if I had orchestrated it from the seats of the gods. I think I played it perfectly this time, armed with clarity that wasn't there the first time around. Sickeningly, this clean feeling disturbs me. Like a patient who's been informed of a lack of diagnosis but can't quite take the good news and go home. I keep feeling like I should be harvesting more significance from this second coming, and I can't tell if it's from a fear of having missed something, or a secret celebration of murky, useless melodrama. Or maybe this is simply the feeling that accompanies all existential crises--not at the end of failures but at the end of successes--the unremarkable-ness of our world after we get our hearts' desires, the confusion over why our lives must continue the same way it has been going, that what happened when the stars and luck aligned in our favor has only (and always) been just a moment in time.
**
Now my small, changed, and forgotten hopes have morphed their way into reality, better than if I had orchestrated it from the seats of the gods. I think I played it perfectly this time, armed with clarity that wasn't there the first time around. Sickeningly, this clean feeling disturbs me. Like a patient who's been informed of a lack of diagnosis but can't quite take the good news and go home. I keep feeling like I should be harvesting more significance from this second coming, and I can't tell if it's from a fear of having missed something, or a secret celebration of murky, useless melodrama. Or maybe this is simply the feeling that accompanies all existential crises--not at the end of failures but at the end of successes--the unremarkable-ness of our world after we get our hearts' desires, the confusion over why our lives must continue the same way it has been going, that what happened when the stars and luck aligned in our favor has only (and always) been just a moment in time.
**
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