I just realized there were no candles at my birthday this year, which means I can't do the traditional corny candles post. In a desperate attempt at a substitute metaphor, I will turn to city lights. There's just something about New York City's skyline that everyone falls in love with. Chicago. Los Angeles. None of them hold a candle (bad pun intended) to my newly adopted city.
I tried really hard not to talk New York up to myself. In some ways, I was successful. I'm realistic about its grime, its narrow spaces, and its isolation, but really, all I have done is accelerate from a crush to a love affair. Because one sees nothing and the other sees everything yet loves despite the seeing. It's like New York has taken place of the friendships that should be blossoming. It's much easier to love a city than a person.
I suppose that's what I miss from the past life. The last two years were filled with a pleasant buzz of satisfaction, grinding into the crevices, getting comfortable. Those were the candlelight years, warm, yellow, and small. Now, the lights are colder, bluer, and infinitely more powerful. The wheel has been re-invented. Granted, the beginning is always more exciting, but also more exhausting. So for one day I wished candles were back in my life again. I wished the coming revolution could fast-forward just a little bit. I wished we could skip to the next candlelight period. But then, maybe I'd be missing the bigger picture. The much bigger picture. Maybe even a whole skyline's worth.
**
Monday, September 26, 2011
Saturday, September 3, 2011
stuck on B+
There's an episode of How I Met Your Mother, where Barney has a moment of rare clarity after a scotch. And he says: "I'm an B+."
That line resonated with me long after it should have been forgotten. In my elementary school, our grades (and in turn, our self-worth) hinged on one test each semester. I was always 2nd in my class. This became a joke for everyone in my family except my mother. I was always met with a slightly crestfallen face after coming home. No reprimands. No ecstatic exclaims either. Just B+.
The very last grades I had ever received in China, I was number 1 for ten minutes, until a kid yelled out his tablemate's scores, who was sick and wasn't there--the absentee had scored 3 points higher than I did. My teacher instinctively looked at me with protective pity. At that time, my dad was mere weeks away from leaving for America. And I was not to be far behind. Did it matter who was number one? Moreover, did it matter if my parents would never find out?
Still, it didn't occur to me to tell my dad anything but the truth. But when I got to the part where I had seemingly taken that elusive title, he interrupted me. "You got it!", he said gleefully. His face was pure happiness. It was so unadulterated, so simple. I did not want to dilute it.
"Yes!"
What happened next deserves its own story. To sum up, my parents found out when my friend came over and spilled the beans. I received the most memorable beating of my life, while my friend watched from our worn, blue couch. Suffice to say my lies decreased drastically after that. Lesson learned.
The other lesson, the murkier one, is that I resigned to my fate a little that day. My high school grades consisted of unblemished good grades save one French class. Then, three out of the five ivy leagues I applied to waitlisted me. Next up, law schools. Second tier. Without a first tier school, it is 99.9% certain that my dream job five decades down the road is also out of reach.
Over the summer someone said if my GPA had been better, I'd be at a better law school. Others are appalled upon hearing this, but I received it with mostly indifference. It is true. It is also too late. Not only in the sense that I cannot change my college grades, but in the sense that in the fifth grade, part of this fate had already been woven into place.
At twenty-one years old, I am too young to think anything is sealed. Consciously, I don't allow myself to think this way. But once in a while, a Barney moment escapes. And I get stuck on B+.
**
Postscript: I just reread this post and it sounds terribly whiny. I run around accusing my mother of thinking anything but the best is crap, when I am guilty of it myself. This is exactly why I found Holden from Catcher in the Rye intolerable. Is there anyone more hypocritical than the one who has everything?
**
That line resonated with me long after it should have been forgotten. In my elementary school, our grades (and in turn, our self-worth) hinged on one test each semester. I was always 2nd in my class. This became a joke for everyone in my family except my mother. I was always met with a slightly crestfallen face after coming home. No reprimands. No ecstatic exclaims either. Just B+.
The very last grades I had ever received in China, I was number 1 for ten minutes, until a kid yelled out his tablemate's scores, who was sick and wasn't there--the absentee had scored 3 points higher than I did. My teacher instinctively looked at me with protective pity. At that time, my dad was mere weeks away from leaving for America. And I was not to be far behind. Did it matter who was number one? Moreover, did it matter if my parents would never find out?
Still, it didn't occur to me to tell my dad anything but the truth. But when I got to the part where I had seemingly taken that elusive title, he interrupted me. "You got it!", he said gleefully. His face was pure happiness. It was so unadulterated, so simple. I did not want to dilute it.
"Yes!"
What happened next deserves its own story. To sum up, my parents found out when my friend came over and spilled the beans. I received the most memorable beating of my life, while my friend watched from our worn, blue couch. Suffice to say my lies decreased drastically after that. Lesson learned.
The other lesson, the murkier one, is that I resigned to my fate a little that day. My high school grades consisted of unblemished good grades save one French class. Then, three out of the five ivy leagues I applied to waitlisted me. Next up, law schools. Second tier. Without a first tier school, it is 99.9% certain that my dream job five decades down the road is also out of reach.
Over the summer someone said if my GPA had been better, I'd be at a better law school. Others are appalled upon hearing this, but I received it with mostly indifference. It is true. It is also too late. Not only in the sense that I cannot change my college grades, but in the sense that in the fifth grade, part of this fate had already been woven into place.
At twenty-one years old, I am too young to think anything is sealed. Consciously, I don't allow myself to think this way. But once in a while, a Barney moment escapes. And I get stuck on B+.
**
Postscript: I just reread this post and it sounds terribly whiny. I run around accusing my mother of thinking anything but the best is crap, when I am guilty of it myself. This is exactly why I found Holden from Catcher in the Rye intolerable. Is there anyone more hypocritical than the one who has everything?
**
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
side effects
You know that feeling when you know you’re having a great time, and you sort of leap out of that moment, float above yourself for a while, while sounds of the scene seem to have their volume lowered? And you--this floating you--think: this is happiness. When this moment is over I will remember it as happiness. You know that feeling? Of course you know it, every Lifetime movie exploits this.
I wonder if anyone's recognized happiness without dissociating this way, without separating themselves by time (memory retrieval), or by perspectives (feeling someone else's joy). It seems that happiness, that flighty temptress, must be viewed with one degree of separation. Like it's an explosive we must wear protective goggles for. Like looking directly at it would be blinding. Like it is sunshine. Or a basilisk.
I wonder what happiness, pure and unfiltered, would taste like. When someone first discovered pure oxygen, he inhaled it and found it so delicious he said it must be what the gods breathed. Of course, as a human, it also made him highly flammable. I wonder if there could be a similar ambrosia for happiness. I wonder what its consequences would be.
**
I wonder if anyone's recognized happiness without dissociating this way, without separating themselves by time (memory retrieval), or by perspectives (feeling someone else's joy). It seems that happiness, that flighty temptress, must be viewed with one degree of separation. Like it's an explosive we must wear protective goggles for. Like looking directly at it would be blinding. Like it is sunshine. Or a basilisk.
I wonder what happiness, pure and unfiltered, would taste like. When someone first discovered pure oxygen, he inhaled it and found it so delicious he said it must be what the gods breathed. Of course, as a human, it also made him highly flammable. I wonder if there could be a similar ambrosia for happiness. I wonder what its consequences would be.
**
Sunday, July 10, 2011
dobbin
I’m reading Vanity Fair. There’s this character, honest Dobbin, who loves another girl unconditionally, but she has given her heart away to a man who treats her like dirt. I just finished a scene where he leaves for a long time, and she doesn’t even ask where, because she, although a nice girl (perhaps the nicest in a 'novel without a hero', is too wrapped up in her good-for-nothing husband and the child he left behind. Here, Dobbin comes to bid goodbye to kind Amelia and her son.
“The cruellest looks could not have wounded him more than that glance of hopeless kindness. He bent over the child and mother. He could not speak for a moment. And it was with all his strength that he could force himself to say a God bless you. “God bless you,” said Amelia, and held up her face and kissed him.”
Thackeray always manages to distill human nature to only the essential. Who hasn’t had a Dobbin they’ve passed up? Who hasn’t been a Dobbin themselves? My heart breaks for him when she kissed him not knowing how important it was, how even the best of us get so absorbed in their own egocentric ignorance! How one-sided even the most intimate moments of life can be.
**
“The cruellest looks could not have wounded him more than that glance of hopeless kindness. He bent over the child and mother. He could not speak for a moment. And it was with all his strength that he could force himself to say a God bless you. “God bless you,” said Amelia, and held up her face and kissed him.”
Thackeray always manages to distill human nature to only the essential. Who hasn’t had a Dobbin they’ve passed up? Who hasn’t been a Dobbin themselves? My heart breaks for him when she kissed him not knowing how important it was, how even the best of us get so absorbed in their own egocentric ignorance! How one-sided even the most intimate moments of life can be.
**
Thursday, July 7, 2011
reptilian living
I went through my old college journal tonight, with actual handwritten entries for the first half. It's amazing how much was forgotten, or suppressed. I was so groundless for a while. The sense of being lost was almost leaping off the page. And I actually felt a kind of anxiety to save that girl from a directionlessness whose magnitude even she did not grasp. It didn't matter that I knew, rationally, that the girl was the one leafing through the pages, and she is fine.
The stickiness and lingering criss-crossing strands between the past and the present have always frustrated me. It would be so much easier if time were discrete, and not continuous, like somehow the artificial units of hours and weeks and time zones we impose upon it actually chopped it up. But I've yet to find anything as unforgiving, unrelenting, and immutable (including my tiger mother) as time.
Yet, seeing as how much I view this past girl as a separate person, it's almost as if time had loosened its iron-grip claws for a second, and the not-so-distant past had broken free. It feels so gratuitous, I hardly know if it is to be believed. Are versions of the self really so easily shed and discarded? Can one slither away unscathed? Or is it a practice only suitable to reptiles, while Eve looks on in jealousy?
**
The stickiness and lingering criss-crossing strands between the past and the present have always frustrated me. It would be so much easier if time were discrete, and not continuous, like somehow the artificial units of hours and weeks and time zones we impose upon it actually chopped it up. But I've yet to find anything as unforgiving, unrelenting, and immutable (including my tiger mother) as time.
Yet, seeing as how much I view this past girl as a separate person, it's almost as if time had loosened its iron-grip claws for a second, and the not-so-distant past had broken free. It feels so gratuitous, I hardly know if it is to be believed. Are versions of the self really so easily shed and discarded? Can one slither away unscathed? Or is it a practice only suitable to reptiles, while Eve looks on in jealousy?
**
Saturday, June 18, 2011
opening closures
I haven't written about graduation yet, in fact, I haven't written much at all lately. I'm just not sure how to approach such a topic, it's too big for my delicate scalpels, usually reserved for surgeries on the tiniest and most useless of organs. They deal with the appendix, not the heart.
College is the school where I've spent more time than any other...coming to this realization during one of my rare, unrushed showers in the last few weeks, I feel ill-prepared for the incoming nostalgia.
I thought the processing would begin with a good cry on graduation day, but no such luck amid the straggling lines, hundreds of mispronounced names, and chilling mist. Something similar happened (or didn't happen) the night when I left China for America, I remember standing motionlessly in front of my cousin. Are you excited? She asked. I said nothing. Not really. I finally offered. And that was that.
We always think these landmarks will open some sort of magical, emotional gate. But we don't live in a Kodak commercial. We don't cry in the tearjerker moments movies have dog-eared for us, but we do for the loss of an old necklace we haven't worn in years, or a picture of a simple bench in a hometown we haven't stepped foot in for a decade, or an honor that passed us by that we didn't even realize we wanted.
The thing about these moments is that they're unexpected. It is not so much like an arrival at a forked road as it is like running smack into an impenetrable wall. Planned goodbyes, organized convocations, event X at time Y, who wastes a tear on them? Someone once said: “Don’t rush or force the ending… All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.” He meant it as a way of writing. But it is also of life. To write badly is to rush an ending. To write well is to know the next scene. And to write with any conviction of truth, is to first realize you know nothing of what's coming. And so it also is with the rare moments of clarity in life.
If there is one thing the start of closure needs, it is the element of surprise.
**
College is the school where I've spent more time than any other...coming to this realization during one of my rare, unrushed showers in the last few weeks, I feel ill-prepared for the incoming nostalgia.
I thought the processing would begin with a good cry on graduation day, but no such luck amid the straggling lines, hundreds of mispronounced names, and chilling mist. Something similar happened (or didn't happen) the night when I left China for America, I remember standing motionlessly in front of my cousin. Are you excited? She asked. I said nothing. Not really. I finally offered. And that was that.
We always think these landmarks will open some sort of magical, emotional gate. But we don't live in a Kodak commercial. We don't cry in the tearjerker moments movies have dog-eared for us, but we do for the loss of an old necklace we haven't worn in years, or a picture of a simple bench in a hometown we haven't stepped foot in for a decade, or an honor that passed us by that we didn't even realize we wanted.
The thing about these moments is that they're unexpected. It is not so much like an arrival at a forked road as it is like running smack into an impenetrable wall. Planned goodbyes, organized convocations, event X at time Y, who wastes a tear on them? Someone once said: “Don’t rush or force the ending… All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.” He meant it as a way of writing. But it is also of life. To write badly is to rush an ending. To write well is to know the next scene. And to write with any conviction of truth, is to first realize you know nothing of what's coming. And so it also is with the rare moments of clarity in life.
If there is one thing the start of closure needs, it is the element of surprise.
**
Monday, May 30, 2011
the other side of utopia
There is a great article on nytimes right now about technology, 'liking', and how they are erasing the proper education to 'loving', self-realization, and being human in general. Of the strands in the article (there are many), there is one about pain:
“And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill...pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.”
I can't decide if he is saying something fundamentally true or just short-sighted. Why can't we, armed with technology, create an absolutely resistance-free world, where there is no natural disasters, no murder, no pain? And to mirror such a world, maybe we will also transform from the imperfect, good-evil, yin-yang creatures that we are, to purely content ones, not so ecstatic nor fantastic, but perfectly 'good' nonetheless. We are taught by novels like Brave New World that such utopias are to be rejected and treated with contempt, but might that just be the author's bias for masochism? Might it be simply his own secret addiction to pain that he is imposing on our Old World? If the world can be so changed that Nature no longer bequeaths any misfortunes on humans, isn't it plausible that within such a revolution, humans will evolve as well? Perhaps we will find meaningful ways to live without pain. Let us not bet, prematurely, on our inability to be rid of our evils. As we are eradicating the pain the outside world causes us, perhaps we can eradicate our need for it as well.
The writer of nytimes and Aldous Huxley might call me a coward for attempting to run away from evil altogether. Their arguments are eloquent and convincing, until we consider their underlying assumption that we could not succeed, but what if, in spite of their insistence on the fixed, unevolving nature of humans, we could?
**
“And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill...pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.”
I can't decide if he is saying something fundamentally true or just short-sighted. Why can't we, armed with technology, create an absolutely resistance-free world, where there is no natural disasters, no murder, no pain? And to mirror such a world, maybe we will also transform from the imperfect, good-evil, yin-yang creatures that we are, to purely content ones, not so ecstatic nor fantastic, but perfectly 'good' nonetheless. We are taught by novels like Brave New World that such utopias are to be rejected and treated with contempt, but might that just be the author's bias for masochism? Might it be simply his own secret addiction to pain that he is imposing on our Old World? If the world can be so changed that Nature no longer bequeaths any misfortunes on humans, isn't it plausible that within such a revolution, humans will evolve as well? Perhaps we will find meaningful ways to live without pain. Let us not bet, prematurely, on our inability to be rid of our evils. As we are eradicating the pain the outside world causes us, perhaps we can eradicate our need for it as well.
The writer of nytimes and Aldous Huxley might call me a coward for attempting to run away from evil altogether. Their arguments are eloquent and convincing, until we consider their underlying assumption that we could not succeed, but what if, in spite of their insistence on the fixed, unevolving nature of humans, we could?
**
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