I am left still with a strange feeling of dissociation, or a flavor of deceit. Perhaps it is not so dramatic. Perhaps it is only the chewing of stale bread, perhaps it is a dryness in the mouth, a passivity in the place of once passion. Maybe it is a sameness now in the absence of love, so to fill the void I conjecture, instead.
Or perhaps it is actually discretion. Perhaps it is actually the flavor of my value set, manifesting, a mother yeast to raise my dough.
I feel badly, now, that I couldn't look at her. I enjoyed her voice, her velvety singsong -- I caught the contortions of her hurt in recalling the events of the last year trying to secure her adopted daughter. It was a small gathering -- she could tell that I couldn't look at her, I'm sure. When I parted we hugged and she said, "Goodbye Melinda" and I knew that perhaps it was really finally over.
The narrative starts somewhere in July, I think, in her improvised monologue to the choreography of swinging balls. I think back, to the caged green soccer lawn across my building's front porch, a brightness too impossibly bright, a summer long bred of a spring promise where taunting buds gave sprouting kisses in March only to hide coy till June. Flirts. Hangers-on. I'm on the phone with her somehow, catching up, speaking about relationships, the adoption, the something-project with the Bulgarian Cultural Minister, I don't know. Sometimes her stories carry such a conferred weight of self-importance usually accrued to international diplomats or dignitaries that in memory perhaps I embellish similarly. Who knows? It's sunny, I'm confused and gregarious, I'm hunting for a sense of my life, I'm proud of the mature distance I have from hers but we're good now, we're friends, we're shooting the breeze, I'm finding out that all the tragedy of the past was now in the process of becoming a hoped for future and--oh--did I think I could help her launch a fundraising campaign for the additional adoption legal fees?
Back in 2011, tonight in that fourth floor East Village studio, my inner vision is being intruded upon by the memory of Jeff's gold-plated faucets and tap circa late 2008, the ones we'd have to spray after using to clean up for the patients, wait, why am I there signing Donna's proof of income? I don't know. Was I on the phone with her at the time, sequestered in a very private place, to commit this very quiet act of signing fallacious documents? "Donna X earns $50,000 per annum and is able to financially support an adopted child as a single parent, Signed, Melinda Lee, Company Manager." I can still feel used, and dirty. My peace and calm and happiness for her final result being shared with the community tonight, well, I'm being intruded upon by weird memories instead and I have to keep my eyes lowered as she swings balls and continues to narrate her noble, angry struggle.
I wish I could say it's all a blur to me from that point on. My memory is slowly loosening its hold on my mind and ability to be in the present, but when triggered I remember only too well. On my way home tonight I look for ways to either feel the fullness of my indignance as I used to, laying hunt upon my own tail--hurried, harried, loud and biting--or to find some fantastical otherness to eradicate the memory of standing there with cheese and wine, smiling-faced with a sense of both boredom and social idiocy, to find something that takes away the strange emptiness I have from this night. Nope, not even the promising distraction of a getaway to Montreal with money I don't have to be surrounded by francophiles who will inevitably only make me feel not french and the ex-lover who will likely be nothing but alternately cold or pining is enough to empty my mind, once I arrive home. My growl at impinged upon space and subsequent mini-fight with flatmate is too regular an event to warrant a clean slate. The only DVD I have to watch is a PBS documentary about contemporary artists, but somehow everything has an "unflavor", my new intellectual passions are unnuanced ambitions, everything art-related is emblematic of my uncertainty; I resort to hanging folded clothes carefully in arrangement by shape and function. I look at the string of tabs in my browser of what my Montreal weekend was going to look like before I became entirely negative of it, possibly if I could just maintain the infatuation long enough that I'd once again carry through an impossible dreaming... but you cannot really tint the lenses rose-colored again, save for the Infatuation, for years now, Infatuation.
I pause to remember that I had noted while glancing down, somewhere, tired eyes sometimes upwards trying to look less reprimancing (a typo that better represents a simultaneous reprimand and wince, I think), I remember that I thought to myself that I was going to focus on writing again for once, to conjecture and validate my experience and to think about the sometimes ongoing conflict not of wrong and right but of right and risk. When is it braver/better/stronger to commit to risk rather than to right? Living a life in pursuit of the right -- meaning, by ethics -- but what are the laws of these ethics, and are they all indeed permanent or permeable? Is it ethical to pursue the primacy of a profit-motive because one wants to start and support a family? How is it not ethical to lie about one's income in order to leap hurdles of bureaucracy so that you can save a child from an orphanage halfway across the world and love her unconditionally? Who made me an arbiter of what is ethical anyway?
Risking wrongness to pursue what's right, the right to risk, this is not about capacity to act, this is contextually dependent for sure, but not necessarily a Western right. This is not about me playing some kind of Nightingale victimhood or pan-Asian passivity, and then lambasting conservative values within the Christian doctrine I came of age in for the feeling that I can't risk, and therefore that I'm not true. Not aligned. A bent wheel.
I still think it was wrong to place a woman at the behest of her yearnings in dance and art in a position where she knowingly creates documents that falsify another's means--even as she (me) was never at that point given the full facts. I think, in a positive light, that a Mel that learns from the past would know now when to say, rather than a desperate "enough!" only when neck deep, to adjudicate and say, "Wow, thank you for trusting me with all of this intimate, difficult stuff. I would like to help you. But I'm not sure if I am equipped to handle so much of your life stress when I myself have dreams to embark upon, difficulties to negotiate, dangers to diffuse and others to pursue. In what way can you exert leadership in this situation that would not compromise our relationship?"
Or something like that. Of course, the other option is to learn to say No, a flat out No, questions if necessary, but from oneself it's a I Know, and a No. In pursuit of living completely without the downcast shame of getting way too involved, it's time.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Made and Married and Made Again; Family History and the Remaking of Commonhood for Commongood
In the spirit of the American confessional, in this first post of over a year, I declare: I am finally willing to attempt to forgive my father. Ten years since he wrote me that letter asking for my forgiveness, 29 years since they made me, 35 years since my mother married him and he married my mother, 63 years since he was made, 77 years since his parents were married, 100 years since my paternal grandmother was made and 102, my dad's dad. I've been reviewing with my cousin Sheryll (first cousin, the other side) the intensely detailed family history my father and his elder brother made in 2007, and through this remembering my bloodline and deciding I have to learn to see what in there is common with the self/ves I struggle so much to embrace in order to stop searching for a father in just about everybody else.
I start by thinking about my parents, about their common. Now a part of the humorous yet tragic mythology I make of my parent's marriage -- the curious, adventuresome and troublesome quest of my youth, that is, slaying their dragons -- I once asked my mother, "Why did you and dad get married?" and she replied, "Well, you know, well, we - uh - we liked the same things, you know, we liked the same music, the same movies ... you know, like Neil Diamond." "NEIL DIAMOND?!?!" my inner and future retaliatory inner voice screamed. Like the pesky flies that won't leave my apartment (they have taken to heart the Christian edicts from my paternal legacy to breed and to prosper), I become stunned and incensed and consumed by the crafty desire to obliterate. I vowed never to settle for anything less than a love marriage, and proceeded to thwart my ability to do this by frequently running back to save theirs.
But bygones is by the by and gone. To revive them without reconciliation is to live with the despair that comes from constant ignoring and resulting forgetfulness (earlier post: "forgetting is already a form of apocalypse"). Because there are rooms of my house I am unwilling to see -- am I the caged, the unkempt, in the dust and the dark? or are they? -- I can feel stupid and ashamed, I indulge in masterful avoidance techniques, I have a blurry destiny rather than an expansive unknown. I am jittery on the inside, clawing at histories and herstories with rubber nails too blunt to scratch, too long to control, with ever weakening force. Yet I keep swiping, and as they slow, I like to watch the shadows dance.
So I think about their marriage, their commons, their common goods, their commongood. In another similarly humorous and frightening quip, I once asked my father after we'd quelled their biggest crisis how it was he knew he loved my mother. He thought, head cocked to one side, now greying and grisly hair swept to the same direction, in his usual plaid or striped collared shirt. As usual, he had a pen and a post-it pad in his front pocket, and pensively he removed a shiny black 0.7 rollerball pen. He held it in two hands, thinking, and then said, "You see this pen? Your mother has the exact same pen." His eyes widened, as if I had protested. "No, but you see, we didn't buy them together, no! I didn't ask for it. But we have the same pen." Then he kept thinking, head tilted, twirling this pen. And then he put it back in his pocket.
I probably applauded him then -- it was my job at the time to either separate them for good or keep them together come hell or high water, so every little bit of self-reflection about their togetherness was welcomed. Why a frightening admission to this otherwise lost 26-year-old waiting for an American visa to just get back to where she thought she knew who she was, which was away, away from all this? Frightening, then, because I knew how much I wanted the comfort of that material and sociohistorical and cultural sameness, that tricky synchronicity, and at the same time knew I couldn't have it, wouldn't want to keep it, wanted to be bigger and better than the produce of our fruit farm. I still look at journeying Japanese couples with envy, or Swedish couples or Colombian couples standing on a subway platform, looking lost at a street corner, or walking roadside with their big gap year backpacks, speaking their own native tongue to each other, and I want it. I want to go out into the world unalone and I want to return home -- in a glance, a handhold, a non-English reprimand -- to a common. But I "know" I won't have it, I've been telling myself for years. Not same enough on the inside to warrant a different match, so many non-matching parts to find a matched mismatch, my soul an eclectic found object, a treasure specialized to beneath the deepest sea.
But I'm reading this paternal family history loaded with 19th century contextualizing maps, Singapore photographs, clan photographs, aphorisms and Biblical scripture and Christian poetry in little shaded text boxes that more or less liken our strewn Chinese migration to that of the ancient Israelites. Page follows page of tables and spreadsheets numbering the five generations stemming from my great-grandfather and great-grandmother who followed their new faith from farms in Fujian to colonial Singapore: 381 progeny, including by marriage, including living and dead! Since the book's publishing in 2007 ... 383 at least! (that's Yang Mee's baby Sophie and Sue's baby Rohan at least taken into account) There are lots of photos of marriages and children, and quite a few reminders to "take heart from the example set by those who came before ... in having families." There is an extremely embarrassing picture of me in a split taken while I was stretching one day on grass. Likely to protect the feelings of those they concern, there are noticeable gaps in narratives about divorces and education that is not academic in nature; I understand the desire, but it does mean negligent history, and a curious absence of the fatherhood of some of my cousins and my wonderful aunt's influence at the Royal Academy of Music.
I'm reading this, and it occurs to me that my father's father -- who he in later years acknowledged as a misogynist in order to explain his indifference to the hurt feelings of my mother (the culture of corporate America could explain the same, or just an indifference to hurt feelings generally without making extra effort) -- had probably more to him than I thought, in that he had secrets, and he had pain, and he had reasons. I learn that my grandfather's father died when he was seven, that my grandfather had a first wife before my grandmother, unknown and unacknowledged to his children. I learn that his second brother died during the war. These are all told in factual ways without emotional resonance, which is likely the way these experiences were really lived. Yet I can't but help to think on this, my head upright.
So Mom - Dad - your commonhood and commongood. They were also married, the fable goes, because of curious coincidences and seeming cultural destiny. My mother adored her father; my father had his same initials, and his same birthday. Both their fathers were prominent teachers, and they had in fact first met each other through these common circles at my father's 17th birthday party where, evidenced in the now famous photograph and anecdote, my dad looked like he was 12 and my mother was so pretty he thought to himself, "that's the kind of woman I want to marry." Both were born in 1947, post-war, pre-independence, meaning mostly that they were lucky to not have to go through many years of the demands of learning Mandarin Chinese and unlucky enough to watch a generation rising beneath them become fluent and successful with it when it became compulsory from 1959 on. Both were Anglophiles, but my mother the unabashed one. Both, it seems, really wanted to catch up with everyone else at the age of 27 since they got engaged after only 6 months of dating.
Both, it seems, had fathers who lost a parent at a young age. My mother's father, my Opa, lost his mother as a child and was raised by his older sister; my Kong Kong, as said, lost his father when he was 7, he the tenth child, all of which remaining (and some grandchildren) to be raised by his mother.
Both would really like to do the right thing, which in our culture usually means right by everybody else, and that can serve some well but not others, and both have tried and fluctuated and suffered for it.
* * *
I have so many printed Powerpoint slides from my father I don't know what to do with them; the latest, of my nephew's birth, is actually laminated, so I considered using it as an actual placemat but have placed it more usefully as a drawer liner instead. The other prints start to tell me more of my dad's inner story the more I try and listen or read it than to read my constant disappointment that he is not the perfect, openly communicating, emotionally deep feeling man that I wish he was -- partly because I want it, mostly because I am it, and I'd like him to know who I am. Again, when the door is opened, does it get revealed which of us has been in the dark and trapped all this while? Or are we both coming out of the closet?
There is one Powerpoint print-out collection seemingly, at first, gratuitous -- pictures from a sudden family reunion at my sister's in San Francisco in May of 2009, a short four or five day unexpected gathering. My mother had finally made an effort for herself outside of her role of "wife" or "mother" and made a liberation trip to Peru -- "while my knees can still climb Machu Picchu!"-- and my sister recently announced her pregnancy. My mother planned a stop to SFO on her way back from the trip, and I was convinced to go see her -- I had left Singapore with three-year-US-visa in hand just six months prior.
I landed in San Francisco both eager and reluctant, mostly reluctant to feel isolated in company again with my latest love lost in England and my latest jobs evaporating into another future-less, waiting summer. But I became full of love and eagerness thinking about having a common (read: "normal") relationship with my mom, going shopping or taking her out to a spa and letting her blithely gossip, as some women should, especially those who never get an outlet. I could love her more when we didn't need to solve or process her and her husband. I was excited upon landing that myself and my sister, for whom she has made her life, were going to be there to greet her off this plane coming back from her liberation "When I'm 60, I'll Wear Purple (and go to Peru) (and then come back) (to where I'm comfortable)" trip.
My brother-in-law stroked his beard strangely as I descended the escalators from my arrivals hall, an odd knowingness and a finger placed to trigger on the Nikon D80 hanging around his neck. Where is Sue? Where is the peanut that is in the stomach of Sue? --well, the uterus of Sue! Where is the peanut? Instead, in a bizarre act of ninja stealth, my DAD appears hunch-shouldered and giggling as if he'd been ballet slippering his 180-pound mass between pillars, beneath staircases, and towards my defenseless figure. Yes -- my father, having less than a year prior finally gone to couples therapy (she'd been asking for 14 years -- I put them in separate rooms, and made them), less than that having placed an actual portrait of my mother on his desk for the fist time, perhaps around the same having written into his electronic scheduling devices: "Remember to do something/say something loving to Pat" -- my father had decided to show up in our lives.
Happy, surprised, "here's my dad coming for me and my sister! I've always known he'd be a great grandfather! Here's my dad! Here's my dad! And here comes my mom! --Shit!" Fear of impending doom subsides as my father quaintly, as always, plays the hiding boy. We figure she'll come out by the baggage carrels and we position DAD in his always grey cotton pants and plaid shirt seated by the restrooms flush to the mouth of the escalator landing. Ever imaginative, DAD shrouds himself in his parka throwing it over his head completely, peeks out, and snickers -- I feel like prodding to make sure he isn't just going to fall asleep in the position I know him best to do so, but he blinks alertly and promises me he's not "resting his eyes" and that I should just let him know when she's down.
MOM: highlighted bronze gleams off side-swept auburn strands making a light joke at being unable to fully cover her slightly balding head (a woman does more with less). She's tan, she's dry, she's a pear, oh she's a peach. She's happy. Oh good. Oh good god.
Embraces, obligatory photos of successful reunion, she's made an effort (at being herself), he's made an effort (at being a member of the family), Sue and Duleesha have evidently made an effort, have conceived and being with child. I have made an effort ... well, I came with a distinctly selfish motive to have a good little holiday with my mum, to be a good kid, yes, well, I made an effort. I've made lots of efforts at these other people. I've laid myself down for most anybody I loved, and if I couldn't give freely and therefore didn't really give greatly it's because I was rather busy laying low because I can go crazy loving and without knowing how to control it really, it's seemed to work better (for who? for others?) to take it out on myself. Any love, abusive love, guilty love, kiddish love, blind love, it's been like my gag banana peel, I trip and fall down. Better, it seemed, to stay there. Why fall another time? Oh wait, but did it make you laugh? Well if it made you laugh ...
Which is ALL to say -- these Powerpoint slides, of what at times was really a terrible gathering, my mother in photos smiling and tilting her head forwards and downwards to try to give her best face and a lowered hairline, whilst in the documents of experience thrashing and pained and trying but still unhappy. Too little too late? I was spared the mommysitting, but maybe my mom and myself should have stayed at the hotel and my DAD been sent to the couch fending off libidinous cats at bedtime and cats at Calvary before dawn. Perhaps he should have stopped being a hero and tried being brave, brave enough to admit that he was lonely without her and at a loss thinking we didn't need him to be an us. Perhaps he should stop shaking his head when she misbehaves, which she does, because she is special, and because who else is supposed to embody the authority that can intervene? Of course, we like having the pictures. Its a commonhood. Both of them seated at the museum "pong chet" (a Singaporean catch phrase bastardizing the English word, "punctured", meaning flat-out tired), leaning against a wall of framed rainforest butterflies and each other with eyes closed, jackets as blankets, like some sort of art installation. Pictures of my sister and I pigtailed like Pocahontas (still my unmanifested party hire character, destined to make me a living!), making faces like, aw, sisters do. I don't forget, this is the same man who made one his biggest guffaws on one of his earliest Powerpoint creations, depicting his family life to fellow servicemen on the Mercyships hospital boat he and my reluctant but abiding mom were being heroic at, with pictures of Sue and myself as cute kids with the bright yellow titling: "My China Dolls". Oh DAD. It probably wouldn't hurt so bad if we thought you actually had a better sense than that of who we might be -- besides something you hadn't quite raised us to be.
But I get it, or get it a little better, now, this thing, this thing he works with and obeys and fights with (a little) all his life, I get it, ok, maybe I get it. It's always a little harder to have an insight on someone who doesn't reveal much self-knowledge. This Powerpoint print-out with the cover title "Converging on San Francisco" and a ridiculous slide of a world map with overlaid arrows and airport codes showing not just our convergence but the actual flight routings we each took to get together -- I'm not rolling my eyes. I long ago learned to accept soft-edged oval portrait frames and expository captions. I still don't entirely understand why there are three whole pages of pictures of taxidermic Savannah animals from the Natural History Museum, but I'm sure if I really think about it, especially because they are uncaptioned, that something about them struck my father in a subconscious way and he had to express it. (I believe the best picture I couldn't take in that hall that day was a little Chinese woman standing by the wall of hominid skulls -- she had positioned herself accidentally to fall right in line with them, and her extraordinary stature had her at exactly the right height).
I've been reading, actually reading (rather than being offended and emotionally exiled by) this paternal family history, Dad, and I get it a little better. I am not sorry for who I am, the complexity I carry with me, and my continued awkward life choices to not be like what this book wishes me to be and yet that I continue to feel intimidated by and impressionable/variable because of. I believe you may have, in the past and in the present in some small ways much quieter with age, felt the same. I know you love Mom because she faces a similar conflict and has a passion in her that you thought bold and attractive until you couldn't understand it anymore and it affected your natural way of handling the conflict, which was to always, with virtuous intentions, acquiesce. I look at your PPT map cover in its plastic folder from a year and a half ago and I think of what in your heart suffers to have this family so flung apart, daughters who went to liberal arts colleges and not universities (yes, the best one, but not the most impressive), what status do we bring? You need to fit in by fulfilling symbols of your culturally designated manhood -- nevermind that you were a happy boy chasing photographs and devotional stories before you gave in, replacing mud-drowned jeep tires on tropical backroads or hitchhiking through Europe. Nevermind that you didn't own a suit until mom was refused the corporate hire because they were looking for a man, and she and Halcyon prepped you and grilled you and shoved you into the interview room. Or is that really the story? I'm not sure if you've actually told me your take on it.
You let mom handle all the finances; our Prime Minister did it first, and he called himself "a kept man" jokingly which I think I recall you saying too, once. A way to ease the discomfort of deciding how to make a life, how to make her happy even when you can't, how to be the definition of a loving father even if you can't understand how, you just can't! It's Ok. Now. I mean, now it's Ok. Now, it's a part of our history rather than a choice we are making about the future. It requests acceptance and forgiveness, not partnership and communicating together.
* * *
You left us outside your heart and let others enter in (only if you knew they wouldn't stay), but you gave us many riches not the least of which was inspiration.
I took up photography with your old camera, which saved me from complete isolation and loneliness as a repatriated teen. You raised me on National Geographics and Economists and Times and Newsweeks so I could know about the world, have a heart for it, and have a quest for it, as you and Mom did (and do). You allowed me to press you about your early sketches of Mom when she was pregnant with Sue, and though you never let me see the naked charcoal drawings, you rendered me two fast contour drawings in marker ink of our living room furniture after which I thought you were a secret genius -- which in recollection makes me cry, because I remember how earlier in my life you crushed my artistic passion at age 7 with a simple, cold response to my then proudest pastel drawing, abstract, expressionistic, like my mind: "Well, you can't do that until you're famous." This is also my mythology or moral tale, the trampled beetle beneath the elephant's foot and how it learned and grew only to be a slightly bigger and more compulsive beetle.
I am your daughter, and you have been many men, so it's often been hard to know exactly which daughter would stick. It's odd to come to at 28, or maybe it's not, but I get it, that to be a daughter doesn't mean to be contingent upon a dad. To be a daughter in comparison to other daughters, well, some are perhaps role models and some are perhaps species that will eat me or that I should rather eat.
I am the youngest daughter of the youngest son of the youngest son of a man and a woman who came by boat to Singapore from a farm in China and through hardship and fortuity were significant in growing the nation with faith- and prosperity-driven values. Their progeny have not grown their wealth, knowledge and that of the nation by indulging themselves, airing their grievances, pursuing fanciful dreamings, romance languages and romantic ideals. They did not come to success by living halfway across the world with an expensive degree spending the last summer plastering drywall and this summer coming to terms -- even if you, Dad, spend your happy moments outdoors renovating the garden again and again, doing honest labor and hands-on problem-solving, even if when I shared with you about my day drilling an exhaust box into the ceiling, you said with subtle protestation: "But you could have learned all that from me!" Even if you made a retirement gift for yourself of a wood-turning workshop, and even as you insist on making technical computer trouble-shooting a demanding shared activity with me, which I hate. When I was young and I used to think like this, I'd think, "See Dad, I am the son you never had," but really I'm your daughter, and Sue's also your daughter, and sometimes, I am both a daughter and an overeager, easily disappointed, trailing dog, the same way Sue is a daughter and a stubborn, sensitive, mysterious horse.
I start by thinking about my parents, about their common. Now a part of the humorous yet tragic mythology I make of my parent's marriage -- the curious, adventuresome and troublesome quest of my youth, that is, slaying their dragons -- I once asked my mother, "Why did you and dad get married?" and she replied, "Well, you know, well, we - uh - we liked the same things, you know, we liked the same music, the same movies ... you know, like Neil Diamond." "NEIL DIAMOND?!?!" my inner and future retaliatory inner voice screamed. Like the pesky flies that won't leave my apartment (they have taken to heart the Christian edicts from my paternal legacy to breed and to prosper), I become stunned and incensed and consumed by the crafty desire to obliterate. I vowed never to settle for anything less than a love marriage, and proceeded to thwart my ability to do this by frequently running back to save theirs.
But bygones is by the by and gone. To revive them without reconciliation is to live with the despair that comes from constant ignoring and resulting forgetfulness (earlier post: "forgetting is already a form of apocalypse"). Because there are rooms of my house I am unwilling to see -- am I the caged, the unkempt, in the dust and the dark? or are they? -- I can feel stupid and ashamed, I indulge in masterful avoidance techniques, I have a blurry destiny rather than an expansive unknown. I am jittery on the inside, clawing at histories and herstories with rubber nails too blunt to scratch, too long to control, with ever weakening force. Yet I keep swiping, and as they slow, I like to watch the shadows dance.
So I think about their marriage, their commons, their common goods, their commongood. In another similarly humorous and frightening quip, I once asked my father after we'd quelled their biggest crisis how it was he knew he loved my mother. He thought, head cocked to one side, now greying and grisly hair swept to the same direction, in his usual plaid or striped collared shirt. As usual, he had a pen and a post-it pad in his front pocket, and pensively he removed a shiny black 0.7 rollerball pen. He held it in two hands, thinking, and then said, "You see this pen? Your mother has the exact same pen." His eyes widened, as if I had protested. "No, but you see, we didn't buy them together, no! I didn't ask for it. But we have the same pen." Then he kept thinking, head tilted, twirling this pen. And then he put it back in his pocket.
I probably applauded him then -- it was my job at the time to either separate them for good or keep them together come hell or high water, so every little bit of self-reflection about their togetherness was welcomed. Why a frightening admission to this otherwise lost 26-year-old waiting for an American visa to just get back to where she thought she knew who she was, which was away, away from all this? Frightening, then, because I knew how much I wanted the comfort of that material and sociohistorical and cultural sameness, that tricky synchronicity, and at the same time knew I couldn't have it, wouldn't want to keep it, wanted to be bigger and better than the produce of our fruit farm. I still look at journeying Japanese couples with envy, or Swedish couples or Colombian couples standing on a subway platform, looking lost at a street corner, or walking roadside with their big gap year backpacks, speaking their own native tongue to each other, and I want it. I want to go out into the world unalone and I want to return home -- in a glance, a handhold, a non-English reprimand -- to a common. But I "know" I won't have it, I've been telling myself for years. Not same enough on the inside to warrant a different match, so many non-matching parts to find a matched mismatch, my soul an eclectic found object, a treasure specialized to beneath the deepest sea.
But I'm reading this paternal family history loaded with 19th century contextualizing maps, Singapore photographs, clan photographs, aphorisms and Biblical scripture and Christian poetry in little shaded text boxes that more or less liken our strewn Chinese migration to that of the ancient Israelites. Page follows page of tables and spreadsheets numbering the five generations stemming from my great-grandfather and great-grandmother who followed their new faith from farms in Fujian to colonial Singapore: 381 progeny, including by marriage, including living and dead! Since the book's publishing in 2007 ... 383 at least! (that's Yang Mee's baby Sophie and Sue's baby Rohan at least taken into account) There are lots of photos of marriages and children, and quite a few reminders to "take heart from the example set by those who came before ... in having families." There is an extremely embarrassing picture of me in a split taken while I was stretching one day on grass. Likely to protect the feelings of those they concern, there are noticeable gaps in narratives about divorces and education that is not academic in nature; I understand the desire, but it does mean negligent history, and a curious absence of the fatherhood of some of my cousins and my wonderful aunt's influence at the Royal Academy of Music.
I'm reading this, and it occurs to me that my father's father -- who he in later years acknowledged as a misogynist in order to explain his indifference to the hurt feelings of my mother (the culture of corporate America could explain the same, or just an indifference to hurt feelings generally without making extra effort) -- had probably more to him than I thought, in that he had secrets, and he had pain, and he had reasons. I learn that my grandfather's father died when he was seven, that my grandfather had a first wife before my grandmother, unknown and unacknowledged to his children. I learn that his second brother died during the war. These are all told in factual ways without emotional resonance, which is likely the way these experiences were really lived. Yet I can't but help to think on this, my head upright.
So Mom - Dad - your commonhood and commongood. They were also married, the fable goes, because of curious coincidences and seeming cultural destiny. My mother adored her father; my father had his same initials, and his same birthday. Both their fathers were prominent teachers, and they had in fact first met each other through these common circles at my father's 17th birthday party where, evidenced in the now famous photograph and anecdote, my dad looked like he was 12 and my mother was so pretty he thought to himself, "that's the kind of woman I want to marry." Both were born in 1947, post-war, pre-independence, meaning mostly that they were lucky to not have to go through many years of the demands of learning Mandarin Chinese and unlucky enough to watch a generation rising beneath them become fluent and successful with it when it became compulsory from 1959 on. Both were Anglophiles, but my mother the unabashed one. Both, it seems, really wanted to catch up with everyone else at the age of 27 since they got engaged after only 6 months of dating.
Both, it seems, had fathers who lost a parent at a young age. My mother's father, my Opa, lost his mother as a child and was raised by his older sister; my Kong Kong, as said, lost his father when he was 7, he the tenth child, all of which remaining (and some grandchildren) to be raised by his mother.
Both would really like to do the right thing, which in our culture usually means right by everybody else, and that can serve some well but not others, and both have tried and fluctuated and suffered for it.
* * *
I have so many printed Powerpoint slides from my father I don't know what to do with them; the latest, of my nephew's birth, is actually laminated, so I considered using it as an actual placemat but have placed it more usefully as a drawer liner instead. The other prints start to tell me more of my dad's inner story the more I try and listen or read it than to read my constant disappointment that he is not the perfect, openly communicating, emotionally deep feeling man that I wish he was -- partly because I want it, mostly because I am it, and I'd like him to know who I am. Again, when the door is opened, does it get revealed which of us has been in the dark and trapped all this while? Or are we both coming out of the closet?
There is one Powerpoint print-out collection seemingly, at first, gratuitous -- pictures from a sudden family reunion at my sister's in San Francisco in May of 2009, a short four or five day unexpected gathering. My mother had finally made an effort for herself outside of her role of "wife" or "mother" and made a liberation trip to Peru -- "while my knees can still climb Machu Picchu!"-- and my sister recently announced her pregnancy. My mother planned a stop to SFO on her way back from the trip, and I was convinced to go see her -- I had left Singapore with three-year-US-visa in hand just six months prior.
I landed in San Francisco both eager and reluctant, mostly reluctant to feel isolated in company again with my latest love lost in England and my latest jobs evaporating into another future-less, waiting summer. But I became full of love and eagerness thinking about having a common (read: "normal") relationship with my mom, going shopping or taking her out to a spa and letting her blithely gossip, as some women should, especially those who never get an outlet. I could love her more when we didn't need to solve or process her and her husband. I was excited upon landing that myself and my sister, for whom she has made her life, were going to be there to greet her off this plane coming back from her liberation "When I'm 60, I'll Wear Purple (and go to Peru) (and then come back) (to where I'm comfortable)" trip.
My brother-in-law stroked his beard strangely as I descended the escalators from my arrivals hall, an odd knowingness and a finger placed to trigger on the Nikon D80 hanging around his neck. Where is Sue? Where is the peanut that is in the stomach of Sue? --well, the uterus of Sue! Where is the peanut? Instead, in a bizarre act of ninja stealth, my DAD appears hunch-shouldered and giggling as if he'd been ballet slippering his 180-pound mass between pillars, beneath staircases, and towards my defenseless figure. Yes -- my father, having less than a year prior finally gone to couples therapy (she'd been asking for 14 years -- I put them in separate rooms, and made them), less than that having placed an actual portrait of my mother on his desk for the fist time, perhaps around the same having written into his electronic scheduling devices: "Remember to do something/say something loving to Pat" -- my father had decided to show up in our lives.
Happy, surprised, "here's my dad coming for me and my sister! I've always known he'd be a great grandfather! Here's my dad! Here's my dad! And here comes my mom! --Shit!" Fear of impending doom subsides as my father quaintly, as always, plays the hiding boy. We figure she'll come out by the baggage carrels and we position DAD in his always grey cotton pants and plaid shirt seated by the restrooms flush to the mouth of the escalator landing. Ever imaginative, DAD shrouds himself in his parka throwing it over his head completely, peeks out, and snickers -- I feel like prodding to make sure he isn't just going to fall asleep in the position I know him best to do so, but he blinks alertly and promises me he's not "resting his eyes" and that I should just let him know when she's down.
MOM: highlighted bronze gleams off side-swept auburn strands making a light joke at being unable to fully cover her slightly balding head (a woman does more with less). She's tan, she's dry, she's a pear, oh she's a peach. She's happy. Oh good. Oh good god.
Embraces, obligatory photos of successful reunion, she's made an effort (at being herself), he's made an effort (at being a member of the family), Sue and Duleesha have evidently made an effort, have conceived and being with child. I have made an effort ... well, I came with a distinctly selfish motive to have a good little holiday with my mum, to be a good kid, yes, well, I made an effort. I've made lots of efforts at these other people. I've laid myself down for most anybody I loved, and if I couldn't give freely and therefore didn't really give greatly it's because I was rather busy laying low because I can go crazy loving and without knowing how to control it really, it's seemed to work better (for who? for others?) to take it out on myself. Any love, abusive love, guilty love, kiddish love, blind love, it's been like my gag banana peel, I trip and fall down. Better, it seemed, to stay there. Why fall another time? Oh wait, but did it make you laugh? Well if it made you laugh ...
Which is ALL to say -- these Powerpoint slides, of what at times was really a terrible gathering, my mother in photos smiling and tilting her head forwards and downwards to try to give her best face and a lowered hairline, whilst in the documents of experience thrashing and pained and trying but still unhappy. Too little too late? I was spared the mommysitting, but maybe my mom and myself should have stayed at the hotel and my DAD been sent to the couch fending off libidinous cats at bedtime and cats at Calvary before dawn. Perhaps he should have stopped being a hero and tried being brave, brave enough to admit that he was lonely without her and at a loss thinking we didn't need him to be an us. Perhaps he should stop shaking his head when she misbehaves, which she does, because she is special, and because who else is supposed to embody the authority that can intervene? Of course, we like having the pictures. Its a commonhood. Both of them seated at the museum "pong chet" (a Singaporean catch phrase bastardizing the English word, "punctured", meaning flat-out tired), leaning against a wall of framed rainforest butterflies and each other with eyes closed, jackets as blankets, like some sort of art installation. Pictures of my sister and I pigtailed like Pocahontas (still my unmanifested party hire character, destined to make me a living!), making faces like, aw, sisters do. I don't forget, this is the same man who made one his biggest guffaws on one of his earliest Powerpoint creations, depicting his family life to fellow servicemen on the Mercyships hospital boat he and my reluctant but abiding mom were being heroic at, with pictures of Sue and myself as cute kids with the bright yellow titling: "My China Dolls". Oh DAD. It probably wouldn't hurt so bad if we thought you actually had a better sense than that of who we might be -- besides something you hadn't quite raised us to be.
But I get it, or get it a little better, now, this thing, this thing he works with and obeys and fights with (a little) all his life, I get it, ok, maybe I get it. It's always a little harder to have an insight on someone who doesn't reveal much self-knowledge. This Powerpoint print-out with the cover title "Converging on San Francisco" and a ridiculous slide of a world map with overlaid arrows and airport codes showing not just our convergence but the actual flight routings we each took to get together -- I'm not rolling my eyes. I long ago learned to accept soft-edged oval portrait frames and expository captions. I still don't entirely understand why there are three whole pages of pictures of taxidermic Savannah animals from the Natural History Museum, but I'm sure if I really think about it, especially because they are uncaptioned, that something about them struck my father in a subconscious way and he had to express it. (I believe the best picture I couldn't take in that hall that day was a little Chinese woman standing by the wall of hominid skulls -- she had positioned herself accidentally to fall right in line with them, and her extraordinary stature had her at exactly the right height).
I've been reading, actually reading (rather than being offended and emotionally exiled by) this paternal family history, Dad, and I get it a little better. I am not sorry for who I am, the complexity I carry with me, and my continued awkward life choices to not be like what this book wishes me to be and yet that I continue to feel intimidated by and impressionable/variable because of. I believe you may have, in the past and in the present in some small ways much quieter with age, felt the same. I know you love Mom because she faces a similar conflict and has a passion in her that you thought bold and attractive until you couldn't understand it anymore and it affected your natural way of handling the conflict, which was to always, with virtuous intentions, acquiesce. I look at your PPT map cover in its plastic folder from a year and a half ago and I think of what in your heart suffers to have this family so flung apart, daughters who went to liberal arts colleges and not universities (yes, the best one, but not the most impressive), what status do we bring? You need to fit in by fulfilling symbols of your culturally designated manhood -- nevermind that you were a happy boy chasing photographs and devotional stories before you gave in, replacing mud-drowned jeep tires on tropical backroads or hitchhiking through Europe. Nevermind that you didn't own a suit until mom was refused the corporate hire because they were looking for a man, and she and Halcyon prepped you and grilled you and shoved you into the interview room. Or is that really the story? I'm not sure if you've actually told me your take on it.
You let mom handle all the finances; our Prime Minister did it first, and he called himself "a kept man" jokingly which I think I recall you saying too, once. A way to ease the discomfort of deciding how to make a life, how to make her happy even when you can't, how to be the definition of a loving father even if you can't understand how, you just can't! It's Ok. Now. I mean, now it's Ok. Now, it's a part of our history rather than a choice we are making about the future. It requests acceptance and forgiveness, not partnership and communicating together.
* * *
You left us outside your heart and let others enter in (only if you knew they wouldn't stay), but you gave us many riches not the least of which was inspiration.
I took up photography with your old camera, which saved me from complete isolation and loneliness as a repatriated teen. You raised me on National Geographics and Economists and Times and Newsweeks so I could know about the world, have a heart for it, and have a quest for it, as you and Mom did (and do). You allowed me to press you about your early sketches of Mom when she was pregnant with Sue, and though you never let me see the naked charcoal drawings, you rendered me two fast contour drawings in marker ink of our living room furniture after which I thought you were a secret genius -- which in recollection makes me cry, because I remember how earlier in my life you crushed my artistic passion at age 7 with a simple, cold response to my then proudest pastel drawing, abstract, expressionistic, like my mind: "Well, you can't do that until you're famous." This is also my mythology or moral tale, the trampled beetle beneath the elephant's foot and how it learned and grew only to be a slightly bigger and more compulsive beetle.
I am your daughter, and you have been many men, so it's often been hard to know exactly which daughter would stick. It's odd to come to at 28, or maybe it's not, but I get it, that to be a daughter doesn't mean to be contingent upon a dad. To be a daughter in comparison to other daughters, well, some are perhaps role models and some are perhaps species that will eat me or that I should rather eat.
I am the youngest daughter of the youngest son of the youngest son of a man and a woman who came by boat to Singapore from a farm in China and through hardship and fortuity were significant in growing the nation with faith- and prosperity-driven values. Their progeny have not grown their wealth, knowledge and that of the nation by indulging themselves, airing their grievances, pursuing fanciful dreamings, romance languages and romantic ideals. They did not come to success by living halfway across the world with an expensive degree spending the last summer plastering drywall and this summer coming to terms -- even if you, Dad, spend your happy moments outdoors renovating the garden again and again, doing honest labor and hands-on problem-solving, even if when I shared with you about my day drilling an exhaust box into the ceiling, you said with subtle protestation: "But you could have learned all that from me!" Even if you made a retirement gift for yourself of a wood-turning workshop, and even as you insist on making technical computer trouble-shooting a demanding shared activity with me, which I hate. When I was young and I used to think like this, I'd think, "See Dad, I am the son you never had," but really I'm your daughter, and Sue's also your daughter, and sometimes, I am both a daughter and an overeager, easily disappointed, trailing dog, the same way Sue is a daughter and a stubborn, sensitive, mysterious horse.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
i am not that writer
ex boyfriend drops a funny little email with a photo of himself in elf-like pageboy costume to perform Don Carlo in Japan with a link to a spoken word poet called sarah kay. like many powerful wordsmith superwomen playing to multiracial young audiences in the demographic of the Rising Jedi Knights (cover of Time magazine, kawanahoo or whatever they call them in Hawaii, mongrel progressive yuphippies), she is herself of multi heritage and a breathless believer of her role in the liberal progressive battle for the something greater than. she writes that "hands are made for loving," and with aside coyness that, in this light, "hands are not political." Of course, she is trying to make the point that hands are political, in her understanding of love in the polis. She confesses to her unborn child, "from a scale of 1 to overly trusting I am naive," but she is not only a believer but believes in her believing -- which makes her believable and unbelievable.
i am in the untethered, water-less winnebago of finding my way to writerland, and just thought to myself to remember that i am not that writer. the kay cadence, a self-conscious post-90s reasserting of the trope of the spoken word artist, something to be made fun of at parties on last saturday night in artist lofts where kuan yin stands blessing unshielded bathtubs and fun boys are thieved by curly-haired blondes who look like sarah jessica parker. speaking with the gangly 7 foot tall man seated upon said bathtub and his oddly-paired, well-dressed girlfriend, somehow i get to blabbering about the kuan yin statue and old chinese mystical wushu movies where the transliterations breed absurdities like "I am Divine Virgin Divine Dragon Gang 9" and in said absurd movie the said Divine Virgin can only save the village/gang/treasure/something by copulating with the town idiot in the middle of a forest clearing in a giant cocoon swirled into being by the whip of her long sleeves. the catch phrases for the evening were "swoop, dragon, swoop" and "rapturous embrace in a cocoon". in the telling of this said story, we jointly mocked the kay cadence, not specifically hers, but the cadence of the spoken word artist of whom I may have once and always desired and will never be.
because who are one's audiences, who listen because you speak in their voice? somehow, i speak for the old men, the loser lover, the ones who can't help themselves, the divorcee putting a daughter through school for acting partly in order to piss off his ex-wife. those who spend their lives fighting their minds that take them to dirt-filled places; the haggard wanderer, homeless, death-obsessed, constantly overflowing with treacherous life. the leech, the leach, la que sabe the one who knows. those who do not hunt, but cannot help to smell spilled blood. sharks, dung beetles, carrion eaters.
she lives on pages but keeps her mouth shut. she keeps nameless people company when they don't have any, can't have any, hope for any while feigning casual intelligence while reading in public. with peripheral feelers, minions of skin dust scattering to attract to oneself, he -- reclined seductively against a public park statue, artfully sliced trousers to shorts, spends time with a writer like she. she next to a smushed banana, she worn down and thrown in a book bag, she in the brown donation bag, she the designated driver, she with the paper back. she, the working man's lunchtime sunshine mistress. she, who pilgrimages to have friends and lives in residence with god. she of the 52 minute battery remaining. she of the clackety clack of bones and keys. she, who speaks well to strangers, estranges her kin, and walks home alone.
i am which writer?
i am in the untethered, water-less winnebago of finding my way to writerland, and just thought to myself to remember that i am not that writer. the kay cadence, a self-conscious post-90s reasserting of the trope of the spoken word artist, something to be made fun of at parties on last saturday night in artist lofts where kuan yin stands blessing unshielded bathtubs and fun boys are thieved by curly-haired blondes who look like sarah jessica parker. speaking with the gangly 7 foot tall man seated upon said bathtub and his oddly-paired, well-dressed girlfriend, somehow i get to blabbering about the kuan yin statue and old chinese mystical wushu movies where the transliterations breed absurdities like "I am Divine Virgin Divine Dragon Gang 9" and in said absurd movie the said Divine Virgin can only save the village/gang/treasure/something by copulating with the town idiot in the middle of a forest clearing in a giant cocoon swirled into being by the whip of her long sleeves. the catch phrases for the evening were "swoop, dragon, swoop" and "rapturous embrace in a cocoon". in the telling of this said story, we jointly mocked the kay cadence, not specifically hers, but the cadence of the spoken word artist of whom I may have once and always desired and will never be.
because who are one's audiences, who listen because you speak in their voice? somehow, i speak for the old men, the loser lover, the ones who can't help themselves, the divorcee putting a daughter through school for acting partly in order to piss off his ex-wife. those who spend their lives fighting their minds that take them to dirt-filled places; the haggard wanderer, homeless, death-obsessed, constantly overflowing with treacherous life. the leech, the leach, la que sabe the one who knows. those who do not hunt, but cannot help to smell spilled blood. sharks, dung beetles, carrion eaters.
she lives on pages but keeps her mouth shut. she keeps nameless people company when they don't have any, can't have any, hope for any while feigning casual intelligence while reading in public. with peripheral feelers, minions of skin dust scattering to attract to oneself, he -- reclined seductively against a public park statue, artfully sliced trousers to shorts, spends time with a writer like she. she next to a smushed banana, she worn down and thrown in a book bag, she in the brown donation bag, she the designated driver, she with the paper back. she, the working man's lunchtime sunshine mistress. she, who pilgrimages to have friends and lives in residence with god. she of the 52 minute battery remaining. she of the clackety clack of bones and keys. she, who speaks well to strangers, estranges her kin, and walks home alone.
i am which writer?
Friday, July 03, 2009
lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy jane
It's half way through the year and this is only my fourth post. I have become so boring. I have become so boring. I have become so boring. I have become so boring.
I have become so boring. I am still enamoured of sexy, artsy, marketable European names like Jan Fabre to the point where I am watching his performance chronology on DVD and am still trying to pay the sort of attention that looks for genius like looking for nails in rubble (the metal might be valuable!) even after the first completely unappealing, unintelligible rape scene. It's half way through the year and I am 27 years old and the present me would not currently write much of what I have written here in the past here now, but as it seems, I have not lost my one consistency of stupidly endless trains of thought. THERE IS A LOGIC TO THIS SENSATION, old young Mel tells current older still young Mel.
Hmmm. Hmm of the Moment. So much more booring than an Um of the moment. Thoughts that were once hesitations symbolic of the struggle to articulate through the morass of inarticulate conflated experience, through the helpless pure self webbed in complex multiselves, have now become the dull, sandblasted Hmm-ings of a pauser, an indecisiveizer, an oh-this-is-how-it-goes-what's-my-next-meal-er. Next, I will be wanting love, kinship, marriage, family involvement, world travel, settling down, figuring out, regular intercourse, societal relevance, a house as the creative expression of myself, and BABIES. UTERINE EXPLOSION. WANNA WANNA CRACKER!!
.......
OK!
Sold!
I'll take it!
Put it on my karma tab!
Life is good! I am enjoying life!
I am no longer spending large amounts of my present missing the conflated pasresent!
I am not experiencing an immediate nostalgia for right now, or rather, right before just now, if only I could catch up to it!
I am relieving my back pain by sitting back, taking time with my thoughts, being only mildly irritated by the heat of the laptop on my two wrists, rocking back into my green-gold rocking chair I found on the street and fixed up myself!
I just farted! Glorious fart of the loveable and provident universe!
The only thing left that I lament -- no swan song for the lost nation, the forgotten friends, the idea of forgetting -- is Melinda Lee as rationally understood as a compilation of her parts and conflicted dreamings! Melee with Issues! Melee with Ideas ....! Melee with Imperative ....!
The vinegariness of methane lingers, as does my vulgarity, as does my repetitive vocabulary. Here, she is only getting smarter for the sake of it, as in "smart ass". I don't even lament being alone for so much of my life, because without that lonely time, when would I be able to do the important work of writing down my thoughts about twice a quarter? [CODE: I am mad at myself for not writing more regularly, more marketable artsily, but mainly for not writing more]
I have become so boring. I am still enamoured of sexy, artsy, marketable European names like Jan Fabre to the point where I am watching his performance chronology on DVD and am still trying to pay the sort of attention that looks for genius like looking for nails in rubble (the metal might be valuable!) even after the first completely unappealing, unintelligible rape scene. It's half way through the year and I am 27 years old and the present me would not currently write much of what I have written here in the past here now, but as it seems, I have not lost my one consistency of stupidly endless trains of thought. THERE IS A LOGIC TO THIS SENSATION, old young Mel tells current older still young Mel.
Hmmm. Hmm of the Moment. So much more booring than an Um of the moment. Thoughts that were once hesitations symbolic of the struggle to articulate through the morass of inarticulate conflated experience, through the helpless pure self webbed in complex multiselves, have now become the dull, sandblasted Hmm-ings of a pauser, an indecisiveizer, an oh-this-is-how-it-goes-what's-my-next-meal-er. Next, I will be wanting love, kinship, marriage, family involvement, world travel, settling down, figuring out, regular intercourse, societal relevance, a house as the creative expression of myself, and BABIES. UTERINE EXPLOSION. WANNA WANNA CRACKER!!
.......
OK!
Sold!
I'll take it!
Put it on my karma tab!
Life is good! I am enjoying life!
I am no longer spending large amounts of my present missing the conflated pasresent!
I am not experiencing an immediate nostalgia for right now, or rather, right before just now, if only I could catch up to it!
I am relieving my back pain by sitting back, taking time with my thoughts, being only mildly irritated by the heat of the laptop on my two wrists, rocking back into my green-gold rocking chair I found on the street and fixed up myself!
I just farted! Glorious fart of the loveable and provident universe!
The only thing left that I lament -- no swan song for the lost nation, the forgotten friends, the idea of forgetting -- is Melinda Lee as rationally understood as a compilation of her parts and conflicted dreamings! Melee with Issues! Melee with Ideas ....! Melee with Imperative ....!
The vinegariness of methane lingers, as does my vulgarity, as does my repetitive vocabulary. Here, she is only getting smarter for the sake of it, as in "smart ass". I don't even lament being alone for so much of my life, because without that lonely time, when would I be able to do the important work of writing down my thoughts about twice a quarter? [CODE: I am mad at myself for not writing more regularly, more marketable artsily, but mainly for not writing more]
Friday, February 06, 2009
meeting me
"me on stage" - a title.
The following, a paragraph:
"I don't know what I would do," she replied, when I asked her how she'd react to meeting a younger version of herself. "Fall hopelessly and violently in love with her, I guess."
The self-reflexive precociousness of the prose grows large; I can see the serif font on fibrous, yellowed pages -- a chapter ending of a paperback novella written for the teenage market. I see it on the page so clearly. Never the right story, but one that "made do." It's like how I never called Roland back after sleeping with him for two weeks because I got a new job doing data entry and he commented quizzically: "You mean, you like data entry?" Fool. I like the feeling that I'm getting by. The idea of success gives me the emotional shits and inspirational hemmorhoids (just a little something obstructing delivery).
Yet again, the spectre of my middling, make-do, improvised future! Glorious unplanning!
"I haven't met who I am going to have been, but I have been the met."
That means, there were others who came to me laid claim to me saying: I was once what you are and in that I was just as alone and that means we should be together; but then I says, that means you would have been us and been alone and I would be us and not be alone and you are cheating me of my destiny to be just like this and learn just like this and perhaps one day meet us again and have little us say, oh no, i have evolved. oh, spot! I'd like to damn it! But these are the gripes of lesser woman than that lady!
The gentleman in the train has short cuffed trousers and elegant expensive shoes. That is correct!
The strange man in the train wears flannel as a jacket, too much gel combed through his hair, moosen ear muffs, khaki pants that are a correctly short cuffed length, and NO SHOES. LOAFERS. That is not quite correct!
The following, a paragraph:
"I don't know what I would do," she replied, when I asked her how she'd react to meeting a younger version of herself. "Fall hopelessly and violently in love with her, I guess."
The self-reflexive precociousness of the prose grows large; I can see the serif font on fibrous, yellowed pages -- a chapter ending of a paperback novella written for the teenage market. I see it on the page so clearly. Never the right story, but one that "made do." It's like how I never called Roland back after sleeping with him for two weeks because I got a new job doing data entry and he commented quizzically: "You mean, you like data entry?" Fool. I like the feeling that I'm getting by. The idea of success gives me the emotional shits and inspirational hemmorhoids (just a little something obstructing delivery).
Yet again, the spectre of my middling, make-do, improvised future! Glorious unplanning!
"I haven't met who I am going to have been, but I have been the met."
That means, there were others who came to me laid claim to me saying: I was once what you are and in that I was just as alone and that means we should be together; but then I says, that means you would have been us and been alone and I would be us and not be alone and you are cheating me of my destiny to be just like this and learn just like this and perhaps one day meet us again and have little us say, oh no, i have evolved. oh, spot! I'd like to damn it! But these are the gripes of lesser woman than that lady!
The gentleman in the train has short cuffed trousers and elegant expensive shoes. That is correct!
The strange man in the train wears flannel as a jacket, too much gel combed through his hair, moosen ear muffs, khaki pants that are a correctly short cuffed length, and NO SHOES. LOAFERS. That is not quite correct!
Sunday, February 01, 2009
apocalypse, how?
On certain downswings of my usual hypomania I wake with heavy eyelids I fear are from insidious chemical gas coming through the heat pipes (and the phantom hole that was once in my ceiling) and walk Nostrand Ave wondering if this is where I will be for the apocalypse? Who would I call first when people start dropping dead?
Of course it will be biochemical, I imagine. I don't think I fear artillery nearly as much. I fear people and how they react unprepared under stress. I fear the mass' survival instinct and how quickly the hard-fought unravelling of ancient tribalisms will retrograde when there's only so much to go around.
Perhaps I fear my cowardice. Perhaps I underestimate, as usual.
But really I wanted to write about pending doom only to celebrate previous glories, inspired by a subway ride's salivation over the word "crab" after dancing in a club where I worried the black people would judge me as trying to be black and the Asian boys were all called "David".
It's a scene for the far-flung during lunar new year week, the recitation of long-lusted homestyle dishes and the resonance of their memory. I joked today that it felt like a recitation of the names of the dead, only, it's not funny, well, only because I feel guilty that I've never sat through a recitation of the names of the dead, nor have I any historical attachment (yet -- oh god, no) to a historical event that would warrant it. HOWEVER - there is always the recitation of foods undeliverable across multiple oceans to my craving, homesick mouth.
slowly now, easy now ... as the genteel mother admonishes, "man man chi ..."
MEE GORENG
TAU POK
HOR FUN
DRAGONFRUIT
CHEE KUAY
TAU WEI
NGO HIANG
LA MIAN
MEE SIAM
JACKFRUIT
JACKFRUIT CHIPS
MANGOSTEEN
NASI PADANG
NASI LEMAK
CHILLI CRAB
PEPPER CRAB
MAN TOU
KANG KONG
SAMBAL
CHOK
PAU
MI
MEE REBUS
POH PIAH
CHEE CHONG FAN
PANDAN
PULUT SERIKAYA
KAYA
KOPI
..... I feel like at least 5 of the above words could be passable middle names for Western-born children on the basis of pure phonetics and new ageism.
But my point. That feeling. That feeling that is not lostness or homesickness, persay, but a distinct and slight rumbling of the "what if it really were all gone", what if you became too old to want something new and all you knew as that which preceded you, well, was gone. I used to lament this. I've lamented it enough in this very brog (coveting the childhood stories of innocent Singapore as seen through the lens of my willed sweetness upon the bitters of my parents' adulthoods). But it all feels different that the world does not seem infinite, that our water and skies and crispy vitamin-D generating sun-basking and naked days of skin on skin and a sense of do gooding (not un-badding) was a clear motive. What if? What if??
Out here in Crown Heights I here a low-flying plane above -- I wonder what it would sound like if there were hundreds. I walk to the subway on trash-littered streets (plundered by the local crazies, and strewn) and wonder how long it would take for a lack of trash service that trucks it magically away before disease would spread and unrest to ensue. Of course, these are mediated imaginings -- oh, to be caught by the future Gestapo dressed in nothing but red ribbon; oh, to be the sole-seeing heroine who knows exactly how to find the foods in the basement bunker! -- but my generation is growing up and I am growing up to see exactly what I am inheriting.
Is the home mantra strong enough? Who will stand up for your millions? The isolating, painful, homogenizing familiarity of that place is diminishing to the creative will, or willfulness, but ... forgetfulness is already a form of apocalypse.
Of course it will be biochemical, I imagine. I don't think I fear artillery nearly as much. I fear people and how they react unprepared under stress. I fear the mass' survival instinct and how quickly the hard-fought unravelling of ancient tribalisms will retrograde when there's only so much to go around.
Perhaps I fear my cowardice. Perhaps I underestimate, as usual.
But really I wanted to write about pending doom only to celebrate previous glories, inspired by a subway ride's salivation over the word "crab" after dancing in a club where I worried the black people would judge me as trying to be black and the Asian boys were all called "David".
It's a scene for the far-flung during lunar new year week, the recitation of long-lusted homestyle dishes and the resonance of their memory. I joked today that it felt like a recitation of the names of the dead, only, it's not funny, well, only because I feel guilty that I've never sat through a recitation of the names of the dead, nor have I any historical attachment (yet -- oh god, no) to a historical event that would warrant it. HOWEVER - there is always the recitation of foods undeliverable across multiple oceans to my craving, homesick mouth.
slowly now, easy now ... as the genteel mother admonishes, "man man chi ..."
MEE GORENG
TAU POK
HOR FUN
DRAGONFRUIT
CHEE KUAY
TAU WEI
NGO HIANG
LA MIAN
MEE SIAM
JACKFRUIT
JACKFRUIT CHIPS
MANGOSTEEN
NASI PADANG
NASI LEMAK
CHILLI CRAB
PEPPER CRAB
MAN TOU
KANG KONG
SAMBAL
CHOK
PAU
MI
MEE REBUS
POH PIAH
CHEE CHONG FAN
PANDAN
PULUT SERIKAYA
KAYA
KOPI
..... I feel like at least 5 of the above words could be passable middle names for Western-born children on the basis of pure phonetics and new ageism.
But my point. That feeling. That feeling that is not lostness or homesickness, persay, but a distinct and slight rumbling of the "what if it really were all gone", what if you became too old to want something new and all you knew as that which preceded you, well, was gone. I used to lament this. I've lamented it enough in this very brog (coveting the childhood stories of innocent Singapore as seen through the lens of my willed sweetness upon the bitters of my parents' adulthoods). But it all feels different that the world does not seem infinite, that our water and skies and crispy vitamin-D generating sun-basking and naked days of skin on skin and a sense of do gooding (not un-badding) was a clear motive. What if? What if??
Out here in Crown Heights I here a low-flying plane above -- I wonder what it would sound like if there were hundreds. I walk to the subway on trash-littered streets (plundered by the local crazies, and strewn) and wonder how long it would take for a lack of trash service that trucks it magically away before disease would spread and unrest to ensue. Of course, these are mediated imaginings -- oh, to be caught by the future Gestapo dressed in nothing but red ribbon; oh, to be the sole-seeing heroine who knows exactly how to find the foods in the basement bunker! -- but my generation is growing up and I am growing up to see exactly what I am inheriting.
Is the home mantra strong enough? Who will stand up for your millions? The isolating, painful, homogenizing familiarity of that place is diminishing to the creative will, or willfulness, but ... forgetfulness is already a form of apocalypse.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
in the span of a song i see our lives pass
always parallel, never in present or past
tense -- i miss you. there is nothing I don't love about you. maybe there are things i don't like. probably mostly about me, or the world
and behaviors at large that i can't but help but run with with my curiosity and bleeding heart.
your head looks like a bed of mulch, hatted, a wizened druid; me hooded and drying my eyes flat palms into fists, together we box and giggle and make Wii we. i trust you with myself unlike anyone i have ever met. or, i don't trust myself with hardly anyone, it's true, but it's not a problem, or rather, one that i can change. i feel i am in my truest form near you, i am unafraid. i will never forget feeling that way in the days before i met you, through old friends i bumped into that led me to a puffy-eyed night at an absurdist bar and your hands on my ribcage: "don't disappear".
but now we say "don't wait." you're right, I agree, i needed to be with you long enough tonight to let go the fantasy of a Lionel Ritchie song, but it still hurts to think that this is how it happens, it might move onward to convenient relationships and one day i won't see you in my mind's eye wandering oafishly through my truest dreamings. don't wait for me, i'm not waiting for you. oh wait, do wait, wait for me, i'm waiting too. i'm not waiting, i'm living, i'm loving, but wait, just live, live for me, yes, love for me, don't tell me, well, just, let's, well, no, well, don't wait, ok, we're not waiting, no, we're not waiting, but you see, he's optimistic, and you know, really, after all this, well, so am i.
i feel like "not waiting" is like playing a game of peekaboo with a young child who revels in the pure dynamics of changing time and space and perception, but knows well enough to know you're there and you haven't really vanished.
i'm not disappearing, i swear, i won't do it.
always parallel, never in present or past
tense -- i miss you. there is nothing I don't love about you. maybe there are things i don't like. probably mostly about me, or the world
and behaviors at large that i can't but help but run with with my curiosity and bleeding heart.
your head looks like a bed of mulch, hatted, a wizened druid; me hooded and drying my eyes flat palms into fists, together we box and giggle and make Wii we. i trust you with myself unlike anyone i have ever met. or, i don't trust myself with hardly anyone, it's true, but it's not a problem, or rather, one that i can change. i feel i am in my truest form near you, i am unafraid. i will never forget feeling that way in the days before i met you, through old friends i bumped into that led me to a puffy-eyed night at an absurdist bar and your hands on my ribcage: "don't disappear".
but now we say "don't wait." you're right, I agree, i needed to be with you long enough tonight to let go the fantasy of a Lionel Ritchie song, but it still hurts to think that this is how it happens, it might move onward to convenient relationships and one day i won't see you in my mind's eye wandering oafishly through my truest dreamings. don't wait for me, i'm not waiting for you. oh wait, do wait, wait for me, i'm waiting too. i'm not waiting, i'm living, i'm loving, but wait, just live, live for me, yes, love for me, don't tell me, well, just, let's, well, no, well, don't wait, ok, we're not waiting, no, we're not waiting, but you see, he's optimistic, and you know, really, after all this, well, so am i.
i feel like "not waiting" is like playing a game of peekaboo with a young child who revels in the pure dynamics of changing time and space and perception, but knows well enough to know you're there and you haven't really vanished.
i'm not disappearing, i swear, i won't do it.
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