Jujube/thesis-memoir
Links:
1
My mom finally mailed me a box of stuff, which she picked out from what I had mailed her from the US the year before. She wasn't able to include the Japanese knives nor the Cuisineart blender. Apparently the government banned the shipping of sharp objects. She wanted to send me a spare electric kettle from her kitchen. The government had banned that, too.
My mom used two plastic bags with the Chinese label "Bei Yi Department Store" as padding. She worked there for more than twenty years. My dad filled in the mailing label. In detailed description of content he wrote — first in Chinese characters and, using the same squarish strokes, English letters — "Clothes" and "Books." He declared their worth: 1500 US Dollars.
I united with two hiking maps of Canada, two of Norway, a knitted grocery bag from Oaxaca, a book on bread making in Finnish, Mexico the Cookbook, The Book of Questions.
Once again, I found the thin hardcover of Letters to a Young Poet, which I bought the day my college architecture advisor told me to read it. It had lived in a basement in Vermont, three houses in Washington DC, one apartment in New York and a storage facility in New Jersey. It stayed on — unlike many of its contemporaries that were given away or discarded throughout the moves — until it was packed into a USPS parcel to Shanghai, where it lived among old documents, and packed again into a cardboard box to Rotterdam.
"My dad wanted me to be a lawyer," my advisor said, "as an English major, I thought architecture would be the middle ground."
He pressed his fingers together and made a gesture towards something far. The present things are clear while the past trickles away, I remember him saying. I also remember we were discussing the future.
Aren't they similar — the thing we call past and the thing we call future.
2
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
3
The unwritten words weighed in my chest. If I didn't let them out, I would collapse and burst into a pool of flames.
Things became true when I wrote. Under the yellow lamp, the tip of the pen touched the paper, casting thoughts into form. I watched the ink spread into the paper until it dried into a matte black. My g's and y's looked odd. I felt uneasy switching to a new pen; it was too thick, too shiny; it was too smooth, too fine. I was intoxicated by the air. My limbs heavy, I marveled at the pink-grey sky, ever luminous.
"I will remember this now that I am writing it down," I wrote this sentence in many different places.
At times I clenched my teeth and kept my notebook shut. It was as if by picking up a pen I would carve the memories into the fibers forever. I wasn't able to make sense of them. I didn't want to relive them. Couldn't afford to. Now I don't remember what happened.
I wrote, but for the longest time I wasn't able to say I was a writer. Writing was a private affair. The only ways I could share what I wrote were riddles, poetry, and later when I learned it, sarcasm.
There was a distance between me and me, and therefore, there was a distance between me and the world.
4
I started reading (about) theoretical physics. I dug a big rabbit hole on wikipedia around quantum mechanics. Consulted reddit book lists. Download papers. I spent days binge watching PBS Spacetime on Youtube and wrote a play trying to visualize entanglement. It was not the worst type of numbing I could've done -- but the point is I picked something so consuming that it made me carry a sense of purpose and proved that I exist and could learn and create. I sipped mezcal in the morning while typing a short story about a lady afraid of the color green. I wandered the streets with my coffee-ordering Spanish and, even though I tried to romanticize it and convinced myself I was making the things I'd always wanted to make, reality was simply monotonous and hopeless. Where would I go now? Who would hear me? Being lost was agonizing.
Letter to a Friend, Aug 2019
5
When I was 17 or 18, before going to the US, I wrote a letter to myself. Around that time I was enamored by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish writer prolific during the 1920's. I bought all the books I could find under his name, thinking one day I would learn German just to read his works in their original language.
There is one line from that letter that I revisit ever so often, my mind's eye watching my moving hand.
"One day I will be an author."
I wrote in Chinese for all those years.
I don't remember when exactly I stopped doing that.
6
"Being here is a demarcation of time," I wrote that in September, 2018.
I wanted to make a speech about the physical and internal turmoil, some of which I endured and some of which I inflicted on myself. But I didn't. Instead I showed some works from the past. The first website I made, the last website I made. A series of photos. A snapshot of a play script.