Jujube/thesis-memoir
My Images
There is a cabin on an island, the island among twenty thousand lakes. Towards the east one reaches the sea, towards the west one walks among pines.
The walls are glass, the roof is glass. A wooden door handle hangs at the height of the hand.
When snow melts, the sky opens up. The sun never seems to disppear entirely, making everthing translucent, even though it stops showing up above the horizon for this time the year.
Next to the woodstove, in which the fire splits the timber and licks the matte black metal, an orange sits in a pile of cloves.
The first thing to see when one goes outside is not something for the eyes. It's the crisp air, which one encounters at the nostrils. It warms up as it travels to the throat, the chest, the side of the belly. It comes back like eternity's soft smoke against the silouette of the coniferous forest. Blue-green, green-dark.
Feed a pinecone to the fire and hear its contentment.
There is night.
Looking
I have learned to look many times.
When I was 12 or 13 I took drawing classes. I stood in front of the plaster cube for hours. I learned to draw in short, decisive lines.
I took a color theory course the first year in college, and watercolor the last. I spent quiet mornings picking out the colors in a Vermeer and a Velázquez and tried to construct them again in a series of jewelry design. Back then I was big on making earrings.
On my way from Main Street back home in that New England town, I often took Frog Hollow Alley, descending until a modest, industrial waterfall came in sight and ascending back up to the street level. I'd pass the window of a gallery, stop, take a mental note that I was indeed stopping again. I'd marvel. There was a large green bowl on the other side of the window — a shade between the softness of moss and the eyes of someone I'd fall in love with years later. The inside of the bowl yielded no shadows. I moved from side to side. It was as if illuminated from within, generous and patient.
I wondered how such beauty came about.
Perhaps that was why I tried to see.
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Pieter Zumthor
John Berger
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My grandpa bought my second camera, a Fuji DSLR, in middle school. (The first one was an Olympus point-and-shoot, a gift from my uncle, whose usage I can't remember much.) We looked through the viewfinder together. Hold the button half way, he said, so you lock the focus here. Compose the image by the thirds, he said, look at the grid.
This is the same grandpa who sharpened my pencils, wrapped my books and demonstrated how a building moved in an earthquake with a spoon. He told me stories of the Northern winters of his youth: making a skating rink, nearly freezing an ear off, snow. I grew up with snowless winters. I exchanged letters with him in high school, a kind of refuge I took from my conflict-ridden adolescence.
He was widowed at the age of sixty-two.
Then I moved to America, and we barely talked.
He had a stroke last year and has been staying at one hospital and another.
"Your grandfather has a Seagull camera. Perhaps you'd like to take that with you?" My mom suggested before I moved to the Netherlands.
It came in a hard leather case.
"It's so new," I said.
"He was one of the few people who had a camera," my mom said.
I destroyed the first roll I used with it. Didn't know how to rewind.
I travel with it now. I don't always develop the film rolls when I finish them.
I like looking through the viewfinder.
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Images carry more depth once I stopped collecting them.
It is a Turkish family. The mother wears a burka and pushes a stroller. Two children run next to her. It is raining. No one carries an umbrella. The mom walks unhurried. Their feet in different rhythms — the children are faster, yet their steps are smaller.
I loved stage directions. Loved reading them. Loved writing them.
PIANIST GIVES HERMAN A LOOK, THEN PLAYS THE PIANO FOR AN ENTIRE FOUR MINUTES. HERMAN AND OLGA SIT STILL.
WITH UNEASE SOFT AS THE WHISTLE OF A ROCK AND BLINDING AS THE BEDSIDE LAMP AT MIDNIGHT, THEY START TO DANCE.
REMORSE SPREADING ACROSS THE POUNDING HEART, HERMAN STOPS AND WATCHES OLGA MOVE BY HERSELF.
HE WAS ONCE A BELIEVER.
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There is the finding of image.
Then there is the making of image.
Writing
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:
In which window did I remain watching buried time?
Or is what I see from afar what I have not yet lived?
Once again, I found the thin hardcover of Letters to a Young Poet. I bought the book when my architecture advisor from college 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 — this thing we call past and this thing we call future.
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What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
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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. The tip of the pen touched the paper, casting thoughts into form. I watched the ink spread under the yellow lamp 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 luminous, pink-grey sky. I never saw the moon.
"I will remember this now that I am writing it down."
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 and poetry.
There was a distance between me and me, and therefore, there was a distance between me and the world.
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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
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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, my mind's tongue speaking the language it now knows better:
"One day I will be an author."
I had written in Chinese till the day I left for the US. I kept a grey, hardbound journal during freshman year where I kept the Chinese words.
I didn't necessarily want to forget the language, even though I so desperately wanted to forget my past.
Making Brokeback Mountains
I watched Brokeback Mountain for the first time in 2019 on a very bad streaming platform. I had to close a dozen adult webcam sites before I figured out how to enter full screen. Suppose that's something you pay for getting something free.
I was in high school when the movie came about. It was censored in the Chinese cinemas, but that was not the reason I did not see it. Had I browsed the night market where I had acquired full seasons of Prison Break, I certainly would have found a copy of it. America was to me the world of Friends. I had no urgency to grasp its rural west, no visual reference of the Rockies, no vocabularies for a discussion on sexuality and, on top of that, an unfortunate misunderstanding of love.
The cowboy hats on the cover must have looked too peculiar to me, should my eyes have glazed it, underneath the plastic sheet the street vendor used to keep off the dust.
Fourteen years later, in the midst of figuring out how to tell stories through film, at an age where love seems more forgiving, I thought to myself: maybe I should watch it now.
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When I write a play I let the characters carry a feeling and put them in extremely uncomfortable places. Then I hear them talk.
A woman demands a journal from a man. The journal belongs to her old lover; and his, too.
A father prepares a sandwich for his daughter, and explodes, out of the burden of guilt, that it was he who killed the mother.
Emmet and Sarah are engaged. Emmet thought of his old love for another man, and Sarah, another woman.
Secrets, loss, yearning. Those are the the things I wrote, without knowing what they were at the time.
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[...]Dawn came glassy-orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows, and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite.
Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx (the New Yorker, October 6, 1997)
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Opening Scene, Brokeback Mountain, Dir. Ang Lee (2005)
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Screenplay, S1 and S2, Brokeback Mountain. Written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (2003), adapted from the Annie Proulx Story from 1997
Encounters
I met Ulises Carrión three times.
The first time was at the Jumex Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.
I saw such a thing as the retrospective exhibition.
Among glass cases of his artists books, frames of his mail art, tube TV screens of his performances, a large table sat full of publications. I pulled the book bearing the exhibition title towards me: Dear Reader Don't Read. My eyelashes touched the pages, since I'd lost my glasses that week.
They were not his writings, but writings about him.
The second was an internet search.
In trying to explain him to a friend in Amsterdam, I googled the name of one of his essays, Ik ben geboren een buitenlander.
The Stedlijk had a museum had a show with the same title. A tribute to him and an appropriation to address the current immigration problems.
The third was on a bookshelf in Finland.
The Art of Book Making, by Ulises Carrión.
In all those times he was dead.
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I start to wonder what larger context means to my work. The word context connotes a sense of fitting in, of understanding my own place in art history, of using the right words at the right time, to the right people.
I never knew too much about art, its institutions, its patrons.
I went through my own period of time trying to fit in.
I called myself a "transmedia writer" at some point because it seemed specifically vague. I could write about anything, for anyone. I could think about the forms of books. I could gather information about a place, a phenomena, a social injustice and translate it into a piece of interesting knowledge. My works were always neatly justified. They were inspired by a site, they were speaking to a form, they represented some sort of social significance.
The external context seemed easy to construe and malleable to bend. It seemed to matter.
Until I admitted its superficiality.
travel hunger
I travel to people.
I travel to occasions.
I travel to be humbled.
I travel for story, serendipity, connection.
I travel back.
Back and forth.
I travel to a refuge with myself.
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When the words add up to sentences and the sentences fill the whole pages and pages tell a story, the displacement becomes a journey and the pages become a vehicle, a means of transport. Nevertheless, while reading we hold the pages very still. Thus there is a manual gesture between the manual gesture and the traveling. Long before man could fly, this journey was like flying. Those who first read Homer flew to Troy.
André Kertész: On Reading, John Berger