Where do we go from here? :\
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It made me wonder, how much of my life, then and now, is truly imaginary? And I don’t mean the word that evokes the images of sci-fi fantasies or psychotic delusions, but its rather subtler application to everyday life, like a small air bubble of inconsequential make-believes that stretch the truth thin. Sometimes I feel like bursting my bubbles with a needle, bleeding it down to the ground, exasperating everything but the objective rights and wrongs. But other times I look down on the absolute objectivity like it’s simply a frame of reference to support our subjective beliefs about the world. If we need both fact and fiction, how much of either do we really need and is it better to experience one before the other? I look back at my army of stuffed animals. I had carefully selected names to match their perceived personalities. I shudder at how innocently brave all this was, that children could so passionately build their lives and happiness on their imaginations. Yet all this determination wavered as these days faded into our memories…Some people believe that in this process of aging, “growing up” if you would, we have grown weary of giving in to our imaginations. I don’t think we are more afraid of where our imagination may lead than to suddenly live without it one day. I think we are truly afraid to experience the disappointment of waking up one day and realizing the eyes that we thought once lovingly stared back at us are no more than a pair of dull and asymetrical glass marbles.
What should I do with you? Another entry….A reflection of today’s women and their oversized purses
I have became illiterate! I read at the pace of a snail and can no longer generate enough patience to read a non-picture book! But thank god for graphic novels… now I can read something insightful that is also full of pictures I have picked up three graphic novels lately, “Blue Pills” by Frederik Peeters, which is about a couple living and loving with AIDs, “Project Romance” by a number of graphic artists, and “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel, which is an autobiography of the author’s coming of age with a closet homosexual father. All three were such delightful reads! Ever since childhood I have developed a habit of writing down witty or insightful phrases from books that I have enjoyed reading so to keep a piece of the experience with me more permanently. (I remember it was a light blue covered square notebook with turquoise colored lines. I wrote each entry ever so carefully, citing the name and author of each book). Here are just a few from each book that have moved me: From “Blue Pills”, From “Fun Home”, Your mother comes in She tells me to choose a book. Cloth-bound, grey and turquoise From “Project: Romance”,
I sometimes blog hop after dinner. I start with a random obscure topic (tonight the topic is Joanna Wang, a non-mainstream Taiwanese singer) in google search. I hop onto the first site on blogspot and start from there. I have very little patience for cluttered content. I simply read the title and the first blog entry before I decide whether to move on. I am intensively amused and often moved while performing this activity. My interest truthfully does not stem from a curiosity at the lives of others, but it came more from how this activity allows me to intimately experience the complexity of the human existence and its infinitely happy and sad dimensions. In the course of five minutes I have lived through more than ten people’s lives today. For three minutes I became a nostalgic parent who just sold some of her childrens’ toys at a garage sale last weekend (http://thewackylackeys.blogspot.com). For the next three minutes, I became Missbettythemom from Texas whose son Mark has terminal esophageal cancer (www.thenextadventure.blogspot). I read the stories of their struggles through endless checkups in US and abroad. Yet there is something almost exhilarating, and I am a little ashamed to admit this, about being able to easily navigate away from one person’s perpetual heartaches just by the simple click of a “Next Blog” link. At the end of the night I feel like I have been reduced and humbled by the struggles of others and how insignificant these struggles are to the human race as a whole. Every single day, people are dying, breaking up, going to war, having life epiphanies, and finding themselves in unexpected places. These milestones carry such tremendous personal significance. Yet they could never inspire a blog reader as much as they have inspired and changed the lives of the writers themselves. A few years back I couldn’t understand why people blog; why the need to share personal stories with strangers. But today I do see a purpose in sharing my dribbles online. Even though I am a nobody to all of you out there and vice versa. The presence of this blog allows me to become a part of this human experience, and to have one post, one word, or just one phrase that can perhaps one day inspire someone out there who is sitting infront of his/her computer, typing that word or phrase in google search, with the hope of finding someone, anyone, out there who has ever pondered about the same things. It’s a cold and dreary day in Philadelphia. At noon, electricity went out. When all the humming and whirring of electronics came to a sudden halt, the house fell asleep. A howling wind beat a lonely rhythm down every empty staircase. I have been listening to Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino all morning. (http://warnerbros2008.warnerbros.com/#/movies/grantorino/score/score13) “Standing strong, do you belong in your skin…world is nothing more than all the tiny things you’ve left behind.” I always found the last day of a year to be a monument in my life. On this day, I am officially 365 days further away from childhood. The weight of my decisions in 2008 hangs like low clouds, before they are punctured by rain and slowly stripped of their significance. On days like these, living feels like taking pictures without a motion-mode. Every shot is imperfect and blurry. How frustrating is this process of modifying the settings through trial and error? But you know you better not drop that camera. (RIP to all the acquaintances I have lost in 2008) At the end of 2007, I wrote a summary of my year in retrospect; I apologized to all the people I have hurt. In 2008, I have hurt a few more. I suppose this will continue until I am old and crummy. I apologize for the hurt but not for the reasons behind my decisions. Perhaps these reasons were only valid at one point in time. But that one point was when I truly lived. Maybe I am becoming one step closer to “belonging in my own skin” after all. Goodbye 2008
I remember these wooden swings on the edge of the athletic field in 7th grade. These rusty fat linked chains hung heavy from an iron frame that was at least 15 feet tall. My desk mate used to push me on these swings in the free-exercise hour from two to three. He had a perfectly round face with bushy eyebrows, and spitted when he talked. I imagined he was a character from a Japanese cartoon. One day I caught him stealing my cream puffs, which I kept in the desk drawer as my mid-morning snack. To repay my kindness to his taste buds, he became extra diligent in pushing me on the swing. There was another girl with perpetually tanned skin and double pigtails, and a boy who had soft features to match his quiet manners. We were classmates and we were all short for our age, sitting at the front, in one corner of the room, where we were swallowed by large wooden desks with inter-linked chairs. There was a gaping hole by the floor where I sat. The heat pipe went from the ceiling into the basement through the hole but sometime in the past something heavy had fallen on it and the cement around the hole crumbled. I dropped numerous treasures down the rabbit hole in the few months I sat in that spot, erasers, pens, whiteout, pieces of cookies. It didn’t seem so ominous until one day the clasp on my watch undid it self while I was flailing my arms in the air after the morning Chinese literature class, and the four of us watched my watch, in slow motion, as my memory would have it, disappearing into the darkness. I felt instantly hollow at the thought of possibly forever losing my watch, my very first watch. It was given to me by my parents as a birthday present. The chains were too loose for my small wrist but I wore it proudly everyday as a symbol of having achieved enough maturity to possess something important. I struck my arms down the hole in panic. Then my desk mate tried, also without success. My heart had sunken so low, even lower than the bottom of the seemingly-bottomless hole. I sat with my hands on my head and cursed my own carelessness when the quiet boy volunteered to go down to the basement. It was a great quest, involving speaking to our reticent janitor, who was a tall large man feared by all in the 7th grade, and the stuffy guidance department official in pretense smiles and fitted gray suit. Twenty minutes later the boy reappeared at the door of the classroom, holding my watch high up in the air. The top of his head was gray from dust bunnies and he was smiling. Two little dimples showed on his often serious face, which was also stained with dirty from the basement. I think I laughed and cried. When I left for US, I had given him a small black and white photo of myself and a candle in an ornate box which I had carefully picked out from the night market in the summer of 97. I remember watching him putting both in a small pocket in his backpack, ever so carefully. I think he was possibly the first boy I had a crush on.
I have imagined my return to China many times. In my first years in America, I have oftentimes dreamt of my primary school. In my dreams I stood next to the flag pole in the middle of the unpaved athletic field. The students were in class and reading their text books in unison; their voices resounded beyond the school yard. I wake up feeling sad that my memories were so vivid and even sadder that I will never know the story of my parallel existence: who was I to become, with whom would I have fallen in love and what I would have done with my life, whether I would have grown out of the timid little girl with pig tails who had spilled orange juice on her pants on the plane but was too shy to ask for a napkin. I imagined tearful reunions and ecstatic moments of reclaiming certain childhood articles and memories upon my glorious return. None of these happened in reality. I met up with childhood friends in a fancy restaurant, where our conversations did not extend much further past our work, our boyfriends and husbands, and “remember that time when…” Our separate experiences have severed our bonds into stringy ties of yellowed memories. When the meals ended we disappeared into our own paths in the night. Time imparts upon us such wonders. Eleven years has changed the face of China but the China I have always known is hiding under its countless scaffolds, high rise condos and eight lane avenues. It is still hiding next to the outdoor swimming pool where I learned to breast-stroke and the little garden where I handed a box candle to a boy I liked. At the security-check point my uncle quietly wiped away tears from his wrinkled eyes. The rest of the family members had said their goodbyes the night before. My favorite aunt posed for pictures with us in a wig that hid the ugly head of breast cancer. I had taken a short stroll to a grocery store with my little cousin, who is no longer “little” at 20. We stood in the rain, where he talked about his future and his girlfriend through puffs of smoke that disappeared instantly into the darkness. I was leaving home, holding a one way ticket to America,
It had rained all night and all day. I drove past countless churches cursing baby jesus while swerving in my lane trying to pass Grandpa going 28 MPH on a 50 road. All of a sudden the commercial district ended and the traffic squeezed into a two-lane residential path. It had gotten dark, but not dark enough to blur the shapes of greeneries surrounding these quiet houses. Unlike the ones I see in the Midwest, these are leafy and spunky looking vegetations with a multitude of shiny shades. Some tower over small churches and others grasp street signs and electricity posts. After yet another wrong-turn, I found my headlight brightening only a section of the guardrail. I was suddenly climbing a small hill and struggling to hold onto the road’s hairpin curves. Rain had slowed down to just occasional drops on my windshield. A light fog descended from the tall trees that lined the inner side of the road. Ferns and shrubs poked the edge of my headlight’s glow from behind the guardrails. Straight ahead, before yet another sharp turn, the path seemed to have disappeared into the thin night air. In the distance, little dots of yellow lights adored the houses that are nestled in a sleepy mountain. I know I must be miles away from my course but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to turn back. I had also rolled down the window so the light rain could bring cool air to my face. Perhaps no one has ever called Birmingham a charming city but in these moments I was definitely charmed. Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '}' in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/atahualpa/footer.php on line 46 | ||||||
At a dinner party last weekend I saw a stuffed sheep stashed behind some books on friend’s kitchen shelf. It was one of those Serta sheep from the mattress company commercials. At about five inches long and three inches tall, the sheep was a small study ball of fur that proudly sported a small blue tag with the Serta logo. Later that evening I gleefully carried the sheep home (now mine thanks to my generous friend) and placed it next to the larger stuffed sheep sitting on my drawers. They made a humorous and awkward pair. Only then did it occur to me that both of them had these large and unexpressive glass eyes attached slightly asymmetrically on their furry faces. I inspected all my other stuffed animals that held too much sentimental values to be thrown away. Sure enough all of them stared back at me with these lazy glass eyes. Some were shaped exactly the same even though they had been purchased in different times and places. This was rather a sad revelation. I remember spending countless days of my childhood staring lovingly into these glass eyes as I whispered my little girl secrets to turtles and bears. As I served afternoon tea and biscuit to them, I had imagined a world of selfless devotion and friendly emotions flashing in their eyes.
