Dispatch From My Anxiety
Brooklyn, New York
Airbnb Self-Portrait in Osaka
Behind the reluctance to write about random things, about my life, I think, is the feeling that writing about anything other than war or collective liberation feels trivial. Any writing I have to offer has to meet a high bar of “This is Important”, but this self-imposed impossible expectation stifles my ability to see that sometimes, the important things can be hidden in the daily and inconsequential - like the interactions I have with people on the street, the way that things are metabolized in me even if there’s no clear output.
Those things feel especially important now that so much feels too big to fathom, too far gone to fix. I used to date this guy who was 23 and who said to me completely sincerely, “I believe in the people’s revolution”. These days I bounce between his brand of starry eyed hope (this morning I cried at footage of the French Left celebrating their unexpected win against Le Pen and far right fascism), and then days where all I want to do is retreat into a hole in the woods somewhere with two dogs and my boyfriend and put the whole business of hope and investment in the future to bed, to scurry back into a personal bubble of protection and ignorance.
- Paying attention to pop music for the first time in years and finding myself deeply invested; Sabrina Carpenter, Chapell Roan, Charli XCX and the girl, so confusing lorde remix. I was stunned by Lorde’s verse, how intimate and real it felt, how much of a mirror it held up to girlhood and friendship. I love the liberated, queer, openly sexual brand of these pop queens who are expressive and emotive in ways that has felt sanitized into commercial oblivion the las few times I’ve tried to check in with pop music. It feels like a revelation; an indication that maybe culture is evolving in the right direction. But then I’m also like where are all the cool pop girls of color? There’s also a nagging sense that it is a distraction somehow, from seeing things as they really are. Does it really matter that two major female pop stars worked it out on a remix when there’s so much else that is not able to be worked out on a remix? Will I ever be able to take pleasure in basic things like pop culture without having an existential crisis? I push the thoughts down and scroll past another image of a child with their jaw blasted off, or a limb missing, and read another tweet or Instagram story take on pop culture feminism.
- The Presidential debate and how humiliating it is to live in the United States right now. o live in the United States right now.
(source)
- The general feeling that my body is decaying, from the flakes of skin I pick off it constantly, to the blood that spurts forth after I scratch off a scab, and the toe fungus infection I’m currently addressing through a three month course of anti fungal medication. Sometimes I look at other people and wonder how everyone else seems so pristine and full of vitality.
- The sense that I need to start thinking about having a baby, but being unclear as to where I’m supposed to start. Do I want to have a family? When do I want that? Is 40 too old to have a child? Will I suddenly wake up at 34 and demand that I want a kid? Will it be too late? Will I even care? Is it enough to be the fun auntie?
- My ongoing lack of health insurance (now going on more than a year). I climb three times a week, ride my bike in New York City and generally do risky shit. I have had health insurance in the past as a freelancer, but the short of it is that there is no real good options for people who do not have full time jobs if you do not qualify for subsidized state insurance. I can pay $800 for mediocre health insurance, and there’s no real other option that is more cost effective. I could probably afford that cost, but there’s a simmering indignation of having to participate in the system where you must simply pay your way into safety. I read this recent article called Everyone Into the Grinder that essentially says if we don’t force the rich to participate in the same public-owned systems that we are all forced to contend with, they will remain unpleasant because privatization means some of us can just pay our way into comfort and basic human rights, reinforcing the status quo.
“The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
A rainbow I saw at the gym
It’s the same old tired script every time a season arrives: it’s too hot, it’s too cold to do anything. I have felt like a little sewer rat hiding in my cave, banging away at my keyboard to reach the finish line on this manuscript, trying to calm my nervous system to heal my crazy skin. At one point I went too deep on a 15 tweet thread someone posted in response to a headline that said scientists are predicting the first Billion people will die because of climate change, and that those people are going to be you and I: those of us completely divorced from the source of their food, who rely on the convenience of globalization to have things magically appear in front of us with zero effort. It’s the collapse of those systems that will get us, and I found myself at 1AM in the evening staring into a bowl of cereal I didn’t even buy or know where it came from, texting my boyfriend to see if we should start looking into buying land somewhere so I can learn to grow my own vegetables before it is too late. “You subsist entirely on imported sake, Japanese snacks and instant noodles. You’ll be fine,” he said.
This past 4th of July weekend, I had an overwhelming urge to work - to get ahead while everyone else was off and enjoying whatever they were doing. The city was eerily quiet, hot and soupy, oppressive in the direct sun. Thursday rolled into Friday which rolled into the weekend and I barely did any writing or real work, the vague sense that I needed to sitting on my thoughts like the silhouette of an apex predator staring me down. Each day, I would go to bed and remind myself that it was okay I didn’t do any work, there was always tomorrow and I deserve a break. I’m realizing that I feel deep down as though I don’t deserve a break, that I am so far behind (in what? And who decides where I should be but me?) that to pause for a brief moment is to sink into the background until I am no longer visible or important.
What did I do? I went climbing with friends multiple days, hours spent at the gym reaching for plastic holds, I ate five hot dogs and felt sick at my friends Tessa and Marshall’s BBQ, all of us attempting to blow vape bubbles (when you hit a vape and blow out the vapor into a bubble wand, which creates milky bubbles). I hung out with my friend’s baby, I saw my boyfriend and watched TV, I went to Beacon’s Closet and tried ten things on and bought nothing. I walked my dog endlessly and drank sparkling effervescent sake (Dassai 50 Blue) by myself in the cool dark cave of my apartment.
What did I do? I went climbing with friends multiple days, hours spent at the gym reaching for plastic holds, I ate five hot dogs and felt sick at my friends Tessa and Marshall’s BBQ, all of us attempting to blow vape bubbles (when you hit a vape and blow out the vapor into a bubble wand, which creates milky bubbles). I hung out with my friend’s baby, I saw my boyfriend and watched TV, I went to Beacon’s Closet and tried ten things on and bought nothing. I walked my dog endlessly and drank sparkling effervescent sake (Dassai 50 Blue) by myself in the cool dark cave of my apartment.
All these things feel excessive and frivolous; and even now as I write this I write it with guilt, that it betrays how privileged and boring I am. I have effectively employed a cop of my own making in my head who is on duty 24/7 - the cop tells me that I should be thinking about how to make the world better, how my work will impact other people, that if I don’t write and read and shoot every day, if I don’t produce, then I am not worthy of considering myself an artist. I have no answers on how to get rid of this constant nagging guilt, the pervasive sense that it’s never enough, that any moment spent -god forbid- having fun, is a complete waste of time. The moment feels so urgent, and at the same time I can’t tell you or I am meant to do about it except stare at it until our brains hurt.
Still, I go to bed and close my eyes and list three things I’m grateful for, three things that made today a good day, and hear my voice ringing out into the night reassuring myself that it’s okay to relax, that I deserve rest, too.
Me with Ayla and Shannon
Piano, Piano
Lesa, Northern Italy
I’ll take a left at the fork and walk through a few narrow alleyways flanked by homes. On sunny days I will hear the sound of Italian flitting out of windows above. Gates might be open, to reveal two baby scooters parked inside next to each other, or a woman hanging her laundry out to dry, shower cap still on. Laundry will be gently lifted in the breeze off the side of balconies, something I can’t help but take photos of despite the cliche. On rainy days, everything is still, all the doors and windows are shut to the world. I can do this entire walk and see nobody else.
I’ll walk past Jasper and Sarvie’s house, down a cobblestone alleyway with the names of Italian families written on the letterboxes in fancy script. Past the multiple gardens owned by Angelo, who sometimes I see walking with his cane between his tomatoes and flowers, up and down the hill despite his bad knee. At this point, I can see the lake. On clear days I can see the Swiss alps in the distance.
The path ahead becomes narrow and bushy, overgrown and shaded, the buzz of mosquitoes in the air. After particularly heavy rainfall, I caught the frozen eyes of two deers staring at me from some distance as I rounded the corner. We stared at each other for a moment before they leapt out of sight.
It goes for about five minutes more, passing a lone deck chair facing the lake past a single chain that says “private property” (begging for me to trespass, which I did once— it took me about ten minutes before I got too nervous and had to leave).
Finally, it opens up to the view of the mountains, the lake, and a giant magnolia tree in someone’s yard that hangs over the public path. On a sunny Thursday morning in mid-March, she was fully in bloom. The grass is overgrown underneath her, and enclosed by an uneven stone wall that is high in places and low in others. I was told it was built by the Romans. I leave my bag on the wall and load my camera, walking on the stones to take photos of her from every angle.
When I first saw the tree on my first day in Lesa, it was about to burst, its branches covered in tiny green buds. It had rained non-stop for the entire first week I was there, the promise of a month stretching beyond me like an eternity. By the time I saw her bloom, I had shot 10 series of portraits, printed them all in a frenzy in Milan and was about to exhibit them in the town community center, marking the end of my residency.
As I finish this essay now, it’s the end of June and two more trips between Lesa and now have come and gone. To age is to experience time out of order, to jump between then and now and later. Going on a trip that felt like it would last forever and then cutting to months later, writing the summary of it in a few paragraphs at my dining room table.
My twenties felt like a flurry of activity, pointed towards the false idol of security and success, a frantic race to a place I had run for so long to reach, only to bail at the last minute. I was in a very long relationship, one that felt final and forever. Now I couldn’t describe to you what it felt like to kiss him. I was flying at the speed of trauma, all of life an endless race against myself and everyone else. Everything was urgent, everything was important. Maybe that’s just what being alive feels like, or being young.
I’m still adjusting to experiencing time in the marrow of it, the actual fact of it. Not dictated by the artificial rhythm of the churn of capitalism, but by the growing and dying of all things. Sometimes I catch myself mixed up in the stream of two times: capitalism time and real time, confusing one for the other.
When I’m in capitalism time, I feel shame at starting a creative career so late, worry that I am not doing or achieving or being recognized enough. I forget that I chose to be self employed, to follow a path that has no guidelines or markers of advancement other than a ~vibe~. I get caught up in playing the same games I used to play as a full time member of the corporate dream, in the dogged pursuit of a promotion, a fatter pay check, a bigger title. In capitalism time, I forget that I’ve made choices about what I want and how I want to get there, I slip back into the same robotic fear and desire for more. Decolonizing my time may be a life long practice.
Sometimes, fleetingly, I manage to wriggle out of the iron grip of capitalism time, and I experience real time, time time. The time of growing and dying. It’s when I’m with my family and noticing how they’ve shrunk, how they’ve softened with age. It’s sitting in front of a magnolia tree every day in the sun and the rain and crying at the bottomless gratitude I feel at the sight of it. I feel it when my dog jumps into bed at 6am and wakes me by gently licking my toe, when I watch my psoriasis come and go, come and go, healing and appearing like an endless video playing out on my skin. I feel it when I think about the ten long months of genocide that has unfolded on our screens, the months of inaction and death.
There’s an Italian expression: Piano, Piano. It means little by little, or step by step. It’s taking things slowly, letting them unfold in time. A man at my exhibition said that to me in response to me sharing that I was going through at least one block of Gorgonzola cheese every two days. I needed to hear it at 20 years old, about to attempt to shove the rest of my life into the next ten years in a desperate attempt to get ahead, to be safe.
Magnolias only bloom one week of the year. Jasper told me that March in Lesa is the time of change, and I had his words in my head during the last few precious day that the tree was in full bloom. I was in Milan to print photos at a darkroom, staying overnight at a hotel. I was worried I’d miss it, willing the train home to go faster, like I was missing my favorite band headlining at a festival. I had waited all month to see her bloom. The flowers were still there when I got there.
I came home to New York at the beginning of April, having skipped the uncertain time where Spring has not yet broken and all of us are losing our minds. The magnolia trees and cherry trees were just starting to sprout in Brooklyn, the process beginning all over again. It felt like a tape rewind, a gentle reminder that things move at different speeds depending on where you are.
I took long walks around the neighborhood the first few weeks I was back, missing the green hills of Lesa. I worked on these photos in the darkroom, photos that were evidence of the same thing having happened on the other side of the world a month before. The Magnolia tree in Lesa has long shed her flowers, but the ones here in Brooklyn, at home, had just started to show.
One Struggle, Many Fronts
My boyfriend Cody, who is 43, often gripes to me about the resurgence of wide legged pants today. He was in his teens at the time that big pants and JNCOs were popular, and one of his signature gripes to me is his sense that today’s youth act as though they discovered big pants, rather than the reality of these pants circling back through time to re-emerge again in a new context.
Another example: I recently watched Ripley on Netflix, starring Andrew Scott and based on the Patricia Highsmith novels about a New York-based low level grifter called Thomas Ripley who ingratiates himself with a wealthy roaming wannabe painter in Italy under the guise of helping his father convince him to return home. Towards the end of this series (spoiler alert ahead), the show splices footage of an imagined Caravaggio sometime in the 1500s mirroring the exact movements of our modern day Ripley in the exact same surreal tree-lined abandoned boulevard on the outskirts of Rome. Clips of murder weapons are hard cut next to each other: for Caravaggio, it’s a knife; for Ripley, a heavy glass ashtray. History repeats itself in the actions of these two men, unlikely kin across centuries.
What is old always seems to bide its time before returning to take its place in the light again. History marches forward in relentless cycles and patterns, swirling mosaics repeating indefinitely, everything made from the shards of the things that came before.
I read somewhere recently that to be human is to forget, that the forgetting is an important part of being able to move forward. The weight of all that happened before us would be too big to carry, too complex to resolve.
Viet Than Nguyen’s book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the War of Memory, begins like this: “This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
He says that America may have lost the ‘Vietnam War’ (which is called The American War to the Vietnamese), but they have won the memory war, because of the cultural hegemony of Hollywood and the English language, the muscle and heft of it that body checks the voices of anyone else present into obscurity.
My dad was part of the wave of Southern Vietnamese people who fled by boat following the fall of Saigon, and the withdrawal of the American troops. My maternal grandfather was absent from his own home for many years because he was hiding in a temple on the outskirts of Saigon to avoid conscription in the army fighting against communism.
I am a direct descendent of these real lived experiences, and even I didn’t quite understand the nuance of what the war did to South Vietnam vs North Vietnam, of how some South Vietnamese felt angry and resentful that the American withdrew their help, abandoned them to the communists. I didn’t even know that my grandfather was gone for so long because he didn’t want to fight. I had never heard of any of these stories outside of the mainstream cultural war knowledge I absorbed through American movies like Apocalypse Now, or The American by Graham Greene. I knew that there were lots of Vietnamese people slaughtered, there was a girl that ran away from a burning village, her clothes disintegrated, that they dropped chemicals from the air, that there were many American soldiers who died. It’s broad and sweeping strokes of my own legacy that were obscured from my own understanding for a very long time, until I actively started to look for the nuance in what happened.
I’m currently writing a fictional novel loosely based on my family, and I found out that detail about my grandfather’s draft-dodging during an informal interview with my mum, who was barely able to even explain it to me. I wanted to understand it better to potentially write about it, but when I Googled variations of the search: “Southern Vietnamese men who avoided conscription in the Vietnam War”, I only found results focused on the American POV, about anti-conscription protests at universities in the US. I went through dozens of pages of search results and could not find one single result about people like my grandfather. I could barely find anything from the perspective of the Vietnamese when I look for information about the war, only that of America. There are barely any photos taken by Vietnamese war photographers. I read about the protests in the 60s, which were described as especially galvanizing because of the death count of American soldiers, not necessarily always because of the Vietnamese civilians who were being bombed into oblivion.
I think this is what Viet Thanh Nguyen means. There is a soft power in moulding memory, one that the American war machine excels at. It’s the power of being able to dominate a narrative so that you are at its center, to reduce millions of people to a historical detail, even to the kin of those people. It’s the power to control what is said and reported, to re-package information for your advantage, like Columbia and its suppression of anti-war student protests in the 1960s, only to then use it as a lionized example of the university’s commitment to student liberty and dissent.
Today, the war machine walks hand in hand with the attention economy. It rides on the backs of the systems behind our screens that leads our attention beyond our grasp, like a herd of wild horses galloping away from us.
I am a victim to it. My attention is pulled into fifty million places at once everyday. I am chronically online. I read about The Cut’s essay boom, about girl dinners and trad wives, hate reads and performative hydration. I sit in bed and scroll through Twitter trying to learn about Jojo Siwa for no discernible reason other than my curiosity demands it. I follow these crumbs of online discourse as though they will lead me to a better understanding of the contemporary environment that I live, work, and write within, but I am convinced that it is all designed to distract me from really seeing what is happening. I am a participant in the mechanism that keeps the war machine going, one that demands my attention be led elsewhere, that it is used to make money rather than demand peace and a different way of doing things. It demands I forget everything as soon as I see it.
Recently, Instagram announced that it will hide “political” content in people’s feed sunless they pro-actively un-toggle that setting. The word “political” here suggests that the political is ephemeral, of no consequence, something to opt out of. That somehow politics is not woven into the fabric of all our lives, no matter who we are. That it doesn’t impact what we do when we get sick, the way we eat, the things we buy that we have the privilege of accessing—assembled and built off the misfortune of a secret, murky Other. I see this as part of the war machine’s effort at hijacking our attention, of making it effortless to turn the other way.
The space between ourselves and the Other seems to have expanded into an uncrossable horizon, a journey so large that you can hardly be expected to take it on your own accord. After all, there’s so much else to pay attention to—internet essays, cultural fads, entertainment spectacles, our own increasingly expensive and fraught lives in the shadow of problems that feel too big. I understand why so many of us to look away at a time when so much is going on. Our individual power seems so puny that to consider it feels humiliating sometimes. I am speaking as someone who has not been able to vote the entire decade I’ve lived in the US as a non-immigrant visa holder. I have very little rights here, as a non-resident immigrant. I am familiar with how it feels to be helpless.
It has been more than six months of the Palestinian genocide. I waver between paying too much attention, and too little. Lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about small details I come across that feel strange, surreal: 15 people drowned trying to reach aid dropped into the ocean in Gaza, there will be a humanitarian pier built there now. Images of more cops I have ever seen using vehicles that look like small boulders to beat and arrest students who have not been able to look away, who refuse to capitulate to the machine that demands that we forget. The strange irony of a paramedic yelling at a police man pointing a gun at Aaron Bushnell engulfed in flames - “we need a fire extinguisher, not a gun.”
I think about Hind’s Hall (f.k.a. Hamilton Hall) at Columbia, which was renamed to honor the six year old Palestinian girl who died the worst way I can imagine a child to die, surrounded by her dead family as strange men move in to murder her, the name pulled down from the hall by armed police just as quickly as it was put up. I missed the original story of Hind during March, a month of fog when I was at an artist residency in Italy, where I paid very little attention, an opposite reaction to the nightmares and sleeplessness from paying too much attention during the first few months of it all. When I read about Hind, I felt ashamed that it was the first time I had heard of her story.
I am grateful that we will remember Hind, that we will remember Aaron Bushnell, Dr. Hammam Alloh at Al-Shifa who refused to evacuate in order to keep attending to his patients. But who else will be remembered in the aftermath of this genocide, when Columbia asks for permission to use the same images of them calling the police on their own students as a point of pride, of their participation in history? Will we remember the faceless babies I scroll past, covered in blood, tenderly held by the arms of bereft parents? The man I saw in a striking photograph, his mouth and eyes wide with anger, screaming against a backdrop of rubble and dust, a lone grey foot poking out a collapsed building next to a floral rug covered in debris. Will we remember the people like my grandfather, and my father, the ones that hid, the ones that stayed, the ones who were related and had to witness their family, their sacred ancestral lands, their culture be dismantled brick by brick in the most violent way possible, sanctioned by the state? Will these stories be lost even to the descendants of these people?
When I first started to travel widely in my early twenties, I was so transfixed by the Vietnamese diaspora I’d find in Paris, in Berlin, in America. It felt incredibly novel to see faces that looked exactly like mine (we call this sprawling diaspora Viet Kieu), but who would open their mouth and out would tumble an entirely different language. It felt as though I was seeing infinite versions of myself fragmented throughout the world. I could have been French, I could have been German, I could have been American. The strangeness of the vibrant Vietnamese community in Houston, or the solitary Vietnamese restaurant in Peru is a product of war, the dispersal of seeds across the entire planet after a place is laid to waste through napalm bombs and violence.
This APAHM, I am going to practice paying attention. I want to pay attention keenly, no matter how painful it is, to what is happening to our Palestinian brothers and sisters, to their stories and their humanity. My generation is one of the last to deal with the generational impact of the Vietnam War, and I feel crazy watching it all happen again in real-time. Indiscriminate bombing, hateful rhetoric and propaganda, violent suppression of anti-war protestors. We are doomed to repeat our mistakes when we fail to fully reckon with our complicity in war, when we paint over the reality in favor of a distorted one, when we look away. When we forget.
Carl Jung said, “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” All oppression is connected. The liberties we have, the comfort I have as a second-generation Asian woman living in safety and with what feels like infinite choice for my life, is built on the backs of the work of others who fought for liberation and justice long before I was born. What is any of this worth - the representation, the opportunities, the celebration - if we choose to ignore those who are targets in the merciless crossfire of history repeating itself? Individual people may fade from memory, but collectively, movements and ideas do not. Solidarity to Palestinians and all anti-war protestors throwing their bodies into the machinery of war. Grind it to a fucking halt. Ceasefire now.
Food Poisoning and Whales
Sayulita, Mexico
Food Poisoning Self Potrait at Casa Selva
Earlier that day, I was crying on a speedboat after seeing whales breach and flop their tails in the Bay of Banderas. 500 Humpback Whales pass through from November-April to mate and give birth. It turns out that baby whales don’t have a lot of blubber (although still weight 1,000-1,500 pounds), so the tropical waters of Mexico are ideal. I knew we were going on a whale watching tour, but animal tours are hardly promises, and I kept my expectation low. Nature does not submit to desire.
My therapist asked me to elaborate on feeling lucky, and I told her that I could never have imagined doing something like this as a kid. This seems to come up a lot. Experiences that couldn’t be fantasized about when I was younger because they felt outside the realm of dreaming. To see those whales was to be reminded of all the once-in-a-lifetime experiences I’ve had: seeing Macchu Pichu at sunrise after hiking with food poisoning for 3 days (I guess food poisoning always is a part of a good travel story), sleeping in a hut in the Italian Dolomites, taking a 12 hour chicken bus to see the reflective plains of Salar de Uyuni for a few hours before taking one right back the same day, walking into the valley of Kings in Egypt, aware that I was standing on the same ground that pharaohs had walked centuries before. Weirdly, being able to drive is part of that list.
These acute moments of feeling fade with the last of a holiday tan, but I wish they could be set like precious gemstones in the front of my eyeballs, a reminder of what it feels like to be so alive! I am thinking about this while lying incapacitated by the pool the day after. My stomach is a hollow bowl, loud and impatient. I watch the sun recede across the rim of the pool, putting my pen down every few minutes. I don’t have the energy to think, and it feels good to let myself write like this. Unhurried, lazy, with lots of breaks. Norovirus has stripped my stomach lining and a veil of distraction that accompanies being so physically able, so busy all the time. It feels good to be still. My stomach churns again as I open my camera roll to rewatch videos of Jill and I squealing over the sight of whales throwing their entire bodies above the surface of the ocean.
Going Home
Sydney, Australia
Coming home is looking at a familiar object through a glass prism. It’s knowing what the Eiffel Tower looks like after a lifetime of looking at it through Google Images, the cartoon Madeline and in the background of Emily in Paris, only to get there and realize it’s both kind of the same but also just a mere facsimile to the version that exists in your head. In my childhood home in Sydney, the glass jugs of boiled tap water still sit next to the sink. There’s still a bowl of cut fruit (this time, honeydew) in the fridge nestled in a bowl, a thin layer of plastic cling wrap waiting to be removed. My name is still scrawled in childish handwriting across each of the nine drawers of the in-built closet, labelled to make sure everyone knew they were mine. To return to a place like your childhood home as an adult is to stitch a memory suspended from the most fragile silk with the reality that so much has changed.
What has changed: the fifteen tanks full of fish my dad used to illegally breed and sell in the abandoned granny flat out back has been reduced to just two (overrun by snails?) in the living room. The 4 for $4 champagne flutes my mother purchased from Kmart specifically for Christmas, the first we have ever owned as a family, bragging about how cheap they were the same way other people might brag about having Riedel glasses. What else has changed: the relationship between my parents and I, one whose sharp edges have eroded through years of talk therapy. It’s been softened by the simple effect of what we commonly know cures all but don’t really believe until we ourselves can be old enough to witness it: time passing. A laundry list of complaints and questions from growing up in a low income immigrant household with its requisite physical and emotional abuse has fallen through the filters of being examined a thousand times and coming out frayed and faded, a receipt in the back pocket of a pair of jeans gone through the wash.
Going home this last December was the first time in my life that I returned feeling somewhat normal, the grievances that I checked alongside my bags poofed into thin air, able to see my home and my family clearly for the first time. Instead, I brought a golem that I created here in Brooklyn. It was a fantasy of what family and home was meant to be, moulded in the vacuum of Brooklyn therapy culture and through the anecdotes of my friends and boyfriends’ families, far far away our rented home in Yagoona, Sydney. I wrote and spoke and thought and dissected all of this stuff as a 30 year old woman living in an apartment that costs triple what my entire family pays, until I was blue in the face and convinced I had looked at it at every possible direction. I did the ayahuasca ceremonies, started writing the book about immigrant trauma. I participated in TikTok conversations about what it all meant to be a second-generation child of immigrants, and I brought all of this home eager to bask in fruits of that labor. To simply return home for the holidays without complication or the sticky residue of childhood trauma. I wanted to come home as someone healed.
I had brought so much expectation back about what it meant to return home, of what a clean and tidy version of family and the holidays meant. That idea dissipated almost immediately, replaced instead with surface-level dinner table conversation, the jokes my boyfriend didn’t understand, my mother telling me that she has checked my GPS every single day for the last five years, including when I went to The Dolomites and the month I spent in Mexico City. I imagined her zooming into foreign places at my blue little dot, not understanding any of the context of where I was, just comforted by the simple fact that I was alive. It became my dad forgetting the ingredients for my favorite Vietnamese dish, banh uot, and walking 30 minutes back to the grocery just to get them, even though he hates the dish himself. It was repeating everything I said three times to make sure they understood, slowing my speech down, removing parts of stories that seemed too complicated. None of it was part of the starry-eyed, one-note fantasy I had built, constructed from cliche and self-absorption.
Both of my parents would allude to me moving home one day, and then backtrack by smiling and saying they’re joking, when we both know they’re not. They say they’re happy as long as I am, and they don’t need me to be home. I know that’s a concession that they make for a daughter who decided that she needed to leave, and has built an entire life away from them. I smile and say maybe, knowing I won’t, that the person I have become doesn’t fit into the sunny rocky shores of Sydney anymore, and the cultural, language, and geographical divide between myself and the love that exists in my parent’s shrinking bodies is one created by and perpetuated by me. I’m a visitor now.
On the morning of our flight home, I cast a shadow over our hotel room, irritable and snapping at Cody. I said I was annoyed I didn’t get to go to the beach on my last day, but that gave way to tears by mid-afternoon that I was actually just devastated that I had to leave. My next visit would be after another year or two of changes in myself, in my family, ones that would have to be reconciled over and over again with each return. A sudden grief descended, knowing that it took this long to enjoy my family, to see them clearly. That they are happy for me but barely understand what it is that I do, that they have never seen my life here in New York, that it is so different in so many ways. Grief for the calls I didn’t make, the interest I never took in their inner landscapes, instead writing them off as one dimensional characters in my life. That I can invest so much time in the process of healing but it will not measure up to simply sitting next to my mother to watch TV with her. That I now ache for a place that I couldn’t wait to leave a decade ago. The reality of what it looks like when I return home, and I don’t live there.
The world that I’ve created in my head does not compare to the one that exists within those fading, marked walls with my name written on them in Yagoona, Sydney. This world may not include the animated dinner table conversation on political views or shared memories I get to have with my boyfriend’s family. There is little to no curiosity about my creative practice, or the life I live on the other side of the world. The movie hallmarks of what it is to return home to family are completely absent. Instead, in this world, the wine glasses are cheap, there is always a place to return to, and there are people who check my GPS every single day to make sure that I am safe, even when I do not call. One fantasy has been laid to rest in place of another that I watch recede on the flight map as my plane climbs its way into the sky to take me all the way back to my life in Brooklyn.
On the morning of our flight home, I cast a shadow over our hotel room, irritable and snapping at Cody. I said I was annoyed I didn’t get to go to the beach on my last day, but that gave way to tears by mid-afternoon that I was actually just devastated that I had to leave. My next visit would be after another year or two of changes in myself, in my family, ones that would have to be reconciled over and over again with each return. A sudden grief descended, knowing that it took this long to enjoy my family, to see them clearly. That they are happy for me but barely understand what it is that I do, that they have never seen my life here in New York, that it is so different in so many ways. Grief for the calls I didn’t make, the interest I never took in their inner landscapes, instead writing them off as one dimensional characters in my life. That I can invest so much time in the process of healing but it will not measure up to simply sitting next to my mother to watch TV with her. That I now ache for a place that I couldn’t wait to leave a decade ago. The reality of what it looks like when I return home, and I don’t live there.
The world that I’ve created in my head does not compare to the one that exists within those fading, marked walls with my name written on them in Yagoona, Sydney. This world may not include the animated dinner table conversation on political views or shared memories I get to have with my boyfriend’s family. There is little to no curiosity about my creative practice, or the life I live on the other side of the world. The movie hallmarks of what it is to return home to family are completely absent. Instead, in this world, the wine glasses are cheap, there is always a place to return to, and there are people who check my GPS every single day to make sure that I am safe, even when I do not call. One fantasy has been laid to rest in place of another that I watch recede on the flight map as my plane climbs its way into the sky to take me all the way back to my life in Brooklyn.
Some thoughts at the threshold of the new year
Honolulu, Hawaii
Looking back, I’m glad to leave this year behind. It’s the year I downshifted Scallion Pancake to focus on writing and photography, a leap that has been hiding behind a corner my whole life. It felt a lot like pushing a heavy cart up a hill. I tried really hard this year. I cared a lot this year. I continued grappling with boundary setting and putting myself first, and learning to manage my energy levels. I teetered between running myself into the ground and feeling like I had everything under control. I felt tired a lot, part of it was that the world felt very heavy, part of it was from the exertion of pushing myself as someone chasing a dream at age 30, an age that feels both young and like I’m running out of time. My psoriasis was probably the worst it has ever been. I felt the most proud of myself this year, for sharing my photography and my writing even when it felt really really scary. I started writing a book! I saved a significant amount of money for the first time in my life, and I was very hydrated. It only took about 15 years for me to achieve those resolutions I set for myself decades ago in my bedroom in the dark.
This New Year, I want to Venmo my friends money for coffee when I’m thinking about them. I want to be the type of person who bakes things and bikes them to the people I love just because. I want to use my library card more, I want to read every book in the world. I want to clean my camera roll out every week so the screenshots of things I forgot the significance of don’t rot in my phone. I want to touch grass, I want to climb outside, I want to swim in the ocean, I want to bury my face in the my dog’s fur more. I want to stick my head out the window of a moving car. I want to play frisbee on the beach. I want to rediscover my sense of joy in style, of feeling expressed in what I wear, even when it feels too cold to do so. I want to finally cook recipes from the cookbooks I collect that sit and collect dust. I want to play more records.
I want to go on impromptu walks with my friends more. I want to be free of the prison of expectations. I want blind confidence. Big statements. I want to follow through. I want to believe that I am capable of anything I want. I want to save money. I want to buy myself things when it feels right, without guilt. I want loud house music in a dark club, eyes closed, occasionally bumping limbs with someone I love. I want to submerge myself in an open body of water, surfacing and feeling my feet kick against nothing. I want to say hi to people on the street I know even if it feels uncomfortable. I want to listen to my body. I want to hear people make a lot of noise because they recognize that the wellbeing of others is tied to their own. I want peace for the people who are suffering. I want safety, joy and community. I want everyone else to have that.
Happy new year. <3
The Best Books I Read in 2023
Brooklyn, New York
Anyway, out of all the books I read this year, there were 15 or so that stood out—books that stayed with me, taught me things, changed how I saw love and life and identity, kept me up at night or had me reading while walking (something I would not recommend on the streets of New York).
This felt like a heavy and hard year, and reading gave me such a sweet place to rest. It helped me better articulate my own feelings, and it constantly reminds me of our connected experience as tiny beings moving around our private little worlds that can feel so overwhelming and isolating. I would say that this list is the books I enjoyed the most, but there were a whole bunch of books I read that helped me refine my perspective on politics or anti-capitalism, so I want to mention those below as well, if that’s something you’re interested in.
- Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò - About identity polities and the inequality of power
- On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson - Essays about freedom to/from in four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate echange
- Who is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind by Fariha Roisin - Part memoir of trauma, part interrogation of the colonialized wellness industry.
- Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell - An examination of the politics of time and and our relationship to it.
- Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton - A short book about how we are basically extractive targets of profit for the health industry as it is, and argues for a future of health that is based on a collective commitment to each other
- The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks - Basically about how we socialize men to be unemotional robots and how that affects women and our relationships.
- They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life by Alva Gotby - An examination of the politics of emotional support and love that is generally not compensated and expected of people in the margins.
All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien - This one was recommended to me by my friend Shirley. It’s about a woman who returns home to Cabramatta (a Vietnamese-dominant south-western suburb of Sydney) after her younger brother is killed at a graduation dinner. With no real answers, she takes it upon herself to investigate his murder which then takes you through a series of POVs that range from her family to community members connected to the murder scene. I loved this because I am going to STAN any author coming out of Western Sydney (where I’m from), and I though it was super inventive to wrap an immigration/trauma story into the genre of murder-mystery.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti - One of the only pieces of writing that has ever mirrored the spiraling questions chasing each other in my head (and in the heads of a lot of other women I know) on the decision of motherhood. It’s like reading a mind eat itself in real time arguing for both sides. Lots of questions on the relationship of art making and identity to the role of motherhood. This quote from the book killed me:
“How far beyond your mother do you hope to get? You are not going to be a different woman entirely, so just be a slightly altered version of her, and relax. You don't have to have all of what she had. Why not live something else instead? Live the pattern which is the repeating, which was your mother and her mother before her, live it a little bit differently this time. A life is just a proposition you ask by living it "Could a life be lived like this too?" Then your life will end. So let the soul that passed down from your mothers try out this new life in you. There is no living your life forever. It's just once - a trial of a life. Then it will end. So give the soul that passed down from your mothers a chance to try out life in you. As a custodian for the soul passed down through your mothers, you might make it a little easier this time around. Treat it nicely because it's had a hard time. This is the first time in generations it can rest. Or decide with true liberty what it will do. So why not treat it with real tenderness? It has been through so much already, why not let it rest?”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang - I DEVOURED this satirical take on the publishing industry, not only because it was so fun to read but because of the subtext and autobiographical details that matched with the author’s IRL life. It’s about a white woman who steals her Asian friend’s manuscript when she dies, and publishes it as her own. The premise itself is fucking bonkers, and it has received criticism because the author appears to have modeled the deceased Asian author in the book on her own career, and re-packaged the criticism she got herself on previous books as in-book plot details. Wild! So fun to read but a bit of a let down in ending.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - Recommended to me by Ash! I love me some magical realism, and this one is full of it. You follow Piranesi, who lives in a weird labyrinth-style decrepit open-aired structure with endless halls and vestibules periodically flooded by the ocean. It is so so beautiful and reads like one of those dreams you try to explain to your boyfriend but no matter how hard you try you just sound like you’re having a stroke. Fun fact, the namesake, Piranesi, is Italian architect and painter Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who is famous for his insanely elaborate etchings of fictional prisons.
Douglas Stewart has an incredible way of creating vivid portraits of a specific moment in time I have no idea about - working class Scotland in the 80’s. These books are devastating, and both center queer young male characters at the edge of understanding who they are in a violent and senseless world of poverty, homophobia and alcoholism. I loved these characters and although I had to put it down at times because of how devastated I was, I never wanted it to end.
Beloved by Toni Morrison - OK yes wow. A Pulitzer Prize winner and something I took far too long to get stuck into. It’s about Sethe, a woman who was born a slave and escaped, and the farm where so much violence happened and which haunts her. There’s an angry baby ghost, and a really unflinching and devastating story of slavery, its consequences and the loss and pain it wreaks onto people and their families for their whole lives. Another book I had to take a lot of breaks from, incredibly beautiful and incredibly sad.
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts - Love me some Alan Watts, this is great philosophy book basically about why the feeling of being separated from everything else is an illusion, and we’re really just bits and pieces of the same universe. Really big thinking and questions on ego and the myths that are sold to us. Had a really great impact on me, one of those books that make you walk around for a few days and everything looks a little different until silly little things bum you out again.
The Boy and the Dog by Seishū Hase, Alison Watts (Translator) - What a sweet little book! It’s about a dog (Tamon) who is on a massive journey to return to its home after a tsunami, and on its way stops at the sides of various characters, each of which occupy a single chapter. You get a window into the lives of all these people, way stations for the dog on its way home, and how the dog creates small ripples in these peoples lives before he moves on. It made me think about what our pets do for us, how they mirror our humanity and desires and needs, and the strange inclination we have as human beings to domesticate and live with actual animals in our homes. Have you ever thought of this while high? It freaks me out sometimes that I literally cohabitate with an animal that cannot communicate with me beyond grunting.
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti - After Motherhood I ran to devour Sheila Heti’s other work, and this one was so strange. You’re basically following a woman who joins her dead father in another world, which I think is being lost on a leaf? It’s incredibly meandering and metaphysical, and very loose on plot and heavy on abstract ruminations about life and beauty and death. It wrecked me. I have a feeling it’s probably super polarizing.
Tự Do Palestine
Brooklyn, New York
T-shirt design by @soulvenir.co
After October 7th, I picked at my scalp each night for a week before going to bed, my finger swiping through my Twitter feed until my arm went numb from lying on it. I’d wake up the next morning and repeat, head pounding and mouth dry as I reached for my phone as soon as I woke again to read the hysteric opinions of people online screaming to be heard on top of each other, mobile phone footage of people digging towards family members buried under grey rubble with their bare hands, parents holding the remains of their children in plastic bags, the official Israel twitter account utilizing memes for war-time propaganda, news links reporting death counts rising and rising and rising and hospitals bombed and babies being taken off incubators because there was no power left. I noticed which sides’ statistics were given the authority of “officials say” and which were skeptically waved at with “according to”. I read and I watched the outpouring of grief and trauma from both my Jewish and Palestinian friends, of the clusterfuck of terror and hatred spiraling down through the years and lives of generations of Israelis and Palestinians after colonial powers foisted one displaced people they didn’t want on another minority group they “ruled” over.
On Instagram, I lost friends who tried to play model U.N. with me in my DMs, accusing me of spreading misinformation by reposting graphics that used the word ‘genocide’, I watched as people I knew, well-meaning, liberal, smart people posting war-mongering Instagram graphics no ceasefire until the hostages are returned even as I read elsewhere that the Israeli government rejected that very deal. I would lie in bed, my fingernails working themselves underneath flakes of scalp as I fretted over each extreme statement I read. How many people must die until people think calling for a ceasefire is justified? Until people are no longer censored and fired from their jobs for calling for the most basic act of human decency? 50,000? 100,000? 500,000? Is it not a genocide or at the very minimum an ethnic cleansing when an entire population of people have their resources controlled for decades and are finally driven out in one great big push protected and sanctioned by the international order of power and the military-industrial complex?
To watch the mass killing of a people televised on social media in real time has felt like going insane, tweet by tweet, video by video. For Biden, Sanders and Trump to hold the same perspective, to see the US government continue pledging a seemingly endless amount of money and weapons to support the wholesale murder of an people, all the while passing laws that equate any antizionism with antisemitism, has been scary.
I sequester 40% of my freelance income for tax time, I pay out of pocket for flu shots and birth control, I ride my bike and I climb and I cross the road and cross my fingers that one wrong move won’t cause bankruptcy. I read articles about the increasing cost of living and the stagnant wages, and then I read that the economy is booming. To live in a country that finds $14.3B in their jean pockets before the laundry to help send missiles raining down on people who lose their legs, their homes, their families while it all passes by my phone screen (made possible from the slavery and child labor driven by the Cobalt mining industry in Congo), a great big wave of human pain and suffering I don’t know what to do with as I cry in my bed.
The U.S. killed 3M Vietnamese people over eight years. I had to look at that number for a few minutes to really process it. Like this genocide, they justified the carpet bombing and use of Agent Orange because of the nature of guerilla fighting, that “Vietcong terrorists” were operating in tunnels underneath villages and the domestic places of innocent civilians, that there was somehow no other choice but to obliterate and dismiss millions of people as collateral damage in a proxy battleground against the specter of Communism. Does it sound familiar, falling back on the justification that lives can be spent because they’re “human shields?”
“Another aspect of Vietnamization was the repugnant use of terminology such as “body count” to describe enemy casualties, not to mention the U.S. military’s infamous use of euphemisms, outright lies and doublespeak: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” (Salon Magazine)
The escalation of sending missiles against Vietnam was based on lies the government sold to the American people around the Tonkin Gulf incident, retaliation for something that never actually happened. They continued to hide behind lies throughout the war, spending the lives of American soldiers and Vietnamese citizens like the endless pot of money for violence, for our defense budget that never seems to be depleted. The media funneled these lies until they no longer could, until people had access for the first time to televisions and photographic evidence of the casualties, of the cruelty, of the innocent blood spilled. The power of the people’s ability to witness for themselves the reality led to some of the biggest anti-war protest this country has ever seen.
“The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Right source: https://savetheflower-1967.tumblr.com/post/60264969522/vietnam-war-protesters-wichita-kansas-1967
Today, with our unprecedented access to high resolution videos of war atrocities, of the bombing of hospitals and schools and sanctuaries live-streamed by journalists over social media, what has been most distressing to me is realizing how far some can hide behind mere rhetoric in the face of real human lives, 15,000+ of them, whole families of them, bloodlines wiped out. How words seem to weigh more heavily than human bodies. How trauma buries itself into the fabric of someone’s body until it twists itself into blind fear and perpetuates the same violence against others. How we cannot see that this doesn’t make Israeli people or Jewish people safer, it doesn’t make any of us safer. War only splinters into more conflict, into more hatred embedded into the hearts of the victims of violence, those consequences spiralling through the halls of histories and families.
Last weekend I was at a retreat with a dear friend of mine Thea. She gathered a bunch of women who were freelancers or entrepreneurs, and we talked about strength and burnout. I was interviewed about what strength was to me, and I found myself talking about leaning on the histories and Stories of revolutionaries that came before me. Of people who made a difference because of their unwavering integrity and action. I’m thinking about the anti-war protests, of the eventual end of that war (millions of people too late, but nonetheless), of the power of student activism, of writers and artists who were brave enough to demand an end to senseless violence.
What has made me feel hopeful is the education spreading like wildfire across young people thanks to platforms like TikTok and that access to information, to witness the amount of people who are turning out in historic numbers in London, in Sydney, in New York, in Texas, people who are bringing their bodies together in public spaces to demand compassion and basic decency. What has given me hope is reading reports of direct action across the globe — dock workers refusing to unload war ships, protestors flooding a bridge with their cars, throwing the keys into the water below and chaining themselves to each other, labor organizations standing up together to protest the unjust wholesale murder of Palestinians, of Jewish people shutting down Grand Central Station in a powerful act of solidarity.
My hope is that our unbridled access to media and to the voices of the trampled can appeal to our better sides, can overcome the rhetoric and the propaganda and the misinformation, that the parts of us that are human and which demanded change and peace during the protests against the Vietnam War are still alive and ready to continue fighting, to be resilient and to recognize how these struggles affect us even if we are protected by the glow of our screens. I worry about continuing down this path of violence and genocide that we know never works, to never evolve past the darkest and most basest corners of the human psyche, of the consequences to our humanity if we look away, move on with our lives, watch it passively a decade down the line via a Netflix documentary. All struggles are connected, all of us are no different to each other, and to look away from that simple fact is to look away from yourself, to be separated from what makes you human.
“The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests, and in knowing who their enemies are. The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth