No Wonder

[Hook]And I wonder if you know What it means, what it means And I wonder if you know What it means to find your dreams

[Verse 1] I've been waiting on this my whole life These dreams be waking me up at night You say I think I'm never wrong You know what, maybe you're right, aight

[Hook]

[Verse 2] You say he get on your fucking nerves You hope that he get what he deserves, word Do you even remember what the issue is? You just trying to find where the tissue is You can still be who you wish you is It ain't happen yet And that's what intuition is When you hop back in the car Drive back to the crib Run back to their arms The smokescreens The chokes and the screams You ever wonder what it all really means?

[Hook]

[Verse 3] And I'm back on my grind A psychic read my lifeline Told me in my lifetime My name would help light up the Chicago skyline And that's why I'm Seven o'clock, that's primetime Heaven'll watch, God calling from the hotlines Why he keep giving me hot lines? I'm a star, how could I not shine? How many ladies in the house? How many ladies in the house without a spouse? Something in your blouse got me feeling so aroused What you about? On that independent shit Trade it all for a husband and some kids You ever wonder what it all really mean? You wonder if you’ll ever find your dreams?

You open the window for the first fucking time since the seven day smog siege and it feels good. You let the brisk air hit your nostrils and for the first time in seven years you appreciate breathing. You appreciate the act of pulling air from your nose and your mouth down your sore throat to fill your lungs. The air is filled with wounded diseases here, but you only hold on to the moment when being alive and being awake makes so much more sense than walking with a wound or not sleeping.

It took you a year and seven smog days to figure this out. Guess it's as they say, epiphanies only come after hardship. This is your crucible and you can let it kick you in the ass or you can go on humming "I Am a God." There are only two choices you face everyday and the right one, ladies and gentlemen, is always Kanye.

KANYE.

However Delicate

Annie said, "one day you'll regret this, you know." Two and a half years later you are not regretting so much as registering. Suddenly you remember the peacefulness of the tiny one bedroom, a home built together. You had purchased everything in the apartment together, down to the thin mattress pad you'd used to sleep on for a month and probably permanently damaged your necks and backs from. Eventually a bigger mattress was purchased, and finally a bed frame even. You'd gone from using scrappy notebooks to keep a budget to Mint. You were only able to carve out a life, in some ways, as a unit, in a city of wonders. You don't regret, can't, because regret doesn't really exist in a dimension you could really comprehend.

With time, you only learn to be more thankful. For every moment that was bestowed on you. And it is because of the past that you learn to appreciate the present, however delicate it might be.

With Love

This woman stitches you back, from the heels to your neck down all your joints, even tears she's strung them together like pearls and threw out with a peel of laughter. We spend an hour in the bakery then go shopping. She cooks for you at her place, the only three dishes that she knows: cauliflower with Laoganma, bamboo shoots with pork meat, eggs with tomatoes, and yes, a dessert made under five minutes in a microwave. She spends the entire day putting you straight and back together, piece by piece. To her you've let out every little angst twisted in a ball, and she untangles them with the astuteness of a sage. You don't understand how you are the same age and yet lack all the analytical abilities. Except maybe we're all experts in life except our own.

You owe her for this day.

You've heard of stories of a helping hand at our most destitute, or unfortunate moment, and how some years later you go back to this person and help them when they most need help. Well, you owe her for this one. You owe her for her patience, for her strength, for all the tales of men she regaled you with.

Thank you, Camilla.

List Making

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing." - Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises I've been making lists.

I've been making lists of movies, of my clothes, and of everything in between. I've been making lists in order to spot the trends and re-organize. Psychologist Meg Jay in a Tedtalk remarked that "our brains are re-wired in our twenties." In my late twenties, I begin to regret all the books that I haven't read, all the films that I haven't seen, and all the people that I haven't met and loved. In an attempt to reclaim the hours, I've been reading and watching and I've been making lists.

List 1: The Good People One of the best interviews I've heard on Fresh Air is Terry Gross' latest interview with Joaquin Phoenix. In a segment that is ostensibly filled with tension, awkwardness, and blunders, arises one of most frank and heartfelt conversations. There's something so feral and weird about Joaquin that he seems to be teetering between laughter (Mockumentary!) and a breakdown.

Usually this type of performance is reserved for an Oscar nomination. The idiosyncrasies that are spotlit on screen and deliciously drawn out, the scenes from movies where your soul accidentally pops out (like the Processing scene from The Artist). Then there is Joaquin Phoenix talking to Terry Gross, and it makes me feel like maybe we should all be a little bit weird around each other more often.

List 2: Places In preparation for a trip to Israel, I've been reading and I've been watching. The vast deserts of Lawrence of Arabia and propaganda segments from Youtube (Do not, for God's sake, search for "middle east" on Youtube). The stories of wars after wars and one failed treaty after another is brutal reading for anyone, but I'm growing increasingly excited to go because I love places of conflict. I don't love it for the atrocities, and the tangled knots of pain that may never be resolved, but I love those places because of the weight of the narrative. It's like riding a fixie. You have to be constantly alert and aware of your surroundings, because everything is history, a point of contention. It keeps you on your feet. It forces you to devour as much information as you can. Even if in the end there is no right.

List 3: Ideas Ken and I have started this daily exercise of submitting "fresh ideas" to a shared Evernote notebook. I was skeptical of the task of coming up with 365 ideas, but it seems to be rolling along. I guess the saying is true, "ideas are cheap." It's what you do with it. This will be the main challenge and goal for the year. One, to keep working, staying on top of management, learn about finance, and then finally, have time to realize one of these ideas. We spend too much time in school, or working for other people, sometimes not because we're not ready, but only because we're just too fucking scared. Well, before you get into an accident like T.E. Lawrence, make sure you've done something noble for someone, some continent, or just for yourself. Make yourself proud.

Don't be chicken shit.

List 4: Movies

I've never understood how my film buff friends did it. How they can watch three movies in a day. In fact, I remember a hazy afternoon in Santa Cruz spent with Ashley. It's sunny outside but we were inside with the shades drawn and I think we were on our third movie when I moaned: "how the hell do you guys watch so many movies in a day?"

Recluse I am now, movie-watching, or that is, good-movie-watching is becoming one of the most enjoyable experiences to kill a day. I don't do it often, but when I do, it's a matter of submerging oneself to the swirl of colors, experiences, worlds, and characters. Don't stop the swirls.

In my list-making, I'm learning that my favorite movies are Chinese-language ones. The lyrical Hou Hsiao-Hsiens and pitch perfect Jiang-Wens. American movies are great, brilliant, big-minded, but in the end what robs my heart are apparently Chinese sensibilities. I don't know if a heartbreaking gaze from Shu Qi or Ning Jing's piercing look is equivalent of a particular Chinese sentiment, but it's hit home, literally.

List 5: Moods It's one thing to keep track of your clothes and know that you have 19 sweaters (no more!!) than a desire to track your moods. Emotions are a fickle beast (and it makes us beautiful and unique, chime in the music). One reason I make lists, organize and try to spot trends is so that I have a deeper understanding of whatever subject at hand, to improve upon it, and diagnose the problems. All in all, I do it so I can control it. Not sure whether this is a sign of maturity or loss of sanity actually.

But really, who needs sanity. Keep it weird folks. That's the lesson of the day, and ongoing. KEEP IT WEIRD.

The Year

The year started with this, "your soul has direction." Actually, to back track properly, the year began with sickness prolonged by food poisoning and general uneasiness in the stomach, which to this day you still feel like you haven't fully recovered from. The fact of the matter is if you get sick in China, you don't just get sick for three of four days. Your body goes through thrashes of being permanently weakened, and full recovery may not happen until you leave the country for a bit. That's how I feel about this ever since getting hit with a cold that took a month to recover from last last year. Not just sickness, the China sickness. It's a sickness from the brows to the bowels.

Good thing your soul has direction. When Re said that, you quipped back with something like, "as long as it all ends in a crescendo." Sometimes you're pretty sure your mind hasn't changed from your fourteen-year-old self, and though lately you've begun to regret that you clearly didn't read enough at fourteen, you miss that sense of unabashed dreaminess, and weirdness, and everythingness. Everything is much more graceful and correct now. When you hear yourself speak with such gusto and move with purpose, when you work out and listen to NPR, when you subscribe to all the smart things and eat all the right brands of chocolates and listen to all the right bands, what's left? Where's the weird niche or the tiny universe that you could tuck yourself in?

But you're not Fei. You have this proclivity to appear together just to prove your type isn't some pushover dreamer type, until this effort to prove something has already re-wired your brain, and you can no longer not freak out when people are already four minutes late to the meeting and haven't called to let you know why.

But you go on, and you wade through, and you learn, hopefully you learn. That, beyond anything else is the New Year's resolution, that no matter what happens, you will learn, and you will love your parents. Right, you'll really have to do something with your two favorite people in the world, mom and dad. Who knew the tune of this one is going to you, but this year's for you guys.

A Year in Music

TOP FIVE ALBUMS Yeezus, Kanye West Good Kid M.A.A.D City, Kendrick Lamar Doris, Earl Sweatshirt 安和桥北, 宋冬野 Pure Heroine, Lorde

TOP FIVE TRACKS

Unravel, björk Collect Calls, Kendrick Lamar A.D.H.D, Kendrick Lamar The Wolves, Bon Iver Constant Conversations, Passion Pit

LOVE

NYC: 73 - 78 (Beck Remix), Philip Glass Unravel, björk Thinkin' About You, Frank Ocean Lucky Charm, Juicy J

WORK

La Familiar, Jay-Z BBC, Jay-Z Congratulations, MGMT

PARTIES

Cold Nites, How to Dress Well Soft Shock, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Doin' It Right (feat. Panda Bear), Daft Punk Skeletons, Yeah Yeah Yeahs Goooo, TNGHT 6 Foot 7 Foot, Lil Wayne Drop the Game, Flume & Chet Faker C.R.E.A.M., Wu-Tang Clan

RUNNING/BIKING

I Am a God, Kanye West All of Kendrick Wut (5kinAndBone5), Le1f Beez In The Trap, Nicki Minaj Grown Up, Danny Brown

CHILLIN

Blood On The Leaves, Kanye West Started From The Bottom, Drake Love Fame, Tyga Retrograde, James Blake Weightless, Washed Out Dope Song, Danny Brown Man of the Year, Schoolboy Q

Overall: Not all albums/songs from 2013. Heavy on Hip-Hop, probably should diversify for next year, but the apparent best showing for the alternative rock sound, Vampire Weekend's "Modern Vampires Of The City," which have topped all the end of year lists， just didn't work for me at all. Even Hannah Hunt (play count 9) replays at a thin emotional range for me. I think part of it is I'm becoming adverse to anything skinny post-ivy white boy in Brooklyn psyche and why I'm glad I'm in Beijing instead of the capital of hipster. Modern Vampires represents for me a shout out to a bygone era. Instead of looking forward to experimentation it's a slide back to traditional tinkering and lovelorn lyrics. It's like Holden Caulfield finally grew up and got it together and you're still not sure you want to hang out with him. The cerebral, neatly packaged aspects of Vampire Weekend is so clean cut that it attacks at the very idea of what alternative rock should be, and I had no idea I had such strong feelings against Vampire Weekend.

I haven't listened to individual tracks on Yeezus that much, but each time listening to the album on a whole has been kind of shockingly life changing, like I haven't had a cohesive experience of really _listening_ to an album for a long time. This album, in terms of its cacophonous, non-sensical narrative (lyrics? sputtering?), the embodiment of a man who's literally falling from the edge and exploding his canvas, has challenged, piqued the listener rather than sedate and agree. It's what art should be. To provoke. To reject. To awaken. I'd rather live and burn out like this than quietly trudging, making intricate patterns, but of course, not everyone can be genius. The rest of us can prattle on and worship. Also, for fuck's sake, it's 2013, I'd much rather have the discourse dictated by a black man than some white boys (wow, who knew I had all this hate).

Kendrick is a personal favorite. The man singlehandedly tops the play counts in my playlist, and if we were spinning records Good Kid M.A.A.D City is probably on its last run. In fact, I'm pretty much sure I've overplayed this album to the point of nausea. It's less sublime than at a more reasonable play count, but Kendrick represents a nimble, smart, honest, self-reflective type of music that is just so taut that you can't help to marvel at every syllable. Plus you can't help but to replay because production is good and Kendrick, who seems so mild-mannered, so unassuming even, is a chameleon and real performer. In one track he's a desperate kid in jail pleading with his mama, pleading with life, in another he conjures MLK and hails new lifestyle. He is at once a towering figure and yet small and nimble. He's general and a soldier. Also I just find him undeniably sexy. Rhymes like witchcraft. Nothing sexier than that.

This is the year of prodigies, and we should be so blessed that the Internet has allowed voices like Earl Sweatshirt, Gevi Tavinson, and Lorde out. I've always found teenage voices one of the most intriguing point of views, partly because my own teenage years were so full of internal raging and passions. Unlike most 14-year-olds though, these three kids, not all musicians, are precocious to a level that puts the rest of us to shame, and yet still are able to retain a timber of honesty in their voices. Earl Sweatshirt, with all his hums, nums, and refs to his father, relationships, has problems like we all do, but is able to narrate them like a ponderous prophet, half poet, half humanity. I dig. Lorde, well, Lorde is actually just Katniss in real life, so she gets a shout out.

The lone Chinese voice on my list, 宋冬野, it's pretty sad. I feel like I'm losing a piece of my identity if I lose indie Chinese music, so next year I'm going to have to pick it up. 宋冬野 represents everything that I find endearing about the folk-rock-indie music scene that recalls all the cool pieces of my childhood. That's right, the only time I've ever felt cool as a kid was not getting into Japanese fashion, but listening to Chinese rock n' roll was a real identity awakening and a very honest way of reconnecting with the motherland. So shout out to 宋冬野 and his 安和桥北. All I need to hear is a "北五环“ for a heartbreaking moment. Nothing touches me quite like talking in Chinese, speaking Chinese, and hence, listening to Chinese.

It's why I'm in China, kids. It's why I wake up everyday with excitement beneath my toes and with the regained conviction that I'm exactly where I need to be. Jin says, I envy your sense of self, of knowing what you need to be. Most people find careers in their life, but I guess I'm lucky that my only sense of direction was China. I almost don't care what I do here. As long as I can witness the mess of changes, work hard, and have these melodic moments where just being here makes me want to jump and shout.

Life is only so simple.

Waiting for Dusk

Waiting for the perfect dusk and when it arrives in painterly form - burnt orange sun, tall chimney smoke, birds in flock - you think this image is all you need to watch time slide by. I picked up Susan Cain's Quiet (Page One, paperback form) in the midst of too many books on backlog (this is what happens with Kindle), and having the misfortune/luck of two all-nighters resulting in work from home next day, I'm really relishing in the mode of being alone and doing one thing at once like, listening to This American Life while lying on the couch instead of running/biking while listening to a podcast. Beijing never slowed down for me since the day I arrived. I haven't stopped working, socializing, dating, running, biking since coming here two years ago, and the result, evidently, is an introvert forced into the jacket of an extrovert. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to learn in the years of pursuing writing that what I really want out of a career is to be with people. I don't think one is necessarily more noble than the other, but just that long, extended, disciplined periods of solitude isn't for me. Learning to work with people -- whether it's co-workers, vendors, clients -- is one of the most valuable experiences I've had in the past year, and will carry me through whatever artistic or professional route I want to pursue, but lately (or maybe for the past year) I'm slowly coming to grasp the importance of being alone, and how it is absolutely ok to not fill your weekends with outings and gatherings.

You see, sitting here in the nook and just watching the sun dip past the horizon, staring at two middle-aged western men wearing heavy grayish Cold War era coats, or noticing the fact that the street lamps go up at exactly 5:05PM (now who gets to decide such a thing) provide just as a nuanced moment as coffee with a friend. In these hours of the pause, our body and mind learns to restore and reflect, organize and ready itself for creation.

In the era of Go Go Go and celebration of the extrovert, the queen of PR, the urbane mind is often caught up in a frenzy. My mind, for one, however disciplined and bland, has learned to adjust to the rigorous schedule of running while listening to podcasts, cooking while listening to podcasts, biking while listening to podcasts, riding the train while reading kindle, working while listening to music, reading and writing, socializing. The intensity of multitasking and the to do list, in the end, beckons just this -- watching the sun slide away like the imperfect sunny side up you attempted at 3:00PM.

Maybe this is why in all the drama evoked from relationships in the past two years, I ended up with a man who I spent time being in comfortable silence with. We were probably the strangest of buddies. Me in my nook and him on the couch, not talking except for the passing of tea. That was it for four months. We'd read and work in the living room kitchen and end the night with dinner downstairs. Moments that were completely mundane and extraordinary in their lack of content. I hope, in the passage of time, that despite how we learn and grow, we will always have those moments of the golden hour.

Poison, Her Tears are Poison

I'm the type of girl writing out PR/Marketing plans while listening to stark songs. I want to learn all about ROIs and income statements between RapGenius' annotated lyrics for Earl Sweatshirt. It's time to grab the Accounting 101 books and dice through moments of fiction. I didn't think it's possible to be this way, until I see him: ice-coffee drinking, meeting-going, world-traveling, blunt-rolling him. If love was a textbook I say he's becoming my unremitting mentor, and from the way he absorbs the world I learn the rhythm and pace of "doing" and remaining effortlessly calm. The past year, more than anything else, has been a tapestry of new worlds opened by information, and a bottomless appetite for all things that move me deeply. I am curious, deeply curious, and only too blessed to be able to experiment with ideas that I learn from paper to put to action. There is an excitement that fills me everyday in a routine of regiment, because realizing that creativity and productivity comes from a place of control and organization is probably one of the biggest gains this year (correction: I'm not talking about becoming a Rilke here...).

As for Rilke, there is a fear that words are drifting far from me. Even as I consume more words than ever, I write less and probably write less well, but it will remain an outlet in which I am most lethal. Words, like everything else in life right now, is a place where I can organize and create.

Cheers to end of the year.

Villains

"I'm getting a theme here that you seem to think I over-think too much." You've never met a man who is so absolutely sure of himself, who is so comfortable in his skin that no earth can shake him. R noted so long ago of this, observing that his self-assurance comes from a place of privilege. You've always thought you were good at reading people but you didn't see this coming at all. All you knew was dude had good music taste and watched rachet videos and the moment he came from the cold and instead of reaching out to hug you hello, he reached down to your boot in a motion that resembled an embrace and said, "cold." Weird.

He didn't eat that much at all, so much so you thought he was either on a diet or hated Vietnamese food. He didn't eat much but you did talk about goals and purpose and work, and when you're done he walked you home in the dark. It was the night before New Year's Eve and you were still a holiday behind before you fell in love with dude who watched rachet videos.

Been a year already. You want to rewind the scenes just to make sure they happened, that the people you know really did appear and disappear. The other day you ended up mixing a memory of being with him at a certain place that was actually with someone else. Everything becomes a blur in this world. It's your very own 1Q84.

Life is simpler now in a sense. Focuses are work, books, music, movies, running/biking. You don't let life carry you away too much. You lay low and work on a steady flow of things. Listening to Earl Sweatshirt between CocoRosie to remind yourself of your anti-social femininities. It's good times to be alive if you don't over-think it.

You're practicing detachment liked a damned Sofia Coppola film.

Remember Modern Dancing

Remember modern dancing in the dark, to Moby, no doubt. Limbs contorted. Bones in flight. You say, "baby, you are really getting into this." I reply, "of course." Because what is there to do if not huff and puff across bed sheets and bedlam. So we lift, so we reach, so we burn oh so hard for a moment where control gives away to an inner weird in a language that only we could understand. I tell my roommate about these management books I'm reading, and how I've only been reading so much of it because the recent bedtime reading of choice -- One Hundred Years of Solitude -- turns out to be so grand in scale, so many characters that it's just plain damn difficult.

"That says a lot, doesn't it," my roommate says. That says a lot about you, reading all these management books instead of underlining quotes from fashion zines.

I'm not sure what it says, but deep down inside, in my core of being, I haven't changed at all from the girl with a bundle of emotions and tendencies.

I hope this never ends, this thirst for living, these moments of weird.

Cleaning Record

You start seriously cleaning again because work is getting ridic busy again. You clean because you need to know exactly where everything belongs and whether or not if they serve a purpose in your life. You clean so you know you have two white tank tops and two black tank tops and five long sleeve undershirts from the zoo from shopping with Banning last year (was it? Last year?) You're so fake posh now that you think you need to get better undershirts because shirts from the zoo might not just cut it, because even though you can't see it they don't bloody well keep you warm. This is how you start buying expensive suitcases and coats. You wonder if this is how it all starts. Part of it might just be getting old being respectable from head to toe, inside out. You want to optimize your pieces of wardrobe like you want to optimize every part of you. This striving only comes hardest when you're busiest, because when you're busy, your personal time become precious, and you spend it reading, writing, running, cooking. You love studying more than you ever have. You love reading more than you ever have. You love working more than you ever have. You love talking more than you ever have. You love listening to music more than you ever have.

When you heard Lou Reed died, the first person you think of is Sasha, and how you guys watched Velvet Goldmine. You started it backwards because you were going through a teenage rebel phase against everything that was western, so you were into Japanese J-Rock and Indie, good shit, ok? Still good shit. You got Sasha into it too, and you thought you were so cool that your best friend who was a white girl got into weird Japanese music with you and here you were two weird girls in Ohio. Then Sasha got in Bowie, and Lou Reed, music that her mom liked (you think), and you knew it was cool. You knew it was cool but you still couldn't dig deep into it.

All in due time. There's always a right time for everything, like the same guy he bumped into in the elevator on arrival and leaving and you both said, "缘分." Maybe one day you'll all meet again, but at the right time and place, and the conversation will extend.

You're really thankful for his space heater. It's a little log of warmth that lights up the universe inside you. You really wished there was more time to read, write, study, work, learn, and just lying there shooting the shit with him, and with friends.

It's funny how when you're young you write in blogs when you're chewing on something melancholy, and these days you write when you want to rave about organization and having an virtual excel sheet of everything in your mind. A matrix to make sense of the world, if you will. I will do my best to organize and make sense of things despite how they might not make sense here, and I will try not to complain because I will remember it is precisely those obstacles that bred opportunities.

In other words, this girl's gone cray.

Io

10/6/2013 You have something like three more hours in the city of the ancients. You think you finally got kissing on the both cheeks down. Instead of just making the pecking sound and following through with the motions, you've now kissed the cheeks of strangers like you've been doing it since age nine. In the city of strangers you study lovers. You study the way they hold their hands, the way their arms loosely cling to each other, the way they walk together in stride. They, like you, are mostly strangers to the city. All have flown hours from other worlds, and their stories are caught in a moment here. You wade through the American tourists with their mid-western drawl, a drawl that is rounded by a touch of the jovial that is so familiar to you.

Sometimes you talk down on the mid-west like it's a blip in the narrative of your life, a mistake almost of how you ended up there, and the conclusion that your heart belongs to New York, but it's like David Bryne says, "Like a lot of people, I grew to disdain the suburbs, their artificialness and sterility. But I could never shake them entirely. There was some kind of weird fascination and attraction that I can't quite get out of my system." For the girl who always lived on the edge of suburbia, who was enthralled by even the idea of a house, who's never lived in a house, there are hard memories from suburbia encased in ember.

Still I think of those streets that I've passed by so many times to and fro from school. The tree-lined, house-lined streets, the square plazas that look identical to any other mid-sized American town, the Pizza Hut by the corner, the dilapidated buildings in the city center, the ghost mansion, the cemetery. That was my world for eight years. The idylls that I will never again return to--my world, all of my world.

How different would I have been if I'd lived in New York like him? Would I be one of those tough, savvy New Yorkers so hard at the core? Would I be precocious to the point of tragedy, bags under my eyes and a heavy soul? Would I be smarter, snappier, sharper? Would I have roamed the clubs by age fifteen and been friends with all the skateboarder boys and the DJs? Would I have been the weird Chinese girl? Or would I have still been the nerd, the bedroom fangirl clicking her way into niche fandoms that stole me away from anything and everything that had to do with Ohio? Do I reject that identity even as it grips me?

In Florence those days seem faraway and trivial. Somehow those days made you hard, harder than any New Yorker could be, because you remember that exact moment when you swore that this was the lowest you can be and that you are better than this, you will get out and you will live. You will get out and you will one day have the view of the promenade from the fucking bedroom. You will live. You will earn New York the proper way, not by inheritance, but by fighting. You went there every spring break, winter break, summer break, conference break, every chance you got. You got kissed by strangers and got internships and went to parties in basements and listened to sigur ros in basements paralyzed and talked about poetry on fire escapes and wrote stories and ate tacos and acted really jaded and pretentious and met real, hard New Yorkers that you love, you just love.

You love the city, and your story will never end with it.

This is what you think of in Florence instead of stuffing your face in gelato. You make a mental note of how you have to fight back to New York one day, to earn it again like the way Dominique had to fight back to Roark.

Gorgeous

"I like the way you move.""Thanks, I think."

情人眼里出西施。You know you are in love, or something akin to getting closer to some truth in life, when you're mesmerized. Just all the damn time. Just all the damn time.

A Mind I Knew

You make the mistake of reading old emails. You notice the ease in every word. Nothing epic, yet something epic stitched in every affection, every greeting and closing. There's so much romance in youth, in fighting together. You make the mistake of reading old emails, but you're glad you did. Your new email from your lover is a catalogue from Rick Owens Home. He gushes about wearing black and looking disaffected and sexy. There are ostrich skin pillows, metal black cubes covered in pony fur, and mink involved. You run for miles these days and is beginning to look cooler and more disaffected day by day. You wrote him an email with headers that mention consistency, timelines, and management just to illustrate that point. This is "me knowing exactly what I want," I tell friend A. Friend B tells me, "this is you paranoid?"

End of story, you don't even like writing emails anymore. Maybe all that's left of the emotional side of you is the photo she took of you, in black of course, leaning and looking disaffected.

Make It

Make time.Make work. Make friends. Make bikes. Make good. Make food. Make love.

Be a maker.

Make it.

MidLevel Esculators

NIKE PROJECT Our Nike project finally wrapped up, here are some highlights.

- Joe: (staring at his hand, palm up) 女人，你在哪里？女人？？ - Record heat wave in Shanghai's history - Strongest typhoon in ten years in Guangzhou - Photographer got food poisoning and was puking his guts out before a location shoot and contemplated "how am I going to tell Qing Qing that she's going to have to find another photographer?" - Plan A: No Rain. Plan B: Rain with tarp. Plan C: Rain all indoor locations. - Feedback from client: "best local shoot we've done."

All in all, waking up at 4AM, 5AM consecutively was a killer, but I'd do it in a heartbeat. I love my job, because it forces me to grow as a leader, woman, thinker, and decision-maker. Also I'll be just too bored otherwise. Embrace experiences that flip you inside out and poke at your guts and push you to your limits. That's all I'm saying.

HK

At some point of the night, we high-fived. The instance to what we high fived to is completely irrelevant to the analogy I'm about to make, which is the day and half we spent in Hong Kong felt just like that: a high five in the middle of somewhere in between, a cameo between lovers, a quick peck in another realm of the unfamiliar.

I guess Hong Kong is station #5. Beijing was a meeting of two people across the worlds. Tianjin was love and magic, our bubble of unreality. Shanghai was mutual resignation to a place we loved to hate on. New York was home, and Hong Kong, well Hong Kong was riding up the midlevel escalators until we hit the clouds. He in his dress shoes and me in my sandals, we climbed up the 75 degree incline until we hit mist and the only thing we could see were mainland tourists.

Of course the only proper way to finish the day is shopping, and the only way to shop are Rick Owens leather wedges. I wore it out to some improv jam session place and felt like a queen. He says, “People forget that clothing can be an armor.”

In my Rick Owens leather wedges and red lipstick makes me feel like one of those cliched scenes where the ugly duckling becomes all powerful and beautiful, and “what is power?” the topic of our dinner conversation, ultimately rested on freedom for him. For me, I don't even know how much freedom a girl needs having crossed from China to Ohio to New York and back, I'm blessed enough. Here's what I think, I believe in betterment.

I believe power is having the ability to create better systems to bring out the best in others. I believe in creating a world where others have a chance to be powerful. That's meaningful work for me, and that's what will keep me going. I believe in working quietly, steadily, and making incremental changes.

As for the girl who somehow stumbled into owning a Rick Owens jacket and shoes, I don't know if she's slowly being transformed, if her perspectives are skewed, if in five years she will be a woman unrecognizable to the 22-year-old she was.

“I'm wearing all black so you don't look tougher than I do,” says my lover. Nothing sexier him, and the way we move through the crowds of these anonymous cities we dwell.

ARI

The last time I saw Ari we walked from the Bronx all the way down to Battery Park. He was just in the beginning of scrambling to get his company started, a pharmaceutical thing that has its arms and legs on the Internet. We made three lobsters in the tiny one bedroom in Sunset Park.

Four years later he and his girl are riding it out in Hong Kong. They are doing well, and our conversations somehow circled around accounting, business, real estate and how Hong Kong must be a miserable place to bring up kids.

“What did we talk about when we were kids?” We barely remember, and maybe there's nothing wrong with being ambitious and weird.

Seeing him again made me see a reflection of myself, and how much time and experience have changed us. “What will we be talking about in three, five years?” I asked. More business? Kids? Life moves on. Make dents. Crash into cul de sacs. If it feels like you are not sure where you're going, remember those escalators at mid levels. You'll never know what the scenery might be like up there, but make sure you're going up.

BEIJING

Coming home is the biggest relief of the month. Even the smog makes you feel a little grounded, along with the traffic, the unruliness of it all. At some point I wonder if this means I'm adverse to adventure, but a friend corroborated that Hong Kong is no place to relax. The entire place made me edge close to an aneurysm - the endless stretch of malls, all this business talk, all this concrete.

Thank God I'm home. All I'm going to do is stare at my wooden ceiling.

Kendrick II

"I'm trying to ween myself off of Kendrick Lamar," I say. Instead it turns out it's much more fun to tunnel in than to drift from one album to another. Albums are cheap these days, not just the cost of buying one, but the very experience of listening to music is cheapened. Easy come, easy go, because the act of procuring music is a click of a button, so is the motion of hitting next on your iPhone.

Listening to Kendrick Lamar, Good Kid M.A.A.D City and Section 80 is like going back to being fifteen and scanning every word to your favorite band. It's the act of collecting albums, making scrap books, flying out to concerts, going on message boards to find out everything about them. I wouldn't say the degree of "obsession" will ever approach a similar attitude that could only be achieved when you're fifteen, but I will say I'm okay with not being weened off of Kendrick Lamar.

In fact, the plethora of information makes me feel like, if we could only just pace ourselves, there's a universe of wealth out there. There are lyric annotations, youtube visuals, crowd sourced reinterpretations, if we can just halt Spotify for a moment and not speed through life, maybe we can learn to appreciate finer things in a finer way.

This is how I want to do life. Even if sometimes work and life feels like it's spinning out of control, it is important to slow down and taste your food, listen to your album on repeat.

Kendrick

You have to stop listening to Kendrick Lamar. It's starting to put holes in your brain. Like a gun, to the head, blasting holes. It's so good, and strong, and tough, and real, and you explained this to him, you "like the texture of his voice, the grittiness, the fact that he can flit from character to character like a chameleon." you "like that he has the normalest black man's face." Nothing special, no diva, just brilliant. Your new favorite words are, lately, in no particular order: strong, tough, and real, simple words that can stand on all fours. You wrote to Patrick, "someday I'm going to write an obnoxious novel with headers." You miss him. He's one of those people you wish would get married already so you can fly the fuck to his wedding and even if he'll be too busy to have coffee with you, that's okay. He's dating a girl name Candace who is also a writer. It's awesome. You wonder why you start to use weddings as an excuse to see your friends.

In fact, you should probably stop listening Kendrick, A$AP, Kanye, Drake, Schoolboy Q, Tyga and all of them for a while, just for a change of mindscape you know. Maybe not so strong and tough and real all the time. Maybe Enya, or Bossa Nova, that Billie Holiday for the sultry summer heat.

Our Nike shoot that we're producing is starting tomorrow. I don't normally write about anything other than emotions in this thing, but since this project will be my life for the next two weeks, I'm going to say: this Nike shoot we're producing is starting tomorrow.

One more thing is, I really like the room I'm living in right now in the Hutong. It's kind of kick ass.

Love Letters for All

Sunday mornings, you drink your tea, you stare out into the world from his double-digit floored apartment. It's like fortified bubble in a cacophony of motion, movement, and people. You think about everything. You think about love letters you write, to friends on their birthdays, to friends on the other side of the world. You don't believe in writing love letters to lovers. You believe in love letters for the moment, for the missing, for all. Sometimes you don't even differentiate the degree of love. The love is in the very act of the love letter. There do you sift and organize and aggrandize until one day you're at her wedding and you dissolve into a puddle of lonely nutrients. Once upon a time, you used to meet your former lover off the D stop on Grand. He'd get off work. You'd get off work. You'd find cheap eats in Chinatown: a bowl of pho, a dish of squid stir-fry. What you remember is not quite the food, it's that moment when your eyes met across the intersection, and he stared and smiled at you with the most exuberant, dazzling smile that you knew. You knew it would be the kindest, purest smile you'd ever get in your life. In that exact moment, when you smiled back, you also realize, with the core of your being, that this won't last. Someday you'll lose that smile. Someday it won't be for you, and maybe not because of the forces of nature, but sheerly from your own will. Years later when your mind lingers to the D stop on Grand, you write to a mutual friend, "he's the kindest I've ever known, and he will be all right." And we, whatever we were, and whatever world we constructed together, will stay with us, and shape us, and propel us to become better people. But I, I will always treasure that one moment when love touched you so deeply with a smile, a caress.

My new lover is afraid to look at me in the eyes from afar. When I asked him about this in the dark, he explained that he was cataloguing the experience of a new place - the trees, the old man with a watermelon, the kids, as if he's stitching a landscape of west side Beijing. He's inquisitive and strong and I don't really know what he's thinking behind the veil of his eyes. Some people use their eyes as window to their soul, some to put a buffer on their heart. He, he is the armor your want to embrace in your fortified bubble floating in space.

What kind of a stereotype am I

1) Ride fixies2) Live inside the second ring 3) Only date men who smoke (it just so happens) 4) No beer, only wine & whiskey 5) Run 6) Early riser 7) Workaholic 8) Like designer clothes that I can't afford like Damir Doma and Rick Owens 9) Black music 10) Journal keeper 11) Breakfast eater 12) Apparently serious (work) 13) Apparently careless (relationships) 14) Apparently reckless (relationships) 15) Apparently rigorous (work) 16) Apparently will finally know who I am at age 30, but not necessarily for better, so says our stylist for the latest shoot.

Nic is more than a stylist. Nic is a smooth talking PR machine who can arrest you with one diplomatic gaze and gay gesture. As 花生酱 would say, "the gays will take care of it," and so they do, with levity, diplomacy, professionalism, and a command that is wholly trustworthy. Nic says I'm detail oriented, in the best way, but 严谨 in my ears sounds more like I've got my soul trapped between a rock and hard place. Somewhere along the line, you grow up a little too quick and your sense of self has already gone on without you.

Upon these days where the minutes tick so fast that you can't keep track anymore, you can only hold your breath and go on. Hold your breath and go on.

Hold it.