Table by the Window

And I'll miss this desk by the window, this bed beside the wall. This is theoretically my third favorite after a serial chain of apartments -- the first being the Hutong dig perfect for the laowai looking for Beijing authenticity, the bathroom of which looked out in the courtyard and when it's sunny the light splatters on your wet, shampooed hair. My second favorite apartment overlooked the May Fourth plaza, where the movement originated, and on the other side, grand courtyard homes being reinvented. I took that apartment from Rong Rong, and inherited a wall of cat pictures and miscellaneous curios before wiping the place down in an act to organize my mind. It didn't have the best light, but one good nook and a great small kitchen. I finished vol. 3 of 1Q84 there and felt like Qingdou in her hide out apartment the whole time.

So the third, this one with the best fengshui and best sunlight, where a year went by in a heartbeat. It is a desk, a bookshelf, a closet, and bedside table. It is everything a girl might need for the rest of her life, and it is leaving, yet again, for some other configuration and window light.

Hard to write about changes, especially when the minutia of the moments add up, and you crave something more after all the Evernote, tasks, and 沟通ing  is done. Maybe like Haruki and his baseball bat, or Jung and his active dreaming, it's time to collect, and create.

Witchetty Grubs

"But Boris -- like an old sea captain -- put them all to shame. He had ridden a camel; he had eaten witchetty grubs, played cricket, caught malaria, lived on the street in Ukraine ("but for two weeks only"), set off a stick of dynamite by himself, swum in the Australian rivers infested with crocodiles. He had read Chekhov in Russian, and authors I've never heard of in Ukrainian and Polish. He had endured midwinter darkness in Russia where the temperature dropped to forty below: endless blizzard, snow and black ice, the only cheer the green neon palm tree that burned twenty-four hours a day outside the provincial bar where his fathered liked to drink." - The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt I find, after a year, the best nook in the house. It's in the northeast corner where you can simultaneously see the moon (on these good, rare AQI 50 days) and the lights from the Worker's Stadium that like flash like a multi-colored electric torch. Finding a nook here is more important than liking the smallness, or the actual nook of the Hong Kong apartment. It is more important than being at the balcony in the New York apartment. Saying all of this sounds absurd, as if existing on parallel planes.

The nook gazes out to the hollow of the city, and it's Patrick who reminded me of its majesty and possibility when he said, "guys I fell asleep looking at the night sky." Incredible. The same radiant, golden boy Patrick, sleeping in the nook in Beijing, remarking on the skies the way we moaned about loneliness in Ohio.

During college in Ohio, when it felt like we could see miles and miles stretch from the rooftop of the Beta House. We'd climbed up to the slanty roof, tearing our best jeans in process, and be a rooftop closer to the moon. Even while we craned for the celestial, it never felt precious until today. Drowned in a city of lights, moons and stars beyond legendary, and it was Patrick that reminded me of the one place in the apartment where a date can be made.

It was good seeing him. In the way that planets align and you finally knew for sure, for sure that what goes around come around. So was that fateful meeting 10 years (10!) ago of him and I, of yearnings for China, and a tolerance for cosmic weirdness.

Many things have happened. A shift in geography. A shift in necessity. The roamer is ready to feed again, and even while, I, like dearest Rob, may feel the uncertainty shining with the moon's lonely halo. The heart is also ravished again. For more. For the next continent. For everything.

Bali

Bali is many singular things.

Bali is stray dogs, offerings, waves, traffic, motorbikes, warungs, suckling pig, smoked duck, Aussies, surfers, a grace, dignity, and gentleness that make you question the singular strengths of all these things, and how woven together, they become a rare moment of rugged serenity.

At first you kind of hate it, because nothing about the traffic suggest paradise. The main arteries that link up to Seminyak from your sleepy surf village, Canggu, are few in between (in fact, there is really just one going north and one going east, passing Pepitos, the big grocery store catering to local expats with cheese and granola).

We made the mistake of making a grocery run on the first day to stock up our Airbnb, and in turn, Bali sucked us in and spat us out with fumes and bumpy roads. In a daze, and stocked with milk, juice, and donut snacks from the market, I swore to take smaller routes on the way back, and found them cutting cross villas and rice fields. The road would curve up and down and narrow suddenly. No lights except the moon, and other headlights crossing in front, behind, and past, existed. So it was in these wayward roads and shortcuts that I found a touch of nostalgia, when I used to ride my bike in the darkness of Nankai U or to Big Auntie's in Heping District in the nineties.

There were other ways in Bali that reminded me of the way things were, or the way things are supposed to be. They collided in the form, as Ken playfully puts it, "Eat Eat Love." Nothing, not work, not phone, stopped in the way of eating our way through Bali. Yet the most memorable moment perhaps still lived in the scratched out "pray," when, pummeled by a wave, you grab fiercely onto your surfboard, hull your heavy body back on the wax board, and saw at the far end of the beach a Hindu ceremonial procession marked by Gamelan music. That was it. The image and moment will live in your mind's eye forever. So will the first time surfing, the first time paddling out to the waves, to the sun, with such purpose, and such gravity.

The magnitude of mother nature has never dawned until one experiences surfing, and there it will, staring at you in the eye, carrying you, and in the next instant, throwing you. Surfers write about the waves they love as a ferocious, beautiful woman. I can see why now. At 14 you went to Hawai'i for the first time and came back with surf fever (even though you didn't learn to surf then) via plastering walls with pages of blue from Surf mags,. At 28 you learned to surf, but more importantly, you learned what happens after the surf, and that is, the sitting. In Canggu beach ("Our Fort Tilden," he joked), we sat on the parking lot steps during sunset after two hour surf sessions and do nothing except sit. The occasional stray dog with his feral eyes would pass by and meditate on the moment with us, and that was it. That was our Bali, and nothing was better than everything.

3AM in Brooklyn

The last time you were up at 3AM rolling through Brooklyn in a car listening to Rae Sremmurd was basically never, so when in did happen in the way of friends stuffing bikes in the van, Ferris calling from the curb (we all thought he was crazy), then driving to some random hipster bar in Bed-Stuy, passing by Ari's house and seriously thinking about waking up the dude (he was sick), then did I understand what he meant by "everything's just so easy here." Maybe easy was the reason why we left, but in 2.5 days you do appreciate the ease and pleasure of having double steaks, walkable streets, gorgeous weather, happening, ambitious people. New York is still the best, even in ridiculous condensed time segments. Everything's a bit like a dream, including carousals, J and B, and my mind melting into a margarita.

All I can remember are Schmoney dances, being hit on by shorties (props to the real men in New York), then crashing into baby boy.

----

After announcing his 15-year-plan during dinner, H turned to us and said, "I love you guys." He said it with such effortlessness that it made me realize that, oh yeah, I kind of do love these guys. Even if our friendship didn't entail the proximity of college roommates, even though we spend most of our days with co-workers, I really appreciate all the friends I've come to know here. These adventure-seekers, these nutters, these us...

Next steps are difficult to make our, but I'm taking it day by day. If you commit to something, commit to it 100%. It's important to commit to the day you're living.

On Beauty

Since we live in the age of consultants, branded selves, and ten-minute talks, since we solve all of life's matters with an app, pass boredom with an app, and share our thoughts on love through an app, this is what I miss. I miss tiled wallpapers, livejournals from 1997, the crack of a smile on his face at two in the morning. I miss the Internet as a messy, emotional, amorphous wad of mysteries. I miss flawed, intensely personal moments not perfected by a logo. I miss run on sentences that doesn't contain a mission, vision, or action steps.

This might go against everything I've learned to hone in the past years in a push to over-plan and over-organize. What I miss is the deep and honest moments that bare a beauty uncontrived.

In New York at two in the morning. I encounter for the first time, chaos that felt real, conversations with real humans, warped space and time. Suddenly I understand why Angelina adopts eight kids. What else do you do when you have the world if not to own the world?

I believe in beauty from craft, patience, time, idiosyncrasies, and most of all, stories that might expose the fragility in the best of us.

The Professional Wedding Goer

"Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly. Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully growin into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention." -The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer

Who knew at some point you'd become a professional wedding goer. You just go through the motions now. The thoughtfully designed invitations, the new dress you pick out appropriate for both wedding and client meeting, the miles you travel, the ceremony, the bride's costume changes, the toasts, the parents, the smiles.

At some point, life becomes a rehearsal of milestones, and everyone a puppet of fate. If the spotlight is bright enough, and you are giving your Oscar-worthy performance, then a moment breaks through at these milestone moments, and life is sheer fucking gorgeous. Other times, such as when you are subject to witness too many of other people's milestones, you feel a little helpless, like something is inevitably ending in the way that childhood ended, and sixteen ended, and your first job ended, and your first love ended.

Milestones are reminders that no matter how special you thought you were, you will fall into the design of being human. That no matter how hard you dreamed of being exceptional, the urge to love, to carry a child, to have the good life, to have peace, to reach the happy ending is an alienable right.

Going to Annie's engagement party reminded me of how young we still are. If thirty is the new twenty then here we are, graduating from teenagehood and whimsy. Yet on the other end we talk about friends in small voices, those who didn't quite yet find the script of their lives. What are they still doing circling that intersection, and when will they find the compass of their lives?

Now is no longer the time to linger on the curb, the world seems to say. Now is the time to be poised and knowing. Now is the time to get your act together, and perform. Or maybe, now is the time to cherish what you have, and live not for society or anyone's expectations, but only yours, and what you excites you, live for yourself.

Bunnies, Iberian Ham, and Atama Daijoubu?

This all happened in one night. One moment you were downing your third Veuve Clicquot champagne, the last full bar you heard Brent utter after a bite of the Iberian ham was "we're gonna have to carry this girl home." The next you were whisked to a ballroom full of the party people, normal looking party people except the occasional patterned kimono or yukata. Your head grew dizzy, like it's being squeezed. The boy band on stage did perfect boy band dancing. You ran to the counter for a glass of water, the bartender says something about picking up coins. You ran to the bathroom, a row of bunny girls took over real estate around the mirrors. You wait in line to pee, thinking about the Yakuza boss man and what the fuck did they put in the champagnes, then next thing you know your eyes snap open from your head hitting the ground and a girl gasped and helped you up and pointed to your head, "atama!" and kept on asking "daijoubu" and pulled out a chair for you and asked you to "sit sit" except that part was probably also in Japanese and all in all you were having an out of body experience at a Yakuza jewelry line money funneling party and all you want were the bunnies, where the fuck were the bunnies? "Hey where are you?" Came instead your boyfriend's text.

It felt like 4AM but it was only 12AM. You found your way to keep together your "atama" and you made it back to your boyfriend.

Beirut

I've been reading about Beirut -- Maronites, Sunni, Shiites, Druze. I've been reading about 15 years of Civl War, a sectarian conflict of east vs east, west vs west, southeast vs. northwest, northeast vs. southwest. I read because I've been half-obsessed with the Middle East since Dubai, and half because I just like the words Beirut and Lebanon. I like the way the words slide off like a hum, that instead of closure, 'ru' and 'non' goes on as if a hymn. I like the way the words look, harmonious in serif and strong in sans serif. I like that two words stand for nostalgia and hope - the heaviness of humanity that we are capable of the best and worst. As for Dubai, well, let's just say you find love in the most unexpected places, and in the colossal year of travel, it was not in the living fairytale of Florence, but in the bloated dream of excess, in the silver monolith rising from the desert that things began to make sense. If Florence was a picture book, Dubai was a sci-fi fantasy novel you hope David Lynch had a hand in. Gazing afar at the Burj Khalifa, there was the tower that defied heat, mankind, and imagination. Like a needle pin pointing true north, it is omnipresent in the desert city, alert and shimmering.

What made me like Dubai were the conversations of imperfections and hope for the better. In their voices I heard the rough edges that echo my own, the rules bent in funny ways there, but we found the pockets of people, places, moments that we could empathize. There lived the children of diaspora, post-colonist, post-nationalist, post-futurist.

In the end all the post post post identities end up sounding familiar, "It's not a place that you'd expect to be good with all the stories you've heard, but in time you find the parts that charm you." Joseph, our Palestinian friend who grew up in Paris said, and onwards he mentioned the few events and venues that made the city happening, much like the way we talk about the five venues to see live shows in Beijing. We were all apart of something that was in the stage of discovery, had a hand in building it as we wagered our youth for something that was inscrutable and fragile instead of comfortable.

"Turns out we’ve been trying to figure out Dubai - this strange, wonderful, occasionally traumatic place we grew up in - all along. (Jury’s still out on whether that trauma was due to Dubai, or just the turbulence of adolescence.) The thing is, we are the child of Gulf Returnees ourselves. We didn’t leave our home countries to come here; Dubai’s the only home we’ve ever known. yet most narratives of Dubai focus on its extremes - solar-sintered skyscrapers made from sun, sand, and glass or the unknown laborers who built them; unbridled admiration for its visionary transformation or vitriolic, xenophobic dismissal; searing desert heat or lush, landscaped golf courses. As residents-but-not-citizens, we’re paradoxically privileged, yet invisible; our stories remain as yet untold.” - The State

The other reason why I fell for Dubai lives in a magazine, in fact, the love lives in one thin volume of personal narratives calling to the Arab diaspora, a volume that is rigorous, thoughtful, hyper-intellectual but deeply intimate. A love for a place doesn't necessarily have to be its beautiful boulevards or quaint coffee shops, but in the minds and stories of its travelers, settlers, lovers and its estranged.

I hope one day I will meet Beirut, as I will meet Africa, India, and all the places larger than myself. Also, check out the Lebanese band Soap Kills, they are my jam right now.

Leonardo

America smells like Windex, and in New York, it's mixed with sandalwood and perfume from big hair. Vacationing in my former home, where I made the daily grind, wasn't easy. I told friends on the first day on how I wanted this trip to not be a vacation, but "simply living two weeks in the city." I'd hoped to wake up, go on runs, work, read, write, see everyone. What I most hoped for was to meditate on the pause, linger in the space, to write, to produce. That didn't happen. The city, as it always had and always will be, is made of hustle and bustle. Instead of writing about life in Beijing, you rode to Fort Tilden and the Rockaways, you rode to and fro the Brooklyn Bridge four times, you rode through Times Square dodging feet, exchanging grins with fellow bicyclists, you rode as a metaphor to create movement and meaning. Between all this riding, an anxiety crawls to the pit of your stomach. It happens the moment you open your eyes. Your lover kisses you and leaves for the day. He dives seamlessly back to life in New York -- work, friends, sensibility. You are confronted with a strange silence and a day not structured by the meetings and deadlines and a vague sense of productivity. You explain this to B as: "I'm was like a gerbil going on and on on that wheel, and all of a sudden I'm thrown off and I don't really know what to do."

Seeking meaning could very well be the theme of the trip, and it arises from these moments of self-doubt, of feeling left behind. As friends forge their paths and have bigger conversations, it was not peace that moved you, but a feeling of static crisis, an anxiety that shot straight through the body and left you paralyzed and screeching for something weightier. Then one day, on the last day in New York, somehow you found it all. You don't have the answers, but you have the image of her seared in your memory.

Aniko and I sat on Washington Square Park the way it felt like we always did when we lived in New York, except we actually never did when we lived here, but the city is full of living memories, and every avenue, every square seem to breathe a past, a conversation. We were both leaving. I the next day and she for good after six years of on and off. We watched the characters in the park. She pointed to me - the parrot man, the abstract painter man, the man dragging his lazy, beautiful Welsh Corgi on the ground, the girl stripping to her bikini and climbing into the fountain. We were two characters in the corner of this world of Waldo.

Here's what she said. She said, her co-worker talked about how much she had learned from her, the kids shouted stories they remembered about her. She talked about using bio-degradable shampoos, Veganism, a dream of building a homestead, an earth shelter, running a camp for kids. She talked about all of us being one single organism, about doing our part. She talked about hobbies, maintaining the hobbies, marriage, growing with that person. She talked about materialism and I talked about my $70 Coach shoes. She talked about how much more "business" I've become. I talked about dreams and values and my million dollar metal tree. I talked about the loss of hobbies and a greater pivot. I talked about the importance of the conversation even though I had no resolutions. In the end, she beamed, "have a good bike ride and dinner," and I offered the cliché, "have a nice life," but meant it hard. So many of us live in the moments, not many of us live purposeful lives, and in Aniko I saw a maturity, fortitude, and strength in reason that blew me away.

We are the makers of the dramatic farewell, just as Aniko forged her own path with discipline, guts, and a ethical compass tougher than anyone I know. The contents of this conversation will stay with me for a long time, just as this trip will and all the faces of strangers. New York is drawing full circle in my life. From a perpetual visitor with wide-eyes and excitement, to temporary resident, and finally, back to the perpetual visitor more seasoned, more nuanced.

On the last day in New York, Bryan and I made a vow that before 30 he will make an album and I will complete a novella. We left the restaurant just as Leo DiCaprio sat down and started walking to the Financial District on our way to the DMV during high noon, trying to find shade on the edges of building like two squealing Chinese girls (he's Filipino). It was on the curb right before Greenwich and before Battery Park when this happened, and that was it, that was the beginning of everything again.

Thanks New York, I love you always.

Zuckers Morning

I eat an half a bagel too much. Everything feels disproportionately large here -- the food, the people, gulps of air. At night we take long walks, and he cuts through the neighborhood like a real local -- here's a restaurant my friend opened, here's an art gallery that I have beef with, here's a spot that expanded, good for them. Every comment conveys ownership, possession, and an ease that comes with 10 years. He grew up here the way many of us dream about the characters in young adult novels. There were private schools, days of being the outsider, pre-Giuliani subways, concerts, drugs, dyed blonde hair, and guitars. All the kids here sound like rock stars, and you wonder, was it the city that made them, or they who made the city?

5AM Story

Watching the city wake up at the fifth hour, it's early and raining, but unlike your jetlagged body the city is already in full motion. You're sitting at the bowels of the city, Lower Manhattan Chinatown, gazing on it all while its skyscrapers fold into roads and twist into bridges to Brooklyn. In your younger days you wanted to live right across from this busy body of water. You no longer harbor the same wish. In some ways you don't have the proclivity to just settle anywhere anymore. Not here, where the buses screech in the rain and East Riverside runners wake up in a huff deprived of their morning routine (I among them if not for a bruised big toe from riding his fixie, and injuring myself at the last possible moment before limping home). No, home is slowly morphing into a temporary idea, an evolving identity of the increasingly post-nationalist self. As for this New York, this machine that keeps humming, some say it's falling into a stupor, that is belongs to the past. I will always be moved by the portraits here - the exulted and the downtrodden brushing shoulders. I will always see wonder in the beast that shapes so many of us - the go-getter, the do-gooder, the guest somewhere in between.

This is where I make my entrance. I will attempt to live here for two weeks, given the fortune of shelter, a bike, and friends who've yet left. I see this trip as a way of detoxing the mind and body, and instead of consuming, will simply live, and simply write. The past year has been a continued frenzy of motion. Work and love rages on and while both are exciting and inspiring, I miss the presence of "emptiness."

As Kenya Hara extols, "emptiness" "...provides all kinds of possibilities and can hold all kinds of meanings." Emptiness is not simplicity, it is ambiguous, big, heavy, and deeply meaningful. It is the interruption of the pause in our day to day routines, the beckoning for a toughened "why?" Why do this? What keeps you going? It is sculpted moments, disciplined, and full, and it is only in New York do I find the peace, on the cusp of humanity, do I find depth.

It has been a year of travel, perhaps this is the reason for his remark. "I'm Angelina and you're my little Shiloh," and more than anywhere else, the places that moved you were places of conflict, friction, people. Beauty exists in the moments between the words.

Desert

Tough time writing this love letter. Sometimes you're just at a loss for words. Before going to the desert, you think of Katherine Clifton. You think of the third chapter in Goon Squad. You are not going to the Safari, but somewhere pretty damn close. You've fallen in love with the idea of the desert because you fall in love with every new idea. You seek change, sea change, and hopefully it begins with a journey to the desert, golden hued and golden heeled.

Dune

I guess it's appropriate that after watching Dune you'd dream about taking instagram photos of giant floating rocks suddenly ramming into glistening skyscrapers. Oh David Lynch.

Drake Moment

Really, have a Drake moment with me. Toss your skirt, loosen up that shirt, nozzle that face against the base and listen to "Over My Dead Body" over and over again, savor how body trails like this, "Baaaahhh-ahh." Sing it with me. "I think I killed everyone in the game last year fuck I was on though."

You reach a sudden state of calm. A calm you could distill from a moment, that moment, when you were looking at the moon and ready to climb a wall and your friend R was talking to you like we belonged in a mystical moment. Mystical was the way D described me at a separate dinner party, and I took it in like a good diehard artist. That night when we were all tripping I realized a few things about us. That we possess everything in ourselves to accomplish what we want. That you only reach a state of calm by doing and striving for what you care about. That in the end it's just you and yourself, and it's better to believe in the only thing you know to be true in this life, yourself. Everything else is transient. The moon, friendships, lovers, family, but as long as you are alive you hold yourself to be true, and you better put every fiber of your being into whatever it is you care about. Only in that way will the moon, the friendships, the lovers, and family stay with you.

Now that I'm beyond the routine of podcasts and morning runs, the clarity of a vision hovers at the horizon. I'm feeling the keywords in my life like all the keywords that we knocked our heads together for clients. Dear R has finally left, but the hole that's there is filled with a sense of empowerment. So here's they are, words of the year.

Do. Write. Love.

I'm having a Drake moment ever since we mentioned Toronto.

Really, Me?! Too Aggressive?!

If I had my way, I will always go to bed at 10PM falling asleep to Anais Nin and wake up at 5AM to Rick Ross ala Kanye "Sanctified." Virginia Wolf makes less sense for me. Who knows, maybe too brilliant, too scholarly, too many literary and figurative spaces, too many references. I'll dig into "A Room With A View" more carefully but right now, definitely more drawn to feminist text that breathe passion and violence. "I like to see her dress up for the evening in barbaric jewelry, her face so vivid. She was not for gentle Paris, for the cafes. She was meant for the African jungle, orgies, dances." - "Lina" from Little Birds, Anais Nin.

I spent my International Women's Day actually celebrating it for the first time by attending three lectures at the Bookworm. This persisting self-discovery phase, dabbles in religion and feminism, seems a little asynchronous at this age. Not sure what happened in college for me when we're supposed to wrestle with identity issues. I'd always been too haughty to question anything since age sixteen, so at the cusp of becoming thirty, it only makes sense that I question everything. Humility is my new rose-colored lens to the world.

As for feminism, I'm still trying to process the main threads and tenor of the discussions that went on Saturday. I went to the talks partly to see who were in the audience, and what sort of energy/questions are generated in China. Feminism is an incredibly complex movement/ism to generalize, and in the context of China it morphs to something that is even more conflicting. Ostensibly you have Communism and the Cultural Revolution that catapulted women to "holding up half of the sky" and put forth certain policies in place that liberated women to gain ground in the work place. Another random stat, China also boasts 19 out of 45 top self-made female entrepreneurs billionaires in the world and more female entrepreneurs than the US population of 300 million. On the other hand, prostitution is the on the rise and China remains one of the few countries that doesn't even have a law against domestic violence. It seems to be a viable climate for very exceptional women, but for the average middle-class woman, because there's never been a "feminist movement," this sense of self and psychological / collective examination is lacking.

To be honest I don't even consider myself a feminist, though I know that declaration might be a little irresponsible. I think being a feminist, other than believing in gender equality (but what does that mean even??) requires action, perhaps actions that change our role in our community, and not simply our lens of the world. Right now I'm simply learning, and what I'm learning is I'm incredibly interested in female voices (just as I am interested in minority voices in general). The world is dominated by too many declarations from the middle-aged white man, and I find so many crevices of interestingness in other voices.

One of the hardest things about feminism for me is the stereotype of women who are a little angry. In fact, one of the moderators on Saturday began a talk with "I'm really angry" and here's why you should be. On the one hand, I think well-founded and expressed anger is essential for change and coloring the tone of any movement. For any change we need passion and people who truly care, and anger is a direct translation of that passion. There may be two (three? five?) layers to this argument. The lack of policies in any country to protect women in prostitution, sex trafficking, domestic and sexual abuse deserves stomps and shouts. On the other hand, modern middle-class women are facing many changes in their role at work and role at home in a knowledge economy. It is an ongoing collective mode of "self-discovery" that deserves patience rather than anger, sharing and contemplation over shouting what is right.

Being a woman, as with being a man, as with being a Chinese-American, as with any "identity" is about embracing everything that might make you, to be comfortable. It isn't about striving for "genderlessness" so much as freedom. Freedom to pursue what you want and not feel constrained by pre-ordained circumstances. It is important to advocate for policies to protect the minorities and act as a buffer to these pre-ordained factors. It is important to create an environment where each and every identity is comfortable with our fallacies and living as our true selves.

This means embracing, in some ways, clashing identities within the modern female. The independent, courageous woman who wants to carve a path for herself, and her wish to one day become a mother, a caretaker of her home. Let there be room for both.

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.