monday means back to work ... though my boss also made me go home after lunch because i'm still coughing up my lungs and blowing my nose out via snot. more words tomorrow. maybe. i'm going to eat dinner at a restaurant i've wanted to eat at for years, so i'm excited.
[17BLGMS] what this is.
in the car pool with peter, on our way back from choir rehearsal, i try to read and not look only at him. the other boys in the car cluck and shove at each other, ask loud questions about things that have just happened at school. the mother driving us regards the traffic ahead. on the pages in front of me, the words dissolve a bit, the letters thinning until i can see, on the other side of them, like spying through a wire fence, the pictures of peter i have collected inside me: peter laughing as he falls on the ice at lake sebago, peter walking through his dark house, his dog fluttering at his leg, peter asleep in my basement, trying to escape it. occasionally i look up, and the real peter flares beside me. i try to place the smell of him. he smells of carnations and, very faintly, cigarette smoke. like a corsage someone left in a bar. i am in love with you, i think then. that’s what this is. (8-9)
mi-yeok-guk is seaweed soup is birthday soup. it’s the soup that’s given to women right after they give birth because seaweed contains a lot of iron and is considered to be good for new mothers, and it is, thus, the soup that you’re supposed to eat on your birthday. my mum wonders out loud why it’s the children who eat seaweed soup on their birthdays; shouldn’t it be the mothers?
my mum makes me my seaweed soup a few days early because i’m sick and seaweed soup is also my go-to sick-day soup. when i’m living out in new york and get sick, i go eat pho and i make seaweed soup because it’s an absurdly easy soup to make, and who’s so inclined to do any intensive cooking when ill? it’s an interesting soup, too — different regions in korea make theirs differently. like, my mum makes hers with beef. her mum, who was from busan, made hers with clams. others make it with anchovy broth. i make mine with beef because my mum makes hers with beef.
the funny thing about korean food? which i know isn't unique to korean food? we all believe we (or our mums) make it best. i fully believe i make the best kimchi fried rice, the best kimchi jjigae, the best ka-rae. my mum marinates the best kalbi and makes the best kalbi-tang and samgye-tang and name a soup, she makes it best. she also makes the best bin-dae-ddeok and kong-na-mul and jahp-chae. how ever you eat it at home, that style korean food is the best.
love should be about making you want to live. (156)
i read alexander chee’s edinburgh for the first time last year, and it’s haunted me since. the prose is sparse and beautiful, the story melancholy and thoughtful, the characters ones you want to wrap in your arms and never let go. i read the ibooks copy of it last years, and it was one littered with copy errors, and i mentioned that in an instagram caption, and chee commented, saying he’d pass that along to his team.
(i love that about getting a book out into the world — the fact that it’s a team effort.) (i want a team of my own some day. soon. please.) (my book is still out for agent consideration.)
when i was in portland last month, i went to powell’s and bought one book — a hard copy of edinburgh. i’m not sure why that was the book i picked up, maybe simply that i saw it and it was a book i’d earmarked to buy since i’d read it, and it’s one of those books i wish everyone would read.
(i also had a lovely interaction with chee at a reading once. he was at the UES barnes and noble for an event with jung yun, and i got shelter, yun’s debut, signed and decided i wanted to get the queen of the night, chee’s second novel, signed as well, so i bought a copy and asked him to sign it. i’d seen him a few weeks prior at AAWW for a reading and panel about queen as well. he asked if i was a writer. i said, yes. he wrote an encouraging inscription. i always appreciate those, especially when they come from writers of color. for me, at least, they usually tend to come from writers of color.)
edinburgh is a good cold-weather book. it’s something you can curl up with because it’s a book that compels you to sit with it even while the story is not the lightest — the novel follows fee, a korean-american boy who’s a soprano in his boys’ choir and learns exactly what the choir director does to his section leaders. the boy he loves, peter, is also a section leader in the choir and a victim, and peter takes his own life, leaving fee to carry his grief and the self-hatred and guilt for his silence until he has to confront it all later in his life.
(i’m sorry; i’m really bad at writing summaries.)
even with such heavy subject matter, edinburgh isn’t weighed down. it’s not a book that wraps itself around your throat like a chain with trauma; chee tells fee’s story gently, with generosity; and i find that “generosity” is a word i use often to describe work i love. i don’t know how quite to explain what i mean when i say that an author “writes with generosity,” and it has nothing to do with prose or language or narrative and everything to do with a certain kind of heart upon which the book is written. it has everything to do with how i feel an author is approaching the work, the intent with which she/he/they is trying to tell the story at hand, and it’s everything to do with warmth and kindness and love, not only for the characters in the book but also for the reader who might be coming into the work with trauma and pain of her/his/their own. a writer who tells a story with generosity is one who wishes first to comfort, to recognize, to meet the reader wherever she/he/they may be because that writer know that they are equals, both the one who gives the story and the one who receives.
we find each other because we need each other. (215)
have i previously stated that i love eggs? i also love foam.
there is a saying in korea that you know who your god is when you think you are about to die. hello, god. i pray to be able to carry peter, to carry him off to where he belongs, way above this earth. well above what could ever touch him. but wherever that is, i instead set him down at the entrance to the dining hall, where we go inside and sneak a soda from the fountain. (17)
i think of my grandparents, the listening quality they always seemed to have whenever i saw them. what were they listening for? when they had decided to leave korea, they did so and then left quickly. it was difficult but not impossible, and they never seemed to express remorse. their whole difficult lives seemed not to weigh on them at all. taken as mornings and meals, suppers and evenings, all of the world could be carried, both the sad and the delicious, their lives seemed to say. (202)
why did lady tammamo take her life instead of living forever? love ruins monsters. she didn’t need the spell of a thousand livers to become human. she just had to love one man. feel the change come over her: the fur recedes across her brow, the fangs flatten to a smile. the paws turn to feet and say good-bye to flight. the danger of her hides itself in shame. (227-8)
i totally botched this potato brioche because of lazy technique. i don’t own a kitchenaid, and i don’t plan to change that any time soon, and it’s been a while since i’ve made bread that required kneading and, thus, forgot exactly how much you need to knead bread. it tasted fine, but the texture was completely off. this is what i get for being lazy.
this is also what i get for deciding to bake bread when i’m still feverish and low energy.
oh well. i’ll bake it again in the next few weeks when i’m feeling better. i still have almost a whole bag of potato flour to use, anyway.
do you remember what it was like, to be young? you do. was there any innocence there? no. things were exactly what they looked like. if anyone tries for innocence, it’s the adult, moving forward, forgetting. if innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it’s what adults have, when they forget what it’s like to be a child. when they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can’t remember what that feels like. (193)
[17BLGMS] sweating out a fever.
i love eggs. i love them made pretty much any which way. you can’t go wrong with eggs.
i’m trying to break my tic of wrecking my nails, and i’ve gone back to painting my nails in an attempt to help myself along. so far, it’s been two weeks since i’ve last torn into my nail beds, which feels pretty damn momentous. the first few days were difficult because i’d sit around, feeling extra anxious because i wanted to pick and pick and pick, but i don’t know, somehow, i’ve made it two weeks, just picking at my cuticles and at the skin around my nails, which, also, isn’t great, but i’m trying to focus on one thing at a time.
who knows when i’ll relapse, but we’re taking this one day at a time.
because i’ve been sick, i haven’t had coffee since thursday. i know — 48 hours, oh, wow, that’s so long. /sarcasm
one of my favorite things about coffee, though, is the ritual. i tend to default to either my v60 or bialetti (i’ve tried so many coffee-making methods, but those two are my favorite), and i had a bag of milk bar buzz i brought back with me from d.c. i never quite know what to expect from a new bag of coffee; i know what i tend to gravitate towards in coffee (low acidic, medium roast, notes of chocolate, caramel, peaches); and i follow my nose when picking up beans.
my nose, though, unfortunately, can’t tell me if a roast will be too acidic or too bright, and that’s often where a bag of coffee will disappoint. someone at four barrel told me that, often, coffee will taste too acidic because you’re using too much coffee to water and/or it’s been ground too finely, and, hey, maybe i should be getting a scale to do this coffee thing “properly” … but the idea of that makes me roll my eyes, too, because i don’t know, i like the calmness that’s in the ritual of making coffee, and i’m not that particular … or am i?
if you could look into the future, would you?
if you could see it, would you even want to?
i’ve got a feeling that there’s bad news coming,
but i don’t want to find it out.
- mika, “last party”
in the evening, i watch my mum arrange flowers into a bouquet. i think she should take a flower-arranging class because she enjoys it. i think i should finally get off my ass and take a pottery class because i think i’d enjoy that.
in the evening, i make dough for potato brioche. it’ll sit in my fridge overnight, and i’ll wake up early tomorrow to punch it down, shape it, let it rise in a loaf pan. i’m excited. fresh bread is one of the best things in life.
[17BLGMS] oh, god, yup, we're doing this.
in december, vloggers will sometimes do this this called “vlogmas,” where they post a vlog every day until christmas (i think? some go all the way through the 31st). last year was a particularly bad december for me, and the fact that my favorite vlogger, claire marshall, was doing vlogmas helped get me through the month because her videos were something nice i had to look forward to everyday. (i love her.) (i keep secretly hoping i’ll bump into her in LA one day.) (idk what i’d say, but whatever, it’d still be cool.)
to mitigate some of the BLAH-ness that i know is inevitably coming my way this month, i thought about something i might do to distract myself. at first, i thought i’d do a sort of retrospective, posting one thing that stood out from 2017 every day, moving from january to december, but the idea of a retrospective strung out over a month … that didn’t sound like fun.
and so! daily blogs. blogs from the day. some of these will be hella boring, and others might be more interesting, but, hey, maybe, everything doesn’t have to be interesting. let’s celebrate the banal, the mundane, the drudgery of day jobs and adulting and life — and, hey, following that train of thought, maybe it’s fitting that we start with this, this blasted cold that has rendered me largely immobile because i’m feverish and hacking up my lungs and desperately trying to decongest my face and unplug my ears and BREATHE — all while i’ve also got a left arm rendered useless from two freaking vaccines and a left knee that’s still wounded from falling on monday.
yeah.
fun times, eh?
hopefully this cold passes soon, though, so we won’t have a string of days of balled up tissues and pitiful expressions and sick-day-foods foods.
and, hey, for full disclosure — i’d love to say i’m spending my down time reading rebecca or sylvia plath’s letters — but, uh, the truth is that i’ve been revisiting some of my favorite rurouni kenshin fan fiction instead … it’s been great. no shame. >:3
[DC] the practice of being better.
last week, we fly out to baltimore because it’s thanksgiving, and that’s what we do for thanksgiving — we descend upon my youngest aunt’s house and eat and laugh and drink sangria and hang out with their dogs.
the lead-up to thanksgiving, though, feels like a whole mess of wrongness. usually, my brother flies into JFK and rents a car, and we have lunch with my maternal aunt before driving down to baltimore. he usually takes a red-eye, and i’ve usually been up too late the night before, so he’s usually asleep in the car for the first hour or so, and we usually stop once for coffee and cinnabon and the bathroom. usually, usually, usually — so then there’s the part of me that just feels wrong because this isn’t just usually, it’s how things should be had my life not gone so horribly wrong.
but what’s the point losing ourselves to everything that should have been? lots of things should have been.
or, at least, those are words i tell myself, and that’s all they are — words i tell myself, words i don’t quite believe. 2017 feels an awful lot like a string of words i tell myself — that i will be better, that i will find my way back home, that i will get a job that will be a career that will mean something, that i will do this and be that, that i will still be alive when 2018 dawns, that i won’t have died in california like i’m still so terrified i will.
sometimes, i think it’s strange that i try to make my business be one of words but often find words to be just that — words. other times, i think that makes sense, that being a purveyor of words means that i understand both how invaluable and how empty they can be, that words carry both strength and emptiness depending on circumstance, situation, and speaker. words, like so many other facets of life, are not inherently good or evil — they are what we make them to be, and to try to make them more than they naturally are is to do us all a disservice.
moving on to other things, i suppose.
i’ve been back in LA for all of five days, and i’m already itching to leave again. i’m starting to think this isn’t just plain old wanderlust; it’s rooted in something deeper, something that sometimes feels more sinister because there’s a fair amount of malcontent admittedly woven in there; but, whatever it is, the fact remains that i’ve always been the anywhere-but-here kind of human, the one who’s always had feet that long to carry her away to every corner of the earth and the appetite to try and experience everything.
because, hey, i think the world is this stupidly beautiful, vibrant, interesting place, and i want to learn it all and taste it all and know it all in its madcap diversity. i want to eat everything i can. i want to experience everything i can. i want to walk amongst strangers, hear their stories, and capture all the colors the world has to offer. i want to know how the seasons differ depending on where you are in the world. i want to see how the sky changes. i want to feel the whole spectrum of what there is to feel when you’re aware of being someone different no matter where you are in the world.
because, hey, there’s this, too — that i inevitably move through the world in a way a straight white woman does not and, consequently, that i experience it differently. that the general world of food writing and travel writing bore the shit out of me because they’re both so white, so straight, so freaking boring. that it’s about time that the narrative is shifted, that publishers start seeking out writers of color who don’t fall into clean binaries, that white people stop being allowed to exist under the illusion that they are somehow more qualified to speak for cultures that are not theirs, that they are able to consume and appropriate only because of their whiteness.
and this isn’t something that applies only to whiteness and “exotic” cultures. it’s about time the narrative is given to adoptees, not martyrs of adoptive parents. it’s about time the narrative is given to queer people, trans people, people who identify as non-binary. it’s about time the narrative is given to those who live with mental illness, with depression, with suicidal tendencies.
it’s about time to stop being so goddamn afraid of the Other.
wow, none of this is what i came into this post to write.
this was supposed to be a kind of travel blog, or maybe it is a travel blog — or, at least, an attempt to suss out what travel writing looks like to me and, in connection, what travel means to me.
i think we tend to put travel on a pedestal, to elevate this idea that traveling results in more open-minded people, but i don’t know, i kind of feel about that like i feel about how we put literature on a pedestal, automatically assume that people who read must be more gracious, less provincial, less prone to bigotry and racism and misogyny.
i keep thinking about that essay kevin nguyen wrote last year, and i keep thinking how true it is. just because we’re in the business of books doesn’t mean we’re inherently doing good. just because people read a lot doesn’t mean they think outside of their narrow, ingrained mentality. just because people are well-traveled doesn’t mean they see outside of their bubble; it doesn’t mean they’ve experienced anything outside of what and who they know. travel, literature, whatever other thing we want to elevate — these things can keep us in our comfort zones and ignorance as much as they can challenge us and make us uncomfortable and help us become better people.
the opportunity means nothing unless we have the courage to step out of ourselves while also looking into ourselves and seeing the uglinesses within.
on saturday, we drive out to d.c.
before we flew out to baltimore, i’d floated the idea of me going out to d.c. for a day because i have friends in the city and i thought i might get restless, stuck in suburban baltimore. i wondered if i could rent a car, was discouraged from it because my brother would probably rent a car and we didn’t need that many cars, and i wasn’t quite sure i’d tag along when my brother and sister-in-law said they were planning to go out to d.c. on saturday.
my little cousin decided she wanted to go, too, though, so off we went. we’d gotten a recommendation for the holocaust memorial museum, so there we went.
the thing that terrifies about the holocaust memorial museum is how prescient it all seems. it’s easy to approach museums as things that stand in record of the past and to put distance between us and those moments in time, like these things happened back then, and back then is removed from now.
and yet — walking through the holocaust memorial museum felt almost like deja vu. watching video footage of nazis walking through city streets with torches felt like seeing images from yesterday because, shit, it was like seeing images from yesterday. just a few months ago, nazis marched in charlottesville, waving torches and shouting white supremacist bullshit. the cheeto was put into office in the same way hitler was, by being a laughingstock no one took quite as seriously as everyone should have until it was too late. the nazis were able to implement their horrible genocide and acts of violence against non-white, non-straight people with the complicit silence of so many ordinary white citizens.
history repeats itself.
maybe the thing that dismays me so much about cheeto voters is that they have shown themselves to be who they are, not only a year ago during the election but also (and maybe more frighteningly) now, a year since. they dig their heels in, defend their choice by saying, i like how he tells it like it is, never mind that he has proven to be as ineffective, incompetent, and dangerous as we always knew he would be.
and maybe there is a kind of reassurance in the i like how he tells it like it is because there is a part of me that would rather look danger in the eye, exposed in all its insidious ugliness than hidden under niceties and illusions. there is a part of me that says, okay, it’s good that the bullshit of we live in a post-racial world that white people loved to spout during the obama presidency has been exposed for being just that, bullshit, that the same people who loved to pat themselves on the back for electing a black president have had to look themselves in the eye, whether individually or as a community, and see that they’re not all that progressive, they’re not all that great, in fact, they’re part of the goddamn problem.
or it could be a good thing, had there actually been that moment of reckoning. self-reflection, though, is too much to ask of most, and no one wants to admit to complicity.
one of the more sobering captions at the holocaust memorial museum came in the section that talked about resistance. this particular caption talked about ordinary citizens, and it ended with the paragraph:
factors such as the intensity of german occupation policies, local antisemitism, and proximity to a safe refuge often influenced the success of rescue efforts. in denmark, 9 out of 10 jews were saved; in norway and belgium about 1 out of 2; in the netherlands, 1 out of 4; and in lithuania and poland, fewer than 2 in 10 survived. when ordinary citizens became rescuers, jews had a chance of survival. (emphasis added)
this isn’t unique to jews during world war ii, either. slaves were able to escape the south through a network of ordinary citizens in america who hid them, ferried them to the next home of safety, fed them, risked their own lives for them. muslims from the countries on the cheeto’s travel ban, especially those who were already on flights when the ban was announced and airports thrown into chaos, were assisted by ordinary citizens who showed up at airports to protest, offer legal and/or interpretation services for free, provide support to families who were anxiously awaiting news of loved ones.
history repeats itself.
and maybe that’s another thing i’ve been learning this year — that we often forget our capacity to do so much even when we’re just “ordinary citizens.” by calling our congresspeople and holding them accountable, we can stand up for each other’s healthcare, for immigrants who risk deportation, for whatever fresh hell the gop tries to shove secretly through the government. by showing up, we can express solidarity for native people trying to protect their land. by donating as much as we can spare, we can help communities ravaged by disasters get basic things like hot food and drinkable water and clothes and sanitary napkins while they try to rebuild and recuperate their losses.
and the key word there is “we.” no one single person saves the world, despite the preponderance of superhero movies in the last decade (and, even then, justice league and avengers, anyone?). no one single person makes a difference. we all do it together, and we don’t do it by just making huge, grand gestures — we often do it by doing the least we can do. we do it by showing up. we do it by donating five dollars. we do it by being present, by keeping our eyes open, by defiantly and intentionally saying, never again.
the main reason i wanted to go to d.c. was to go to momofuku. momofuku ramen isn’t my favorite ramen, although momofuku noodles are my favorite — i love their noodles — but momofuku hits all the nostalgia points in me that makes it one of my favorite bowls of ramen.
unfortunately, ccdc doesn’t have momofuku ramen anymore?!? they have other noodles but not the ramen! and apparently momofuku la might not have the ramen either?!? that makes me sad. i’ve literally been debating a vegas trip just to get some momofuku ramen, and i don’t gamble or go to clubs or enjoy going to shows, so i’d literally be going to vegas just to get some momofuku ramen and that seems kind of exorbitant, even for me.
i just want a taste of home.
