Tag: anecdotes

lucky dragon

E. convinced me to try it as we sat in his living room one night, while eating chocolate-covered figs. He retrieved a Swiffer from the crowded broom closet and taught me how to paddle. He sat down next to me on the couch, handed me the Swiffer, and we pretended we were on a boat. I expressed my doubts. He shrugged and suggested that all the guys who do it are really fit and good-looking. The whole situation was comical, and I bought into it. I mean, there were chocolate-covered figs involved. Of course I was tricked!

The next day, he texted me at like 8:23am and asked, “You awake?”

Ugh. So I pulled on my stupid tiny bike shorts and geeky waterproof shoes to trudge downstairs for my first dragon boat practice. We arrived at the World’s Fair Marina, already drenched in sweat. The heat was nearly unbearable, even for me(!) I felt my hair immediately growing lighter, my skin growing darker.

We got on the water. I felt like I couldn’t breathe after every run. But E. was right in the end. All the common suffering buoyed us, and I just reminded myself what he promised (tricked?) me: “Yeah, it seems like you’re doing to die and you won’t make it through the sprint. But TRUST ME it will make you forget all the suffering your heart is going through.”

… yeah. sho’ did. For a hot minute.

***

Before we went out on the water, the very fit and good-looking guy in front of me (that part wasn’t 100% a lie) turned around while the boat was still docked and introduced himself.

“Hi, I’m Jack,” he said.

“Hi, I’m Rose,” I replied.

“Oh man. It’s like… Titanic! We met on a boat together!” he ventured, grinning. Which makes this the first time in history a guy has initiated the cheesy part of the Titanic reference with utter sincerity. “Just promise me you’ll never let go.”

You really can’t make this up, even if you wanted to.

So yeah, um. After that, I paddled the sh*t out of that race, my eyes following his paddle the whole time (I got lectured later about the difference between paddling and rowing).

That evening, my roommate brought home a whole bag of Jamaican sweet currant rolls and asked if I wanted any. I told myself, I deserve this.

And yes, I believe I do. I deserve this life. My heart sure will go on.

You can’t have everything at once. But give me one of each: the sun on my face, the water, a way to paddle to another shore, and the ability to write myself out of any storm.

Read More

Grief is a thing with feathers.

“To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.”

— Rebecca Solnit

shore

You know, we all want to appear like we have our shit together. Grief is a hard thing to write about without sounding negative. I’ve been doing a lot of magical thinking these days. Somehow I keep thinking you’ll hear me from across the ocean, which is the point of calling it magical. The tiny part of me that knows you won’t, that tiny part grows larger every day. Does this cause relief or despair? I can’t tell the difference.

***

I stared down at the camera you gave me that has not turned on since our last trip together. “Click, click,” the on button does nothing. I set it back down carefully. I looked in dismay at my beloved Kindle, stuck (ironically) on the last page of a book called The Course Of Love. It wouldn’t budge. The universe was telling me something. Every one of the electronic things that surrounded me in my life ceased to turn on, one by one, in your absence. I then put my phone down anxiously, wondering if it, too, will eventually crack under the pressure. Nervous from thinking about cracking under pressure, I will my heart to withstand.

“There is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”

I vehemently think, maybe besides the electronics you send everyone in your life, I just wanted you to show up at my door. Point at your chest. Show me it’s home. I want to be different from all the things and people you plug into, turn on, replace, upgrade, discard, abandon, lose. The ones that stay in your home in lieu of me.

It’s hard to want one of everything. It’s harder still to turn them down when offered, one by one.

Why do we think we should act so differently when the world is burning and we only have a few more days to live? Why would we hold each other close and relish the last few days, and yet when we have years we decide we can take our sweet time? Then of course we will look back and think, “it was too late. I should’ve done more, sooner.” We are the kings and queens of taking things for granted.

My anger feels unbearable. Am I angry at you, or at the loss of you? Am I angry because I’m scared of what would happen if I stopped being angry?

***

Since you’ve been gone, T. and I talk almost every day and we write in our secret blogs about grief. It helps to know someone is listening. Sadness can span any amount of time. There is no limit. It’s ok to not have a limit. Yet our culture of mastery and closure demands that there be clearly outlined phases, demands that there will be an end. Is it self-preservation or a form of denial to think there is always a finite and linear route, a light at the end of the tunnel?

We even have imaginary hierarchies of grief. I am certain we all tell ourselves things like: “surely, a death that has already occurred is certainly a greater heartbreak than ambiguous loss,” or “psh, the end of a relationship is no comparison to greater griefs that could occur.” Or, “it’s been X number of months, so I should feel fine now.” The lines get blurry.

As T. says, grief isn’t a competition. But we are only human. Even in our hearts we attempt to rank things, willing it to be so, searching for reasons to excuse ourselves from feeling fully. As if telling ourselves that “it’s not a big deal” and we should “be over it already” will magically make it true. In the movie Crazy, Stupid Love, there is that scene when the coworkers at his office find out about why he’s grieving. The coworker’s response is, “Oh thank god man, it’s ‘just’ a divorce! It could have been cancer!” And he mutters, “Yeah, thank god. It’s just my relationship.”

I held C. while she sobbed, “I thought we would grow old together. I wanted to grow old with him.” Inside, my heart was caving. Me, too.

I’ve never had the right words to tell my stories, but we can only take the words we have and rearrange them in various attempts. Sometimes, when I’m feeling the most brave, I imagine the only place the stories translate correctly is in my eyes. Sometimes I feel more brave and think that if I just allow you to look into them, you will finally understand. It’s magical thinking- the West Village brownstone we’d share together, the food adventures, the 2 minute planks and dairy-less pizza AND ice cream afterwards. And then I wake up from those dreams. And it doesn’t seem to work in real life. Others occupy your room, your bed. My eyes go dark. There is nothing to be read within them. But sometimes illiteracy is the obstacle, isn’t it?

Eugenides writes, “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in ‘sadness,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘regret.’ Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, ‘the happiness that attends disaster.’ Or: ‘the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.'”

Anyway. So as grief buddies, we ended up reading this post (Grief Magic) together (excerpts after the jump), and I felt like I had been dropped back in the middle of this vast ocean where you are on a shore I don’t know how to navigate to. These themes repeat in my writing, but I’ve seen in all my reading that we simply have to write about things until we are done writing about them. And that might take a lifetime.

But it’s okay, like Rapp says in her essay: we have everything ahead of us, and nothing at all. Perhaps there’s comfort in that, or at least some Germanic train-car hybrid emotion that can finally encompass our history together.

I get close to the shores I can find. I reach out to touch the water. Magically hoping that you’ll know. Magically hoping you’ll reach back.

hello, it's me

Never mind if he calls, the places you get
through inwardness take time, and to drift
down to the shore of the island, you know
by the sand moving, even the coarse sand here
It’s hard to say if you can even stand up, there
but there is blue sky, and blue water tipping up
the same distance from you as your face. Its face
goes further behind the eyes, without weight
or haze, and the horizon is just a change where
from going deeper you go wider, but go

— Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

 

***

Excerpts from “Grief Magic” by Emily Rapp, via The Rumpus:

Read More

To dance with my father again

Many tragedies have already occurred this year – both in my personal realm and out in the larger realms of this country and the world. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, and I try to celebrate my family every day (even from afar): steeping myself in gratitude for their love and hope for their well-being. This Sunday is Father’s Day, which always falls on or close to my birthday.

* * *

When my sister and I were kids, my mom would give us pots and pans to bang on like drums. In the living room we had free reign to hold big spoons up like microphones and giggle while shaking our little behinds. Mom would laugh, telling us how we were so good at “扭屁股” as toddlers.

My father listened to all the songs you’d expect a dad from his generation to listen to. I remember groaning in the mornings when I’d hear Broadway musical songs start blasting through the thin walls. I’d cover my ears, fully knowing that this was his subtle morning wake up call. He always preferred to have Rodgers and Hammerstein take the heat of a teenager’s wrath at getting up early. As a side effect, I learned all the lyrics to “The King and I,” “Sound of Music,” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” He would put Peter, Paul and Mary cassette tapes on repeat, and he made us attend guitar classes to learn folk songs.

Yet there was always a chasm that I couldn’t cross to get close to him: the stereotypical strict and stoic “Asian dad” that sternly directed me to the collection of World Book Encyclopedias rather than answer my questions himself. Like the way he placed Broadway musical songs in between us and him, I felt that he wedged his career in there too. In lieu of “I love you,” he would declare variations of “Go study harder.” I was terrified of him, not because he was mean, but because he was always the strong, strict silent type. And I wanted to be perfect for him, I never wanted to let him down. I thought that you were supposed to be terrified of your dad. Maybe as a kid that’s the only way you know how to feel when you’re in awe.

He always worked incredibly hard to help the people around him. I didn’t see him as much as I hoped because he’d often leave for work before I woke up and return after I had already gone to bed.

A few years ago I went to a restaurant in Houston’s Chinatown for lunch. The restaurant owner came up to our table and started chatting with me in Mandarin. When he found out the name of my father he bowed to me out of respect. I stood there in shock. Because I rarely interacted with my father outside of his strict requests for me to behave or do better in school, I was unspeakably moved at how revered my father is in his community; like a king, even.

So one of my fondest memories is a big cliché, but it’s a cliché because it matters. Though he often spent more hours at the office than at home, I remember the few occasions during which he would put my tiny toddler feet on his feet to dance around the living room, and sing in a Sinatra-like voice (with a pretty thick Taiwanese accent). Whirling around the room with my handsome dad grinning at me, I felt like a star in a musical.

My parents came to the States knowing almost no English. They met each other here while studying at university in South Carolina. They never had the means or time to take a honeymoon together. I think often with indescribable gratitude about how they have encouraged (or at least silently conceded to) my adventurous curiosity and desire to live my life fully.

Though I’m sure my mom worried endlessly over the years as I went on frequent trips, I have been filled with gratitude that they’ve given me a life that allows me to chase my wanderlust to far corners of the world. My first solo backpacking trip found me in Paris along the Seine, watching people dance the polka to live music. I promised myself I’d learn how to dance it, and my senior year I took a ballroom class and whirled around the room laughing while boys arduously led me into the merry polka steps. I felt determined that one day I’d be able to take my parents to places they were never able to see when they were younger.

In November of last year, I casually texted my mom about where she would like to travel if she had more free time. She loves sitting at home in the living room watching travel shows, and we talked longingly of colorful India. She quickly added, “But first, New York City to see you.” I had to be sneaky because it’s difficult to get my mom to agree for me to do nice things for her. So I covertly booked the plane tickets that night.

My mom (with her well-worn skill of basking in Taiwanese and Texan heat) feared it would be too cold in New York City in December but braved it anyway. My parents’ first time in the city, and luck was on our side as the benevolent sunlight shone down on us. While researching good things to do that weekend, I stumbled upon an incredible coincidence: “The King and I” was playing again in New York City during a Broadway revival tour at the Lincoln Center. We had the amazing opportunity to go together, and I still remember my Dad’s eyes, silently watching in real life this musical he had loved for decades from afar.

Afterwards, I asked him if he enjoyed the show. “Well, it didn’t put me to sleep,” he responded with a smile. Which, in case it isn’t clear, is a compliment of the highest order with my dad.

After watching the musical, on their final day in New York City, I took my parents to Central Park. We walked past the Shakespeare statue, and I talked about how I would dance tango with friends during the summertime in this part of the park. During the “King and I” song “Shall We Dance?” Anna teaches the King how to dance the polka.

I exclaimed to my dad, “Would you like for me to teach you how to polka?”

Even now, the little girl inside of me is a little bit terrified of him. I steeled myself for my dad’s stoic scoff and possible responses: that we were in public, that he was tired, that he’d be embarrassed. To my amazement, he held out his hands to me. I showed him the step slowly. And we danced around the statue, laughing and shuffling as I hummed a polka beat while breathlessly counting “one two three AND, one two three AND” while the sun shone down on us in New York City in December.

The King, and I.