give up denying it and continue to move
cat drawings, the gift of guerilla gardening, and entangled life
Hey — while on a walk with my parents earlier this month we ran into this guy hauling a huge garbage bag of leafy, leeky looking plants and scattering them into the grass. I was so curious about what he was doing I stopped to stare at him, openly, and nudged my mom to ask him what on earth he was doing. He said hello and straightaway launched into such a perfect explanation of why these plants are good plants that it sounded rehearsed: you can eat it, you can kill weeds with it, you can say goodbye to painful weekend grass mowing. And then he gave us a bunch of stalks, which were dripping dirt, and told us how to cook it as well (blanched because raw buds are poisonous. Dried is ok too) and then told us to come hang out at his house and also to check out his profile on the neighbourhood WeChat.
I felt, like, a real buoyancy from that interaction. Days later I would vacuum the floor around my desk and marvel at how good it felt to do something active and real with my body; I laughed like crazy because I couldn’t figure out how to replace the head of the vacuum and it turned out to be shockingly simple. I would dance in my basement and feel so rooted in that awkwardness; I would give up denying it and continue to move. My back pain dissolved. I was, as Buddha Stretch says, inside the music. I wonder now what it would be like to feel that sense of surrounding warmth in my own neighbourhood, all the time. It sounds like a joyous fantasy, at odds with how our suburbs seem to have evolved: security cameras on every door, suspicion, vigilance as the default mode.
Which gets to my main thought lately: I have felt a constant vigilance around my own drawing. I’m working on an illustration, which I feel way too inexperienced to complete. It was making me dread working on it every time I opened the file. I don’t remember who said to just show up all the time (maybe from Art & Fear by Ted Orland and David Bayles) but in the end I just forced myself to work on it for an hour a day. I watched a couple of Marc Brunet’s tutorials, which seemed click-baity to me at first and five minutes later I was like, this guy is so good. And then I also realized that I am actually just not very good at art or drawing, and never have been! I always believed that I was just an artist waiting for the right moment to get back to being good, or what I thought was good, but the moment I stopped drawing was the moment art stopped being a part of my identity. This was annoying, because I have so much work ahead of me before I can draw how I would like to, but also so freeing, because I’m not disappointing anyone anymore. I used to fret that I was wasting time learning the wrong stuff, drawing the wrong things, that learning day-trading never looked more viable. But really there’s no expectation to live up to. There never has been. There’s just work to be done.
In the poetry class I’ve been taking, one of my friends was discussing one of the poems we were analyzing, and he said, "I’m saying all these things with a question mark, ‘cuz I don’t know what the fuck,” and that was so beautiful to me! Like, our thoughts are worth saying even though articulation is hard. And that process of thinking itself takes you to somewhere you wouldn’t be able to imagine unless you tried to speak it out loud. And accepting that gives you such grace, I think. How many lovely qualities have we seen in people that we aspire to embody just as fully? Just like when I watched Plus One dir. Jeff Chan, Andrew Rhymer and thought Maya Erskine was so hilarious and wacky…feeling like how straight white men must feel when they watch, like, Taxi Driver or something. Hahaha.
What else; Som-Mai Nguyen’s gorgeously written essay, Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility made me think a lot about who I’m writing for, and how I’ve been approaching my own writing with this feeling hanging over me: is my being Chinese coming across in the writing, and is that important? Why do I need this to come across. Who do I need this to come across for. She discusses it with a clarity way beyond my own articulation, so:
Indeed, whether by naiveté or narcissism, many diasporic writers seemingly cannot accept that The Motherland doesn’t care for them and their psyche’s under-processed, shapeless projections onto a culture to which they do not hold the keys alone, if at all, no matter what White people on committees think. — Som-Mai Nguyen
A friend recently shared a reminder from her mother: Vietnamese doesn’t need you. We get so embroiled in our diasporic angst, writing heartfelt, tortured essays about not being able to impart cultural knowledge to any children we might have, but we’re lucky for what is not the case for everyone who has lost a language or had it taken from them. — Som-Mai Nguyen
And she brings up this lovingly-articulated thing about what communities are, really:
When people say the X community, I wonder whether they just mean some X people I know and refuse to say that because it sounds sillier to extrapolate uniform feeling from the latter, as there’s no X convention where everyone votes on a slate of propositions. I feel no allegiance toward Vietnamese, Vietnamese(-)American, Asian, or Asian(-)American “communities” because no such things can be composed of millions of individuals without interpersonal relationships. I graduated from law school recently, and you could not have caught me dead at any Asian Pacific American Law Student Association events making polite small talk with people headed to clerk for the country’s foulest xenophobes. I do not care for the nation-state, any nation-state; I care about people who have fed and held and loved me, and those I’ve tried to love back. — Som-Mai Nguyen
Earlier I went out to T&T because it was a rare weekend morning where there was no yoga (because it’s SUMMER!!! 😎🌻🌅) and bought 3 indulgences: curry roux cubes, kewpie mayonnaise (a whole fucking kg!), and this danish toast bread which is basically just a loaf-sized croissant. Fucking delicious all three of them. I mean even the mayo and bread by themselves were so good I was happy for hours afterward. And the guy at our glasses store seemed to be new and he tightened my glasses for me and said why don’t you see how it is for now and if not come back again. I don’t want it to pinch you. And that was nice. And later my mom was like, They are really trusting here. They didn’t even ask if we were customers they just did it. And I was like, Yeah, and in my head I was like Yeah, which echoed all the way down.
I do think it means something that it took me around a month of not writing before I could come back to it. I was reading some of Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl, and was struck by some of these scenes that I recognized in Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So much of his life had made it into his books. So much of my life makes it into my own art. There’s no point trying to disentangle it. Give up denying it and continue to move. I wrote in my journal, “should sleep soon. I love 100 cal ice cream bar,” and “I should go downstairs and live my life and cook some shit.”
the gallery
stuff i read recently:
my july playlist, now at 69 songs:
songs on heavy rotation:
sadgrl.online’s neocities website, which is so full of resources + web development help that i wriggle in delight just looking at it. i have been so obsessed with looking at ppl’s beautiful and unique personal neocities websites.