節日 節日來了我們在門前踢球 狹窄的空間尚有兒子起腳的良機 我長於通坑渠，把皮球準確放在 樹與籬笆之間，一個角落 影子如常的黑 節日來了兒子跟表弟玩電腦  皇馬對英格蘭可以12比0  碧咸掃跌碧咸——Penalty! Penalty！  我在翻報章斗大的標題 戴墨鏡的地產商大義滅親 笑咪咪把昨天的自己摑落在報屁股下 節日來了我們吃肉 吐骨，把湯喝得呼呼作響 電視上舉起的木楫像筷子一樣齊 水花一樣高。 我們喝掉所有青啤 眼睛跳進城門河洗掉去年的晦氣 節日來了我們摘樹上的黃皮 妻子說甜我說有點酸 沉色的才是成熟的呀妻說 我拿了一 把給兒子他說不想吃 我拿了一顆給女兒她掉頭便走了 節日來了電視上有脅殺人質的消息 蒸氣升騰母親的湯越來越入味 父親說買來的雞須養一段時日才宰殺 粽子吃淡了我們的餐桌需要一點糖 節日來了我暫停問功課 兒子反問那人為何跳下去 我說或許，或許他要證明一些甚麼吧 但事實證明他還未學會游泳呀 對，這世代，要學好游泳便是這道理 節日來了我們難得胡謅 我們唱歌然後忘記歌詞 我們歡聚然後各自歸家 節日來了我們潛入海底隧道 慶幸還有引擎聲音 像波浪不斷為我們催眠 6/23/2004 Chung Kwok-Keung, tr. May Huang

Festival The festival is here we play football by the door Even in a tight space my son can nail a kickoff  Skilled at the nutmeg, I plan to place the ball Between the tree and hedge, a corner The shadows are dark as always The festival is here my son games with cousins Real Madrid and EFL are down 12 to 0 Beckham fouls Beckham—Penalty! Penalty! I turn the paper’s looming headlines The shady real estate agent holds law above family Cackling, he slaps yesterday’s self onto the paper’s ass  The festival is here we eat meat Spit bones, noisily slurp soup The paddles they lift on TV are neat as chopsticks High as splashes. We down all the Tsingtao And our eyes jump into the Shing Mun River To rinse away last year’s bad luck The festival is here we pick wampee fruits  My wife says they’re sweet I say sour The darker ones are ripest, she says I bring a bunch to my son he says no I bring one to my daughter she walks away The festival is here news of murder is on TV Steam rises and mother’s soup grows tastier Father says you must wait to slaughter chicken After plain zongzi our table needs a little sugar The festival is here I stop asking about homework Yet my son asks why the man jumped in I say perhaps, perhaps he had something to prove Aha, but in truth he proved he could not swim Yes, in today’s age, this is why you learn to swim The festival is here we get to talk nonsense We sing and forget lyrics We gather and go home The festival is here we dive into the cross harbor tunnel Thankful for the whir of engines  Hypnotizing us like waves

🖼️ Like most things that are turned in late, this monthly memo is brief, scattered, retrospective, and a bit lame (sorry). June was a month of big life-changes for me (on paper, mostly) although life feel the same-ish. I guess that’s how the state-of-the-world is, too—laws are signed and orders are passed, but they just seem to formalize or ignore a concurrent reality. Much like the translated poem I’ve included above, this piece still feels like a work-in-progress, but here it is anyway.

🎬 This month, I re-watched Knives Out (still satisfying the second time round), wrapped up Legends of Tomorrow with Kevin, finally finished watching My Cousin Vinny, and also watched the first season of Rhythm + Flow, which is like the hip-hop version of The Voice. I’ve never really been an avid listener of rap music but thanks to Rhythm + Flow, I now have a better understanding and appreciation of the genre. Truly some of the best rhymes are found in rap verses.

🎶 HAIM’s highly-anticipated 3rd album, Women in Music Part III, debuted this month and the sisters never disappoint. While the promo singles they released earlier this year are still (to my ear) the main bangers from the album, most HAIM songs get better after several listens—especially when heard live. All in all, I think they’ve strategized their music-release-during-quarantine very cleverly. Other songs that have been on repeat this month include Chance the Rapper’s “No Problem,” Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out” (a timely tune, as I moved out of Hyde Park), and Jawsh 685’s “Laxed – Siren Beat” (a TikTok hit).

📖 Tragically, I did not read much in June, unless you count many tweets, the Illinois Rules of the Road handbook, and USCIS instructions as “literature.” However, I am hoping to read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and finish reading Joshua Wong’s book in July. I feel that my writing has been dry and drab recently and I think I can chalk it up to the utter disintegration of my reading habits….

💬 June’s word of the month is cul-de-sac, a term that seems to crop up everywhere for me. I encountered it multiple times in Legends of Tomorrow as a recurring trope, then in a NYT crossword (I’ve also used “sac” in my own crosswords), and then IRL in the streets of Naperville. Cul-de-sac is one of those words that I sometimes hear, know exists, yet never really need to use in daily lingo. I feel like it is a very American concept, particularly in relation to suburban life. It’s also a phrase that can sound kind of fancy (it is French, after all), until you translate it plainly: dead end. 😬

On a metaphorical, large-scale level, I wonder whether big movements happening in both the US and Hong Kong can be compared to cul-de-sacs, passages that lead nowhere. I experienced a similar frustration when I was learning to drive in the suburbs. What’s the point of driving into a cul-de sac if you just end up exiting the same way you came in?

In urban planning, cul-de-sacs were originally integrated to create safety and connectivity, but they now sometimes come under fire for being unsafe, and even bad for your health (residents living in cul-de-sacs often need to drive to get anywhere, increasing car exhaust levels as well as safety concerns for kids playing outside their home).

As we navigate the fourth month of quarantine, I also feel that the pandemic situation in the US feels a bit like driving in a cul-de-sac, going in circles without making progress. But perhaps that is taking the metaphor too far…

Anyway, I will aim to publish July’s monthly memo before the month is up. I’ll be pressing “publish” in Berkeley when the time comes!

This weekend, Kevin and I got engaged! 💍We have been together for the past three years, and have known for a long time that we are in it for the long haul. It comes as no surprise to our close friends and family that we’ve decided to tie the knot, and I feel very lucky for all the twists and turns in my life that led me here. Okay, enough sappiness…

Naturally, we have been thinking a lot about “engagement”—particularly, how it happens. Traditionally, an engagement follows a proposal—usually an offer extended by the groom to be, who gets down on one knee and whips out a ring. Typically, the ring is expensive. And in some cases, the proposal is a surprise—or a public event, where onlookers gasp and gawk.

Earlier on, Kevin and I had floated different possibilities to each other. Maybe “I” would propose, hence flipping the stereotypical proposal process on its head. Or maybe we would both plan to surprise the other person at a specific time. Or maybe we would just skip the “proposal” and focus on the marriage. Over time, however, it became very clear that no matter how we handled the situation, we should approach it the same way we approach our relationship: by working as a team, and doing things our own way.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, an engagement (訂婚) is a family event that comes with a number of traditional procedures (禮俗). Usually, a special meal is prepared and families from both sides have to be present. However, in the US, an engagement is typically a more personal affair, something arranged between the couple. Of course, what I’ve described is just a reductive explanation of how engagements transpire in different parts of the world. But they do usually share one thing in common—an engagement ring.

Ah, the ring—’twas a source of stress for both of us early on in this process. Did I want an engagement ring? Yes, but I also knew I didn’t want Kevin to shell out $$$ for an engagement ring that I’d eventually trade for a wedding band (I’m not the wear-two-rings-on-one-finger type). I can think of so many ways to better spend that money. I also knew that nothing would stress Kevin out more than picking a ring out by himself, since we like to make big decisions together. So, if we were to get an engagement ring, we’d pick one out together. And I did not want to ring-shop online—I wanted to try the ring on in person. Then came our next challenge: due to the pandemic, all the shops were closed. What next?

Kevin and I had planned to get engaged and married around this time, and the timing would have been perfect—my mom was scheduled to visit the US in May, so she would have been here to celebrate with us. However, I reiterate: the pandemic happened. We realized that we had to improvise… which brings me to the ring.

I have been beadmaking since I was young, for both my mom and my aunt enjoy making beaded jewelry. Almost all of the jewelry I’ve worn in my life has been handmade by them, and this is a big reason why I never wanted to pierce my ears; my favorite earrings were clip-ons that they made using beads, thread, and wire:

Last December, when I returned to Hong Kong for the holidays, I started beadmaking again. In fact, I started to make rings. Here’s a sample at some of my creations:

So when I returned to Chicago in January, I brought with me a box of beads. And last month, my aunt shipped me even more beads (alongside masks, bless her).

So although Kevin and I could not go ring shopping in person, we had everything we needed to make a very special ring right at home. And given the number of rings I’ve been making since December, I think it’s safe to say that I knew my beadmaking experience would come in clutch very soon…

MAKING THE RING

Both Kevin and I are very hands-on people; we enjoy DIY, making food and supplies from scratch, fixing furniture on our own without calling the landlord (well, I guess he enjoys that), etc. So constructing a ring together made sense and seemed very fun (unlike stressfully shopping for a $$ ring).

To make the band, we followed a very simple beading technique that I use for almost all my rings. We used fishing string—which feels symbolic since Kevin and I have very nice memories fishing in Alabama and on our first camping trip together.

• 

• 

We initially considered a different centerpiece, one made using beads and pearls. Here was an early candidate—a sunflower!

However, we both then thought that it might be better to have something more prominent as the centerpiece. Looking through my jewelry box, we found the gem you now see in the picture. It was originally attached to a pair of my earrings, but it sometimes fell off. So I decided to just remove both of them (I have jewelry tweezers at home). As you can see, the earrings look just fine without the beads. Here’s another fun fact about these earrings: I bought them in Mongkok while Kevin waited for me to make up my mind for like, 40 minutes. So in a kind of sweet way, they remind me of Hong Kong—and Kevin’s indefatigable patience.

The next step was to affix the gem onto the ring. Ultimately, the best way to go about it was to glue the gem onto the beads using Gorilla Glue. Here’s trial 1 (spoiler: it didn’t work). The glue work was kind of messy and bubbly, and the band itself was also too loose.

So we tried a different technique… As you can see in the photo below, we altered the beading of the band so that the gem could actually sit on the ring more comfortably (thus leading to a cleaner gluing process).

Before finally tying the ring together with a surgeon’s knot, I wore it for a while (loosely tied) to make sure it was the right size. We also had to glue the gem back on a few times (lol). But here it is now, looking quite good!

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve been thinking about the Taylor Swift song “Paper Rings,” which contains this lovely line: “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings.” In truth, I have been thinking about that song since last summer (lol). But I also think it’s notable to mark the difference between Taylor’s first worldwide hit, “Love Story,” and “Paper Rings.” In “Love Story” she sings about a prince who “knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said ‘Marry me Juliet’….” In “Paper Rings,” we see a more practical, less fairytale, yet just as romantic version of marriage. For ultimately what bonds two people together is the relationship they share and their commitment. A ring, shiny as it is, shouldn’t be at the center of any engagement. One day, this engagement ring is going to rust and I might just tuck it away somewhere. But the relationship that forged it is everlasting. 😊

The Trees

In my front yard live three crape myrtles, crying trees
We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing
During a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat

Falling into us. I don’t want to make more of it.
I’d like to let these spindly things be
Since my gift for transformation here proves

Useless now that I know everyone moves the same
Whether moving in tears or moving
To punch my face. A crape myrtle is

A crape myrtle. Three is a family. It is winter. They are bare.
It’s not that I love them.
Every day. It’s that I love them anyway.

Jericho Brown

🖼️ This month, Jericho Brown won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, becoming the first black and queer writer to win the award. His poem The Trees is exactly what I needed this month: a gentle, although sorrowful reminder that familial love, complicated as it may be, is often unconditional.

–

Many people assume that I was born in May because of my name, and although I was a March baby, it’s true that I have a particular affinity with the month of May. This month, I’ve been making crosswords (more on that later) and I’ve noticed that my favorite words to hide in a grid are names. Names have the quality of being both unique and shared; everyone has their own name, but chances are someone or something else has your name, too (unless you’re X Æ A-12, whose name was recently changed to X Æ A-Xii). So it’s a beautiful thing to find your name in the world, and while I’m no astrologist, I’ve always thought that the month of May has powers to clarify my life.

In many ways, this May has been a month of mourning. The COVID-19 death toll in America surpassed 100,000. George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police on May 25. Hong Kong received heartbreaking news. As many of us shelter in place at home, how do we process the sweeping loss that connects us all?

French writer Georges Péréc famously wrote the novel La Disparition (translated as The Void , The Vanishing, or The Vanish’d in English) without a single e. When I was younger I used to think the novel was a gimmick. But e is essential in French; it appears in most words, including je (I), mère (mother), and père (father). Raised in post-war France, Péréc lost his family at a young age. His novel, devoid of a single e, reckons with loss and trauma. What is louder than silence? Don’t the subjects of our writing and concentration hide in our texts, like clued answers in a crossword? In The Trees, Jericho Brown uses the motif of a crying tree to show us sorrow instead of directly describing his family. The poem is short, and we don’t get a clear picture of the people implicated in its final stanzas—but through a trio of crape myrtles, Brown tells us exactly what we need to know.

I have been thinking about how I can write about Hong Kong without talking directly about Hong Kong. How I can contribute and continue to be a part of the city that raised me. How I can grow older, moving across this complicated country while holding on to home. Maybe to write about Hong Kong is to leave it out entirely, like an e that anchors a language. Perhaps I may write about Hong Kong by telling you about Chicago, a city that is stubbornly flat, mostly winter, and divided into grids. In Chicago, I mostly live in one language. I use the oven when I cook. I don’t always like to use public transit, and don’t like to take the train home late at night. But like many other places in this world, Chicago has a long history of protest, and had to learn to rebuild itself after a fire. Have I ever fought for Chicago? I’m not sure.

I find it curious that, despite the absence of e‘s in La Disparition, Georges Péréc’s name is always on the book cover—often alongside a giant E. Many e’s appear on the cover of the book, as if the book itself is bound by the absence it so diligently marks. Perhaps there’s some relief to be found in the fact that Georges, even when weighed down by the loss of e, held four in his own name.

So, what’s in a name? In the wake of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery’s deaths, the hashtag #SayHisName went viral on the Internet. The New York Times printed 100 names of the 100,000 people who lost their lives to COVID-19 on its front page. In the abyss of loss, names echo to shape the human lives and stories that once were. Once spoken, they become something we share and acknowledge. So every May, I am grateful for 31 days of feeling my name resonate with the world around me. One of the poems I’ve been translating this month, 字典 (“Dictionary”), contains the following line:

要碰上的字
終會碰上
那麽日子裏新生的事物呢
該如何對應？

one will always meet
The words one is meant to meet 
What about the things born every day 
How should we name them?

This month, when so many lives and possibilities have been lost, may we hold on to names.

🎬 Alrighty, I’m going to wrap up the rest of this memo hurriedly. The TV I watch nowadays is basically whatever Kevin watches. So this means I finished watching The Mandalorian and watched some superhero TV from the CW network (Flash, Supergirl, etc.) this month. We also watched some of the animated Beauty and the Beast — did you know that the film was supposedly Disney’s first “feminist” film? I also started watching the Bon Appetit YouTube videos, which truly live up to their hype. I wish I could elaborate more on this section but my screen-life is a blur these days…

📚 A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean – This is one of my favorite short stories of all time and I’ll never forget the deep pang in my heart I felt the first time I read it. A River Runs Through It uses the art of fly fishing to tell a story of brotherhood and love, and it captures so much of the thorny emotions felt between siblings: pride, helplessness, love. Fun fact 1: MacLean was the William Rainey Harper Professor at UChicago! Fun fact 2: Brad Pitt starred in the film adaptation.

“Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as “our brother’s keepers,” possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts.

I also started reading Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, and the sentences in his stories are gorgeously woven. What a formidable talent.

🎶 I don’t have anything too profound to say about the music I’ve been listening to this month… here are some highlights!

HAIM – Don’t Wanna
Artie Shaw – Cross Your Heart
Carly Rae Jepsen – Felt This Way and Stay Away
All of Taylor Swift’s acoustic songs from the “Live From Paris” concert
Taylor Swift – Paper Rings

💬This month’s word of the day is, undoubtedly, “crosswords.” I made a crossword for each day of the month, and you can play all of them here. I also am working on an essay about translation and crosswords, which I hope to publish soon… that’s all for now! More soon~

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “To the Young Who Want to Die”

My monthly memo is a day late, aaaah! As you read, please think of “this month” as April, which is when I began writing this piece.

🖼️Every April you hear someone say “April is the cruellest month,” and T.S. Eliot’s words—composed in post-WWI England—ring particularly true now. Yet the poem I want to spotlight this month is Gwendolyn Brooks’ beautiful reminder that cruelty can pass, and that hope is generative. Green’s your color. As we enjoy warmer days, I’m sometimes taken aback anew by the influential power of natural surroundings. I grew up with the sea and the mountains as neighbors, and have always relied on nature to shape the way I feel and create. I love how the day-to-day transformations of trees tell us that change is on its way. These sweeping gestures, like the sunlight hitting the trees just right, or a night’s rain forming a makeshift pond for ducklings, are blessings. These days, it often feels that nothing is more reassuring than green.

I guess “not much” happened in April, although the start of the month does feel a lifetime away. My brother’s 2-week quarantine period ended, and we celebrated with a hearty fried-chicken dinner from Harold’s. My little sister celebrated her 21st birthday (aaaah!) so we celebrated with green tea cheesecake. Another big event I’d be remiss to omit: this month, our apartment united in a concerted effort to drive out the mice in our apartment, although I regret to say that a few probably remain, alongside their telltale droppings. We did find and trap a mouse in our sink, though—that traumatic memory remains stark. This month, I also cut my roommates’ hairs (all boys), watched Kevin grow out his beard and then finally shave it, and revived my foodstagram. What have I noticed about myself this April? I am emotionally appreciative of things that may seem mundane, like my glasses (remarkably clear after cleaned) and my two precious stuffed dogs (my mom drew their portrait this month!). I am also relentlessly distractible, prone to multitasking at a desk that has become a workstation for too many tasks. And I know even more now that my body relies on movement, be it dancing in my room or going on walks, to stay sound and sane.

They say April showers bring May flowers, and I am—as always—thrilled for the coming of May, a month I tend to over-symbolize (I can’t help it! I’m May!).

🎬 This month, we not only caught up on, but eagerly await every new episode of Clone Wars, Season 7. Now the show is the whole apartment’s Friday night bonding activity. Star Wars has been a big part of my life ever since I was young, influencing my fashion (one too many Star Wars t-shirts), usernames (I am “maytheforce” on Instagram), and holiday plans (new movies tend to come out in December). But I never thought Star Wars would return to me in the form of an animated series during the Quarantine of 2020. Aside from Clone Wars, Kev and I have also been watching Jane the Virgin, which many friends told me to watch years ago. I guess quarantine is when you find time for things you put on the back burner, right? Wish the same could be said for my longstanding plans to write more! Jane the Virgin is totally up my alley, though—the show is centered on female protagonists, Jane is a writer, there’s tons of meta-narration (which is probably my favorite literary device), and it’s a comedy. I used to always think that books are where I find uncanny parallels to my own life, but this month I’ve realized that I find them in film as well. But, fear not—no parallels are to be found in the reality TV show Too Hot to Handle, which Kev and I also watched this month. It’s a reality TV dating show with an AI “big brother” named “Lana” who scrutinized the contestants’ every move…

📖 Should I set a goal to spend more time reading books than watching TV next week? Anyway… I finished Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. It’s a heartrending read about a Korean family’s journey through generations during the Japanese occupation of Korea. It was hard to get into the novel at first, and it contains a number of scenes that are difficult to read, but once you’re past the 200 page mark you can’t put it down! I’ve also started reading Unfree Speech by Joshua Wong, the Hong Kong activist who was one of the leaders of 2014’s Occupy Movement. Joshua is a controversial figure in Hong Kong, of course, and a household name. And I’ve been reading about him in the news since the early 2010s. So why am I reading Unfree Speech now? I guess it’s a way for me to revisit a part of Hong Kong’s recent political history that ties so crucially into its present and future.

🎵Songs that have defined my month include…

• Taylor Swift — “Shake It Off” — I have always wanted to choreograph a solo jazz routine to this song and this month, I finally did it! I may post a routine breakdown here next month.
• Red Prysock – “Jump For George” — Two of my friends and I decided to collaborate on choreographing a section of this song. I’d never heard it before, but it was fun to choreograph!
• “1973” — James Blunt — Does quarantining make you nostalgic? Real question. Nostalgia is important in Ling Ma’s “Severance,” a novel about a pandemic, and I wonder whether being on lockdown encourages me to cook meals that are closer to home and listen to older music. Anyway, I used to love this song and I love it again now.
• Conan Gray’s new album came out, and his style is a blend of Taylor Swift and Lorde. So it’s unsurprising that he’s on my music radar.
• Laura Marling, one of my all-time-fav musicians, also dropped her album Song For Our Daughter this month, plus is hosting a series of Instagram live guitar tutorials!

💬 My word of the month is Crossword. But as I’m already a day late to posting this month’s memo, I’ll elaborate on why in a future post! For now, I leave you with one of May’s Minis:

I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet’s differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

Sonnet 8 from Clearances by Seamus Heaney

🖼️ For a long time, March has been a complicated month for me and my family. March is beginning and ending; celebration and grief; life and death. But perhaps it is this way for much of the world, too, for this is the month in which winter melts into spring while sunlight stays around for longer, beaming its way through the living room even at dinnertime.

When I first visited America, always in the summer, what I loved most was the longevity of sun. Here, the sun rose early and took its time to set. As a child, I was entranced by how light lingered, elongating an ordinary day.

Did I ever have an “American Dream”? I never thought of my feelings towards the US in such terms before, but sometimes you only recognize the shape of a feeling when it is ending. At 18, I made the decision to come to the US because this country produced so much of the art and literature I loved. In America, the parking lots were the size of soccer fields, universities were prestigious and promising, and the sun always seemed to be shining. As a teenager living in one of the densest cities in the world, I felt that America was where I’d find space and freedom—the blessing to do whatever I wanted. 

In many ways, I found what I was looking for here. Chicago has become my second home; it’s a place that has shaped my thoughts and my future. But this March, even as I make plans to stay in this country, I know that my “American Dream” has somewhat splintered. Perhaps it’s the convergence of political crisis (I am talking about the primaries, yes) and public health emergency that has finally broken me. But I think part of it is also watching people around me earlier this month shrug off the coronavirus when Asian countries (and Asian people abroad) have been compromised, traumatized, and stigmatized by COVID-19 since January. Oftentimes, the feeling that you can do whatever you want has large-scale repercussions.

Recently, I came across an article about the pandemic titled “That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief.” I began this piece by saying that March is a complicated month for my family, and that’s because 10 years ago this month, my dad lost his fight with lung cancer. 16 years ago, he was diagnosed—at the same time SARS descended on Hong Kong. Now, as I read about ventilator shortages across the country, I think about how my dad depended on complicated respiratory equipment to survive. I think about how regular hospital visits wove themselves into the fabric of my childhood years. COVID-19 impacts not only those who are infected with the disease, but also anyone who depends on emergency services, medical machines, and hospital access. When SARS came to Hong Kong, I had no idea that my family had not one, but two deadly illnesses to worry about. All I knew, as a kid who disliked going to school, was that I got to stay home. Now, I wonder how many of my favorite childhood memories originated from the SARS era. I always like to believe that my memories are more accurate than they are.

When I was in Hong Kong this December, I catalogued my old diaries (over a dozen; I was a prolific journaller). I revisited my diary entries from March 2010, confident that I’d find, in the spaces of grief, my own handwriting; proof that I had journalled my way through crisis. After all, this is what I remember doing—writing, writing my way through grief. To my surprise, I found nothing. An absence, a clearance. The final poem from Seamus Heaney’s sequences of sonnets “Clearances,” written in memory of his late mother, comes to mind.

Grief takes the form of its subject, loss. And, as something that is difficult to talk about, even with family, grief is deafeningly silent. When you see an empty restaurant, a shuttered shop, or a silent campus, you are observing grieving spaces. It is little wonder that so many people I know risked passing through germy airports to return to their families despite travel warnings. To grieve apart always accentuates the loss, for grief itself is a vacancy. 

But March, as I said at the beginning, is also about celebrations. March is, and it almost feels underwhelming to say this, my birthday—and not just mine, but my brother’s, too. To have a twin means to grow up with someone who has been with you since there was nothing at all; to have a companion in the countering of loss. For the first time in four years, Henry and I got to spend our birthday together, and I don’t take this gift lightly. He flew in from Syracuse last Sunday, and the days before the flight were turbulent and nerve-wracking; Henry’s flight was hastily booked, cancelled, rescheduled, and then rescheduled again. He was flying in from an airport near New York City (as I type this, my poor brother is still in room-quarantine). Everything had to be cleaned—Henry himself, his clothes, his suitcases. While he showered, I stepped outside to where we had left our shoes. When I picked up his boots, prepared to wipe them down, I glanced at the sole and saw—to my surprise—that we’d both been wearing the same shoes that day—Clarks. What are the odds? Twinning, as they say.

I am lucky that I get to be quarantined with Kevin, Henry, and our great roommates. I’m lucky that I get to work from home, and that I can FaceTime my mom and sister. In times of crisis, it always feels trite but crucial to count your blessings. March 2020 has been a master class in escalation, but also a lesson in patience. It has been a month of cancellations and grief—but also celebrations and sunlight, the miracle of watching the days last longer. As we continue our social distancing, alone or with family, we are joined in protecting our loved ones and strangers. As March turns into April, let us hopefully move past our grief, fill in the vacancies, and safeguard the coming of spring. 

*

🎬 Okay, I’m going to be concise for the rest of this memo. This month, Kevin and I finished seasons 4 and 5 of Clone Wars. The series becomes stronger as the seasons progress, which is largely due to the maturing of Ahsoka Tano and the series’ filling-in of plot holes from the original prequels. If you read February’s monthly memo, you’ll know that we watched seasons 2 and 3 last month. So, we are making good progress—but also watching literally nothing else, perhaps to our roommates’ disappointment.

📖 I finished reading Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. The novel’s multiple protagonists include a translator, a poet, a publisher, a mother. A translated book about translation? What else could be more up my alley? I also started reading, but did not finish (alas, I had to return it to the library) Sour Heart, a collection of short stories by Jenny Zhang. My favorite book that I read this month was Last Things by Jenny Offill, whose imaginative language and lean prose made from great bedtime reading. I’m currently working my way through Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which feels uncannily relevant to my life right now. Why is it that the books we read always mirror our lives?

“My mother said that one day the pictures wont make any sense anymore … because everything will be inside … and we’ll all live in huge buildings connected to one another by tunnels…. Our skin will be thin as paper from staying inside and we won’t even remember that we once told time by the sun.” – Jenny Offill

“History has failed us, but no matter.” – Min Jin Lee

“How does this thing about remembering the future work? … If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.” – Valeria Luiselli, tr. Christina MacSweeney

🎵I started “zooming” this month, so”Zing a Little Zong” by Bing Crosby has been stuck in my head (when I sing it aloud, to Kevin’s amusement/frustration, I change the word “Zing” to “Zoom”). “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” by Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington also feels very apropos right now. Additionally, I challenged myself to learn a solo jazz routine to “Melody in Swing” by the Don Byas Quartet, so that’s probably my most-played song of the month.

💬Quarantine. That’s it, that’s the tweet.

In 1997, the year that I was born, the H5N1 virus in humans was first reported in Hong Kong. Almost 20 people were infected while 6 died. This would not be the first time the “bird flu” virus descended on Hong Kong.

In order to contain the 1997 outbreak, the government ordered a ban on chicken imports from China and then a mass slaughter of chickens; around 1.3 million birds. According to a CNN article from 1998, “Hong Kong’s chicken killers haunted by guilt,” the slaughtering of chickens was a deeply traumatic event for workers in the Agriculture and Fisheries department. Many of these workers were religious and did not want to kill birds; some could still hear the cries of the murdered birds when they went to bed at night. “Hong Kong Destroys Its Chickens,” a Washington Post article published in December 1997, goes into more detail on the killings:

More than 250,000 chickens were killed with carbon dioxide gas in the first day of an operation that involved thousands of government workers from a half-dozen agencies as well as private vendors, who also slit the throats of the birds and dropped the carcasses into plastic garbage bags. Yellow dump trucks and earth-moving machines made huge piles of poultry remains at three large landfills….. So massive is the job that the government did not have enough salaried workers and ended up hiring day laborers to kill chicken and geese for one Hong Kong dollar — the equivalent of about 12 cents — per slaughtered bird.

Although the public was assured that you could not catch the bird flu by eating chicken, this did not stop restaurants from removing chicken from their menus or the government from ordering the slaughter. My favorite poem by Chung Kwok-keung is 家務 “Housework” (translation forthcoming in Circumference Magazine later this year). The first time I read the poem, I teared up. It tracks the speaker’s relationship with chickens from his childhood to adulthood, as he watches chickens go from being creatures of love and affection to the faces of a fatal virus. I won’t share my full translation here yet (message me if you want it), but here’s the last stanza:

Is that love? I see a thin fluid flow from your beak like tears
Is that the flu I see a whole city of people with long faces
Between rainy and sunny days, I learn to wear masks and hazmat suits
Deeply raking the mud, doing that never-ending work
Oh-oh, I hear again that voice that voice stopping and going
Mouths sealed in every stuffed black plastic bag
Is that love, for the children we removed you from the cookbook
Is that love, for our own sake we piled up your bodies
Like houses crowded together in the morning at night in a shut-up city
I hear that voice that voice is nearby is at my feet
Without understanding it that language is buried like the days

Original text here.

I mention the bird flu because it is the first influenza that took place in the timeline of my life so far. Since then, there have also been SARS (2003), H1N1 swine flu (2009), Zika (2015), etc, listed here. And now: COVID-19 (2020).

How do infectious diseases shape cultural and personal memory? I have been thinking about the influence of diseases such as SARS and H5N1 on HK’s history as I translate some of Chung’s poems, a number of which touch on these diseases. I have also been thinking about how I am personally reacting to COVID-19, which is the first serious pandemic that I am experiencing as a functioning adult. Now is certainly the first time I am making decisions surrounding personal health in a place other than HK, in times of a virus. This distancing in some ways makes homesickness all the more acute.

I actually have distinct memories of the SARS era, or so I believe. What I remember is not SARS, however, but a blissfully long chunk of time spent at home; piecing together puzzles on the study room floor; making art with my mom; reading. It’s absurd to think that while this deadly virus was proliferating in Hong Kong, my artistic interests as a child were also proliferating. When I remember SARS, I remember staying at home (school was cancelled) and thriving off tons of playtime. Only years later did I realize that it was a totally different narrative for my parents. For the city.

Trauma, grief, and disease create voids in our life of different magnitudes. 1.3 million chickens eradicated from the face of a city. A misremembering of months spent away from school. Cancelled conferences and international gatherings. A 3,000+ global death toll.

This Thursday, I was supposed to attend AWP, the largest literary conference in North America. On Saturday, the largest physics conference in the world (to draw 11,000) was cancelled 36 hours prior to the event. AWP is supposed to host 12,000 writers. To make matters worse, the CDC released a patient who had tested positive for COVID-19 over the weekend in San Antonio, and said patient immediately went to the mall, a food court, and a hotel near the airport. Yesterday, the mayor of San Antonio declared a public health emergency. He later claimed he did so purely to seek legal leverage. He would later publish a letter saying that San Antonio is as “wonderful as ever,” encouraging others to visit. The co-executive director of AWP (now former director; she resigned this morning, long story) sent mixed messages about a potential cancellation through her personal Twitter account; writers panicked; misleading information was tweeted; planes and hotels were cancelled; and then came the announcement that the conference is still on.

Rumors, proliferating rapidly alongside the virus, are powerful vehicles for self-fulfilling prophecies. People hear that supermarkets are running out of rice, so they go and buy all the rice; next thing you know, the supermarkets are out of rice. People hear that a conference is cancelled, so they cancel their hotel reservations and registration; next thing you know, the lack of attendees in-effect cancels the event.

Crises always expose flaws that are already inherent in a system, and the institutional issues that have arisen since the COVID-19 outbreak remind us that our world is, at its ugliest, a place where xenophobia can run amuck; where decisions about public health are set aside for profit; where fear can drive irrationality.

Now is the first time I’ve thought about how a pandemic can affect the publishing industry. The London Book Fair will soon experience the same lack-of-attendance woes as AWP is now, for example. Small presses who shelled out to attend the conference will take an economic hit. This is the first time I have seen so clearly a combined crisis of health and governance in the literary world. In his takedown of AWP in the LA Review of Books, former AWP executive director Matt Burriesci wrote: “How can this board restore the organization’s health when they don’t seem to even acknowledge the sickness?”

There is a lot more about the virus that I want and need to think through, but perhaps not on this platform. Years later, when I look back on this time, I wonder what I will remember.

“These kind of soy sauces are passed down for generations. They are heirlooms. If you look into yourself, you see past, present and future. You see that time revolves endlessly. You can see the past from the present. By looking into myself, I see my grandmother, my mother, the elders in the temple, and me. As a result, by making soy sauce, I am reliving the wisdom of my ancestors. I am reliving them. It’s not important who or when. What is important is that I’m doing it in the present. I use soy sauce, and I acknowledge its importance. It is no longer just me that’s doing things. It’s me in the past, in the present, and even in the future. Soy sauce is eternal. It is life itself.”

– Jeong Kwan, a Buddhist nun from Korea. She said this during an episode of Chef’s Table. It’s not a poem *per se,” but it is the most poetically heard-rending thing I came across this month so I wanted it to serve as the poem of the month.

🖼️ February tends to be a short but crammed month, and this year was no exception! This month, my ALTA mentorship officially kicked off, and I got to meet my mentor Jennifer Feeley in Chicago, which was wonderful. It’s crazy to think that my book project is slowly, yet surely, underway. This month, we celebrated both Kevin’s birthday—I made a Yoda cake using spinach and honey—and valentine’s day (back to back, convenient for me). We felt lucky that the annual UChicago Folk Festival took place over that weekend. We go every year, so neither of us had to brainstorm date ideas (our ideal date night is probably binge-watching Clone Wars at home, so thinking of “real” dates is challenging). But we did end up having a nice dinner at Strings Ramen and then a surprise Saturday night dinner at Giordano’s, where I bit my tongue so hard that I took an entire week to recover and couldn’t speak/eat properly for like 3-4 days. On the subject of my February afflictions…this month, I also had to get my ears cleaned (first time using my medical insurance) after my ear wax accumulation became unbearable (sorry if this is TMI), and for the past 2 weeks my left neck muscle has been kind of sprained (from trying to knock water out of my ear; from doing bad crunches at Cardio HIIT; from waking up the wrong way and yanking it). Anyway…February has also been a busy, busy month at work, as we’re gearing up to go to AWP in San Antonio next week (more on that in March). But I’ve still found time to work on some translations, and co-translated this op-ed for Lausan HK: “I went to eat at three ‘Hongkongers Only’ restaurants.” It’s “a reflective account of what it has been like to be Mainland Chinese in Hong Kong under the dual conditions of epidemic and ongoing political struggle.” I’ve said it before and will say it again; translation is all about having empathy.

🎬 If you follow this blog, you’ll know that I watched Miss Americana and wrote a long, “extra” blog post about it. I actually watched it a second time in a more relaxed setting (just me and Kevin and one other roommate) and that was waaay more fun. February is actually quite a significant Movie Month; the Oscars happened! I am delighted that Parasite took home four major awards: best screenplay, director, foreign film, and PICTURE. Of course, Parasite‘s win also behooves the Academy. It feels like the first time in a while that a Best Picture win has been so widely celebrated. I’ve been reading some more analyses of how the film is a technical masterpiece; e.g. the simple “ram-don” dish is a striking metaphor, lines are employed in the cinematography to represent class divisions, timing is perfect and exacting in the film and screenplay, etc. More on Parasite later. This month, Kevin and I also successfully finished Season 2 of Clone Wars and are now on Season 3. Sometimes I wonder why I spend so much time watching these cartoons, but then again I realize how much fun it is to indulge in these concise, tightly-written episodes. Actually, one of the episodes even made me tear up! An episode we watched today (I am composing this sentence on Monday, Feb 24) also made me think a lot about how the accents of voice actors are used to suggest, sometimes problematically, racial differences between different aliens. For example…Cham Syndulla is French? Lott Dod and the other Neimoidians are…East Asian? Of course, given how Neimoidians are depicted as being somewhat slimy and treacherous, you can see how casting them in Asian voices is kinda problematic. I did some digging on the Internet and feel justified by this article from 1999 that confirms some of my thoughts on the matter:

The Phantom Menace is filled with the hierarchies of accent and class status. The Jedi knights speak in full paragraphs, resonant baritones and crisp British accents…. The “status-obsessed,” hive-dwelling Neimoidians, on the other hand–who lead “a labyrinthine organization of bureaucrats and trade officials from many worlds that has insinuated itself throughout the galaxy”–speak like Charlie Chan.

Also, wiki.starwarsminute points out that the stereotyped demographic changes based on which version of the movies you’re watching:

In the English language version, Silas Carson (the actor playing Nute Gunray) imitated a Thai actor’s reading of the lines.

In the German version, they were dubbed with French-sounding accents.

In the French, Spanish, Czech and Italian versions, the Neimoidians were given Russian accents.

Okay, enough on Star Wars (for now). This month, Kevin and I also watched To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (we’d seen the first movie together) and I think the movie may have convinced me that I’m no longer a rom-com gal. The movie was generally fun to watch, although the on-the-nose attempts to emulate Wes Anderson (and Buzzfeed Tasty) were a Bit Much. Kevin was frustrated at how “extra” everyone in the movie was; I felt personally attacked by how Lara Jean wears a perfect outfit (and new shoes) in every scene; we both thought the movie did John Ambrose McClaren dirty! And, like Star Wars (I guess I am bringing it up again), To All the Boys tries to thrust diversity in our faces through its casting while steadily uplifting something else; in the case of the rom-com, it’s what can best be described as a “basic white girl” aesthetic. The movie stars an Asian-American lead, which is great. But when you cast an Asian-American woman in a film that isn’t fundamentally interested in race yet sporadically gestures to it throughout, the screenwriting begins to feel a bit checkbox-y. It’s telling that the press circuit has mostly been interested in the male heartthrobs in the film, too. The audience isn’t actually primed to root for Lara Jean throughout. At times, it feels like she is explicitly directed to get on our nerves. In this way, I think she and Kelly Marie Tran (as Rose Tico) are in the same boat. Maybe. On Feb 28, fueled by sheer curiosity, I sped-watch Love is Blind, the new reality TV sensation taking over Netflix. It’s 10-episode show that begins with a simple, yet dystopian, conceit: if you put 10 women and 10 men in two different rooms, and allow them to have conversations without seeing each other, can they find true love based on *personality* alone? By episode 10, they are supposed to get married. Of course, because it’s reality TV, no one on the show looks “bad” to begin with, so it’s not exactly a princess and the frog situation. The real experiment of the show is not, as they claim, to discover whether love is blind. Instead, it’s a concentrated character-study on the ways in which gender dynamics manifest even in the absence of physical interaction.

📖 This month, I read Severance by Ling Ma, who teaches fiction in the Creative Writing department here at UChicago. Severance is an eerily timely novel about the “Shen Fu Virus” that turns New York city into an apocalyptic city. The fevered zombies repeat mundane actions over and over again until they turn into the walking dead. The novel probes us to consider: does one need to be fevered to be trapped in an infinite, mindless routine?

“Memories beget memories. Shen fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop.”

All zombie narratives are about the disintegration of society in some way (politically, environmentally, socially), and Severance is also a story about immigrating, “severing” from a home country. The parts in the novel that really resonated with me were what the narrator had to say about moving to the US; her mother telling her to moisturize and their realization that milk is sold in the US in gallons.

I’ve also started reading Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, translated by Christina MacSweeney, as well as Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart. I also read quite a few poetry books this month; Suzanne Buffam’s The Pillow Book, Ted Kooser’s Kindest Regards, and of course a number of poems by Chung Kwok-keung.

Two articles published online that I loved reading this month are 1) Lok Fung’s piece on the “Ups and Downs of Poetry,” in which she mentions me alongside a number of other women writers as “同類人” (kindred spirit, birds of a feather, etc.): “旅居芝加哥的黃鴻霙從現代性的換喻入手，拆解那些愛情與城市的現象” (something like “Chicago-based May Huang uses the modern literary device of metonymy to unpack images of love and the city”). Lok Fung was one of the poets I wrote about in my thesis and now we are pals! Love to see it.

2) The second article I loved is Sharon Choi’s op-ed for Variety, in which she discusses her experience interpreting for Bong Joon Ho throughout the film awards season. This piece brought tears to my eyes, it’s so beautifully written. And her grit and kindness is so evident throughout all of it. My favorite passage is this one:

Switching back and forth between languages has never been my job; it’s the only way of life I know. I’ve been my own interpreter for 20 years. A psychologist specializing in bilingual children once told me that most people have a similar brain capacity — if a monolingual knows 10,000 words, a bilingual would only know 5,000 in each language. All my life I’ve been frustrated by having to choose one of the two. This is why I fell in love with cinema’s visual language. Filmmaking is a similar process of translating my interior into a language that can communicate with the outside world, but I didn’t have to search for equivalents that were only approximations of the original.

🎵 After my long rant on movies + books, I will spare you with a mercifully short paragraph on my February in Music; the Folk Festival took place this month, and the one band whose sound really stuck with me was Bill and the Belles, an americana band from Johnson City, Tennessee (I really hope y’all read that as a Wagon Wheel lyric). My favorite tune by them is “Lonesome Blues.” There are such clever rhymes in that song, and its percussion presents fun opportunities for dancing. I feel obliged to add that Doja Cat’s “Say So” was also a significant song for me this month because it is the track my Cardio HIIT instructor uses for the weights circuit of the workout. Lollllllll

💬 Finally…my word of the month this February is….SHOES. Because this month, I finally decided to invest in shoes again. Shoes for work; for the snow; for dancing; for general coolness. I have a difficult relationship with buying shoes, and once considered writing a dystopian short story in which the protagonist is trapped in a large, suburban DSW for 24 hours and can only escape if she buys the perfect pair of shoes… but anyway. Shoes enable you to fully become the person you want to be, whether that person is a runner or swing dancer. This is nothing new, of course; just a life lesson I had to remind myself again this month. And shoes also remind me of the timeless saying, “to put yourself in another’s shoes.” I feel like I’ve been doing that a lot this month, not only through my translation work, but also at work; while watching the DemDebates; when thinking about the coronavirus; during phone calls with my family. Onwards to March!

I’ve been sitting on this news for a while, and am happy to finally announce that I’ve been awarded funding through the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program to work on my translations of Chung Kwok-keung’s poetry with Jennifer Feeley! Jennifer is a translator I’ve admired for a long time; her translations of Xi Xi’s poetry was the first instance of Hong Kong poetry in translation that really resonated with me. The six other mentees chosen through the program work with Arabic, Catalan, Korean, Russian, and Norwegian. You can learn more about the other mentees and mentors here, and scroll down (or visit this link) to learn about my project. I hope to use this blog as a space to provide updates on my process; an online translation journal of sorts. 💖

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The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to facilitate and establish a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a project selected by the emerging translator. The mentorship duration is nine months. The emerging translator is expected to choose a project that can be completed in this timeframe, and they will only be advised on that particular project. Congratulations to this year’s poetry from Hong Kong mentee, May Huang, who will be mentored by Jennifer Feeley:

May Huang is a writer from Hong Kong. Born in Taiwan and based in Chicago, she translates prose and poetry from the Chinese. She graduated from the University of Chicago with honors in English and Comparative Literature last June, and is a member of the Third Coast Translator’s Collective, a community of translators primarily based in the Chicagoland area. She is thrilled to attend ALTA for the second time this November as a mentee of the Emerging Translators Program!

May was introduced to literary translation in 2017, when she enrolled in a prose translation workshop taught by Annie Janusch through her university’s Program in Creative Writing (coincidentally, May now works as the program’s Student Affairs Administrator). Since then, she has been lucky enough to study with Jason Grunebaum, Haun Saussy, Jennifer Scappettone, and Lynn Xu. Her thesis, which was awarded the Janel Mueller Undergraduate Thesis Prize, explores the ways in which poetry and translation shape urban life in Hong Kong and Chicago.

May’s interest in the poetics of place has always been a driving force behind the poems that she reads, writes, and translates. Her poems about Hong Kong have appeared in journals such as Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Kindling Journal, and her reviews of Hong Kong poetry have been published in the Hong Kong Review of Books. The first translation she published, titled “Chicago” and published in Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation, came from a suite of city poems by the Taiwanese poet Ya Hsien. May’s translation of the short story “How the Best Masters Died” by Ma Xiaoquan is forthcoming in the Wuxia issue of Pathlight Magazine.

Over the course of the ALTA mentorship program, May intends to translate a book-length manuscript of poems by the Hong Kong poet Chung Kwok-keung (鐘國強). A prolific poet, essayist, critic, and translator, Chung has been writing poetry for over two decades and is the recipient of numerous Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among other accolades. His poems navigate the personal and political to portray the city’s different dimensions; through his work, one understands more about what it means to work, eat, live, love, and protest in Hong Kong. For May, translating Hong Kong literature is not only about advocating for the city’s culture, but also about better understanding its past, present, and possibilities. When translating Chung’s work, May feels connected to and endlessly inspired by Hong Kong—a city she is proud to consider home. May’s translations of Chung’s poems have appeared in Exchanges and more recently in Asymptote, in an essay on protest poetry that went viral on Twitter.

May is thrilled to be mentored by Jennifer Feeley, whose translation of Xi Xi’s work was one of the first examples of Hong Kong poetry in translation that she encountered. Now is a crucial time for Hong Kong literature to reach an international audience, and May is grateful to ALTA for supporting Hong Kong voices through its mentorship program.

This mentorship is being offered by ALTA in partnership with the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation.

Happy end-of-January, and welcome to a new tradition that I am launching—May’s monthly memos! Since the new decade began, I’ve been thinking of a blogging practice I want to turn into a habit. I didn’t want to blog about something every day, and I’m trying to train my brain to not think about time in weeks, which is what four years of the quarter system have taught me to do. A month seems nicely-sized, and lends itself to an alliterative title, which often influences my decision-making. I should probably say something about the word “memo,” too; I chose it not only because it starts with ‘m’ (I could’ve gone with “musings” or “mail”), but also because I like what “memo” means: according to Wikipedia, “memo” is derived from the Latin memorandum est, “It must be remembered,” a fitting motto for my monthly blog posts. There’s also a formality about memos, which are used in law and business communications, as well as an informality—I can write in bullet points and keep things short. My monthly memos will likely begin with a poem, briefly go into “notable happenings” of the month, discuss movies/books/music I consumed, and conclude by unpacking a word or phrase that sums up the month. Here I go!

____________________________________________________

Because the year is new and the great change
already underway, we concede a thousandfold
   and feel, harder than the land itself,
a complicity for everything we did not see
or comprehend: cynicism borne of raw despair,
long-cultivated hatreds, the promises of leaders
traveling like cool silence through the dark.
My life is here, in this small room, and like you
   I am waiting to know—but there is no time
to wait for what has happened.
What does the future ask of me,
those who won’t have enough to eat by evening,
those whose disease will now take hold—
   and the decades that carry past me once I’ve died,
generations of children, the suffering that is never solved,
the heat over the earth, its marshes,
   its crowded towers, its unbreathable night air.
I would open my hand from the wrist,
step outside, not lose nerve.
Here is the day, still to be lived.
We do not fully know what we do.

—Excerpt from New Year, Joanna Klink. This poem feels uncannily appropriate for January 2020.

🖼️ January is one of my favorite months of the year because it always signals a new start. For the past 4 years, my Januaries have started with travel—flying from Hong Kong to Chicago. This year, the transition was particularly difficult, and I felt homesick in a way that I hadn’t before (nostalgia + guilt + worry). Leaving and going are often part of the same miserable equation. But before I knew it, “the great change [was] already underway,” and I soon settled back into my Chicago life. I got a gym membership, and for the first time ever now “work out regularly,” going to the gym 5 times a week with Kevin. I typically run on the treadmill, swim (because swimming is marvelous for thinking), and lately have also been enthralled by Cardio HIIT classes (I am sore in 4 different places as I type this). At the beginning of this month, my essay on Chung Kwok-keung’s poetry was published on Asymptote, and I experienced (also for the first time ever) what it’s like to go viral-ish on Twitter. Last week, I received some more positive translation-related news, but I’ll wait until February to announce that here… This month, the world saw the outbreak of the coronavirus; “disease will now take hold,” as Joanna Clink says in the poem. Masks and food staples are sold out in many places, and there is fear in many corners of the world. What’s most distressing to me about the virus is the way in which its arrival has piled another calamity onto Hong Kong, a city that has spent the past 7ish months embroiled in protests. Months earlier, people feared going outdoors because of tear gas; now, people stay indoors for fear of a dangerous virus. Both political instability and health epidemics are rooted in government incompetence. There is no way to truly talk about the virus without also talking about China’s dictatorship (and Hong Kong’s puppet administration). It’s in times of serious viruses that the connective threads of the world become exposed; global commerce and travel are also victims of the virus. I hope next month brings better news.

🎬 Because I started the New Year on a 15-hour flight, I watched a ton of movies this month. On the plane, I saw Boy Erased (grim and haunting, about a conversion therapy program), Mary Queen of Scots (badly written Oscar bait, imo), Olaf’s Frozen Adventure (to clear my mind after having watched 2 dark movies), Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Cate Blanchett is a gem), half of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (one thing I’ll say about that movie is that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie make chewing food looks really good). Back in Chicago, Kevin and I finished watching Season 4 of Star Wars: Rebels (shockingly good) and are now watching selected episodes of Clone Wars. Earlier this month, we also watched CATS in theaters. It wasn’t…
that bad. The cinematography and performances are great. Of course, Taylor was fantastic. And Sir Ian McKellen was actually quite convincing. But… all things considered…it was a bit of a catastrophe! I 100% saw Judi Dench’s human hand and gold wedding band at the end of the movie. By far the best movie I saw this month was Knives Out, written and directed by Rian Johnson. It. Was. Delightful! I love a good whodunnit. The film was supported by an outstanding cast in outstanding costumes. Tonight, I’ll be watching Miss Americana, the long-awaited Taylor Swift documentary directed by Lana Wilson. You can expect a review of the doc to appear on this blog soon!

📖 This month, I’ve mostly been reading one big book: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I planned to kick off 2020 reading novels by women/ POC writers, but somehow ended up picking a staple of the (mostly white male-dominated) western literary canon. I can explain myself—I’ve been following a Moby Dick bot on Twitter and every quote the bot tweets is, quite frankly, profound. I actually knew relatively little about the novel going in; I didn’t realize it was kinda a gay love story (although I’m not too surprised; I’m familiar with the Melville-Hawthorne love story theory). I also didn’t think to take the novel so literally; Moby Dick is literally full of dick jokes. And I mean this in the most literary-analysis way possible. Phallic symbols are everywhere, including the titular sperm whale. The book also explores race; there’s a chapter on whiteness (the whiteness of the whale and of people) and one of the book’s main characters is a person of color. There are almost No Women in this book, although Melville does have a rather long chapter on whale “harems.” It’s always an ~experience reading a novel by a narrator who is blithely unreliable; there are moments in the novel where I think our narrator (“Call me Ishmael”) has got to be kidding me! And he probably is. He claims to be a geologist, art critic, poet, playwright, sailor, whale-expert… Moby Dick is kind of an 800-page long white male fantasy. But it’s a fantasy that is often beautifully written, and isn’t afraid to tell on itself. In as much as it presents a grim view of society, human relationships, and the environment, Moby Dick is a playful read. It’s like whale-watching at sea; there are time in the novel where you just stare at the ocean and lose interest, and times when the hint of a fin or spout of water totally grips your attention. If you want to experience some of that Moby Dick Magic without having to read the whole book, I’d recommend checking out the Twitter bot, reading the chapter on whiteness, and also the chapter on “spermaceti” (the chapter is titled—I kid you not—”A Squeeze of the Hand”). Aside from reading about whales, I’ve also been reading poems by Chung Kwok-keung, as he gave me (very kindly) a number of his books in December when we met up for lunch. I look forward to translating more of his work!

🎵 Since I’ve been going to the gym this month, workout music is essential. To Kevin’s dismay, I spent the first week listening to “Mr. Mistoffelees” and “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats” from CATS. My most-played song of the month is probably Eric Church’s “Heart Like a Wheel” (recommended by my brother) or “Neon Moon” (both the Brooks & Dunn and Kacey Musgraves remastering). I looove country music. Towards the end of the month, Chinese New Year kickstarted my nostalgia for old Chinese classics; I’m currently listening to 老鼠愛大米 (a classic from my childhood) and 你知道我在等你嗎 (which my sister and I heard in Chinatown). They truly do hit me in the feels. I also discovered the Postmodern Jukebox version of “ME!” and it’s giving me LIFE. I’ll regularly update my 2020 songs on this playlist.

💬 Now, to wrap up this quickly-elongating memo: my January word-of-the-month is threads. This month, I sewed my frayed sneakers back together; I threaded together beaded rings with fishing line; I scrolled through countless Twitter threads to keep up with the drama of our times. And “threads” has come up in the media I’ve consumed, too, notably in Knives Out (threads of mystery, ya feel?) and chapter 47 of Moby Dick:

“…it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. …The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course- its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.”

It’s kind of a gnarly paragraph to unpack, but Ishmael is drawing a connection here between threads and fate. What parts of our future do we have the “free will” to weave? Are the threads of our lives “unalterable”? Ultimately, Ishmael seems to suggest that the vibration of chance determines how our destiny unravels. So, threads speak to the future. And just 3 nights ago, I watched the ending of The Return of the King (which always makes me cry) with Kevin, and Frodo similarly wonders:

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”

It’s a quote that immediately spoke to me, as I—even in January—am already thinking about where I’ll be in six months, whether I’ll be here in the US or back in Hong Kong, picking up the threads of an old life. As Clink says in “New Year,” “what does the future ask of me… Here is the day, still to be lived. / We do not fully know what we do.”