Thoughts Near the End (of the year)

For people whose depression can be easily triggered, predisposed or not, I guess the little things count very much. It’s easier to be sad, or be attracted to sad ideas, songs, movies. I know for me that is the case. Mourning a lost love seems more appealing than living in a functional relationship that hits the plateau of drama and excitement. Yearning to create a greater contribution can overshadow the small triumphs the ordinary job actually gives on personal and societal levels.

I walked by the Christmas tree at work decorated with simple wishes from underprivileged children today. Every year I pick a wish, fulfill it, and leave it under the tree. It started more like a novelty as I rarely do charitable work most of the year. Is it also convenient, makes me feel good, and costs very little. But this year it hit me how small these wishes are. A $20 train set. A $15 doll. New pajamas for a little boy. New hair accessories for a little girl. Who am I, a woman not climbing high on the corporate ladder, unmarried and childless in this world, to have the fortune to be able to purchase any of these things, easily more than a few, to give?

And when asked by my sister what I would like for Christmas, I simply said, I don’t really need anything. But I will get many presents anyway. I am that well taken care of.

Any day I plan for the future is a good day. Any day I fight off the thought of wanting to disappear into the dark is a good day. I don’t want to be vain, but I don’t want to be modest about the genuine joy I experience. Like the Christmas lights, I will blink for joy. Even if the living tree itself will eventually rot to its inevitable death— I want to continue to delight in moments, knowing how lucky I truly am at times.

Lately, thoughts and things on baseball and reading and self discovery

It’s true. The activity of reading breeds the desire to write. Not that I have anything really good to write at last, heck, I’m forever procrastinating on expanding and exploring my ingenuous ideas. But the desire to write something, , anything, even just as a collection of my thoughts, when I find time to do so, can be so forceful that I must tend to it before being able to eat and sleep. Not Tolstoy here, just someone who babbles better by putting it down on paper.

After so many short stories involving elaborate themes and hard to follow metaphors, and a depressing memoir on a wannabe muse surrounded by mad-men type of drunk writers and artists in the 50s, I picked up a book recommended by my baseball obsessed friends, fueling my own baseball frenzy, “Moneyball.”

Said to be an easy read by the jocks who underestimated that, baseball, although thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated by me, was not a subject I was at the same matching level when it comes to familiarity with terminology and such. My induction to baseball fandom came at the tender age of 23, when I first moved to SF amidst the 2002 post season festivities. A true band-wagoner(as a Giants fan and a city dweller), I sided by default with the home team not knowing squat about the sport, while telling everyone that I love the city life as I paid up parking tickets all over town.

I’m not that smart. I’m definitely not a diligent worker. I have very little patience and usually overlook details. But throughout the years, I’ve discovered one strength I possess, and this one strength has summed up my ability to survive (mind you, NOT to succeed, but to survive). That is, the ability to assimilate, by being obsessed with what I need to be and/or do and/or know. That’s how I learned English at the accelerated pace at age 14. That’s how I earned my internship to Washington DC. That’s how I translated Eileen Chang’s short stories from Chinese to English when no one asked me to. That’s how I ran a half marathon. That’s how I lost 20lbs in two months. Unfortunately with this great strength, also comes the greatest weakness— my desire to unleash my potential at something is completely up to what my heart desires at the moment. Which, sadly, explains unconventional achievements no one truly cares about, as they never add up to money and fame.

Another weakness of mine is that I also digress. So here it is the deal with baseball: I really cared enough to want to understand it. After the 2002 season ended in disappointment for all the Giants fans, I started searching online, and eventually taught myself the rules and general strategies by reading MLB.com. It was not yet the age of wikipedia and yahoo answer, and I was rather pleased with knowing a lot more than I once did on my own.

Entered the next seven seasons that I treated baseball exactly like its nickname: American’s favorite pastime. Then 2010 came. I went to 5 games that season, 2 really good ones, 2 ok ones, and one really important one. I started reading my boyfriend’s Sports Illustrated, listening to him about possessing a baseball signed by Nolan Ryan, his outings to the Mets ballpark as a kid, his memories of playing catch with his grandpa. It became real when a long time Giants fan, also a friend of mine, almost broke down when we were the NL pennant winners. Kind of an underdog, but kind of not, the Giants finally went on to win the World Series.

In 2011 I picked up Moneyball. To learn more about the game, and to be able to cut in occasionally with a comment while the kids who know their sh** talk. I feel like a wannabe but I love it. To me they are the big leaguers and I am the pupil whom they take a lot of pride in teaching, with Moneyball being the textbook.

I might pick up Bill James, too, once I’m ready. It’s like playing Super Mario Bros. I am at 3-1, slowly advancing.

Ultimately, reading sports lightens my heart. Until I crave a melancholy mood when baseball season ends, I am on a leave with Lahiri, Trevor, Chang, and Roiphe.

How to Write a Love Story: Where Would You Like to Go with Me

“When the weather gets warmer, I would love to check out Madrid…”   the girl said quietly, fingers tracing along the coast of Spain on a  map laid out on the living room floor.

“We should fly into London first, ” the man replied with much excitement, “we can visit my friend’s brother.  He lives in Notting Hill, a great neighborhood.”

“Yeah I went clubbing there one night,” the girl nodded her head, but her tone seemed to suggest slight disinterest.  Or he might be just reading too much into her every gesture; he really couldn’t tell.

“How about Scotland?  We can start with London, since the tickets are usually much cheaper from here to London.  Then we check out Scotland, doing a little Scotch tasting.”

“I’d like that, “she looked up to him, yielding a smile.  Scotch tasting— he wondered why he didn’t bring it up earlier.

“Then we fly to Madrid.  From there we can go to Avila, Seville…”

“How about Valencia?”

“Valencia…?”  he bent over to find it on the map, “that’s on the coast.  But yeah, we can!”

“Then maybe the Basque country, too.”

“Of course,” he looked at her, “and we can end up in Italy.  With good food and good wine.”

He waited for her to join in with the thought on ending up in Italy.  But she didn’t.

“No Italy?” he asked.

“No.”

“But I thought you always wanted to go there.  The food, the architecture, the Gucci,” he said, hoping for a laugh thrown back at him.

“I can’t go to Italy with you.”

“But you can go to Spain with me.”

“Well, different destinations are for different people.”

“That’s interesting,” he said lightheartedly, but was really appalled by her comment. 

“You would also be good for Tokyo,” she said flatly, eyes now fixed on Japan on the map, “I see us eating and drinking our way in the maze of bars in Tokyo.”

“That’s nice.  But I don’t think I can go to Tokyo with you.”

She looked up at him, perhaps a little hurt— again he couldn’t tell.

“To each his own,” she said, folding up the map and getting up from the floor.

Spirit Drug III.

Naperville, IL

Outside of the suicide watch ward, the Morrones were sobbing uncontrollably.   This attempt marked Chloe Morrone’s second one in two years.  A note was found next to their thirteen-year-old daughter’s bed, as she was found unconscious with a plastic bag over her head tied to the bed post:

I hate it when people say “cheer up,” as if A. that is easy to do and B. that is possible at all.  I don’t cheer up.  I don’t do anything “up.”  I sink, I fall, I get buried.  Everything I associate with effortlessly is down, not up.  I am a functional depressed person.  I don’t smile and mean it; I smile because that is the only socially acceptable facial expression for a human being most of the time.  If I could choose, I’d stay blank and emotionless until I broke down.  But I can fool y’all.  I can smile.  I can tell a joke.  I am just never happy.

Maybe I have chemical imbalance in my body, like Evan.  Maybe evolution skipped me on self preservation.  I am consistently, gradually, unavoidably sucked into the big black hole as I age.  I think my peak has come and left.

“She promised…  She said…  She promised that she wouldn’t do this again…”  A little over a year ago, Chloe jumped into her family’s frozen pool.  Their housekeeper, happening to have left her gloves in the kitchen, turned back and saved her.

My Thoughts on the Tiger Mother “Controversy”

The fact that Amy Chua’s WSJ excerpt caused such a stormy reaction just on Facebook (all my East Coast bred, Ivy League educated ABC friends posted and re-posted it with mixed responses), it was no surprise that the book jumped to the NYT bestseller list shortly after.  To me, Amy Chua not only had the audacity to stir up anger and perhaps even fear in many American softy parents, but she demonstrated her skills as an excellent marketer, too.  That Yale law degree sure came with some street smarts, as controversy is the best advertisement these days.

One columnist pointed out that Amy Chua’s parenting is nothing new, and definitely not “Chinese.”  It is how all upper class, highly pressurized elitist parents raise their kids.  Which is true.  I never knew I would be an oddity for attending public schools all my life, until I encountered a Brown and Columbia educated Jewish man, who went to private prep schools all his life.  Think Dead Poet’s Society— It’s not just Amy Chua who opposes letting kids be in school plays.

Book selling gimmicks aside, Amy Chua’s style to me is not, singularly Asian, nor does it showcase secrets to successful parenting, unless you define success in the narrow terms of money and degrees from prestigious schools alone.  What I’ve witnessed as “successful parenting,” Asian style, are far different from Amy Chua’s glamorous Conegie Hall  recitals and straight-A report cards:

The nail salon I frequent on a monthly basis is owned by a recently immigrated family from Vietnam.  On a busy day, the entire family is at work, and this includes the oldest daughter who is in college and the older son who is still in high school, with the youngest child in grade school working the register machine.  Two weeks ago when I visited, there were just the sister and brothers team, working a busy Saturday afternoon by themselves.  When I asked where their parents were, the sister replied that they had been on vacation for a week.  Granted, her voice was flat and her facial expression suggested annoyance, but she was, nonetheless, at work with her teenage brother on a Saturday afternoon.  How many American parents can entrust their young adult and teenage children with the family business for a week to go on vacation?  Perhaps a better question is, how many American children of that age would sacrifice their weekends to let their parents go on vacation for a week?  To me, that is successful parenting.

I think it is more plausible to teach children values that will save their lives than to push them to perfecting at piano or memorizing the entire textbook for testing purpose.  I think that’s what I treasure when I think of Chinese/Asian parenting.  The kind of love and sacrifice that move the kids to return the same to their parents.  Not because they owe their parents, as Chua argues, but because they are willing and ready to love back just as unconditionally.

The Never-Everland

“You have so many rules,” he said to her with a devious smile.

“I don’t have rules.  I have a husband,” she replied, sneering at him.  They sat next to each other at the bar, both for the most of their time  stared straight ahead at rows and rows of bottles.

“But you came out tonight.”

“True.  I have nothing to say about that.”

“What if— say, we escape to the land of no consequences for a few hours?”

“You already live in the land of no consequences.”

“And I am inviting  you there.”

The bartender yelled out last call.  She thought about her husband, sound asleep at this moment, on his red-eye flight home.  As well she thought about the affair he had years ago on one of his business trips, and the e-mail from the woman, informing him of the abortion, that “it’s all taken care of.”  She ached at reading those words, more than knowing that her husband was unfaithful—  she never got pregnant by her husband.

Then she found her fingers interlocked with the man’s under the bar counter.

“All I am offering is a journey to where all the good things are,” the man said coyly.  So she borrowed a few hours of her life into the never-everland.  In the morning she would return to being someone’s barren wife.  But for now, she wanted to take a temporary path elsewhere.

Spirit Drug II

Chiang Mei, Thailand

Every Thursday morning, Rutana received three visitors: Tanya, a third-year law student who during her summer vacation volunteers for the international NGO that rescues child prostitutes in Southeast Asia; Dr. Kevin Sullivan, a senior research fellow in Psychiatry; and Ling, the Thai interpreter hired by the two foreigners.  When they visited, Big Bro would stop by from time to time as well, joining the conversations briefly and bringing snacks from the kitchen.  Rutana liked those mornings.  There had never been people this interested in her.  From “where is your hometown?” to “what is your favorite food?”—  Rutana liked the attention, and she liked talking to them about herself.

There were days back in Bangkok that she had no one to talk to for days.  The pimp would punish her by locking her up in a bedroom after work for whatever mischief they found on her, and shun her from any communication.

“What type of mischief?”  Tanya asked.

Rutana tilted her head, and replied thoughtfully, “hmm, like, not meeting the number they wanted, or complaining about the smell of a customer…”  There was no bitterness or sadness in her tone.  Which had been  her general disposition even when she told the darkest, most inhumane experiences she had endured at the brothel.  And there was also no reservation in recalling any details, no matter how intolerable they seemed to her visitors.

When Rutana talked about the first time she had sex with a customer— after forced injections of hormones to make her appear sexually mature at age eleven— Dr. Sullivan turned his face, saddened and disturbed.

“The unbroken spirit,” Dr. Sullivan later wrote, “is what Rutana possessed and what I wish upon all of my patients suffering from depression.  No one and nothing could make her lose hope.  Even after she learned that she was HIV positive, she insisted on enrolling in school and living her life to the fullest until her last breath.  There was never despair in her eyes.”

Spirit Drug I

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Rutana could see the rice patties when she rose up above her greasy windowpane.  The wood panel once painted in lime green, now severely chipped, carried out a dark bluish hue on the surface.   She loved resting her chin on top of the windowpane on a nice spring day like this.  The breeze came in with the fragrance of local flowers, now blooming nearby.  As she savored every moment of it, she smiled, like an azalea in bloom herself.

Mama Pan was at her door by noon, sending in a metal plate of food prepared by Chef Big Bro.  Water spinach! Her face lit up.  Big Bro remembered.  With very limited contact to the outside world, Big Bro was the only man she really got to talk to.  Definitely not the only man she got to see; there is a difference between Big Bro and the men she saw in Bangkok.

The days in Bangkok had now been long gone.  Rutana was rescued on her thirteenth birthday after two years of hellish life in Rom Dee Prom brothel, where she worked for a few pennies a day, as her pimp monitored and restricted her every move.  When the NGO workers managed to bring her out during a police raid under the new prime minister’s stern policy against child prostitution, Rutana’s feet touched the ground of the outside world for the first time in eight months.  When asked what she would like to do now that she had her freedom, she smiled timidly to her rescuers and said, “I’d like to go shopping sometime.”

Naperville, IL

Evan sat up in the dark.  He contemplated leaving a note, but the thought of anyone being able to understand what he had been going through seemed to him impossible.  He wasn’t even sure if he could explain it all himself, if someone were to read his note.  This fog of infinite sadness and intolerable heaviness, tearing at his every nerve, keeping him up at night with nightmares, making him sleep for sixteen hours when he crashed.  He couldn’t handle it anymore.  The church necktie his mother gave him to wear for the Easter mass in the morning was just long enough for him to wrap around the beam in his closet, and to form a loop for his pale throat to dangle in.

That was the end of any Easter Sunday festivities at the Morrones’ household.  And to one Morrone in particular, God ceased to exist after that day.

***

Chloe Morrone went to school after the spring break with her brother gone forever.  She didn’t know the meaning of forever at age eleven; she only thought about it as in being in love with someone forever, like when she had a crush on Jeremy Sanchez in fourth grade.  But in fifth grade she started to like Aiden Joseph instead.  She once wrote on the sleeve of the book cover for her Social Studies textbook “Aiden J. Forever” with the drawing of an arrow through a heart.  Evan saw it and teased her.  Evan was fourteen that year, grew five inches in the summer, and started to have acne on his fair skin.

“What do you know about forever?” he inquired his little sister.

“Mind your own business,” Chloe said with a reddened face.

Chloe had now acquired the most certain knowledge on what forever meant.  Not forever in love, as she used to speculate, but eternally abandoned.

Snarled

We fought an epic fight.

I started packing, and you broke down crying.  What a sight.  I tore the love note I once left you on the dinning table, now pinned to the refrigerator, apart— I tend to go with dramatic gestures.  I know how to pinch that nerve of yours.  I know how to push you to the edge.  And you, such a calm and soft spoken man, ah you.  So beautiful, too, even when you get upset.

I looked around the room.  My books stacked up in a pile, pajama pants folded on the lounge chair.  I was tired.  So I turned off the lights and went to lie down in bed next to you, facing you.  Tangled and twisted, we stared at each other in the dark.

Things will get better tomorrow, when there is light.  Some love stories are all about how we survive.

Spirituality and etc.

**written on the third Sunday in November 2010**

I have never been a religious person.  Ok, maybe for, like, five minutes in high school, being the geeky girl who had just arrived from Taiwan , in glasses and with a bad perm, and the Christian kids were the only ones nice enough to befriend me.  Everyone else was too cool for school; I was at the bottom of the bottom of the high school food chain.

But did I assimilate fast.  In two years, I learned to shop at trendy stores and dropped the “s” at the end of singular nouns.  More importantly, I met Annie, a girl considered by many Asian adults as “marginal” but by me as extremely “cool.”  I picked up smoking cigarettes at 16.  I snuck out of my parents’ house to meet boys later that same year.  I thought I was some bad ass (I so wasn’t).  But the truth is, deep down inside, I missed going to the youth group on Friday nights at church.  I missed not having to pretend to specialize in apathy.  There, on Friday nights, we played games, the cheesy ones played at camps, sang songs, and prayed.   It was nice.

So I continued on with both tracks.  I skipped the first period to hang out at Jack in the Box, the second to smoke cigarettes behind the mall with Annie and her “hard-core” friends from the high school two towns away, known for breeding juvie detentionees.  Then on Fridays I would get dropped off at church, singing and learning how to play the guitar with the good Christian kids, as if I was one of them.  Duality was my religion— or I thought, being mostly wrong and unnecessarily poetic about almost everything at that age.

Then came college.  Religion was something I’d write about for various social science classes, as in “human beings seek out religions in order to cope with their own limitations and the unpredictability of nature…  blah blah blah.”    I was quite a champ at churning out those papers at the time.  In short, religion became a subject to study, a philosophical idea, a political debate…  Those were the years of self serving rightousness and eagerness to be a progressive intellect.  It was fun, for the time being, especially with a lot of pot smoking and long island iced tea in company.

One thing: I have always been fascinated by Catholicism.  The intricate symbolism of crossing your body, dabbing the finger in holy water for blessing, the practice of communion…  As much as Christianity has become the easy target in the circle of ultra liberals, I will always have a special place for the mystic, ritualistic aspect of it.  I own three rosaries: One a good luck charm given to me by an ex-boyfriend; one a souvenir bought for me from Vatican; and one purchased by a coworker on the Mediterranean cruise.  I also have a statue of Our Lady Guadalupe procured from a voodoo shop during a trip to the Big Easy.  Some may find my fascination to be blasphemous, that I seemingly reduce their faith to the triviality of an artifact collector— Not exactly.

This has taken me a while to realize.  No, I will most likely never become a religious fanatic, and this applies to all religions, not just Christianity.  But the concept of spirituality has always been an interest of mine, knowingly or not.  Why did I yearn for the Friday youth group gatherings?  There were nights I felt drawn in by the youth minister’s message.  There were nights I sank in prayers and felt the peace bestowed upon me.  Maybe being a bad ass wannabe was never my true calling.  But throughout the years, I’ve continued to find that a short visit to church satisfies a yearning.

Today I attended a mass.  I sat and watched its graceful progression unfold to the backdrop of the choir.  A Filipino family in their Sunday best sat in front of me.  A Vietnamese grandma with her toddler grandson sat behind me.  A silver-haired white couple was to my left, and a young black man to my right.  They were all worshiping the same lord.  They kneeled down to pray, in unison.  They dropped one knee to show respect as they existed at the end of the mass.  Then I realized what I was looking for this morning.  Believer or not, I was humbled and softened.  And that was a good feeling.

I’d say that’s the spirtuality, etc., I was looking for.  And it was very, very lovely.