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A story
Tuesday, Sep 9, 2008 11:30PM / Members only
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September!
Saturday, Sep 6, 2008 3:57AM / Members only
Hatteras, North Carolina
I’ve been out of town for the past three weeks and change and working frantically on the one or two days I’ve been in town in between. But now I’m back in Brooklyn for the foreseeable future and summer’s last gasp. Whew.Trip 1: Rented a beach house on Long Island with some friends. Barbecued and played hours of Rock Band. Took the ferry to Fire Island and watched nude mens on the beach.
Trip 2: Drove up to Toronto with my parents to see lots of family and attend a cousin’s wedding. Ate countless Chinese restaurant banquets and other deliciousness. Spent time with my grandma. Took the subway downtown to see my fellow VONA-ite Teenah. Gained about five pounds in pork alone.
Trip 3: Headed down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina with P for the lovely wedding of two of his friends. Jumped into the ocean off the beautiful beaches. Sat around a bonfire. Sang hours and hours and hours of karaoke.
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I made these pictures just for you. Courtesty of this site.
"1966"
"1962"
"1960"
"1994" (HA!)
My actual 1994 yearbook picture. Oh boy... -
Tuesday
Wednesday, Jul 30, 2008 12:07AM / Members only
I'm a good place right now, savoring the down time before big work kicks in and getting by with a handful of freelance jobs. Every morning I wake early--at 7, earlier than I ever wake up, trying to reprogram myself as a morning person--and swim laps in the neighborhood pool, cool even with the sun beating down. I eat salads with vegetables from the local farm and go to yoga classes that leave me feeling dampened and unrolled. I am writing and writing every day, easing my stories into place, brick by brick. It's so hard, but so worth it. I am trying to not think about what I am going to do with this book, if/when/how it will be "finished," what happens next. Everything will work itself out. At night I go out to meet friends and picnic in the park, drink on rooftops, escape the city for beach trips. There is free music in the city every night. I ride home past the shipyards' stillness, creaky bike wheels turning against the shadows, and shower off the heat.
July melts into August and the summer is already too long and so tragically short and not anywhere close to being long enough. -
My left-coast side
Sunday, Jul 20, 2008 8:55PM / Members only
I got these two sides going, there’s my big-city-loving New Yorker-at-heart side, and there’s the side of me that yearns for dressed-down nature and dreams of living in a cabin in the woods, by a lakeside, or a tiny cottage by a sea. Refusing to drive puts the brakes on those options, so instead there’s my former home, San Francisco, for a two-week stint each year, with its hills and ocean and the sweet smell of trees on foggy summer mornings.
My mom’s got a friend in San Francisco that she met more than 40 years ago. I visit her every time I’m out there. They were co-workers in Manila in their twenties. First my mom came to the U.S., to New York. A few years later her friend Lily arrived—on the same day my mom was leaving to move to Canada due to an immigration snafu. Fast-forward a few more years and my mom was ready to move back to the States, after marrying my dad—the same month Lily left New York to move to San Francisco with her new husband. So they’ve been friends for most of their lives, but on opposite coasts, seeing each other a once or twice a decade. My friends on the west coast and I met in our twenties and we’ll probably never be living on the same coast or in the same city again. Which ones will I still know when we’re in our sixties? Will one of our kids visit the other one, bearing gifts, the next-generational evidence of our friendship? (I guess I’d have to have kids for this to happen.)
The writing workshop I attended was amazing, life-changing. It’s like that every year I go and I love it for that. I love meeting my fellow writers there, and the dedication that the incredible teachers have for the program. This year I went in feeling completely brokedown, hopeless, and stuck with the story collection I’ve been working on for the past two years, even thinking that I should give up writing forever. And the support, advice, and craft insight I received was invaluable. Even things I had known before—I need to be more disciplined, I have to focus on doing the work I want to do and stop being such a control freak about the outcome, stop listening to the haters, stop obsessing about getting published before “it’s too late”—somehow, when hearing this from the teachers and writers there, it finally sank in. The mythical lightbulb popped on, I rubbed my eyes open, and came out of that week feeling revved up and free from the baggage and writing-related anxieties I’d been carrying around with me for too long. Yes!
Besides seeing friends and hitting up old haunts like the Osento and Kabuki bathhouses and my favorite eating spots—oh, the time-honored tradition of late-night chowing down in a Mission taqueria after going out—I also went to a zen center up in the Muir Woods for three nights, soaking in the Northern Cali scenery and waking up at 4:30AM (!) every morning to meditate for two hours with the residents. Afterward the morning service, guest practice retreatants like myself worked for a few hours on the grounds, weeding and turning over vegetables beds on the center’s famed organic farm. It was hard work at times, and borderline shocking to realize I’d been awake for eight hours by the time lunch rolled around, but I was seriously blissed out during my time here. There were interesting people to talk to (more Asian Americans than I’d expected) and something very freeing and meaningful to get down to basics, just sitting and working in the mornings and spending the afternoons reading and hiking on the many trails nearby. No cell phone access, no internet. Delicious veggies and fruits served fresh and grown on the farm. I dug my bare hands into the most alive soil and went to bed at 9:30 every night, thoroughly tired. I felt quieted. In a good way.
In some ways the past weeks have been some of the best days of my life. Not at all the most dramatic or adventurous–unless that’s what you’d call eating a lot of burritos, sitting by the ocean, taking a writing workshop, and digging in compost piles on an organic farm–but yes life-changing, re-orienting, cleansing, re-purposing, clearing, finding a way. All in a place that I ran away to and then ran away from. I will always be running, I hope I will always be running, but I think I am done running away, and starting to run towards instead.
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NYC Reading at Bluestockings!
Thursday, Jun 5, 2008 11:12PM / Members only
