Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the praires and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Edit: Wild geese... they fly south.

Visiting my grandmother

After eating with my parents today, my dad coaxed me to go visit nai nai with him once before school. My mom offered to take home the leftovers from lunch, but I gave her a confused look, so we all went. I never knew what the deal is with the two sides of my family.

We ran into her on her afternoon walk, outside the Selfhelp building she lives in. She smiled such a big smile, the kind that consumes your face from the eyes outward. I don't get moved the look; I think about how I'm going to inherit her protruding eyelids. She said it's so nice to see us. And that I never seem happy seeing her. I feign a smile and say hi.

She's so happy. She lives alone, but is not lonely. I don't think she's seen her spouse in years, maybe at least decade even. I don't think they talk to one another. For most of my life, she's been around my neighborhood, visiting us and our cousins, being warm and saying nice things. She brought me and my sister to church every Sunday for a several years when we were young. She bought me my first Bible when I had to memorize the names of all the books for Sunday school. I think she's not lonely because God is with her all the time. She brings Him to her when she chants the (Chinese) name of Christ almost every minute.

She used to babysit me. We would go around Flushing, and she'd put quarters in the rocking Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck because my parents thought those games were too pedestrian. When I grew up, she'd remind me of those adventures literally every time she saw me. Recently, she does it less because I made a note of it to her, but she still brings it up self-referentially. I don't think it comes from senility, we just don't have that much to talk about. She told my dad to visit ye ye when he's in China, but ye ye passed away a few months ago. Never really knew him.

She asked me if American schools teach me how to treat one's family, beyond worldly matters like history and politics. She warned me about high maintenance girlfriends. She reminded me about my dad's temper, and how he's gotten better. She said my mom was very frugal. When she chanted Jesus Christ, my dad brought her a chair to sit on. She said that God was giving her a chair because she loved Him, but my mom just laughed, derisively.

I know more intimately what my other family members mean to me. Not her.

Moments

Moving back in two weeks

Things I'm going to do before then. Consider this self-inflicted public humiliation.

• Apply for driver's permit. Vision test and written test on Monday.
• Swimming classes. To, uhh, relearn how to swim.
• Driving school. Pass.
  
• Road test.
• Read some books. Now including Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook.
• Learn some more MATLAB. Cry.
  

Excellent.

Writing like Hemingway

I noticed a book at Barnes & Noble yesterday to teach people how to write like Hemingway. I sat down with it for a while. It spoke a lot about how literary devices, his writing style, sentences structure, Iceberg Theory. Then I noticed I really don't want to write like Hemingway. Aside from our subject matters, I don't think it's cool to be evasive, indirect and short. Words already fail us so often, I just don't have the patience to create something out of other people's imaginations rather than the ideas that I already struggle with transmitting. Better pick up some Fitzgerald or Poe.

And speaking of writing, I just read John Richardson's piece in Esquire: The Last Abortion Doctor. One might think this is an article about abortion, but it spoke so truly about related topics such as medicine, politics, gender and pain. It's really hard to read. It's probably the best thing I've read in a long time. I do think that all feeling human beings need to read it, especially now, just to understand a little bit more about what life is.

Superhero fantasies

My sister used to say that I could turn any object in my hands into a spaceship. Ballpoint pens turned into rocketships and wristwatch buckles became dragons. I had a collection of beads that I'd sort by color and have them wage war upon each other on a shaded political map of the world, Risk-style. Even the holes in these beads played cannon mouths in my insanely militaristic daydream games. My family members know that I have a rich collection of sound effects for jets, guns and explosions.

I had absurd superhero fantasies, like every boy between the ages of five and thirteen, I'm sure. I had one in particular that involved a sword and a Superman-style Fortress of Solitude. The way that it goes is a twelve year old me would find a sword in the stone in some remote mountainous region near where my parents are from in China. (Swords were important to this, ever since Crouching Tiger.) I would be on a quest to imbue this weapon with magical abilities, a la Cardcaptor Sakura. (One character specifically. I adored that show.) I drew broadswords on sheets and sheets of paper. Then I created my Fortress of Solitude. There were a few versions. One version was a domed platform floating in the sky. Another version required another dimension, accessible by a closet. They would all be foresty, full of wildlife and waterfalls.

My paradise was designed to be eternally and emotionally sustainable for my immortal superhero self. I considered whether to bring in family and friends into my immortal oasis, but it seemed an arbitrary privilege; I can't bring in everyone.

It became one of few complicating factors that brought my fantasy to the ground. I thought about creating people in my world. (Of course, I could select for physical characteristics and personality. Omniscience over bioethics.) I knew I need people, but I also couldn't decide whether ultimately I could tell the difference between a community of many conscious, sentient beings and a self-centered universe populated by characters that may or may not exist in their own right, but only seem to be. I hope my friends aren't scared of me yet.

The other complication that brought my Fortress down was what I saw outside the window. Superheroes don't grow up in Flushing. I had yet to attribute meaning to my location. Without a location, I could be anyone. I guess this is why people leave this place. I don't think Flushing has been home to anyone more than two generations at a time.

It's funny. My sister asked Chang-Rae Lee why he wrote about Flushing. He said that this is a magical place. In my life, I've thought about magic the most in middle and high school, commuting to school on the 7, dreaming about getting out. Now I get homesick when I'm away.

Wow. I need to think about this.

On Facebook, wonderful thoughts take people and hold them still.

Following Virginia activist/filmmaker Annabel Park's posted item about very personalized ethnic conflict in China, a thoughtful someone writes:

heart wrenching... but the equivalent of this is an equally heart wrenching story about israeli settlers in palestine or even us settlers on indigenous american soil... ultimately, the chinese shouldn't be in xinjiang, and the israelis shouldn't be in palestine.

i tried to read the story understanding my privilege as a Han Chinese, and as a settler in N. America occupying Native American lands. It's hard.

Goddamn. Something a lot of people (like me) need to think about. The privileges of being Han Chinese are extensive, and I've only begun realizing this. You have a cultural history that won't be washed away. The numbers of your ethnic population are not under threat of extinction. I've been thinking about the "concentration" that I have to do within my concentration. I think I'll do it on internal colonialism.

Concentration is such a word. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.

Now is always the time for immature idealism.

I reject anything else.

I find myself reading a lot about Obama's visits to see Putin and Medvedev. I know about Obama's youthful idealism. I'd bet a lot of people empathize and identify with it. It's something I feel like I know.

What would it be like if we always had a foot in what is impossible? What good could we accomplish? Would we mess it up? Maybe, but I don't usually consider that. What if we recognized this in everyone, at all times? Could we be more honest? Could we let go of what holds us back?

I'd also like to take the time to say that this article is really, really worth reading. If only I could write with my feet nailed to the concrete.

I'm afraid of people.

There, I said it. I'm absolutely terrified. There are stories like this one. It doesn't have to be about family, and it doesn't have to be about Michael Jackson. But what scares me is that these sagas of trouble and hurtful waters can be about anyone else. It happens all the time. Most of the time, we only summon the courage, at best, to write about it.

What a shame that we don't develop our social minds with perfectly identical connections and thresholds, so that we can always see and predict the mutual effects of people on people just by examining ourselves. Instead, we must learn how to express ourselves and our concerns in the dark, and be limited by what we don't know. The fact that this is frustrating doesn't bother me as much as the fact that it's dangerous.

We are really, really powerful beings. Like giants, we don't always see what we break under our feet. We grow into such great creatures by wrapping ourselves in layers and layers of socialized tendencies like onions. We don't know what is on our skin, sometimes ever. And it's scary walking with giants who can't feel their skins. It's absolutely terrifying.

And so by my theory there's a bunch of large, clumsy, lumbering creatures who step on each other and don't truly feel the way we interact. We hurt and punish, even loving all the while. We can treat other people like how we'd like to be treated ourselves, but unless we understand ourselves, we don't have the right to treat anyone in any way at all. Maybe it's safest to be awkward and evasive.

If you're wrapped really tightly, please, let go. I'm working on my own layers, but I'm also getting really paranoid.

25 of May, I could not sleep

I was in a sleeping bag, my last night in Berlin. For two hours, my mind leapt around many things. I sat up, stared at the clock with a still restlessness that I couldn't really understand, grabbed my notebook from my bag and went to the bathroom. I'm reading what I wrote then right now.

I wrote: What does it mean that, in pursuit of ideas, I can only travel from one continent to another on this water-bearing planet when the edges of the universe have not even been conceived of yet? When we still don't have the means to understand fully what creates, entraps, defines and captures us, as captivating, ethereal, and wholly coincidental as it is? Obviously being on another continent does things to my strange sense of place.

I also wrote about superhero fantasies, adoption, connections, a letter to a lover... and things I need to do this summer.

I'm not sure what was going on then. Above the margins I drew a little diagram with arrows that went... thought > anxiety > more thoughts + no sleep > more anxiety. A few lines below that, I wrote: I'm approaching the limits of cognitive function. Enough said?