say a little, mean a lot.

[jpnesecurrency]

In Praise of the 10-Percent Wrong Relationship

We fear imperfection in our love lives. What if we embrace it instead?

Modern day dating seems to be this endless loop of “what else is better?” “what else is out there.” To me, these are just examples of our obsession with perfection, where if we can’t ourselves be perfect, then our partners must be. As if we deserve that. As if we could address or complete our own imperfects by looking for something that is. Why don’t we just date or connect with people simply because they are interesting? And give us something to look forward to? Because they stir something in us?

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It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference. It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own.

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New spelling of my name (1983)

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rearranging where we place emphasis

there was a moment today when I took stock of everything I was feeling - from my congestion to my stomach cramp to the uncertainty weighing down my mind, and I thought: wow, this is a new low. This was my body saying “enough” after months of running it to the ground. I’m waiting to hear from an interview, one that I really put my all into, and one for which I am preemptively mourning my rejection while I also recover from this nasty cold. This one has really knocked me out, and I’ve been in bed all day. I felt good enough to go for a walk at one point and this is when I had that initial thought of feeling so overwhelmingly at the bottom of things. After my walk, during which I sulked a little, let out some throaty groans (I highly recommend vocalizing), and moved my body some, I did feel more resolved. 

I’m not sure what it is that shifted in how I feel about the process, because the feeling and the circumstance is the same: I put in my all. But when I started my walk, and for the last week or so, I felt a sort of injustice and even unrequited love toward the world, feeling like I put in my all only to not get anything back. How unfair all of it really is. F*ck meritocracy. Perhaps it was when I acknowledged fully how I was feeling, that I felt a shift. I let myself replay all of my efforts and preparations, I re-experienced some of the minor victories I felt after each stage of the process, and I feel incredibly proud. There is still great satisfaction that I tried my best and that is what matters most. 

All this to say, it takes a lot of work to shift one’s perspective in order to take the same observation and circumstance and imbue it with new meaning. I don’t know if I have a new perspective or necessarily want one at the moment. However, placing emphasis on certain things in the observation or experience helps - especially the ones that valorize your effort and integrity. Even if what matters most is feeling proud of my efforts, there’s a little room still for the doubt and confusion and sense of loss. That part is not going away, and is integral to this experience. So if we let ourselves feel all the things, take stock of all the things, then we can assign those things their order of importance.

We have to go through and not around.

[jpnesecurrency]

To the stranger who ate ice cream with me one autumn evening in Washington Square Park

Hi. 

Do you remember when, as we sat in the park eating our ice cream, some dancing personality approached us wanting to perform, and I said, no thank you & you were impressed that I offered such a kind dismissal? I scoffed then thinking you barely knew me. And do you remember that you told me you were *slightly* lactose intolerant when I asked why you got mint chip vegan? It seemed like such a personal detail to share to a stranger. What about when I started talking about how my father came the US and you gave me a look that said wait, mine too? And that story you told me about the last man on earth who received a knock on his door? Did you make that up on the spot? I was impressed and then quickly embarrassed because I couldn’t come up with a short story spontaneously even though I was supposed to be the aspiring writer. 

I’m jogging my memory and these are the little details that fill in around the one single thing I remember best: when you spoke your native language. Ironically, I can’t quite remember what it was that you even said, but I do remember its effect on me. I still think about the lulling sound of it sometimes.

I’m jogging my memory because I’ve been hearing a lot about regret lately. Actually there’s this book I learned of called The Power of Regret, about how thinking about the past and what we fail to do can inform us about what we value in life and how we can do better in the future. That’s not to say I regret our serendipitous encounter, or even its finitude -- the short-lived conversations, the dinner that we never had, etc. But it made me dwell a little longer on the moment. Sometimes I am grateful for strangership and sometimes I am curious and wish there was more to it. 

I think about that evening like I’m watching a movie, except I know there was no script, it was all improvisation and some things played out well and some things less so. A lot of information was left out, both the kind you want to hear and the kind you don’t. And so without a script, it’s not fair to regret something you had little control over. But still, I wanted to create an opportunity to fill in some of those gaps, provide you with more information and also, selfishly and curiously, see what effect I had on you. And maybe that is the regret, not pushing further for an opportunity that would be more controlled, more scripted, so we could feel more satisfied about our performances and effects on other people. 

I like closure, I like clarity, and I like to communicate clearly. Just-- I don’t know if it’s appropriate for me to do so right now. In the past, it would seem I’ve always appeared uninvited, and I’d prefer to respect the space that you’ve created, if that was intentional.

Anyway, if you get this, I hope you call. But if you don’t, that’s okay too. Sometimes there’s beauty in something unfulfilled. 

[jpnesecurrency]

New York City, the elusive toxic ex

The city is such an elusive toxic ex. And unfortunately, for me, it’s the one I would still get back with if they asked me to. It’s carved a place in me because it gave me all of these first experiences, and pushed me to do things I would’ve never done. I came here when I was 22, right after college, working odd jobs and living in an 8x10 in Brooklyn. I stayed out late and fell asleep on trains at 4am. I carried a toothbrush in my bag, along with a lot of other things because #commuterlife. It was glorious. I got tired of living that kind of life after a year so I left for a little bit, and now that I’m here again, it’s exactly what I hoped running into an ex I still loved would be like. The red flags are mysterious novelties once again, like letting you be free and whoever you want, but that’s also how they make others feel too, so in the end you’re not even all that special. Here I am, back in the city. I can’t say that I didn’t take this into calculation, putting myself in the vicinity of old love, of potentially running into this ex at any moment, of impulsively falling in that trap yet again.

[jpnesecurrency]

A Toast to All the Rejects

What a shared rejection spreadsheet taught me about success

leaving this here so I don’t forget about it

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Permission

Trying to work on this “ask for what you want” thing, and it’s harder than you think.  I always tell people “what can you lose?” when I give them advice to do this very task I find so daunting, and I can’t seem to understand for myself what that means. 

When I was a kid, I really liked eating raw tomatoes, dipped with salt in the palm of my little hand. One time, I must have been five or six, I wanted one, but was so scared to ask. I remember shoving my face into the side of my mother’s body as I breathed the question in a muffled voice, “Can I have a tomato?” She couldn’t hear me and told me to ask louder. When she realized what I was saying, she laughed, as if it was so silly to be afraid to ask for something so inconsequential. “If you want it, just ask!” But that was me, and that’s been me. 

I find myself operating in the same mode of anxiety - fear, dread - as when I was, say, in high school wanting so bad to hang out with my friends, and yet not knowing how to bring it up to my parents (specifically my father) who expected me to be home. When it comes to getting to do what I want, there is a constant weighing of pros/cons, causes/effects, repercussions/meanings, when it could be as simple as indulging in a pleasure. Maybe it isn’t that simple sometimes, but maybe it should be? Will that change how hard it is to ask?

If the freedom to be who we are, and do what we want is associated with asking for permission then is it truly being free?

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five of cups

I have a good friend from high school that has completely disappeared. I’m not sure where he went, but I think about him sometimes, and miss his friendship terribly. He’s the perfect kind of friend who’s so far removed from your life that you can confide in him about anything, who asks genuine questions that help you make sense of things when you’re too far in your thoughts, and yet, cares to listen especially to my peregrinations. He was the kind of person who made me realize, as a teenager, that it was possible to love someone even if you weren’t in a relationship with them. To have such a person was such a privilege. 

When you have a connection with someone, don’t take it for granted. 

[jpnesecurrency]

Recap of 2021

As I’ve said to many in these past few weeks as the year was wrapping up: this year felt both so very long, and so very short at the same time. Is that possible?

Ya girl has had a very eventful year that I’ll recap here: January: Consisted of going back to work after maternity leave, choosing to teach half online, half in person. I learned that renewal of my contract was not guaranteed for the following year. I sent my baby to his first daycare, only to have it close within two weeks because of a COVID case. I learned how to have back-up plans. February: I turned one year older, and decided to leave the uncertainty of my job for a different uncertainty, and started reaching out to friends and networks outside of academia, learning how to pitch my experience as skills. I was very uncomfortable. March: The anti-Asian assaults culminating in the events in Georgia were especially taxing for me. I surprised myself by reaching out to friends and family, asking if they needed support, when really it was me who yearned for comfort and connection. My partner & I bought a home in a city that we wanted to live in (regardless of what the job market would bring), sight unseen and without a realtor. My family thought we were crazy. April & May: Wrapped up teaching at my first job out of the PhD, which I loved but also needed room for more growth. I decided to take a postdoc in New York in an entirely different department. We moved into our new home in a new city, and I vowed I would never move again (this is of course not indicative of reality). Summer: No travel abroad, unfortunately. Spent the most amazing time in New England while I channelled all of my creative energy into interior design and writing a short story. This told me that doing creative work is what brings me most joy. I ended the summer with an academic retreat in Seattle for new scholars of Vietnamese studies, which was restorative and wholesome, why isn’t this kind of support and collegiality more common? September: We moved again, though this time not our entire apartment, just a few suitcases to the tristate area so I could commute to the city. I met people from all walks of life at the new institution and felt a renewal of energy toward academia and going on the job market* again. New York gave me life. It was boisterous, enabling. October:  (Selective) job applications. This month was also an important one for figuring out what I needed in my personal life, which rules I wanted to abide by, and which rules I wanted to break. It led to hard, deep, but transparent conversations about what good relationships consist of. These conversations made me realize how porous the boundaries are between past and present, career and personal life. The things I wanted in my career were inextricable from how I was raised as a child of immigrants, the things I wanted in my personal life were not separate from the rules I had once followed at school. November: A blip that I do not remember.  December: A hard month. I received a large batch of rejections – from presses, applications, grants – and felt a deep sense of dread for the year’s end, simply because I wasn’t ready for what is to come. But will we ever? Yet each time I felt dejected, the universe seemed to offer me a bone. I guess it’s not over yet, but as I learned this year, I’m having back-up plans, and I’m wary of precedents and rules. 

*For context, the academic job market for a coveted position in French, let’s say, is extremely competitive. There are maybe 25-30 positions a year, to which I might be able to apply to 5-10 because of my area of specialization/research interests. Many people “go on the market” 2-3 times before they are able to land a position that puts them on track to be permanent faculty. Some leave altogether. 

I’m gonna be more honest with myself this year, give less f*cks about what people think, wear sneakers with suits, ask for what I want, and feel less guilty about it. 

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But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.

Joni Mitchell

I think it’s enticing, this serial dating culture, because we have a hard time knowing how to love ourselves in a constant, reliable way. Because we are the people we trust the least, we need constant reminder of who we think we are, how lovable we can be. But maybe we need to have monogamous relationships with ourselves first, learn to love and then to continue to love ourselves deeply, first. 

[jpnesecurrency]

diaphanous

sometimes, all you want is to be seen, just as you are. 

[jpnesecurrency]

Dippin’ dots

I received a package the other day in the mail from an old friend. She had been  one of my middle school English teachers and was one of those young, hip teachers that leave impressions on students because they’re pretty but also willing to entertain all of our (pre-)teenage antics. She was a mentor of mine, so we had a special relationship and continued to be friends even after I graduated college. In middle school, we shared a journal where I could write thoughts and activities so she didn’t miss anything. I really wrote about anything and everything. I was so impressed that she had kept this journal, even the flower petals I had pressed between the pages were still intact. 

On one of the entries, I told her that on our next outing together, I’d like to get dippin’ dots. Now, have you had dippin’ dots? They use to sell them in stands at the mall, where people would scoop the small dots of ice cream into cups for you. Now, they are just dispensed from machines because the nature of the ice cream does not require much administration. This wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone if they read it in passing, but even now, I get a particular feeling about dippin’ dots, the way you might feel about something that’s not great, but still want because you don’t want to miss out. When I think of dippin’ dots, I can’t seem to remember what they’re like, probably because, I cannot pinpoint a precise memory where I got to try them. Considering how much I wanted them, I think I would remember such a memory. Dippin’ dots was a weird luxury because they were overcharged ice cream sprinkles, essentially. I would stare at kids who got to have them, thinking that their parents were probably rich enough to buy them something so inconsequential. Food was supposed to be filling, not experiential. So asking to have them was an expression of something a lot more revelatory, especially so because I never would have asked my parents or older sisters. They might have said yes, but it was just not within what I considered their realm of possible.

Reading that entry now, I think about how much that says about my adolescence, to want to try something that I might not even have liked. There were so many things I was trying to say about how I was figuring myself and the world out, but didn’t know how to say them directly.

The things we say when we don’t think anyone’s listening, including ourselves. 

[jpnesecurrency]

worth a risk.

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hypervisible or invisible?

I’m so used to being unseen that when someone expresses remote interest I tell them a little too much Talk about myself a little too long Too thankful for an opportunity to be heard And then I leave the situation a little ashamed, wondering “what do they think of me now?”  as if being myself was, this time, not a question about being enough, but a little too much. 

[jpnesecurrency]

I’m not concerned with being incomplete, but with being unrealized

I remember seeing this quote somewhere, along the lines of “you are not yet who you are meant to be.” And at first I felt like it was such a prescriptive thing to live by. But it comes back and back again, and what sticks is not so much the part about being the person that we are supposed to be, but the “not yet.” We are still only beginning to learn to live and love, and we have to establish what is worth containing, what is worth exploring. There will be casualties, and I’m trying to determine if I’m okay with that. And I think that’s a part of living this life for me, to live as much as I can within my capacity, sometimes even vicariously, to be tempted, to test and push on boundaries, and to wonder if there is more, because who I am is not fixed.

And to me this is directly related to learning to love yourself. We talk about loving ourselves all the time, and how important that is, but if we welcome growth and evolution, then you have to continually learn how to love yourself. No one talks about how that is a constant work - it’s not a one time and done kind of thing. 

sometimes, like relationships you build with others, you outgrow the relationship that you build with yourself. 

[jpnesecurrency]

Trying to unpack identity politics

I’ve been thinking about identity politics a lot these days, and perhaps in denial about how much it actually affects me. In a common struggle for representation for example, I am very aware of how necessary it is to highlight particular identities, because each groups has different needs. This is why multiculturalism didn’t exactly work in the early 2000s, because cultures couldn’t just “play nice” with one another, united in a shared struggle for representation.

But that’s not the layer of identity politics I’m referring to, that’s really only the surface. I’m thinking about what is at play when it comes to gatekeeping, safeguarding one’s culture. 

Recently, in consulting job postings for academic positions, I’ve been observing an interesting pattern in which many schools call for francophone specialists of Africa or the Caribbean, without explicitly including Asia, as if France didn’t colonize Vietnam for almost a hundred years. At first put off because this precisely what I work on, I started to wonder about the ulterior motives of search committees, my suspicious nature fueled by years and years of being on the lookout for myself in this line of work. Then someone I know tells me others find his work unviable because he is not studying the culture of his own kind, but that of another oppressed people. I found this to be unfair and discriminatory, especially coming from a white professor who is basically saying you need to study your own culture. Here in this example, people are calling out identity politics as if it’s a bad thing. A later, unrelated moment, I think about how defensive I get when I see “Vietnamese” on food networks and magazines, simply because they add peanuts or fish sauce to their dish. I think if they’re going to do it, they should do it right. 

And then I pause to wonder: have we taken it too far, this politics of identity? How contradictory it is for me to be upset about job postings who disguise their need to hire Black candidates through the language of “diversity” which they mean to exclude an Asian like me, or to find the professor’s observations discriminatory when I hold on so dearly to what I know of my culture, and feel so protective of it that I don’t want others, especially those from an historically oppressive community to label or title my food in a certain way? Is that hypocritical?

But maybe there isn’t a wholesale version of identity politics that we can just pocket and use to our advantage. Maybe my protection of my culture and my memory of it is different from a White man’s perspective of how he sees identity politics evolving, because it is likely threatening for him. Or maybe they are related - why do I feel possessive and protective, if not an inheritance of colonial trauma? Perhaps gatekeeping isn’t fair if it’s a way for me to justify and claim the Truth of my very flawed, subjective memories of a certain culture, and perhaps we don’t go anywhere by holding on to the past. And yet it’s hard to let go when that is the only thing you can claim as your own in this world.

More on this later. 

[jpnesecurrency]

We’re not really strangers

I discovered this new game: We're not really strangers. Have you played? It’s basically the Truth part in Truth or Dare, in cards. It’s meant to be a “purpose driven” game that helps you break ice and get to know other people beyond the surface. It’s silly to think that we need a game to facilitate deep discussions, but this is just where we are right now. I’m not going to be one of those people who forgo things because “in principle” it shouldn’t even exist. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you start, as long as you able to reach your objective. What’s important is the conversations you are able to have. Plus, social interaction is becoming less and less intuitive, and do we expect to just drop interactions all together? Do you not have a conversation with someone simply because they don’t speak the same language? Anyway. The game has questions on cards, from “How are you, really?” to “What’s the most pain you felt that wasn’t physical?” It helps you push boundaries, dares you to be brave, and even provides you blank note paper so that you can write secrets, confessions, to “dig deeper.” 

I came across the game with that last question, “What’s the most pain you felt that wasn’t physical?” And I contemplated a long time: have I even experienced pain? Other than for professional or work-related purposes, I haven’t thought a question for that long, racking my brain for experiences, figuring out how I would find a suitable answer. And it’s likely that I don’t have a good answer, because in my mind, there is nothing more painful than loss. I think losing something you can never have back can be extremely painful, and I don’t know if I remember feeling that. I know that your brain tends to purposely block out painful experiences, so I couldn’t recall anything acute. I remember saying once, when I broke up with a boyfriend, that it felt like a deep physical cut in the upper left part of my abdomen, but I couldn’t remember how that felt, except that it hurt a lot. The things I do distinctly remember and perhaps can still feel though, are the droning hums of ache, nothing “painful” per se, but achy and unable to pinpoint. All things that happened when I was younger: Feeling unwanted in a given context, wondering why I couldn’t love myself, feeling invisible, feeling misunderstood, grief, etc. Our lives as we live it aren’t always punctuated by tragedy, but most of us still go through important, defining, hurting moments. It made me think, how lucky I am, to not have to deal with change so suddenly. But maybe that’s not the way that we should think about pain. It isn’t as clear-cut as choosing between a second of intense pain vs. a minute of ache. Maybe the most dangerous pain is the kind in which you don’t know where it begins and ends. 

The entire thought process made me wonder if we should each play the game alone, and confront ourselves with these difficult questions that often times we don’t even dare ask ourselves. Maybe I should get this game.

Happy Monday. 

Edit// I think I came up with an answer.