Hello! Coming back after Thanksgiving with a special edition.
If you haven’t picked up on it already, I tend to break my newsletter into three sections: work, life, and play.
Over break, I had more time to read/watch things, all while catching up with friends and family. Work was absent, so life and play blended together. Because of that, I thought I’d use the usual media recommendations (the “play” section) to frame happenings from the last two weeks (“life”). Enjoy.
Work
Cutting this section short this week. I’m working on the same stuff as my last post, with the slight difference that I now only have 2 weeks left and can feel myself slowly getting more emotional about leaving. But we’ll save that for another time.
A little announcement and respite is that I’ve officially decided to return to wapo next summer, this time as a graphics and design intern, so I’ll be making stories on the newsroom side. :)
Life/Play
Last Saturday, I headed home to Illinois, snagging a window seat on the plane. When we made our descent, I saw the yellow-brown patchwork and overwhelming flatness of midwestern fields and got surprisingly excited. I guess I didn’t realize how important and attached I feel to this place, because people say it’s boring—and objectively, maybe it is. But my life is rooted here.
The natural thing you do when you revisit a familiar place is take note of the differences. I passed through Chicago Chinatown for a meal before driving home and noticed a couple new barber shops and neon signs. I got a haircut and my Mandarin is still so awful that I can hardly communicate how short I want it, BUT. I can speak enough where I can tell them that my Mandarin is bad. Here’s how the conversation between us went:
Him: *says something in Mandarin that I don’t understand*
Me: Ahh . . . 我的中文不好,你会说英文吗? [my Mandarin isn’t good, do you know English?]
Him: 我的英文不好 [my English isn’t good]
*we look at each other, laugh pretty hard, shrug, and then say nothing the rest of the time*
Progress. At this rate, I’ll be fluent by the age of 50.
Because I was on break and it’s been two weeks, I’m really excited/passionate about the stuff I’ve selected here. I hope you like them (and let me know if you do).
A brief spoken word performance by Arpi Park about being from the midwest, and leaving the midwest:
“How did the apple roll so far from the tree when the ground is so flat?”
. . .
“I probably put loving my neighbor before loving my family.”
Especially after this break, I realized I spend more time actively caring about my friends than I do for my own family. I met up with friends 3 times instead of just being with my parents, even though I was only home for 3 days, and it’s weird, because I feel like my parents are the ones who taught me in the first place to care about others.
So much of my love for my parents goes unspoken, and I should work toward a better balance. That’s difficult when time is finite, but it’s important to try.
Daniel Sloss’s comedy special, Jigsaw (on Netflix), which presents a metaphor for life as a jigsaw puzzle, and uses it to discuss the way we view relationships. On Twitter, he keeps a count of how many breakups were caused by the special (via tweets from people who watched it) and he says it’s been 40,000+. Sloss is so good at being genuine and vulnerable without alienating or scaring the audience. (it’s from the 31:40 mark to the end. The first half is meh)
If you don’t have 30 minutes to watch, I’ll summarize: Sloss says that your whole life is like you putting a puzzle together, only you’ve lost the box, so you have no idea what the picture is supposed to be. The 4 corners are career, family, friends, and hobbies/interests. You’re finding them and moving them around. The middle pieces are commonly perceived to be a partner, someone who ‘completes’ you, and if you don’t have a middle, you’re incomplete. He says, well the issue is that the middle doesn’t have to be a partner—it can be something else. Besides, everyone is building their own puzzle, and it’s a high demand to ask someone to put their whole life into a singular piece for yours, and making a puzzle together is hard because everyone does it differently. But we’re so desperate to fill that middle that we end up just shoving people in who don’t actually fit; we change the corners to satisfy them.
I’m not sure if he’s totally correct, but I thought it was a comforting justification for being single, especially when you’re young and still finding your ‘corners.’
This New Yorker profile on Barbara Hillary, the first black woman to reach the North Pole. It was written last July, but she died last week at 88
She has been in and out of the hospital, and says that she’s “skin and bones.” But she is already dreaming about her next trip. “I’ve discovered a place, but it’s in Russia, and I have to figure out how to get permission from the Russian government to go there,” she said. She continued, “You see, dreams, even if they don’t come true, are important. Isn’t it great to maintain a dream or a memory? I can close my eyes and still see the wonderful mountains in Antarctica—contrary to public opinion, it is mountainous in places, and they’re blue-gray, and there’s the joy of silence.” I asked if she thought the Russia trip would happen. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I find that it’s like looking at a great dessert in the window of a store and saying, ‘I’m going to have that.’ And if I don’t? Look at all the people who have unbelievably boring lives, look at all the women who have been programmed like glorified maids.” She waited a few seconds and added, “Am I a hopeless dreamer, or was I born at the wrong time?”
This song by Monsune (Scott Zhang), which I interpret to be about the Chinese-Canadian experience:
I have many thoughts, so I’ll write a lil review and story.
My friend sent me this EP, Tradition, in September, and I quickly fell in love with it. It samples lots of 70s r&b, incorporates wild bass lines, and touches on topics like infatuation, coming of age, and diaspora. Basically, things I’m always thinking about.
I say ‘infatuation’ because the way he describes love is never about the long term. When you’re in your early 20s, love is, logically, not that serious—even though we sometimes wish it were. On MOUNTAIN, he proposes that right now, our love interests are more like drugs, saying, “I don't want to need you by my side / tell me when you want to / and I'll come over just so we can roll around a bit and get high.” In other words, screw dependence and building a life—we’re young. Let’s just have fun.
As nonchalant as that sounds, it’s not without vulnerability. Every song seems to flow in and out of quiet reflection, with both 1998 and CLOUD succumbing to slow, distorted outros, and MOUNTAIN having quiet verses that rapidly build to a scream-in-the-car chorus. It’s mercurial, just like a young adult. In fact, the EP opens with him mumbling, “I’m at that weird age where I can’t tell if I’m an adult or still a child.”
When I heard Tradition for the first time, JADE immediately captured my attention the most. Gentle twinkling, reminiscent of Frank Ocean’s Endless, gives way to a winding guitar line, and Zhang (Scott? Monsune?) sings in a drawn-out fashion: “Fruits of your labor / watch as they float across the sea / sooner or later / I will come home.” But is that an actual plan, or an unlikely wish?
At the end of the song he starts going wild, scream-singing a bunch in frustration at being stuck between two places (which I assume to be China and Canada). “I've been going back and forth for fifteen years, fifteen years.” It feels fitting, and the EP’s title, emblazoned in Chinese on the cover, suddenly makes sense. 传统. Tradition: the handing down of customs from one generation to another. Generational ties. It’s great, and therapeutic as fuck.
After playing this song on loop for a week or so, I asked my mom where she put the jade necklace she got me when I was 12. I never wore it before because I used to feel embarrassed of my heritage, but lately I’ve been proudly wearing it. When I first put it on, I looked in the mirror and realized how much had changed in 8 years, and how much more I’ll continue to change.
Then, last week, over lunch, my mom mentioned how her college friend’s son makes music. A few minutes later, she elaborated that he performs under the name Monsune. “Wait,” I said, “you KNOW him?”
Naturally, I flipped shit. Apparently we actually met when we were toddlers. I obviously have no memory of that, but I was mind-blown at how small the world is. The Asian-American (or in his case, Asian-Canadian) experience is so varied, and I never felt like anyone expressed the simultaneous grief and longing the way I did, let alone in song. So of course the person who makes that song is the son of someone who immigrated in the same little group as my mom. Lol. Anyway: it feels good to know that other people out there feel this way.
JADE closes out with an exasperated voice mumbling, “Sometimes you just grow up like that, you know?”
I want to think I do.
That’s all for this time.
Madison