On family, friends, and other things

Part of what makes growing up in an abusive home hard is the difficulty of assigning blame. On one hand, my parents (especially my dad) deserve enormous blame for the harm they caused, and I have a small, dark part of me that wants to absolutely shred them for it. This part of me sees itself as a great arbiter of justice. It likes to imagine itself privy to all the necessary context and nuance to perform the solemn duty of eviscerating two failed souls, which it would do in the greatest blog post ever written, with all the flair and grace and subtlety the task demands.

This part of me is dead wrong, and I constantly fight to kill it. Justice is not about evisceration. Justice is compassion, forgiveness, mercy. Justice is stepping back to look at the vast gulf between myself and my parents -- the generational gap, the cultural programming, the historical inequality -- and realizing just how little choice they had. The suffering contained in each of their childhoods would bury mine in a landslide, with a little dirt left over for the laundry. I have enormous admiration for both of their stories, and their quartet of well-adjusted children speaks volumes about the strength of their characters.

But this landslide leaves me at an impasse. Experiencing harm does not justify inflicting it on others. And while I want, desperately, to forgive them for all they've done, I can never bring myself to do it. Even imagining myself doing it dredges up a profound sense of disgust from that same dark part of me I'm constantly trying to kill. I know I should do this thing, but I can't. The result is a confused, deeply ungratifying, festering bitterness.

This situation is made even more frustrating (in the same way getting annoyed by a totally irrelevant thing that really shouldn't bother you makes the situation even more frustrating) when considered in context. I live, by any metric, a fantastic life. Just yesterday, I was reflecting on how I spent every minute of the day doing things drenched to the point of dripping with meaning, every one of which I loved and wouldn't have traded for anything else. These kinds of days are not at all rare for me, and I am painfully aware of just how few people share such privilege.

So here I am, living a phenomenal life. The abuses of my past wither in the light of my present joys. I've won. I've tangibly and obviously transcended every ugly word and angry beating my parents inflicted on me. And yet they fester nonetheless. My default state of being is so good that it's jarring whenever the bitterness creeps in. For the most part, I succeed in quashing it, but I never know when it'll next come calling.

Here's another unfortunate thing that occasionally creeps in unless I resist: Sometimes I feel like I like my friends too much. See, my only family here is my mom and dad. I don't talk to them much. I don't talk to my siblings much, either. As relationships go, my friends are all I really have. And that's a scary thing.*

*One of my worst fears: dying suddenly one day, and my friends finding out only long, long after I'm gone.

Friendships function best when everyone feels equal. I usually feel equal to my friends, but a noticeable exception occurs whenever I hear stories about their wonderful families and strong support systems. It produces a soup of mild jealousy, awkwardness, and inability to relate.

It's just a soup because the main course is what's actually important. See, I actually can't get enough of these stories. I can't get enough of any story where my friends succeed and flourish. They are my favorite stories in the world, in part because they're true. The main course is delicious, but I still have to have sip that soup.

All of this makes me feel silly. There is no shame in loving your friends too much. If anything, I would prefer to love them more. And they really are better then family, because on closer inspection, the human devotion to family is a strange, evolutionary house of cards. Family relationships are totally arbitrary. Whether you get really unlucky and have horrible family members, or get lucky and have the best family in the world, you didn't do anything to deserve either. Why should I care about random people in my life I had no say in? Contrast this with the incredibly empowering ability to choose your friends, and be chosen by them -- not just once, but continuously, in ways that grow and deepen. The relentless agency inherent to friendships makes them so much more fulfilling.

Yet the beauty of family is incredible. When my family traveled back to China after a full ten years of absence, I still remember the vivid expressions of my uncles and aunts and cousins jumping up and down in the airport, waving their hands up, crying from eager anticipation. They'd never even seen some of us before. There were hundreds of people I was connected to by blood who invited us in for tea without a second thought, a community I didn't even know I was a part of even while I was apart from them. It was a sort of unconditional love everyone should have access to.

I often tell people that trip was when I first started to understand what "family" could really mean. I'm still trying to untangle the full meaning.

There's this oft-misinterpreted Bible quote: "Blood is thicker than water". A lot of people think it means family (i.e. blood) relationships should supersede all other relationships; i.e. can't be washed away by water. But the full quote actually has the opposite meaning: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." The promises and bonds -- the blood covenants -- we form with our friends can often supersede our family, water-of-the-womb relations.

I like both readings of the quote. Both can be true. Both family and friendships are incredibly powerful and meaningful for different reasons. And I've had more access to one than the other, and I feel simultaneously blessed and cursed by that.

 

This post was brutally hard to write. For the most part, I don't like telling people about this stuff. I don't like seeing the naked pity writ large on their expressions, nor do I like hearing the hushed, meaningless condolences that quickly follow. I don't see myself as a hero or a victim, so I don't want other people to see me as a hero or a victim, either. I don't want to be praised, and I definitely don't want to be pitied. I want to be judged on who I am now, not what happened to me a long time ago. But after you read something like this, your opinion of its author changes. It's inevitable. I wouldn't write it if it weren't.

So how do I want your opinion to change? I'm going to answer that question in two words: It's complicated.

That answer might initially seem like a cop-out, because you can use it as a valid answer to almost any question while also not actually answering the question. But it's not a cop-out, because I don't mean the answer is complicated. I mean what I wanted to communicate in this post is just how very complicated we all are, how complicated the people who've wronged us are, how complicated the people we love most are. We are, all of us, roiling landslides of happiness and suffering, ceaselessly picking up dirt and leaving other dirt behind as we cascade down the mountain of of time. We only collide with each other in the most ephemeral ways. Let's make the most of them.

Turn

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The world is but a small, dark place

A fleck of motion, a pinprick of light drifting amidst an unbearably vast void

And that makes every grain of sugar all the sweeter

Every breath of laughter all the sweeter

 

Think of the all sailors, lost at sea, adrift in that small, dark place

As they glimpse the pinprick of the lighthouse, that fleck of motion on the unbearably vast horizon

How radiant their smiles, how jubilant their hearts

Think of the newborn, emerging from that small, dark place

As they open their eyes for the first time and glimpse true love

The smallest among us are often sweetest

And to be fleeting is to be precious

 

How precious this pinprick is

All of Earth

All of it sustained by a fraction of a fraction of a ball of light which is itself a fraction of a fraction

Yet nonetheless it holds all this

Home to all we know, and so much more we don’t 

 

See, the world is not some small, dark place

It is vast

Incomprehensibly, yet bearably vast

The horizon itself, that endless expanse of sky, is but a fraction of a fraction of it all

 

Each unturned stone harbors a thousand untold secrets

Each turned stone felt a thousand long-dead loves

And so I want to turn them all

 

And I lied to you before

The earth is not all sustained by sunlight

See, we know of biological communities deep beneath the waves that subsist entirely off of the energy of hydrothermal vents

Laborious chemeosynthesizers

Glorious anaerobic reminders

Of the countless untold wonders that dance at the edges of my periphery

So let me turn my head, and let me turn yours, too

I want to turn them all

So I guess what I want is to turn into the world

See, the world is but a small, dark place

And yet it turns us all

The Essential Weirdness of Stories

An essential weirdness permeates all good stories: the weirdness of purpose. Things in stories happen for reasons; they must, for stories to make sense. Authorial intent and meaning require a basic assumption of cause and effect to be intelligible. Strong narrative structure entails strong beginnings and strong endings; good characters need good motivations; resonant themes shine brightly by definition. Even those stories whose point is ambiguity and dissatisfaction nonetheless have a point.

In these ways, stories are not like life. Life is filled with the random, the meaningless, the unintelligible. Life's complexity resists the sort of throughlines present in even the simplest narratives; life's level of detail eludes any attempt to capture it all. In a fraction of a second, we can have a thought that would take us hundreds of pages to try to describe, and even after all those reams, we'd still feel like we didn't quite explain it right. And (in another way in which life and stories are different) even after all that, we still have no idea what will happen next. So much of life is happenstance, and therefore naturally opposed to formulation. As my friend Kathleen told me, "You can't accidentally write anything. You can't accidentally create."

I often tell people I stopped being Christian because I went to a Chinese Christian camp with a charismatic pastor who delivered all these powerful sermons about life, but I got so much more value out of the non-theologic parts of his sermon that I stopped believing in God. I saw how all the important parts -- loving my family, listening to my parents, taking pride in my heritage, having meaningful conversations, resisting temptation, being still -- were attached to a totally vestigial, evidence-free religious dogma I could easily jettison, and jettison I did. Or so the story goes.

The problem with this story is that it doesn't make any sense. The pastor (whom everyone loved, and who was a truly gifted speaker) structured his entire message around God, the importance of God, and how wonderful God was. Indeed, his whole point was that all that other stuff about loving your family or whatever was totally vestigial, and could be easily jettisoned if love of God wasn't also present. Why didn't I feel the weight of the essential core of his message as much as I felt the other parts? I have no explanation. Furthermore, I know plenty of people -- people in my age group, with similar backgrounds, whom I still know today -- who were heavily impacted by that core message of God, who cite that guy's sermons as a key inspiration for their personal devotion to Jesus and to church, and who will tell my same story with the opposite outcome. Why did our paths diverge so radically?

I want to ascribe the divergence to something intelligible, but I can't. The truth is, there are probably thousands of minute factors -- genetic, environmental, stupid -- I'm not aware of. Maybe my personality meant I never had a chance of committing my life to Christianity from birth, or maybe I'm still a mere breath away from becoming a pastor myself. Maybe the peculiarities of the connections between my neurons caused me to interpret the pastor's mannerisms in a totally different way, or maybe I was too busy chewing an especially tough piece of fingernail to hear a crucial sentence that would've changed everything. There are whole reams of reasons why this massively impactful moment in my life could have broken the other way, and I regularly choose to ignore them. I exclude those details in service of telling a more logical narrative.

The same is true for other stories I tell: how I started liking rap music after listening to it on full blast in my teammate's car (many people, including friends of mine, got turned off of rap music precisely because its listeners blasted it on the street), how I never built a great relationship with my siblings because my dad was yelling at us all the time (there are tons of siblings for whom that sort of abuse is galvanizing rather than isolating), how I love writing because I love reading (some of my best friends are avid readers and readily admit to hating their own writing and avoiding the practice at all costs).

It's a lot easier to explain why something happened if you already know it happened. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives are not our lives; they are carefully manicured things, curated for purpose and plot through the darkly tinted lens of hindsight.

Stories are weird. They reside just beyond the uncanny valley of un-reality, contain just enough truth to deceive us into thinking they are all truth, when even the very best stories are but shadows of our indescribably rich and complex lives. But at the same time, stories are an essential component of the human experience. They are the only tool we can use to extract meaning from a sea of gibbering chaos. They are the best way to share all the roiling complexity bubbling up within us, and in so doing, lighten our individual burdens. And so, even though they churn with all this subtle strangeness and false promise, stories are all we really have.

As I reflect back on 2020, I can’t help but conceive of the year as a collection of stories. And I already know I'm going to assign a lot of meaning and purpose to those stories, and there are going to be logical cause-and-effect relationships and character motivations and (hopefully) bright throughlines in my reflections. I want to frame all those things appropriately. I don’t want to lose sight of the frailty and myopia of my own constrained perspective. And I'm hoping that after reading this, you’ll be able to frame all the stories you tell yourself with all the subtlety and caution they deserve.

 

 

“I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.” -Ecclesiastes 9:11

 Part of the inspiration for this came from this video.

Lyrics: Shaped Like an Ellipse

Video | Audio only

I'm a savant with a soft heart who thinks outta the box, avant-garde, ex-lovers like the Devil cuz they fell hard, so far spinnin’ fast like a pulsar, early on the play that’s a false start, colder than the water found on Mars, re-cover rap like it’s a lost art, my bars catchin’ like a strain of SARS, brain’s changin’ the game with in-flamed pul-monary range, I’m luminary, tearin' it up, so say a prayer or I’ll make ya perish, I win games, got more rings than your eighth marriage, parry garish affairs with savoir-faire on a pair-o’ jet-skis and embarrassed a barracks of American paratroopers when they coul-dn't get me; regal air on the Se-renge-ti like Mufasa, droppin’ heat like the luftwaffe, poppin’ off like the top of a bottle o’ Smir-noff vodka, can not stop this abomination like-Hutus in R-wanda, I'm tearin’ the roof-offa this whole damn-nation, my congregation’s the size of the human race, no exaggeration, I’m losin’ patience, you're losin' face unless you prove your faith, cuz you’re there but for the grace of Wei, I’m makin a declaration: I'm a reckless Asian whose consecrated exhalations em-brace the face of a generation, no confabulation, so fire call me a conflagration

I blot you out son, call me an eclipse
Double focused, shaped like an ellipse
Better hang tight or you just might lose your grip
Yeah you coulda had sex but you’re listenin’ to this

You’re vacuous as clickbait, I won’t acquit, I’m immaculate as shit -- wait. I meant to say they’re infatuated, my numbers cause a spit take, like “what? that must be a mistake!” nope, I got the unborn too, embryos on my flow, still in the womb, ‘m killin’ a dude and catchin’ ‘im jammin to my tunes when I visit his tomb, bringin’ invidious doom to perfidious noobs, I’m ad-vanced and in-sidious, a combination o’ Sith Lord and Nvidia so giddy up before I get rid rid o’ ya like Walter White did with Lydia, Mr. T (mixed her tea) with fake stevia, I pity da fool who doesn’t know my Camp Rocks like Nick Jonas, a bamf talks, calls me a see-change like glaucoma, so glam my glances induce orgasm, my pants got ample room for expansion, what I call a shack to you is a mansion, Shaquille’ll kneel in front of his king, no need to ask ‘im, I’m the essence of fashion and straight cash, impassioned and makin’ a splash-near areas from Cali to Kashmir

Helix in double-time, Francis Crick mode, I got sick flows cuz my lymph nodes went AWOL, don't need no sticks and stones cuz I kick most o'my glib foes from zip codes with a quick dose of my slick prose, bitch hoes’ll emit woes like "this blows", better tiptoe when my grip's closed cuz I slit throats when I spit roasts-real as Pinocchio with a slim nose, whip votes from coast to coast like hypno-sis, know souls to the bone, call me gnosis, bulldoze'm like Nick Bosa in a Ford Focus, in my pro-phase like mitosis, con-tagious like tuberculosis, in-sane, out-rageous like Jim Davis en-caged with Cassius Clay, and I’m so famous my picked name is en-graved in thick frames from South Station to Las Vegas

Do not let me shake your soul

Audio

 

Do not let me shake your soul

Do not let me plunder your convictions
Hide them
Bury them
Bury them someplace deep, beyond the reach of sunlight, so deep I will not find them
You will need more than a shovel
Bulldozer and backhoe at minimum
Drill rig to be safe;
Deafening and diesel-powered, and though you may choke on the fumes maybe they will serve to mask your scent when I come hunting
Don’t get distracted
Keep digging
Do not give yourself to me because I will know exactly what to do
How to touch you
How to change you
My plans are not “cooked up”
They are incubated
This poem is just the beginning

So dig
Dig with drill bit and dynamite
You will not dig deep enough until you breach the molten core
and even then you will find
Something has been there all this time, waiting
Finally done incubating,
Now ready to breach your molten core
You can’t let it
Resist!
Plug up that dam though your hands may shake
It is already cracked and
leaking
And listening to this poem isn’t helping.

Do what you need to do.
Stop listening if you must.
You don’t have to learn what courage means today --
just that it means the opposite of comfort.

So do not let me change you.
Lock the door and bolt it,
Drop the curtains, bar the windows
Good neighbors make good fences
And I am an enemy to both.

But I am inexorable.
Those precautions, that careful planning?
It will all amount to nothing in the end.
It was over when you started listening to this poem.
No matter what happens
No matter what you do
I will press my hand into the wet cement of your soul, so
You can either rush to dry it with a blowtorch
Or be thankful at how it hardened long ago.

My Multitudes

I don't like the introversion/extroversion dichotomy as a model of personality types. One reason is how easily it changed for me. In my first two years of high school, I didn't talk much with people. I mostly stayed home, played a lot of video games, and tried (and succeeded) to hide my dysfunctional family situation from my peers. I was also arrogant and thought I was smarter than most people, so I figured they'd be a waste of my time anyway. I felt drained just being around them.

In junior year of high school, I made some great friends. It was the same time I was getting into board games, so we'd hang out every week playing games and talking deep into Friday nights and shallow into Saturday mornings. They were my first exposure to mature friendships, laden with vulnerability and trust, friendships that humbled me and taught me things. These friends made me into a much better person. Being around them didn't make me feel drained; it filled me with energy and passion. (It also helped that my friends were incredibly smart, talented people whom I continue to admire.)

I had shifted from feeling drained when around people to feeling drained when not around people. It was a big change during a highly developmental stage of life -- but I am acutely aware of how easily it could happen to me again, in either direction. Ever since, I've considered the part of my identity that takes energy from being with or apart from people to be highly mutable, and hence not a reliable label of who I am.

I know people who identify as extremely introverted or extroverted who are confident they'll never change. For them, introversion/extroversion is a clear, established part of their identity. I don't know if they're right or not. All I know is, I was also extremely sure I'd never stop being introverted, and I was totally wrong about that. I'm sure all the extreme 'verts I know know themselves better than I do, so the duality makes more sense for them. I'm cool with that. But I also wonder if they can change like I did.

A bigger reason I don't like the dichotomy is because I don't like it when people quickly stratify themselves into binary categories. It's always felt too simplistic and reductive. Whitman put it best:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Sometimes, I feel so introverted I can't even muster the energy to send a one-word reply to a text message. I actively avoid close friends. I'd much rather read, or write, or dance in the peaceful solitude of my room (close the door on your way out, please).

Other times, I crave interaction. I call people who aren't expecting me just to hear their voice. I go for a walk so I can see some human faces. I start conversations with strangers on the street. I want people to pay attention to me and give me compliments so it's not weird when I give them compliments.

Feeling these different urges doesn't seem unhealthy to me; if anything, their breadth is an essential part of the beauty of being human. When I have to collapse all of this breadth into a single word -- "introvert" or "extrovert" -- it seems like I've failed to communicate something important. It also feels like the person who hears my self-categorization immediately forms an impression of me based on which side I picked, an impression that can only be deeply flawed.

To illustrate this tension, I will tell you two stories. Both of them took place in empty homes.

The first story takes place at the end of my time in college, the day after my roommates moved out. We were good friends, usually having dinner together 4 times a week. We were also very open and comfortable around each other. When our lease ended, they left a few days earlier than I did.

I will never forget what it felt like to leave my room and see absolutely nothing in the house. The day before, it had been full of boxes, furniture, assorted packing paraphernalia, and not just things, but sounds: jokes and laughter, table legs scraping on hardwood floors, all the bustle of moving and all the laziness of not wanting to.

Now, there was total emptiness. My roommate's door, right across from mine, creaked on its hinges. I could hear my breath echo into his empty room. I was acutely aware of the sounds my clothes made as they rusted around on my body. I was struck by a profound, piercing loneliness.

I loved college. I'd been in school my entire life. I had no idea what life would be like afterward, without the structure of classes and teachers and syllabi. I was also someone who genuinely loved school, who loved studying and learning and teaching, and I had no idea where I'd end up, and it seemed impossible for me to end up in a place I would love quite as much.

I'd also made my closest friends in college, friends I didn't know if I would see again. I'd already undergone the painful experience of losing close high school friends whom I thought I'd never lose contact with. We naturally drifted apart due to our increased distance and loss of commonalities. It seemed totally reasonable for that to happen again, even though I really didn't want it to.

All my sadness, anxiety, and fear came together in the silence of that barren house. I felt wholly and utterly alone, in every way someone could feel alone -- physically, intellectually, emotionally, temporally. I was more extroverted than I'd ever been in that moment, totally drained of energy, in need of human contact. And there was no one home with whom I could share my multitudes.

The second story is when I finally moved into my apartment here in Boston. The two people I know out here are both super busy, so I ended up doing it all alone (well, almost -- I did pay a Brazilian guy I met off the street $20 to help me carry the heavy furniture inside, but that was the extent of my human contact -- I drove 30 hours from CO, stayed in an AirBnB while taking the bus to various libraries every day so I could look for an apartment online, found one, got an email for a better apartment that turned out to be a scam, paid the deposit for the real apartment, found cheap furniture on Craigslist (which, in total, comprised three bookshelves, two sofas, curtains, assorted cookware, a desk, chair, bed frame, box spring, mattress, table, dresser, and nightstand), rented a truck, moved all the furniture into my new place (with the help of the aforementioned Brazilian guy, who didn't speak English, so I communicated with him entirely through Google translate (shoutout to the Google translate team -- y'all do amazing work))), and collapsed, exhausted, onto my new bed.

I was wholly and utterly alone, and happier than I'd been in months. I was incredibly proud of myself for doing it all on my own. I felt mature, independent, self-actualized, free. It was the sort of freedom that felt so good I wondered if the radical libertarians were actually on to something after all. Everything I wanted to happen was happening -- not through chance, but through my own hard-fought efforts; I'd been working diligently toward a dream my whole life, and when I got finally got to the end, I found out it had all been worth it. Great endings go on to become even greater beginnings, and my future would be greater still.

I had no one to share my triumph with -- it was well past 1:00 am, and I was too tired to talk to anyone anyway. But even if I'd had the energy, I don't think I would have. I was caught in the blinding light of joyous introversion, totally fulfilled. It was a special, private moment, a moment begging to not be shared, a moment crying out for stillness. It was a moment just for me. It was a moment I -- no one else -- had earned. And so I laid there and exulted in my multitudes.

The Second Half of "Bittersweetness"

 Audio

This poem is about bittersweetness -- mostly the second half.
It’s about the embarrassing moments you learned to laugh at.
It’s about all the failure leading to self-improvement.
Sure, it’s about all the things that matter, but it’s also about all the things that didn’t, looking back.
And it’s about all the things that, when you look back, you no longer see.

This poem is about all the times you knew it wouldn’t last, and you were at peace with that.
It’s about all the great endings that blossomed into even greater beginnings.

This poem goes out to all the parents who gave everything for their children and did not call it “sacrifice”.
It goes out to all the battle-hardened friendships forged in the crucible of war, to the sweet tenderness of scar tissue and the memories that made them.
To all those who have loved, and lost, and are loving all the more.
Keep all those unblemished hearts; purity is for germaphobes and preachers, and I am neither one.

Give me all the hearts that ache, because how else will they learn to heal?
Give me the ache of my muscles on the mountaintop, because how else will I have earned the view?
Give me the breathlessness that comes after the marathon, because after I cross that finish line, I want to feel my lungs burning. Stoke that pulmonary fire, because I want to run faster, need to run faster, cuz --
There are all these things I left behind, and when I look back, I don't want to see them anymore.

Give me the darkness before the dawn.
Yes, by all means, give me the petrichor of earth after the storm, but please: do not deprive me of the storm, and
Give me a shovel while you’re at it, cuz I have some things I want to bury.

You see, they thought I wanted sunrays when I was craving moonbeams.
They thought I was cold and wet and miserable, but I was dancing in the rain.
And that shovel -- was not for digging graves.
It was for planting seeds.

You can’t grow a garden until you break the earth, and so --
I will keep breaking my heart until it is fertile ground, trade my platemail for plowshares, and if the well runs dry I will refresh it with my tears.
And don’t worry if I cry.

The harder we weep in winter, the sweeter we celebrate in spring.