notes on an early sunday morning
faye wong reminds me of my mother. i miss my family. maybe it's just her large-eyed expressions of wonder, that kind of angular face, or her status as a total diva (::snap snap::).
so it's become apparent that i'm hopelessly, endlessly infatuated with the chinese film industry. i almost feel defiant in justifying it. having spent a good portion of my teenage years apathetic about my own culture, whitewashed into ignorance, indifference, it only makes sense that the motherland comes creeping back into my heart through this kind of art. it's been a slow but steady reprisal, stemming from boring-ass general education courses on tao te ching freshman year to moderate amusement at the one tang poem i still have memorized from age five surfacing in a chinese lit class sophomore year, to watching my first wong kar wai movie in the basement of doheny library and subsequently this cult-ish following i find myself a part of.
nowadays i lament my poor mandarin, make promises to learn via book or cultural immersion, look forward to that thirteen-hour plane ride to see my parents and sister oriented in my birth country, vital jealousy, wanting to embark on a tour of beijing to see mao's body and hong kong to pick up some cantonese. oh, and watching the japanese trailer for eros over and over again to hear the few sultry lines i know by heart now.
and there's a section in the book stacks i've discovered of translated contemporary novels that i've been poring through with an unprecedented fervor. yes, it's official: i'm as chinky as can be.
but i feel like i'm making up for lost time. for a while, within the confines of suburban ohio and bigoted lifestyles that reduced me to a mere jackie chan yell from fifteen-year-old white kids or the aforementioned moniker of "chink" or "chinese kid" [as if i didn't know] from strangers, there was a while that i was embarrassed to admit where i was born. ashamed that i wasn't a full-blooded american, pale as pale can be, eating steak and potatoes every day and definitely not rice, no, not at all.
and i would scoff at my dad mentioning that i might eventually live in china as an adult, would grow quiet as my family chattered loudly and unabashedly in public while fat soccer moms shot us dirty looks, would feel my stomach turn over in chinese restaurants as people glued their eyes to us as (ironically enough) the only chinese patrons.
and then there was a period where all i felt about this was anger, anger that society could abuse the fragile esteem of a twelve-year-old, that people dared to say things to my face let alone behind my back, that my parents could never know or understand because there was not only a generation gap but a tremendous cultural gap and what did they know about growing up in white white white america, and anger and fuck you, look how far i got in high school despite all this racist pandering that smoldered me into a cold age seventeen and so much bitterness.
but now. now i feel more at ease with myself than ever. i am unapologetic about who i am, what my tastes are, what my heritage is [blah blah, not to get all amy tan] and i'd be flattered to be called a communist or be accused of eating dogs and cats because hey, what are you going to do about it.
i'm quite self-absorbed but it's doing me some good. i have a lot of time for introspection, and i think i am kind of a loner at heart. and of course, will always be a chinese-american man. i think about the many ways that this country has changed me, molded me, brought me up since stepping off a plane in new york at age four [or was it five?]. and i want to laugh because god, it's so ridiculous how haphazard it's all been, i could've easily been farming potatoes back in wuhan and blissfully unaware of all these things, of all these wai guo ren that i love and hate and would never know.
but... when it gets to the bottom of it, what i really want to know is: when did gong li's tits get so huge?
