Its very easy to be productive with limited Internet access. The lack of air conditioning also restricted me and my sister to two rooms in the apartment, so we read up on some literature. If you're interested, this is what I read in those two weeks. I would recommend everything, but asterisks denote favorites.
Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers.*
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code.*
Green, John. Paper Towns.
Huang, Eddie. Fresh Off the Boat.*
King, A.S. Everybody Sees the Ants.
Lakhouse, Amara. Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio.*
Lockhart, E. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.
Morrison, Toni. Sula.
Rowell, Rainbow. Fangirl.
Rowling, JK. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ.
Various authors. The Art of Plants vs. Zombies.*
I overestimated myself when I thought that I would take full advantage of the massive amounts of leisure I have. It seems that 2:40 AM has become a common sight on my clock. Honestly, I feel more at peace with life right now than I do during any other given time during the day. The air is "mad" cool and smells like poetry wafting through my windows. No one's awake. No food is around for temptation. Everything is quiet, and sometimes, a good conversation might even happen across borders.
I don't know what to do with myself. Should I take full advantage of my alertness during this time, or do I need to change my living habits? I love this quietness, but its an obligation to be conscious for the daytime. I don't know how college life messes up this pattern, how studying fits in with being constantly surrounded by new and amazing people. But right now, I love this night. I actually, right now, love being alive. This feeling is so rare...
Maybe that's why I'm still awake.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Adulthood
If you're reading this and you're thinking about that 7th grade mix-up with "adultery", let me just remind you that that's actually a really bitter memory for me, and every time you guys laugh about it, it actually kind of hurts, just like it did when y'all didn't let it go back then. JSYK. hahaha.
I know my role as a maturing person is to step it up and accept my parents for who they are instead of crying about it. On the other hand, I don't want to be too accepting, and just allow what they dictate to be true.
I know that even science says that my mom is out of her mind about Six Flags, but at the same time, I don't want to go behind her back anymore. It might be the cool thing to do, maybe even the strong thing to do, but given morals and whatever, its not the right thing. And that's another crazy idea, that moral decisions have to compromise experiences and friendship.
I used to completely reject my parents for the way they restricted my social life. Today, even, I envy the year above me, which has a huge friend group at church and is close cross-genders. They can talk and party like any other functioning member of society, while we're all stuck in our own parent traps. If my parents didn't make socializing such a shameful process, I might be less awkward, more outgoing, and a happier person. I personally still believe that having so many more deep connections would have saved me from moping, a lot of depression, hate, and non-living thoughts.
At the same time, I've finally realized that at least my parents really care a lot. At least they maintained a family that now has an identity and unique dynamic. There was no divorce that broke us in half, no cheating that made us feel like scum. Even if they were messed up standards for what we want to be, at least my sister and I have some knowledge of father and mother figures. While we don't have any real life examples of affection, we're still by-products of responsibility, discipline, and even love (lol). That's respectable.
These Chinese ideals for living have spread throughout my entire life, especially for food. Most people believe that three meals per day is healthy. This is true, but my family told my 5 year old self to never waste food. Then, by the time I began to feel guilty about eating way past my limit, my mom told me to never force myself to eat. This kind of commentary persisted throughout this past year, and my dad was consistently obtuse about it. Again, it was this persistence that put me through incredible shame.
Still, again, there's another side. Without this public, embarrassing rebuke, I might not have realized how messed up my habits are. These insecurities led my mom to reveal some of the darkest parts of her life. That kind of knowledge of someone I've only known for 18 out of her 50 years of living is not only intense, but it also rips up my assumptions of her circumstances. So many of these defining conversations wouldn't have happened if my mom hadn't directly addressed my problems.
Another part of life, athletics. My parents and I screamed at each other about the value of badminton, running, and health versus SATs and academics. They have never valued athletic progress, but instead, tolerated physical maintenance. Once, my dad straight up told me that I would never be an athlete. This crushed my motivation and my dreams, because financially, they controlled every aspect of my competitive athletics. It made me direct my hatred towards studying and settling down, and I would literally shake with the itch to be aggressively active.
Here, I started to truly gauge my mental intelligence. My parents believed in time investment and repetition, which is partly true, but they didn't have a grasp of the high school system. I faked at least 20 SAT practice tests, and still received the score I wanted. I understood the amount of work I needed to put into pulling my grades, even if I do complain about it in school. At the same time, I began to cherish the outdoors with every fiber of my body. The meaning of freedom became infinitely more vast and important. Its hard for me to linguistically describe the exhilaration I feel in fresh air as the sun is going down or the breaths I can barely take when I see bodies of water. When I think about Cornell and how I can take a twenty minute walk to my 7:30 PM discussion, I want to dance with literal giddiness, because it seems so fresh. I mean, maybe I would love the feeling of flying on the courts even if there wasn't "oppression" in my life. But I don't think it would be the same.
One more. My parents never saw art as anything more than a trivial hobby, even though for most of my life, I've wanted to integrate it with my career and lifestyle. When the going got tough, I always had to quit drawing lessons, even though my teacher there was the most encouraging and valuable instructor in the world. Art was the only place where positive and negative reinforcement were always in balance. I don't want to come off as arrogant, but I have very few doubts that if I consistently trained for the past 7 years, I would be as sophisticated as Eliza. Not in creativity, but in technique. I truly believe that given my intuition of aesthetics and perfect homework completion, I could be able to study at a high level in a Chinese art academy under some masters.
But I didn't receive consistent training. Instead, I watched a lot of YouTube, read a lot of comics, a made a lot of dopey cartoons. Even when I was drawing stupid stuff like the Elite Team tshirt design, my parents got mad because I wasn't studying for AP tests that were two months away. During the latter half of senior year, I still had to hide my sketches because I was afraid that they would tell me study for my ELA final or something. That sucked. Having to hide so many things from my parents diminished my already wavering passion to, sometimes, almost nothing.
Still, there's a positive side. Since I wasn't able to do any large scale projects, despite having so many in mind, I ended up making art that was "relevant". For instance, I picked up a little digital work and made quite a few designs. And yeah, they're shit compared my traditional work, which is already falling subpar, but its another kind of life, an entirely different community. In these past two years, I've played so much more with concept and audience than I ever wanted to, and the results are positive. I posted this one on Facebook, and it went 150 likes. It took a long time to build up confidence to publish crust like that, but in the end, the feedback emphasizes to me, once more, the vitality of concept and audience. "Its the heart that counts" is real.
Anyway, tl;dr, this was just a rant that I had to figure out on paper. Bart and Geo are so articulate when they talk things out, and I'm kind of down for the whole avoiding mind games thing. SO, the writing today - low level. The thoughts - still pretty basic. The necessity - 100%. -_- Call me crazy but at least in this way, with respect to my parents, I think I want to be an adult about it.
I know my role as a maturing person is to step it up and accept my parents for who they are instead of crying about it. On the other hand, I don't want to be too accepting, and just allow what they dictate to be true.
I know that even science says that my mom is out of her mind about Six Flags, but at the same time, I don't want to go behind her back anymore. It might be the cool thing to do, maybe even the strong thing to do, but given morals and whatever, its not the right thing. And that's another crazy idea, that moral decisions have to compromise experiences and friendship.
I used to completely reject my parents for the way they restricted my social life. Today, even, I envy the year above me, which has a huge friend group at church and is close cross-genders. They can talk and party like any other functioning member of society, while we're all stuck in our own parent traps. If my parents didn't make socializing such a shameful process, I might be less awkward, more outgoing, and a happier person. I personally still believe that having so many more deep connections would have saved me from moping, a lot of depression, hate, and non-living thoughts.
At the same time, I've finally realized that at least my parents really care a lot. At least they maintained a family that now has an identity and unique dynamic. There was no divorce that broke us in half, no cheating that made us feel like scum. Even if they were messed up standards for what we want to be, at least my sister and I have some knowledge of father and mother figures. While we don't have any real life examples of affection, we're still by-products of responsibility, discipline, and even love (lol). That's respectable.
These Chinese ideals for living have spread throughout my entire life, especially for food. Most people believe that three meals per day is healthy. This is true, but my family told my 5 year old self to never waste food. Then, by the time I began to feel guilty about eating way past my limit, my mom told me to never force myself to eat. This kind of commentary persisted throughout this past year, and my dad was consistently obtuse about it. Again, it was this persistence that put me through incredible shame.
Still, again, there's another side. Without this public, embarrassing rebuke, I might not have realized how messed up my habits are. These insecurities led my mom to reveal some of the darkest parts of her life. That kind of knowledge of someone I've only known for 18 out of her 50 years of living is not only intense, but it also rips up my assumptions of her circumstances. So many of these defining conversations wouldn't have happened if my mom hadn't directly addressed my problems.
Another part of life, athletics. My parents and I screamed at each other about the value of badminton, running, and health versus SATs and academics. They have never valued athletic progress, but instead, tolerated physical maintenance. Once, my dad straight up told me that I would never be an athlete. This crushed my motivation and my dreams, because financially, they controlled every aspect of my competitive athletics. It made me direct my hatred towards studying and settling down, and I would literally shake with the itch to be aggressively active.
Here, I started to truly gauge my mental intelligence. My parents believed in time investment and repetition, which is partly true, but they didn't have a grasp of the high school system. I faked at least 20 SAT practice tests, and still received the score I wanted. I understood the amount of work I needed to put into pulling my grades, even if I do complain about it in school. At the same time, I began to cherish the outdoors with every fiber of my body. The meaning of freedom became infinitely more vast and important. Its hard for me to linguistically describe the exhilaration I feel in fresh air as the sun is going down or the breaths I can barely take when I see bodies of water. When I think about Cornell and how I can take a twenty minute walk to my 7:30 PM discussion, I want to dance with literal giddiness, because it seems so fresh. I mean, maybe I would love the feeling of flying on the courts even if there wasn't "oppression" in my life. But I don't think it would be the same.
One more. My parents never saw art as anything more than a trivial hobby, even though for most of my life, I've wanted to integrate it with my career and lifestyle. When the going got tough, I always had to quit drawing lessons, even though my teacher there was the most encouraging and valuable instructor in the world. Art was the only place where positive and negative reinforcement were always in balance. I don't want to come off as arrogant, but I have very few doubts that if I consistently trained for the past 7 years, I would be as sophisticated as Eliza. Not in creativity, but in technique. I truly believe that given my intuition of aesthetics and perfect homework completion, I could be able to study at a high level in a Chinese art academy under some masters.
But I didn't receive consistent training. Instead, I watched a lot of YouTube, read a lot of comics, a made a lot of dopey cartoons. Even when I was drawing stupid stuff like the Elite Team tshirt design, my parents got mad because I wasn't studying for AP tests that were two months away. During the latter half of senior year, I still had to hide my sketches because I was afraid that they would tell me study for my ELA final or something. That sucked. Having to hide so many things from my parents diminished my already wavering passion to, sometimes, almost nothing.
Still, there's a positive side. Since I wasn't able to do any large scale projects, despite having so many in mind, I ended up making art that was "relevant". For instance, I picked up a little digital work and made quite a few designs. And yeah, they're shit compared my traditional work, which is already falling subpar, but its another kind of life, an entirely different community. In these past two years, I've played so much more with concept and audience than I ever wanted to, and the results are positive. I posted this one on Facebook, and it went 150 likes. It took a long time to build up confidence to publish crust like that, but in the end, the feedback emphasizes to me, once more, the vitality of concept and audience. "Its the heart that counts" is real.
Anyway, tl;dr, this was just a rant that I had to figure out on paper. Bart and Geo are so articulate when they talk things out, and I'm kind of down for the whole avoiding mind games thing. SO, the writing today - low level. The thoughts - still pretty basic. The necessity - 100%. -_- Call me crazy but at least in this way, with respect to my parents, I think I want to be an adult about it.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
China: The Track
When my aunt offered to show me the school track, I was skeptical. The last time I had tried to run in a neighborhood, even a well maintained one with proper occupants, it had felt awkward and restricting. People stared at the American, moving too quickly to blend in, but too slowly to be an athelete.
She reminded me that Nanning's heat had a dangerous power. The heat radiates from the ground, she said, even at night. Your uncle died three years after moving here, because the air turned his body into cancer. This was on her part, a scare tactic, but it was also in part true. The ground was glass, and the world was its greenhouse. Nanning swelters in a wave of fieriness that only grows bigger.
In the dark, the track was lit by only by the city stars, lights from apartment buildings towering above. I could barely see the lanes, but could feel the bodies around me. About 50 people - mostly students, some parents - were walking, jump roping, or beating their shoulders. My legs itched (from mosquito bites, but also...) to join them. I dove into the circling crowd.
My aunt was right. The track was a searing pan, and it was hungry for braised humans. I ran very fast - as fast as I have ever run, and passed every single person at least twice. I ran to feel the heat seep into my body, toe to head, and then ran faster to create a wind to cool off. On my 12th lap, I heard the smack sole to rubber - two boys, around my age - catching up. I sped forward, and they followed suit. So we raced.
Twice, my pursuers communicated to each other, "hao kuai!", the second time with emphasis, in some sort of delight surprise. I didn't respond, because I felt the anaerobic effort seizing my stomach, emptying my lungs of oxygen. I was, for the first in a long time, sprinting. In the last hundred meters ("zhui hou yi bai mi!") we ran for our lives. We tied. Or maybe I won. Or maybe I lost. I didn't know and couldn't bring myself to care. The boys slowed to a reasonable pace and I settled for a leisurely, knee buckling walk. My first race, perhaps my only taste of what it would be like to join track. One minute, two connections, on Nanning University's campus.
The next night, another runner and I kept pace with each other. In another couple days, my cousin brought me to Guangxi University's badminton gym. There, I was able to play with two graduate students. They weren't particularly skillful, but they were fast and strong. Communication was hard; I'd often begin shouting something out of enthusiasm and stop mid-sentence when I realized that I didn't know the vocabulary. Regardless, we played for two hours in near silence. Our soaked shirts clung to our skin, butt there was little room for judgment. We led vastly different lives, but for two hours, we were synced to flying birds and blind ambition.
This is what sports are about. Not diplomacy, not victory. Sports are about that moment of connection. A single moment for a single goal; to find people like myself in a country across the world.
She reminded me that Nanning's heat had a dangerous power. The heat radiates from the ground, she said, even at night. Your uncle died three years after moving here, because the air turned his body into cancer. This was on her part, a scare tactic, but it was also in part true. The ground was glass, and the world was its greenhouse. Nanning swelters in a wave of fieriness that only grows bigger.
In the dark, the track was lit by only by the city stars, lights from apartment buildings towering above. I could barely see the lanes, but could feel the bodies around me. About 50 people - mostly students, some parents - were walking, jump roping, or beating their shoulders. My legs itched (from mosquito bites, but also...) to join them. I dove into the circling crowd.
My aunt was right. The track was a searing pan, and it was hungry for braised humans. I ran very fast - as fast as I have ever run, and passed every single person at least twice. I ran to feel the heat seep into my body, toe to head, and then ran faster to create a wind to cool off. On my 12th lap, I heard the smack sole to rubber - two boys, around my age - catching up. I sped forward, and they followed suit. So we raced.
Twice, my pursuers communicated to each other, "hao kuai!", the second time with emphasis, in some sort of delight surprise. I didn't respond, because I felt the anaerobic effort seizing my stomach, emptying my lungs of oxygen. I was, for the first in a long time, sprinting. In the last hundred meters ("zhui hou yi bai mi!") we ran for our lives. We tied. Or maybe I won. Or maybe I lost. I didn't know and couldn't bring myself to care. The boys slowed to a reasonable pace and I settled for a leisurely, knee buckling walk. My first race, perhaps my only taste of what it would be like to join track. One minute, two connections, on Nanning University's campus.
The next night, another runner and I kept pace with each other. In another couple days, my cousin brought me to Guangxi University's badminton gym. There, I was able to play with two graduate students. They weren't particularly skillful, but they were fast and strong. Communication was hard; I'd often begin shouting something out of enthusiasm and stop mid-sentence when I realized that I didn't know the vocabulary. Regardless, we played for two hours in near silence. Our soaked shirts clung to our skin, butt there was little room for judgment. We led vastly different lives, but for two hours, we were synced to flying birds and blind ambition.
This is what sports are about. Not diplomacy, not victory. Sports are about that moment of connection. A single moment for a single goal; to find people like myself in a country across the world.
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