Rambling to Rectify?

I’ve got this inordinate distaste for adultery.

That’s probably not unusual. The God of Abraham agrees with me here, and He is— as the Texas Board of Education will have me believe— the great codifier of our star-spangled moral code. (This despite all those lawmakers who forsake their marriages with charming and well-coiffed wives for a few hours with a prostitute smelling of Chanel No. 5.) Not that I count myself among the People of the Book. I object to adultery because I’ve got this aesthetic preference for proper Confucian families, which parallel in their adorable orderliness the master’s proper well-run state. And also because I fangirl King Arthur, partially out of pity. The man tries to found a New Order based on fair rule and social justice, but then his wife has to sleep with his biffle? Lancelot, it’s not that hard to not fornicate with your liege-lord’s consort. Just don’t do it.

I don’t understand adulterers. From where I’m sitting, it’s always easier to cleave to the status quo; any deviation from that norm just makes things harder than they have to be. Seriously, Sir Knight, why expend all that energy cuckolding your king? Allocate it towards acts of gallantry or something— that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

I promise I’m not actually a conservative moralist. Those last three paragraphs of inane reactionary rambling were designed to illustrate one thing (in the most obfuscatory way possible, because that’s how I roll). Writing is hard. Because it’s not my status quo. I guess I’ll have to keep blogging until it becomes so or something. Then I’ll no longer feel like a fidgety adulteress, allocating unnecessary time away from mindless Facebook procrastination and readings of sketchily translated motherlandic philosophy. Okay, I think that metaphor just broke down.

I remember when writing used to help me put my thoughts in order. I’d sit for a little while spellbound by the keyboard rattle of structure and narrative and (sometimes) poetry emerging from the tangle of sensations in my head. It was nice, like unsnarling a knotted skein of thread. I keep meaning to try to recover that feeling. Here goes?

My parents and I have this running joke, stemming from their occasional anxieties over whether immigration was the right decision for our family. “Well, think about it,” I say, whenever this comes up. “If you’d stayed in China, I’d be thinner and better at math!” And they’d laugh, remembering the charcoal skies of Beijing, the mind-numbing hell of the gaokao, all those tacky “opportunity” slogans Immigration Services like to put on their eagle posters, because they’re true.

I say my canned response is a joke, funny because it’s true but largely inconsequential. But these are, after all, the two respects in which I’ve failed. The two ways I’m subverting the model minority stereotype— contributing so much to the advancement of the APA community just by being quantitatively challenged and fat! I say that last bit largely without bitterness— I mean, I am less bitter than I sound. Anyway, I guess I make up for it in other ways. I drink my tea unadulterated by sugar, I can quote from the Analects, and I’m handy with a mouse and filters.

For the most part, I can bury these insecurities under projects of various kinds— I’d rather be productive than pretty, which is convenient, productivity being mostly within my reach. But when I’m in China, I can’t help but feel shamefully out of place. I’m remembering again how I walked through Beijing with my breath held taut, trying to take up as little space as possible. Which was hard, what with my stout oafish limbs and the crude voluminous outline of my hips, in comparison to the gazelle girls who moved past me with easy grace. When everyone looks like me in other ways— the dark eyes with epicanthic folds, the inky hair— the contrast becomes biting. So I'm realizing that I’m a teenager after all, for a little while longer, with all the irritating shallowness and insecurity that implies. Hopefully I can keep that tempered. I don't do angst; it's so indecorous.

Part of this stems from this question I sometimes turn over in my mind, pointlessly, like I’m toying with a bauble— would I rather by invisible or beautiful? The former entails greater freedom and would be easier, for me at least, to achieve. But the latter implies to me a tantalizing degree of control over both the self and the environment, and an artistic process— converting persona into objet d’art. Anyway, to frame that question in the most narrow and literalistic way possible— in China I can be neither. I’m just preparing myself to feel the resulting downtick again this summer.

Nostos for Return

In three weeks I’ll leave for the motherland on a Yale-funded flight, but I thought I’d start blogging now. Something to ease myself into this whole writing-with-regularity thing, before I fall under nigh-contractual obligation to report weekly from the province of my birth. Here I should insert some wistful encomium to Heilongjiang— the Black Dragon River, cold Amur, under whose frothing and watercrested shadow I guess I toddled my first steps. "Frothing and watercrested shadow"-- yeah, I think that's fauxetic enough. Maybe I should angst over how I don’t remember anything— just a soft, sooty impression of dark and narrow buildings, which sheltered me for the first three years of my life. For all the other Yalies going to CET Harbin, the trip to Dongbei—the far Northeast— will be a novelty. But me— I guess I'll be coming home.

That’s why I’m so glad Light encourages blogging. I mean, I’m the flakiest diarist ever. I’ve got a closet full of half-filled journals, covered with the glitter of elementary school, the baroque florals of middle school, the slick faux leather of high school. I could see my handwriting evolving but never my (lack of) perseverance, always too scared of the blank page’s white insistence. But maybe this will be okay. Half of blogging is photoblogging, and I live with my Canon Powershot strapped to my wrist, compulsively clicking at every banal beatitude and dust-mote tragedy I encounter, because I hate to be hostage to my own memory.

I don’t remember things very clearly— I’ve forgotten Harbin. I went back one summer with my parents, three years ago. We sipped kvass, fermented bread drink, as we wound between bakers’ stalls in the morning market, and I stared through the lens of my camera at the onion-domed Church of St. Sophia. I learned to talk a little bit like a Dongbeiren, a real Northeasterner, but Harbin itself lingered on in my weakish memory as nothing more than dreamy Russophile haze. It’s all cobble-stoned streets, with signs subtitled in Cyrillic.

I don’t want to forget this time. Writing weekly will help me keep a record, as long as I can stick with it this time. I hope this blog doesn’t become another powder blue notebook shoved under my faded summer dresses, filled with just five pages of impatient script.