#4: Starting with “I love you” and ending with “Please eat now.”
"The Love She Most Desires," redeeming the mean girl, and allergy season.
Hi <3 Love you. Happy Sunday.
— E & K
On affection as currency
A parents’ relationship is often a child’s first encounter with love, and mine—like most immigrant children’s—was not the most emblematic. My earliest recollection of conflict is seeing my father’s ashtrays in our kitchen, lingering cigarette smoke in early morning hours, and pieces of divorced papers half-drafted by my mom, as strong as she was, only to be ripped up days later. My sister and I would press our ears against the door and pretend to be asleep in our beds when the noise died down. The next day, or the next week if it was especially bad, my parents would come in, often with reheated plates of food, and make their rounds, first to my sister and then to me, starting with “I love you” and ending with “Please eat now.” They didn’t expect us to say it back. After all, my father always said us fighting was better than letting go, and that it explained why America’s divorce rate was so high—people just let go.
Things did get better towards the end of high school. I’d like to think they realized a healthier way of expressing love, from all the Married for God and Love & Respect: The Love She Most Desires books on our coffee table, but a part of me is still scared that they just gave up on us. After years of treating their I love you’s as an oasis from the ruins of a screaming match, a good night, love you text everyday feels undeserved, anticlimactic, almost silly.
I don’t know what to do with the power to hold someone else’s happiness in your hands and be able to hold it against them. Perhaps when I say affection is currency, I’m referring to the need for everything to be okay for it to mean something. But nowadays, it’s still safer for me to send photos of my food or the gym to my family’s group chat than for me to say I love you, too. Though truly, I do.
On being a mean girl
From The Mean Greens, something I’m currently writing for SPARK:
The truth, as I’ve come to learn it over the years, is that I am not just “bad” and I am not just “mean.” No, I am dangerous. I carry something in me—a darkening, a fallowing, a black springtime blooming—that first fascinates you or incites feelings of, I don’t know, sympathy. Pity. Love. You saw me cutting up my mother’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in second period, scribbling sonnets in the margins of a paperback, or dashing out of Spanish class to have a super-sexy panic attack, and it made you want to fix me.
But what girls like me tend to do with all your gestures of generosity, how we crush up your good intentions and coax the ugly thing inside you to rear its head; that is unfixable. I am not the only sick man here. Competition, paranoia, envy, ego—it’s as much in me as it is in you, baby. I can dredge all kinds of terrible things up to the surface. Like calls to like, and I think your affliction likes mine.
Working on this piece has got me thinking about childhood cruelty. I’m sure some of us really were the angels people make all kids out to be, but I’d wager you have a few childhood idiosyncrasies you’d rather keep hidden. Hey, me too. I tell this joke often, but I used to make girls stand in a line during recess and have them “try out” to be my friend. They’d have to do arbitrary things, like show me their palms or report their opinion on vegetarians, while I made arbitrary marks on a clipboard like some kind of boot camp secretary.
It’s funny (and, Camille comments over my shoulder as I’m writing this, giving Blair), but it was also a mean thing to do. I made girls cry over this stuff. I said baseless, cruel things. Many of them were children of color, struggling with their self-image the same way I was, but I’d chosen to be a bully about our shared weakness—while they’d retained their kindness instead.
We celebrate “mean girls” like Regina George or Blair Waldorf by making “best moments” compilations of their coldest quips or praising their independence and strength. They certainly make for entertaining characters. But I’ve found that real-life mean girls, having been one myself, are much less aspirational. They hurt others, obviously, but are also deeply hurt people themselves. Meanness is almost always an armor protecting the softer, more fragile emotion underneath: anger gives way to fear, and fear gives way to sorrow.
Don’t hate me too much. All that nasty behavior eventually caught up to me—I can definitively say that I’ve since paid for it and learned from it. Still, I have to wonder from time to time if she’s still sitting inside me somewhere, kitty with the claws, chewing up some poor kid on the playground to keep herself from crying. Don’t hate her too much, either, please.
Moments lately
What we’re listening to
Here’s the playlist. (Updates biweekly!)
E: I finally got around to listening to Mitski’s new album. My favorite is Heat Lightning, which reminds me of my days running through summer thunderstorms on an empty golf course. It was as serene as it was doomed for catastrophe. I’ve also included some songs from a playlist Kelly made me, featuring the holy trinity of ethereal pop/dreamcore/woman on the run (my big three). Lately, I’ve been getting back into Chinese pop, which admittedly does get a little corny sometimes—like, the guy I went on a date with last Fall who showed me his Chinese rap songs on Soundcloud—but it makes me feel at home nonetheless.
K: Rina Sawayama’s Love It If We Made It. It just sounds like my brain. I also (hot take maybe) find Matt Healy intolerable as a personality, so this is an iconic save by Rina. Some new finds, courtesy of Sandra, have been included in this week’s playlist, too. She showed me three tracks for a WNRS card prompt (What songs remind me of you?) and I shit you not, they were 3-for-3 in the rawest, most read-me-to-filth way. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, considering she’s co-produced her own KVRX show for three years (💅).
What we’re reading
E: My subscription emails are usually hit or miss. I am sure we’re all guilty of this–glancing over an email, promising ourselves we’re “read it later,” and, of course, we never do (if you’re reading MBF in your inbox right now, much love to you).
As a twice-a-month email opener, I found this week’s “The New Yorker Recommends” to be especially good. Michael Luo’s feature of Pachinko author, Min Jin Lee, reminded me of why I loved feature writing, a dream I let go of after hating the formulaic, repetitive side of reporting I saw in the few journalism classes I took at UT. Profiles are hard to get right because we all have the tendency to compartmentalize people into one or two labels. So, there’s so much to love about the honest nuance in Min Jin Lee’s interview. She talks about the Asian American experience from all angles (affirmative action, generational gap, Christina Yuna Lee’s murder...) and how she reads a page of the Bible every time she sits down to write (as someone who did this before, I’m obsessed).
Another highlight of the week, and possibly my favorite article of all time, is “Don’t write what you know”—why fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity will always transcend the literal truth. Growing up with bookshelves full of biographies, I used to think that if a story wasn’t true, it’s not as good, not as real. Johnston convinced me that it was the opposite.
K: I finished my first read of Frankenstein! It was incredible!!!!! I literally haven’t loved something this much since 2016, when I started watching NBC’s Hannibal. I have no interesting, philosophical reasons for liking Frankenstein. I mean, yes, I could write about free will or the subjectivity of monstrosity (coincidentally things Hannibal also tackles), but Frankenstein was just a really, really exciting read. I thought about it while walking to class. I thought about it in the shower. I was obsessed with it the way we were all obsessed with Harry Potter in 2009.
For writing research, I’ve been reading Deep Secrets by Niobe Way. In the way of contemporary fiction, Amber lent me Homesick For Another World and Eliza mailed me her copy of A Certain Hunger, both of which I’m about a quarter through. There are a few more floating around on my shelf/by my bedside, but these have been my most enjoyable reads within the last month.
What we’re watching
E: Headspace’s 1-minute meditation. Lol. And Leah Field Notes’ “getting productive *without being toxic* ft. the 8 task method.” I am trying not to be at war with myself every morning (i.e., putting 20 things on my to-do list and beating myself up at the end of the day for not doing them all). Condensing my day into 8 tasks, including meals, self-care, and friend meetups, has helped a lot.
K: My sixth grade “space science” playlist has been slowly re-integrating itself into my life. It features such gems as: Travel INSIDE a Black Hole! TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)! Hubble, Journey Through the Orion Nebula! Watching videos about the destruction of our universe or the spectacular birth of stars, and internalizing that these are real objects in real space-time, and it’s all happening right now puts whatever issue I’m experiencing into cosmic perspective.
How we’re living
E: My younger self would not believe that I’m finally able to gain weight. For the first time in 19 years, I don’t feel fragile and breakable. Finding joy in: balancing my diet between candy and salads, going to H-Mart with Kyra, almond butter, and an event-free weekend.
K: Fighting for my life rn (allergy season 😍 🌱 🌸 )
I’ve been taking a lot more pleasure lately in doing my hair and makeup. I get kind of sloppy in the wintertime (one does not need lipliner to read in bed all day), but warmer weather is doing wonders to my skin, my energy, and my patience in the morning. As I say in the caption of every annual summer inauguration photo (a real thing, see: 2021, 2020, 2019), She’s back!
I found the dry shampoo brand to end all dry shampoo brands. Exiting my Severus Snape era! 🤞
Our brilliant friend
A belated happy birthday to Divina, who celebrated her 23rd in New York City with her beau. Stay caliente. We owe you a brunch!