September in Review
The old woman out.
青い玉 (2010) by Hyo-j
status: driving, finally.
E: today is october 2nd, life is passing by, and i haven’t written much. post grad so far is like a summer that never ends, heat in the middle of fall. i recently spent a month in china, where all i noticed how much i’ve changed. i used to question my parents for making us move across the world, and i spent the better part of my days in america pining after my memories of an old country. the red of chinese new year, the closeness of our extended family, the distance in mine, how this unfamiliar landscape made us unfamiliar to each other. i noticed this much the last time i was here, at fifteen.
now that i’m 21, and i’m inching towards the age my parents first met, i try to shed off childish assumptions. this time, i’m retracing the decisions that made my parents uproot our family, through the farming village my mother grew up in, the first apartment they bought when they had just gotten married, the baby diary they wrote in to document my growth. i stumbled upon an entry, dated a few months after i was born. my mother’s hasty handwriting spoke of an argument with my father and how much she loved me. as i read it aloud in hesitant mandarin, she quickly snatched the diary away, in embarrassment perhaps, but the damage was done: i started feeling an inexplicable sadness for a time that occurred before i could form a memory, a time she wrote honestly about her life, the way i’m writing to you now.
once i returned to the US, i started learning to drive, a quintessential american rite of passage i avoided for years. on these wide open highways, i missed the proximity of china, how people ride motorcycles in thunderstorms—he’s holding an umbrella to the left, blocking the pour, a toddler is squatting in front, and a woman has her arms around his waist, her head resting on his back. passing cars on the left miss them by a few feet. to us, this type of driving is dangerous, unfathomable, but it’s how they live, where i came from.
my driving instructor tells me to switch lanes, and i’m better at driving than i thought i’d be. it’s a silly sign, among many, that i’m becoming more ‘american,’ but i’m remembering everything that led to this moment, all the love and sacrifice, and i know better than to resist.
status: aging, reluctantly.
K: can i make a crummy confession? i haven’t been able to stop noticing people’s forehead wrinkles as of late, likely because i realized earlier this month that i myself have them. they are very faint, my friends reassure me, practically invisible! but i have them. i cried a great deal over this discovery, embarrassingly enough, to both my girlfriend over facetime (who found this distressing) and my roommate (who found this funny) while we were en route to the san francisco botanical garden. “you are literally delusional,” rishi said, which in the language of girls means something like, you have unfortunately pinpointed something very real. your day is going to be ruined if i don’t lie to you right now. she handed me a kid’s carton of yeo’s soy milk and patted my arm.
i want to face the prospect of aging calmly and elegantly, but i must admit that getting older depresses me. my whole life, youth has felt slippery in my hands, hard to grasp: i’ve borne the same high-cheeked, thin-nosed face since i was a kid; the same stark black hair and widow’s peak; the same intolerable sophist’s cadence that had office aides in high school mistaking me for a teacher. some joviality comes through in my heart-shaped face, my wide grin…but i have for the most part always felt—and looked—like the old woman out. now, freshly stripped of my sixteen-year (!) identity as a student, it seems i’ve lost another line of defense against impending maturity. i feel a sort of mixed anguish about getting older: my vanity suffers, but so too does my general sense of self-hopefulness.
“i’m still reeling from the loss of that uplifting feeling of possibility so endemic to schooling, particularly college,” i wrote in my journal a few weeks ago. “it seems the most telling sign of adulthood is when you no longer feel defined by what you could be, but rather by what you are.” it was easier, i find, to dream of being a full-grown woman from the lofty and well-guarded tower of childhood. now that i’ve hit the ground, free to do as i please and liberated from practically every communal landmark of achievement or prestige, i find myself overcome with fears of stagnancy, ugliness, disappointed potential, undesirability, and powerlessness. for me, these things are apparently all intertwined.
i ended up feeling much better at the garden, where rishi and i found a patch of grass to sit and eat fruit. surrounded by geese droppings, the happy romping sounds of big dogs, and an abundance of blue lily blossoms, i felt a pang of admiration for northern california that grows more familiar with every passing day i spend here. it’s no unextraordinary or easy thing to love a place and choose it—to harness all your material powers in order to make choosing it happen. young creatures dream of lovely things, but i suppose it’s the old ones who undertake the lonely, convoluted, and contradictory ordeal of actualizing them.
new city girls, bento boxes on high-speed trains, voice memos, wired earphones, the color lilac, fruit tea, arched dim-lit lamps, gingham fabric, chilly nights, snowskin mooncakes.
E: a notable recent read was qian julie wang’s beautiful country. it’s a harrowing memoir about growing up undocumented and poor as an immigrant child in new york city. in a standard rags-to-riches plotline, she writes as a successful yale law graduate and former biglaw associate. i have mixed feelings about this book. on one hand, i’m happy about its call to attention to immigration issues (it made it to obama’s list of favorite books of 2021.) on the other hand, i’m wary of people’s tendency to treat books like these as a sole reminder of their privilege. a NYT critic said finishing the book made her “pick up [her] passport and inhale the scent of its pages.” a reviewer on goodreads said this book is “perfect” if you want to feel “EXTRA grateful” for what you have…
on a sentence level, some of her writing in beautiful country were hard-hitting. on her father: “he loved america too much, maybe more than he loved us.” on summer in new york: “the brooklyn summer was the tiger mother i never had.” on her mother: “ma ma had refused to teach me to cook. cooking well was a curse for women, she said, because it meant you would have to do it every day for the rest of your life.”
other parts fell flat. i think it’s because the author tried to give us an overly wide overview of her years from second grade to middle school. plot started off slow and meandering. i also hoped for a richer childhood perspective, one that isn’t tainted by her maturity and hindsight as an adult.
for ‘punchier’ prose throughout, i recommend jenny zhang’s short story collection, sour heart, that is told from the rich pov of young immigrant girls in new york (my favorite is we love you crispina).
currently reading: jessica au’s cold enough for snow, gustave flaubert’s madame bovary and bo seo’s good arguments
picking up next: sylvia plath’s the bell jar
E: kai-lin, how do you cultivate stillness in your life?
K: whenever i feel dizzy with change, i put down familiar things in unfamiliar places. i order the same drink in a new bar, read the same novel in a new park, or wear the same dress to a party full of new people. my shabby little shoebox of well-worn rituals keep me anchored to myself when everything else—my friends, my career, my apartment furniture—is adrift. naturally, there was a lot of talk among friends this summer about blank slates and starting over; the allure of reinvention angles sharply back into our lives like a visiting star each time we approach a steep drop-off into the unknown, inducing us to let go of the past for fear of it holding us back. i just try to remind myself that just because everything is changing doesn’t mean i have to change, too.
K: ebie, how do i make conversation with strangers?
E: treat them as your bff! whether the scenario is someone you think is cool, or someone at an awkward networking event, they are the same. here are my foolproof ways to make conversation with strangers:
make initial contact. when in doubt, compliment them on something, ask for help on directions, coffee orders, literally anything as long as you’re genuinely interested in the answer.
linger on cliche questions no longer than a minute (name, where are you from, how long have you been in the city, etc.). these are crutches, and we want to move into friend territory…
reveal a vulnerable detail about yourself, like something that happened to you recently or a strong feeling (excitement, anxiety, fear, passion) you have about something. bonus if you can relate it to something they’ve revealed about themselves. common ground here is more meaningful than in step #2. do it tactifully, though, leave the we’re not really strangers questions for the third meeting.
if step #3 leads to a long conversation, yay! if it’s rolling to a stop, let it be. sometimes things don’t click, and that’s okay. your success rate will increase the more people you talk to. leave it to fate and being at the right place at the right time. know that this is what a good connection feels like — laughter and a fuzzy feeling like you’ve known each other forever. from an ada limon poem: i remember we broke into laughter when we saw each other. what was between us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed over. it came out fully formed, ready to run.
this budget-friendly levoit 300 air purifier, which has been a godsend for filtering dust, pet dander, and odors in kai-lin’s new apartment.
china’s version of instagram — xiaohongshu — that is fun to scroll through (featuring smart beauty tips and a dose of chinese culture that you don’t get in the west)
these 100% italian cotton white boxer shorts from hommegirls. the accompaniment editorial digest is also worth checking out.
al,thing [얼띵] carries an adorable collection of tableware and home goods. (its apparel and accessories collections are also super cute!)
ssense’s paris georgia catalogue of maxi dresses. kai-lin especially loves the black & white marlo and off-white talia.
Thanks for reading! Part collaborative writing experiment and part guilty-pleasure digital archive, My Brilliant Friend delivers thoughtful weekly dialogues on love, friendship, and culture to your inbox. You can subscribe below to receive new letters from us directly or visit us at mybrilliantfriend.substack.com.
My Brilliant Friend is co-written by Ebie Bao and Kai-Lin Wei.
Feels like September in your words. Love the collaborative writing ❣️