K: happy wednesday and happy holidays! to celebrate the fast-approaching new year, here’s a special edition of this week’s 888 life updates. we’ve rounded up our best and most memorable moments in the last 12 months.
E: so many things happened this year, but launching my brilliant friend with you guys was my favorite. thank you so much for sticking with us. hope you are living well, resting, and reflecting. see you in 2023. :)
💗 playlist: best of 2022
Where we’ve been
E: when i finally got my green card last december, i wrote “new york to hong kong” in my journal. no plan on how to get there, but just that i must. i thought this would be year i stop being scared. say yes to everything. question everything. see everything. still reeling from heartbreak, i wanted my life to be unrecognizable. i would shed off old bits of sadness, place them in new homes. new york, hong kong, bali, bangkok. waterfronts, cafes, islands, hotels.
i’d say i grew the most in new york. i lived in the city for the summer against my parents’ approval and, i guess, logic. it was undoubtedly one of my best decisions. i realize the most important thing about a place is what you’re willing to sacrifice for it. people would often tell you, in a tone of disillusionment, the rent is shitty, the views are cliche, the dating is humiliating. all that’s true. i was fighting for my life, misplaced keys on the 1 train and sweated my ass off in a small ac-less apartment, but i chose to do it there. you look around and there are people choosing to do it there with you, too. i liked this newfound autonomy of choice and, as trite as it sounds, a feeling that you’re part of the world, with all its intensity and passion and danger. i let myself be swept by dreamlike moments - running along the hudson at sunset, playing 34 questions to fall in love with KL, working and lunching and yoga-ing at bryant park, touring the michael kors showrooms - and at the turn of fall, didn’t ‘find myself’ but felt sure that i will return, older, wiser, more prepared. i wasn’t too sad when i left. you don’t know what a city means to you until you see its skyline shrinking from the plane window. when you’re inside a summer, everything is right at your face, demanding your attention. but distance, the tangle of longing and homecoming, like a bitter winter walk on canal street to reunite with your middle school best friends at joe’s dumplings, that’s where the heart is.
fall came my study abroad in hong kong. the city is a two-hour drive away from Foshan, my birth city, real home, so i thought i might be able to return to some childlike fantasy where i followed my grandma around her neighborhood park and my mom bargains on the street for cheap stationery. instead, i was ushered at large into a young, modern landscape with financial skyscrapers and ferry-driven waterfronts that rivaled that of, well, new york. naive as i was, corners of old hong kong still peeked through its crevices, on hanging clotheslines and colorful basketball courts and open-air restaurants with thin plastic as table cloths. i found my way crippled with broken cantonese, which often brought me to places catered only to the west. by the end of it, newness became tiring and inundated with homesickness. i moved up my flight date, eager to return to houston, where christmas decorations felt familiar and grounding, not plastered on huge malls with sparkling neon lights or in crowded rooftop bars surveilled by HK police, and i could be a kid again for the holidays.
from now until jan. 1st, i’m laying in my parents’ windowless study room planning out my notion, sitting still for the first time in a while. spring brings more change: my last semester with KL before we move off to opposite ends of the country, a short story collection, and trips to the coast. i had a good year!!
spring-summer: san francisco, chicago, new york.
K: this summer was the first in many years where i had no obligations tying me down to one place. thanks to two remote-option internships, some savings, and a network of talented and generous friends, i was able to fly from coast to coast, staying with friends who were interning or had already graduated and moved. i had a grand time in these beautiful american cities: hosting parties, drinking grey goose martinis, sitting on shaded park benches in central park or along glittering pacific waterfronts—all while knowing i was living in the play-pretend la la land of someone trying to buy herself time before real life came knocking.
earlier this spring, i flubbed an incredible opportunity to intern with a major brand consultancy in manhattan. i couldn’t figure out what i did wrong—the answer seemed to oscillate every other moment from “nothing” to “everything.” and though i was accepted to a fellowship with another great offer attached, i couldn’t shake off this sense of having gone astray, as if i’d not only missed a mere internship opportunity, but some essential signage pointing me down the path to happiness, which i figured would look something like getting a return offer from a fancy ad agency, moving to new york with eb right after college, wearing expensive long coats on the subway, being generally chic and worldly, etc.
i was happy to be hanging out with my friends all summer, but i was also starting to question a lot of things about myself, my career, and whether i’d accurately predicted what would make me happy. the more i moved in advertising spaces, the less certain i felt about it being the right industry for me. the more cities i visited, the fewer reasons i saw to immediately move to new york next fall. most terrifying of all was the fact that i could feel myself changing: losing parts of me that once constituted the bedrock of my identity, crowding out dreams i’d been married to since 10 years old, and coming into adulthood with a newfound pragmatism that felt (and still feels) like the worst kind of self-betrayal.
fall-winter: athens, the peloponnese, istanbul.
an old spark colleague and our friend karen published a newsletter in october about moving to new york in the fall. i remember thinking with some astonishment as i read it, “oh! i understand!” she compared the autumn wind to paper: “good, thick, white as drywall paper.” maybe it was because i missed eb, but i found myself more attuned this year to the romance of autumn than ever before. there were the trees, which suddenly seemed so alive, and the sun, which i needed to feel on my face at least three times a day to keep myself going. “a slice and a dab and it pours through avenues like a great whisper,” karen wrote. about the wind, yes, and also sadness.
just as i’d feared, i had come back from new york and changed my mind about virtually everything. my childhood dreams were falling away. my pictures showed a girl i didn’t entirely recognize. my days were busy but unsatisfying, my nights agonizingly quiet. i felt like a dying star. as it happens, redirection is rarely easy or fun: not only does the future suddenly become dangerous, but the past exiles you as if you were a foreigner—because in some ways, you are. “nowhere to stand now but in the raw red room of the present,” i wrote. most of this fall was spent wrestling with myself inside that room.
i’m writing this letter to you in bits and pieces: some on the balcony of my hotel overlooking athens, some outside the tomb of suleiman, and others still on the windy upper deck of a ship slicing through the bosporus strait. i’ve had a few months to collect myself and adjust to the big changes coming my way next year: graduation, a new job in a new industry, moving across the country, and potentially living in beijing for a few months—but for once, at the year’s end, i’m not thinking about all of that. instead, i’m thinking about how nice it’ll be to see my cat again, what sorts of new winter teas i’ll try at my favorite shop in east austin, and where eb and i should go for drinks and dinner next week—when, after 2.5 years, we’ll finally be roommates again.
thanks for reading! this is part 1 of 2 of our year in review. part 2 will be up tomorrow at 9 am cst. let us know in the comments how you spent 2022 and what you’d like to see from my brilliant friend in the new year.