"Capitalism Destroys Us, Movements Heal Us"

"The body had to die,

 so labor power could live"

Silvia Federici 

Caliban and the Witch (141)

I am strongly influenced by Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch." I read that book alongside Maryse Conde's "I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem." Conde's book is also really amazing, and Federici's historical and theoretical ideas give another layer of meaning to the depth that is already there. I hope to do a more detailed write up of these books sometime down the road.

In the meantime, I want to share a talk that Federici recently gave in Philadelphia, entitled, "Capitalism Destroys Us, Movements Heal Us." The organizer has kindly uploaded the audio recording. Check it out. It's super helpful. I especially like the distinction between "sacrifice" and "suffering." The Buddhist instincts in me really like her acknowledgement and acceptance of aspects of life as suffering.

It's making me think alot about the importance of organization in helping maintain sustainable political lives. The 10% we can offer to political work while also studying, working, caring for family, self care, is small when it is alone. In fact, it becomes a small droplet that gets lost in the midst of a gazillion other things. But when many people pool their 10%, 5% - s together, then our joint (small) forces become bigger and more meaningful political activities.

I have been to meetings where people spend the only 2 hours of the week they have to spare, nearly dozing off because the work is not engaging or meaningful. Being present at a political meeting does not mean we are growing and engaging meaningfully. We need to have organizations that channel the only 2 hours of spare time someone can offer, into meaningful, inspiring, challenging work that helps us grow. For that, we need structure and political content.

We need to build that! Or we won't win against the capitalist scum bags that overwhelm us! We need to build that, so we dont burn out! Also so we won't conflate all forms of "sustainability" with self care that takes us AWAY from political work.  I believe it is possible to be sustainable and be engaged politically. I also do think there is need to take time away sometimes, but that cannot be the only way we conceptualize sustainability.

Family...

I feel a little silly that I can't sleep tonight cos I am excited for the first day of school tomorrow :P
I mean, I guess I'm kinda really excited to start (and finish! *fingers crossed*) nursing school. I had been preparing for this since...2007! O-M-G that's right! Pre-reqs!!! I hate you. Pre-reqs that expire? I hate you even more!

Anyway. I fill up my time by getting emo. I recently had a little conversion experience. I don't know how long it will last. I'm hoping it's not a temporary thing.

I realize how much I love my family!
My quirky, weird, atypical, problematic family! (which family isn't?)

My parents are not perfect. My mom has issues of internalized colonialism being from Taiwan and loving, absolutely adoring everything Japanese. Taiwan was a former colony of Japan. Japanese colonialism had different policies for Korea and Taiwan. Where they deprived Korea of any industrialization or technological transfer etc, they fawned over Taiwan and developed it as their lil model colony. It was the bad cop stick vs. the good cop carrot game they played.

My mom's racism is probably the hardest for me to accept about my family.

Growing up in Singapore/Malaysia, and seeing my mom despise all the people around me because they were "Nanyang" Chinese, or Malay, or Indian, was really poisonous. Because being a mixture of all this was how I grew up -- language, food, friends, education. Even with Singapore's racist anti-Malay, anti-Indian, Chinese supremacist education system, we still had an illusion that we were a multiracial society in my childhood years. Hell, I even *look* like a SEAsian Chinese! And it was never good enough. Where in school we learned about Japanese colonialism of SEAsia and all the degenerate racist things the Japanese military did under the name of "pan-asian unity," in my phase of deep nationalism and patroitism, my mom would simply squash all that by hushing me up. Shaking her head furiously and yelling madly, exactly showing how my young heart seeking a history to call home, was shattering her denial of how hers had merely been at another's mercy. I didn't understand why. And I despised her for it.

I have tried rejecting her. It succeeded for some years. But I think I am ready for some fresh memories.

I am ready to remember my mom's voice, not as echoes of memory from my childhood and teenage years. I want to hear her voice again, before it ends.

Somehow, having worked in a nursing home and interacting with all these elderly who have so many contradictions, and feeling this need to distinguish between their degenerate ideology and their humanity, because I need to reclaim parts of my own humanity, is, strangely, doing something to me in a deeper way.

I know women and many oppressed people have resisted historically by killing their oppressors. I will not condemn the right to self-defense, and related to that, the rage that emerges from years of pent-up oppression. But I guess I wanna say, that this form of resistance, as legitimate as they often are, is dehumanizing to us all, even if at times necessary. This system dehumanizes all of us, and so I am not positing an ideal humanity that is being disrupted by acts of violent self defense. It's not that. It's a deeper thing, a possibly deeper, tragic thing. Something I feel unqualified to talk about because I havent been in that position yet.

Anyway, I suddenly really wanna genuinely care for my parents. My mom who has lost her kidneys to a money-grubbing capitalist medical system. My dad, who has not found what he really wants and has illusions of grandeur, of believing that persistence and inspiration alone can help transform his village high school credentials into a Einstein/John Nash genius at age 66. Maybe so, most likely not. Regardless, I love them.
I never want them in a nursing home.

"Poetry" - A film about Alzheimers, Poetry, and Gender

I don't see a lot of films where elderly women are the center of the stories. "Poetry" by Lee Chang Hoon, is one of the few films that beautifully, sensitively, gently accomplish this. This film is about a woman who has Alzheimers, whose realization of the illness (and impending death) shapes the way she interacts with the world, shapes the way she acutely understands her gendered experiences and her empathy with other women (particularly a young deceased rape victim and her mother), but who does so in a very gentle and yet passionate and strong manner. She seeks poetry as a defined, tangible "poetic aspiration," and yet doesnt realize that as she wanders through the last leg of her life, she is experiencing and speaking poetry at every turn.

I like this film in part because the main character, Yang Mija, is seeking words at the same time that her body is losing them. Yet her body transcends language, and her physical presence in the world, her accidental encounters and experiences with other people in her town, embody what poetry is. In the end, the poetry she writes transcends language and time and body -- she and the deceased girl become one in the reciting. It is this merger of time and space that is the essence of poetry, at death. The gendered experiences of patriarchy in the film are subtle, but very present. Mija is a single grandmother, who brings up her daughter's child, Wook. Her daughter had left the town to find work after her divorce, in Busan. It is not a coincidence, that Busan is the 2nd largest city in South Korea, and Mija's daughter's move seems to be a larger picture of urban migration. Mija meets with the fathers of Wook's friends who are discussing how to cover up their childrens' involvement in the months-long rape of the recently deceased girl. Mija is the only woman present, in shock upon hearing the news, but also from the men's callous attitudes about the girl's death. She finds out later, to her surprise, how widespread this callousness is, both in her own grandson, as well as in the man for whom she cares for as part of her maid-job.

Anyway, watch this film. It's on Netflix! Here's the poem at the end of the film. It's beautiful, so it's here, but if you hate spoilers, don't scroll down below the trailer:)



Agnes' Song
How is it over there?
How lonely is it?
Is it still glowing red at sunset?
Are the birds still singing on
The way to the forest?
Can you receive the letter
I dared not send?
Can I convey the confession
I dared not make?
Will time pass and roses fade?
Now it’s time to say goodbye
Like the wind that lingers
And then goes, just like shadows.
To promises that never came,
To the love sealed till the end,
To the grass kissing my weary ankles,
And to the tiny footsteps following me,
It’s time to say goodbye.

Continued here

我不再潇洒了！：）

我爸说我这次回家，变得比较消沉，跟过去比起来，是比较“不潇洒” 了：）
挺搞笑的。我说“成熟”，“稳定”，他说“没威风”。。。

我想这过去一年所经历的哀愁，情绪的极端上下，锻炼出来的我，毕竟有些沉重。这也是岁月与人生经验所创造的，是无可避开的。虽然多年不见，父亲仍能观察到我的变化，也是挺不错的。

说起“潇洒”， 也让我想起叶倩文的 《潇洒走一会》。这首歌是那么地表征了九时年代的风各。我觉得父亲过去也非常喜欢这首歌。

video是有点过时。。。：）
  *warning: cheesy 90s Chinese video* :)

Hot pot goodness

I am not a photo person...so here's something jacked from the internet.

This past visit home, I got to celebrate the Mid Autumn Festival. This was the first time in 10 years that I was able to celebrate this festival with my family. It meant a lot to me to be enjoying hot pot with my brother, my new sister-in-law, her parents, and of course, my parents. Mooncakes, shrimps, noodles, fish, vegetables...wow. It was a feast. Everything is round on the table, the hot pot itself, the table, the seating arrangements, and the people! Round and full with this yummy food!

My mum gave me the hot pot stove, to bring back here to Seatown, and I put it right to use! I had a lovely Mid Autumn Festival Round 2! with cherished people in my life. Shopping, preparing and eating with friends was a labor of love and made me so happy and light headed -- with barely no alcohol!!

Also wanted to share a piece I wrote a long time ago now. It's about my life, my parents, and this myth that's been associated with this festival. Those were some angsty days.

Mooncake Festival

Tonight is the Moon cake festival. The bright full moon sat comfortably like an egg yolk, beaming in the cool darkness of night. There, legend has it that Chang-er sits with her rabbit after she took the elixir of immortality four thousand years ago, to prevent her evil husband, Hou Yi, from ruling eternally over all heaven and earth. Four thousand years ago, Hou Yi was a good man who shot down nine out of ten suns to save heaven and earth from being scorched by the blasting heat of the ten suns combined. Chang-er watched as power and time tweaked him beyond recognition. Four thousand years ago, Chang-er exchanged brimming material luxury for eternal solitude to save heaven and earth from being ruled by one evil man, her husband, Hou Yi. She is so beautiful like a glowing gem hanging in the sky. Yet she is so alone in the vast vacuum of the soundless universe. What were the thoughts that ran through Chang-er's mind when she popped the elixir of immortality into her mouth? Was she nervous, frantically popping the pill in her mouth, in fear of Hou Yi's sudden arrival into her room? Did she in her frenzy, grab the nearest thing next to her when swallowing the globular object and did it happen to be the rabbit? Was she nervous and afraid was she not sure what would happen next was she suddenly a moon first and then flew up to the sky or did she first fly up and then become a moon? Was she as bright from the beginning and how did she feel about the choice she made? Could she have regretted and it was too late to regret because there was no choice but to go through with her choice? And how much choice was there, really, if the stakes for not doing it, were so high? He could have turned on her and killed her too because he was so evil… Did he beat her, was she abused, and any escape would have been a good reason to get away from the man who once was kind to her? Did she just happen to save heaven and earth? Or did she really intend to give up all to save heaven and earth? When Papa sat by me and Nin's bed on those nights when he was not traveling to those far away countries, I relished the stories he would tell. Running out of new bedtime stories, he repeated them one after another. There would be the story of Chang-er, and then sometimes there would be the story of Momo Taro, the little peach boy who grew up so quickly that his elderly foster parents couldn't believe it for all that their old eyes were worth. When narrating these stories, Papa's eyes danced with the fiery heat of the nine suns that Hou Yi had shot down, his voice suddenly trembling, suddenly angry with the angst and hatred of the villagers who felt betrayed by Hou Yi's deception. The five-syllable "Elixir of Immortality" that he would utter, was like a consonant-cluttered conundrum with a pronunciation that my early years could only recognize but not repeat, with a mysterious significance I could only imagine but not empathize. What could be so exciting about staying young and juvenile, when age and maturity was all that my young body was craving? Chang-er was a symbol of strength and resilience as I sometimes filled my little bolster with clothing to escape from home because the noise was too much and Nin was too annoying and I didn't think Mama and Papa loved me because she loved her business more and he loved the far-away countries more. Especially those nights when the sounds of vases and plates breaking, and Mama's cries mixed in with all that were a little too much cacophony for comprehension. Knelt knees with caps cutting coarse ground, salt-stung eyeballs staring into far away distance, I wanted to grow old instantaneously so I could be big and strong to protect Mama. Those nights I would be Chang-er, who would leave home and fly to the streets and seek out an adventure by venturing into the city where excitement and adventure burst through the colorful sidewalks onto the roaring asphalt roads… I would say bye bye to Papa…to Mama…to Nin… We will meet in our next life and thank you very much for the care that you have bestowed unto me while I have lived and sometime somewhere I will express my gratitude and repay your kindness…. How did Chang-er feel when she flew to the moon? Did she feel like Papa did when he left home to find work as a construction worker in the jungles of Brunei at age 18? Perhaps with that tinge of desperation that inevitably transforms itself into anticipation and excitement because one cannot live in downtrodden conditions without venturing onto new grounds? Or, did she feel like Mama did when she scrubbed toilets of the ritzy and the glamorous and felt her dreams disappear into the sewage of waste water and poop? I mean, did Chang-er feel for a moment that the moon could potentially be a very wet and dirty place where she could easily slide and slip into potholes and crevices if she just was just careless for a moment? Or, did she feel like me? Like me, when I attempted to sneak out of the house in the wee hours of the night with my clothes-filled, toothbrush and toothpaste-packed, walk-man and cassette tape equipped, ramen noodles-stuffed bolster? In other words, was she prepared for the unknown like I was when trying to launch an escape into the unknown streets of a scary and suspicious night? Tonight, Chang-er lives again as I share moon-cakes whilst drinking fragrant jasmine tea on a warm night. Tonight, the fog shades the bright moon glow into a cloudy orange. Her distance made painfully clear as the mist carelessly hides her on the night we pay tribute to her sacrifice. Chang-er, how does it feel like to watch us live our lives? Do you wish you had never left? Do you ever regret your decision and do thoughts of the people you saved from Hou Yi's terror help you get through your occasional loneliness? Tonight, I am 21 hours and 10 000 miles away from family. Sometimes, vestiges of home float slickly above new surroundings, like oil that never mixes with water. Moments of loneliness tickle memory into an unlived utopia, knowingly deceiving yet comfortably nostalgic.

A new phase

It's been a minute since I wrote in here. Summer felt like forever, and within that forever, it had its share of highs and lows. I am back here now, in pretty, cold, wet Seattle. Only when I left did I realize how much I like living here, how much I like having a home with loved ones and community.

Transitions! This year has had so many of those funky moments. I am bad at transitions, and have to brace myself for them. For now, the biggest transition in my life is no longer being a CNA (though I should apply for an on-call position), and now *finally* being a nursing student.

A little nervewrecking and scary, especially after our 8 hour-long orientation yesterday where basically we were told it's either STUDY and CLINICALS, or DIE.

It's not really a choice for me. I have to power through these 2 years. Be a good student and do well in my clinicals and practical. My family needs me to do this, get the fuck out and have a stable paycheck that I can support them with, and oh, pay back my loans with.

Welcome to this new period.

浪子回头，金不换

所谓“浪子回头，金不换，”我这次去探亲回来，真觉得自己成熟了一点。
母亲身体虚弱，但父母两仍然看起来是蛮开心的。也许是因为哥哥结婚，我回来看他们的原因。。。
家是那么的复杂，家人之间有那么多的历史。最后仍然是需要以爱心和关怀去对待。我真希望自己能够承担这个责任与状态。

我现在较深地了解与接受，自己真是存在在两个不同的世界，不同的国家的人。而两地都是家，都有我的历史。我的各人历史，家人的历史，与世界社会与政治，在这过去五十年来的变化，是撤不开的。

what nourishes us, cannot be quantified.

我爱我的家庭，我那奇怪，非传统，而非常独特的家庭。

哥哥前天说新加坡是他的家。
我回应，但这个国家可不要你。你为什么觉得他是家？
他回答，我哪有选择。除了这地方以外，我还有哪儿能叫“家”的地方？

忽然想念陳潔儀在新加坡国庆日唱的《家》