dream

I had a dream that my friends and I all went to rob a bank together. To do so we had this elaborate heist plan that included travelling across a sort of theme park wonderland. Everything was going to plan but in one of the stages, which involved sitting on a conveyer belt-type thing that zig-zagged across a river, I was balancing my glass water bottle and the bottle part fell out of the holster and into the river. I panicked. I needed that water bottle. I had to get it back. So I tried to return to the spot where it had fallen but I was going against the direction of the conveyer belt so it was futile. Finally I jumped into the water and used my phone flashlight to find it again, then hopped back on. But I had lost us precious time. By the time we arrived at the bank vault, we were in fact only milliseconds ahead of another group that also wanted to steal from it. The gate fell down in front of the vault and we couldn't make it in; instead we randomly diverged to a corridor on the left to run away from the imminent police. That corridor was long, dark, and winding, and we finally emerged in a museum exhibit about astronauts. My female friend (who exactly it was, I no longer remember) and I were the only ones left. I don't know what happened to the others. We were both dressed in astronaut suits because, by the way, the whole heist sequence was set in the future. As I passed by an information board about the first man in space I saw my reflection. I had the suit on but not the helmet. My hair was in a bun. Everyone was staring at us as if we'd walked out of the pictures. Then I realised the museum was in Chinese. "Where are we?" my friend asked. I pulled out Google Maps and zoomed out and out and out. We were in Taiyuan. Suddenly I was excited. "This is where I'm from!" I said. "This is my hometown!" Beijing wasn't far, and from there we could fly home.

thoughts on fiction

I often eat lunch at the Social Science Library café because you can get a hot meal there for £4 or less. I sit alone on one of the long tables and eat while reading New Yorker stuff on my phone. A couple of weeks ago I was scrolling through Fiction and read this piece called Writing Teacher by John Edgar Wideman. It's about a black professor of fiction at a university who has a white student writing a short story about the struggles of a single black mother. It was pretty boring, to be honest, and I kind of started skimming. But one aspect of this otherwise uninteresting story was the way the main character thinks about fiction –– as if it's alive and has its own agency, or a knot that you have to untangle.

My student’s story stuck like most people’s because there’s no place for it to go. Except to explore the sadness of wanting things not to be the way they indisputably are. A story begins with an author’s desire to write it. Starts with a person the author happens to be.

[...]

So let’s look closer. Together, Teresa. I believe we both care. Look right here, page 3, where your young woman’s infuriated by a smug, smart-ass emergency-room clerk who assumes that the female in front of him, because she is young and colored, won’t own health insurance to pay a doctor to sew up a bloody gash in her daughter’s head. Why not have your young woman kill him and turn your story into that story. 

Show not tell. Don’t bother telling me or telling a young woman you are on her side and wish to help. She doesn’t need that kind of help. She’s quite as capable as you are of dealing with an obnoxious clerk. Your story depicts her as stuck much deeper. She needs more than words, your story says. So maybe chopping off the clerk’s head a way out. A way out of the story and out of yourself, too. Risk letting her do what you would never do. Then maybe the young woman will speak for herself, not you. Speak with action not words. Break free, break bad outside the story’s boundaries.

This was really interesting to me. It kind of shows that, to really write fiction, you can't just make something up and plan out the plot, the character development. You can't write a neat little flowchart like an an essay. To really make your story alive, you can only write and see where the fiction takes you. You're in dialogue with your character. Your story has to really change them––there has to be a reason to tell it.

Based on this, I guess this main character would write fiction by creating a character, a truly real person, and then putting them in a situation. Just the initial situation. Then write your way out of it.

That's really fascinating to me because I'm a big planner, obviously, I love to plan my life and make sure I always know what direction I'm going in. Like I've described before, I used to outline the plots of my stories. But something I worried about was that my characters and plots were all just cardboard: existing on a superficial level, doing things but with no real soul or personality. I wondered how I could develop three-dimensional characters.

My biggest issue was trying to make my work deep: putting in different themes and motifs so that people analysing my work in the future will write essay upon essay about me. That's always what I've wanted with my writing, even this blog, which I started because I was reading Yiyun Li's To Speak is to Blunder and she mentioned reading Katherine Mansfield's diaries and I was like, "I want a proper diary so that people in the future can use it as aids to write my biography/analyse my work. So that when I'm dead my publisher will capitalise on it by editing my entries into a neat little book and print it in hardcover." Anyway, so I tried to write based on feeling. I would pick a theme, like "loneliness" or "alienation" or "disconnection from reality" or "fear of the future" –– all things I feel acutely –– and try to run with it, but nothing ever really came of it. But wasn't the point of fiction to write the truth?? Here I was with my emotional truths and I had zero inspiration, could think of no story other than a girl sitting on a swing with her head leaning against the chain.

But fiction should be more organic. You need to let it breathe. Some of my favorite work has been to just write and then figure out what it's about. I played around with words and wrote a poem about physicality. I messed around in Chinese and wrote a poem about grief. I started to describe the taste of watermelon and ended up with a piece about diaspora. (WOW I just checked and not to brag but it has the most views out of all the pieces in Industry's Food issue.... although half of those were probably just me) (The formatting was not me I'm pretentious but not THAT pretentious.) All of these are non-fiction, technically... I mean, they're kind of in that weird zone with poetry where it's based on fiction but for the sake of imagery and emotion, the truth has been adjusted. I just need to try to apply it to fiction.

I guess that's why a lot of fiction is semi-autobiographical.

I also just read this Jenny Zhang interview and I love, love, love Jenny but for some reason I couldn't focus properly on reading it. I actually had to force myself to read it. The whole time I wanted to close the tab. Strange. Maybe it's the design or something.

layering 101 (may morning)

My second Youtube video and first real Oxford vlog is a short montage of May morning, this morning. Joshua and I woke up at 5 to go to Magdalen Bridge to hear the chorus sing and then a guy say some religious stuff about the coming of spring. It was extremely cold so I had to make do with my non-winter clothing, hence the title. Usually clubs open until later on the night before Mayday so most people go out and stay up all night. The bridge was full of people, both locals and students, a huge number of whom were drunk out of their minds. There was screaming, chanting, clumsiness, and stains, which I didn't really appreciate since I was hungry, tired, cold, and completely sober. Still, I understand. They must be delirious by now. Maybe next year I'll go out too and see how it feels, although I don't know how I'd survive the nocturnal temperatures. I can't exactly hit up the club in my 7 layers.

We stood around for half an hour waiting for something to happen. I actually hadn't previously known what was supposed to happen, but I expected dancing around a maypole. That didn't happen. After the chorus and prayer that we heard emanating from a microphone from inside Magdalen College, we followed the crowd to the High Street, where there were people doing Morris dancing, which was very cool. Still, it was too cold, so Joshua and I went to Vaults and Garden for some breakfast. It was so full that we had to sit outside and I could barely feel my hands.

Most of my friends didn't want to wake up early, but it was so worth it. What's the point of going somewhere else for university if you're not going to enthusiastically participate in the local culture there?

my academic future

Just came out of the most productive tutorial I've ever had. (Usually tutorials feel more like repetitions of ideas I've thought about before.) It was with Jack, the only boy in our year, with whom I've never had a tutorial before. In seminars he talks and talks, to the point where tutors have asked him to shut up, something that has really made me notice how men are raised to be confident and self-assured whilst the 12 girls are much more timid despite having really intelligent ideas. Jack is obviously also very smart. He went to Westminster and he's extremely knowledgeable about art history, especially classical stuff and Renaissance, which is a bit alienating to me because all my knowledge is cobbled together and I don't really have a deep understanding of anything, meaning I have to do much more reading for essays and think deeply and even then be unable to write an essay that probes the topic hard enough since I've only had a week to write it.

Anyway, this tutorial was for essays that we were assigned before the vacation. There was a list of almost a dozen questions and we could choose any. I chose to talk about Postmodern architecture's classical pastiche and Jack wrote about Cy Twombly's engagement with the classical. It was truly enlightening on both topics and, as often happens, I now no longer want my tutor to read my essay because it states that Modernism was a complete break from tradition, which I now know is obviously false and a very strong claim to make. Can't wait to be torn apart in the comments...

The stuff that Jack said about Cy Twombly was so incredibly interesting. I previously only knew Twombly visually, as in I could recognise his very distinctive style, but knew nothing else. Turns out Twombly lived most of his life in the Mediterranean and made a lot of work that engaged with Antiquity and mythology and its connection to the present and its ever-changing nature and how it affects our perception of reality, his use of irony and humor, the relevance of his artwork against a backdrop of the Vietnam or Iraq war... I was blown away. I now love Cy Twombly even more than I did before (his work has always just been so alluring and mystifying and breathtaking).

I have absolutely no idea what I might want to specialise in. I'm constantly learning so much. For instance, I used to be completely apathetic to architecture and knew absolutely nothing about it and in over a week I've been able to write 4000 words about Ricardo Bofill and Michael Graves. Doesn't mean I'll specialise in architecture but still...

Topics I'd be interested in taking further:
- Indigenous Mexican art & Mexican art in the first few decades of Spanish colonisation
- Modern Chinese art (20th century) - I'm taking a class on this in 2nd year called 'Art in China since 1911'!! It won't be taught by the legendary Craig Clunas who retires at the end of this year but still, I'm so excited!
- Modernism (e.g. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, De Stijl, Cubism, Fauvism...) - I'm also taking a class on this in 2nd year that covers this entire topic. It was really tough to choose because it was either this or a class on...
- Film studies. Ultimately I decided not to take the class on film because it was on European Cinema, which I'm sure is very interesting and important, but I'm a lot more interested in Asian Cinema, and I couldn't let myself miss out on the modernism course. I just think it would be cool to be that lady who writes about phallic symbolism in Farewell my Concubine
- Cy Twombly!
- Tibetan Buddhist murals. They're just so beautiful.

Overall I'm interested in any art that is hybrid, diasporic, cross-cultural. That's why my object essay is about east-west dialogue on the porcelain market in the 18th century. And post-colonialism is always a beloved topic of mine. Race relations, feminism, Orientalism... oh my. I know what I'm really not interested in, which is the art of Antiquity or the Renaissance or whatever... I mean, I care, but not really.