Purity

margaret atwood saying 'male fantasies, male fantasies' over and over - 10 hours | YouTube

I bought Purity by Jonathan Franzen for ¥128 (actually quite a bargain, as the jacket says £20) at the Beijing Foreign Languages Bookstore for precisely two reasons: 1) It was 600 pages long and I figured it would last me a couple weeks; 2) I've heard the name Jonathan Franzen before so I had some kind of assurance that it would be quality literature. I ended up reading the bulk of it while lying around in bed on Sunday and finished it way too fast. I now have 2 weeks left in Beijing and nothing to read except for The New Yorker, yet again. I'm hopefully going to keep this quite short.

While I acknowledge that Jonathan Franzen is a good writer – he writes scenes really well and is very good at building up emotion and sustaining interest – I found his style to be annoying. It was annoying in itself, and made more annoying by the fact that it was only just annoying enough for me to find it annoying, but not infuriatingly annoying that I couldn't bear to keep reading. I had to continue to read whilst annoyed. It was annoying. It was annoying because there wasn't anything inherently bad or low-quality about it: it just emanated white male entitlement and self-satisfaction. He made little jabs at the literary world, including a reference to Michiko Kakutani whom he'd once called stupid after she gave him a bad review, and one about the amount of authors named Jonathan, that were obviously meant to be coy, witty, and satirising, but are really not funny at all. It actively reduced his dignity in my eyes. And it's just one of the many instances in which Franzen thinks he is soooooooo intelligent. I feel embarrassed for him, I really do. The worst part is that he really does think he's being self-deprecating, when the narcissism emanates from every word that he types, every space between each letter (I did learn that this is called the kerning, which is cool).

One of the major ways in which Franzen demonstrates just how smart and cool and interesting he thinks that he is is his Freud obsession. Everyone has daddy issues or mommy issues, and it could not be more transparent. He constantly brings up how Andreas Wolf (the same name as one of my friends at uni, actually the third reason why I decided to choose this book over others) literally sought his mother in the women that he was sleeping with. And the same with Pip. Like, it was so shockingly unsubtle. It really made me lose respect for Franzen. 2015, and he really thinks that constant allusions to Freud makes his book interesting.

I also take issue with his portrayal of women. I don't think that Franzen is a misogynist, because this means that he oppresses women, but I genuinely believe that he hates women. He hates women not in the institutional way in which society hates women, but in the way that ignorant people believe sexism works, which is just straightforward personal hatred. There is a bit of misogyny, in the way that he describes women – this sort of condescending, judgemental description full of contempt, dismissal, and pity that only a man could muster, because only a man would truly see women as objects to the point where he ever thought he had a right to write about someone, even a fictional character, in such a matter-of-fact, cruel, and completely dehumanising manner. In terms of hating women, that's the thing: his female characters are very fleshed-out, entirely three-dimensional, and all have their own motivations and aren't merely used as tools in male narratives, although it does sometimes feel as though they are. He does justice by them. The titular character, Purity, is the least fucked-up character and she gets a nice happy ending. I'm no English student, and I don't really want to open this book ever again, so I'm not going to go back and analyse it, but there was something about the way that women are portrayed as manipulators of men, as 'making' them do this or 'not letting them' do that, that makes me uncomfortable. Twice in the book Franzen uses the word 'train', as in 'She had trained him not to say X because she didn't like it when he did'. As if she were some kind of witch for whom men were but pets to be trained to obey. Both times I was really unsettled by the casual use of that word, as if this is what relationships are like. I don't know. But it made me feel really weird and I think it's a good way to demonstrate the way that women are portrayed in this book – and not just in Tom's story because that's written in the first person by the character Tom himself so is obviously biased and doesn't necessarily reflect Franzen's own opinions – but in pretty much every heterosexual relationship in the novel. I guess it's this classic male thing of deflecting blame and shifting responsibility. Everything a man does is somehow his girlfriend's/mother's fault, something she had somehow provoked him to do.

In a way it reminds me of Westworld, which I watched earlier this month and absolutely loved (Ah I love Lisa Joy!). I was concerned by William's attribution of the awakening of his evil to Dolores. He explicitly says that Dolores helped him to realise that he loved to kill and commit violence, and he constantly returns to Dolores throughout the next thirty years, paying tribute to her as the turning point of his story. But why is she somehow responsible, and not him? Why do women always 'make' men do things? Dolores was experiencing her own purgatory, had been and continued to be in hell for decades upon decades. She was living her own life – meanwhile William projected himself onto her and made her into a plot device for his own story. It's like men always have to be the protagonist, the special boy, but also can't bear to be in control of their own decisions, especially when the consequences come to light. Nobody is responsible for anything you do except for yourself.

Edit: I've been reading some Goodreads review that I wholeheartedly agree with and I forgot to mention: ALL THE MEN KEEP THINKING ABOUT KILLING THEIR WIVES/MOTHERS BECAUSE OF HOW MUCH THEY HATE THEM LMAO. LIKE........... ENOUGH SAID.

Also a review by Karen on goodreads says: "the ultimate white male novelist writing white male novels for white male readers and this book reads like him taking that criticism and thumbing his nose, saying "oh, man, you though i wrote like that before, check this out!" and ramping it up a thousand notches by being even whiter and maler." And wow. I really felt that. So much. Like I said, this is one of the white-male-est things I've ever read in my life. Also I just remembered what he wrote in the story of Leila Helou, the Lebanese-American journalist, which, like many of his descriptions of women, was soooo unfair and mean because he made the character, a woman or an immigrant respectively, say it, as if it was their point of view, as if they would think like that. When Leila goes to grad school to get an MFA in literature she says that she had more "immigrant lore" than the white men in her course which made her writing more interesting. That reminds me, once more, of Jenny Zhang's Buzzfeed article, which is so good that I keep on thinking about it. Like, boo hoo, Leila/women of color in MFAs get to be immigrant women and that gives them soooo much privilege because they get to write about it. Lucky them! Okay I'm done now. I need to cleanse myself. I've been meaning to read Brideshead Revisited so I'm gonna go see if it's free online somewhere.

On Thinking

I've been reading a lot of The New Yorker in my downtime at my internship and it's got me heavily considering a career in the media, writing features and cultural commentary and literary for magazines, instead of (or as well as) becoming an academic. But these ideas all really anguish me, because whenever I consider a future career I start thinking about the amount of effort I have to put into things and it stresses me out to no end.

Journalist? I need to travel a lot, interview people, do a lot of research and reading on something I'm not necessarily all that passionate about, write a lot of drafts, trawl through hours of transcripts and notes, figure out how best to write my article so that people will want to read it... So much work.

Author? God, writing is so hard. I've been trying to get back into writing fiction recently and it's killing me. I can't produce anything and I'm embarrassed by anything I write, including this blog post.

Academic? I need to read a lot and think about my problems... I often remind myself that just because I study a humanities subject where there are no correct answers like History of Art, it doesn't mean that my field is easy - I should be experiencing the same kind of suffering when writing my weekly essays as a maths student who is unable to figure out a problem question, and an art historian probably wrestles with one problem/issue in their field throughout their whole career just like a physicist might. (Think Michael Caine's character in Interstellar, being unable to "solve gravity" his entire life.) But that is so hard! Why do I need to use my brain and put effort into things? I don't want to, no matter how passionate I am.

Today, while idly waiting around on an errand for my supervisor, it dawned on me that a possible reason for why I'm so averse to having to figure my way through difficult things - especially when it comes to literary/textual based things like my studies and my future career - isn't just because I'm lazy and lethargic, but actually because I hate to think.

The issue lies in the language in which I think - or rather the language in which I perceive myself to think. I believe that everyone thinks in concepts and images that follow each other in quick succession and also float around like a mind map or a network of relationships, rather than in a constantly-running internal monologue as is usually portrayed in a narrative (sorry, bicameral mind theory from Westworld, which I just finished and am amazed by, partially because I'm inspired by the show's co-creator (but let's face it, the show's her baby), Lisa Joy). I think that we have way more thoughts than we can process or be conscious of, and that immediately after having a thought significant enough for us to actually take note, we repeat it to ourselves linguistically, which is the internal monologue. But the original thought is actually not linguistic. But let's assume for the sake of this post that we can think 'in a language'.

The language I think in is undoubtedly English, as is evident from the fact that my blog posts, which are primarily for me to express myself, are in English. Part of the reason why I like the 'thinking in concepts not in a language' idea above is because I take a lot of pride in being a native speaker of three languages - in fact, it's a huge part of my identity (especially in regards to French and the way it affirms my Swissness and my belonging in my home country), and I don't like to admit that I think in English. Since I definitely don't think in French or Mandarin, I'd rather think in concepts than think in English. Realising that I'm internally monologuing in English makes me anxious and unhappy; waking up from a dream where all the dialogue was in French brings me joy and satisfaction.

When I'm working my way through a maths problem, I think in numbers and letters, which are the same everywhere. When I get really into a problem question, the thoughts don't really occupy my mind - they flow straight from conception onto the page as my hand jots down line after line of algebraic calculations, which all logically follow one another. An equation is simplified, fractioned, values are moved around and transformations occur. I don't need to talk to myself in a specific language, which is why I so thoroughly enjoy watching a question start with something complicated, full of exponents and sines, only to transform, through my hand, into a clean, perfect "equals 2."

When it comes to being given a maths problem and then solving it, I love to think and I love to solve.

Even within maths, my English Anguish is manifested: whereas I can differentiate a purely algebraic problem quickly and effortlessly, the second that the same question is re-formatted into a real life situation, I freeze. A vase with such-and-such volume is leaking water at such-and-such rate... I find myself unable to assign X to the vase and Y to the water's rate of change, and the correct numbers to the Xes and Ys. All I need to do is to convert the text-based question into pure numbers and letters, but that's the one thing I struggle with the most. I think, now, that it's because thinking through the issue - talking to myself and leading myself through the problem - requires me to say "the vase is X and the rate of change is Y..." Whether I'm just telling myself this in my head or actually writing it down on the paper, I have to use English.

It's the same in my studies now: all my essays and most of my readings are done in English, and my essay plan needs to be in English, so to formulate my essay and its plan I will need English thinking. That's why when I'm really in a bind I sometimes bring a friend (usually V who's happy to indulge me) to sit in my room so I can speak at them about my ideas, thus figuring myself out. This is because I hate to speak to myself in English, whether out loud or in my head. Every time I do, I can feel the cage of English closing in on me, limiting my fluency in other languages (particularly French).

I can't stand being Anglophone, so I won't allow myself to think thoughts in my head or on paper with no obstacle, so I find thinking to be a chore, so I find any work that I do that needs me to access my internal monologue to be a chore, so I don't want to work hard. It's nice to know this and I find it such an interesting revelation but I honestly don't see myself changing anytime soon. I could try to comfort myself by saying that it's okay to think in English because I'm going to be writing in English, so I need to ~immerse~ myself in the language, but it's no consolation once I've realised that I do all my Googling/Wikipedia-ing in English and that I can barely function without English.

To reiterate, I'm actually happy with my level of Chinese, which I think is already quite good for someone who didn't grow up in China. It's the French inadequacy when I'm supposed to be fluent that tortures me and is the main reason why I'm so upset about my over-reliance on English. In the latest editorial letter for one of Sine Theta's issues, Iris and I talked about how we felt about our diasporic identities a year after writing the 'third space' conversation and I said that, in part because I've moved to a different country where I've felt the need to differentiate myself from Chinese-Chinese kids, my angst about whether I'm authentically Chinese has become angst about whether I'm authentically diasporic, whether I really have a cross-cultural experience, whether I'm Swiss enough, whether I'm Third Space Enough. And I don't know what to do about it.

a love so..... beautiful...??????????

I just finished 致我们单纯的小美好 (A Love So Beautiful), which is this Chinese 23-episode TV show that tracks a group of 5 friends from high school all the way to adulthood and marriage. I started it thinking it would be a really cute rom-com but by the end it turned into a look at a really toxic, unhealthy relationship that is nevertheless portrayed as the most adorable, romantic thing to ever have happened.

Quick summary: Chen Xiaoxi, the main character, is infatuated with her classmate and neighbor Jiang Chen, who claims not to like her back. She spends her whole high school career trying to get him to fall in love with her. (He actually likes her; I'm really not sure why he doesn't act on it sooner). Meanwhile the new guy at school, Wu Bosong, likes her and looks after her a lot. There are also two other people who are their friends and end up getting married - they don't really matter. In university Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen end up together, but they break up upon graduation partly because Jiang Chen leaves to Beijing for a medical residency. Three years later, he returns to Hangzhou to find that Xiaoxi and Wu Bosong are now together. He forces them apart because he still loves Xiaoxi; Xiaoxi and Wu Bosong break up after she rejects his proposal. Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen get back together and get married.

Jiang Chen and Chen Xiaoxi have an awful, abusive relationship and I'm just going to quickly rant about this in bullet points instead of sleeping or doing work for the JCR committee.

The main issue is that, like most romances on screen, the unhealthy aspects are not highlighted and it is portrayed to very impressionable young people as something that is desirable - whereas in real life they should be getting restraining orders.

RED FLAGS BELOW.

• Xiaoxi is explicitly, clearly infatuated with Jiang Chen throughout high school, but since he professes not to like her back, there is a huge power imbalance between the two of them. First of all, Jiang Chen is a lot more academically excellent and popular, making Xiaoxi seem lacking in comparison. (Later when they're together people often comment that Xiaoxi isn't good enough for him, which further gives him control over her.) Xiaoxi is also much shorter than him so she constantly has to look up to him with big doe eyes like a dependent child. Xiaoxi hangs onto his every word and the way that he treats her, even if it's one word or one look, can affect her mood (which also affects her grades and her life). He is allowed to be as aloof as he wants because he apparently doesn't like her back. 
• He knows that he holds a ridiculous amount of power over her and is mean to her because he can. He often gets jealous about Wu Bosong and will punish Xiaoxi for it even though she doesn't understand why. 
• Example: After Xiaoxi embarrasses herself in public, Jiang Chen is about to go comfort her when she sees that she is wearing a T-shirt gifted to her by Wu Bosong after she got her shirt dirty. Wu Bosong has bought a matching one for himself so it looks like they're wearing a couple outfit. Noticing this, Jiang Chen tells Xiaoxi that she is an embarrassment. This causes her to cry for days and for her grades to suffer so much that her parents arrange for her to transfer to a different high school with a stricter learning environment. At the last minute she decides not to because Jiang Chen asks her to stay. (In his POV he says that he has "decided to temporarily forgive her [for 'betraying' him by daring to hang out with a good friend, who she doesn't know likes her] to make her stay at his school.") 
• He also refuses to vote for her for class president because she was running around on the football field with Wu Bosong. ?????? What??? 
• I honestly cannot wrap my head around the reason why Jiang Chen doesn't just get together with Xiaoxi in high school. He clearly likes her back because he gets very jealous. Yet he allows her to suffer and be unhappy - not only over the fact he doesn't like her back but also because he leads her to believe that he is flirting with a different girl. He also allows Wu Bosong to suffer, because Wu Bosong is pursuing a girl who clearly has no eyes for him. Wu Bosong would never even be a threat if Jiang Chen and Xiaoxi were already together when he arrived, because he never would have thought about pursuing Xiaoxi at all. The only explanations I can fathom are: 
• a) Jiang Chen has been cursed by a witch to never date in high school
• b) much more plausible: Jiang Chen doesn't like Xiaoxi back. He just enjoys the attention and power and control. 
• Anyway, he's 16 and they're kids. Overall he's still quite a sweet kid struggling with his own issues. 
• How their relationship starts: Jiang Chen kisses her while she is drunk. Then he starts telling people she's his girlfriend until she notices. 
• He takes her for granted and totally assumes that she consents to whatever it is he has planned for her. She does, in fact, consent but he never asks her what she thinks - only expects her to continue to adore him. 
• Although they are now together, he continues to be very cold and aloof towards her, and it's usually not obvious that this is done out of affection. Why is he still playing hard to get? Meanwhile she has to beg him for attention and constantly be really nice because a small slip up can piss him off so much that he ignores her. 
• He orders her around and decides the speed at which the relationship progresses.
• He tries to make her dependent on her. She does not make any other friends (okay, it's a show, they don't want to add too many new characters but still.) He forbids her from drinking alcohol. He tries to forbid her from getting a summer job, saying that if she wants money she can ask him for it - literally attempting to tie her to him, making her unable to live without him. When he decides such things for her there's never an explanation or even a hint of suggestion: it's just "because I said so." 
• Sidenote that isn't really about one person abusing another but a sign of an awful, toxic relationship: I have literally never seen them have a real conversation while together?? They don't communicate - the reason why they break up is because they're constantly trying to guess the other's emotions, and don't tell each other extremely important things. Instead they harbor resentment towards each other, which is the reason why they break up. There is no basis to their relationship at all. They merely react to the situations that occur in each episode. 
• He initially tells his boss that he doesn't want to go to Beijing because he and his girlfriend are going to get married - something that he never brought up to Xiaoxi. 
• During the three years that he is in Beijing, he continues to think about her and tells people that yes, he does have a girlfriend. 
• When he returns, he sees that she has moved on. He asks her whether she regrets breaking up; she says no. He continues to pursue her even though she is in a relationship and repeatedly tells him that she does not want to be with him or even see him. 
• He takes advantage of the fact that she is too polite to tell him to fuck off to insert himself into her life constantly. (To be honest, based on his behavior, if she told him outright to go away and got angry and insulted him he might have become violent.) 
• He uses a fake girlfriend who helps him to manipulate a situation so that he and Xiaoxi end up alone together. 
• He kisses her multiple times without her consent. 
• He corners and confronts her, demanding that she apologise to him. FOR WHAT?? I still don't understand. He does not apologise to her. 
• In fact I may be wrong but he may have never, ever, ever apologised to her ever. 
• He has lots of power and money, so he does huge favors for her (mainly: using his influence at the hospital to get faster and better treatment for her father; selling his car to be able to spend 400k to self-publish a book for her through a big publishing house whose owner is his patient) even though she never asked, and in fact is unaware that he has gone so far to help her out behind the scenes. Obviously this makes their relationship even more imbalanced. He already acts like she owes him unconditional adoration, but now she actually does owe him. 
• He does boyfriend-style things like picking her up and actively competing against Wu Bosong, who is literally her actual boyfriend. 
• He remains friends with her friends, and her friends invite him to every social gathering even though she is clearly uncomfortable being in the same room with him. 
• He remains in very good terms with her parents and uses them as a way to get close to her. 
• He tells her, "We will get back together". It is not a question but an order. 
• He is controlling and possessive, at all times, whether or not they are together. 
• He never considers Xiaoxi's personal feelings and opinions, because he does not consider her to be a human being. He never asks her what she thinks - just assumes that she will agree because she is like a puppy who thinks he can do no wrong. She is an object to him. He tells Wu Bosong, "she has always belonged to me." 
• After she breaks up with Wu Bosong, Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen's relationship begins anew because he kisses her without her permission and then cuddles her while she sleeps, also, obviously, without her permission.
• A highly disturbing piece of dialogue, taking place when Xiaoxi wakes up to find herself in his arms and he wraps his arms tighter so she can't escape his grasp: 
• Jiang Chen: Where are you going? 
• Xiaoxi: Toilet. 
• Jiang Chen: Will you be coming back? 
• Xiaoxi: ... Yes. 
• Jiang Chen: Okay, you can go. But come back as soon as you can. 
• I don't think I need to explain how fucked up this is. They aren't together at this point. He would not have allowed her to leave his grasp unless she agreed to return. But apparently this is very cute and they get together after this?????? 
• While she is very drunk, he asks her if she wants him to propose and she says yes. The next morning, he tells her that she had proposed the night before, and suggests they get married soon. Which she of course doesn't remember, because she was drunk and because it didn't happen. Yet he insists it was the case. This is gaslighting. 
• I don't understand this at all?? Why would he want to do this? It makes no sense. The only reason behind this is simply for control. 
• The evening after he proposes to her, she doesn't want to have sex with him and doesn't want him to come over. He forces the door open and enters her home, eventually ending up in the same bed as her. 
• The entire time that her ex is stalking her and harassing her, Chen Xiaoxi has no way out. If she tries to move away, Jiang Chen would probably transfer to a hospital near her. He would never have let her rest until she agreed to be with him again. 

Again, my biggest issue is that this is portrayed as a love story to "melt your heart", according to the YouTube description. It teaches young girls and young boys that such behavior is acceptable in a relationship. It is not. The entire relationship is a red flag made up of small red flags and Jiang Chen would have made Xiaoxi's life a living hell for the rest of her life, which would probably have ended with her being murdered by her husband, who is an abuser. 

This has actually made me afraid to ever break up with my boyfriend, in case he somehow ends up becoming that crazy ex and/or the next men I date will be abusers who will ruin my life. This show has made me very upset and uncomfortable. Bye.