the possessed

I just read The Possessed, Elif Batuman's first book, about her various encounters with Russian literature during the time in university and at her PhD when she was studying it. As with all of her work, it is funny, engaging, highly fascinating, and very thought-provoking. Some notes:

Within the first few pages Batuman recounts her freshman year experience taking beginner's Russian and falling in love with a guy in her class, then going to Budapest to teach English in the summer - the plot of The Idiot. I'd always known that The Idiot was based on her life (not because I did that much research or anything but because it obviously was, just from the setting and stuff like that), but I never realised that it was exactly her life. I'd assumed that at least some of it was completely made up for narrative interest, like the story about the physicist that she reads for her class, which felt so weird and surreal that it must've been made up. But even that actually happened. I don't know... for some strange, inexplicable reason, I feel a bit betrayed and sad that basically everything is true but with the names changed a little. Maybe it's because, although I love The Idiot in part because it makes being a lonely student with not much to do seem as cool as anything else, it still has all this interesting stuff that happens that doesn't feel real. I really don't know. But somehow this has slightly dampened my enjoyment of the novel.

Like in The Idiot, Batuman's voice is so unique here. The way that she observes everything happening around her and makes all these observations of the small details makes the incredibly normal things appear magical or absurd. But after a while it kind of gets on your nerves... she starts to come off as arrogant, because there is little about her as a person -- it's all just her perspective and the way she sees others. So when everyone she meets is a little weird, it makes it seem like she thinks she's superior to them all- she's the only normal, sane person in this crazy world of landladies who force their guests to eat ant-infested jam when they do in fact have good jam and of respected professors who poop their pants in public. Even the Old Uzbek stories, filtered through her teacher, become slightly comical. Just by virtue of pointing anything out at all, Batuman manages to make what she has pointed out feel weird. It reminds me of when my friend from Oxford, Jason, came to stay in Geneva for a weekend while he was traveling and he would point something out about my house, like the London 2012 Olympics keyring we'd bought but never gifted that had stayed, still inside the original packaging, on top of a wardrobe in the hallway until now. And suddenly I would feel super self-conscious and awkward about the presence of that keyring, even though he'd meant nothing by pointing it out. Even though it had been a neutral observation. I guess it goes back to Sartre, and the vulnerability of being seen - the fact that the second that something is seen/recognised/acknowledged there's immediately this idea of shame associated with it, of like, "Oh no, I've been discovered." I even told Jason that he reminded me of Elif Batuman. It's not that Batuman is being malicious when she characterises the people she encounters in that way, but the fact that she wittingly describes them as these sort of eccentric, nonsensical people just feels, after a while, kind of mean-spirited. It feels like everyone she meets is just a caricature, that nobody can really please her or come off as just... normal. It feels like everyone is being mocked - like that high school girl who exchanges open-mouthed, wide-eyed, laughing scoffs with her friends when you walk past (even if it might not be about you), making you feel like the most worthless, insignificant insect in the whole world. And while the reader is meant to partake in this inside joke of 'look how weird these people are', you start to feel a bit uncomfortable at the way Elif/Selin navigates life, as some kind of cynical/ironic bystander who describes other peoples' eccentricities for our private amusement. You don't really want to be that person.

Anyways. I still love Batuman and want her to adopt me. I'll close off with this quote that she says about Isaac Babel but which is also a big theme from The Idiot and which I think about a lot. I'm not sure if I relate to it or not.

"Babel wasn't alienated from life––to the contrary, he sought it out––but he was incapable of living it otherwise than as the material for literature."

edit: Just to add.... Elif Batuman has honestly had my dream life. Harvard undergrad (completed in three years) and then 7 years doing a PhD at Stanford, all the while writing for magazines and travelling a lot... and now the author of two books. Also she's funny and so beautiful. OMG Elif please be my mentor I wanna be like you <3

julie, julia, and nora

So Netflix has pushed Julie and Julia to me a lot but I never had any interest in it at all. A few weeks ago I read Nora Ephron's personal essay in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/serial-monogamy) and thought it was quite cute. Then the other day I thought again about Julie and Julia and how it's meant to be about a modern woman engaging with Julia Child through her cookbook and was like, "Oh my god this is a Nora Ephron movie isn't it." Sure enough Ephron was all over the credits - she wrote, produced, and directed it.

Anyway, here's my Letterboxd review:

this is SO WHOLESOMe also the fact that nora ephron also engaged so much with cookbooks... i love
edit a lot of the reviews on letterboxd are like these stories arent interesting because theres no real conflict or growth and ok sure but also not all stories have to be really dramatic to be interesting... i loved that this was about how passion and hard work and INTEREST in something can really touch and change your life, and that you can measure your life by the “mundane” things like what you cook and what you wear and **ahem** the films you watch. in a time of information overload its important to cherish the times we really do engage with something. ive just started actually cooking these past few months and even though i dont follow recipes (and prob never will bc im impatient) and also hate french food, i felt connected to this too. and obviously so did producer/writer/director + new yorker article author nora ephron !

I just wanted to add that ever since I interviewed Canadian science fiction author Larissa Lai for Sine Theta's 8th issue back in September, I've been thinking a lot about this one thing she said, about the inherently patriarchal nature of traditional Campbellian hero journey narratives. I even quoted her in a footnote in my Greenberg essay when I make a side note on the patriarchal language in one of the secondary sources. She said that traditional narratives are driven by a black-and-white understanding of conflict: good versus evil, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. She said that they're stories about the boy needing to kill the father in order to come into manhood. But women don't want to kill their mothers - they want to have relationships with them.

“Women’s narratives,” she said, “need to be relational in the first instance, and not dialectical.”

I've been thinking about this because in some ways it feels true. In some ways I want it to be true, because then all this resentment and bitterness I have about men appears easily explained, that there's this inherent difference in the way men and women behave because of the way they've been socialised to think and to relate to people. But I'm also wary of generalising, because if you take this to the extreme you'd be saying that men are inherently violent and women aren't - which apart from being wrong is also quite dangerous because it would then excuse violence from men as 'boys will be boys' and would treat male violence as something uncurable and inevitable. But of course that's not what Lai is saying: she also talks about how women can actually be really nasty to each other and that's an aspect she wanted to explore in her books.

I've also struggled a lot with her use of the word "dialectical". Does she mean dialectical like a struggle, like a class struggle, between two sides? Or just a Socratic dialogue where two sides talk to each other to solve a problem? Because that's two completely different things and dialectics can mean either or both (or not??? IDK I'm very bad at grasping complex theory that has many explanations because the concept has been written about by different thinkers. I once cried in front of my tutor after class because I was frustrated by the ambiguous definition of the words 'semiotics' and 'structuralism'.) I guess in this context she means the former, because it would be the opposite of relational.

All this is to say is I've been wondering what kind of narrative would be a more feminine one, a relational one that's less about defeating evil. I haven't really found anything but I guess I'd say that Julie and Julia is one. But I'm wary of doing that because it's literally a movie about cooking. And what would that say about women? Lol.

I don't want to make this too long and I'm a bit annoyed that this is the first post (as far as I remember) that I'm making about the topic of Lai's relational narrative because it's literally been on my mind for months and I haven't formulated any real thoughts. This post is yet another ramble with no real aim. But I guess that's what blogs are for.

Also lol, Julie Powell just started a blog and left it there and didn't do anything to promote it (apart from telling her friends I guess) and suddenly it has a ton of readers?? How does that even happen, like how did they even find the website. There are so many websites wtf. Why can't this happen to this blog.

reading update

I spend way more time thinking and talking about reading than I do actually reading! Lol.

I'm going to be spending next week at Uni Bastions working on my André Breton essay due on week 0 of Hilary. I was looking for audiobooks for Breton's Nadja (I now realise you can't really do an audiobook of it) when I found a YouTuber called Antastesia who made a video about it in French. It felt so good to listen to people speak in French at length again and she was also a really interesting person so I've been watching her videos which are generally about literature and just her life training as a teacher and all that. It's so fascinating... this girl reads so much. It's very inspiring. So apparently there's this whole niche part of YouTube called BookTube where people just... review books? Wow.

Which leads me to the fact that I have 2 weeks to read 3 books if I want to complete my Goodreads reading challenge of reading 25 books a year. I don't know if I can make it because I'm absolutely crawling through Herzog right now (it's so boring to me... it's such a classic 'man and his inner angst' novel so far. Like I just do not care that his wife left him for his best friend - I have no sympathy for this man who apparently cheated on his wife too and is a bad father so like. Boohoo.) I'm also reading Griselda Pollock's absolutely fascinating new book on Charlotte Salomon (I bought it after I went to her guest seminar this term on the same topic) but it's literally like 500 pages and 3kg and I can't figure out how to hold it comfortably so I'm just avoiding having to pick it up. Oh my god why is it so heavy.

Tomorrow I'm going to town and going to do some shopping for Christmas. I think I'm going to treat myself to Elif Batuman's first book, The Possessed, because I love her and want her to be my mentor. I'm still thinking about The Idiot... It's had such an impact on me!

But in the meantime I need to use every cell in my body for the strength of restraining myself from becoming a BookTuber too. Or an 'ideas' YouTuber like Contrapoints and Philosophy Tube or the cultural critics I've been watching like Lindsay Ellis. Considering that a) I barely even read anymore / know nothing and b) Have no interesting or original opinions, it would be of no benefit to anyone. But the urge is so strong... I have such a weird compulsive need to share myself to an anonymous audience (like this blog) - I log everything I read onto Goodreads and all the movies I watch onto Letterboxd. It's not even so people will read it necessarily, but more for myself. It's fun to go back and see how I live through the media I consume. And yet the fun is in the fact that it's online - if I was just keeping a Word doc on my computer of the books I read it would be so boring. But I also don't, like, super crave attention. I only have about 3 friends on each website and we never interact on there. I wonder why I'm like this. Such an utterly modern phenomenon.

things i hope to get done over the winter vac 2018-2019

(but let's face it......)

• Write my André Breton essay at Uni Bastions library
• Do the reading for Social History of Art that i missed:
• Craig Clunas
• Arnold Hauser
• Hatt & Klonk
• Study for modernity collections! 
• Read Griselda Pollock's massive book on Charlotte Salomon
• Read Herzog 
• Read 1 other book before the end of 2019 so I can complete my 25-books reading challenge on Goodreads
• Read Krauss on narcissism, recommended by Ros Holmes in her new media lecture: 
• "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism" (1976) 
• Read Derrida on fragmentary language, recommended by Elisa in our psychoanalysis tutorial: 
• Read bell hooks on the oppositional gaze:
• "The oppositional gaze: black female spectators" (1992)

Sino Travel Blog 2017: Taipei

So I started writing this like December 2017 and it's never going to be finished so i'll just post it here lol. Oops. 

After the claustrophobic clutter of Hong Kong, Taipei, with its wide roads and low buildings, came as a relief. We got off our China Airlines flight, which, despite being only a little longer than an hour, had a ton of movies––we were able to introduce Blaise to Moonlight––and took the commuter MRT into town, getting of at Ximen station, right next to a vibrant pedestrian shopping district called Ximending. Meander Hostel, where we stayed, was at the very other end of Chengdu Road, a long strip lined on both sides by shops, cafés, and cinemas. Throughout the week that we stayed in Taipei, we learned to walk briskly and dodge the groups of young people chatting around street stalls. We often passed a New Balance flagship store and would hover to gaze admiringly at the blown-up photos of glamorous people wearing sensible but cool sneakers by the window, even going inside a few times to check out the shoes, until eventually I gave in and purchased a white pair that was on sale. It was too pure in color, however, to wear, so I wrapped them up in plastic bags and shoved them to the bottom of my backpack, where they took up quite a large amount of space, waiting for the day to arrive when they could prove their worth...


We'd originally booked a 4-person room with an en-suite bathroom (yay!), but since Yasmin wasn't able to make it, we had to agree to let a stranger stay in the fourth bed if needed. The first few nights, however, it remained unoccupied. We dumped our stuff on the bunk beds and sat under the air conditioning for a while, relishing the cool breeze. Taiwan may be less dense in population compared to Hong Kong, but it wasn't any less humid. It became a running joke to sigh in contentment and say, "So this is the breeze that Kevin was talking about in that beach scene in Moonlight..." every time we walked past a storefront that was blasting its AC out onto the street.

That first evening, we had what might have been the best meal of the entire trip: an unassuming Sichuanese restaurant tucked away in a side street off Chengdu Road, where a huge pot of rice, unlimited tea, a cold appetizer, and five dishes cost a tight $900 NTD... 30CHF! The price of a single bowl of noodles in Switzerland! And best of all was how much Blaise and Seb enjoyed it. We picked up some bubble tea, naturally––we were in its homeland, after all––and waddled over to Ximending, where we wandered around its labyrinth-like streets, getting lost in the LED lights, stinky tofu smells, and racks and racks of fidget spinners on sale.




The hostel did free breakfast every morning, so we resolved to get up at human hours this time round. The next day, we helped ourselves to peanut butter on toast and green tea at 9am and got ready for the day ahead, but Blaise promptly went back to bed and refused to budge. After many attempts at persuasion, Seb and I left him behind and ambled towards the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall under a blazing mid-afternoon heat. Despite the gray clouds in the sky, I could feel every individual ray of sunlight that beat down upon my skin.

After a photo-op on Liberty Square, we climbed the stairs to enter the cavernous hall, thinking it would be cooler. It wasn't much better, but at least we got to see the changing of the guards. I wondered how these guards managed to maintain absolute stillness while in full military gear. I knew that they were boiling––they needed a man to come and dab the sweat off their cheeks before performing the changing ceremony. The actual ceremony involved a lot of musket-waving and heel-clicking––each little noise that they made in unison reverberated across the entire silent hall. In front of Seb and I were two Taiwanese-American kids brought here by their father and grandfather who stood fidgeting impatiently. I wondered if they visited often, or if this trip would become a major component of their identity crises in the future. I would see quite a few diasporic children while travelling, including a boy and a girl at the Youjian Pingyao performance in Shanxi whose mother needed to constantly whisper them translations, and a pair of mixed teenage sisters who threw each other conspiratorial looks at the Muslim Quarter in Xi'an. I don't even remember how I felt about these visits when I was a small child, though I probably didn't appreciate them all that much, since they mostly consisted of talking to family members I didn't recognise, watching television, and being teased for my bad Chinese. Eventually I developed a lot of diaspora angst, which was one of the initial reasons why I'd planned this trip, although I was now more self-aware. I wondered if, in ten years' time, these little boys would look back at that moment in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and also feel nostalgia for a home that both was, and wasn't, theirs.

Outside, there were troupes of dancers and drummers rehearsing for some kind of event. Seb and I sat on the steps of the National Theatre (left in photo above) to watch the uniformed performers, and talked about a film idea we had: someone who works in a small photo-developing store who discovers stories hidden in other people's photographs. 

We walked to the 228 Peace Park (and telling Seb the, like, three things I know about that event) and at some point we must've picked up Blaise –– I don't remember. I flipped through the journal that I tried to keep this summer but I only really wrote on Hong Kong, and stopped when we arrived in Taipei, apart from a brief bit on the last day (more on that later...) I stopped doing a lot of things a week into the trip, such as brushing my hair. I got really tangly and plasticky because I didn't bring conditioner, so I would basically just wash it, let it air dry, and then throw it back into the ponytail that permanently hung out of the hole on the back of my baseball cap. I'd also long given up on makeup: the eyeliner would immediately melt in the heat and print a circle under my eyes, making me look like I'd come from the early-2000s emo scene. And I learned that there was no point in trying to avoid mosquitos. I diligently spread large quantities of anti-itch cream on my bites and sprayed lemony chemicals all over myself every morning, but it didn't stop a dozen bites from appearing every day, some swelling into astonishing proportions. I gave in to my primal urges and scratched them until they broke, leaving scabs on my arms and legs. This was a really terrible idea, because now, six months later, I still have faint scars that I fear shall never disappear. Don't scratch your bites, kids.

I also eventually gave up on this log, so know that there were many, many unrecorded ones, too.

The hostel was one of those really well-organised ones where they have events every day that you can join for free. The first night that we were there, one of the guests, who was a trainee hairstylist, was cutting hair in exchange for "stories". Seb really wanted to do it, but the person in front of us was waiting too long, so eventually we left. That second evening, Bonnie, one of the staff members, took a group of us to climb Elephant Mountain on the southeastern edge of the city. The climb was, frankly, one of the most difficult physical exercises I've ever had to do. Blaise and Seb quickly disappeared ahead, and I struggled to climb the individual stone steps up, feeling pressure both to keep up and to not block the people behind me. Every time I thought we were almost at the top, I would glimpse yet another row of stairs. I had to grip the filthy, paint-chipped banisters for support, which was disgusting. The copious amounts of sweat I was producing mixed in with the humidity in the air, making me feel like I was wearing a bodysuit made of pure moisture. I could feel it in my ears. I feel like that was when the floodgates of my sweat glands were pushed open––for the rest of the summer, I would be constantly mocked for having "a lake down my back" and "literal drops of water on my neck". On that fateful evening, Bonnie gave me tissues with which to physically wipe my sweat as a reward for reaching the top... and I would never be the same again.


The view, though, was worth it. We arrived just in time to watch the sun slowly set in the west, creating a gorgeous silhouette of the Taipei skyline, including the Taipei 101 building, with its joints of metal-and-glass bamboo (eight of them, naturally!). The viewing platform had a circular bench on which you could sit, and God did I want to sit, but it turned out that the tree in the middle of the circle was full of ants. So we stood, and watched the pink glow of the sky flush up Seb's face as he wore a pink hat, a pink shirt, and ate strawberry-flavored Pocky. Truly a Wes Anderson moment.

Touching the moss on the rocks.

The next day was spent doing what I did best on this trip: racking up those steps on Wechat. (My record was ~37'000 in Nanjing!) We navigated Taipei with our feet, checking out everything from the Huashan 1914 Creative Park (hipster heaven) to Zhongshan Park. Tsai Ing-wen, if you're reading this: please put more benches and garbage bins in Taipei, please. Sincerely, teenagers who walked for a very long time while holding our trash in our hands and with no rest.

We spent a great part of the afternoon looking for the Qi Dong Poetry Salon, which we thought was a poetry-themed tearoom/café.

The Google Street View for this quartier is actually bringing back all the war flashbacks... I even recognise some of these signs!

Following the directions given to me by Baidu Maps, we spun round and round the tiny lanes of Qidong street, finding only an empty playground, gray residential apartments, and worn-looking small businesses. I thought I was hallucinating: surely the Poetry Salon was right where we were standing! Why couldn't we see it? Had it been shut down? There was a traditional-looking house to our left, and I peered at the brochures in the glass case on the wall, trying to understand what this establishment was. It looked like some kind of museum or temple. We stepped inside, into a shushed hallway that required us to take our shoes off. Beyond the doorway, there were tatami mats and shadows of people walking around somewhere far off. Was this the Qi Dong Poetry Salon? I still didn't understand this building's function. A paragraph seemed to invite us to go inside for tea. Was it free? I was confused. Seb and Blaise knew nothing, of course. We hurried out before someone could ask us if we needed any help. I was convinced that the Poetry Salon was still out there, somewhere, waiting for us. It taunted me. It called me a coward for not being able to find it. I could feel my friends getting annoyed, though, and we were hot and thirsty, so we adjusted our search parameters to "anything with air conditioning". We ended up going into a café where I had a really awkward conversation with the barista because I misunderstood a quickfire "eat in or take out?" as "you're not allowed to bring in that milk tea that you bought from a different store". (After having spent the week in Hong Kong speaking English––terrified of offending locals by speaking Mandarin to them and knowing no Cantonese except m goi––I was still getting used to the fact that I could actually speak freely to people in Taipei. But who am I kidding? My Mandarin sucks.) We sat down, had some drinks and food, used the toilet, and played around with creating the Vertigo Effect on our phones. After spending enough time inside to feel guilty about not drinking in the city, we set off again, but not before taking some really cool selfies in one of the mirrors that they use to let drivers see around a corner.

We picked up some takeaway dumplings (the ladies asked me how many dumplings I wanted, but for some reason I thought they'd said how many grams... a fumbling exchange ensued where I became more and more embarrassed, but we did end up with a box of 15, which the ladies insisted weren't enough for all three of us. I reassured them that it was only for a snack) and walked down Zhongxiao East Road––the long horizontal line that cuts across all of Taipei, dividing it into two––window shopping until nightfall.

I think this was the day that we visited the Shilin Night Market, one of the places that, to this day, makes me "that annoying girl who won't stop talking about that time she went traveling in Asia". Yet, how could I not? A street full of mouth-watering smells and delightful sights. I can still remember the warm orange glow of the street stalls selling lamb skewers, Xinjiang wraps, Taiwanese sausages (Ô, l'amour de ma vie, les saucisses taïwanaises! Si grasses, si douces, si sucrées! Si dégueulasses! Mais tellement bons...!), seafood of all kinds, cold noodles, stinky tofu, Korean fried chicken, and––and––and––! Oh, my!!! While Seb and I walked around eating wonderful cold noodles off paper plates, Blaise dragged me to a stall that only sold chicken and asked me to translate the menu. After rattling off each item, he reluctantly chose the chicken thigh filled with rice. It was so spicy that tears filled his eyes, but he second he finished it, he ran back to buy a second one. If I was a street stall owner, this sight of a white guy running back to my stand crying––willing to suffer to enjoy my food––would bring me so much joy. Another stall helped us get rid of our rubbish (again, President Tsai: please put more bins in the streets!) while blasting Guan Zhe's 想你的夜, an absolutely iconic song that is one of those angsty C-pop ballads that make me miss my ex even though I don't have an ex.

After stuffing ourselves, we strolled into a clothing shop that sold really cool Instagrammy stuff like DHL T-shirts, flannels, and graphic tees (including one of FKA Twigs). While Seb and Blaise pored through the selection, I figured I could get the same stuff off Taobao anyway, so I wandered around and danced to the music being played on the speakers. The shop assistant was really nice, complimenting my outfit (a white sports polo paired with pink H&M sweat shorts, which, along with the permanent fixtures that were my cap and sneakers, made me look like a tennis player). He told me I had really cool style, and admired my confidence and lack of self-consciousness because he saw me dancing around. (And this is why summers are amazing! I'm writing this in December right now, and I would never have this kind of confidence in cold weather.) Likely assuming that I was Blaise and Seb's Taiwanese friend, he asked me where they were from, and when I replied, he said, "Oh. They're so shuai!"

The staff at the baseball cap store in Ximending were also super friendly. We'd walked past it in the first evening and decided to get custom embroidered hats, but it took us a while, the night after Shilin, to find it again. Each of us was convinced that we had the best combination of directional instinct and photographic memory, but ultimately I have no idea how we managed to come across it. I'm convinced that Ximending's side streets are magical, and shuffle around every night, with some shops being at times revealed or concealed, and that we simply didn't have the enchanted map. A few months previously, Seb and I had started planning potentially getting tattoos of minimalist Rothkos, but in Taipei we settled for hats. We each picked out a Rothko we liked, and I also designed a cap depicting a Swisscom photobooth for Gabriel. There was a fat guy dressed like a hypebeast and a girl who was the definition of "goth gf": all-black with silver chains and a sharp bob, but with the kindest demeanor and friendliest smile. They helped us finalise our design, and sweetly made us part with quite a lot of cash. The hats, when we picked them up a few days later, didn't turn out exactly as expected, with Seb's graphic looking more like a ribosome than was desired, but it wasn't really their fault.

With mango shaved ice! 

Blaise left halfway through the Taiwan stay. He had a flight in the morning got up at around 8 to take a taxi; I remained asleep while he snuck away. By the time I woke up at 11am, his bed was empty. "Why didn't you wake me up?" I asked Seb, feeling horrible. He replied, "I thought that if you woke up early you'd want to go outside. I wanted to stay in bed." That was that. The evening before he left, we deviated from our usual straight-line route from Ximen station to our hostel by visiting the Cinema Park, of which we knew nothing apart from its cool intriguing name. We were delightfully surprised by the graffiti everywhere. There was a giant painting of two herons on the side of a building. A girl was dancing in front of a camera fixed onto a tripod. After wandering around for a while, we sat down on the pavement next to the park itself, which was all concrete and included some young people wearing Thrasher and fishnets teaching themselves how to skate, which was adorable. This one guy kept going around doing tricks –– he obviously thought he was talented. Another girl was wobbling. The other half of the park was taken up by a huge group of teenagers wearing matching athletic wear and orange T-shirts: they were rehearsing for some kind of dance competition. They moved in almost-perfect synchronisation, with a few people at the front of the group directing the sharp, confident poses that they were striking. Another week and they'd nail it. Off to the side, some members were taking breaks, drinking water and chatting with their friends. We sat there on the (ant-infested, I worried) concrete and listened to the music being blasted for what seemed like an hour, staring at nothing and everything. In that moment, as scratched the massive mosquito bite on my wrist and I let the dusk take me, I felt like a true flâneur.

The day that Blaise left, Seb and I finally got to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). We had previously tried to go on a Monday when it was closed, and had instead spent some time in the tiny tea shop nearby where Blaise bought some tea for his mom. They only had one exhibit currently on –– another was being installed –– about the artist's father who would peel off spam adverts in the streets and fold them into origami boxes. I had to dissuade Seb from trying to shoplift from the museum shop. Then, bubble tea in hand, we decided to follow the path of a free walking tour that we were too cheap to take. All the while developing a slight addiction to whistling. It started out with me showing Seb Shostakovich's Jazz Waltz No. 2, which I had recently discovered, while sitting on a bench in Da'an. The tune soon became stuck in our heads (although I could never quite remember the whole thing) so we would belt it out, with some short breaks to pretend that we were on the walking tour by making up explanations for the history of the city. Seb is a far better whistler than I; he can reach all the high notes in Chopin's Nocturne No. 2. The route took us past the Taipei Grand Mosque, which I hadn't known existed, and into the Qingtian neighborhood full of little restaurants and cute stores. We bought some xiaolongbao to-go and sat down in a small park to eat it. That was the best xiaolongbao I had ever had: not too much soup, with the perfect sauce dip. Even after the time I spent in Nanjing and Shanghai, no other xiaolongbao would ever taste as good. There was a big tree with yellowing leaves so I took one to use as a fan. It was triple the size of my head. When we returned to the hostel, Bonnie let us borrow a permanent marker to draw Blaise's face on it. Thus Blaise was easily replaced.

The next day saw me and Seb going to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, a massive, modern block of white in the north of the city. Outside there was an installation that featured white hammock-like structures and cool fog that would be sprayed out every once in a while. Seb and I stayed there to enjoy the respite from the heat. Tiny droplets of water latched themselves onto Seb's leg hair and glistened in the sunlight. Inside was a typical modern art museum with expansive spaces and interesting large-scale multimedia installations. We stayed inside a dark room with projections of blue waves for a while, listening to the sound of the ocean. We also visited the Story Museum nearby, which contained sketches of how Taipei used to look compared to now. It had a small swing set in a park and we sat there talking until our shadows got longer. That evening, we went to a restaurant that my Tumblr friend recommended. It had a queue around the block and a lady was going around giving us laminated menus. We ordered the famous eel rice, as well as some tempura, and were ushered into the busy room, where we sat at a large table facing some random girls. The tea was bottomless; all we had to do was go and get it from a giant dispenser and bring the boiling hot beverage across the crowded restaurant without being knocked over. It was delicious and totally worth it. It's called Hizenya.

The next day, something happened that I still talk about a lot. We had rather lazily wandered around Taipei and had decided to visit a cat café –– I no longer remember where it was, but we then had the brilliant idea of walking back to our hostel by following the river. Seb wanted to use a bike-sharing app; I didn't. We figured it would be nice to see the scenery. I held an empty bubble tea cup in a plastic bag and waited for a trash can to appear. We walked, and walked, and talked. We took photos. We played music out loud –– everything from Hotel California to Swan Lake. We got thirstier, but there was nothing to drink. We used porta-potties. Our legs began to ache, but we couldn't stop. We could only walk. There was only forwards. When we finally got to the point where Google Maps was telling us to turn east back to Chengdu Road, there was actually a giant wall. We had to cross busy traffic and go up some stairs in order to bypass the wall; beyond it, it was rush hour and a constant, endless stream of scooter drivers blocked us from being able to cross the road. 

Arriving at Meander was bliss. We immediately rushed to the water fountain and proceeded to chug from the glass. 

sartre / gaze / other / me

haven't posted in a while! been really busy at school, a lot of hard work and a lot of socialising too. second year is definitely so much better than first year - i feel a lot more comfortable here and i have a really nice handful of friends that i meet individually and who are all cool. not to jinx anything but i think im living my best life!

for my class/essay this week on psychoanalysis and the gaze, i read sartre's "the look" chapter from his being and nothingness 1943. even before i started reading him, i had been reading summaries that mentioned him (both surveys of the idea of the gaze and a martin jay chapter about the ontology of vision in sartre & merleau-ponty back when i was doing my cézanne essay) and they all talked about how absolutely terrified sartre was of vision... he saw it as this demonic thing that made you vulnerable to pain and suffering and he saw the relationship between two people (the exchange of looks) as a constant struggle for power, a conflict... someone said it might've been because of hitler's hypnotic gaze, others because of his biography - classically freudian, they said that he had been very close to his mother for the first 12 years of his life because his father had died but when she remarried he felt enormous amounts of angst. so even before i started reading sartre i thought that maybe i would relate to him: i've found that i'm extremely, crippingly self-conscious and this self-consciousness permeates my very being. i'm always so anxious by how im seen by other people, especially 'half-strangers', people who know enough about me to recognise me / talk about me but nothing else who are in the best position to judge me.

i don't know if my state of relentless self-consciousness is because im a woman of color (specifically, an east asian woman, for whom the basis of much discrimination against me is the idea that i'm a perpetual Other, irreconcilably foreign), because i have anxiety (?), or maybe just who i am as a person which i guess would include the above two.

when i finally did read sartre i found him to be really exaggerated as well, especially in his portrayal of the battle of gazes between Me and the Other where we both try to subjugate each other as objects yet must acknowledge each other's subjectivity. like omg dude... calm down. i do think, like, maybe he grew up in an abusive household. i once read this personal story on the internet about triggers: the author's parent would come home and open the garage door to park the car. when the garage door opened it was thus a signal for the author to stop doing whatever they were doing in the living room (like watching tv) and hide and clean up everything to avoid crossing paths with the parent / angering the parent in any way. after many, many years since escaping the abusive household the author didn't live anywhere with a garage but one day heard a garage door noise on tv and that immediately triggered their fight  or flight response - they became extremely anxious and stressed and it took a long time for them to recover, just from that noise which brought back all the memories of the end of freedom and the beginning of a tense and violent atmosphere.

to sartre it is also not just the look of the Other that actives Me but anything that could suggest the possibility of being seen - e.g. any noise. his emphasis on shame, fear, and anxiety upon being seen - i think at some point he says "shame is the shame of the self" is also just so saddening to read about... it kind of feels like he might've gone through moments where he needed to hide from someone who wanted to hurt him. because of that i felt weird about identifying with him because i've never been abused or anything like that.... at the same time, sartre is doing philosophy. his goal is to prove the existence of the Other by anchoring it to Me (the self, the cartesian cogito - descartes proved the existence of Me through 'i think therefore i am' but since I have no access to anyone else's thoughts it means that I can't be sure anyone else really exists) so that there can be no Me without the Other, and also the Other is proved through the impact the Other has on Me (proving fire exists using smoke). he uses the gaze to establish that fundamental relationship between Me and the Other - Me is defined only by being seen by the Other (it would never occur to me to define myself if i was always alone - there would be no mediation between me and me). so since sartre is doing philosophy, everythign he says is meant to be universal, even if it does turn out to be informed by extremely personal experiences. of course that's what makes philosophers different from each other.

anyway, so i did kind of identify with sartre a bit. here are some quotes i noted down. from the Hazel Barnes translation, 1966.

"I see myself because somebody sees me." (260)

"The look does not carve me out in the universe. It comes to reach me at the heart of my situation and grasps me only in irresolvable relations with instruments. If I am seen as seated, I must be seen as 'seated-on-a-chair'." (263)

"Every act performed against the Other can on principle be for the Other an instrument which will serve him against me." (264) - this, about My freedoms being limited when the look (judgement) of the Other is applied, is so pessimistic and sad and dramatic. is everything really such a struggle? :(

"Thus the Me-as-object-for-myself is a Me which is not Me; that is, which does not have the characteristics of consciousness. It is a degraded consciousness; objectivation is a radical metamorphosis. Even if I could see myself clearly and distinctly as an object, what I should see would not be the adequate representation of what I am in myself and for myself (...) but the apprehension of my being-outside-myself, for the Other (...) which does not refer to myself at all." (273)
this was really compelling to me. i think it's a good way to describe how it feels to internalise racism/misogyny because you see yourself the way the white man sees you - as object both philosophically (dissociatively - not-Me) and patriarchally (sub-human, of less value) - and therefore marginalised, never the center of my own universe, object even when i am subject. it is impossible for me to see myself as truly myself because i have been overpoweringly exposed to the male/white gaze which objectifies me and turns me into passive image (laura mulvey).

im kind of bored of writign this so im just going to put in the artwork that i talked a bit about in my essay without any commentary.



Adrian Piper - Self-Portrait Exaggerating my Negroid Features (1981)

pond

I realised recently that I've let myself become an anxious mess in the past few years, and I won't get into it now because I don't really want to talk about it, but in short, I'm a chronic worrier and it's starting to get a little self-destructive.

On one of our flights, my brother had a book with him that he'd bought back in Europe, called Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. I didn't really have anything to read so while he slept I snuck about 40 pages. It's been two or three weeks since I read the beginning of that book, but I think it stayed with me... this sense of folding towels and eating breakfast and opening the windows to let the air and light in, of living alone and having this space in which thoughts swim and things are quiet and you can do laundry by yourself.

Our house has been in a state of unprecedented mess ever since we returned from China, because we've been too busy to tidy up and also in general we just have too much Stuff. Yesterday I had a breakdown because I couldn't stop thinking about the mess and the clutter, and it stressed me out to no end. Everywhere I looked there was something to be done. I had to do something right then and there. But I couldn't, because it's a family house, and I can't just go in and start sorting things out because different objects belong to different people, and my parents have their own system and plan. So I just sat there, crying and shaking and feeling really upset. A small part of it, I think, was to do with the latent feelings of peace and serenity that I got from reading Pond. Before my stress got the better of me, I was taking clothes off the drying rack and folding them, sorting them into different piles for different people. And then I went to the washing machine to get the latest load to hang up, and that's when I couldn't handle it anymore. Part of me started thinking again about the comfort of routine in Pond, and the voice of the narrator and all that. Just this idea of this little stone cottage somewhere in Ireland (I guess) in a small town, and a young woman with no apparent employment and a lot of furniture, sweeping the floor.

Pond is a really mesmerising book, it draws you in even though it's about nothing, because it's about nothing. I picked it up again even though I really should be reading The Tiger Flu. It's so calming. The narrator also has thoughts that never stops, but because she's in a space (her house) that she completely controls, and because she's in control of her life, she just lets her thoughts run wherever they want. Here's a quote I really like that I find quite relatable:

"Quite often I'm terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but that's usually my own fault for the simple reason that I'm too quick to conclude that things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go until they have turned out completely."

I think that probably sums up almost every single thing I've ever been anxious about.

the idiot

Saw this meme online and it really reminds me of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and the character of Selin. There's a key moment in the book where Svetlana tells Selin that both of them see their lives and experiences as part of a narrative about their lives, which means that other people they encounter aren't perceived as real human beings but rather as side characters - which leads Svetlana to conclude that two such people cannot truly be close, and instead such people should be close with normal people. That's why The Idiot feels like an absurd or surrealist novel even though it's entirely set in the real world - it's because of Selin's voice and how removed from reality she is, because she's constantly turning everything she sees into a narrative.

glenn greenwald

Been reading this massive New Yorker article about Glenn Greenwald, so I just want to note some stuff down. I definitely agree with what he has to say about the Trump-Russia thing, because a lot of this hysteria over Russian interference stinks of people trying to absolve the US of responsibility... like at the end of the day an overwhelming amount of Americans voted Trump, especially college-educated middle-class white people. It's like this outcry over the ICE separation of families that calls it "un-American", when based on history that's actually the most American thing there is. But both Gabriel (to whom I sent the article) and I agree that Greenwald has some pretty serious anger control issues, easily revealed in the way he talks about small family conflicts ("I wanted to drown them in the pool"). Although he's extremely intelligent and strikingly observant, he often gets angry and goes on a reckless rant that hyperbolises and generalises, which is directly broadcast to his audiences without even going through an editor, and which he is too proud to retract or modify once he has calmed down. This not only makes him come off as aggressive, confrontational, and irrational, thus discrediting the actually interesting and thought-provoking things he has to say, but also leads to misunderstanding of facts.

that state of limbo where you don't have a current read and nothing seems to satisfy you, like when you hit shuffle on a playlist and just skip every single song without any idea what you're looking for

I'm finally back home in Geneva – just landed this morning – and I've resolved to once and for all finish a good enough draft of my absurdist novel that I've been working on since 2014 so I can start thinking about agents (!!!). But I also want to keep reading. Jialong has this book called Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett that I started on the plane from Taiyuan to Beijing but I can't really touch it since it's his 'Currently Reading' right now so he kind of always has it on his person. I'm not in the mood for the political books I bought when I got super excited about being an intellectual, or my summer reading list. But none of the books at home are calling to me... I picked up To The Lighthouse and didn't feel up to reading something so difficult, so instead I took out The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which I started a while ago but felt that the narrator's voice was too intense for me at the time. Frances keeps telling me to read it though, so I should at some point. But then I saw The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (a Swiss book!) that I bought in London over a year ago because I was seeing it everywhere and stopped after a page because it was ........ so bad. I picked it up again just now, thinking that I could race through this trashy thriller and feel good about finishing such a hefty volume, but I don't know if I can do it. Maybe because I'm reading it in translation (but no professional translator can be THIS bad, right?) but it is awful, awful, insufferable. I can't even describe how bad it is. I just can't believe this was considered for the Prix Goncourt. The way it introduces exposition is so awkward and clunky, and the narration isn't immersive at all. It feels like someone summarising, in high detail, the plot of the book, instead of the book itself. I had a sharp headache in my temple earlier today that has just returned because of this book.

Should I finish it? Is the cheap thrill derived from watching a complex mystery unravel worth the deeply irritating writing style? Is there even going to be a good ending? Are these 600 pages going to be the end of me?

To the 3 people who read my blog, please advise in the comments. I'm suffering. I need something to read. Yes I could be reading Proust on my iPad, or Woolf, or The Sellout, or any of the many, many books I have. But right now please tell me yes or no - should I force my way through this drivel? Is patriotism a good reason? Maybe I should be motivated by writing an awful review after... but will I even have the strength to?

I guess first things first is to go to the Apple Store and have this rattling noise on my Macbook looked at.

a dream and the idiot

Two nights ago I had a really vivid dream that I barely remember now. I know that it involved some kind of a party in an open space, like a field, at night, with those bright white football field lights that make everything look photographic. The partygoers were people from high school, like Sam, the guy I had a crush on between from Year 8 to Year 10, who in the dream was asked if he had ever liked me back and said "for about three weeks, yeah." There was also Burke, Sam's closest friend who moved to the US after Year 10 and with whom I lost touch even though he visited often and partied with other people from the year (I never went. It wasn't my thing so I wasn't really invited). Now he has really long hair and is some kind of frat boy at UVA who hangs out with a lot of white Christian-looking people. I mainly just remember entering this sort of shed with Burke, and the interior was really this massive warehouse space. We were on the balcony and we took the metal grid stairs down, and on the ground floor there was an elevator. It was completely empty and then I think some security guard appeared and asked us to leave.

I'm reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman, whose protagonist is a Turkish-American girl in her first year studying at Harvard in the 90s, just like Batuman. Emily recommended it to me back in April, and I made a mental note to get to it at some point, but I only remembered it again after I was binge-reading Jia Tolentino articles on The New Yorker a few weeks ago and she wrote about reading the book, and about love. Suddenly I was consumed by this urgent, almost life-or-death desire to read The Idiot. I made my mom bring it to me from Geneva (my family arrived yesterday and I'm already 40% through with the book.. going way too fast as usual) and meanwhile I trawled through Batuman's New Yorker bibliography, too, hungry for anything at all from that author.

Anyway, so I'm reading The Idiot and so far I absolutely love it. I think it's going to be one of my favorite books. I love Selin's voice, this wry, bored voice that registers details and arranges thoughts in the most interesting way. She's so sharply observant, and sees through things immediately. The writing style is sparse and not that descriptive. It only and always notes the most peculiar things that make the whole story seem absurdist, like the implication that Selin got into her freshman film seminar because both she and the professor had a cold, and that she was rejected from the literature seminar because she had a cold and the professor didn't. I loved all the references to the places around Cambridge and Boston, because it reminds me of the summer I spent there in 2016. In many ways I had a very similar Harvard experience to Selin: I had about two friends, spent a lot of the time by myself doing work and thinking about things, and I took classes purely out of interest that turned out to be quite anecdotal. Now I could write about the Hungarian middle-aged man in my Advanced Narrative Non-Fiction evening class who introduced himself as Gabe but whose real name was Gabor, which is Gabriel in Hungarian, apparently, or the kid from Tokyo named Tokio, and it would be quite Selin, I think. Usually when I read books about kids my age they're leading really cool and interesting lives and have lots of friends and lots of adventures, and it makes me feel sad because I'm not having all these adventures and my life seems mundane. Selin's life is pretty dead too, and only novelisable because we're able to see into her head and read her thoughts, but I somehow find a way to be jealous of all the exercise she does (running every day, not being completely, mortifyingly incompetent at tae kwon do). And of course how easy it is for her to write a story.

I'm completely preoccupied with this idea of what my life should be like (a text: a film, a book), which is this exciting thing full of shenanigans and inside jokes, but, like Emily said, The Idiot "gives visibility to all the sad pretentious teen girls out there." I'd personally probably replace 'sad' with 'lonely', but both adjectives probably fit. The book is helping me realise that it's all really about perspective, that even the most boring events can be interesting to read if the right person is writing about them. I don't know if Batuman was like Selin in college, but if she was, I'm sure it was satisfying to go back to those monotonous, depressing days and make them into a story –– make all that nothingness that she experienced actually matter because it becomes a contribution to a wider, transcendent narrative. It's a completely different thing to people like John Green, who write these fantastical YA novels where a ton of really cool stuff happens to the self-insert protagonist, so that he can relive his nerdy youth and pretend that it was full of manic pixie dream girls.

I've become a lot more confident and accepting of myself these past few years, but something that's always remained a dark cloud has been my teen years, the ages between 12 and 15 or 16 when I kind of just hung around wearing ugly clothes, reading books, having a loud and boisterous personality, and feeling like white noise. I'm really ashamed and embarrassed about those years, partly because I was really uncool and lame (this partly had to do with my desperate crush on Sam) and partly because I resent past me for being so completely unashamed and unembarrassed and not self-conscious. I may have hated myself at the time, but I had the courage to carry around an A3 sketchbook with me all day, every day and sketch in the British Museum and explain to strangers my family tree that displayed all the relationships between the dozens of characters in the story I was writing. I can't imagine doing that now. I've pushed out most of my memories of the past by actively avoiding thinking about them and reliving them, to the point where I really don't remember much from those years. I was the kind of kid who recommended stuff to the teachers to show to the rest of the class and who sang alone in public. I wasn't afraid of anyone and I genuinely thought everybody liked me to some extent.

For a while (between the ages of 16 and 18), looking back, I could only project my own current unhappiness onto the past version of myself. I was unhappy, I did cry a lot, and I did constantly feel like there was a hand pressing against my throat making it hard for me to breathe and making my heart feel heavy –– I still feel these things –– but I was also such an interesting kid. I used to resent the fact that I'd wasted my teenage years, those wonderful years of complete lack of responsibility, when I could've loafed around, not studied, and taken drugs, but that I instead spent on Tumblr and bossing around my so-called friends. But first of all I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't been who I was, and second of all my years were only wasted if you have a very narrow view of what teenage girlhood is supposed to be, no thanks to film and TV and literature. (Although, to note, my usual response to "What would you do differently if you woke up tomorrow back in Year 7 with all of your memories?" is actually "Read all the classic literature that I haven't read yet, like Goethe and Virginia Woolf and Hegel".)

The Idiot helped me realise that things that you may feel anguished about can actually be looked at with a perspective that makes the experience productive. I can't believe that I'm posting on my very public blog on the Internet about how pathetically infatuated I was with Sam (I recently found a long poem that I wrote recording all of our significant interactions and analysing them, lamenting my unrequited love, that is so cringeworthy it made me want to kill myself when I skimmed it) but it's been a long enough time that I can view it with amusement and endearment rather than soul-crushing, agonising humiliation. My philosophy up until pretty much this very evening has been "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become what you were meant to be." (The Last Jedi (2017) dir. Rian Johnson) but that's not really a way to live healthily. So here's to writing funny fiction based on my very lame teenage experience in the future. I wonder how Princeton's treating my old crush these days.

emotions in the postmodern age

I'm reading Brideshead Revisited and I came across this passage:

Which I just want to document because it expresses this idea I've been thinking about for a while, because I read The Name of the Rose over Christmas and am now intermittently reading a few pages of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, this idea that we can't express our emotions, which belong wholly to ourselves, without alluding to existing texts and quotes because we're so saturated by other people's thoughts. I was going to write a short story about that, about a girl who's grown up reading all these really cool things about life and love and who then expects her own life to be as exciting and interesting, but it obviously isn't. She gets into a relationship when she's 17, a year after she feels she's supposed to, and she's constantly analysing it and herself and she doesn't really know the difference between what she wants and what she thinks she should have. She's supposed to break up with him after a year but then she gets pregnant and stays with him. I haven't started writing it, and probably never will, I just came up with it in an attempt to squeeze some fiction out of myself. Not only do all texts speak of other and previous texts but we also want our lives to be a text, which it obviously can't be. It also relates to young-girl stuff, like the fact that no matter what I'm doing at all times there's a second part of my mind that constantly visualises how I look in the third person, how other people (specifically men, who have the power to judge and compare in this utterly entitled and inhumane way - something that I also touched upon when I talked about Franzen's description of women in Purity) see me. My self-consciousness consumes everything I do.

Why must we see everything second-hand?

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.