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. 

seoul searching: diaspora angst from a fresh angle

I just saw Seoul Searching, a 2015 film set in 1986 about kids from the Korean diaspora who are sent to a summer camp in Korea to learn more about Korean culture (basically the same as the root-seeking camps that the Chinese government does today for Sino diaspora kids that I've been to 3 times) and even though it was a bad movie I loved it so much. It was just so cute. My Letterboxd review (pasted below) says enough to be honest but I wanted to record the fact that I saw this film on my blog because I think it's really important. I'm actually quite surprised a film like this was even made. It's just a really sincere attempt to reflect the diasporic experience and it may be cheesy but it definitely spoke to me. I'd put it up there with Bend it Like Beckham as movies that are just wonderful and fun and about the diaspora. It's pretty sad that any film that even touches this subject is immediately entered into some sort of canon because there are so few of them, I guess, but I enjoyed this much more than, say, L'âme du tigre, which frankly took itself a bit too seriously and tripped over its angst. The diaspora angst in that film literally consumed the entire film whereas Seoul Searching and Bend it Like Beckham have actual plots. 

Anyway this is what I wrote on Letterboxd: 

i was gonna say "i was gonna say they shouldve ended the movie with the slo-mo fight but then we never would've seen sid and klaus dress up as each other" but i take it back because not only did the only half-black character get zero characterisation or closure and was used as just the token mixed kid / "ooo there's a half-black girl", but she was actually antagonised which is just so unfair to her - when even mike the predator got some half-assed attempt at redemption. my baby did nothing wrong!!
anyway this is a terrible movie full of stereotypes and cliches AND ALSO THE WORST BRITISH ACCENT IVE EVER SEEN LMAO HOW DID THAT GIRL GET CAST JFJDJKLFKLJDLJKS but i love it because it's so cute and earnest and sincere!!! this is diaspora angst done in a more unique and refreshing way <3

I got another message on Tumblr today from an anon who reads my blog and wanted to use the "things i like" format and it just shocks me that people actually read this like??? it's so messy and disorganised and i can barely put forth an articulated thought. thanks for bearing with me, the 3 people who view my posts <3