Month: November 2017

My high school was so woke in the 90’s, it already offered Asian American Studies classes. I didn’t take them, because I figured the essence of my own being meant I already knew what I needed to know about my own identity. So it wasn’t until my freshman year at UC Davis that I took an Asian American History class, only because all my required courses for my computer science major were filled up. My professor was Bill Ong Hing, and within the first lecture I was hooked. By the end of that year I had entered the world of community organizing, and I eventually graduated with an Asian American Studies minor. Throughout my whole college career, I had no idea what I was going to do with these ethnic studies courses, or the library of books I had collected. It was 15 years ago when I picked up Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart for that first class that changed my life, and I feel so honored to share that moment of inspiration with the world now.

It feels amazing to come full circle with my work at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, by presenting this film adaptation of Bulosan’s book, directed by Frank Chi and featuring Hasan Minhaj, Ivy Quicho and Junot Díaz. America is in the Heart was one of my first encounters with an American history that actually included experiences I could identify with. I’m so proud of this project and I hope it introduces a whole new generation to this masterpiece.

Writing here has been such an internal tug-of-war between ego and insecurity, responsibility and guilt. What I do know is that when I don’t write, I go to bed feeling like I’m missing something. I’ve made a habit feeling this way for the years that I haven’t been regularly writing in any form (besides writing emails, which is about as silly as counting podcasts as “reading”). It’s not that I got tired of writing, or discouraged. Actually, it’s my writing that started it all – that go me teaching, traveling, politically motivated, and the reason I know most of the people who have become central to my life. The reason I stopped writing is because the life that writing gifted me got filled with so much. So writing here has been a part of my process of returning to that which makes all else possible – my writing, my family, my soul.

Whenever we try to get back into something that we used to be great at, we’re sure to hear someone utter, “it’s like riding a bike!” It’s like riding a bike is as much of a cop-out as saying that anything that’s unfamiliar tastes like chicken. So for the record, frog doesn’t taste like chicken, and writing isn’t like riding a bike. The expression comes from the fact that, if you ever knew how to ride a bike before, then even after years of not riding, your muscle-memory will kick back into hear as soon as you hop on the seat and put your fingers on the handlebars. Maybe that’s true. But what they don’t tell you is that your bike-riding skills will be equal or less than what they were when you last rode a bike, which is probably in the third grade. And back then, riding anything was thrilling, because we were still a lifetime away from driving a car. In the third grade, we didn’t have anywhere to go, so we rode for leisure, and in our invincible bodies we popped wheelies and rode down stairways with such finesse that if someone asked if we were great at riding bikes we’d say “the best!”

The problem with looking at returning to writing like returning to biking is that, like biking, the writing doesn’t age well unattended. It’s not wine (to add another poorly-placed analogy). And while I’ve spent a fair share of my life formulating phrases and sentence structures in my head, there’s something about the birthing process of splaying them out for yourself and others to see that simply can’t happen internally. I could pull the same tricks out of my hat as I did back in college, but for that I’d have to ignore the fact that I’m no longer impressed by quickly-paced multi-syllabic rhymeschemes (and neither is the rest of the world). The emotions that were raw in me back then have either been consumed or expired. Writing like my 19-year-old self would feel as inappropriate as dressing like my 19-year-old self, and while one could argue that the problem lies in the fact that my young self wasn’t writing or dressing timelessly, I’d argue back that it’s that bold short-sightedness that made my work resonate with my peers and others back then.

So now I’m laying all this out, as my mid-thirties-self, feeling pretty cruddy about it all now, but also intrigued by what this will be to me when I return to it years later. The goal for now is simply to leave something for me to return to in the first place.

This is the third time I’ve tried to reach enlightenment. The first must’ve been at some point when I was carving a space for myself in the Bay. I had just returned from college, and was reacquainting myself to that elevated Cali life. I was newly politicized, was decked out in earth tones, and may have event rocked a headwrap. I was frequenting the kinds of dimly-lit spaces where frankincense incense burned slow. I met a girl with thick, rebellious hair, who religiously used Dr. Bronners on everything and who said she could feel my energy. This was a time of lucid dreams, of atoms moving in the kind of visible manner you only really get if you’ve ever attempted astral projection. But then she broke it off, the colors turned to gray and I carried on.

The second time, I mentioned not too long ago. A woman named Sun held my hands and told me to imagine roots coming out of my feet and a beam shooting out of the top of my head. No matter that we were on the 7th floor of a hotel room in Minneapolis, or that I had a flight to catch soon and this was how I decided to try to stay up. I listened to her voice, a voice that spoke of past lives who were conspiring together to lead me through this life. I was living in New York, beginning my first relationship in five years, toiling with all the existential things that some of us describe as Saturn’s return (obvz, you can’t take the Bay out of the boy). I woke up with tears streaming down my cheeks and everything vibrating. I continued this meditation for a solid few months. But then I left New York. I lost my routine in the move.

So now, I feel pretty wack for returning to meditation during the age when #mindfulness is scattered throughout Whole Foods. I came back to meditation via an app, and now I do my 20-30 minutes with a timer on. It’s very pragmatic, logistical, and it works. It’s been almost two years that I’ve been on this path, and although this might be seen as my actual “successful” bout with meditation, when I close my eyes and let my mind go, it often gets rattled with a larger question of why I’m here in the first place. Why is meditation now a treatment instead of a moment? What am I putting pressure on myself to stay grounded in? What am I attempting to rebalance each and every morning? So much of meditation is described as “looking inward,” but I believe what made the past sessions powerful was my ability to transcend my own self, to look outward. Despite my meditation streaks and newfound ability to sit still for half an hour, a big part of me is still longing for the kind of openness and curiosity I approached my meditations with when I was younger, when life was less stable and when my spirit had more at stake. I have so much more privilege in life now than I did 5 or 10 years back, but is privilege a fair trade for soulfulness?

Last night my mom committed the horrifying act of estimating how many more times I’d see her in this life. “You visit twice a year, so if I live for 10 more years then we have 20 more times together.” This wasn’t a statement made to passive-aggressively conjure the guilt of a son. Mom and Dad have been supportive of my decade living in the East Coast in ways that defy the laws of immigrant-parent physics. She showed little resistance when I decided to live out my dream of being a New Yorker in ’09. She mustered bewildered excitement when Lovely and I moved to Beijing during China’s smoggiest winter on record, and finally stopped waiting for me to come home when I began my life in D.C. 

That was almost five years ago, so her matter-of-fact statement about us only having a handful of moments left together came from more of a pragmatic, “let’s pencil these into our calendars” sort of a reflection that has still spiraled me into a morning of existential musings and questions about whether I’m really living the life I’m supposed to be living or if I’m just chasing frivolous adventures, overly-concerned with how people are responding to my internet self while the people who truly love me wait in the wing. Of course, there are the balanced happy mediums that I’ve spent over a decade not fulfilling – calling home more often, being truly present when I do visit, taking advantage of the plethora of technologies that make it much easier to keep in touch than ever before. Sometimes I think about the era of the Pony Express and telegrams, and how terrible I am at even sliding an envelope into the mailbox down the street. Thank the heavens for the telecommunications giants for saving me from a life as a hermit.

For this holiday season, I’ll be trying to practice immaterialism by thinking less about the gift as a product but instead as a process. Ordering something for someone on Amazon has no story. The void of that is patched by gifting something way more extravagant than what’s needed or wanted, to disguise cost as rarity when it was really just a different link on the scroll-through. The gifts I appreciate most aren’t necessarily the most functional or deeply desired. They’re the ones that reflect my relationship with the gifter, that reminds me of them whenever I see it. I think by now I should accept that I no longer need that classic Christmas morning experience, tearing at a big box like Ralphie and squealing with joy when it’s that shiny thing I’ve been longing for from its window display. If I’m actually going to inch toward actual immaterialism, a decent start would be to stop participating in either end of that expectation.

The basement is a sacred place, meant primarily for two things – for storage and for safety. To shield ourselves from tornadoes and nuclear bombs, we humans carved holes in the ground, which we also use to store our old college textbooks and family photos too. I was in a basement last night. While most people here in D.C. have converted theirs into tight, dim rentals to hustle to interns spending their summer on a budget, OTHERFEELS is one in the neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant that was generously converted into a haven for musicians and their kind. The walls and ceilings are packed in with soundproof foam, string lights line the stage area, and everywhere you go someone’s sparking something. In this age of cyberwarfare and rainbow bagels, it’s nice to know that some things don’t change. Being there to catch my sis from the Bay, Hollis, was all the makings of reminiscing. 

Almost exactly 9 years ago, I was also in a basement. Then, it was in Boston, on tour with iLL-Literacy and our backing band The Hi-Lifes, who I too frequently take for granted in my memory’s eye. This jam session is one of the only captures I have of Otis Jackson Jr., the drummer iLL-Literacy toured with back then. He passed away this past week, and as I prepare to head to California to say our adieus to him, I’m reminded of how much life this man gave me. You can tell from my camerawork here how captivated I was (and still am) by his control over rhythm, the juice he put in each strike of the drum. His heartbeat. Truly, basements are sacred places. For storage and safety. Archived in the walls of some pit in the ground in Boston, probably to an unsuspecting tenant, is the radiance of this night of a decade’s past. Rest in power, OJ. 

Sunny, a Diné storyteller that I recently spent the week with in New Mexico, told me that writing one’s own story is the most important thing. That it must be done everyday. She gifted me a pen, which immediately broke in my backpack, and that became my excuse for continuing not to write. But lately I’ve been feeling like I’m without a compass, an anchor, a foundation. Whenever that happens, I think about how long it’s been since I’ve written something besides an email, and the distance from that is usually vast. It’s been almost a year since I started this blog, only to abandon it after a handful of posts. It has been a year of absolute fullness, and actually overwhelming fullness, but one that I also realize won’t be logged without me. So let’s see how this goes. 

This year has been one of establishing and dissolving routines. 

Each morning I:

• Drink a big thing of water that I boiled the night before. It’s a habit my mom got me on a year ago, and she made me do it with a specific thermos that her friends plugged her on. She says that the fancy, higher-quality canteens that you see everyone with these days are too good at trapping heat, so you’ll still burn your tongue the next morning. The cheap one leaks out just enough to flush out all the nasty. Later, I also found out that Nelson Mandela did it too (I can’t remember where I learned that and when I tried to search all I found was this, so…)
• Meditate. Okay, this is something that I’ve picked up several times in my life and dropped time and again, just like writing. But this time my streak has been for almost two years, which is amazinggggg. Each period I’ve meditated has been completely different. The time I miss the most is after my friend Sun (not to be mistaken for Sunny) held my hands in a hotel room in Minneapolis and told me that she saw all my past lives lined up behind me. After that, each night I sat in the dark in front of a candle, I’d imagine roots sprouting from the pads of my feet and light beaming from the top of my head, and within minutes I’d open my eyes to the world vibrating. That was back in 2011. Nowadays, I can’t even close my eyes for 3 minutes without thinking about whether I need to get a new to-do list app to replace my current to-do list app. But still, I try for 20 minutes a day, in the morning. My friend Nai`a recently launched a series of guided meditations which have been an awesome balance to my brain’s increasing similarity to a rabid chihuahua trapped in a small dumpster.
• Do OG Chinese ppl stretches. Like meditation, my stretches is a reminder that whenever I think I’m onto some new elevated shit, it’s something that I was actually feeling new and elevated about years ago. When I was living in New York, I biked from Brooklyn to Manhattan Chinatown every morning to do tai chi with the elders in Hester St. Playground. I was taking it hella seriously, even spending my Sunday mornings in an old ballroom studio training with a master. They’d tell me that the young guys would always come around and stay for just a few months before disappearing, and I swore that I was way more on point than those losers. Then I disappeared.  Now I’m back on it, more out of physically necessity than chasing some elevated image of myself like I was in my 20’s. Here’s how I got restarted.

• Hand pour my coffee. This is some hipster shit that I’m sure when I have kids and actual responsibilities I’ll reflect on and wonder why I spent so many precious hours of my life pouring water in slow swirls. Or maybe not. I like the idea of beginning my day with something mundane and inconvenient, but that comes out better than if it was just automated. My friend Nafisa, who doesn’t drink coffee, mentioned that alternating the direction you pour into the grinds helps stir better, so I worked that in too. On a day like this when I’m not feeling like I have a billion things to do, it feels like I’m tending to a zen garden. A pretentious, drinkable zen garden. 
• Morning poop. It’s hella necessary. Just know that if you make me be somewhere before 10am you’re disrupting my entire biology. 

Time management continues to be a struggle. In the best of mornings, included in my routine are also writing my declarations and intentions for the day, journaling, making a beat on my drum machine, and getting all this done while being an attentive husband. I’m still coming to terms with how I can anchor myself but remain flexible and not a diva when my mornings can’t be what I wish them to be. I’m also learning that these routines can’t be done as a means to an end. I lose my track whenever I do this expecting some kind of return like increased productivity or establishing the beginning of a good day. The best excuse I’ve found for following this regimen is that it’s a very noble alternative to waking up and immediately zapping my brain with the internet. For me to have agency at least in the first hour of my day and before I step into the chaos.