Month: March 2021

I haven’t really expressed how much I miss massages, because I know how bourgie that sounds. Even the reasons why I needed to get one on a regular basis prior to the pandemic sound bourgie – all the international flights, the stress of working a white-collar job, the calcifying of my neck and shoulders that made me groan while getting up from the couch since my early thirties. These days my back hurts less, and I owe that partly to the slower pace of life, but mostly to the healers both foreign and familiar who have laid their hands on me; who risk welcoming strangers into dark rooms, who put their whole selves into the art of human contact.

My go-to spot in Washington, D.C. is a small studio in the basement of an apartment complex in Dupont Circle. That description itself alludes to why it remains a well-kept secret. Describing it to friends immediately elicits a response of how that sounds “shady,” “sketchy,” “seedy,” and other s-words that are only associated with massage businesses that are Asian. No skin off my back, I’d think to myself. More appointment slots for me!

I was convinced to venture in because of a one-star Yelp review. “It hurt so much and when I told her to stop pressing so hard, she still pressed too hard!” I immediately booked an appointment. “Don’t ever get a massage from Lai, she’s way too rough!” I requested Lai (all names here have been changed for privacy).

Lai was the eldest of the staff, the one who appeared to have corralled the rest of the team. All the workers there come from Thailand, where many of them still spend some seasons. My first time in the waiting room, they handed me a blue ballpoint pen and a sheet with a diagram of a person with palms outstretched. “Mark where it hurts,” the form said. I handed back what could’ve been a page from a Smurf coloring book.

“Let me know if I’m being too strong, okay?” Lai said, as she dug her thumb into my shoulder. I took this as a challenge to my cultural authenticity, like when a waiter asks if I want mild, spicy, or Asian-spicy. So as Lai smeared her arms down my spine, flattening entire mountain ranges with her knuckles, I swore to myself that I would never utter the words “gentler, please,” just like I would never pour Sprite into a glass of fine scotch. It was Lai who taught me how to breathe through it, a skill that I’ve learned to exercise even when not lying on my back.

After a couple of years, Lai left to run her own spot in Northern Virginia. She was replaced by Sumi, whose stature reminded me of a sequoia tree, her palms wide like a pair of ceiling fans. If Lai is a master of smoothing out knots, then Sumi is a master of turning you into one. A 90-minute appointment with Sumi is an episode of pure bliss, especially if you didn’t know that the human body can in fact be folded like a military shirt. She began her sessions by firmly pressing her hands on me from head to toe, as if encouraging each body part to reveal the pains they wouldn’t even admit to me. She would then contort my limbs like an action figure, introducing me to my own flexibility. Oh, I guess I can do that, I thought, the first time she grabbed my wrists from behind and extended her foot into my back. Her sessions would end by her whispering, “breathe,” as she inhaled deeply, cradled my head inside her elbow, and thrust her entire body sideways. I floated out of the basement those days.

I met Jana once when my lower back was killing me, and Sumi was in Thailand for the summer. Jana’s frame is petite but her grin is vast, and she graced me with it every time I walked through the door. “Oh, it’s you!” she’d exclaim, as she rushed around the counter to fill me a cup of ginger tea. Although Jana doesn’t have the muscle of Lai, or the size of Sumi, she cultivated a craftwork of her fingers that can play your spine like a grand piano. The times when I didn’t exactly know where it hurt – I just knew it hurt – Jana could sleuth out the aches, and shoo them away by maneuvering her hands like she was throwing gang signs at them. “You’re too stressed,” she’d say every time. “Work and travel,” I’d huff facedown into the pillow. She’d click her tongue like a concerned auntie before pulling out the hot stones even though I didn’t purchase the premium package. She’d end her massages by clutching my scalp and rapidly flicking her fingers from it, like she was weeding out my worries. “All better, yeah!” she’d say, more a statement than a question. Jana taught me that sometimes the hurt can’t be forced out, it must be asked politely.

My last massage was before the pandemic. Sumi was moving back to Thailand to continue her practice closer to family. “I’m only taking my last appointments with my favorite customers,” she smiled at me warmly. That last massage was the best parting hug ever.

Last week in Georgia, somebody shot up three massage studios, killing eight people. Six of them were women whose descriptions could have matched Lai, Sumi, and Jana. The way I heard the news was by calling into a work meeting and being asked, “How do we respond?”

As we strategized over Zoom, I felt my back clench up, knowing that this was a nightmare come true – that now, throughout the country and probably the world, women who have dedicated their lives to healing us have been minimized to victims, trends of violence. While news outlets interviewed the perpetrator’s parents and reminisced on his childhood stories, many failed to spell or pronounce the names of those he killed. In some cases, the victims are described in the words of the gunman – “temptations” and “addictions” – while we are hard-pressed to learn of who they truly were; healers, cultural practitioners, caregivers engaged in forms of non-Western healing that continue to be widely misperceived as petty labor, superstition, or erotic leisure. I grieve over how frequently women in the practice of massage accept appointments uncertain of whether their next client will make it their last, and how weary they must be responding to sexualized inquiries with, “No, I don’t do that,” or “Yes, I do.”

My staff left our call without an answer, but with the task to reflect, and ideally to generate a statement that can fit into an Instagram slideshow that condemns the collision of racism, sexism, disdain for service workers, and general disregard for Asian healing practices. I don’t know what the statement will be – all I really know right now is that my whole body hurts, no matter how much I’ve tried to stretch, use massage tools, and shave travel and work from my daily life.

I think I just miss massages – yes, because of the luxury of dedicating an hour and a half to being completely pampered – but more so because not having them represents what this period has evaporated from us: a deeply-felt encounter with art, a sense that what ails us can be instantaneously remedied, and the intimacy of strangers who put everything they have into freeing us from the pain we carry.

the rain in LA this past year has been a gift. like all good gifts, it is occasional and well-timed, mostly doing its business overnight so that by the time we awaken, we are greeted by a layer of pristine sheen on the ground, sunlight bouncing off of it as the clouds dissipate. i’m not a fan of surprises, so i never made friends with DC’s rain, as hard as i tried.

maybe one day i’ll appreciate those mornings when i took my bike out for a balmy commute down 15th toward the smithsonian, when suddenly thunder boomed and unleashed an instant, district-wide ice bucket challenge. i cursed the perpetually-inaccurate meteorologists as i showed up at my important meetings late, with socks soaking, scalp reeking from a helmet that had gone stale holding the water from previous storms.

sometimes i’d enter the metro station after work, excited to catch the last hour of sunshine that i had been fomo-ing from my office all day, only to resurface seven minutes later to a hurricane. i’d find a spot to stand amongst the other staffers from various departments, eyes heavy from the day, lanyards wilted over chests, waiting for the sun to come like a night bus.

it strikes me as odd that DC was chosen, with its wildly unpredictable weather, as the place for government to establish routine systems and processes. it’s as if all this bureaucracy was established in contempt of a city whose climate forces people to break out their galoshes in the middle of july. in the summer of 2013 while moving into our DC apartment, we rented a car to pick up our first nice furniture – a non-ikea dining table with a polished wood surface. i stepped out into the sweltering heat to let the guys at the store know we had arrived, but in the middle of lugging the table over to the car a torrent of rain befell us. after stuffing the soaked box into the trunk, i collapsed my drenched self into the driver’s seat and started crying hard. i don’t even know why i was moved to tears like that, it just seemed appropriate for the weather. by the time i left DC, i had curated my wardrobe with exclusively waterproof clothes.

so it seems growing up in california’s endless drought never taught me to appreciate the rain like i should. don’t get me wrong – i love walking through fields of dewy plantlife. i love the sound of droplets ricocheting off my window as i fall into a warm, cozy slumber. i miss the days of being in honolulu and singapore, where tropical thunderstorms drop in for a minute or two to spritz the day. and i love DC, even if i don’t miss the celestial uncertainty. there’s something so endearingly-DC about sitting in a meeting on a rainy day, everyone in soggy suits and wet hair, trying to keep it together and go about business as if everything is fine, even though it’s not, because in the bigger scheme of things, it actually is.

it’s spring so i’m writing again! this is the story i tell myself when i cringe at my winter dry season, which followed fall burnout, which was preceded by summer stopgivingafuck. whether the change in season is a placebo, or if my creative juices are actually photosynthesizing in strange and complex ways probably doesn’t matter, at least not for the writing itself. i already spend way too much time writing about writing.

the stories i tell myself about why i write or don’t write could fill a book, which is how i know i’m not ready to write one. i’m already too product-driven, too concerned over what people might think that i often can’t hear my own mind. this past year i’ve produced some of my favorite writing, thanks mostly to the fact that i stopped making a big deal about it. i’ve always interpreted the periods i don’t spew out a beautiful poem or vignette as a sign that my powers are fading, that i’m destined to look back at my talents like the “one that got away.” this year i learned that whatever’s trying to get away probably isn’t the one.

i also learned that there is no amount of workshops, classes, motivational memes, or prescribed regimens that can do more for a writer than what’s gained by cultivating a deeper understanding of self. in my most prolific days, i was showing up at poetry slams every week with new fire, a new notebook filled to the margins. i was generating stanzas with quadruple meanings encoded, multisyllabic rhymeschemes stacked like brick walls, 16, 24, 32 velvet-smooth bars lined in a row. i was writing as a way to learn who i was. this year i wrote to remind myself of who i’ve become.

one of the books i’ve been grazing on over the past few months is bruce lee’s tao of jeet kune do. as with all martial arts, it begins with underlining how much more important it is to defend than it is to strike. it was here that i discovered a different way of interpreting the writer’s block, as not an impediment but a defense. the best fighters recognize that most of the fight happens while in a block. to come out swinging inspires awe for only so long before they reveal themselves as empty blows.

we writers, too, can master our blocks. it’s while in a block that we can observe, feel, understand, intend. even when we’re not writing, when we’re not sure if the words will ever find us again, we’re still telling some kind of story in our head. i return to spring with a deeper appreciation for those stories, the ones that are often filled with the most epic battles with our own demons, the odysseys for self, the ones that have no language because they transcend. the stories that hit the hardest.

when lovely and i moved to LA last february, we gave ourselves a year and some change. lovely grew up here, and there’s something about settling down in the place where you’re from that doesn’t vibe with the culture of ceilingless upward mobility that so many of us have been raised to aspire for. probably the same reason i could never see myself in the bay again. “i wouldn’t even be able to afford to move back!” is typically my response – a convenient truth but not actually the reason.

i remember when i was going to put the une on the map (the une is what we called union city, a suburb that i often even need to point out to fellow californians as one of the exits that blur by when driving the 880 from oakland to san jose). “it’s where they opened one of the first jollibees in the bay,” i sometimes offer, often to just further confusion. sometimes i resort to identifying the une by referring to our neighboring towns. my go-to used to be hayward, “next to where the rock grew up!” these days, its easier to just say it’s near the tesla plant in fremont. but that’s neither here nor there.

if our time in LA was just meant to be a year and some change, tbh i don’t even know if the counting has even begun. it was a year, but was there some change? we made our last big target run just a week before the lockdown – a hybrid of nesting and hunkering down. just yesterday, we finally braved the outside world to buy new furniture – an antique chair with an elaborate wood carving and mustard velvet upholstery. we’re calling it our zoom throne – recognizing that this may be a vote of no confidence to assurances that we’ll be back to the old normal by the fourth of july. not depending on it.

not counting this first year in LA does a disservice to the city as a landscape. the fact of the matter is that i’ve spent more mornings at the beach than not, have hiked malibu state park so regularly that i recognize each tree, and have learned to navigate from venice to DTLA without the guardrails of waze. i have planted trees and watched cacti shrivel, been confounded by why some of my succulents discolor in the sun, and can recognize exactly at which hour my yard patio gets engulfed by the shade and drops the temperature ten degrees.

to say our time in LA hasn’t started yet is to claim that all of the sand, ocean, greenery, and groundedness that defined my past twelve months were only consolations for not being able to hit the club. okay that’s not fair – not just the club, but the theme parks, the concerts, the sun-coated brunches on january patios, the bbqs and kick-its, the joints passed with the countless people i know here whom i may not have seen anyway, regardless of the pandemic, but which we amicably allow to be the explanation – a convenient truth but not actually the reason.

last month, my brother commiserated over how nothing happened for the past year. he turned 30 last february – he anticipated a brave new world, but instead he got the same old thing. none of us might truly understand all the change, growth, and transformation that this past year of lockdown brought us until we actually go back out into the world. i imagine that many of the public spaces that i used to flow through with such ease will feel jagged, awkward, suffocating, compelling me to escape to the isolation and boredom i’ve learned to embrace. some of the familiar faces that have been missing from my life will feel like a breath of fresh air, other reconnections may be greeted with new incongruences, proving that so much has indeed changed.

what i do know is that i’ve lived the shit out of LA this past year – it may have been filled with emotional rollercoasters rather than actual ones, more nights with netflix than hollywood encounters, time passing on my couch rather than cars in traffic. it was an LA that only i know, and only could’ve known this past year. it was a year at home.