Author: drzzl

there’s so much that i love and miss about DC, but the weather isn’t one of them. i’m reflecting on this after spending the past month in the bay area’s inland (a confusing phrase, i know) where i let the afternoons slide by as i basked in the endless sun. returning to the LA coastline where, contrary to popular belief, most days are overcast, i found myself preparing to go into a fit about the dramatic decrease of sunshine i’d be getting.

this, i admit, is an egregious complaint, especially in these times. the fact that i’m sitting out here in my yard, typing away in shorts and a tank top, is a sign of that. if i were in DC, this morning writing session would have already been foiled by hot mugginess, relentless rain, or both. the climate might be the district’s only enduring form of bipartisanship – how the sun can burn and the clouds can pour, all within a day, all within an afternoon, all within an hour. in LA, the weather knocks before it lets itself in. the sun and clouds will engage in a game of will they / won’t they before finally settling on one side or another for the last hours before the sunset.

LA is the kind of place where you can determine the weather by stepping outside. DC is not, and july is the worst. DC is the kind of place where you bring an umbrella even if it’s 90 degrees and sunny. it’s where you’ll find a poor hill intern in a suit, on a skooter, drenched from head to toe because he thought the dry sun on k street would last until m street. newbie moves.

my newbie move happened in july 2013 – my first july in DC, and one where i was juiced to debut my first smithsonian exhibition. “a summer block party!!” i thought to myself with content. why show art in a stuffy building when we could project it in silver springs’ town square? BECAUSE CLOUDS, BITCH! replied the sky. i spent the two nights of the exhibition opening biting my nails while the clear mornings gave way to the blanket of gray, the crescendo of thunder, the breaking of lightning, and finally, the invasion of rain.

“we might have to end this,” the tech guys warned, as they explained how they could only shield the projectors from the rain in blankets for so long before they’d overheat. will they / won’t they?

the weather was one of the big incentives for moving back to california, an incentive that i huffed to myself every time i found myself biking through a surprise downpour halfway through my daily commute. we’re definitely spoiled here in california, and i’ve already become impatient when the clouds part an hour late according to the forecast, or if the sun doesn’t let out a ray as yellow as yesterday suggested it would. in those moments, i recall the times when i’d enter the DC metro on a cloudless afternoon, only to reemerge greeted by torrential rain. i recall how everyone in DC seems to be in such a hurry to get to the next thing, except for in a storm. how we would all just stand by the top of the escalator, huddled beneath the curved covering, waiting, knowing, quite confidently, that in no time at all, this too would pass.

face it. you’ll never truly be able to run from the fact that you’re a child of the suburbs. born and bred. remember high school? and how some kids barted over to logan from as far away as oakland. how or why, you don’t really know, but you recall then being the first time you heard someone claim THE TOWN and THE CITY in all caps. they held their heads up in a way that was foreign to you, except in songs. you envied how rappers would shout out new york and other metropolises you’d never been to before, how you listened intently to “california love” like pac was really going to call out union city. you proclaimed that you were going to put the une on the map, and you meant it, until college, where it was easier to say you were from sf. except when they asked you which part, and you lowered your eyes and said “it’s actually a small town 45 minutes away.” and how you made a point to say it was only 5 exits from oakland, when it was actually more like 9. you remember asian american studies, and learning about the model minority myth, and not wanting to believe.

you remember edward scissorhands, and michael moore docs, and how the scholars hadn’t yet coined ethnoburbs so you had no vocabulary to distinguish your upbringing from the kind on tv with the picket fences and synchronized lawnmowers. but you remember pre-colombine school shootings, and getting out of the way for the train to pass by while walking the railroad tracks from alvarado to walmart, and the field of gladiolas, and more asian bakeries than you could count. you remember how proud the white teachers were of the all america city award in ’99, and how proud the brown parents were, and how indifferent you were tho. you remember third grade, and winning an essay contest about your love for the american flag, the same year a sub sent you to the office because you refused to stand for the pledge, and how you’re not sure if you meant it during either of those episodes.

in middle school, you shopped for your cds at tower records in fremont hub, where there was no “rap” section, and you know that’s how you started identifying with “urban.” you know that’s most of why you spent half your time at davis trying to transfer to berkeley, and how before you even claimed your diploma you were claiming oakland. and how you made sure to point out that the overpass that divided your apartment from the best buy on hollis meant your address was not emeryville. and how when you think of those years in brooklyn you can’t help but think of rats, and when you think of those years in harlem you can’t help but think about the smell of hot garbage, and how you thought street smarts was mumbling to yourself loudly while waiting for the night train so the shadowy figures in the station wouldn’t fuck with you. you remember beijing smog, and dc sirens, and how it wasn’t even a year ago when you huffed about being done with city life before moving to venice, and how you’re more quick to call it LA. and now you’ve been at mom and dad’s house in the burbs for the past month and you’ve seen more lizards than roaches and you haven’t left the block since tuesday and you can’t front about how good it all feels right now even though you know this area code won’t ever mean shit in a song.

earlier this month lovely and i got retested, and upon getting our results immediately hightailed up the 5 to see my family in the bay. it’s the faster, “less-scenic” straight-shot route, compared to the 1, which slithers up the coastline. californians looooove to gush over the 1, due to the fact that it offers scenic views of the ocean, passes through redwood trees, and crosses quaint towns. if you ever tell them that you’re driving between LA and the bay, they will often perk up, roll their eyes to the back of their skulls, and intoxicatedly gasp, “oooh, are you going to take the 1?

fuck no i’m not taking the 1! is what i want to reply. if you’ve ever watched the first scene from john q you know why. half the commute is one-lane highways hugging the side of the mountain. every 10 minutes you’ll find yourself behind a big rig and have to make the mortal decision to either continue driving at 30 mph while everyone behind you honks, or try to pass it up and risk a head-on collision followed by a firey death plummeting down said beautiful california coastline. as the driver, you’re relegated to keeping your eyes on the road while everyone else in the car is like “omg the sunset is sooooo beautifulllllllll” while leaning over you to try to capture a shitty shot. meanwhile, dare to start your trip late enough in the day and you’re punished by having to navigate the last few hours in the pitch black forest on some ichabod crane shit. nah bruh, fuck the 1.

the 5 is actually gorgeous, especially with fresh eyes after a decade in the east coast and four months in lockdown. the 5 is often described as “boring” because it’s basically just a long stretch of highway marked every half hour by clusters of gas stations and in-n-outs. on it, you encounter big sky and the rural parts that resemble what most of california actually looks like, but that’s often forgotten in the shadows of hollywood and silicon valley. there was a point when i was living in the bay that i regularly drove to LA, and became familiar with cutting through mountains, passing fields of cherry trees, and crossing the sea of cattle. not to say that i’ve learned to love the smell of manure and cowhide baking in the sun that fills the car when i hit that point, but i’ve come to know the route so well that, when the stench started seeping through the vents, i couldn’t help but sigh gleefully: almost home.

now that we’ve been at my parents’ house for two weeks, i’ve learned that every single one of the grown-n-sexy routines that i spent all of quarantine manicuring are a ruse. in LA, i formed a habit of pre-planning gourmet meals for each night, caressing potatoes and thanking the earth while i peeled them, paying mind to dicing onions symmetrically, roasting cauliflower to a perfect brown. now, if mom doesn’t cook, adriel doesn’t eat. more than a few times, i’ve startled myself in the middle of the afternoon with a rumbling belly, rampaged the kitchen, and ended up having chocolate for lunch. are you familiar with egg taco? i’m very familiar with egg taco.

the habit that’s been hit the hardest has been my writing. admittedly, i haven’t been able to take my inner musings as seriously ever since the protests for black lives resurfaced. it hasn’t felt appropriate to, even privately, bemoan creative blocks and loud neighbors as the world has gotten heavier. i spent most of june replacing my writing with reading, learning, planning toward contributing to the whirlwind of causes in need of attention, but i very quickly began feeling all the muscular tensions, mental cloudiness, and existential dimness that ushered me into burnout last year.

visiting my family has offered more time in the day for loving conversations, but also plenty of extra time to fixate on my phone, and more reason to feel that my voice has no place unless its sentiments are anchored to a headline. one of the things i’ve missed in the weeks that i’ve been gone has been living with nico, who meets my moments of frustration or deflation with the question, “what would make you feel most free?” the answer is never “bottle shit up.” the truth is, i feel most free when i write, especially when it’s a healthy balance of writing like our lives depend on it, and fucking around with brain droppings. i must remind myself that what we’re yearning for, fighting for, isn’t just to end oppression but to sustain thriving…to be free to create, free to reflect, and even to be free to take the easy route when we feel like it.

this i know to be true: that the best days are those that begin with words. as with exercise, long stretches without writing leaves me brimming with pent-up energy, gassed up with nowhere to go, feeling unheard, unheard by my own self. this might all be an excuse for my short fuse. it’s not like i didn’t lose my temper in the spring when my mornings were consistently filled with prose and poems. but “quelled” might be a good word for this, i’ll have to look up the definition later (one of the many manifestations of the liberation i feel when i write is the cavalier use of terms whose etymologies i’m quite sure never expected someone like me to try on for size).

subdue, silence, suppress…nm, i googled it and “quell” isn’t the right word. consoled, perhaps? refuge, if refuge was a verb and it didn’t carry with it the sociopolitical context that suggests my use of it belittles someone’s lived experience? clearly, i’m caught up in what others might think. it’s been like that all my life, but has been heightened ever since the protests began, when “if you’re not talking about this then you ain’t talking about shit” sank into my chest. it’s not that i wish it were any different, these things i’m processing. to identify as a writer is to accept that my crafting of sentences, especially when made public, are supposed to mean something, that it’s not just for play. who are you to say anything right now is the mantra that nobody in particular other than myself has drilled into me each morning since the start of june. it is daunting but necessary. i’d rather the reason i avoid writing be because of this, and not for lack of time, or energy, or will, which may describe how i reflect on my past years gone dark.

maybe i’m asking too much of myself, but i believe that to strive for excellence is to reach a point where even my most careless, vapid responses to any given moment can still serve to benefit someone or something. i know that this isn’t what’s recommended of the artist’s way, that to commit to pervasive fruitfulness can appear as a clear path toward becoming withered and dry. the notion of morning pages is to just let it all out without judgement. but what if not-judging is actually the hard part? one of the main reasons i haven’t been writing as much lately is because i can’t approach the page without judgement, even if i know it’ll be private, i’ll know what i said or didn’t say that day.

i guess this is all healthy, in its own way. i was getting too bold, feeling too confident that every breath would blossom into something. but the terrain is ever-shifting. i am accepting this as a moment to find new footing.

yesterday i had the honor of moderating a convening for the collective future of north america’s chinatowns. it was presented by wing on wo, a family retailer of porcelain wares tucked in nyc chinatown. w.o.w. is one of the neighborhood’s longest-standing establishments, and whenever i visit mei, her dad gary, and their elders, i glimpse the decades of labor, dedication, and persistence that went into maintaining, among other things, a site of familiarity for my sporadic visits to new york. the store is filled with a delicate array of bowls, teacups, and fish-shaped-vases that have cycled through over time, many of which are older than me.

i left yesterday’s program thinking about my grandfather with an intensity that i haven’t afforded him since he passed away in 2015. “my gonggong used to have a photo studio in sf chinatown,” i mentioned to panelists. it felt like a stretch, a flimsy offering of relatability that was equally an admission that my intimacy with chinatown is two generations removed. i grew up in the suburbs, lost my tongue by kindergarten, and my relationship with gonggong became a syndication of me asking “lay deem ah?” (canto for wassup), him grunting without turning from the television, and me responding “gumma ho lah” (canto for that’s wassup) before my grandma interrupted with some sliced oranges that were definitely worth whatever genetic modification was needed to make them that sweet. “ho teem gah!”

as is the way that family stories go, gonggong’s chinatown studio appeared out of thin air. whatever blood, sweat, or tears may have transpired between transporting his wife and children from hong kong to america, and opening the studio of his dreams, is glossed over with “and then.” my mom was a teen when they immigrated, and gonggong was a strict and insular father, so i imagine that there aren’t many details she could divulge about how he found his community in san francisco; how he may have scouted sites throughout clay street; who may have finally hooked him up with a walk-up expansive enough to house a room for shooting, a dark room, a kitchen, and a bathroom; how he got all those cameras and lights and backdrops.

(a few christmases ago, my mom revealed that the family was actually supposed to move to chicago, but there was a long layover at sfo and gonggong was so restless that he went to chinatown. “and then we missed the flight. and then i met your dad. and then you were born.”)

i grew up with gonggong’s studio as a matter of fact, among the countless matters of fact that a kid just accepts as his reality. when i was young, it was just “get dressed up, we’re gong to san-pan-see to take pictures at gonggong’s today.” those trips are now encapsulated in mental snapshots of the bay bridge from the backseat of the family mazda with priscilla chan in the speakers; dad dropping mom off and circling the block until she hopped back in the car with a big pink paper box stacked with egg tarts; walking up the narrow stairwell lined with the familiar faces of strangers frozen in sun-faded prints; the mysterious room with red lighting and a funny smell; the dingy bathroom with the eternally-dehydrated blue bar of soap.

i don’t remember posing for any photos – those memories have been hijacked by the photos themselves, and my assumptions of what i must have been feeling based on my facial expressions on them. i do remember once entering the studio and gonggong excitedly showing me a pair of life-sized ernie and bert muppets that he hand-stitched. i had learned enough to respect my elders that i don’t think i said “doesn’t really look like them,” but i must have conveyed it by doing something like saying “oh, cool” and then walking away.

gonggong was an artist, and sometimes i tell people that my creativity was passed down from him. if that’s true, he also passed down his aching for recognition. he was what people in america would call “a photographer’s photographer,” but ended up frustratingly living the life of what people in america would call “a migrant craftsman.” in the same way that people don’t typically consider that the hands that made their dim sum might belong to an aspiring beard award winner, people went to gonggong’s studio expecting nothing more and nothing less than a finger to snap the shot. he was vexed by the fact that his artistic practice was reduced mostly to generating passport photos. be became increasingly short with customers who prioritized pricing and speed over lighting and depth. to his chagrin, people became less understanding of why it would take so long to get their photos back. and then 1-hour photo became a thing. and then his studio closed.

one of my fondest memories with gonggong is in 2010, following my first trip alone to china, where i learned to use my new canon rebel. by then, gonggong had long-abandoned his dreams as a photographer, and had even garnered some local praise for his calligraphy work. but his friends – craftsmen artists who carved stamps from stone and dipped brushes in inkwells – had mostly passed away. gonggong had stopped leaving his apartment in the richmond. he always had sunglasses on no matter how dim. who cares about the lighting anyway?

i excitedly scrolled through the tiny lcd screen to show him my shots of shanghai’s alleyways, the longsheng terraces, the mountains lining the yangzi. the photos were probably terrible, by a photographer’s standards, and i imagine his silence as either refrain from criticizing his doe-eyed grandson, or complete resignation and lack of interest. but he removed his sunglasses, so at least there’s that.

by the time i got my job at the smithsonian, he was so sick and so over with life that language was only one barrier among many to communicating my accomplishment to him. when he died two years later, i wept bitterly and wanted to proclaim that i’d fulfill his dreams of our family being recognized in the arts, but was faced with the irony of existing in a world where recognition now holds its currency on instagram. (i mean, if he thought walgreens was the death of photography…)

the story of my gonggong is about dreams that were resilient through the tribulations of immigration, but that couldn’t withstand the relentlessness of technology and convenience. he was willing to uproot from his motherland, learn a new language, stomach the bureaucracies of running a business – but when it came to bending his artistic practice for a fickle consumer base, he wouldn’t budge. in my line of work and with my digital diet, i’ve become so deep in the church of adaptation/disruption/nimbleness/pivoting that only lately i’ve begun questioning what about my own practice is unflinching, uncompromising, what won’t budge.

when i think deeply about gonggong’s last years, i realize that – as heartbreaking as it was for him – it’s not really the closing of his studio that was his last straw. it was the tragically inevitable dwindling of his circle of friends, the slow vanishing of the community that made him a part of chinatown even when he no longer had an address there. i guess he passed that down to me too – without my community, what would be worth writing for? what would be worth living for?

i also realize that he couldn’t have been much younger than me when he first stepped off the plane, introduced himself to the people of chinatown, and then became one of those people himself. which helps me understand that his dreams might have been less about artistic recognition and more about having something of substance to offer his community that he held so dear. and that it’s not too late. because some things just take a long time to develop.

somewhere | between / beyond | lockdown \ liberation | before / after | restlessness \ unrest | until / upon | dismantlement \ reparation | encompassing / aside from | calling out \ seeking within | including / except | your silence won’t protect you \ who am i to speak | not to mention / let’s not forget | don’t take up space \ you’d better show up | because / despite | be the change \ bitch i am not the one | considering / ignoring | irreconcilable differences \ bound liberations | however / and still | statements \ undertones | but / yet | disposing of black life \ capitalizing on juneteenth | not the least of which / by extension | the antonymization of black and all \ the conflation of matter and sacred | the necessity / the futility | of | centering the marginalized \ decentering the center | to support / the resistance | even against \ all odds | arundhati roy calls quarantine a portal \ angel kyodo williams calls the binary a hell | i gain \ my release | here

my inner-sandra-cisneros wants to be able to romanticize each moment my writing session in the yard is interrupted by a car stopped at the corner light with its music turnt up. there have been points where i’ve enjoyed this kind of scenario, like when i moved to brooklyn in 2009 and all the cars bumping “empire state of mind” made it feel like a summer-long welcome procession. or a couple years later in my apartment across the street from the apollo, each week “ruff ryders anthem” blared from the speakers of the actual ruff ryders motocycle gang as they descended upon harlem from yonkers. but these cars in venice???? i just need them to roll up their windows and get the fuck off my mango street.

to be fair, i’m only vexed by certain cars playing certain music. it’s LA after all, so when someone pulls up blasting “pistol grip pump” i immediately drop whatever i’m doing and run outside like the ice cream truck is coming. any snoop, dre, or pac is also just considered part of the natural sonic environment of my neighborhood: ocean breeze, cawing seagulls, gin and juice. i can even let slide whoever was at the light earlier playing norah jones’ “if i were a painter” at full volume, off the strength that you’re probably hella hard if you’re confident enough to be playing norah jones’ “if i were a painter” at full volume in 2020 or ever.

even my fondest memories in beijing are owed to the guy outside the mall every night hawking roasted yams from a wheel barrel while playing “eternal flame” on loop from his mini-PA. what i’m trying to say is, public amplification of music is all good as long as it’s a song i like.

but whenever someone here rolls up and fills the block with whatever the fuck teeniebopper DDR soundtrack nonsense they’re playing, i have to stop and ask myself the horrifying question: is this what it’s like to be one of those white people who moved near howard university and tried to make the boost mobile on the corner shut down their go-go music?? i remember balking at how aloof those people were, how their ignorant violation of d.c. protocol sparked a period of guerilla go-gos throughout d.c.. is my annoyance this morning actually a gentrifying infringement on venice’s deep cultural heritage of douchey beach techno?

when jordan davis was gunned down in jacksonville for playing his music loudly in his car, i recalled the time in 11th grade when my friend rashaud was almost yanked out of his window by an officer who stopped him for disturbing the peace in the pizzeria uno parking lot at fremont hub. what i’m trying to say is, when the music in a car is turnt up, the actual threat usually isn’t the person behind the wheel.

when i was a teenager with a crisp new driver’s license, turning the music up loud felt like a rite of passage. i remember the anticipation of queuing up my toyota previa’s cd player so that the hook to my carefully-selected track would play right when i rolled into the parking lot at logan high (some of my go-to’s were earth wind and fire’s “that’s the way of the world,” black star’s “re:definition,” jay z’s “it’s hot,” and for a brief dark period in my life, jedi mind tricks’ “genghis khan”). i felt like turning up my music was a genuine offering, a way to evangelize any poor soul out there who hadn’t been put up on mos def yet.

one of my favorite periods are my years in d.c., where the turnt up music of choice in my neighborhood was 90’s r&b slow jams. the smooth and heartfeltness of it at night was like a balm to the daytimes that were filled ubers honking at buses and the jarring motorcade sirens that came up my street everyday like clockwork. the slow jams usually came from a black lincoln or benz, parked with its headlights off, sometimes a soft neon purple glowing from inside while al b. sure lullabied the district to sleep.

and that memory reminds me of another one: a few years back on record store day, lovely and i were at som records on 14th & t, flipping through limited edition vinyl along with a bunch of other equally-pretentious music aficionados, when all of a sudden a man in his 50’s burst in and bellowed, “Y’ALL GOT ANY KEITH SWEAT CASSETTES??” everyone paused for a moment, until the owner responded that, unfortunately, they had no keith sweat cassettes in stock. when the man left, people in the store softly chuckled while returning to their self-important digging, tickled by his novel inquiry, oblivious to the fact that keith sweat cassettes would be exactly what we would all be looking for by next year.