I want to really remember these past endless weeks. I have to. We all must. Perhaps we don’t even have to try. This will just live in our stomachs for the rest of time.
I haven’t written here in a minute. The age old feeling of not knowing how to or what for, I suppose. Less articulation, and more just making space for thoughts to carry in whatever capacity they are in right now.
It is impossible to return to where we last left off. Even if it was a good place. The body wants the comfort of something familiar, but I’m pretty sure the heart wants something bolder, like—
Departure.
It took exactly two full days to fill the wardrobes with new air. The interior of old shelves are not quite as white as they used to be. Is that from the dust? Old feeling? Little remnants of strange textures colliding all at once across the years? They sit like giant checkboxes, the space in them, tick marks in themselves. Vacuous shells, with a sudden fullness in the sudden clarity. Evidence of a happening, an unfolding, an eruption.
To share a little of old things. My somewhat intense pragmatism meets often with friend and foe, nostalgia. I do wonder which of these two are natural as opposed to learned. Nostalgic, but rarely romantic. Pragmatic but totally, inescapably, smothered by feeling.
I am often nostalgic for my former selves. Plural, as I wrote in a comment somewhere on IG, because:
I always feel like my lil me’s are a lil disparate, them having moved from place to place without much time to process change— like I have to jump forward a bit with every move. So I guess it feels kinder to acknowledge those different portions of myself rather than clump us all together…
New movement always takes me back to where I I I used to be going. The reality has been that life is a constant contrasting, even conflicting, double for me. What my friends see and know of me, takes a rather different shape at home with family. I am of course, utterly myself, so this is has little to do with authenticity or even contradiction. More that what I understand as comfort in these two spaces differs greatly. Perhaps this duality is felt across all families. Sure it isn’t unique to mine. Perhaps I feel my particular contrast so profoundly because the two rarely intersect. I can, for instance, only give you a handful of occasions where friends have properly gotten to know my family. And even when they do, there is always such a chasm between us. My family’s journey, fitting so very few others’ journeys, has always struggled to find community, lasting friendship etc. Movement costs such things.
We have always been a bit of a sanctuary for one another. Not a perfect one of course, one that ultimately has broken down a bit (another one of the potential costs), but we have always ever been the only ones who know each other by this shared crossing. And this binds us, inevitably. We see how it unravels us, makes us defensive, protective, so out of sync with so many others— so out of sync with each other. We trace our smallest changes across all the various spaces we take up and we realise we are so unlike each other. We see, through the fragility and the hurt and the self-control, how it drains and nourishes us. We acknowledge the patterns we run into— people who want nothing but surface things, who want nothing to do with community, who want a romance of it all. We aren’t here long term after all. Who want to befriend us because of our movements. It makes us so awfully interesting and they want to tell their friends about us. We are their little curiosity, their peculiar little Asian family, well packaged and ready for show-and-tell. We’re called exemplary, a perfect family, a true miracle against the changing circumstances. With all of these encounters, it’s no wonder my mum and my brother and I are so close. Mum spent most of our childhood defending the shit out of us.
Don’t talk to my daughter like that. Stop treating her like that.
Like what, they’ll say.
These days, I defend her.
Social media knows little about this. Neither do our employers and our friends and our teachers and all the people we meet at every new turn. They do not know the extent of the contrast to which I go home to. They do not grasp the quiet I resign to, turn to, quite truthfully cling to when I am with my people. They do not understand why or how I disappear.
I see that there is water in the glass and mourn the temporary stillness, the ways in which it will be consumed, swayed, swept under. And yet, I admit and confront these realities easily, I must. But only after holding onto the feeling and remembering, always remembering, because I know I cannot keep it. Perhaps I fool myself with a word like ease. With the things that have somehow made it this far, I get frustrated with a parting that must come at last, but I know that this feeling and reality is a sort of reunion in itself. We’ve been here before. This particular arrival in London is in many ways a return. Truthfully, in the time it has taken for me to get here/there, I was well drawn away from the UK entirely. I went from insisting on London to wanting as little as possible to do with the UK. The lack of support I was getting was astounding. I spent at least half a year drilling other routes available to me (after the job that should’ve could’ve would’ve sent me there fell through at long last). I sent in applications to The Netherlands. They rejected me on account of my application made from France and not Hong Kong, where I should be, apparently.
Where I should be. You mean where hundreds of thousands have left the city due to political unrest and absurd ‘national security’? Not to mention their covid strategy. Where news outlets have been shut down with but a day’s notice, global headquarters pull out one by one, iconic local brands have but ceased to be, a whole movement jailed and exiled, an entire people dispersed across the world? I read and write about protest. I speak my mind. Do you think going ‘back’ is an option for me? Where I should be? There was a potential job that could have taken me to Germany. It went to someone else at the very last moment. So few of the companies want to sponsor talent, let alone talent that is so junior. They do not want to train us either. There’s just so much actual work to do, we don’t have the time, they always say. It wants as little to do with foreigners as possible. We just don’t think you have enough local knowledge, and plus, we have local talent. They don’t tell you that the industry is actually struggling financially as well and totally bamboozled by all this ethical consumption under capitalism dilemma. They don’t tell you that they desperately need a new kind of talent to help tackle DEI. So instead they make sure to let you know you are not enough.
You have to get creative in routing new roots. I needed a visa to somewhere, anywhere. I applied to Masters in The Netherlands as back-up. I got in. I showed myself that this would be such a fruitful path to go down. Any step out is never what society tells you is a step back. We’re told all sorts of rubbish about linear progress. But you already have a Masters, this would be so silly. But this has little to do with what I have on paper and everything to do with what can take me there. If we start calculating all the little steps and how wrong it feels in accordance to progress, we’ll get nowhere. With mum’s blessing and brainstorming support, I was driven by the realisation that I would not have to rely on the UK any longer. This realisation brought me joy, it gave me some semblance of hope. It pulled a weight off my shoulder. I’m so tired of pleasing a nation that deserves none of me or any of us. It speaks this language that makes it out as though we all should be begging for all that it has to offer. But you have so little to offer. It gave me courage to go elsewhere. I saw the immense opportunity of starting completely independently in a country where I know very few people (this is no longer a fear to me, this is a blessing). I would get to grow on my own terms.
And yet, a visa came through eventually from the UK.
Here we are heading for the city of great reunion in just a few weeks. This is where everyone else has also ended up. This is a good thing. This is, for so many people, the dream. This was your own plan all along. I must not seem ungrateful.
I suppose what I mean by ease is not the plainness or the effortlessness (for both of these are deceiving), but more so the through-ness. That is not a word, but: the translucency, if not total transparency, of the thing that holds the water. The fact that it must be, the trust we must give to what cannot be much dwelt upon. We must resort to little facts, even if they are but half truths. That is the ease I tell myself. Is this the infamous resilience I’m told by others to possess?
I know that this ease is trained— by the currents of my movement, by the experience I have in being let go of too easily by others as well. If you make it difficult by letting things fester, take a hold of you, then you will hurt far more than it should be able to hurt you. So you rise above it. You curate a sense of ease that only you know. You hold yourself closer to your guts. You find personal ways of digesting the tenses and the tensions. Is this the maturity they also tell me I possess? This is how movement has become such an intimate thing for me. And by intimate I mean neither good nor bad, simply close-knit. Perhaps it is an ease with priorities that I feel, for the ease is rarely the undertaking itself. I deceive myself with a mental image of things to drop: the weight of the physicality of memories, but not the words themselves, never the words. You begin to see through the things that used to hold you. The people who cannot and do not support you. They reveal themselves, to be honest. The height from which to drop or raise the body to the next place— collapse the self a little, grasp at the tentative concentric circles that form around you— but not the moment of collision, the arrival, which always gathers in delayed response. Not the grief that comes months, years later, which you realise cannot be reached for anymore. The height has changed after all.
Ease as bearability: fold as water does inside strange new shapes. I am an Aquarius after all. I take this ease extremely seriously— with a severity even, that looks at ease with little delight and truthfully, a lot of rage. But rage is a pounding acknowledgement of movement. Rage is a flooding. Maybe, to so many people around me, who think they know me, I do make it all look so easy.
When I so-called disappear, I suppose in their eyes, I really do disappear. They assume my leaving is easy. That in leaving, I let go. That I do not cherish, do not remember, do not take others seriously or sincerely. But recall what I said about jumping forward with every move. I never forget. Things just shift.
Everyone wants to know where you are headed and when they will see you there. Yet, the movement itself is sacred to me. I do not care too much for the arrival. Not the event itself anyway. That’s the snippet of the story that we all know how to celebrate too keenly. I just don’t want to make an event of myself, of our reunions. I want to see you and only you. What we find together again is nobody’s business but ours. I suppose here marks the jump forward. All that I have done in order to get here— that’s the through-ness. These are the checkboxes filling themselves. I need my full heart, where is my full heart. It is impossible to do any of this half-heartedly. I must not seem ungrateful.
Am I excited? Yes, of course. But I am also deep down dreading this for more reasons than I can dare describe. If it was up to me, I would bypass the first week or two of arrival to get to the part where I am just there. A part of things, getting on with silly errands. If you see me buying a terrible Tesco baguette, no you did not see me.
But you’re supposed to be excited, you deserve this, Jasmine. See, a word like deserve does not sit well in my stomach especially when it comes to such a nation. I deserve better than no sponsorship and terrible pay and a visa that only acknowledges me as a temporary gust of wind, maybe even a fart. It must do for now, but don’t count me in on your games. I rather think the wind and gas can be very empowering actually. I admire their disruption. I enjoy turning what others too easily deign an inconvenience and not worth looking in the eye into the very space in which I thrive. And so I will pass through, don’t mind me, and you have my word that I will not stay.
Thank you for the beautiful words and the worlds that hide inside them; they touched paths untravelled and crossroads deserving more deliberation lying deep. A memory from a little me, that had existed much less than I now have, is setting different kinds of desks around me made of books; yes books are something that I’ve always felt close to my core and hands. The desks represented different versions of the future me. Some had more books on them, others had random stuff from around the house, and others were empty. I remember looking at the desks and finding that I had to choose just one of those paths, nurture one of those future ‘mes’ and murder the others to be simultaneously unbearable and boring. Since then I’ve been able to accept that there is more than a duality inside us, but rather a multifaceted ever-changing existence. That the path we take is more than important milestones and decisions to move but that the minuscule things that surround us, the lilliputian decisions we make every day, create a sort of temporal field around us that enables us to see nothing but the very next steps in our journey. That the people we emerge our souls within, leave an inexorable impact on who we are. And at the same time, different aspects of us spark into existence and get nourished depending on who is standing next to us. Much like a gravitational system that is in constant movement because its relative masses are ever-changing. So… I’m not sure I’ve yet gotten the gist of this constant movement. But I’m pretty certain I’m no longer the person that started writing this.