花样年华

I’m renaming my reading/media review to consumptions because it’s really about everything my brain has eaten and what my imagination is feeding on.

2022 was cynical but 2023 was paradoxically both a dumb-jock and theatre kid era. It felt like I didn’t have braincells to go around because I was doing so much sport and socialising every weekend, but I also met a friend who got me into plays and musicals.

As always, there’s a bunch of sci-fi here because it’s my comfort genre.

Hyperlinks indicates I've written about it in a separate post.

classic east asian cinema

All the shows in 2023 are associated with memories, which is a sweet journey as I write this post a year later.

I met a new friend at work! She was a new starter who knew someone from her hometown in China, and I knew that mutual friend who linked her up to all the Chinese people at work and then promptly jumped ship (lol). This new friend had a keen interest in theatre and film so we bonded quickly talking about Shakespeare and Wong Kar Wai. I have her to thank for my healthy creative diet because she actively follows the local theatres and lets me know what's running. I'm 100% the beneficiary here because she sometimes gets same-day rush tickets and boy!! Watching Frankenstein in center seats for $45 was such a treat!!

Early 2023, she told me that there was an indie cinema that only showed classic and cult movies, and that they were doing a Wong Kar Wai and Edward Yang run. (Certain locals might know the one, it has a hotel, a cafe and a bakery all in the same building).

I got to see 花樣年華 [In the Mood for Love], 重慶森林 [Chunking Express], and 一一 [Yi Yi] in the span of 2 months. It was an incredible experience because you are sitting with a small crowd who all wants to be there and actively has an interest in classic Asian cinema. Mass media makes me miss niche spaces, there’s an essay in me about easy consumptions and algorithms, because you can feel the difference when a fandom requires effort to get into. We were all there because we had an interest in something that was made twenty years ago, and found the one cinema that was showing it.

I suppose Edward Yang is having a resurgence, because in 2024 the city gallery ran showings for his opus (mostly on weekdays which was Discriminatory towards corporate slaves). Fun fact, all three of these movies had the same editor: William Chang.

花樣年華 [In the Mood for Love]

• Look.... I should explain that I first encountered this movie through the Every Frame a Painting video on evoking feeling through editing, and I found the video essay by Nerdwriter1 which (1) completely rewired how I viewed shot composition and (2) founded how I viewed In the Mood for Love.
• I will never forget their description of the yearning of the characters, how the film is about the suggestion of desire, roleplaying it because to embody desire is to destroy yourself. How physical distance is a paralanguage for emotional distance, to just miss each other in space and time is to miss each other emotionally, the mere hint at the possibility of a connection, but not the connection itself.
• [Context: In the mood for love follows a man and a woman (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung!!) who live in adjacent apartments and are perennially left alone by their working spouses. However, they realise their spouses are having an affair together, and in their mutual grief and loneliness, grow closer and develop feelings towards each other. However, they decide not to act on their feelings.]
• I think I love the idea of this movie, more than the movie itself. I had just encountered its traces in so many forms over the years: in cinematography essays, kpop music videos, fashion editorials, conversations with friends and art.
• It was more disjointed than I expected, and not just in the frantic scenes, also between the emotional ones. I felt like there were too many sudden cuts that disrupted the momentum of emotion, I was expecting more match cuts (either in subject or movement), seamless builds of sound, overlapping metaphors from superimposing images. Ah, I think I had recreated the movie in my mind, and the movie I watched was just not the one I expected (classic dopamine reward prediction error).
• Perhaps it's also because I draw and I photograph, and I've also walked that question of "how do I create yearning", "how do I show grief". I've thought through the ideas of in the mood for love so often, that, anything different would feel like a miscommunication.
• Anyway! There are so many things I enjoyed about that movie:
• The musical motif that repeats over certain scenes until you become conditioned to it, and laugh even before the scene plays out.
• The choice to roleplay the infidelity which hurt them!!! (“what do you think they are doing right now?" // “who made the first move?” ) So self destructive, so masochistic, so delicious. They are actively coaching each other into being their spouse (“My husband will never say that”). Nerdwriter put it brilliantly: “By coaching the other, they construct a fantasy where they control their own betrayal and infinitely delay the moment”. It is a shared delusion!!
• The aesthetic of Hong Kong apartments in the 1960s, the narrow corridors, the shared living room and kitchen (apartments are really just bedrooms in a share house), the noise of communal spaces (mahjong, gossip, cooking) - I am reminded of one of my favourite scenes in 一一 [Yi Yi / a one and a two] which was such a Look at city living. In Yi Yi, the wife is in tears because her mother is in hospital and you see her stricken face in the window with all the city lights reflected. It’s a melodramatic, somber momemt but …. then... the neighbours start arguing LOL. And it's the hysterical type of lovers argument about accusations of cheating that's full of swearwords and dirty insults. You can’t help but laugh and cry at the same time. God, that ability to harness contrast to highlight paradoxes. It will stay with me.
• And of course, the visual language, the cinematography. My eyes were peeled on every single lighting decision, every camera pan, every frame, every position. That was delightful because I've thought so often about the editorial choices in each shot because I've seen the frames on the internet over so many years (as a screenshot, redrawn in fanart, or recreated for a photograph).
• Do I even have to talk about elegant Maggie Cheung in cheongsams and high updos. The shape of her!!

重慶森林 [Chungking Express]

• Damn this was a fever dream and a half. You have to love cinema to love this because it's just good looking people doing crazy things (the pixie cut dream girl home invasion plot where she breaks into her crush's apartment to move things around would not be cute if this was set in the 21st century and the girl was not Faye Wong). I agree with Roger Erbet opinion on Chungking express, "You enjoy it because of what it says about film, not because of what it knows about life."
• It's soooo original which makes it fun and a delight to watch because I can just recognise the points that have influenced others throughout the years:
  • I recognised the blurred running/chase scene that inspired shots in the minwon bittersweet MV
  • Diner love stories! Two plots that overlap at a single place, cute lovesick policemen (my friend was there for Tony Leung and I was there for Takeshi Kaneshiro), eating canned pineapple with the expiry date of 1 May 1994, talking to inanimate objects like a soap and a towel because love made you diseased, mysterious blonde woman who run away and don't turn up again.
• Again, I'm in love with the 1990s aesthetic of pagers, friends calling up the restaurant they think you are at to get a hold of you, using other people's landlines.

一一 [a one and a two] or, [Yi Yi]

• The same friend told me about this showing but I chose to watch it with my mum for her birthday.
• If Roger Erbet saw this movie he would love it because of what it knows about life. This movie is about life, it's about everything life is about. Living in a city, living with 3 generations, first crushes, familial duty, childhood curiosity, unrequited love, human connection, capitalist profit, honesty and integrity... I can go on. This is my favourite movie of recent memory and I think about it often.
• When I wrote [once again, love]. Ester taught me the finnish word elamanmakuinen which means 'tasting like life'. I thought about this word often while watching because it was such a heartfelt portrait of a lived life, capturing both the tragic and the humourous, placing them side by side or even in the same scene to remind you how crazy life is. Relationships are complicated, time passes, people act unexpectedly. People fight, accidents happen, and life goes on and on. I try to describe my favourite scenes below but it falls so short of experience it. If it happens to be showing near you I highly recommend this movie!!
• I love the editing (and is it no surprise that the editor of Yi Yi, also did In the mood for love and Chungking Express! William Chang let me download your brain). I love especially how different scenes with different generations are placed side-by-side so that you notice the similarities and realise the timelessness of love, grief and anger (examples below!).
• Some highlights:
  • The very beginning at the wedding banquet, the young son gets bullied by a group of older girls (universal occurence). Mum gives dad a pointed look, dad dutifully deals with it.... by taking him to McDonalds LOL. The way Chang cut the scenes was SO comical, it felt like the ba-dum-tss beat of a joke.
  • Out of the lift the father runs into his first love. You immediately see the contrast between the two. He’s just an average aging dude and she’s polished corporate sexy, hanging out with American businessmen and speaking fluent English. The two of are so stiffly courteous at first, they exchange polite salutations, she leaves, and then turns, stomps back and angrily hisses at him about how he ditched her and never gave her closure AND YOU REALISE SHE HAS NEVER LET GO. But then the lift opens and their other classmate comes out and the tone completely shifts, she is over-sweet and customer-service-saccharine and next to her the father is a humble bumbling fool who doesn’t even have his business card on hand. Anyway it’s just a short hilarious scene but also a fascinating microcosm of social personas contrasting personal feelings I could write an essay like this about every scene in this movie. The way people wear a persona in public spaces but deep down they are 18 again.
  • There are so many subplots in the movie which is why it is three hours but it so good I would rewatch it again.
  • And the two plots of the daughter’s crush on her neighbour’s ex-boyfriend vs the father and his first love!!! There’s this scene of the two teenagers walking and you can see their nervous faces and their fingers twitching, the hesitation, the brief pause, and then they HOLD HANDS!! But then camera cuts to the father catching up with his first love after 30 years, reminiscing about high school, and saying “When I first held your hand, I was so sweaty.” AHHHHHH, that connection!! Between the two generations!! With one becoming a narration of the other!!!
  • And the rest of it is just absolutely crazy do I even talk about the mother being scammed (?) by monks or the single mum’s lover double-dipping with the daughter or the MURDER. It’s crazy but it still tastes like life, like a Banana Yoshimoto story or a Murakami afternoon.
• Life is beautiful Yi Yi is my favourite movie.

hwa is now a threatre kid

2023 also kick-started my play era!! 2020-2022 was such a drought... maybe I needed to acclimatise to full-time work so that my brain was relaxed enough to seek art again.

Gosh I love theatre, I didn't realise how much I missed this, or how I was always a theatre kid in a corporate monkey suit. I love the art of it, how you can look everywhere, choose where to look, how it's both dance choreography and a renaissance painting all at once. It's more than a picture because it's not just the framing which directs the eye, but the movement of the actors, the lights, the set, the gaze. This year I watched Blessed Union and Picture of Dorian Gray and both were! So ! good! (Jump forward: in 2024 I saw Holding the Man, Woman in Black, Lehman Trilogy, Rent, Frankenstein and the 2-part 7-hour monster that is the Inheritance. 2022 I just saw the Mousetrap.) My city has both large commercial theatres and community playhouses and I'm making a habit to get the yearly newsletter and check out all kinds. Only thing missing here is the musical adaption of sports anime (Japan I'm looking at you).

Blessed Union

This was a drama-comedy following a lesbian divorce and the messy breakdown of a modern family. This was running during Pride and I was recommended this play during another Pride event, the queer lit writers panel (which I've written about here). It was recommended as part of the social commentary about 'sanitised queerness', or, the maddona-fication of gays. There's this perception that, since queer people had struggled against the establishment and fought to get their rights and to get their humanity recognised, they now live perfectly happy, quaintly carefree but eternally grateful lives.

(I reflected on this idea after the writer's panel, and did think about all the queer media where the queer other was the martyr, the wounded sacrifice but morally perfect and thematically opaque. Or the queer love story where all conflict is external and the relationship breaks under the strain of the world, but at no fault of the lovers (Song of Achilles, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous). But it was easier to think of counter-examples, like Rent and Beijing Comrades, (and the theory that all Disney villains are queer-coded). But then I thought of queer representation in non-queer films and realised that statement was probably true, because the queer person was just the queer person. They were not Byronic Heros or villains with a heart of gold, they were just, the queer person.)

Blessed Union was counter-cultural in this regard, because it, for the first time, showed a lesbian divorce (context: Australia legalised gay marriage in December 2017). It was a funny comment that yes, gays can get married and fuck you, they can get divorced too.

But sure, the cultural commentary was there, but I loved it for everything else. The woman who sat next to me knew the playwright (Maeve Marsden) and told me the play was based on her own life, and the divorce of her own mothers. And I could tell, the play was richly detailed in the way some fiction falls short. Like, the LGBT of it all was! Was! Everything was a little inside joke. The son in a catholic school, the daughter in overalls and doc martens donning a fringe and a bob. The parents, one butch one femme, one of them vegetarian and the other one vegetarian out of obligation. And the references to my city, the locations, the historical marches, the music. The play was full of it.

And there was more. There was so much tension in the air because of how the dynamics were set up:

• The inequality between a parent who was a school teacher, and the other parent in a corporate job, the beginning of condescention when the relationship starts fracturing because of the income and environment inequality. How, in the absence of love, bias starts flowing in and every slight becomes an irreconcilable character flaw (this! was so fantastic to watch because you could see one of them becoming more desperate as the other one became more distant).
• Two white women parenting biracial children! The objectification point was called out in the play, like, did they want their children to be attractive or to be special? (So!! good!!) And also how the children had to live with the loss of their heritage while existing as biracial. (Aside, Delilah and Asher are such queer children names. I'm also side-eying the parent's names being Judith and Ruth, very dated, very biblical).
• The gender dynamics of a coddled, younger son who is frolicking at home and school while his family is going through a meltdown, and the high-achieving, law-student older sister trying to hold this family together by hosting dinners and making sure their mothers communicate and trying to also parent her brother and make sure he's not going to drop out of school!

Blessed Union has to be my favourite play because I am a lover of dialogue, and this has my favourite dialogue of any media, ever. It's because I know how hard it is to write dialogue, and writing arguments is three levels above that because you have characters throwing things at each other. It's fast-paced but it's also irrational and also incredibly exposed. It's how repressed feelings leap out of buried wounds, they can be talking about Christmas dinner but they're not, it's about commitment and the hurt when someone you love chooses someone else.

There's a scene where Delilah has a panic attack and I felt that. I was sobbing in the theatre because it was exactly how I used to have panic attacks during arguments with my mum. When you are overwhelmed with everything and you are trying to make someone understand, but they misunderstand and accuse you of the antithesis of what you meant, and then you are just caught in your own chest because you want to explain but you can't. That scene, when the characters talk over each other. Damn. I think I'm going to buy the script just to study the craft.

The play has only ever run once at a local theatre so :( it will be a long time before I see it again and probably impossible for international friends :(((( if you're want to know more just ask I have burned this play into my brain as a core text.

Picture of Dorian Gray

This one was also good! A co-worker recommended this but it was the last week of its run so it was sold out and the only tickets were these view-restricted seats in the back that I had to call to buy but I did it!! I walked to the theatre that same day after work to watch it by myself and it was a treat. Haha, I actually felt so educated afterwards and definitely a little queerer.

Dorian Gray is a famous novel by Oscar Wilde, where a beautiful young man looks upon his portrait, realises the transience of youth, and makes a wish to stay young and for the portrait to grow old in his stead.

But!! This Kip Williams adaption is a one-person play where the actor plays 26 characters and that person is a woman!! (I am a little proud that this play is going to the West End) There were screens on stage and some was a live feed from cameras on stage, and some were pre-recorded. So you had a camera crew tracking Oscar's expressions and it felt so meta, like this was the modern Dorian Gray in the selfie-age, the face blown up 5 times larger than life. And sometimes there were filters!! And sometimes it was through a phone that Oscar was holding and he was taking selfies. And then there were scenes where Elyn (the actress) was talking to herself dressed as different characters and it was so! Seamless but also surreal. Like the dinner party scene with one live actor and 6 tv screens. Crazzzzy.

Loose thoughts:

• Dorian Gray was so much gayer than I remember... I should reread it. I think I first read it around 11 because my mum had a copy in our China apartment from her university days and in the age before internet, I read every book in that house. I read it for the plot and absolutely did not catch Basil's obsession and possessiveness over Dorian and the pre-emptive jealousy of Lord Henry. Basil not wanting Dorian to be introduced to Lord Henry because he knew Dorian will be corrupted but also because he knew Lord Henry was more fun that him!! The little aggressions when you know you can't win!!
• Idolisation triangulations of Basil -> Dorian -> Henry!!
• Portraiture as a way to capture the soul ... mmmmm I'm thinking of Murakami's Killing Commendatore where the narrator is a portrait painter but during the course of the novel, encounters portraits that he had to 'stop'. Like the portrait of the faceless man (and the reading that the faceless man was the dark side of himself, and this was a portrait that could not be painted until the narrator confronts the darkness within him). And of Mariye a young girl with a missing father who may or may not be a man called Menshiki. The artist had to 'stop' because he knew that Menshiki would want to possess the portrait if it was completed (!!! Thinking about the metaphor there), but I'm also thinking about the potential of Mariye to grow up, and by painting the portrait you are locking down her soul. A lot of stray thoughts.

science fiction my one true love

The Unreal and the Real Vol 1 + 2 - Ursula Le Guin

A very complete collection of le Guin short stories. Most of the famous ones are in there (Ones who walk away from Omelas, Matter of Seggri, Solitude) and I read because I wanted to feel the breadth of her opus, the range over her life. I also love le Guin more for her ideas rather than her storytelling. To put it another way, I like her speculative work, where she takes a concept and thinks through the anthropology and the history of it all, then creates a story that is not quite a story, but more of an essay disguised as a tale. E.g.

• The ones who walk away from Omelas - I found this through the reference in BTS Spring Day!! Her most famous story probably and the bane of high school english students everywhere except for me. I don’t need to summarise it, you can read it online here. I’m curious to hear what tlist thinks, what would you do if you lived in Omelas? Would you walk away or stay? I would walk away, because self-sufficient happiness matters to me, and the guilt is something that would stain my life. I think this means I am not utilitarian, or a consequentialist, but I don’t align with Kantian deontology (Learning philosophy is still an unchecked box on my life list, but with Arcane in 2024, I realise that this was something I have to study if I want to write better stories. Characters embody ideas, but circumstances push the limits of their values)
• Nine Lives - one of my favourites! About the technology which allows multiple clones of the same person, mostly for the utility of labour. It’s the kind of story that opens questions on identity and relationships. Does the repetition of the self negate individuality? What is it like, to be known so well you don’t need to talk to communicate. What happens when that is lost? A story I would reread.
• The matter of Seggri - this is one actually my favourite le Guin short story. It’s a series of evolving anthropological reports about a matriarchy where men live in castles and can not work or be educated (due to a high mortality rate). Every chapter is a new generation of anthropologists so you can see the time pass for society as well. I recall this style of le Guin’s in chapter 7 of the left hand of darkness, which is probably a heavyweight of fictional gender theory. And the concept of “Resehavanar’s choice” - which is the choice to introduce a planet to the he coalition of humankind and alter the course of their future irrevocably.
• Solitude - anthropologist mum brings two kids to a new world where gender is segregated and no adult talks verbally. It’s a society of silence except for the children because of a cultural fear of ‘magic’, which I interpret as the fear of losing autonomy over their own thoughts. Persuading or distracting someone through your words was shunned as ‘magic’ — it prompted me to think about my own headspace, and how much influence I let the world have. The mother-daughter conflict was another thing I loved, the creation of an unbridgeable conflict culminating in death. I love death at lightspeed - the moment the mother left the planet, she knew that was the last time she saw her daughter because of time dilation (I will steal this trope one day). “I had not intended the silence as a message. I had only rested in it.”
• Betrayals was a story about that kind of parting. A pair of lovers in an old world, watching people leave to Hain. “All these years I love til I die are like a few minutes, an hour to them.”

I think that’s how she divided the two volumes. Most of the sci-fi, speculative stuff was in volume 2, and volume 1 was… weak. Boring and mundane (to me!). It felt like those writing exercises you would do in class when the teacher gives you a prompt. So the stories in vol 1 were exploring a slice of life, a particular feeling, or execution one idea.

• Diary of a Rose - was interesting! About a machine that visualises the brain’s thoughts but used to create a diagnosis that punishes and eradicates liberal thoughts. The idea that political philosophy being diagnosed as a psychosis is ! Very authoritarian.
• Gwilan’s Harp - was sweet, and written the style of a folk tale with sci-fi elements that were hidden from the protagonist (I love dramatic irony).
• May’s Lion I liked this (spoiler) because it was about rewriting a story to alleviate guilt. Very Atonement of it all.

I liked Volume 2 sooo much better. A few still had that one-gimmick climax, but were against an interesting sci-fi backdrop:

• Mazes - an alien invasion story from the perspective of a rat in a laboratory
• The Poacher - Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the hunter
• The Wife’s Tale - reverse werewolf
• The Wild Girls, The Fliers of Gy, The Rule of Names, Sur.

Asian Female Authors

Hotel Iris - Yoko Ogawa

Hahahaha Hotel Iris is like. Small town Young girl discovers BDSM with an older man. There’s a risk that they will get found out. He kills himself. The emotional conflict was just the dom losing control and the MC having a sub-drop spiral. The end!

(The depiction of petty jealousy was interesting to me. The man’s nephew came to visit and there was a detail of the MC being jealous that the nephew shared the man’s hands.)

Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa

I’ve written about Memory Police in a separate post (note: it is not positive!). I will check out her other novel about anterograde amnesia the housekeeper and the professor.

Heaven + All the Lovers in the Night - Mieko Kawakami

Noooooo Kawakami, I wanted to like you so bad.

Other DW users have written about Heaven (about two bullied outcasts in a Japanese high school) and All the Lovers in the Night (about the life struggles of a woman working as a proofreader). They will be much more helpful than I ever will be about Kawakami. I have yet to read Breasts and Eggs which I’ve been told is The Book to read if you want to get Kawakami. I’ve found it at the library near my mother’s house so I will borrow it next time I visit!

Why don’t I like it? Because of the speeches and internal monologues! Kawakami is super quotable and there’s many observations about the psychology of bullying or the paralysis of modern life, but it feels so heavy-handed and out-of-character. The narrative/character/dialogue doesn’t quite support the point but it is dropped out of the mouth of a teenage boy or the mind of a socially anxious woman. Like Ogawa, Kawakami has fantastic ideas but the execution doesn’t quite sail.

All the Lovers in the Night was solidly in the depression literature genre which I just wasn’t in the mood for in 2023 (more on that below with I want to die but I want to eat Tteokpokki).

Lizard - Banana Yoshimoto

<3 Yoshimoto I can trust. A collection of short stories that was a quick afternoon read in my bedroom. I enjoyed it, the way she writes is confident and immersive but the mood feels delicate. My notes on them are like: wow you really can’t summarise this story, the interiority is fantastic (e.g. Newlywed). It’s like describing Yi Yi, which is all about life. You can’t describe it, you can only live it.

How can you describe a Yoshimoto? The situations in the stories all feel absurd — a woman who, as a baby, her mother threw her into a river because of post-partum depression, a homeless guy who turns into a beautiful woman to talk with a newlywed narrator about love, a girl who went blind after witnessing her mother’s murder when she was young, conversations about bisexual sex parties, a woman in an affair worrying about the wife, someone getting married but growing up in a cult. You get it? Crazy normal stuff.

There is a common arc to these stories. The characters are holding a form of love, but they also carry baggage from their past. There’s a choice about what to do with this baggage, whether they want to carry it, adjust the weight, or drop it entirely. The facts in these stories are absurd but the conversations, the reflections, are so mundanely vulnerable that the stories just continue to resonate, even a year later.

I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki — Baek Se-hee

This book is a collection of journal entries which documents the author’s sessions with her psychiatrist over a twelve week period and her life living with depression. It went on my TBR because BTS RM recced it. I’m looking at my notes from 2023 and I want to laugh (“She needs amino acids, consistent sleep and EXERCISE.”). I do think her psychiatrist is useless and I was frustrated that she wasn’t recommended to do anything effective that could have improved her life (~ but that is not the point of the novel~).

I am aware that a few books being recommended recently have solidly fallen in this line of depression literature (Of the ones I’ve read: Notes of a Crocodile, All the Lovers in the Night, the Vegetarian). The narrator is depressed, anxious, or just sad and listless, things happen, the narrator can’t change, things fall apart, the book ends.

I just haven’t been enjoying those books as much as some mutuals — I’m trying to understand why and catch myself out for being petulant. I suspect deep down an ugly part of me thinks “I’m better than you”, and so I look down on the narrator’s internal struggles. That is not a nice feeling to have and I will meditate on it!!

Maybe I wasn’t in the right headspace for this book? I was solidly in my jock era when I read this so my notes sounded like an ethnic dad reacting to their son crying (Say no to emotional vulnerability, say yes to FIXING IT *slaps on duct tape*). The first half of 2023 was emotionally difficult and I consciously gave myself routines and activities to get out of that low. So to read a book where the narrator did nothing effective yet continued to wallow, it read like grief porn. I know the media cycle has been commercialising vulnerability and this book (to me) felt close to the line where a person chooses to be sad because they enjoy it.* It didn’t help that the novel was a structural mess sold as genuine and realistic (read: stream of consciousness unedited)

[*as always, half the book written by the author and half by the reader. I was probably unwilling to like it and did not offer much grace.]

Beijing Comrades

Holy shit I loved this book and all the little nasty humans inside it. I picked it up in the library because it had a big rainbow sticker on the spine, was clearly about Asian gays and the blurb said “a tumultuous love affair set against the sociopolitical unrest of late-eighties China”. HWA WAS SOLD.

Hahaha the political side in the blurb was just bait. Sure Lan Yu was at Tiananmen in April 1989 , but it’s a tiny portion of the novel and couple did not care about politics the way gays do now. Every other chapter they only cared about themselves and are fucking. The book is about their relationship, their violent differences, the snapshot of being gay in 1980s Beijing (but kudos to the Chinese author for posting a story explicitly about Tiananmen onto Chinese internet on 1999).

I loved the glimpse into Handong’s life, the capitalistic, egotistical businessman. The multitude of condos for different uses (and different lovers), friends going overseas to shop, the cigarette brands marking the social classes, the changing political winds and the corresponding business risks.

One detail is how clothing ties you to an identity because certain clothes were not available locally, so Handong's friends bringing back clothes after going overseas, Lanyu refusing to wear them because it makes him look Taiwanese, it's a contrast to how available things are in 2024. Even a small detail like buying rock cassettes in the university district, of course they were only available there! In 2024 I watched a League of Legends music video, followed up with a 30 minute video essay breaking down the lore and immediately bought the companion book Tales of Runeterra. All from my dining table. In the 1980s, I would have heard a song on the radio because someone chose to play it, then maybe go into the city to a game store, browsed the shelves then maybe encountered the book in the wild. But I wouldn't have known it existed. There's this sense of serendipity in the 20th Century that makes it easy to get nostalgic over.

Handong is a shitty human who make unethical decisions and bears the consequences of them — I love that. I’m sick of perfect characters making morally safe choices and having lukewarm fights about misunderstandings rather than actual fucked-ups.

In love, Handong and Lan Yu are irrational. They both cheat, they get passive aggressive, communication peaks at a C+. There’s not much to love about Handong other than the fact he deeply loves Lan Yu, and there is so much to love about Lan Yu (P.s. Lan Yu is the title of the 2001 film based off this novel!)

The plot is choppy. Some scenes feel like a fever dream or a midday telenova. The ending is hilariously unfortunate and maddeningly abrupt. But, that’s what you get for a web novel published in 1999, there’s going to be imperfections because it’s written so wildly, and I think that endears me to it even more. I suspect at one point the author graduated university, ran out of time and said “fuck it I’m done. The story ends in 2 chapters.”

Friends who are interested in Beijing Comrades, you might also like Notes of a Crocodile which is about lesbians in 1980s post-martial law Taiwan.

I read this over the course of two bus rides, the first one I started thinking of my grandma and cried, especially at the poems where Limon describes the death of her step-mother. Poetry is always so difficult to describe because it creates so much feeling, but I don't want to talk about the feeling because it is personal to me. I want to talk about the text, the craft. But poetry is about the feeling. It's a bit like talking about love, you almost destroy it when you put it into words.

My favourite poem is the Riveter:

See, our job was simple:
Keep on living. Her job was harder,
The hardest. Her job,
Her work, was to let the machine
of survival break down,
Make the factory fail:
to know this war was winless,
To know that she would singlehandedly
Destroy us all

Other poems I loved:

Play it again

How years later,

some might say that their love was not a love,

or was not the right kind of love, but rather

a sort of holding on in order to escape another

trapped fate of desert heat and parental push,

but I want to tell you, nothing was an accident.

Not their innocence or their ideals, not their

selfish need, not their dark immortal laughter,

not the small place with the roaring traffic, not

the bus rides, or riots, or carelessness and calm,

not the world that wanted them in it, that needed

their small, young faces united in kiss and weep,

not the song that surrounded them in a good fight,

that repeated, Come, Come, come out tonight.

the good fight

(you got to read this one in print because of the formatting! It’s a dialogue between two speakers)

you knew it would hurt her?
Yes and i knew there would be bodies.
Yes and I knew that I’d lose her forever.
Yes and I chose that and I chose to lose her.

How do you love?
Like a fist. Like a knife.
But I want to be more like a weed,
a small frog trembling in the air.

the whale and the water inside of it

will the idea of race fall away

if we all stop talking?

No we require the goat.

Lies about sea creatures

Sometimes, you just want
Something so hard you have to lie about it,
So you can hold it on your mouth for a minute,
How real hunger has a taste

In a Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me

But love is impossible and goes on
despite the impossible. You’re the muscle
I cut from the bone and still the bone
remembers, still it wants
the flesh back, the real thing
if only to rail against it, if only
to argue and fight, if only to miss
a solve-able absence.

+ The great blue heron of Dunbar road

One of those books that was hyped to be transformative and reassuring and impactful and so (once again) I built it up in my head to be something different than what it actually was. It is honest and personal, but because CS Lewis was an academic (and a children's author), I was expecting a level of questioning and a journey towards acceptance. Selfishly I wanted him to say that he found the word to describe it. We can be selfish readers sometimes (and that's okay). So it was a surprise at how defiant he was, and how his analysis of grief was tinged with fear for future loss.

I did enjoy this book! There were a lot of yes's and no's from me because I was interacting with it. I was seeking a certain resonance, a reflection of what I was feeling at the time. He was going through a different kind of grief and as I re-write my notes a year later, I appreciate the intensity anew.

A Grief Observed was compiled from the notebooks of CS Lewis written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. She was his only wife, and they were only married for three years at the end of Lewis' life, when he was 57 until her death from bone cancer.

I still think about what Joy Davidson meant to CS Lewis, to be a bachelor his whole life, then to experience all the love in a few short years. (And I am always curious about the friendship between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein). Tangent, in the book Joy is "H" because he first published this under a pseudonym (and then people kept recommending his own book to him hahaha)).

I will remember his battle with the emotion of loss. He had this fear of misrepresenting her, the loss of an accurate memory for a selfish image that his mind supplies for his own benefit. He is critical of the common condolence that someone will continue to live on in their memory because he does not want to fall in love with a memory, Lewis calls it "incest" (and I am thinking about that~ I keep revisiting stories where people are in love with their memory of someone as a substitute for the real thing).

He deals with a variety of emotions ancillary to the grief - the embarrassment of knowing that everyone approaches him wondering if they should say something about it. How her death feels almost indecent to talk about because he was a late lover and her adult sons (Lewis' stepsons) have known her so much longer and in different ways. And there was his own irrationality as well ("an animal fear, like a rat in a trap"), his recognition that he was using her wishes as "an instrument of domestic tyranny", a thin disguise for his own wants.

No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.

For those few years H and I feasted on love, every mode of it - solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unempathic as putting on your soft slippers"

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

The remembered voice - that can turn me, at any moment, into a whimpering child.

This was interesting - grief as an indulgence of the ego and the shame of recovery as if to recover from grief is to disprove the intensity of your love.

I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome stick-sweet pleasure in indulging it - that disgusts me.

We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on a grand scale, tragic heroes, not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved"

And at the end, the subject turned towards religion. CS Lewis was a Christian so he grapples with death as a part of the divine design. I will remember how he realises it's futile to bargain with God as a benevolent, omniscient creator ("A cruel man may be bribed, but a surgeon who believes he is doing good?"). When he talks about the reunion on the further shore, I thought about Ted Chiang's short story [Hell is the Absence of God"]: "Lord are those your real terms? Can I meet H again only if I learn to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not?". CS Lewis wants to see H again, but he can only do so if he goes to heaven, and he can only go to heaven if he is Christian, so he can't use H as a road to God.

If you like Ted Chiang's short story, Ken Liu was inspired by it and wrote Single-Bit Error:

Lifespan: why we age — and why we don’t have to - Dr Sinclair

I gave this 3/5 on Goodreads. There’s gems in there but it suffers from the academic sell-out disease where 10% of the book is actually useful information from the author’s expertise, 20% is paraphrasing other people’s work without rigour, 20% is is thinly veiled autobiographical ego-writing and the remaining 50% is philosophical padding about the future of humankind.

I got the ick because it gives off such man-splaining vibes. He is so out of his lane. Sure, if this is mass-marketed I can get why people think this book is revolutionary but for anyone with the slightest exposure to science fiction or macroeconomics or grief-writing, his ideas on life and death are trite.

I would only recommend it if you can get it for free and then still I would only rec the first 30% of the book. I do think it’s cool how we are now at the frontier of treating aging as a disease, something which can be studied and maybe even cured:

• Richard Feyman: “There’s nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.”
• Takeaway: Aging does not happen because of a breakdown in nuclear DNA - when old animals are cloned, the clone is not born old. They are born young. Therefore, aging occurs elsewhere. After two decades of research, Sinclair’s theory of aging is “information theory”: we do have systems that actively repair DNA (by sirtuins), but if they have too much information (i.e. too many tasks due to more and more damaged DNA/telomeres), the repair schedule slows down, and then gets overloaded. This was tested by breaking non-essential genome in mice, and then seeing them age faster than their peers.
• And then Dr Sinclair goes through the experiments which isolates individual factors which quicken/prevent aging (I love this part).
• tl;dr the answer to a long life is moderately stressing your body so that survival circuits are engaged, but not too much that you over-damage it. So a low-protein, low-dairy, low sugar diet is good (lowers inflammation) - with more vegetables, legumes and grains. Intermittent fasting is great, if you are always full, your body thinks times are good and gets complacent with your immune systems and epigenetic recovery. Being slightly cold or uncomfortable is also good, as well as exercise (any exercise, but High Intensity Interval Training is the best at engaging the greatest number of health-promoting genes)
• Dr Sinclair recommends exercising while cold ;_____; or sleeping without a heavy blanket ;______; (this user is experiencing difficulties)
• Anyway this area of science is a space I’m interested in so taking recs!

Miscellany

[Concert] Twice: Ready to Be

• I loved it, I love them, I loved the show. It was a 3 hour concert and they honestly WORKED. Jihyo was belting, Momo was cunting, Dahyun gave a long ment in English!! The whole stadium was screaming — the lyrics, their names. Both guys and girls dressed up so the commute there and back was so fun, you just knew who were Once.
• I made my own outfit based off the I can’t stop me MV!! I also went with a coworker and I think we were past coworkers onto the friend stream but still kinda professional so prior to the concert we made some polite apologies and toned down how much of a fan we were. Well, despite our efforts the front immediately dissipated at the first song. We both lost our shit and started SCREAMING. And then the dam burst and we screamed through the whole concert. The next day we debriefed at work and did a mutual, “tell no one” pact.
• I think we both embarassed ourselves during Go Hard when their silhouettes got backlit and they were doing the cuntiest dances. Oh dear.
• Twice did super cute spoilers in between sections where some members would do a dance from another member’s solo. As a chronically online person I spoiled myself from twitter BUT we got to see Chaeyeong twerking haha.
• Speaking of solos!! The solos!! Jeongyeon’s recorder solo in Juice, Mina’s twerking in 7 Rings, Momo’s pole dancing, Chaeyeong playing the guitar with plaits <3
• Tzuyu danced to Pop for the dance break of Ooh-Ah!! And in the ending ment Nayeon just burst out laughing going “Tzuyu is so long!”. SHE IS A LONG ONE.
• I also loved the ONCE roaming dance camera during the encore. People were throwing their heart into it (and I am preparing to practice for Seventeeen in 2025).
• I’m looking at my journal and 50% of it is just about how hot they are so I will censor myself!! I loved their outfits and aesthetics: Jihyo’s high ponytail and Chaeyoung’s pigtails!! I also want to make the shorts that Jihyo, Nayeon and Mina were wearing during the encore (the tiny ones with the ruched sides that make your ass look ************)

[Game]Witcher 3

• Top 5 favourite games! I loved the lore, the open world exploration, the lingering sense of apocalyptic dread. I got super invested in the deck-building card game Gwent and at one point of the story shot /way/ ahead of the plot just to collect the last few cards and had to scream my way out of an over-leveled bandit camp.
• I played this with a walkthrough because there are 36 possible endings about the fate of the world and the characters!! I chose the path for greatest peace ;__; but at the cost of the personal happiness of some characters.
• My favourite part of the plot was how important the father-daughter relationship was between Geralt and Ciri. Ciri is the child of the prophecy/saviour of the world/promised empress etc etc but whether or not she ‘succeeds’ depends on certain parenting decisions by Geralt throughout the story. It was so interesting to see how small things play out against the ultimate fate of the world!
• Unfortunately because it was the game and not Netflix casting I was not bitten by the Geralt of Rivia/Dandelion ship. I know the fandom is there! I can sense it lurking on my periphery.
• I want to read the books Witcher was based off!

[Web Novel] Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint

• I read all 1.3 million words before bed between January - March 2023. It’s just a novel where Things Happen and there isn’t much foreshadowing beyond the immediate future so I achieved spectacularly consistent sleep! It’s entertaining but not too scintillating as to destroy my self control.
• Definitely a piece of media where I enjoy the fandom more than the work itself. I’m well fed by one yoonhankim fanartist on twitter and the occasional renaissance masterpiece. The themes of the last few chapters lend SO WELL to epic fanworks.
• SPOILERS:

  yoonhankim up there as one of my favourite ot3s of all time for themselves as well as what they represent in the reader-writer-character trinity. I always believe that a reader gets as much out of a novel as they bring into it, so to see that played out in the reality of ORV world was mind-mending. Kim Dokja actually creating worlds to take the role of "the Oldest Dream", the Fourth Wall as a physical entity, Han Soonyoung breaking through the final subway door! I love what how ORV looked at the symbiosis between a reader and writer, how they save each other out of loneliness, the imagination of the reader creating the novel and bringing the character to life, the strength of a character to bring hope to the reader. Especially since ORV was a web novel, I couldn’t help but think of the analogy to the fic community and how much we are built by each other, and also by our idols (and our ideas of them).
• After ORV I shifted to Killer Sudoku and after that I think it was Fire Emblem: Three Houses which was horrific for my sleep.

Other Media

• A Death in Tokyo: every year the English translators drip feed one, and only one, Keigo Higashino novel. I am at their mercy.
• A fall of moondust - Arthur C, Clarke: just a short fun thing about things going wrong on the moon. I always pick up the Greats when I come across them in the library (Clarke, Philip K Dick, Robert Heinlein, Asimov).
• 方长: cute chinese mook from an international student cooking for his friends during covid.
• Spiderman: Across the Spider Verse: I will sell my soul for a good animated movie.
• The First Slam Dunk: it took 2 years for this to get a local release and I spent 2 years eating fanart on twitter and yearning. I’m so glad they took their time to make this because you can just tell how much love went into creating it. It also has a killer soundtrack — but I will always remember the silence of the finale in the cinema where you could feel the room hold its breath.
• Everything, everywhere, all at once: this is a movie that deserves to be rewatched for a hundred years!! I also need to rewatch because as I write this 2 years later without my notes I can’t remember the scene which was most poignant to me! (It was something about the portrayal of the ethnic mother vs second generation daughter conflict. And also the butt plug fight scene!)
• The life-changing magic of tidying up: I read the Marie Kondo classic while waiting at the Chinese Consulate office for 4 hours for my visa — that was singlehandedly the most terrifyingly Kafka-esque experience I’ve had in my life. It is a great book to read ahead of doing big-clean outs but my favourite takeaway was learning to have a place for everything in your house. This way you don’t have to ‘clean’, because you have the habit of putting things back in their proper place.
• Make time: self help books are either a disease or a symptom. I remember nothing from this.
• A Shot in the Dark: ( ♪ Where the heck is Saki? She’s waiting down in the lobby ♪) HAHA. Different Saki this one is the pen-name of the British dude HH Munro and I found a copy of his short stories in a secondhand bookstore. Fun sponty read!
• Chainsaw Manwatched with a friend over a series of homemade dinners after work. I remember most fondly the shots of Aki waking up, cleaning the house, and cooking breakfast. I saw it first on twitter and when I saw it again on the screen I just felt an urge to manifest housewife.
• Re museums and galleries, my favourite museum of 2023 was the advertisement museum in Tokyo! (Highly recommend for all lovers of illustration and graphic design). I also went to the state gallery and saw the Kandinsky exhibition, a private gallery of contemporary Chinese art, and the museum of intangible heritage for Cantonese Culture (which was such a Concept - to try and preserve something intangible).
• Zelda: Breath of the Wild Restarted Zelda 1 during the annual winter depression. I got up the final castle and got too stressed to finish.
• Joysound: this is the Japanese karaoke system which you can get on the Nintendo Switch if you set up a Japanese account and buy a gift card for the Japanese store (which is hard but not as hard as setting up an Indian YouTube account!). I got it to practice my Japanese reading and also because I love singing. My go to songs are:
  • First Love - Utada Hikaru
  • Marigold - Aimyon
  • Love in the Ice / Doushite - TVXQ
  • Walking with You - Novelbright
  • Anime OSTs: Brave Shine, Butterfly, Worlds End, Colors, Crossing Field, Silhouette, Can Do
• Top Spotify song for 2023 was Super (ping! no surprises)

Life Comments

• I got my first tattoos in August 2023!
• Started taking volleyball seriously the second half of 2023 and signed up for training and social scrimmages. At one point I was playing 5 times a week haha.
• Got into perfumes in August 2023 with the Le Labo city exclusive releases and the one tweet that listed the kpop idols that wore le labo … lets say my characterisation of Mingyu seismically shifted after smelling Santal 33.
  • I loved Another 13 when I first smelled it but after knowing 5 guys which wear it I can’t enjoy it anymore LOL (same as Sauvage). One friend recently bought it for himself and we all passed it around. Another friend straight up said “smells like dick” and now I can’t get that out of my head.
  • I do have a perfume post in the drafts! My favourite scent for 2023 was Le Labo’s Matcha.
• Neck pain era in September that got so bad I couldn’t sleep HAHA. Upon reflection it was because I spent a weekend practising serves so the repetitive motion lead to muscle fatigue.
• Sept-Dec was a gym rat jock era, I’m pretty sure I read zero books and lost all my brain cells. I also walked to work for the first time!
• October was my shit magnet era I had two police incidents LOL. My friend got hurt during a brawl in a club and I witnessed a knifepoint mugging the week after.
• Had a lactose intolerance scare but it’s okay I can still be a dairy queen
• I liked a guy in the second half of 2023!! We were getting to know each other and were speeding through the pre-dating stage where we were texting every day and meeting up 3+ times a week to talk. After a month I confessed and HE WAS TAKEN BY SURPRISE. Shocked speechless, didn’t know what to say, didn’t see it coming. We didn’t end up dating but I gained the insight that men have grains of rice for brain cells.

Final Comments

• 3rd time doing a media round up and I’m still finding my groove. Friends what is your process?! Tell me your ways.
• I usually journal within a month after consuming content and most of this entry is based off what I had already written — so I’m at a loss why I still have so much to say 2 years later! Perhaps given the distance, my brain is connecting the dots between each story and my life. With the perspective, I can see the eras of my interests and the themes that I keep latching on to. For example in 2022, I consumed a suite of media branching off the Netflix series Love, Death, Robots. For 2025, I want to do the circuit of Wicked (novel) - Wicked (both movies) - Wizard of Oz (novel) + Emma (Austen novel which the Popular scene was based off). Another circuit is Penelope of Sparta (Fortiche movie!) - Epic (the musical cycle) - Iliad - Odyssey + Song of Achilles/Circe (maybe). Something about consuming the source with the derivative makes my brain whirr.
• Since I do a ‘catch-all’ post, I’ve stopped collecting my media into their categories (like anime, games, books, etc) and have one masterlist. For 2025, I’ve decided to have a monthly box that catches everything I’ve consumed or latched on to. This will also include songs that I’m looping, ideas inspired by art, youtube rabbit holes, or even a routine that I kept up for a week. I’m hoping this will better capture ‘the person I was’ — I’ve written before about how terrified I am of forgetting (why I’m writing again), but I suspect that when I’m finishing my 2025 consumptions post in 2027 I’m going to have a good hard think if I’m trying to remember too much!
• Now I’m off to write my 2024 consumptions post

`

Other Writings

• My thoughts on the following have been posted separately:
  • Spuknik Sweetheart - Murakami
  • Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa (note for friends who liked it, the post contains haterisms)
  • I went to a writer’s panel as part of the local pride month. There was a segment with East Asian Queer authors that was fascinating to observe.
• media round up for 2H2022
• media round up for 1H2022
• personal: how I want to live this life (about singing competitions and quiet growth)