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I am a patient boy. I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait.

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Dream journal: my grandparents bring home four enormous catfish that lie gasping on the floor. There’s no way they’ll survive the night (and I need them alive) unless we get them back in water. One of them goes into a bathtub. I want to put another into an oversized porcelain vase but my parents reject this idea because of the object’s value. The remaining catfish show less and less movement, their mouths slackening. We scramble to pull it together. Eventually each fish finds a temporary home in tubs or makeshift containers. There were rooms in this house that I forgot even existed.

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“Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

– James Baldwin, Another Country

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"The grammar of existence includes all the figures of language itself: simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche — so that each thing encountered in the world is actually many things, which in turn give way to many other things, depending on what these things are next to, contained by, or removed from."

– Paul Auster

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Found this amazing piece of propaganda plastered all over the Wuhan Metro, part of an ongoing nationwide campaign to encourage “civilized” behavior among the citizenry. This poster is directed at those ubiquitous cultural emissaries of the modern age – Chinese tourists – and features seven thou shalt nots. Love the style and hope this artist can do at least a commercial or two with Adult Swim.

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Bumbling around Shanghai, thinking about “displacement” as the year winds down. One word with such a swirl of implications: physical/geographical resettlement, unsettlement, removal, dispossession, supersession. Though my family has lived here for more than ten years, I am still a stranger to the city, in the city, amid the inherent strangeness of China writ large. I locate myself within and without, halfway, in-between, stuck in the middle, too much or not enough of this, that, the other thing.

I’d like to say that it doesn’t bother me as much as it once did, but the truth is I still think about it a lot, maybe now more than ever, even. Compared to a decade ago, I speak Chinese a lot more comfortably and have revived my literacy thanks to a combination of diligence, necessity, technology, relationships. But so much of it — not just language, but nationhood, society, family, self — remains beyond grasp and, to a degree, inscrutable.

Translation is laborious, always. But the act of translation is embedded in life itself. We translate thoughts into words, words into actions. We translate our ways of thinking and being into different contexts, making adjustments for the sake of others, for our own sake. We translate dreams into reality. We are constantly engaged in the act of moving “from one place or condition to another.”

Maybe displacement isn’t so bad, after all. There is freedom in displacement, potential and possibility. One can belong anywhere, everywhere. One needs nothing to have everything.

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Calico Cat by Kumagai Morikazu. My spiritual state for the remainder of the year.

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Spending a lot of time with this lady as of late, and the journey’s not over yet. I’d rather dispense with the notion of traduttore, traditore. This project feels more about revival and reclamation. I’ve been slogging away for months, mostly in my living room, but through this text I’m also floating between Africa and Spain, with echoes of Taiwan and some mythic Chinese past.

Forget betrayal. Translation is time travel and communion with the dead. Writing these stories over forty years ago, could she have imagined what lay ahead? There was her own life with its tragedies and exultations. And there’s this, now, her afterlife, partially rooted in a digital space she wouldn’t have recognized. New inflections in diverse languages. A profoundly different world that, in some measure, remains unchanged, the same foibles and cruelties and passions driving the human race.

I wonder if she ever made it to New York and what she thought of it. If not, she’ll be here soon enough, I guess.

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Unexpectedly got to attend Wong Kar-wai’s talk at MoMA this past Monday. A last minute opportunity came up that I couldn’t refuse. It didn’t really hit me until I was sitting in the audience – surrounded by cinephiles and cineastes, the room overflowing with excitement – that the evening might reawaken something in me, throw up the proverbial mirror to my own fixations and tendencies in storytelling.

After all, it was WKW’s films that first stirred something intense in my nineteen-year-old self, this exquisite ache about which I knew little at the time but would come to know too well in the years following. Wong described beauty and texture in the mundane, fated relationships and urban loneliness, lurid imaginings of past and future, ritual and remembrance. As an undergrad in film school, I was enthralled.

It’s important to trace and articulate your own aesthetic or creative lineage, the “many-gendered mothers of [your] heart,” a phrase I’ve just adopted from Dana Ward via Maggie Nelson. It’s one of those trite, overly simplistic realizations that one seizes upon while entering another phase in life and/or emerging from long hours in a therapist’s office. Simple is often good, though, as in simple-heartedness. Complexity is overrated.

Hearing Wong speak and watching many an artfully curated clip, I felt nostalgia for the nostalgia I felt many years ago through his cinema. A nostalgia for a time and place I never knew: Hong Kong in 1964, or perhaps New York City in 2016. Back then, I didn’t quite understand, but now I almost do. It’s like I’d displaced myself in time, or maybe I’d anticipated my own displacement. Now I’m here looking back at my displacement from this place, which is also, suddenly, displaced. Ain’t life funny, though. Maggie Cheung still looks great.

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"Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable."

– H.M.

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Bright Lights, Big City

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Looking out onto New York City from a bridge is “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” Jazz Age or not, Queensboro be damned, Scotty. Riding the N train over the Manhattan Bridge every day brings a small but significant pleasure to my commute. Even if that vertical thrust of skyline is a familiar vision, it never ceases to inspire. I love the way golden morning light cascades onto the East River and sets aglow office buildings by the waterfront. My favorite time to cross the bridge is sunset with all its spectacular hues of lavender and rose, the city veiled in a dewy sheen, soft as a dream. Then there are those journeys by night when darkness has already overtaken most of Manhattan. All seems somber, perhaps even pensive. I’ve figured out where to stand to avoid having to move at all for my whole ride on the N. And, even or especially by night, the view onto New York is a small thrill, a moment of pause. Herein is all that you have lived and loved, forces both tangible and unseen that have brought joy or sown sorrow. You lean against the door and feel the subway rocking gently, rhythmically, drawing you into a trance, lulling you into a satisfied stupor. More, more, more, the city whispers. More, more, more.

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When I lived in Washington Heights, I used to wake up to these ghostly whistles now and again. Sometimes they would seep into my dreams and gently tug me into consciousness with their strange sibilance. In the dead of night, it would always take a few groggy moments to determine that the sound was real, that I wasn't just imagining it or hearing echoes from a dream. We lived in a fourth floor apartment that had an expansive view of this northeast sliver of Manhattan, the twinkling lights of the Bronx just beyond. I assumed the noise came from nocturnal freight trains passing by and crossing over the Harlem River. But there was something undoubtedly eerie and sublime about it. With the city dark and quiet all around, the nighttime world seemed porous and unstable, suddenly susceptible to encroachments by other realms. Reality felt wispy and light. I loved the delicious mystery and suggestiveness of this sound. I wanted to bend reality to my will.

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Washington Heights, September 2009