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[yssjj]

Music played by gentlemen who try to make their living as cigarette salesmen, and post boys, and delivery boys and messenger boys

Ben smells like cigarettes when I lean into him. “Wow, you smell so good.” This is the first date. We’re basking in the glow of some pasta we whipped up and watching something on TV.

“Thank you!” I’m leaning against him fully at this point and he’s been lightly teasing me every time I go for body contact. “Hello,” when I pop up around him to “check on the pasta.” It makes me feel a little silly and wobbly.

“Hi,” he says now, this sweet, sweet smile on his face when I look up at him from my slight lean against him. He tastes like cigarettes, too, when I kiss him. His kisses are like pressing your face against a soft comforter. “You’re so attractive.” His voice breathes out those words. I’m rippling. It's been a single date and he’s looking at me with that soft shiny eyed smile and I’m thinking about buying tickets for the play so we can go see that a month from now so I can secure a ticket to hear his voice again.

Here’s a trick: you can open your eyes when you’re kissing to peek at the other person’s face and feel a little more special when you get to witness the moment they’re completely into you, or at least into kissing you. His eyes are closed and I feel warm all over.

He shows me how to smoke and I try my first cigarette with him, and he’s marveling at how it’s a first I’m sharing with him, and even though I’m not sentimental about firsts or lasts I can’t help but make it a little special too.

-

My brother and I are in Korea, it’s the summer after my freshman year, and we’re Americans in Seoul, soaking in the local culture, soft invisible particulates of tobacco smoke snowing lightly on us, carried by the wind. We watch a cloud of gray smoke rise into the air above the stone-paved corner of the park, both of us in awe of the casual consumption of dark tar cancerous growths sticky coughs by such a large group of random individuals.

To say something, I offer a conclusion: “I guess that makes sense, a post-lunch time smoke break.” Total culture shock for the both of us, American-made puritans. Is it because of our health values? Or maybe it’s because we’re more scared of the idea of the taboo? Would it have been the same if it were just people drinking? I don’t know how to feel about the fact that it smells sweet and good, but the brain automatically links the dark tar cancer smoke gray air and I watch the smoke in the air replenish itself, getting thicker and thinner and flowing in between.

“That’s so crazy. Isn’t that crazy?” My brother shook his head.

Korea smells like cigarettes and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and exhaust and wet concrete. It smells like breathing in car smoke and ventilation air. When I’m little and my brother and I imagine that our home is really in Korea, even though we’ve lived in America almost our entire lives, we go and catch the smell in America behind certain apartment buildings where it’s dim and the outgasses cling to the brick walls and asphalt ground, sticking to the pores in the cool darkness.

My dad is busy at work until 6pm, at which point he’ll probably go shut himself outside to smoke and then shut himself inside to work more. But my brother and I both count the time down anyway, silently counting the number of smoke clouds we see outside as we wander around on the large sidewalk blocks and metro stations, as lunch passes into late lunch into supper into early dinner.

-

He lights his cigarette by hunching over it, flicking his lighter on with one hand and cupping around the cigarette end with the other. Do you mind if I smoke in here? It’s your car, Ben. I don’t mind. I think of the way Al Pacino would say that as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, diplomacy, quiet politeness, words coming out like he’s sighing in monotone. I don’t mind. Does he want me to say that I do mind? I’m never sure what I should say. That question only comes up because I am in love with the way he holds the cigarette in his mouth and the cigarette end bobs up and down. What does he think he looks like when he’s smoking?

I’m clinging to his arm while he’s driving us to a bar. “You smell so good.” It’s automatic. I can’t stop myself from saying it. I watch the smoke whip itself into a cloud around his open mouth.

“I do need my arm to drive.” I let go of his arm. “And I think,” he says, “that what you said is probably Freudian.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? I look at his face to try to figure out the undercurrent of emotion in that statement, but I can’t see anything in his half smile overexposed by the sun glaring through the car window.

-

I’ve never actually seen him do it, but I’ve always known that my dad smokes. His apologetic explanation always follows the smell itself, but it was always a sweet smell when he picked me up.

My mom explained to me after he had gone and left that he would smoke near the dimly lit “basketball court” (asphalt with a single crooked basketball hoop) attached to the cul-de-sac we lived on by a set of large stairs made with mulch and square wooden frames, where I once felt my six-year-old feet unstoppably smush the unending flood of wooly bear caterpillars.

I will never see him as he walks up the stairs covered in black goop. I can only imagine the image through my mom’s voice, that he would go all the way over there to smoke because he didn’t want to do it near us. Also, she said as if it was an aside, also, our next door neighbor wouldn’t let him smoke near her house.

-

Why smoking? Smoking is opulent. It’s bad for you in every way with very little reward. There is some utility to smoking. Smoking calms you down, according to Ben. That would be in line with his depression. It wakes you up too. It’s an upper (also according to Ben). Also in line with his depression if we consider the idea of self medication. It seems a little nonsensical to smoke weed and then a cigarette, the way Ben does it, since it seems to negate the intentional slowness of the former. Or, another nonsensical combo, alcohol and cigarettes. But he says that antidepressants don’t work for him so he just makes do with what he can (which is a surprising statement from a psychology major, but hey, what do I know about cigarettes and drinking five beers a day and medication resistant depression, when my depression played nice to the first medication I was put on).

Also, it looks cool. I think most people smoke cigarettes because they think it looks cool. I think that at least Ben smokes partially because he thinks it looks cool. Men smoke. In Casino, after Robert De Niro explodes (really, before he explodes, if we want to get into storyline chronology), he lights his cigarette by taking out his lighter and flicking it open, holding the flame right up to the cigarette. We’re watching Casino together after Ben showed me his newly acquired VCR copy. I curl up on the corner of his sofa and listen to the VCR squeak. The beer is making me feel warm so I watch the silhouette of Robert De Niro’s cute pink suit (did they really wear those back in the day?) get into his car and explode. He flies through the air.

“No no no, for your first time watching it you have to be able to see all the details.” Ben grabs the remote and flips through his TV and breathlessly we’re on HDMI 2 we’re on the new TV interface that’s somehow connected to wifi we’re on youtube and he’s rented a copy of Casino, without asking me to pay and it’s playing and I try to say something about how I can pay him back but he’s watching the movie so I turn to watch it too.

I can now see the buttons on Robert De Niro’s pastel pink suit, the embossed details of his nice car that he climbs into. He explodes again. He flies through the air. He turns around before all of that happens in his reality within the screen and takes out his Zippo lighter and flicks it open and puts the flame to the end of his cigarette. He takes his cigarette out of his mouth and smoke pours out like fog flowing over a creek.

Ben thinks that’s hard as fuck. I can’t say that I don’t think so too.

-

The staircase was glowing faintly. I tiptoed down and saw my dad dimly lit by the tv through the grates of the staircase railing. I can’t smell him from over here.

“What are you doing up?” He was eating the snacks we had bought at Hmart. I didn’t know that he actually was the one eating all of those. My mom had said it and I thought of it as a mythology. I didn’t know that my dad ate snacks in general.

“I can’t sleep.” I looked at my dad through the grates of the staircase and imagined myself on the sofa.

“You should go back upstairs and try again.”

I went back up the stairs. The room next to mine, my brother’s, is silent.

-

In the opening of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano smokes a fat cigar on his way down the familiar looking highways of New Jersey. The highways look exactly as they do in Virginia on a rainy day when you’re somewhere that looks like the kind of miserable Annandale, which has successfully dodged development since the 80s after the first wave of post-Korean War immigrants, maybe trying to keep that feel of an older Korea that still smells like exhaust and concrete rather than the something shinier now.

Ben’s making me watch The Sopranos because he wants to watch it. When the opening plays, Ben bops his head back and forth and bounces with the beat. I imagine that he learned this in his local Pittsburgh band days in high school, where he was introduced to cocaine. His smile is this soft thing.

Bwa oo wa oo wa, I mimic the saxophone interjecting in. His smile is this soft thing, self-satisfied, sweetly happy. I can smell the sweet smell of cigarettes lingering on him from across the room.

-

“In high school I used to dig through ashtrays to find enough cigarettes to smoke.” The orange tip of Ben’s cigarette flickered with his oxygen intake. I wanted to kiss him. Maybe rather that I wanted him to want to kiss me so I just stood there, watching his cigarette flicker in the dark. He looked into the street. I imagined the high school Ben digging through the ashtray across the street in front of a fluorescent laundromat. I’m in high school and I’m seventeen years old, snapping rubber bands against my wrist because of fucking AP tests, of all things, what have I lived through that’s “real.” I think about how if Ben and I had met in high school we would be unrecognizable to each other. I feel stupid and small for thinking he would want to kiss me.

When he finished his cigarette he threw the butt into the road. Fluorescent orange circle hitting the ground and popping soundlessly. The dash of bright orange against the darkness made me smile so hard that he looked at me and asked me if I was against his littering. I shook my head no in what I hoped was a cute manner. We walk back into the bar I’m pretending to enjoy being at so I can stay next to him.

Later, two weeks after Ben stopped responding to my texts, I wrote:

I'm not talking about the good or bad of the action,

I'm just talking about the arc a lit cigarette makes in the dark

an orange arc that dashes itself against the dark asphalt smashing into a million little stars.

-

My brother and I, most of our conversations happen passively, as if we breathed in and what came out happened to be words, since we were next to each other anyway. Never much further than that. The real version of my brother is hidden behind the perfect invisible barrier, an uncrossable ocean of privacy. Maybe he’s more comfortable this way?

We’re in the car in the two front seats. In the car, he’ll pull something up on the aux and ask me if I’d ever heard of it before. It’s MF DOOM. “I like his production,” I’ll say, knowing that I won’t be able to pull the criticism even though it’s what I’ve hated the most about my mom, her constant criticism about the music I’d show her, “but his lyrics aren’t great.” I wonder if that hurts him. I don’t know why I can’t just not say it. But the criticism comes out like carbon dioxide, the unstoppable consequence of pulling in breath.

“I like Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics,” I say. I imagine everyone else who has listened to Kendrick Lamar before my ripe age of 21 and I feel stupid, again. I wonder how many of his friends at Brown know so much more about music than I know or ever will know.

“I just can’t get used to his voice,” he says.

“No, I get that, but you know the one that goes I got I got I got royalty got loyalty inside my DNA.”

“DNA,” he responds.

“That makes sense,” I say, feeling stupid again. “I like that one. You know the one that’s about being alright in the end? I like how his voice sounds in that one. You get used to it. He talks poetry, you know?”

I wonder what my brother’s inherited inner critic is saying about me and what I’ve said. Poetry. Who do I think I am?

-

Brisk cold. Bracing cold. I think about the feel of each cold temperature as I go out to meet the morning on my way into school and the night on my way out. The morning colds are often brisk in Pittsburgh compared to how they feel in Maryland. But sometimes the yellow sun is cold in the face of a bracing cold.

The night colds are usually bracing. Had I always felt this cold in the winter? Ben said that, that stupid fucking mimetic phrase that comes out of my mouth habitually, Ben said that his favorite days are cold winter days, smoking in snow fields.

I walk into the dark today and feel the bracing cold. Bitter cold. I take out my third cigarette out of the yellow pack and fail to light it three times in a row, the wind is blowing so hard. The cigarette lights and then goes out again. Another click click click now facing away from the wind and the cherry stays in this time. Ben said it was called a cherry. Cherry sounds bad and a little slimy. It’s orange, anyway. The cigarette does nothing to warm me up and it instead makes my hands start hurting with cold in the bracing and bitter cold of the nighttime. The dark makes my hands feel more miserable. What a fucking liar Ben is. Nothing good about cigarettes in the cold and I smoke only half of it before it pisses me off and I put it out on the ground, crouching, smushing the butt into the asphalt and then getting up and stepping on it for good measure. I pick it back up and put the half cigarette in my pocket.

-

The image of Ben cupping his hand around the end of his cigarette suddenly released itself and floated away like a balloon going to touch the sky. I still watch movies and think about what he might have said about the camera angle and split diopter shots because everything he said in those moments were true and pure and from somewhere deep inside of him. But the Ben who threw me onto the bed and called me gorgeous and kissed the back of my neck, the Ben who couldn’t stop repeating how attractive I was to him, the Ben who texted me if he could give me a ride to my friend’s place just because he wanted to see me, that Ben flattened.

Most of the men I hook up with put on some sort of pleasant character that they think I or a general someone will like. Just projections of what they think is a character that’s realer or truer than they can be. It’s polite of them, I guess. Is it like if I have something to offer them, they feel obligated to be nice to me? It’s almost like sales, to lie and swim slow circles around the eventual wake of the waves. Maybe that’s what being a boy is, constant image projection. Those boys and their images blot out of my mind, but I say blot out like it’s something I do consciously, when it’s more like they leave my house and a wet fog has dampened the lines that they left in my house and their marks will fade away with the water evaporating in the morning sunlight. I wonder what my brother would think if he knew I did these things he would disapprove of, like hooking up with guys with this kind of fake exterior and smoking cigarettes, what a shitty third parent I turned out to be.

Why would you lie about being into someone? Because you weren’t lying but the attraction was just brutally short, because for him it’s not about meeting someone you actually like, it’s about having power over someone else in a small window of time, because he wanted to believe it.

More and more my dad fades from my field of view too, fading from the day that I smelled the stale cigarette smoke from his polo shirt in Korea, meeting my brother and I during my 4th grade, his 3rd grade summer visit, a surprise arrival, both my brother and I knowing that the consequences of his appearance would be a disappearance from the rest of our lives. Now all I see of him is images on Youtube and TV, images that are just surface projections of him, the banking institute professor, the PhD in economics he earned in the US that ruined him so much that he had to run from the US as a whole (according to my mom, he’s never said that to me). Does he ever think of my brother when he makes these videos? Imagine the boy who asked my dad all of these questions about his job in economics and going to graduate school and what kind of jobs there are, my dad seeing this boy for the first time in four years because he refuses to visit us in the US, so this boy traveled miles and miles and spent thousands of dollars for his tickets and mine. Does he actually think about the boy who I watched over and who watched over me when we flew internationally for the first time, a 3rd and 4th grader trying to handle passports and tickets and baggage all by themselves, dealing with a stranger grandma trying to convert us to Christianity, both of us maybe more scared for each other’s lives than for our own…

-

“Your dad smells bad, right?” My dad picks me up, all of me in a single armful. I shook my head no and felt his stubble on my cheeks. He had gotten me chocolate covered strawberries, my favorite. The blunt hairs felt like a million pencil leads. It was itchy. The smell was sweet. I wished I could handle the itchiness for a little longer but I wiggled and he pulled away.

-

One of my favorite things to do is to just sit behind my brother while he’s doing whatever on his computer, watching Youtube videos on the hottest restaurants in New York City (where he goes whenever he can), reading about expensive watches he’ll never ever let me buy for him regardless of my earning power, playing video games. I sit behind him, a couple feet of empty space separating us. He doesn’t turn around.

“What are you playing?”

“Just ARAM. Just something casual.”

“With who?”

“Brian and Jason.”

“How are they doing?”

“Good.”

That’s all I know to ask. I wish I knew what to ask more, but maybe this is what I do best for him. Sitting behind him and watching silently, like how dads do on the images I see on the internet. Giving their silent audience and hoping that their son can feel the warm sweet smell of someone watching over him for the brief moment they can.

[yssjj]

you and me and you

Let me admit here that we never really understood each other. I don’t think I knew very much about you at all. But even so, there was an intensity about the way we both tried to look through each others’ eyes. Most of the light particles we catch off of each other go through straight air, straight through people we meet without hitting anything interesting. Every once in a while, though, with me and you, we’d hit something solid in the center of each other. It was, as Rutherford said when he found the atomic nucleus through a photon hitting it, having expected nothing where the nucleus was, nothing there at all, “as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”

Here are some images of us that I’ve begun to collage together –  We were in the same major and we were both Korean, a connection I may have gotten too artistic about. You’ve got to understand, for me, being Korean was a special thing, a thing only a handful of people in Maryland were. We both look Korean too in that glossy way - but maybe it’s just the hair. Maybe it’s just that we both look polished and self conscious in an appropriately Korean way, or maybe it’s the way that we both saw the homeland just enough to grasp onto the small things that would keep us Korean in America. Or maybe that both of our parents were well off, so we both had permed hair, understated but nicely cut shirts and pants. Maybe just the hair.

We first talked after a couple of our classes had passed by, ending up in the materials lounge to ostensibly work on homework. By the second sentence you were (jokingly) threatening to piss on me and neither of us could keep a straight enough face to do much of anything except gasp for air.

With that first interaction, we had already started a little private dance where we both understood the unsaid rules of loud personalities, of charisma, of projecting beyond yourself. We could layer jokes upon jokes. You would take on bits as personas, becoming at one moment the absurdist romantic [ES4] that decided love based on strict values (the perfect girlfriend, you would claim: Korean, 5’3”, in a classy major but with the old money to back it up), then an abstraction of a woman (batting your eyelashes, yelping in faux disgust, flirtatious meowing), then a needy yearning friend (clinging to a mutual friend and begging him to go drinking with you that very night, that you were sooo lonely, come on).

I would try to match you, but I think the best I could do was play along. The point of these exercises, of course, is that you can express yourself without exposing any real truths about yourself. Not knowing this point, I wasn’t quite sure what I was trying to be or what I was supposed to be. In this way, I didn’t have a strong philosophy behind my characters, so you probably found my personas unoriginal or predictable, as if I was trying to write poetry with idioms I picked up from others rather than arranging words myself. 

Then this game collapsed, and we started a new game in each other’s heads, both trying to spiritually exorcize each other. I know I laughed a lot at you to my other friends because of the paradoxical senses of the I-don’t-understand-why-you-did-that and the es muss sein of it all. 

Note 1: I asked you about a mutual friend who you’re always ragging on. I love this mutual friend because I think he’s smart and finishes everything early. And he asks me to check homework with him, even though I’m always scrambling to finish things by the last minute. I feel honored to be graced by his kindness, and also a little smug, because this means that he thinks I’m smart enough to check homework with. You seem dismissive about the intelligence I’m crediting him with, which I note to interrogate you about later.

Later that month you call me drunk and I seize the moment to investigate. I ask you why you’re always ragging on him, insisting that he’s not as smart as I make him out to be. You snap at me that I don’t understand your relationship with him, that they’re closer friends than I’ll be with him, and you hang up. I look across the room to my roommate, who has played witness to the entire conversation.

The next day I approach you in a circle of mutual friends. You don’t respond to me. The circle of friends are politely ignoring the fact that you refuse to look at me. This is unbearable and I leave.

A divorce, if we admit that we tend towards melodrama. But that implies that we’re putting it on as an act. Even though we acted this out together, none of our motivations were hyperbolic; every moment of hot hatred was real for me, absorbed completely by the way you met me with complete silence after that single disagreement. That silence hung in my head. And the way you looked at me in that first and second slices of time, and the single moments that stand in the air now between us, implied to me that it was and is real for you too.

Our friends were mutual, but to me it felt like you dominated in that regime. You get Friday, Saturday, Sunday all day, as long as the parties would go on and the Valorant lobbies would stay filled. I had the charisma to swoop and peck at them during the school days, the quiet moments dotted between and during classes. It pissed me off that your friends let you stew in silence without comment. Did it piss you off that they hung out with me anyway? We drew in the borders of our society, completely arbitrarily and without communication, two kids with crayons that kept their heads towards the ground as the shadows moved across the expanse of the paper covered in red and blue lines. In this way life went on exactly the same for us, just with equal partitions.

The ability to see through each other revealed things that we didn’t know that we hid. A mini-anecdote – we were walking out of class, when you said, like it was an aside: “There’s not that many people here who would impress me. It’s not like high school.” Did you register the surprise in my eyes? I tried to keep it like you had acted, like you had said nothing at all.

I mean, I agreed to some extent– I knew classmates I respected greatly and would never bet on winning against, whatever that meant, since I never put that competition into practice. It was something I daydreamed about like regular people daydream about becoming famous. But it wasn’t the same as high school, where I was unbearably outmatched beyond any spectrum of time with local celebrities. Why the comparison in the first place? Maybe this line of thinking came from our similar backgrounds which emphasized a certain intensity, more concerned about winning than anything really difficult or important, like having a job, making enough money to buy food for your siblings. Soft people from cushy backgrounds making up brutal games out of ennui. Maybe those games were put upon us by our backgrounds in Korea or here. In Korea the need to struggle against something and keep thrashing forwards (to where?) remains strong even after the war. Or maybe we can look at our experiences here, back in our hometowns. The quiet contempt in the voices of white teachers who would never compliment you – you couldn’t just be perfect, you had to be beyond extraordinary to beat the mild successes of white students. So we would compete.

But beyond the theory, let’s go back to the moment with you and me, where I was rereading your pride as arrogance, because I wasn’t sure if you had the right to say that nobody here impressed you. You were constantly sleepy from staying up to do homework, and despite that, you’d be copying my answers the moment before class not because you struggled with the homework, but because you were too busy with other things That’s not fair of me, really, to throw you under this line when I exist in the exact same way, a small bubble that rises up within me thinking that maybe I am different than other people, that I understand things more deeply than others. Understand you more deeply than you do.

Here I am, talking at you in the self-centeredness of writing, creating a new history of you and me without the democracy of discussion. But I’m just trying to collapse this world of infinite answers into a small one to model my point of view. I’m trying to tell you how I honestly felt because my honest feelings are conflagrations, subjective spontaneous combustions around the objective. But even if my feelings create an inaccurate history, that fiction will become a history to you and me and our two separate narratives on this brief, evil connection between the two of us.

Another mini-anecdote: I call my dad, thirteen time zones away. I have a plan in mind to move conversation; I subtly bring up a TV show that I had seen screenshotted on an old iPhone 4 he had left me, nestled between pictures of birthdays and pajamas. Maybe a sort of connection could be made, since I had just finished watching the entire thing. But he didn’t recognize the show. The story I had created around that picture was fiction for the sake of trying to understand it. A photograph in time with no historical purpose beyond my creative input.

Note 2: We’re walking down the Pittsburgh sidewalks that are blue in the shadows to complement the sodium orange lights. We haven’t talked in a couple months. We’re at a shared classmate’s 21st birthday party, and I am pleasantly drunk, which is only partly counteracting the depression. You start to head out, and I decide to make a diplomatic move to concede self to self, offering to walk with you back.

It’s nighttime as we walk back, and it’s briskly cold, warm for December. I have my hands in my pockets in the coat I’ve worn (and fit in) since middle school, holding the coat loosely closed in the middle through those pockets. I’ve forgotten my sweatshirt at the party and won’t realize it until tomorrow morning. I am feeling an unearned sense of optimism that comes with seven or so shots. I ask you if we’re cool or not, and you answer that we are not, and that actually, you think I’m a bad person.

Now I am feeling a little melodramatic and sober. “Remember what you did to my friend? I don’t really want to talk to you at all.” What you’re referring to happened a year ago; I assumed your friend was hitting on me and decided that was unacceptable enough for me to flake on him, which admittedly wasn’t very nice of me and I do and did regret that. But that didn’t seem to be an issue until now, even before the icing out. But maybe it’s something that’s been festering for a while, something that was acceptable until I continued to ripple and warp unpleasantly and you got sick of it for once and for all. I think about running into traffic and getting hit by a bus to make you miserable, to try to earn some sympathy from you and make you feel bad about being a jerk, but I’ve played this game on both sides before and the best move is to be silent and walk away.

I’m walking down that path now, in early September, listening to Dzinorabedo. Hugh Masekela says: “When the young men are recruited from the countryside of South Africa to come and work in the gold mines of Johannesburg, in the packed trains (dreams?) that carry them to the mines, or rather, from the country to the mines, they usually sing many songs, reminiscing of times of old.” I’m in middle school. I’m in an Uber to the Chicago aquarium with my mom and my brother, and the radio is playing Hugh Masekela. “This is one such song that speaks of the times of our forefathers when the sky was the roof and the ground was the floor. Things were much less complicated.” My mom is insisting that I was too old for the aquarium and that we really shouldn’t be even bothering to go, that I wouldn’t enjoy it. I am watching the clear water outside of the car windows, trying not to burst.

“Things were much simpler back then.” My mom says to the taxi driver, in Korea now. I’m in high school. She’s talking about an older Korea that wasn’t so expensive, didn’t have so much hustle in the quick style Korea has today, a Korea I could hold in the back of my mind, by thinking of those classic Korean ballads, trot songs, these weird mixes between jazz and pop and enka and the blues about lost children, lost parents, lost loves. Songs for grandparents to cry over in concerts played on TV that I would watch while my brother and I were left alone in Korea as kids, my dad at work, my mom at home past an ocean and an entire continent, regardless of the direction you took to get back there.

One night in sophomore year, desperate for plans to go out no matter what, making a little karaoke night, sneaking in shots of terrible burning cinnamon candle fireball in our pockets, I was the only one who really was enjoying myself at all, I think, since I had really made these plans for myself, what my mom always criticized me for, making plans all for myself and never considering what other people wanted to do. All I wanted to do was sing trot, and I was watching the other kids who were watching me a little closer whenever I hit a note a little too strong and didn’t quite get it right. Childishly thinking of elementary school memories when I thought that my singing was fairly decent, really, but none of the other girls thought so, they paid attention to our class queen instead with her mock Mariah Carey ornamentation. That childish sense of lack… Wishing, as I’ve made it habitual, that everyone would finally turn to me and give me the acceptance (what did that look like? what did I want, really?) that I would daydream about…

But you, with this light in your eyes like you really meant it, you said to me, “Your voice is really made for these old-style songs, Seoyoung.” That was something new that you had told me about myself, something nobody had said before, something that reflected off of that something solid inside me which still rings in me when I sing that “I’ll believe you, that you’re only in love with me, only if you promise this to me…”

[yssjj]

Fifty Shades of Grey: actually very good

The common criticism leveled at romance novels is that it’s the easy fantasy of women. I want to break down this critique by looking at Fifty Shades of Grey, which I had the pleasure of watching last week during our Big Straw movie night. In popular critique, Fifty Shades of Grey was a notable movie for women. It was especially considered so because men didn’t understand what women liked about it, but seemingly were also able to say that women would like a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey. When I described what I found about the plot so fascinating, my friend noted that it sounded like the kind of thing women would want, which is interesting because both of us are women. Does that mean we both implicitly understand the pull of the story, even though both of us are able to create distance from parts of the fantasy at the same time? Or does it mean that we’re both different from other women, the women that this is supposed to be a fantasy for?

I almost like to think of romance like a hermit crab essay, where we’re co-opting the conventions of the genre to tell a story within its “rules.” This creates a sort of fantastical nature to the story at hand because we expect things to be a little unrealistic – we are, after all, acknowledging to some extent that this is just a simulacrum of reality. We make our story with these tropes and rules because we want to focus on the intricacies of romance between people. While I’ve never been a fan of genre writing in general, I’ve been trying to challenge myself to see if any of my critiques of the genre are actually true. Is it true that tropes are lazy? Or can they be used as a tool for something more?

Fifty Shades of Grey is interesting because it has widespread appeal despite dealing with a topic that is seemingly impossible to talk about frankly - sex. It also talks about romance and the way romance is intertwined with sex. How many other rom-coms do you see good, enjoyable sex as an important part of a relationship? Sex is one of the most vulnerable things you can do with another person.

And in Fifty Shades of Grey, while sex is an important part of the fantasy, the narrative challenges us by making the fantasy also stand for many different ideas: consent, kindness, revenge, spite, repression.

Anastasia is supposed to be this clueless, infantile girl who knows nothing and is brought to sexual fruition into womanhood by Christian Grey. She’s an English Literature major with no ideas for what jobs she wants to go into, fresh out of undergraduate, entering the real world for the first time in her life. Christian rushes to go save her at a party where he tells her that she’s drinking too much, and she takes the moment to faint into his arms like a blushing bride. She is, also, literally a virgin. 

However, their romance starts on equal ground. There’s not much difference between their two power positions because their flirting relies on implicit consent via attraction. The chemistry is crazy in the first thirty minutes of the movie. It had me blushing and shit. It’s an absolute masterclass in rizz. And rizz only works if both people are willing to play the flirting game!

But when Christian and Anastasia first have sex, their romance is tilted from equality, opposing figures, to the traditionalist idea of the nurturing male figure in a relationship and the naive female figure who needs guidance into learning about this adult world. Think submission to your husband in the evangelical Christian worldview, the post-WWII housewife who gives up her job to learn how to guide her own children under the husband who replaces the father figure. Christian is already trying to dominate their relationship, before he asks Anastasia to sign a sex contract (an actual thing that happens in the movie, please stay with me, I know it sounds ridiculous and it is).

Christian then begins to attempt to take control of the rest of Anastasia’s life. When she tells him that she’s not interested in what the sex contract outlines after researching what BDSM actually is, he finds her in her new house, somehow gets in, and then seduces her to convince her to continue looking at the contract. Is this crazy? Yes, obviously. But his actions are allowed within the realms of the romance movie because his actions stand for not literally being crazy, but as someone who is trying to transgress boundaries. He is trying to embody his expected role as a teacher by forcing her to learn what he thinks she needs to learn in sexual maturity. And at the beginning, Anastasia goes with it. 

Christian shows Anastasia his Play Room (where he does not have an Xbox) and attempts to force his contract onto her. She asks him to sleep in the same bed with her after sex and he refuses, instead choosing to indulge himself in some after-sex piano playing (not joking). He offers to GO ON DATES WITH HER (generally considered important in relationships) so that she’s more willing to sign his contract. Anastasia has a business meeting with him and creates some boundaries on the contract, but is unwilling to actually sign it. She meets his parents. She goes to visit her mom to talk about the relationship but Christian shows up uninvited to the restaurant she and her mom are having brunch in (to her mom’s DELIGHT, that psychopath). To try to get on her good side again Christian takes her flying in a glider, which seems successful. Anastasia comes back home and when Christian refuses to discuss any of their issues, she tries to physically touch him (against the rules of their conduct) and he lashes her as punishment. 

While this scene seems to be caused by her refusal to use safe words and play along the rules that she’s agreed to (as one could argue is supposed to happen in BDSM), we can understand as viewers that her lashing out (haha) is because she understands that the lashings he’s giving her are not from play punishment.

It is from a need to invoke the power he wants to have in the relationship onto her, a way to pretend that his real anger and hatred are not real.

These are the intuitive things that we understand during sex, that even if in words we are play-fighting, playing at anything at all, the underlying emotions are what sets the true tone of the actions we are taking. But Anastasia understands the implicit hatred for her in his actions. And in that moment she realizes that despite her being submissive, she is the one with the power and control in the relationship. Christian doesn’t have power or understanding over her. He doesn’t even have those things over himself. 

Anastasia is failed by almost every single person in this movie. Her friend is instantly charmed by Christian and his dogged chasing after her. Her father is the same, having heard Christian give a talk for Anastasia’s graduation, what a successful young man he is! What a suitable replacement for her current male retainer, her dad. Her shit mother who refuses to even come to her graduation because her boyfriend broke his knee (who cares) is DELIGHTED when Christian finds where they are having brunch across the US and comes up to them as a surprise. Anastasia’s understandably upset reaction isn’t even seen by her mother, who is more fixated on what a handsome young man he is, I’m so lucky to meet him in person, the next parent I’ll be passing you onto. 

But Anastasia wasn’t drawn to major in English literature because of Jane Austen and her fatherly husbands. She was drawn to it by Thomas Hardy and Tess of d’Urbervilles, a story about a girl who struggles through bearing a child out of rape, getting rejected out of the fact that she isn’t pure. Tess takes her story into her own hands, even if it means that she has to face execution for killing her rapist. 

Because Christian refuses to realize Anastasia’s power in the relationship, because he is so fixated on this idea of projecting power, of dominating her when the relationship relies on her consent, on her acceptance of his power, Anastasia leaves. That’s the ending of the movie, Anastasia looking at everything Christian is pretending to be, looking straight past him and through him, final eye contact through the elevator doors that close on him and she leaves. 

In this way this movie does embody BDSM as a kink but also a culture – after all, the submissive is supposed to have the real power. They are the one who decides what the dominant can or cannot do. They are the one receiving pleasure and who really controls the game of sex. So they are also the ones that can terminate sex entirely. The dominant does not exist without having a submissive. Their role in sex doesn’t make sense without the submissive, while the submissive can enjoy pleasure on their own. The entire time they’re having sex, Christian is focused on Anastasia’s pleasure. The sex is about her. She never gives him head, and they only have sex for maybe five minutes of the entire movie. The rest of it is foreplay, and she holds the power to say whether she enjoys it or not.

If holding power in a relationship is a female fantasy, then shouldn’t we question why that’s such a fantastical idea in the first place?

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Is Fifty Shades of Grey sex positive? 

The first half of the movie is almost an instructional guide for someone who has never heard of BDSM before. But if we then assume that the narrative is supposed to be didactic we would lose the criticisms we can hold against Christian Grey. Could you read Christian Grey’s interest in BDSM as a reaction to abuse and trauma that he went through as a neglected and then adopted child? I suppose you could. But isn’t it also true that the level at which Christian Grey has leaned into his role is a little atypical? Generally (and while this is based on my limited personal experience), people don’t own a full room of BDSM toys with a key that you keep on you at all times. People in the BDSM community aren’t big on creating legal contracts that you have to sign before you get into a relationship with them.

Instead of asking whether Fifty Shades of Grey is sex positive, I think we have to focus on sex as a characterization of people in the narrative. Sex is a tool to create the movie’s narrative; the movie isn’t a tool to define what sex is.

Christian Grey himself as a character encapsulates a male archetype that I’ve seen so often in movies recently. He’s what characters like Patrick Bateman, the guy from Fight Club, Ken in Barbie aspire to be in their respective movies. The idea of the alpha male.

But the alpha male isn’t a person. It’s a loosely combined aesthetic of ideas that these people try to simulate.

We can tell this because when you examine the ideas closely, there seems to be no actual meaning or depth in thought for the images these men play at. And I don’t mean like, deep philosophical meaning. I mean like Christian Grey’s job seems to be “business.” Same with Patrick Bateman. He also works in “business.” So does the guy in Fight Club, until he moves onto cult leader, which arguably he’s not even doing, that’s his alter ego. Ken tries to move up from “beach” to “man” in general, which is also not really very specific. Not that they need to have specificity, but how can you personally like being in something like just “business?” You can’t even ask if these men get any joy out of their jobs because they don’t have any real definable job in the first place. They’ve rejected their personal selves in favor of some sort of “successful” exterior. How painful that must be! What do they do for fun? One of my co-watchers noted that Christian Grey seemed to have decorated his apartment based on what would come up in Google for “rich person apartment.” I mean, of course! His persona as an alpha male doesn’t come with instructions on how to do interior design. If he tried to be an actual person, his apartment might be ugly, but at least it could be unapologetically him.

This male pain is also based on the simultaneous rejection and need to attract the “feminine.” As the masculine character has no emotional needs or wants, a feminine character must be his dual to provide these inferior (but ultimately required) feelings. Christian Grey understands that he has this lack of actual personhood, and he is simultaneously repelled and attracted to Anastasia because of her femininity. The only interests he has beyond his alpha male persona is his Play Room, which is why it’s absolutely crucial that Anastasia accepts that part of him. But Christian doesn’t realize that that too is just an extension for the need of control and the character he plays as a dominant. That’s why Anastasia rejects him in the end. She can see through all of his bullshit romance of himself as this awesome, powerful businessman. 

But Anastasia wants to believe that she can change him. Don’t we all want to change men in our lives when we see them falling into this lack of humanity that will ultimately make them unhappy?

But we can’t! In the end Christian has to choose to go beyond what he has decided to be in conformity with society. But it’s a fantasy because in this universe we can touch someone’s heart and ask them to look at us as people, as people who understand their pain and can be talked to, not parented and taken care of.

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erasing meaning from gangnam style

Since we’re an Asian-interest magazine, I’m going to assume that you know what K-pop is, if you aren’t vaguely familiar with it. Living through the 2000s has been a very exciting time for Korean identities in the mainstream. One could sense the time dependence of my identity in the US; in elementary school, I mostly interfaced with the American joke wondering if I had come from the North or South, which failed to consider that all of my grandparents had come from the North, and would never see their family or friends again due to US intervention. But by high school, my fortunes had turned around! At this point, we were being accosted in Marshalls by well-meaning parents who wanted to ask us about BTS because their daughter looooved K-pop, which raised another question: how did they know we were Korean in a primarily Chinese community? 

But regardless of my personal bitterness, it’s important (to me) to consider how this happened. And it was a gradual change, to some extent, but really a large paradigm shift happened to change the visibility of the Korean identity in the US, around when I was in 6th grade. K-pop at this point had been what my other Korean friend and I watched on old YouTube during playdates for her to fangirl over, and for me to vaguely stare off into. It’s not like K-pop hadn’t had any international success, but it felt limited to the Korean-American diaspora and niche internet communities. “Gee” by Girls Generation is a song I would like to argue really first crossed the border into mainstream success, but I think that’s wishful thinking for an iconic song I happen to like (seriously, go watch it). 

I don’t think it would be a controversial statement to say that “Gangnam Style'' was a really big deal. Statistically speaking, it topped iTunes charts in 31 different countries, it was the first video with a billion views, and it’s still the 11th most watched video on YouTube. But I’m sure just mentioning it brought you back to whatever you were doing while I was arguing about how stupid Harry Styles and Call of Duty were (I wasn’t a particularly critical-thinking middle schooler). Gangnam style was all over the radio, blessing my 7 a.m. rides to school in my mom’s Corolla, and I’d climb back onto my main after-school activity of the desktop computer to see the thumbnail on YouTube before clicking away and watching two very large buff men put together a mega burger made out of bacon instead.

Not that I had a global perspective of things at the time, but what was interesting about the virality of “Gangnam Style” is that it seemed to originate from completely different reasons across the US and its original target audience in Korea. I sensed this as one does through the American cultural hegemony, another middle schooler friend, who confided to me that it was great that Korea would be seen in such a positive light thanks to “Gangnam Style”. I wasn’t sure. I felt a little uneasy knowing that my cultural diplomat was PSY freaking out over a lady’s ass. 

“It’s awesome,” the guy who oversaw our after-school pick-up told me. 

“Did you know,” I said, pausing my round of Touhou 7 that I would bring in on a USB, “that it’s actually about capitalist critique?” I had learned this after Googling the lyrics because it felt a little rude to not know what a song in my own language meant. I wasn’t 100% sure what that meant, either, but they were words I knew went together according to Tumblr. 

The entire video, really, made me a little nervous. Who was I in the eyes of others at school? PSY? Who even was he?

I didn’t really want to be associated with this goofy Korean man who wasn’t very handsome. I wanted to be taken seriously.

We can chalk this up to the nervous identity crisis and desire for acceptance of any middle schooler, but this difference in understanding “Gangnam Style” wasn’t just personal, but a symptom of cultural differences. Not just cultural differences, but a refusal to translate or understand the spectacle of Korean messaging in the US. We can look at this with post-feminist theory as well as the pervasive use of ironic justification in the 2000s-2010s.

Background history

In Korea, PSY was already known for being a runaway success, starting as an underground artist who began to produce hit after hit, starting in 2001 with the success of his first full-length album because of his non-traditional styling (compared to the extremely polished and conventionally attractive looks of K-pop groups), use of comedic lyrics, as well as vulgar lyrics criticizing Korean society. So “Gangnam Style” wasn’t a far departure from that. 

The lyrics of “Gangnam Style” feature a guy who describes himself as “macho” and wants a girl who “looks quiet but parties hard when she goes to party,” or is “sexier covered up than a girl who is scantily dressed.” This narrator’s thoughts lean into the post-feminist sexism of the idea of a “girl who isn’t like other girls,” but PSY openly mocks the narrator’s preferences through the narrator’s parallel ideas on his own looks and perceived attractive features. This narrator brags that he also “can get crazy passionate” and “has bulging brains instead of bulging muscles.” While not necessarily as applicable in the Korean feminist scene during this time period, in the US this can be understood as the attempt to validate “alternative masculinities” that are not based on the traditions of physical power, but instead “intelligence” that became popular in the 2000s and 2010s. 

The hook, “Oppa Gangnam style,” can be understood as the narrator calling himself a cool guy from the Gangnam district, which can be thought of as posturing that you’re from a rich, high-culture district. The classical comparison is to Beverly Hills, but you can also think of people who brag about going to Harvard, being snotty about New York City, or so on. It mocks the idea of constructed masculinity through materialistic attempts at class mobility with commercial goods (the Mercedes car) and images of lifestyle (lounging at a “beach,” going to high-end spas) by showing these as tasteless, corny, and crass. “Gangnam Style” critiques the materialistic culture of Korean youths, who aspire to come off as rich and upper class through elegance and “taste.” But PSY lampoons this through an overtly corny music video that claims that he is portraying these “elegant” people who ultimately are chasing after masculine ideals of being considered attractive and meeting women who are feminine ideals in aesthetics. These men treat women like objects because they believe that they can achieve their masculinity through materialism and class.

But how many Americans know that “Gangnam Style” is a satirical critique of Korean materialism?

At the risk of being unfair, my two examples certainly didn’t know. Most other K-pop music videos have English captions, including the videos that were released before “Gangnam Style” caused a huge growth in interest in the genre. But “Gangnam Style,” 10 years after it’s been released, still has no translations on the video itself. Which seems strange since so much of the music video is guided by the lyrics. If the lyrics are lost on the American audience, where does the international appeal come from?

International Appeal

The answer is that the themes behind the lyrics were never part of the appeal. Most of the appeal comes from the music video. T-Pain tweeted, “words cannot even describe how amazing this video is...”, which is directly linked to the skyrocketing popularity of the video as news sites began to cover it. So the virality of “Gangnam Style” in the US must be studied through the lens of pleasure removed almost completely from the lyrics. Taking the music video at face value, then, we can get a different reading using post-feminist themes of irony, the choice of objectification, masculinities, as well as the construction of the consumer through advertising and sexuality.

The positive response to “Gangnam Style” has generally been attributed to the absurdist nature of the scenes in the video, as well as the dance itself. The Washington Post claimed that “'Gangnam Style' has made an extraordinarily stupid-looking dance move suddenly cool,” ignoring the fact that the dance was chosen to look stupid in the first place.

The Sydney Morning Herald claimed that the video “makes no sense at all to most Western eyes" and it "makes you wonder if you have accidentally taken someone else's medication."

The deliberate removal of meaning from the video is reminiscent of Adorno’s concept of the culture industry. The video loses the power of “psychology” over the “structure” of the music video. The Western viewers thus avoid the confrontation of culture in the music video by brushing the visual themes aside as “meaningless.” So it becomes “uncritical fun” and viewers can thus transcend the need to even know the lyrics. There is a racial aspect to this as well—the Korean-focused message is brushed aside since it “makes no sense at all” to a Westerner. So the minority Korean message is subjugated and destroyed, made invisible by mocking the silly Asian man doing his silly dance. In this way it becomes pleasurable to an audience that may otherwise be alienated by its themes.

Another way “Gangnam Style'' is understood in the US is through sexuality, as advertisements and other video forms have already created this sexualized “set of images.” It is likened to LMFAO, probably in reference to “Sexy and I Know It” for their satire of the grandstanding of masculinity. But LMFAO creates satire through the focus on male genitalia and body humor. The comparison of “Sexy and I Know It” can be understood by “Gangnam Style'' being seen as a video about a satire on male sexuality instead of consumerism, with American viewers focusing on the nudity and Noh Hongchul’s pelvic-thrusting dance. The latter dance is actually a trademark of Noh Hongchul’s comedy acts, but the American audience doesn’t know this, and thus interprets it in the language of images they are familiar with. As Sut Jhally puts it in “Advertising, Gender and Sex: What’s Wrong with a Little Objectification?”, the viewers are informed through the “system of images'' that are present in American society, and also happen to be obsessed with “gender and sexuality.” The one English lyric in the song is “Hey, sexy lady”—which adds to this perception and leads to a later ironic reading of other scenes where women are sexualized.

So of course there is no closed captioning—PSY understands the appeal for American audiences includes taking the lyrics as nonsensical and meaningless.

Another distinctly American reading occurs for the objectification of women, notably the yoga lady image that became the icon of “Gangnam Style.” With the context of the lyrics, it’s clear that this is a direct critique of the sleazy nature that comes from commodifying women. The women present in the music video are also traditionally beautiful, with the woman who seems to be interested in PSY in the music video being an idol herself. Without the context of the lyrics that deconstruct the delusion of a romantic, classy lifestyle where women only have value from being traditionally beautiful, however, this scene is transformed into the post-feminist “irony” that Rosalind Gill talks about in her paper “Postfeminist Media Culture.” American viewers thus participate in the sexualization of these women by the constructed “silliness” of the music video. By making “Gangnam Style” absurdist and bereft of meaning, PSY’s yoga lady scene is seen as “funny” and “subversive” towards sexism, even though the original critique is on materialism and commodification.

The real absurdity is the American response to “Gangnam Style” as a force to “understand Korea” in the US by Obama, and even as a way to hail world peace by the UN.

Even Noam Chomsky was part of an MIT parody of “Gangnam Style,” partaking in “mindless fun.” I felt a little disturbed at the time that this might be the image of Korea constructed for the American mind as actual interest in the culture was swept away by the exaltation of the video as nonsensical and meaningless. As a 6th grader, this wasn’t how I framed it to myself, but the way the Western viewpoint became dominant over the original meanings of the video signaled to me that my Korean experience would become destroyed and overwritten by the white, American viewpoint. The post-feminist mindset also created a post-racial mindset where irony was used to mock other cultures, setting a white gaze in media much like the male gaze asserted by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” That’s why so many TV shows were able to partake in blackface (like The Office and 30 Rock, just to name a few) and take pleasure in unashamed racial violence—to the white gaze, it is funny, because the original meaning of racial violence can be stripped away.

 

References

Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Sexual Culture.” The Routledge Companion to Media & Gender, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203066911.ch54.

Horkheimer, Max, et al. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2020.

Jhally, Sut. “Advertising, Gender and Sex: What's Wrong with a Little Objectification?” (1989).

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 1999.

[yssjj]

Crash (1996)

The gas statioj has a drinks store because it helps the car/owner bond if you eat fluids together

[yssjj]

postcards

A Glass of Morning Water

Stifling heat. A comforter falling from the sky. The water in the air collapses Long strings of tiny glass beads Woven into soft, dark clouds.

The wind has blown the rain from its hanging place Rotating wooden panels Slicing wide sheets of air. Water falling against glass panels. 

Sweat condensing onto mine, A cold drink touching a glass table A wet rim the shape of the glass. The smell of your water glazing onto my skin.

Postcard marked for Tuesday

On Sunday I fell asleep thinking about sleeping next to you.

[yssjj]

american psycho: he's just like me fr

In No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, there’s a passage where the main character, Yozo, who is ostensibly Dazai (it is a semi-autobiographical book), struggles to figure out exactly what the hell his Sister wants from him in a fairly obvious situation:

“One autumn evening as I was lying in bed reading a book, the older of my cousins–I always called her Sister–suddenly darted into my room quick as a bird, and collapsed over my bed. She whispered through her tears, “Yozo, you’ll help me, I know. I know you will. Let’s run away from this terrible house together. Oh, help me, please.” She continued in this hysterical vein for a while only to burst into tears again. This was not the first time that a woman had put on such a scene before me, and Sister’s excessively emotional words did not surprise me much. I felt instead a certain boredom at their banality and emptiness. I slipped out of bed, went to my desk and picked up a persimmon. I peeled it and offered my Sister a section. She ate it, still sobbing, and said, “Have you any interesting books? Lend me something.” I chose Soseki’s I am a Cat from my bookshelf and handed it to her. “Thanks for the persimmon,” Sister said as she left the room, an embarrassed smile on her face…”

At this moment, Dazai/Yozo provides an accidentally hilarious moment through his lack of empathy. Even though Yozo faces similar despair, he is unable to connect sadness to the sadness of others. After several trials of this sort of situation where a girl comes to him crying for support (which despite his wishes is a recurring theme in his life), he has figured out a simple, effective solution—distract them with sweets, books, anything at hand, even a suicide pact.

Of course, this isn’t the correct “answer” to these situations. He could have just… talked to her! But this is impossible for Yozo because claims to be completely disconnected from her. And he’s too terrified to try to reach out. He imagines that all other people have a monster behind their mask, ready to attack him at will.

The entire book is like this, a person who doesn’t know how to interact with other people because he is actually terrified of everyone around him, which is all rooted in his feeling of spiritual isolation. The title is a direct statement of the narrator’s feeling towards the world around him—as someone who is just faking being human, what point did he have in existing when he has to live in fear of everyone around him, who is ostensibly better at this being “human” thing than him?

American Psycho was this to me, an attempt by another alien (Patrick Bateman) to decipher exactly what the hell is happening in 80’s yuppie corporate NYC. Or as he aptly puts it:

EVELYN  Well, you hate that job anyway. Why don't you just quit? You don't have to work. BATEMAN  Because I...want...to...fit...in. I think he wants to fit in!

Patrick Bateman has decided, unlike Yozo, that he will fit in. He—at least, consciously—believes that he is stronger than everyone around him. Christian Bale does an awesome job monologuing with the emphasis on monotone, dry, and powerful from his ability to seemingly separate himself from the riff-raff around him. This might be why a lot of men (from what I have heard, no citation given in this article) take from this movie that this is the way of a “sigma” male, one who is different from the rest of the pack.

(This is where I would submit my sigma male test score but I couldn’t find the screenshot.)

fear and anxiety

Because of all the (wrong) takes on American Psycho being anti-feminist because of its violence against women, or the idolization of Patrick Bateman because he can cull his competition, you would think Patrick is good at killing people. This is not true in the movie. Patrick Bateman is actually very, very bad at killing people. When he kills Paul Allen, he becomes a total wreck, running through his apartment to come up with some sort of alibi, slamming open closets and desperately packing together a cute little travel set. Not that I would know how to commit a murder, but you would think for someone who considers himself to be in control Patrick would have a better idea on how to proceed with this kind of thing. His answers to Detective Donald Kimball’s questions range from guilty to insane. When Detective Kimball asks him if he knew Paul Allen was missing, Patrick jumps to asking him if the “homicide squad” is deployed on the case.

He even panics out of a murder when Luis Carruthers hits on him because it’s so unexpected, ending with Patrick desperately looking for any reason to just leave (“I’ve gotta��� I’ve gotta… return some videotapes.”—as a bonus, he uses this SEVERAL times in the movie to leave uncomfortable situations). He then washes his gloved hands in the bathroom in an attempt to try to return to a “normal” interaction. It’s not pride and power pushing him forward. It’s anxiety!

Like Yozo, Patrick is also afraid. When he lies to Jean that he got a reservation for two at Dorsia (his trigger word apparently), he decides that the only course of action is to kill Jean before they make it to the restaurant. To directly discuss the traditional idea of toxic masculinity (as referenced by the men who want to be Patrick), theory would say that Patrick kills to gain power over women or to flex his masculinity. But his pride isn’t on the line when he tells Jean that he got a reservation to Dorsia. And he’s not trying to be powerful and masculine when he decides that killing Jean is the only solution. His decision is a panicked answer to stay disconnected from Jean at any cost.

Just as Yozo accepts a suicide pact from a woman because he doesn’t know how else to comfort her while avoiding connection to her, Patrick decides with how smoothly he handled Paul Owen’s murder that staging another murder is a get-out-of-jail-free card from the impending doom of having to admit that he actually can’t get a reservation for Dorsia.

And his Dorsia fear manifests in reality as a personal hell when the maître d’ hysterically laughs at him, screeching, when he first calls for a reservation that night at 8:30 for a date with Courtney. The second time he calls he gets a normal response, with the maître d’ telling him that the restaurant is completely booked for the night. But Patrick’s fear response is already baked in from the first interaction he created with his own anxiety.

societal normalcy and self-acceptance

There’s something deeply relatable to the need to try to figure out what is “normal.” Especially, the further you might naturally be from “societal normal,” the harder it is to try to figure out how to get there. At this point, the proverb “be true to yourself” might seem to come into play. But our urge to be normal is because we want to connect to others. We want to not be alone, even if that’s at the cost of suppressing our true selves.

Patrick manages to fit in at the boy’s club at work by performing all of the gestures of the others, at lunch, at Christmas parties. But his true self is completely isolated from his coworkers. He’s someone who is unrecognized as his own person to the point that people mistake his identity for others in the group. His fiance knows nothing about him and doesn’t care to, even when Patrick is trying to tell her that he has homicidal urges. The only reason she’s even getting married to him is because they have the same friends and breaking up “wouldn’t work.” Even Carruthers only hits on him because of the clothing he wears.

But even when you fit in, you want people to understand you. So Patrick tries to connect with people over and over again. But when he does try,  it’s unreciprocated. The only time he can talk about his interest in pop music is with prostitutes he hires for sex—almost as if the sex is just an excuse (which might be why his violence is also focused on them). His jokes constantly fall flat with his peers. His joke about Ed Gein sticking women’s heads on sticks could be inappropriate (and is given the rest of the context of Patrick’s personality), but it’s a very vulnerable moment for Patrick. He is purposefully revealing part of who he is and receives worse than a bad reaction—no reaction. When your friends rebuke you, it’s a decision to reach out and connect out of care. No reaction is the choice to pull away.

And when he finally does meet someone who is genuinely interested in him as who he is and is willing to reach out to him, he is unable to complete the connection. Jean is the only woman in the movie who isn’t willing to mask to just “fit in.” When Patrick takes her out and talks to her in his condo, we can immediately get a sense of who she is because she’s telling the truth. But Patrick takes this vulnerability and tries to push it away from him—thus the attempt to kill her with a nail gun—and fails as his own vulnerability (he’s cheating on his fiancee) is revealed via inopportune phone call (from said fiancee).

Silence. Jean is obviously embarrassed and upset. JEAN  Was that...Evelyn? Silence. JEAN  Are you still seeing her? Silence. JEAN  I'm sorry, I have no right to ask that. Silence. JEAN  Do you want me to go? A long pause. BATEMAN  Yes. I don’t think I can...control myself. JEAN  I know I should go. I know I have a tendency to get  involved with unavailable men, and...I mean, do you  want me to go? Another long pause. BATEMAN  If you stay, I think something bad will happen. I  think I might hurt you.  (Almost hopefully)  You don't want to get hurt, do you? JEAN  No. No, I guess not. I don't want to get bruised.  You're right, I should go.

And at the end of the movie, Jean is the only one who is able to find Patrick’s “true nature” because she is worried about him after he calls her. Patrick doesn’t reveal who he is to her. She’s the one who searches his desk and finds the drawings he has made of his compulsions, of his real or imagined crimes against humanity.

violence

After violence, Patrick responds with desperation and panic. We even see this in Paul Allen’s murder, the one murder Patrick seemed to really enjoy, where Patrick scrambles to come up with something so that he avoids getting caught. Patrick claims to have killed Christie only because “she almost got away.” In the final chase scene, the consequences come for him at an amazing tempo; police cars surround him after the sound of the first shot dissipates into the air, he escapes but is surrounded again and forced into a shoot-off, then is chased down by helicopters.

But that’s ridiculous—it’s totally fantastical. Because these scenes are in Patrick’s view of reality, it suggests that he wants to get caught. Patrick wants to be held accountable because it’s the only way he could imagine others understanding the immense amount of pain he’s in.

Part of our connection to people who really like us for who we are is that they can help us understand when we feel off. We want our pain to be vindicated as something that’s not okay. In times of desperation, we want to be able to reach out to others and hear sympathy, or reassurance that we are right to feel that something is wrong and that we should go get it checked out.

Patrick describes his need to hurt other people as a consequence of being in pain in the first place at the end of the movie. It’s a call for help for someone to notice and get him arrested so he can get fixed. But Patrick is completely alienated. Beyond Jean, nobody else cares about him to bother being concerned. When he tells a woman that he’s into “murders and executions,” she mishears it as “mergers and acquisitions” due to the level of attention she’s giving that conversation. When he leaves a long, rambling confession of all of his murders to his lawyer, his lawyer first mistakes him for someone else, and then laughs it off as a silly joke. Even as Patrick tries to double down and tell him that he was telling the truth, his lawyer takes the reality of the situation (that Patrick is at least delusional, since Paul Allen is alive and kicking) and decides to tell Patrick off for taking the joke “too far.”

In Patrick’s last monologue after his conversation with his lawyer, he “surpasses” having anything in common with the least sympathizable people.

BATEMAN (V.O.) There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with  the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil,  all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward  it, I have now surpassed... INT. BATEMAN'S OFFICE - DAY Jean is alone in Bateman's office, looking through his diary.  We see the pages that she is looking at. They are filled with  doodles of mutilated women and their names...Jean looks lost  and frightened, and begins to cry. BATEMAN (V.O.) My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better  world for anyone. I fact I want my pain to be inflicted on  others. I want no escape. INT. HARRY'S BAR - EARLY EVENING  As the film ends the camera moves CLOSE on Bateman. He is  leaning back in his leather armchair, drinking a double Scotch,  his eyes blank. BATEMAN (V.O.) But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. I gain no  deeper knowledge about myself, no new knowledge can be extracted  from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any  of this. This confession has meant nothing...

He knows that losing his connection with even the most insane people will mean his internal pain will find no catharsis. Nobody can reach him and soothe his pain. So he inflicts his pain on others, even though it doesn’t help his pain, because it’s better than not doing anything. All he has left are the drawings that Jean has discovered, his last call for help.

Pain will always exist. But connection makes us understand that our pain is human, even our pain seems to come out of us in terrifying ways. In this way, Mary Harron has created a feminist movie by simply letting guys have emotions. The consequence of allowing men to have feelings is that they want to find other people who truly understand them. Patrick and his coworkers simply “fit in” but they don’t belong to each other, to anything at all beyond a sheer facade, a mask that can be put on and peeled off at the end of each day.

Then maybe we can rework toxic masculinity from being a way to have power in social situations to wanting to just “fit in” as a way to get some sort of connection to others, even if the people you hang out with don’t really understand you. But the consequence of this is that these shallow connections don’t fulfill us, and when we undergo pain, it becomes easier to take it out on these people that you don’t even like anyway, or people who aren’t even in your ingroup. When men see Patrick Bateman as a sigma male, is it that they see someone in control? Or is it that they see someone who shows a way to cope with the pain they feel, even if the method is violent and doesn’t even work, but at least it seems cathartic on the movie screen?

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Littering

I'm not talking about the good or bad of the action, I'm just talking about the arc a lit cigarette makes in the dark An orange arc that dashes itself against the dark asphalt smashing into a million little stars

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on chemicals in my rivers

Today’s ritual for health: steroid topical ointment, only four days. After that I’ll have a non-steroidal topical ointment for four more days. Then vaseline applied on wet hands to make a thin film, hands patted dry on a towel. I take escitalopram (the left-handed version) and birth control, little bitter pills as a nighttime treat. When I have headaches or period pains I can take an ibuprofen. If I’m running a fever I can take an ibuprofen. Or even a huge combination pill of dextromethorphan, guaifenesin and phenylephrine (also known as mucinex) so I can sleep at night. Formulated to taste sweet as a joke, I drink two down with a large glug of water instead of the peppermint oil gas I’d try to suck down my sinuses. Old mornings greeted with a sand dry mouth that had gasped down the air for my hermetically sealed nose.

All of these names were family to me, but sealed behind glass picture frames, we the first American generation. The medication was reachable (I was 5’3 by 11), but my mother never suggested that they were for anything but the most severe fevers. And it never occurred to me to ask her for some. When I cried from the contact of a lukecold blanket, She would measure out my temperature before administering a child’s dose of ibuprofen, liquid form, 30 mL, tasting like spiced grapes. Instead it was tar-black herbal medicine and probiotic supplements my mother had brought to the US from her Korean pharmaceutical degree. I shook myself awake in bed, 3pm, my heaven-mandated pain in a garden of blankets.

Then I watched my college roommate pop four acetaminophens on an empty stomach to preempt a headache. The next time I got a cold, I ran to the university nurse, who prescribed something to unclog my axiomatic tiny nose (and then charged me $400 for it). Did you know eczema is curable? I sat on the dermatologist’s papered-over patient bed and felt the glow of washing dishes without rubber gloves, feeling my hands plow through the old clay I molded that ripped open cracks into my skin. When the dry winters tore it open my mom applied L’occitane (said lo-chi-tahng in Korean) hand creams that would try to pat down ravines. Then the oil and redness would react to create small bubbles under my skin, the bubbles which would then oxidize, tiny combustions across my hands. Now I have steroids. Don’t let your skin get used to being chronically inflamed, the dermatologist said. A thirteen minute appointment and I was moving into the cold spring outside, scarf only having made it over one shoulder.

When I want to die I take my left-handed bitter apple and even though She would throw me out of the house for it, She can’t see me here. I use steroids for four days, the number four which starts the word “death” in Korean. But not in English. And I use painkillers and anesthesia and birth control and antidepressants and I am down on earth with everyone else and I smile in my sleep.

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my eeaao review

The biggest immigrant story of this past quarter is probably Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

One of my favorite exercises to do with a movie once I’ve watched it, before I’ve really started to put together an opinion, is to pull up the Google reviews. What I love about Google reviews is that there are many words being written. These words create a space to drag out the subconscious and outline yet unformed thoughts and emotions so I can better grasp exactly how I feel. What’s perfect about Google reviews is that the amateur lens asks you to specify their sweep over the movie production and storyline, the review’s writing being more involved in pouring praise on actors and tropes rather than specific story beats. Why does that actor work in that position? Rather, what was the point of the story being told, and how does that actor’s performance enhance or detract from it? Google reviewers tend to have a good grasp on “what is supposed to be,” and that helps clarify my own thoughts.

Let’s pull up the movie reviews of EEAAO.

Much like the other Asian immigrants or children of Asian immigrants who watched this movie, I did cry throughout its runtime. The oft-retweeted Twitter post about EEAAO features a friend group, comprised of children of Asian immigrant parents, holding themselves in different poses of exhaustion and release, on the ground and against the wall. Leaving the theater, I felt like I had been moved. By the time I had gotten on the bus, I started feeling like someone who had impulse-bought a bus pass for three days, figuring that it would be cheaper in a bundle, only to realize the price of the three-day bus pass was exactly equivalent to three one-day bus passes. And that I wouldn’t be able to ride the bus tomorrow because I was going out of state. There were many words, but my point is that despite my original positivity, I wasted my money watching this movie.

The focus on the mother as a person and character is interesting—the Asian immigrant stories I’ve seen in English are usually focused on the intergenerational trauma that the American daughter feels, and how the values she’s taught at school and through her circle of American friends clash with what her parents expect or want from her. I liked that there was a more sympathetic idea of the mother, Evelyn. She’s too busy to have the emotional space to explore who she wants to be. We get to explore her dreams, her connections, and her regrets in regard to her family. How her struggle to stay financially stable as an American immigrant sidelines these thoughts. I thought of my own mom watching her, remembering how much she couldn’t be at rest because of her full-time job.

But past that, there’s very little to define Evelyn. For a story about her, we know very little about her; how she grew up (a flash—a portrait of a tense family), what her parents were like (implied to be difficult, but not much beyond that). We don’t even know what region of China she’s from. We know even less about her husband, Waymond, other than the idea that he’s a “loving spouse,” and Evelyn’s foil as an emotionally “good” parent, having the space to chase after his emotional needs through a divorce statement. Joy, the daughter, is a disaffected, troubled adult who is struggling to find her way in life, outside and inside of the family. It’s a very unspecific movie. To sum it up, EEAAO is about a Chinese-American family, where the mom has cultural differences come between her relationship and her daughter. But that’s as vague as you can get. This could apply to any “immigrant story” about an “Asian-American family” that “struggles with cultural differences.” Really, we can broaden this to be about the “intergenerational gap,” which at the very least is not limited by the constraints of the tropes seen in an “immigrant story.”

The interviews with the directors, the Daniels, clarify parts of the personalities of the characters. Evelyn is described to be “imagined” as if she had “undiagnosed ADHD” in an NPR interview. Joy is described as being depressed. It is a shallow drive. Evelyn could have ADHD. But instead of going into how this might have affected her life and her experiences, and how that then leads into her marriage with Waymond and her relationship with Joy, it’s just used as a fun trivia fact to look for. Same with Joy. We don’t actually get much from her other than that she’s “depressive.” What are her motivations? Does she not have any? What does she want to do with her life? We don’t know, because EEAAO does not care. She is simply a Disney plus sitcom teenager, misunderstood and rebellious.

EEAAO is not concerned with figuring out who these people are or why exactly they might do the things they do. They are attracted instead to the tropes (the “tiger mom”) antagonizing the immigrant parents. When Evelyn tells Joy she’s “fat” and “needs to watch what she’s eating,” Joy does explain to the audience that she says these things out of love. But it’s too fast and too “one-liner,” trying to sum up a complex mother and daughter idea via an Easter egg-esque moment. And then the movie frowns on Evelyn, showing Joy crying as she runs to the car when Evelyn repeats that sentiment to her “out of love.” Yes, there are misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture. But it’s spelled out for the viewer by condemning Evelyn’s actions towards Joy, even as she tries to protect her; when she lies to her father about Joy being a lesbian, it could have been portrayed in a gracious way, knowing that to Evelyn, her own interactions with her father (which she has years of practice and trauma with according to the movie) spell danger for her only daughter. Of course she would lie! But the movie sides with Joy, not Evelyn, despite the movie being focused on Evelyn as the star. Joy is the stand-in for the white American gaze, striking out at injustices she (white American culture) perceives from Michelle Yeoh (what is asserted to be “Chinese parenting”).

This being labeled as an “Asian-American” story is apt. EEAAO flags itself as “authentically Chinese” with scenes from Hong Kong, the characters speaking in Chinese, and Michelle Yeo being a wuxia star. As a symptom of the lack of care in character development, there is very little exploration into the culture itself. What’s notable about a lot of the reviews I’ve seen surrounding this movie is that despite the implicit understanding of the “cultural value” EEAAO has, there is very little discussion of the cultural portrayals themselves. From the first review, one out of two mentions is here: 

The second review doesn’t mention “culture” at all. That’s the magic of this movie—by having a thin veneer of “Asian-ness” over a “down-to-earth and sensible” story, it’s easily digestible and not too challenging to the everyday moviegoer.

One of the ways EEAAO adapts a potentially complex story into relatability is by making an appeal to the “Asian-Americans” and the “Asian-American experience.” This is instantly flawed because cultures that fall within the “Asian-American'' sphere are very, very different. It’s easy to forget—sometimes I even catch myself assuming that I would know things about Chinese culture because Chinese and Korean culture are conflated so often in the use of chopsticks, ancestor worship, and specialty supermarket brands. But even just within Japan, Korea, and China, each country has very different cultures towards speaking, honorifics, what the work sphere looks like, what jobs are valued, what home life looks like, who stays at home, who is taught at school, and how this translates to the US. And this is just part of the East-Asian sphere, which is the stereotypical content of the “Asian-American,” especially in EEAAO. But if we expand the Asian-American sphere to truly include all of Asia, EEAAO conflates the East-Asian cultures with the wide diversity of experiences, homes, and regions in India, Thailand, Pakistan, and Iran. And to conflate is to write over, or to exclude entirely from the story, because some cultures don’t fit into the idea of “Asian-American.”

Even EEAAO asserts this “Asian-American” generalization—not purposefully, but by overgeneralizing the family’s story. The parents are from China (not discussed or specified, but simply implied from the flashes backward and forward). The mother is not a mother, but simply Michelle Yeo, a “tiger mom” who just wants the best for her daughter and does that by antagonizing her. The daughter, to borrow my roommate’s words, is some mysteriously disaffected adult struggling to find a path in the world as well as communicate with her family. What exactly is she struggling with? Finding a job? Looking for something she’s interested in? Talking to her family about setting boundaries and finding love within those boundaries?

Food, we are told, is the immigrant way of showing love. Sure, but most families, historically American or first generation, have noted the food = love statement. The reality is that it acts as a flag to tell the audience we are “real” Asians making an “authentic” foreign movie. We are stepping out of the “American,” the images say. Put on your seat belts. But by using culture as signals, not giving them the space to breathe as their own themes and functions, the cultural words lose meaning and depth in the context of the story. It trivializes “Asian culture” as backdrops to a “foreign story,” one that has to be simplified, not explored, for non-immigrant audiences. Even though a story told well will be moving enough for watchers to understand, even if they haven’t lived through that specific experience. It cheapens immigrant stories as a gimmick, not an experience. A skin over the white American story told about Asian immigrants. The first review actually hits this idea spot on with word choice: 

& a whole buffet of Oriental cinematic tropes

It’s a Disney movie, and that’s how EEAAO fails. It’s Encanto, where years of worry and habit are “fixed” by getting the family back together. I wished that Encanto had been a TV show, with more character studies, more sister bonding, and learning new things about the relatives you believed had to be close to you. That might have been too much to ask for a children’s movie, where it has to tell a story compactly and in a way that kids will understand. EEAAO challenges the watchers to follow the spectacle and find the story under it, but the story is shallow and flat. All of the work went into the sci-fi, not the movie. You can’t have a good immigrant story by simply changing the genre—you still have a sci-fi immigrant story, not a story. It’s flashy, it’s boring, and it does the “Asian-American” story a disservice.

We need more real stories. Stories about who the parents are, what they do, how they aren’t just “bad” tiger moms but real mothers. Women with worries, trauma, and logical reasons for the actions they undertake, especially when they’ve been pushed and pulled by the incredibly difficult action of immigration and adaptation into a new country. As long as we keep demonizing the most “Asian” people in our families, the story will strain against reality to accommodate our “Asian-American” line. To be authentic, we must be real and challenge the tropes and narrative conveniences of the “immigrant story” with specificity, sympathy, and the unique Asian-American worldview.

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Note taking rules

Rarely, I do this, but I should more often - the beginning of a unit has big letters in highlighter.

After that, classes/topics by day are separated by a highlighter line.

Sentences are big ideas. I don't like having too many bullets, actually, so I am kind of wishy washy with this. I usually put topics that are directly related under big idea sentences.

Bullets have one space before the bullet from the end of the page, and one space after the bullet.

If there is a subbullet under it (related to that bullet in topic), then it goes one space after the left-hand alignment of the text under the first bullet.

Sometimes instead of subbullets I just keep writing from a colon; so it will be like definition: xyz... new line aligned with the colon and more writing.

Graphs begin at least three squares from the left of the page. If they're under a bullet, they can go two spaces after the bullet's text starts. This isn't super important and is more about looking not too cluttered.

Graphics can happen usually four squares after.

For equations, I haven't figured out a good spacing for them yet. I tried doing three squares but honestly it's still kind of gross. Maybe five or four from the side? And a new line after the text before starting the equation. With proofs, I think I want to start doing equation headers for what the equation is and then text under that.

Since equations are so important I want them to stand out. I've tried circling them with highlighter but that's kind of clunky. My friend has a really good way of doing it that I need to borrow.

Vocab words or terms are highlighted. I think I should start doing this for concepts as well, since a lot of the homework problems I've been seeing are related to specific concepts in lectures.

Grid paper, .38 Muji pens, mildliners. Will add more if I think of anything...

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2004 post it packaging

Immigration documentation

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Excerpts of "Long Distance" by Ayşegül Savaş

Hot and cold in a relationship. Being in love with someone is such a big exercise in trust that it's hard to stop believing in the other person, even when it hurts with how much the relationship trembles and oscillates with nothing at all.

My English professor talked about how relationships, even really bad toxic ones, are sustained because there is some need being fulfilled by it.

It's nice being on such a similar wavelength with someone. Similar enough and you fall in love with them. In social psychology, studies have shown that similarities are what really bring people together. Even with perceived differences in hobbies or "personalities," if their values are similar that's enough to hold a happy relationship (the matching hypothesis). The longer you spend with someone in that kind of proximity, it becomes easier to see the undertones that are ultimately driving the overall current of that person. Sometimes that's hard to look at directly because you want to believe that the driving force is less fundamental than it is.

I think what makes up a lot of people is their habits - what habits have they picked up from their past? What driving forces move them towards those habits? How are those similar or different to the habits I have picked up subconsciously from my past?

I'm easily disappointed in people because of those habits. But who am I to be disappointed in others, when those habits may suit their life the best?

In a relationship, because some of your habits and driving forces fit with each other, you can sustain each other on whatever special need is being met that nobody else can. But isn't it heartbreaking when that need isn't enough to keep the relationship together? Or other habits break apart the ability to keep those needs satisfied.

That's what a long term relationship is like. So many infinite weeks of marching through life, moments of really beautiful bliss (sometimes even months of it). And all of that brushed away in a single week. A person collapsing into a pile of salt.

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Simone Rocha SS22

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Melted Potato earrings