Author: Sel

Globetrotter, reader, writer & lover of stories, music, art, and the world. I like funny horoscopes, apples, iced tea, OSTs, running, lyrics that rhyme, wild histories, and happy endings on good days, bad days and days in-between :-) Harvard '21.

Oh, Cairo

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Returning from Cairo, Egypt is like waking up from some hot, hazy dream. These first few days after spring break I fall asleep each night as though I’m drugged. My skin feels like papyrus, my eyes are always heavy. There is a residual kiss of the city on my forearm — dark brown tendrils, an exploding sunflower fading from the touch of water and soap. Some kind of spell — an experience that cannot be easily shed, thick and sticky as it is — made from the concoction of heat, civilization, dust, camels, kofta, sand, golden brown mummies, and the blue Nile lingers and weighs.

Day 6

We are at Khan el-Khalili, a labyrinthine bazaar. We wind through alleyways drawn with shadows and glitter, under the fraying canopies and corrugated metal roofs overhead, and past the heaps of gleaming silverware by our feet and gilded lanterns by our faces. There are pyramids as small as the size of my palm, papyrus that lies in sorry stacks, and sequined dresses and ‘I ❤ Egypt’ T-shirts fluttering in the breeze.

The guide points out the famous El Fishawy Café — Perhaps the most famous café of the Arab world, he says. Lazy, hooded eyes stare at me through the veil of vapors from the shishas. I watch myself — slightly tanner, wearing a white “H” hat, eyes shining from under the visor — in the giant mirrors that decorate the exterior of the café on both sides of the alley. This was where the Nobel Prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz wrote frequently (also apparently the setting of Midaq Alley). I picture myself writing here for a moment, surrounded by battered mirror frames, bubbling water pipes, and fresh glasses of mint tea. The promise is so great that I can almost taste it, like apricots with tobacco on my tongue. The thought dissipates when we emerge from under the archway, the swirls of smoke behind us.

We are showered in sunlight. It’s like walking through a living vignette.

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Day 4

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We have lunch on a terrace overlooking the expansive lush greenery of the Al-Azhar Park — now an urban oasis full of fountains, boulevards, and greenery, where it used to be a sea of garbage and rubble. Before lunch, when we are walking up a slope, Professor Asani says a name as though I should recognize it.

Aga Khan? I repeat, bewildered.

He’s the current Imam, believed to be a direct descendant of Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, Professor Asani tells me. Still alive. The park is his gift to Cairo.

After lunch, we get onto golf carts. They zoom down the smoothly-paved concourse and the park roads running alongside the 12th-century Ayyubid wall (which used to wall off the old city dumpster, i.e. in the Park’s previous reincarnation), before gliding out of the vehicle gates —

We are down a congested alleyway, lined with workrooms, construction sites, teetering shacks, and breathtaking medieval architecture. We hop off twice to see the mosques, both still in different stages of restoration by the Aga Khan Cultural Services. The mosques stand like epitaphs amidst the biographies of poverty. The reality is that the beautiful park is in the middle of slums — one of Cairo’s poorest districts.

Later, when the carts retrace the path back to the park, the children wave at us from the windows that look over the wall.

Do they come here often? I ask the professor.

Yes, they do. There is another entrance, not the main entrance, but it’s much closer to the Darb al-Ahmar (the slums). It’s very convenient, he tells me.

I think of ruddy cheeks and grimy hands frolicking in the grass. It almost seems perfect, but somehow it’s not.

old city wall

DAY 3

The bus is winding through the streets of Old Cairo. We are on our way to the American University in Cairo. Outside the glass, the downtown colonial-style buildings recede. Wide bridges soar over open bazaar squares full of umbrellas that sprout like mushrooms. Amidst the colorful stalls is the Al Hussein Mosque with its towering minarets. That too disappears from view. Soon, I see an endless sea of half-constructed buildings baking under the sun. Receding past us are floors without roofs, rooms without walls, windows without sills — abandoned brick and mortar Lego lands. There is the sky on the other end, dotted by rippling clotheslines of clean colors amidst the rubble. Someone is climbing from one room to another, grasping jutting concrete, in full view. I glimpse their lives, half-enclosed, in mid-sentence. After a while, the view seems perennial. 

But, a swerve, a turn, and we are down another road. There are now swaying palms, multiple cars parked before gated mansions — Victorian, Versailles, Mediterranean, Greek Revival, Art Deco, you name it, they have it. The roads are eerily empty. In the last few minutes before we pull up in front of a very American-looking campus, the bus passes Dunkin’ Donuts, H&M, and strip malls with familiar logos.

If the mansions weren’t clear enough of a sign, these malls are. We are in ‘New Cairo’ — Egypt’s new capital, still in construction and yet to be named.

DAY 1

I am strangely awake despite the exhaustion of flying fifteen hours the previous day, the jet lag of having slept only 2 hours this morning before waking up at 6:45AM, and the sheer heat from my baffling choice of dressing in all-black, long-sleeve.

Our local guide Yashar’s voice booms from the front of the bus through a mic, as we pull up at the Pyramids of Giza. He tells us three ‘must-knows’:

  1. Egyptians are very friendly (the type of friendly that entails inviting you to their house so that they can learn English or insisting, as I would later witness at Khan el-Khalili, that I have waited my whole life for you — said to a group of us by a vendor).
  2. ‘Free’ means ‘you need to pay.’
  3. You need a little baksheesh (tips) for everything.

The bus roars with laughter.

With these three things in mind, it was easy to ignore the vendors trying to sell scarves, guidebooks, and bookmarks with hieroglyphs at Giza.

At Saqqara (where the oldest complete stone building complex known in history was built — Djoser’s Step Pyramid — in the 27th century BC by his vizier, Imhotep, who happens to be the title character of The Mummy!!!), a few hours later, I try to find the public bathroom. It takes me fifteen minutes wandering through the parked tour buses before I find a desolate-looking sign at the edge of some steps leading steeply downwards.

When I reach the bottom, there is a man cleaning the entrance. I am about to walk right past him when he rubs his thumb, index, and middle fingers together in front of my face. Behold, the universal sign for baksheesh.

I groan internally, as my wallet is locked in the bus. We stare at each other for a brief moment before I wordlessly turn to go. But he stops me and graciously lets me through. In a few seconds, I emerge again.

No toilet paper, I tell him.

He shrugs and it occurs to me he might not understand English but then he unlocks a cabinet to hand me a roll.

Shukran, I say.

He stretches out a hand. I shake it.

Kiss hand? he asks. When I widen my eyes and says no, he smiles and shrugs again.

OK, he says.

It’s both the strangest and most effusive public bathroom encounter I’ve ever had. The truth in our guide’s words resound.

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***

Religion is a multi-sensory experience.

Professor Ali Asani tells us this at least three times each day on the trip.

The sentence seems to be intuitively right, but I only begin to grasp it when the days wore on.

Cairo is full of sounds. Different cadences of the Adhaan (the Muslim Call to Prayer) play from minarets, a few seconds apart. They cloak you for a few solid moments, so viscous that your mind goes blank. Then, the shroud lifts and life resumes.

In Cairo, you see the soundscape mattering as much as the landscape does (recitations of the Quran! Sufi music! the Adhaan!). Symbols and space cannot do without one another.

There is something quite wondrous and unexpected about the ambiguity between the Prophet and the Poet; perhaps, both one and the same. The divine that is embedded within the text of the Quran is one that is not only read but also listened to.

When the Quran is so much of an oral and a visual text, stylized and recited, what does it mean to read?

There’s a quote by a Persian poet, Saadi of Shiraz, which Professor Asani shared with us:

Every leaf of the tree becomes a page of the sacred scripture once the soul learns how to read. 

The book of nature — the scripture that is all around us. It’s a beautiful thought.

The Prophet once said, the professor tells me gently when we are standing in the desert under the unimpeded glare of the sun, that God is beautiful and He loves beauty.

What about the violence and ugliness in the name of God’s beauty? I ask.

That’s not religion. That happens when religion becomes increasingly secularized, he says.

Immediately, it sounds oxymoronic. But, as he explains, I understand. Religion used to be about the transcendent. Yet, now it’s about politics — to govern people, to create wars, to carve territory, and to kill enemies.

The religion I witnessed on the streets of Cairo and in its astounding mosques is not that religion that we hear of so often in the media — wrapped up tightly in the political lexicon of coups and democracies, the numbing statistics of casualties, or the heated debates over accessories in the West. There has always been a visceral fear, fanned by one side, seeded by another. But, in Cairo, Islam may be chaotic, Islam may seem contradictory, but it’s really just about grasping transcendence in the seemingly ordinary moments of transience, of beauty, of listening.

Brevity: Renaissance Woman

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Yuri

“Dark” by Xuan Loc Xuan

Brevity features short posts on the interesting, incisive, or inexplicably moving ideas I encounter at Harvard. It’s a record of the detail in those intellectual and creative moments, as well as an exploration of the curious questions that keep me up at the midnight hour. Here’s an honest snapshot of my mind.

Sometimes, I realize how much more I have to go and then —

limits.

I saw on Facebook that someone in my year won the Wendell Prize (congratulations!). It’s awarded to one Harvard sophomore annually, who is identified “as the most promising and broad-ranging scholar in his or her class.” We were Facebook friends but I don’t think we’ve ever met in real life. I Googled his name. What came up first was an article he had written for the Harvard Independent, titled “Getting In.” It was beautiful — a portrait of a young artist rendered more evocatively, gently, and vulnerably than most writers on campus (myself included) could have.

How to be a modern-day Renaissance woman (or man)? In a few seconds, I just knew. This was it.

Returning to the page of search results, I clicked the second listed site. It was a Physics department page. He was an undergraduate researcher in the Department of Physics, doing “statistical and semiclassical analysis of thermal distortion potentials.”

Before me was a vague outline of someone who was not just good but excellent at many things. I felt a burst of wonder and respect, but also intermingled in a tide of wistfulness, a dim sense of loss. It wasn’t self-negating. Yet, this brief internet encounter with a silhouette of brilliance made me rethink why I found his straddling of fields so surprising.

Our instincts are honed by stereotypes. Somewhere along the path of my education, I must have subconsciously internalized the distinctions between the literary arts and the sciences, took their gulf for granted, and happily embraced specialization. Why should scientists not be able to write beautifully? (Carl Sagan and Paul Kalanithi come to mind.) Why would it be impossible that a writer be a scientist? (Like Nabokov and his butterflies.) Are their objects of inquiry — nature and culture — all that different? The universe and its truths. The human condition. A story with different building blocks.

With the platter of liberal arts options, I have thus far chosen to do a grand zero of problem set classes at Harvard. Truth is: I’ve willingly, single-mindedly boxed myself in a rigid taxonomy of disciplines, the boundaries of which might actually be more nebulous than I think. The divisions between fields that we presume as perennial are often recent constructs — e.g. philosophy and the natural sciences (for instance, phenomenology started as psychology under Brentano).

Not sure how I will move forward with these thoughts. After all, I count myself blessed to have found an irresistible love for the humanities and the opportunity to study them at a place like Harvard. But, honestly, where else could I have had such a close brush with the contours of a renaissance man, or this acute of a realization?

(Typed this in a flurry, during a break from writing a paper that’s due tonight. Back to more practical tasks on hand!!!)

Lots of love,

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Beauty Diaries: My College Skincare Routine

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Today, I talk about one of the loves of my life: skincare. ✨

After more than a year of wanting to write this post, it finally gets written—yay! People have reacted with varying levels of curiosity and astonishment when they first hear about my daily skincare routine. I still remember my American roommates’ jaws dropping when they first saw the bevy of bottles on my shelf and my collection of sheet masks during Opening Days. 

How I Discovered Skincare 🙈

I began developing a semblance of a skincare routine only towards the end of 2016. Before that, for a good decade, all I did was wash my face with two towels (one hot, one cold) every morning before scrambling to school at 6.30 am. In secondary school, I started using a foam cleanser. After A-levels ended in 2016, I wandered into Kiehl’s with a skincare-loving friend (Junru!) and bought my first products. The journey started there and then. Subsequently, K-beauty aficionados like Xin Min and au naturel organic purists like my mother showed me the path. 

Since then, my routine has evolved with the season, with experimentation, and by trial and error. Many products have fallen in and out of favor, but I have found a go-to routine with a certain set of core products that I’m most comfortable with. One thing for sure: my skin and complexion have improved!

My Skincare Philosophy 💡

  1. Be kind to your skin and it will be kind to you.
  2. Though a routine might not make a big difference to your young dewy skin now, your future self will thank you for it.
  3. Expensive/cult products don’t always work. The best products are the ones that work for you.
  4. Skincare can be a good alternative to make-up. 
  5. Habit and routine is key. The length/complexity of a routine is less important than how regularly you do a routine. Tedious routines are not going to last. So keep the number of products at a level with which you’re most comfortable and can persist. 

My Current College Routine ⏰

I do 90% of these steps in college. In total, they take me roughly 10 minutes in the morning and 13 minutes at night (unless I do a sheet mask). 

If you’re new to skincare, I advise that you start with 3 core steps (don’t overload your skin): sunscreen, cleansing, and moisturizing — absolutely crucial to any and all skincare routines in the universe. 🌏

At home, I also steam my face, which has been transformative but quite impossible to do in college. 

Below, I’ve listed both past and present products I’ve used in each step of my routine, with ratings:

🌸: Stopped using it after the first few tries.

🌸🌸: While using it, I couldn’t wait to finish and replace it. Made little difference to my skin.

🌸🌸🌸: Nothing phenomenal, but at least it made my skin feel good.

🌸🌸🌸🌸: My skin improved markedly, and I would use it again (and again).

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸: Holy Grail. I cannot do without this in my routine.

Step 1: Cleansing (ESSENTIAL)

I use a foam cleanser in the morning (just a tiny smear). At night, in the shower, I do “double cleansing” — an oil cleanser to remove my sunscreen and a foam cleanser afterwards. Choose low-pH cleansers that do not strip away essential layers from your skin.  

Sulwhasoo Gentle Cleansing Oil Ex 🌸🌸🌸🌸

AmorePacific Treatment Cleansing Foam 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

AmorePacific Treatment Cleansing Oil 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Illi Total Aging Care Cleansing Oil 🌸🌸🌸

Neutrogena Deep Clean Acne Foam Cleanser 🌸🌸

Step 2: Exfoliator (once in a while)

In my freshman year, I used the Cure Natural Aqua Gel about once every two weeks — it was very therapeutic rubbing away all the dead skin that has accumulated on my face (you’ll be surprised). I left my bottle at home this semester, so I occasionally use the Murad Skin Polish on my nose to prevent blackheads.

Apart from that, I’ve stopped physical exfoliation, i.e. scrubbing, (because of laziness) and now primarily use the COSRX Pimple Clear Pads as a substitute — the pads are pre-soaked in betaine salicylate and willow bark water to chemically exfoliate. 

COSRX One Step Original Clear Pads 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Murad Pore Reform™ Skin Smoothing Polish 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Cure Natural Aqua Gel 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Neogen Bio-Peel Gauze Peeling Wine 🌸🌸🌸

Step 3: Toner / First Treatment Essence

Toner is not essential (it’s for balancing the pH of your skin), unless your cleanser is stripping. Any essence or serum that can boost the absorption of your subsequent steps will do the same work. 

Sulwhasoo First Care Activating Serum EX 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

Naruko La Creme Face Renewal Miracle Essence 🌸🌸🌸🌸

MISSHA Time Revolution The First Treatment Essence 🌸🌸🌸

Mizon AHA & BHA Daily Clean Toner 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Kiehl’s Calendula Herbal-Extract Alcohol-Free Toner 🌸🌸

Step 4: Sheet Masks (when you feel like it)

Pamper your skin, scare your roommates, and don’t leave it on for too long!! Usually, I just wear it and do my readings or read the news on my phone. I’ve tried many, but here are the memorable ones.

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For porecting: 

  • [Bubbling Charcoal Sheet Mask] Dr. Jart+ Porecting Solution 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
  • [Charcoal Sheet Mask] Dr. Jart+ Pore Minimalist 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

For hydration: 

  • [Rubber Mask] Dr. Jart+ Hydration Lover 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
  • [Bio-Cellulose Mask] FOR BELOVED ONE Extreme Hydration  🌸🌸🌸🌸

  • [Hydrogel Mask] Naruko Snail Essence Intense Hydra Repair Mask 🌸🌸🌸

  • Dr. Jart+ Vital Hydra Solution 🌸🌸🌸

  • Dr. Jart+ Soothing Hydra Solution 🌸🌸🌸

For clearing:

  • [Rubber Mask] Dr. Jart+ Clear Lover 🌸🌸🌸🌸
  • Dr. Jart+ Clearing Solution 🌸🌸🌸

For brightening:

  • My Beauty Diary Imperial Bird’s Nest Mask 🌸🌸🌸🌸
  • Dr. Jart+ V7 Toning Masks 🌸🌸🌸🌸
  • Sulwhasoo First Care Activating Mask 🌸🌸🌸
  • Freeset Donkey Milk Skin Gel Mask Pack Aqua 🌸🌸🌸
  • SK-II Facial Treatment Mask 🌸 (Cult-favorite, award-winning, but BEWARE! The leftover serum pilled and balled up on my face. This happened several times. And I had to wash my face again right after, which defeated the whole point of doing a sheet mask. I subsequently gave them away. What a waste of money. -_-)

Step 5: Oils / Essences / Serums

As many or as few as you like. I recommend going simple and not tiring your skin. I currently only use the Kiehl’s serum, which I’ve bought more than five times.

Kiehl’s Hydro-Plumping Re-Texturizing Serum Concentrate 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

COSRX Advanced Snail 96 Mucin Power Essence 🌸🌸🌸

Naruko Supreme Rejuvenating Elixir Oil 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Innisfree Green Tea Seed Serum 🌸🌸🌸

Step 6: Eye Serum / Eye Cream

Splurge on your eyes, darling.

Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair Eye Concentrate Matrix 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair Eye Supercharged Complex 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Step 7: Moisturizer / Night Cream

I currently use two moisturizers per routine (instead of one) since Boston’s wintry weather makes the skin around my nose really dry. In the morning, I will use the COSRX Snail Cream to touch up the sensitive skin around my nose and at the edges of my mouth, followed by AmorePacific’s Creme to seal in the moisture. At night, I will use the COSRX Snail Cream, followed by the Sulwhasoo Overnight Mask.

AmorePacific The Essential Creme Fluid 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Day)

Sulwhasoo Overnight Vitalizing Mask EX 🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Night)

COSRX Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream 🌸🌸🌸 (Winter)

COSRX Ultimate Nourishing Rice Overnight Spa Mask 🌸🌸🌸

Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Oil-Free Gel-Cream 🌸🌸🌸

Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Cream 🌸🌸

Step 8: Sunscreen (ESSENTIAL)

The most essential step towards good skin. Uneven pigmentation? Dark spots? Premature wrinkles? Sun protection is the best anti-aging product out there. I used to hate sunscreen because the European products I tried always left my skin feeling greasy (which can be a real nightmare in Singapore’s sultry humidity).

In 2017, I started wearing sunscreen on a close to daily basis and it took me a while to change that into a daily habit. Now, it’s second nature and I put sunscreen on even if I’m just going to be indoors all day long. Depending on the season, I use different types of sunscreen. For instance, in the summer, I use the spray versions of the ANESSA and Biore sunscreens on my body.

Shiseido ANESSA Perfect UV Sunscreen Skincare Gel SPF50+ PA++++ 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Face) (All seasons) (Waterproof)

Shiseido ANESSA Perfect UV Sunscreen Skincare Milk SPF50+ PA++++ 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Face) (All seasons) (Waterproof)

Biore UV Aqua Rich Watery Essence SPF 50+ PA++++ 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Face) (Indoors) (Not waterproof)

Nivea Sun Protect Water Gel SPF 50 PA+++ 🌸🌸🌸

Dr. Jart+ Every Sun Day UV Sun Fluid Broad Spectrum SPF 30 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Avène Ultra-Light Hydrating Sunscreen Lotion Spray SPF 50+ 🌸🌸

Others (throughout the day)

Kiehl’s Cactus Flower & Tibetan Ginseng Hydrating Mist 🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Good for flights and after exercising) (Portable)

Crabtree & Evelyn Soothing Hand Cream Therapy, Goatmilk and Oat 🌸🌸🌸🌸  (Winter)

L’Occitane Cherry Blossom Hand Cream 🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Winter) (Portable)

L’Occitane Verbena Cooling Hand Cream Gel 🌸🌸🌸🌸 (Summer) (Portable)

If you’ve read all the way till here, I applaud you for your dedication!!!

So, what’s next?

I’m definitely no expert and my choice of products is limited to my skin type, my budget, and the weather I have to surrender myself to. If you are hungry for more, Fifty Shades of Snail (one of the only beauty blogs I read) will be a great portal to the world of Asian skincare and the infinite options (product formulations) available for customizing your own routine. Delve right in!  

Do you do skincare? What are your favorite products? 💖

Wishing you all healthy, glowing skin, 

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My Sophomore Spring Harvard Classes + Some Little Things

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Belatedly, wishing all of you: Happy Year of the Pig!!! ❤ ❤ ❤

First things first, things that have served as brilliant reminders when life works weirdly:

1. Turn your FOMO into JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) — I would like to interpret it as loving yourself and realizing that doing nothing or doing less are all relative terms that we use to measure ourselves relative to something external. Though we might often doubt ourselves for not doing enough, not spending time on academics or extracurriculars might mean spending it with your body, your mind, or your soul. (Thank you, Marwah. x) That’s as worthwhile and meaningful. We all have different paths and different destinations along the way. So the balance is to walk my own path while still keeping in sight where I want to go and to make sure I’m keeping pace with my internal calling.

 

2. Maintaining a healthy weight is a marathon not a sprint!!!

3. My classes. Let’s say, Q = “Eating more brings weight gain” — at least, there’s one thing in life that works by the same causal logic as proposition Q: reading and thinking more brings a better version of myself. I’ve slacked off quite a bit this long weekend (on Sunday, I curled up in a corner of Cabot Library and just read romance novels for an entire afternoon). No skimping on readings subsequently, Selina!!!

Now, a bit more about what I’m taking this semester:

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AESTHINT 47 Forbidden Romance in Modern China

I was destined to take this class. Forbidden Romance? Check. China? Check. We’ve studied illicit love letters between Lu Xun and his female student, Yu Dafu’s auto-erotic story of narcissism and patriotism, and the secret love affair between the married darling of modern China and Virginia Woolf’s nephew.

Almost astonishingly, I’ve discovered that women back then had much greater latitude in exploring new forms of intimacy, constructing a new feminine subjectivity in romantic liaisons, and breaking from societal traditions. The many types of love (teacher-student, extramarital, eroticism, older woman-younger man) that flourished then amidst the post-May 4th zeitgeist might be considered taboo right now. Perhaps, the literary history of modern romance is a narrative of regression.

Professor David Wang, who teaches this, is so incredibly earnest and empathetic in his lectures. His lecture on the life of Yu Dafu (a writer who began his life with debauchery and ended up in martyrdom) was the first time I teared up in a lecture.

HIST-LIT 97 Sophomore Tutorial — Cultures of U.S. Imperialism

One of my main reasons for declaring History & Literature is to explore imperialism/postcolonialism and narrative historiography (empire and globalization through fiction) in tandem. We will be reading many authors who I have encountered before (which could be a good or a bad thing): E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad (!!!), J. M. Coetzee, Wole Soyinka, and Jamaica Kincaid. Thus far, we’ve looked at the British empire as much as the U.S. empire. It’s interesting being the only non-American a class as U.S.-centric as this one, and having grown up with a partially Anglophone education in Singapore that bears the indelible vestiges of British colonialism.

PHIL 33 Ethical Issues in Social, Cultural, and Artistic Representation

Telling other people about my classes this semester has been a mouthful because of Phil 33. Everyone’s response is always a lull, followed by, Say again?

I didn’t actually shop this class, but shopped numerous others. Expectedly, on the Friday of Shopping Week, I once again ended up in utter confusion and disarray about my course cart. After my friend told me in the afternoon about this class, I decided to enroll on a whim. I’m interested in the topics we have been discussing in class (it’s just 8 of us) in the abstract, but not that much in the specific. Right now, we have been analyzing arguments on both sides of the Confederate symbol debate. How do we judge the past? What gives a symbol its racist meaning? How can we correct historical injustice?

Subsequent topics might resonate more:

  • Cultural Property and Cultural Appropriation
  • Stereotypes
  • Ethics and Fictional Representations

PHIL 136 Phenomenology of Lived Experience

Taught by Professor Samantha Matherne!!! (She taught my Kant class last semester and was phenomenal.) Absolutely a blast so far. I wasn’t familiar at all with the word ‘Phenomenology’ before taking this class and still am not quite sure. The central question is: what are the general structures that any experience involves?

We started by looking at treatments of the phenomenology of lived experience in general in texts by Brentano and Husserl (now Heidegger). I’m really excited to later work out the phenomenology of specific modes of lived experience in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Emilio Uranga’s “Essay on an Ontology of the Mexican,” and Sara Ahmed’s “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology.”

I WILL DO MY READINGS THOROUGHLY!

If any of these ideas interest you, come talk to me about my classes anytime.

4. Happy Lantern Festival! 元宵节快乐～We’ve reached the fifteenth (and the last) day of the Lunar New Year celebrations so fast. There have been some dreary days and afternoons of seemingly incurable malaise, but also some mornings when I sit in class and look at the world in wonder, emerging from a vulnerable conversation into a kinder world.

Even though I haven’t eaten tangyuans (those glutinous balls with black sesame or peanut paste fillings), I had a call with my mom tonight across continents and time zones, which put my life in perspective and filled me with faith. Thank you for always believing in me. You don’t know how much it means to me, 妈咪 ❤ Sending this ball of positive energy to all of you. On cold nights with swirling snow weighing on gaunt treetops, think of this cute picture below.

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Lots of love,

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[Valentine’s Day Short Story] April, I Arrive on The Shores of Your Love

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Author’s Note: Here’s the first short story I wrote in college. It’s from 2017. I workshopped it in the first creative writing workshop I took at Harvard — thank you to Claire Messud and everyone else who gave me their precious feedback. The writing might be kitschy at parts and the style is also rather different from how I write now. But, here’s a story for those yearning for love and also those who are happily in love. Happy Valentine’s Day! x

All illustrations below are by a talented Vietnamese artist I came across on Pinterest tonight, Xuan Loc Xuan, whose artworks somehow tie in astonishingly, effortlessly with the lives of three women. 

Parrot

The bar is closed. Sometime between darkness and dawn. Kento sits behind the counter, surrounded by pyramids of bottles from floor to ceiling and an assembly of shimmering glass. His fingers, bathed in the dusky retro lighting from the lanterns overhead, drums on the mahogany. This is his crystal vestibule. But, right now, his fingers look like they are rubbed with faint streaks of blood. He is almost afraid to touch the book before him. What if he sullies it?

He unbuttons his vest, rubs his hands, and noiselessly mixes the cocktail that gave him his first sip of fame; it has been a while since he last made the Taiko for himself—It’s her favorite drink here, he thinks, as he downs it in a gulp. When his tongue swipes against the residuum of bitter matcha powder on the roof of his mouth, he wonders if this is why she drinks it so religiously. It has been exactly four years and eight months, he thinks, since she first walked in. Wearing sunglasses past midnight. Looking like a lost tori. That night, she sat there in silence staring at the Taiko she ordered. He alone saw the drops that trickled down from under her metal shades into the green swirl. He said nothing.

She came back the next week, and then, the week after. It took him a while to realize that she wasn’t frigidly aloof like those other moneyed Japanese women who frequented the bar. She was just painfully awkward. It took him even longer to realize that she was, in fact, a writer—her unsmiling photo on the back covers, hesitantly staring into readers’ souls from the bestselling racks. Her most recent novel published last year was even getting adapted into a film starring Ume Yuji.

Just yesterday, she asked him, “What is the Taiko to you, Kento-san?”

“Taiko? It’s love. I’m not sure if you’ve fallen in love before, Yuri-chan, but it’s everything. Bitter, sour, sweet, and a burning feeling that then dulls into solitude.”

Her eyes flew to his hands before looking down. A quiet moment passed between them. Then, she took out a book from her handbag. “This book to me is like the Taiko to you. It’s my gift. I hope you read it,” she said. She left without ordering anything.

Now, the Taiko has given him courage and awakened a long-dormant thought. Can it be?

He holds the book, feeling its smooth spine. His curved knuckles rest against the hard wood. April is scrawled across the light brown cover, which has printed creases. It looks like a piece of cardboard, he thinks.

He flips open the cover, his index finger briefly touching her printed name, and begins.

***

on a train

— March 31, 2013 —

She couldn’t help staring at him. She didn’t expect to see him again. An anorexic girl sat a few feet away, giving her the side-eye every so often; on the other end, a tiny kimono-clad grandma with a silver bun primly perched on a seat, orange Daiei grocery bags pooling around her sandaled, flaccid feet; and, sprawled across four seats, two high school boys with brilliantly bleached hair who, considering the hour, must have skipped school. While her usual rush-hour mornings were spent on trains brimming over with men and women in monochrome suits, this was a sparsely occupied carriage with specks of personality.

And there he was: a tousled-haired young man slouching against the white train door—of a small build, but lean instead of stocky. His dark eyes looked like they had been mascaraed—framed by very, very long lashes, she decided—below gently arched brows, resting slightly far apart above a roundish nose. There was a shadow on his left cheek, which turned out to be a dimple on second look. He wore a long-sleeve navy and white striped shirt, a ticket stub sticking out of the cotton pocket on his left chest. He didn’t look too poorly-shaven for a homeless boy. Perhaps, he lied that day?

She wondered how others saw him, a face constructed in delicate strokes, maybe soft and unthreatening, an underlying glint of narcissism in every curve and every line. He knew he was attractive. If so, she did not see him the way they did. He was to her violently tantalizing, appearing out of nowhere each time, searing her sensibilities. Her lips parted a little at the thought of walking up to him. She smacked them and tasted the bitterness; ah, the shimmering warm pink of Marc Jacobs Have We Met? 108. She inhaled sharply.

You are already late for work, she reasoned with herself. You told him off that day, why change your mind? You rarely change your mind. But, she could already feel the gears in her mind eagerly reverting their course. Let them watch.

His eyes darted down from inspecting the ceiling to meet hers. It was a disinterested glance. Bored, almost goading. He flicked his gaze away after a few seconds too long. She wasn’t sure if those seconds held in them any gleam of recognition, but she would know in a moment.

He looked back at her as her stiletto heels clicked across the carriage. She smoothed down her pencil skirt, wiping the sweat that gathered on her palms since she saw him.

“Hi, I’m Etsuko-chan,” she spoke quickly, before this spurt of crazy courage ran out.

“I remember you. But I don’t need a lady friend.”

At work, no intern around his age would have dared to treat her this way. But, right now, this didn’t bother her at all. The words tore out of her rouged lips awkwardly: “I’ve changed my mind.” She was trembling like a loose leaf, autumn-red.

He looked less wary now, the hard set to his mouth softening like the bowed wet edge of the cardboard in that Tuesday’s downpour. Ever since she had lifted the soaked lids of the cardboard box—a box that read “UNWANTED PET” in a Sharpie scrawl—beside the back entrance to her apartment building three days ago, she had been haunted. Angled towards her widening eyes, his striking face was lit by the dusky glow of the streetlamp. The raindrops slid off his cheeks onto the hollow of his collarbone. That day, he was curled up like an umbrella handle.

This face now seemed almost hopeful.

Taking a deep gulp of air, she continued rapidly, stumbling over words, but the invitation tumbled out before his warming gaze, “Have you been—uh, have you found a place yet? If not… if not, you can stay with me.”

“Why?” The question trailed out before them both. He uttered this one word in wonder.

“I don’t know,” she replied in equal wonder, “I don’t know.”

***

Ume ashore

“Cut!” the director, grinning through his grey stubble, yells in a hoarse voice. He sounds strangely choked up. His bloodshot eyes aren’t the only misty pair in the studio. A round of appreciative applause breaks out amongst the set crew.

Ume’s head hurts. This is a bit too much for her, she knows. Every engaging script is like this. They suck you in and then spit you out, rearranging the configuration your soul. It must be almost midnight.

He withdraws his lips from hers, and bows slightly. “Thank you, senpai. I thought you were really good, as usual, ” he says, eyes crinkling. She smiles, but her involuntary raised hand to her lips betrays the fact that somewhere in the middle of that long, passionate kiss she had completely forgotten that the reel was running. She has been exceedingly careful thus far not to let her budding attraction to him spill over the boundaries of their professional relationship, but now that she is no longer attached it is far too easy to indulge in her attraction and let herself fall.

Her assistant’s head pops up from behind one of the cameras, sending her a wink.

As Ume collapses onto her cushioned chair, she kicks off her heels and massages her sore feet. It feels good to forget for a while, no matter how briefly, the scrutinizing eyes, sympathetic looks, or, worse still, veiled messages from that smug harpy Ayane who must have been praying for her breakup since they competed for the same role two years back. When Ume started dating the heir of the Toshiba Group last year, she thought that she had finally found the right man—he might have been balding, but he certainly could be considered good-looking for a wealthy guy. Here was a man who was finally as successful as she was, if not more. Even the newspapers thought so, deeming them the power couple of the entertainment world. She must have been congratulated at least a thousand times. Yet, their perfect match began unraveling once Ume started filming April this year against his objections and the bald pig in turn got caught with some unknown model in the tabloids within a month of her strict filming schedule. What a joke.

Since breaking up publicly two weeks ago, Ume has been trying to figure out why she had felt the strangest tide of relief wash over her when she told Mr. Toshiba, “Let’s end this.” And then, there’s the tricky matter of her feeling a little too much attraction for her younger costar on set. At the first script reading in January, she had taken one look into his gentle eyes, single lidded, almond-shaped and slightly drooping, the white of his eye like fish belly, and felt the tension from her fights with Mr. Toshiba caressed away by softly lapping waves. She liked him immediately then. He may be seven years younger, but there is an almost Buddhist serendipity to his quiet demeanor. Being around him makes her feel light. Yet, the outside world will chew them up if she does anything about her attraction; she can already imagine the headlines in bold font: “Ume Yuji Dating a Toshishita after Losing Toshiba Heir”.

Feigning nonchalance, she turns slowly to glance at him, sitting a few feet away and diligently annotating his script. He seems to sense her gaze, suddenly looking up. Instead of averting her gaze as she usually does, this time she holds his eye. She catches the mild surprise on his face. He arches a brow, and makes a move as if to get up. It breaks the spell and she looks away instantly. What is she thinking being so forward?

Is it the script? The narrative is doing weird things to her. She has never thought about dating a younger man before reading the script and the novel of the same name that it is based on. April has a resounding sense of loneliness that resonated with her even while she was still dating that Toshiba heir. The novel’s last sentence encapsulated what she yearns to feel but has never felt despite dating several men:

Many years later, as she stepped onto the train, Etsuko would always remember that last day of March when she looked into the eyes of solitude and found another, arriving again and again onto the shores of a shared loneliness that can only be love.

Perhaps, Ume is, as much as she is unwilling to acknowledge it, lonely like Etsuko.

Despite how utterly bizarre April is as a love story, Ume has never felt this close to a character before. Her character, Etsuko, is a beautiful and successful twenty-seven-year-old woman. Yet, Etsuko is also broken in some way, always wearing a mask of control that everyone expects of a Todai grad; this nags at Ume the more scenes they shot. After a string of failed relationships with men who are inevitably intimidated by her intelligence and accomplishments, Etsuko adopts a homeless twenty-year-old young man like a pet, settles into what most would definitely consider a taboo pet and owner relationship, discovers genuine companionship and even the possibility of love, but one day finds him missing from home. Everyone tells her that they have never seen a young man with her. Etsuko checks the CCTV tape of her apartment building to try to find out when he left, but realizes as she goes further back that no such person existed in all these months. As she wanders out, Etsuko sees the same cardboard box labeled with “UNWANTED PET” again, opens it to see a cavalier puppy staring back at her, and smiles. What a great story. Ume knew without a shred of doubt that she was going to take up the role the moment she closed the book covers.

Yet, during the January script reading, the director had blithely announced, “Look at the powerful ending! We have a wonderful film in our hands about feminism and about finding oneself, which has been very popular since Hollywood’s Eat, Pray, Love. We might have a good run at the box office.”

She had immediately protested then before the round table, “Kubota-san, I don’t see how that can be the case. I read the book and it’s honestly all about solitude to me. I wonder if the writer-sama might be here to share?”

The writer, Yuri Yoshizawa, had not been there and never did come to the set at any point in the filming. After a month and a half on set, Ume has all but confirmed that the mysterious Yuri Yoshizawa is a recluse, but that is beside the point. Even if Yoshizawa-san were at the script reading to endorse the director’s interpretation, Ume would have still refused to concede that this is what the story is all about.

In that glass-paneled room, crowded with the primary cast and the director, assistant-directors, and assistants of assistants, Ume had asked, “Is Etsuko schizophrenic?” But the director had declared, “No, no, making Hisao up in her head is just a coping mechanism! At last, our dear Etsuko-chan realizes that she needs no man. That’s more important, that’s way more important. We want to leave it open-ended for the audience.” If Ume were Etsuko, she would have wept bitterly when she opened the box only to see a dog. She knows what it’s like to want to fall in love so badly with someone who will love you unconditionally in return. It’s a yearning for someone to share in your loneliness, a yearning that can overcome pride, societal conventions, and render all the petty checklists you have inconsequential. It seems to her that April is a lonely woman’s plea for love. She feels herself echoing this plea wordlessly, with every laden line that she acts from the script. If she doesn’t do something, she might go crazy like Etsuko.

“Hey, Ume-chan,” a voice sounds from above her. Her costar has made his way over to her chair and now looms over her.

She looks up at him searchingly, curiously. So this is how she falls: despite every rational fiber in her body telling her how unwise it is, despite how she knows even if he says yes their relationship will not be fondly looked upon, she is about to exhilaratingly, unwaveringly throw herself onto the path that Etsuko wanted so badly to tread upon.

“Ume-chan? Are you okay? There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he draws a deep breath before speaking, droopy eyes unblinking, and crouches down to her eye level.

She knows her mind is made up in that moment. She inches her face towards him, places a finger on his moving lips, and whispers, “I have something to tell you too.”

“Hmm?”

“I want to ask you out on a date,” she says to him. A pause and then, her bold red lips, still slightly smudged from the prior scene, open and close: “Thoughts?”

As she watches his eyes lit up, Ume finally thinks she can grasp that feeling of arrival that Etsuko mentioned, that marvelous feeling of stepping ashore when your feet expects watery depths but instead finds an assuring foothold of solid earth.

***

April

Yuri gets off at the Yushima station when it’s dark. Outside, there are the few usual men drinking scotch and smoking cigarettes on the curb. She drags her luggage down the steps leading to her favorite bar with some effort. One of the men—half-drunk and pretending not to be—sways to his feet with an outstretched hand and yells slowly, “Blind obasan, d-o y-o-u n-e-e-d h-e-l-p?” By then, she is outside the basement entrance, but she would not have dared to answer anyway. She pushes her sunglasses further up her nose bridge before entering.

Her eyes make out the inside with accustomed ease. There are the same few Mesdames surveying the bar like hawks; they must have been beautiful once, with subtle, artful touches to their eyes and lips and cheeks that remind people constantly of that fact. Poaching rich men? she thinks to herself. She cocks her head as Kento appears behind the bar. The Mesdames’s alert faces melt into what might even be a smile when he slides the drinks to them.

She looks away. Beside the Mesdames sits a lone foreigner—male, in his mid-forties, and white. Definitely American, she knows this from his ill-fitting San Diego Zoo t-shirt inside a boxy blazer and the bowl of fries set before his Budweiser. Next to him is a young couple, too busy making out to drink their glinting Golden Daiquiri originals. And in a dim-lit alcove towards the side of the bar, huddles a group of adults—some sort of bonding gathering after work, probably—slurring “Kanpai!” amid bottles of Black and White, ties and glasses askew.

Kento, who she is here to see, wears a white slim fit tuxedo. His black hair, streaked with silver, is slicked back as usual, adding some color to his outfit, alongside a maroon red tie. He is shaking up a drink, as though cupping a heart in his weathered hands, when she pulls to a stop before him.

“Yuri-chan,” Kento says when he sees her, “you haven’t been here in three weeks.”

She can already feel her body trembling. “Oh,” she manages a reply, her voice humbled, “you’ve noticed.”

“And you are wearing sunglasses again. Like you did on the first day you arrived.” He pauses and then adds quietly, “I notice everything about you.”

Before Kento had opened his mouth, she was positively certain that he would have been taken aback by her book. Yet, here he is telling her that he remembers the first day she came to this bar.

She remembers it too. That night when she first met Kento was also the day her closest friend got married. At the dazzling wedding banquet, Yuri had looked around and felt then as though time had solely left her behind when it was busy transforming every woman she knew from girls to girlfriends to mothers. On the train back home, she caught a glimpse of herself in the window—an expressionless, unremarkable face lit up by the bluish phone screen, blurring with the rolling dark hills that receded into nothingness—and had the strong impulse to be anywhere other than on this train heading back to her empty apartment. She got off at the next station. When she found this bar after a quick Internet search, she had already begun regretting her rash decision. That night, the bar was crowded with a big group of raucous revelers that did nothing to drown her loneliness. She felt lonelier than ever. It was then when she saw the bartender, silent and smiling, like a priest intoning a mass to well-ordered rows of glasses. In the pool of warm light, she saw his dancing hands concocting drinks that swallowed worries without prejudice; his clear-headed sobriety in an inebriated world; and, through her sunglasses, she saw plain as day his brilliant solitude.

“Oh really?” she asks hesitantly, “Did you read April?”

“I did.”

“Then, do you know why I wrote that Etsuko and Hisao met on 31 March?”

Before he can answer, the American man gestures at Kento, taking him away from Yuri’s end of the bar, and requests for a Taiko in a butchered pronunciation. As she watches Kento make the drink, she feels her eyes moisten—fortunately hidden by her sunglasses. Kento is like an artist condensing the human experience into a glass: a few drops of rice wine, some green tea liquor, a spray of matcha powder, ice clinks and then, a sudachi citrus slice sinks into the shades of green, before finally a gold leaf rests with a sigh at the top.

In the past three weeks of self-imposed exile from the bar, Yuri had realized acutely for the first time how intolerable her suburban apartment was. How she had used to spend all her time within those walls for years was now unfathomable. Totoro her pet parrot, who was trained to squawk “I love you” passionately in twenty-four languages, no longer entertained. There were nights when the ceiling seemed to be descending on her and she got to as far as the train station. But, the thought of Kento having read her book and disliking it—disliking her—kept her away from the city. She returned to her dull apartment in Setagaya-ku where even Totoro did not bother to talk to her. In the silence, she allowed her fears to take root and grow.

Kento pushes one of the two glasses towards the waiting American. The other Taiko he places gently before her.

He says, “It’s because we met on March 31st in 2013. Tell me if I’m right.”

Yuri takes off her sunglasses, eyes still fairly red and eye circles a garish greenish-black from weeks of insomnia, and stares at Kento.

“We are also seven years apart in age,” he continues, looking at her so closely that he seems to see into her and past her at Etsuko.

He says, “And I am also as lonely as you are.”

Yuri knows she is crying but she finally doesn’t care.

“So, Yuri-chan, will you accept this from me?” he asks, cupping the Taiko in two hands, sliding it slowly but steadily across the mahogany countertop at where the wooden edge meets her heart.

She remembers the plot that stretched back four years, eight months and three weeks, on the first day of April when she emerged from the bar into a kinder, more hopeful world and felt the wet sunlight on her face; when she locked herself in a dark apartment to write another woman’s life and her own intertwined, wondering if it could say what she would never tell him to his face; when she ventured into the city once a week on a fifty-seven-minute commute past rolling hills to observe another’s solitude, murmuring a soft prayer each time that perhaps he would one day consider sharing it with her. She feels a heaviness as if she had just awakened from a years-old slumber with unspoken words, imagined moments, and fully-written sentences in her body. She finally arrives ashore.

Ashore

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Yuri and kento