Category: Harvard

my pillow book: the pathos of November

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Inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s diary-lists in The Pillow Book.

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Things That I Will Remember

Shivering as we tread the familiar path to Annenberg in the canopy of night. Everyone holding signs celebrating the declaration of their concentrations. Shimmery silver streaks, Trophy Wife and Sugar Daddy signboards, bare cookies, beaming faces, flashing lights, postcards sent into the future, holding my choices in my palm: History & Literature and Philosophy.

Classroom to Table with Professors Ellen Song (History & Literature) and Musa Syeed (Screenwriting). Faculty Dinner at Leverett House with Philosophy Professor Samantha Matherne. ❤

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Professor Matherne, who chatted with me about Kant, Kyoto, the imagination, grad school, and teaching philosophy. 🙂

Stepping into the dim, timber lighting of Border Café, looking left and right, before my gaze falls on a face I haven’t seen in person since 2014. Many things change, her smile (and our appetites) stays the same. Aspirations are different, more uncertain, still fervent. Our eyes as bright, as clean as our sixteen-year-old selves.

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The hasty, just-right moment of picking up the phone, hearing a strangely familiar voice and only being able to utter Oh my God again and again until we both start laughing. Falling into an easy camaraderie built from a patchwork of a few days — some friends are only made in a handful of hours but seem to have been known to me from a past life. Laughing in an empty dorm room strewn with red solo cups and curious, sullen bottles of alcohol, like the aftermath of some alien abduction scene, the three of us the last ones standing. Talking till 4AM, bleary-eyed, yet feeling like if sleep was not gravity, we could float till infinity in this ether of honest intimate conversation.

Eating hotpot with ginger ale and lemon tea, slurping a big bowl of ramen under the veil of steam and the wise words and heartfelt advice from Tim & Ee San, tasting first snow on the tip of my tongue.

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To the wisest and the kindest. Thank you for guiding me and bringing me to eat yummy food! ❤

Going wild at Berklee’s Jay Chou Tribute Concert, in stark contrast to all the other mild concert-goers. Singing like no one can hear us, dancing like no one is watching us.

Doing Harvard-Yale as a room, all deck in Harvard gear, rubbing numb fingers, smiling in the wind, rosy cheeks, furry hats, munching on fries, cheering confusedly, posing for photos, and collapsing into giggles over how good we look.

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Walking from Fenway Park (in Boston) back to our dorm (in Cambridge) in the cold, noses red, sipping on bubble tea (milk green tea, mini bubbles, 50% sugar, no ice) and talking about everything under a sky thick with clouds and fecundity.

Things That Constitute A Bad Day

Waking up at 7AM after snoozing my 6AM alarm for an hour, once every eight minutes.

Writing a paper already due which I got an extension for. Clock ticking.

Stomach growling but no real food in sight.

A throat parched and scratched from two chocolate chip granola bars and a hundred goldfish crackers.

Waiting in front of the printer for ten minutes, paying three times, refreshing, and nothing stirs.

Being late for class. Again.

Falling down the stairs of Quincy, wrapped like a maki roll in my puffy ankle-length down coat, tumbling, crashing into the long legs of some bewildered, terrified guy who grips me tight and sets me right on the stairs. Glasses askew.

Not wearing contacts and glasses fogging up when I blow my nose.

Limping back to my dorm room in the darkness, puddles sprouting in front of me like invisible tiles.

Purple bruises on my legs when I want to wear a skirt.

What I Wrote This Month

A 20-page screenplay titled UNWIND ME about the inexhaustible variety of college life. Three characters. One night. Sometimes we don’t see how much we need someone to care or just how lonely we are. 

A paper using the lens of trauma to inspect the complexity of white liberal guilt in Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine: its historicity, hypocrisy, and fantasy of a return to innocence.

A comparative paper on the extent of fictional repair in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats vs. Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt.

Coming up next week: revising UNWIND ME and writing my second PHIL 129 midterm paper.

Things That Don’t Last

Strawberry yogurt-coated pretzel crumbs. Squashed juice boxes. Empty bottled iced tea. Lindt chocolate wrappers like aluminum petals.

Negativity. Bad days. Writer’s block. Being upset at a friend. The absence of a response, the limbo before a decision, the length of time called waiting.

A month like November.

Lots of love,

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I declared my concentration!

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BLACK SCREEN. FADE IN.

INT. DORM ROOM – NIGHT

Selina (20, Singaporean-Chinese) has both hands on the Mac keyboard. She is leaning forward expectantly before a desk piled high with dog-eared books, loose sheets of paper and thin notebooks with mythical, cartoonish covers. Cue music: something whimsical like Hisaishi’s Nausicaä Requiem! something dramatically perching on the edge of the symphonic abyss like Mahler’s Sixth!

The my.harvard page is loading.

She stretches and hums.

She checks Instagram, puts her phone down, and flips a page of Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine.

The front page loads. The music reaches a feverish pitch.

She feigns hesitation for a moment. It’s nice to dwell in a state of no commitment. Then the stillness breaks as her fingers start flying across the keyboard.

She swiftly clicks on “My Program” and then “Declare Concentration”.

ZOOM IN on her laptop screen. A series of selections from one drop-down list to the next:

  • Joint Concentration. Click.
  • Primary Concentration. History and Literature. Click.
  • Allied Concentration. Philosophy. Click.

The cursor hovers over the red ‘Submit’ button. The music dies. Silence is viscous on the screen.

SELINA
Alright. (a pause) Amen.

A beat. She grins and presses.

Click.

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Lots of Love,
Officially a Hist&Lit and Philosophy major,

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After the Darkness, A Meadow of Books

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The number of papers I’ve written this semester: 

7.

Words that appeared in my first 10-page screenplay*: 

Wong Kar-wai. Temple. Claypot. Kant. Fortune-teller. White peach tart. Mahjong. Wikipedia. Red Mansion Dream. The Gods are real.

*If you are intrigued and would like to read it in exchange for giving me your genuine critique and constructive feedback, please reach out to me. (´･ω･`)

The number of times I went to the gym: 

8.

Where I’m going for Thanksgiving Break:

Cambridge (UK) & London (hello my loves)!!!

The number of sit-down exams I will have during Finals: 

0.

WHAT? It is, fortunately, happily, emphatically, true.

Correlatively, the total number of pages I will have to write in my final papers:

41 to 48 pages.

(A 20-page screenplay, a 6-8 page Global Fictions paper, a 7-10 page literary analysis or creative project, and an 8-10 page paper on Kant.)

The number of days till I come back home (i.e. fly back to Singapore): 

40.

(In fact, I won’t even be on campus during Finals Week (or Reading Period) because I’m flying off on the last day of class, which is December 5th. I shall lovingly labor over my papers in Singapore.)

A jumble of things on my mind: 

Unpaid. internships. Concentration dilemmas. (ಥ﹏ಥ) Career choices. “Don’t idealize or romanticize suffering.” Screenwriting. Grad school? Techno-orientalism, postcolonialism, literature & culture & race. Sit in an alcove and read and read and read until I grow cracks and crumble like moth wings. Do novels get written under deadlines? Do I want a creative senior thesis? I want to read big, fat, difficult, swollen, convoluted books that I will never read again. But, I don’t want to take a class only on Shakespeare, or Poetry, or early British literature. I should do Hist & Lit. The fantasy of intimacy with the language is increasingly falling apart. I want a critical lens, to explore, to challenge, to immerse myself in the contemporary, not the old, white, Western canon that has nothing to do with a 21st-century Singaporean-Chinese girl grappling with globalization, who wants to enter a conversation with writers who deal in that vein of global imagination. 

Here’s an Easter egg—a random snippet I typed on my phone in class because I was hungry and homesick and harboring within me a dim sum-shaped hole: 

The first thing I hear when the Play begins is the flurry of Cantonese chatter. Flying across the room like darts and then bouncing on the cloud of soft affection, blood ties, subtle enmity and piping hot early morning news Fresh off the Tongue making rounds.

Xuan, beautiful, a head taller and cantonese-speaking, whispers into my ear, with a glint in her eye. That short fat man, Xuan says, with a hiccup, as she downs another gulp of sweet white coconut milk, does pharmaceuticals and always loses in mahjong, probably intentionally when he plays with my Ma. Listening, my mouth forms the shape of an ‘o’.

No one else notices us collapsing into giggles, or my wobbly chopsticks dropping the prawn puff beneath the table, or us imitating the adults while chewing, or me eating three times The Amount of Golden Buns that Mami said I was allowed to.

The table is strewn with dumplings with different skin, different colors, different meat textures, with brown baskets of steaming hot pastries half the size of my tiny palm, with sweet chicken claws and spicy carrot cake, hard noodles in cups and soft eggs in half cut shells, and the iced mango sago melting over my tongue like cold cold honey.

***
After a brief patch of darkness, of indecision, of agonizing back-and-forths between two concentrations that may seem indistinguishable to the observer (English with its early British literature and poetry requirements and the glowing possibility of writing a novel in a Creative thesis, and History & Literature with its incredible freedom of charting my own course and piecing together a singular academic focus from an array of departments), of self-interrogation, of asking myself again and again ‘What do I want out of college?’, of grasping the shovel to dislodge already fixed aspirations, of negotiating the dilemma of studying the canon versus what I’m actually intellectually passionate about, of self-doubt, of my aversion to certain facets of the English language, of my fraught relationship with writing…

I see that there is always a meadow of books—my green light, an intellectual lodestar. It eludes me sometimes, but it’s an ancient instinct from which I may stray but always never wander far.

My favorite books that I read in class this semester: 

 

 

Lots of love,

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My Sophomore Fall Harvard Classes! (ft. Life)

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I realized I’m almost through with September and have not talked about the biggest chunk in my sophomore life thus far—my classes! There’s a reason why I’ve literally had no time to write about this. Life has been an absolute whirlwind. Here’s a snapshot of the residential problems plaguing our suite of four: I discovered black mold in my built-in closet last Friday and after lots of back-and-forth with the building manager and maintenance staff, we got it fixed (repairing the air-conditioning ventilation, painting the wall, sending my clothes to the dry cleaner, setting up a new portable wardrobe in the common room, etc.); last night, we noticed a small patch of black mold growing on our bedroom ceiling; today, an entourage came and arrived at a diagnosis that they needed to tear down part of our ceiling and our walls and eradicate the black mold infestation once and for all. In short, our room is no longer habitable as it is. UPDATE: my roommate, Ani, and I are moving to Adams temporarily until the Housing side fixes everything. It’s both strange and overwhelming, packing again, uprooting and anchoring the physical center of my life to another location after just getting used to DeWolfe.

What a day. But, I’ll be honest: this is a very skewed representation of what sophomore year has been like so far. Sophomore year, living in (or, more accurately speaking, on the periphery of—since we are in DeWolfe’s overflow housing instead of our affiliated Leverett House) an upperclassman house, the initial excitement of Shopping Week, seeing everyone again, reconfiguring the axis of my movements from the radius of the Yard to the Charles River to the restaurants of Harvard Square (an alarming statistic for my waistline: I have eaten at the dining hall for a grand total of fewer than seven times)… All these felt strangely natural, like slipping into another skin that is constituted by the atoms of past memories, unconscious habits, and the visible veins of known bonds.

My classes have also been unexpectedly rewarding and captivating. I love what I’m reading—some days I have to finish more than 300 pages in an afternoon—but I’m actually poring over each and pouring my mind wholeheartedly into every novel, secondary text, and philosophical treatise. I almost wonder why I didn’t do that in my last two semesters. I hope this sense of affection (quite lovingly) and fascination I currently harbor for what I’m learning in my classes won’t diminish as we approach the slew of midterm papers.

PHIL 129 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

One of my goals this semester was to take my first Philosophy class in college—I had loved studying epistemology (KI!) in JC and writing a research essay about the construction of historiography in fiction; I found that in retrospect I had unconsciously gravitated towards writing my HUM10 papers on Descartes and Nietzsche instead of, for instance, Austen and Joyce; I always entertained the thought of doing a secondary (read: minor) in Philosophy despite a distinct lack of concrete action on my part.

A friend recommended this class to me in the middle of shopping week but I was extremely hesitant, to say the least. But, in comparison, the other three Philosophy classes I had shopped were either too alienating, uninteresting, or foundational. When I finally shopped this class, forty minutes late and after missing the first session, it just felt right. Kant is, undoubtedly, incredibly dense and erudite = hard to digest. (How does he pack so much meaning into each sentence?!) His writings have also transformed the trajectory of Western thought, from epistemology to metaphysics, ethics to aesthetics, religion to politics. I see him as one of those thinkers that I need to read in order to even make sense of the world. Yet, I’ve not done so on my own initiative. But, I guess that’s what college is for—to really chew over and interrogate those books that we can’t conquer on our own or just wouldn’t have the devoted time and space to do so after we graduate.

We focus on one and only one of his major works of his for the whole semester, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87). The text presents an account of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, with Kant setting forth his criticisms of rationalist metaphysics and empiricist skepticism, and defending his views on the nature of the mind and of experience, the metaphysics of transcendental idealism, and the foundations of mathematics and natural science. I’m daunted but so, so excited.

HIST-LIT 90DI Speculative Fictions in Multiethnic America

This is my first History & Literature seminar! I’m not a huge sci-fi reader but the keywords in this class really caught my eye, in particular, techno-orientalism, post-race, and Afrofuturism. ‘Orientalism’ is one of those words that I will geek out about. I’ve researched about it in the foreign policy context, in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, and in relation to the epistemology of postcolonial fiction. But, I know close to nothing about techno-orientalism—for a genre like speculative fiction, how are new critical theories emerging and old ones recontextualized?

Growing up in a country as multicultural as Singapore, I’ve long had a fascination towards local narratives of multiethnic communities—consuming a diet of literature created by those on the periphery of the Western canon allowed me to imagine alternatives to how we live now. Yet, with age, I’ve recognized the pressing need to interrogate the ethics of representation in our global cultural matrix. In the genre of speculative fiction, reading works by writers other than the classic Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov entails an opening of our minds to the many possibilities of different, more hopeful ways of living as conceived from diverse experiences—such stories are a powerful resistance to the hegemonic (now splintering) visions of capitalism, of white domination, of nationalism, of technological ascendancy, etc.

ENGLISH 188GF Global Fictions

The reading list is to die for. How could I resist???

This course serves as an introduction to the global novel in English, as well as a survey of approaches to transnational literature. It considers issues of migration, colonialism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, religion and fundamentalism, environmental concerns, the global and divided city, racial and sexual politics, and international kinship. Authors include Teju Cole, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Liu Cixin, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Monique Truong, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, Arundhati Roy, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

I realized last semester while taking Professor Homi Bhabha’s seminar on the genealogies of global imagination alongside HUM10’s survey of the literary canon that I relished the opportunity to read books that are truly global in nature. Reading about modern cities, diasporas, migrations, identities in flux, histories in contention, the legacies of colonialism, and multiple subjectivities, I hope I can better grapple with the tensions between power structures in existing literary traditions and these textual acts of resistance and imagination, which are reinscribed in contemporary negotiations of identity in a globalized world.

ENGLISH CLR Introduction to Screenwriting: Workshop

I continue my addiction to the English department’s creative writing workshops. This is the third semester in a row that I’m doing one—I really couldn’t help but apply. There’s something special about the small community, the devotion to the craft, and the intimacy of knowing your classmates through their writings and their critiques of yours. After doing two fiction writing workshops under Professors Claire Messud and Neel Mukherjee, I wanted to try something different this semester.

Screenwriting is something I’ve always wanted to do but never did. In last semester especially, I noticed how I like to write with a lens in my head in my short stories—panoptic sweeps, overlaying vignettes, cinematic memory, and realistic dialogue. In fact, filmmakers have inspired my imagination as much as writers have. I admire Hayao Miyazaki for the touch of innocence in the ethical complexity of his narratives, Chen Kaige’s visual flair that almost defies language, Wong Kar-wai’s silent yet emotionally intense approach, the infusion of romance and psychological intimacy in Wes Anderson’s nested framing stories, and Roberto Benigni’s use of comedy amid a collapsing world. Not sure if I’m going to stick with this current vision, but two main directions I hope to explore in my writing for film include: firstly, a magical realism that harkens to the worlds of Studio Ghibli, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the martial arts epics of Louis Cha; secondly, local stories from across the global Asian diaspora that are driven by authentic voices.

***

In some ways, this semester has been both completely like and unlike anything I expected. I am grateful for all these experiences and people, with moments of startling clarity, absorbing books that push the boundaries of my mind, and seemingly unending, candid conversations, full of childlike digressions and guileless interest that trickle on and on.

If you’re interested in hearing more about any of these classes, or what I’m reading, let me know and I’ll write another post!! Also, hopefully, the black mold goes away. Forever.

Lots of love,

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Confronting My Worldly Fears

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At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

At the most random of moments, I consider my own mortality. One such instance was as I was seated in the cozy office of Professor Racha Kirakosian, which contained books so numerous that they seemed to be spewing out from the shelves with a life of their own. Half an hour ago, I had bumped into Carissa outside Lamont as she was on her way to see our Hum 10 seminar professor. I took it as a sign from the universe.

Just being in Prof Kirakosian’s office, in the presence of someone whose interests and expertise range from German to Religion to Medieval Studies to Game of Thrones, someone so winsomely at ease, witty, and genuinely passionate about life, I felt almost ashamed of my own fears—those that emerged with the onset of sophomore year, creeping like vines over my humanities-centric class schedule (the next blog post!), over the obstinate, inarticulable aspirations I harbor, and harnessing my vulnerability to the capitalist onslaught on campus, emblazoned in two words: Recruiting Season.

As a freshman, cocooned in the bubble of the Harvard Yard, my days were largely buffered by a sense of exhilaration and lethargy, the four years of college unfurling before me like an unending yellow brick road. As a sophomore, I am now suddenly catapulted from the periphery of real-world concerns to the precipice of worldly success outside of college gates: the moneyed prestige of Wall Street, the ascendancy of Silicon Valley, coupled with the irrational but still visceral fear of unemployment.

I can’t recall the conversation between Prof Kirakosian, Carissa, and me in complete specificity—I just remember laughing a lot, feeling at intervals, a sense of wonder and the budding certainty that life can work out in magical ways for those faithful to what they love. The professor confessed, after I hesitantly voiced my fears, that she never expected to be doing medieval studies or to be where she was today, but it was all about following her instincts at every stage in life.

I think about it sometimes, she said, the fact that we don’t live forever. I ask myself if I want to be doing this today if I were to die tomorrow. 

There’s an army of people doing CS, she said, why force yourself to do that? 

I see you as someone constantly reinventing yourself, she said.

In that small room almost suspended outside of time, like being in an interstitial space between two selves coming of age, with the soft afternoon sun seeping in like egg yolk, I felt many things crack open over my head—the purpose of our individual humanity, the power of instincts, and how even as she said those words, I drew strength from what she saw in me.

Often, in a place like Harvard, I feel the simultaneous pull of opposing forces: the allure of worldly success and the devotion to growth in wisdom. On days like this, I am grateful for God’s gentle reminders and life’s role models.

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Professor Kirakosian ❤

Lots of love,

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