Tag: Life Update

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.

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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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When In Kyoto ≧◡≦

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With the most adorable Sae-chan ❤

Kyoto is one-hour strolls along train tracks, washed-out pink carpets hanging on strings, bottles of sake behind second-storey windows, two scrawny girls trying to catch a pale yellow butterfly with a net, watery rice paddies beside a parking lot full of Toyotas & Hondas. Kyoto is that moment my hair almost rustles as my bones quiver with the ground, with the rumble of the passing train across a few thin walls. The train tracks are embedded in a sea of rocks, streaming to where the horizon meets the sky—so clean yet intense that, despite all differences, it’s almost reminiscent of the sixth station scene in Spirited Away.

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Kyoto is light grey sheets of rain on wooden houses, bright red gates before tiled rooftops, the simultaneous terror and wonder of Yayoi Kusama’s black dots in an endless space of yellow, the swish of the obi in a maiko’s (apprentice geisha) kimono in spotlight, the cool softness and stickiness of mochi against a parched tongue, and the heavenly pleasure of matcha ice-cream in all possible weathers and places. It’s touching a love rock in aged temples and above waterfalls, and trying but failing to touch a deer grazing freely in the precincts of Nara.

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Kyoto is spending buckets of coins at a game arcade with a six-year-old, a thirteen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old, in a ruthless game of air hockey, in deceptively promising claw machines that cheated my feelings (I swear, it’s rigged), in the pew-pew sounds of Jackpot, in the vortex of Coin Pusher which sucked all our money away, in the tiny space of Purikura photo booths (the photos help you discover new levels of cuteness that you never know existed within your features), in the din, the clamor, the furrowed brows and upturned mouths.

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Kyoto is waking up earlier than I ever did since college, at 7.30am every morning, being greeted in a cascade of murmurs of ohayo gozaimasu, being ushered out of the house with itterashai and welcomed back with okaeri. It’s the simple warmth of daily dinners, eating at a table of more than three, of strangers who now seem to be almost like another family.

Kyoto is the daily routine of three-hour classes—one on East Asian religions, one on inequality in contemporary Japan—in a cool, white classroom. It’s venturing in underground malls, running down alleyways in the rain and tasting food samples with newfound friends. It’s everyone in the photo below. 😊

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It’s also my first experience of an earthquake. Fingers crossed for the days to come.

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Little Princess, Sae-chan~ 💓

Praying, with love,

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From 20-year-old Me, With Love

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Today I turn 20! I wonder how past birthdays feel like because this one feels very homely despite the fact that I’m in a country I’ve never been before. Last night, I was sitting cross-legged in a hotel room on the 46th floor of Japan’s tallest building, wearing a dripping sheet mask, clad in Mickey Mouse PJs, typing out this blog post while my parents enthusiastically exchanged scintillating tidbits of gossip and news glimpsed from their phone screens, engrossed faces enclosed in bluish halos.

We’ve got to close the windows, my mum comments, curled up on the bed.

However pretty the view is, my dad concurs, you can’t eat it.

As always, when I occasionally tune in to my parents’ conversations, my brain thinks: hmm…?? It’s so weird, but so them.

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The last few times I’ve been on a family trip were Bali and Macau at the beginning of 2017 (read about a countryside episode in Bali here and a heart-pounding first encounter in a Macau casino here). This time, our vacation to Japan was entirely planned by me. To celebrate my 20th, my parents submitted themselves to my whims and bucket list items for a full ten days. The day after tomorrow, we will be on the last leg of our trip, Kyoto, where my parents will drop me off for a two-month Harvard Summer School program from June 3 to July 28.

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Today, I spent my birthday at Universal Studios Japan (featuring The Wizarding World of Harry Potter!!!). What a dream. How amazing it is that people of all languages from across the world—there’s a smattering of Cantonese, Chinese, English, and some European tongues mixed in the staccato lilt of Japanese surrounding my ears—are enchanted and invested in the world that J. K. Rowling created. Her words have taken on a life of their own, to be re-woven by each person. We take a slice of this fictional world and make it ours—even the tiny granny sipping Butterbeer while tottering in Hogsmeade on wooden clogs and the excited forty-year-old lady in a pink dress waving her wooden wand in front of Ollivanders. How powerful stories are when they seep into our concrete architecture to become tangible, tangible things. They compel into existence a new physical reality. It’s every writer and reader’s ultimate fantasy.

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Spending time so intimately and completely with my parents on this trip has grounded me. They pronounced at the beginning of our trip, as I was happily munching on dim sum in the airport lounge, that their main present to me was to help me to slim down. My saddest takeaway from freshman year had been fifteen pounds of flesh (mostly fats. biological inaccuracies not considered)—when people laugh about Freshman 15, BEWARE. It is real. After a winter of snacking, hibernation, and a final month of belated awakening, I returned to my parents’ arms a much chubbier version of myself. This trip, surrounded by matcha everything, gyoza, unagi, cheese tarts, okonomiyaki, takoyaki and all sorts of infinitely tempting foods presented exquisitely (even the fake food put on display looks absolutely delicious), I’ve been compelled by my parents’ withering glances and snarky remarks to exercise self-control. For someone who loves food as much as I do (e.g. our Japan itinerary is basically a food-centric sightseeing, extensively researched based on food blogs, gourmet guides, GURUNAVI, Tabelog, TripAdvisor ratings etc.), this has been tremendously painful. My parents had the weirdest conversation about how I would have thrived in medieval times when chubbiness was desired since the state of plumpness represented sufficient resources at one’s disposal. Time spent apart from my parents abroad has heightened my awareness of how precious such face-to-face contact is. Talking to them almost constantly in every waking minute about everything and anything is a real blessing. They love generously, unconditionally and wisely, with an empathy that is almost intuitive and most singular. On this day, I am most grateful for them. 爸爸妈妈，我爱您们！💕💕💕

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Tonight, after a day of Harry Potter, roller coasters that go backwards, 360 degrees and parallel to the ground, yellow minions and pink Hello Kitty, virtual reality headsets, and 3D and 4D rides; of eating fudge and exploding bonbons, drinking Butterbeer (heavenly calories in a mug); and of puking after a ride, squelching across park zones in the rain and waiting in some queues, it’s a good day. When I left the park, I was cold, shivering from wet toes, hungry but ineffably happy. 😊

It has been slightly more than a year since I started this blog. Thank you, always, for interacting with this corner of my world and pieces from my life—for reading (as you are right now in your inbox!), commenting and sending messages, and for your support, criticism, and attention. Thank you for coming along for this ride and becoming part of this experimental space that I started on a whim in 2017. To be utterly honest, I had no idea how long this blog was going to last. Many short-lived blogs have preceded it. But, somehow, in my 19th year, documenting my life became a habit. It’s disarmingly easy writing here, to you, you and you. Among you are many wonderful, precious friends, old and new. I’m thankful for your friendship ^_^

I told my parents that I had no idea what to wish for this year, but as I clasped my hands and closed my eyes before blowing the candles, I ended up taking more than three minutes to run through in my head all the wishes I had.

My wish for this blog is for it to keep growing with stories, with footsteps of those who come and go, with a trace of my words in your thoughts and feelings, with an honest account of my personal growth—mistakes and jubilations, stumbles and detours, ascents and conquests, explorations and experimentations alike—as I step into my twenties.

I hope we’ll all grow alongside each other.

Here’s to my new decade on Earth! 🌏

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Lots of love,

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Before It Ends (Part I & II)

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Part I

Typed on May 5, Sunday in the Canaday basement while waiting for my laundry (surrounded by the humming of the washing machines and dryers).

Freshman year is ending, it really is. I can feel it in my bones. I’m flying off in four days; I’m done with three out of four of my classes and doing my last take-home final oceans away in Singapore; I’m drowning in packing (too many shoes and books and clothes); college already feels like a dream.

How to capture this feeling? Winter break felt like a short interlude between acts. Yet, this time round, departure evokes the closure of a final curtain call. To simply call it the most transformative year of my life, the year of adventures and expanded horizons, seems too pale.

When people say that college might just be the best time of your lives, I now admit with wonder that it really may be.

What a week. On May 3, Thursday, I emerged from the depths of Lamont (the only 24-hour Harvard library) with my roommate cum project partner, Emily, after nine full hours in the café. From 10.30am to 7.45pm, we churned out a 12-page (single-spaced!) business case study. On May 2, Wednesday, I wrote and submitted a full 14-page creative project from scratch (procrastination woes) for Professor Homi Bhabha’s English seminar. On April 30, Monday, I revised a 3000-word short story and expanded it to 4750 words for final grading. Altogether, I wrote a total of more than 13,000 words this week for the final papers of three classes. Crazily unforgettable. Could I have started earlier? Possibly. Do I regret this? Not really.

As everything winds down, it also feels deliciously like we are all on the precipice of new beginnings. What individuals are we as we venture home after this weird, incredible, crazy, electric first year at college? College will be a different experience next semester as we leave the Yard, declare concentrations, take new classes and find our paths crossing with new people that we’ve yet to meet out of the 6,600.

Part II

Typed on May 8, Tuesday on the plane before it takes off from the Boston Logan Airport (a race against time).

It’s funny that a year ago I wrote a post about packing and leaving home (I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane + Life Updates) and then, freshman year happened in a blink and once again I’m packing and leaving, again and again like some iterative pattern. Packing was a thorough nightmare this time round when completed all by myself—in the end, my belongings were distilled into two suitcases, three boxes, one fan and one clothing rack for storage; and then, there are the two suitcases that I’m bringing back to Singapore.

A few minutes before I got onto the Uber to the airport, I stared at the empty room with the sad-looking mattress, brown desk and drawers, stripped bare of all signs of my former habitation. Sometimes, when we walk across the Yard—a flash of brilliant green, the throng of tourists, the crimson bricks—it’s easy to think that Harvard is ours. But, as my belongings were picked up, the room emptied out and the keys I had kept in my pocket for a year were dropped off in the metal mail slot, I realized how brief our time here is. Canaday E-44, however fleetingly, belonged to us. As did Annenberg (I hope I don’t miss you).

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Posting this before the plane takes off–

Lots of love,

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