My grandfather was interred on a hillside in the outskirts of Taipei city on a muggy July afternoon. As tradition dictated, we turned our backs on his coffin as the gravediggers dropped him into the ground. There is nothing sinister about a man dying from old age, but there is too much mystery about death to take chances, so by turning away, we were protecting our spirits from following his into the grave. Continue reading “July”
This morning, my father saw me packing my lunch.
“You don’t always have to bring lunch,” he said.
“I like bringing lunch.”
“Yes, it’s all very economical and all that, but you ought to be social. You should eat with your coworkers occasionally.”
I ought not to let this hiatus go on much longer.
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| Edward Hopper, Office at Night, 1940 |
It seems like months ago, when in fact it’s only been a few weeks. But when I interviewed for the position, one of the J’s asked me what I thought I would like most about the job. Idealizing it, I thought, and gave them a fitting answer.
“I hate sitting in front of the computer all day,” I said, “I look forward to having a job that will let me exercise my creativity and interact with people.
They nodded, telling me that’s exactly the type of position it was. After all, they were looking for a liaison of sorts, an organized and competent individual who could write the hundreds of emails it takes to get a video made and a website launched. I would spend time in front of the computer – that was inevitable – but I would be up and walking a lot too. Especially to the factory, where the windows are made, and perhaps up and down the smaller corporate building looking for my bosses, who are often away on business.
I’m not complaining. The work is challenging in a strange, good way.
“Reorganize our website,” they said.
“I don’t know anything about web design,” I said.
“Just try your best.”
Then they said, “Write a storyboard for a company products video we want to make.”
“I don’t…okay. I’ll try my best.”
“Yes, we know. That’s why we hired you.”
During the interview they had winked to let me know they acknowledged all the hard work that must have gone behind my GPA, a foggy indicator of ability to anyone who knows anything about English majors. They smiled pleasantly at all the other jobs (mostly unpaid) listed on my resume, which I had beefed up with English major embellishing skills. The day had been cold and the tiny conference room with an outstanding echo we were in was even colder. I shivered in my chair, wondering if my lips were as blue as my fingers. They took me on a tour of the factory and it too, was cold, but not quite. The machines, the people, the lights that seemed to hang so much further away than the plastic-covered florescent lights of the corporate buildings seemed warmer. People smiled at me as I walked through, perhaps because I was young, and perhaps because I smiled back. As I began my work, I realized that I preferred the factory to the corporate building.
This is not to say the corporate building is not a pleasant place to be. It is just cold. Too cold, with several of the offices kept at meat locker temperatures. I shiver at work. I sit, shiver and I type. My fingers turn blue and I find myself envying the men and women who work in the factory behind me, especially the guys in the tropical acrylic molding room.
My bosses are kind, tall, white. Family men. J1 is fifty and frugal – a rarity for most of the white men I’ve met. He drives an old burgundy Mercedes, brings his lunch, and golfs with 25-year old golf clubs. Ten years ago, his wife couldn’t stand to watch him play with the rusting clubs anymore and bought him a new set, which he promptly returned.
“I don’t need them,” he told her.
A few years later, he lost his job and a friend of a friend, knowing J1 to be a good, Christian man, hired him for the marketing department of his company that was like Groupon. Except it wasn’t Groupon. It folded after a few months with the CEO closed the company down one night without bothering to tell any of his fifteen employees. J1 woke up the next morning unemployed.
“Not even a phone call. Not even an email,” he said, leaning on the edge of my cubicle with his face pointed thoughtfully towards the ceiling.
“But yes,” he said, “Golf is important. I think my being hired here had something to do with my game. And my clubs.” He’s a humble player – doesn’t lie about how many strokes he take – and it helps that his clubs are old.
“When your clubs are all shiny and new but your game is terrible, then people know you’re all talk. An egomaniac. Most people don’t like to make deals with egomaniacs.”
People won’t think he’s all talk either way. J1 is blessed with an earnest face. A little too tan, but it’s from riding his bike with his dog, six miles a day rather than lounging around in his backyard with a young wife. But frugal as he is, he acknowledged that 25 years had taken a toll on his golf clubs. A month ago he went to a tournament where one swing sent his club head one way and the golf ball another. He stood sheepishly on the green, a six-foot four man in neat, pressed clothes (he takes care of his things) holding nothing but a rusty shaft with a shabby grip.
“I think I’ll get some new clubs this year,” he said.
J2 in his early thirties and elusive like men in their thirties are. He’s been at the company longer than J1 and his eyes have a mischievous twinkle. He was an English major too, a fact he mentioned during the interview, and I wondered what books he liked to read.
“They came looking for an engineer, but they got an English major instead,” he joked. He seemed to be thinking many things at once, but it was he that put me at ease. He comes to talk to me less than J1, as J1 has seemed to make the video his pet project, which works for J2, because he travels more and attends more meetings when he is around, but when I poke my head into his office he, mouth filled with sunflower seeds, always waves with giant hands for me to come in, reminiscent of my professor. He comes in early and leaves early, because he has a toddler at home. These men in their thirties with their young kids, wives that still look good and want to go out and the energy to play with their kids, smiling and crawling after them with their Blackberries so they can simultaneously read their email and take baby pictures.
J2 brought his baby daughter to work one day, an 18-month year old angel with strong legs and caramel hair, who shrieked and ran in and around the product display area – a behemoth of history and transparencies, designed by the interns before me. She stomped around and under the glossy transparencies that hang from wires like stiffened, discarded alien placentas. She grabbed at nothing, as her small fingers couldn’t possibly wrap themselves around anything as slippery as chemically strengthened glass and acrylic. I overheard a woman in the office say that she had her father’s lips and because I could not see this or any other similarity, I said the same thing.
“She does have your lips,” I said, wondering if he would think it were a compliment. Then the little girl turned her face at me and away again, in a flash. She had blue eyes, bluer even than J2 when he wears a blue shirt, and I thought to say this, but he spoke first.
“So, you have any toddlers in your family?”
I thought about my pregnant cousin and her husband, a guy freshly thirty who stands just as J2 was standing next to me now.
“Soon,” I said. “August or something. We’re an old family now.”
He picked his baby up, settling her in the crook of his arm, her rounded pink bottom like a pillow on his elbow. I put my hand up to touch her hands, but then pulled back, wondering if it was polite to touch your boss’ kid, especially when your hands are freezing. Better not burn her with the cold, I thought, and put my hands in my pocket. Walking away, J2 smiled at his baby, warm in his arms like a fresh loaf of bread.
Recently, loved ones have taken to congratulating me prematurely.
“You’re almost done! You must be so excited!”
“Just three weeks away!”
“I’m so proud of you! Do you want anything for graduation?”
“A graduate! You’ll be just like Dustin Hoffman in that one movie with the ambiguous ending!”
No one’s actually said the last one to me, but it’s the statement to which I can provide the most accurate response.
Lately I’ve been stalling. I haven’t been writing except for lame one pagers in my diary (pining about ‘Ben,’ mostly) and I certainly have not been reading for or participating in class discussions. True, “graduation” is only three weeks away (two, if I subtract the week of Thanksgiving, as I will be home for its entirety) and true, time, in its inevitable way, will fly, but right now, this Tuesday evening, the unwritten pages of final papers are piling up and I haven’t a clue as how to tackle them. It’s no longer a question of motivation – I haven’t been motivated to do well in school since senior year of high school – but rather, an issue with…”What now?”
I didn’t expect this stupid, common question to hit me too like the proverbial ton of bricks, but it has and my face hurts and so I’m asking: What now? I can see into the immediate future. I will graduate. With above average grades, below average affection for my alma mater. (At the department store the other day, I overheard a teenage boy discussing Berkeley and Brown – “I like both,” he said. I looked up from black boots that didn’t exactly fit, my face red, “Choose Brown,” I said.)
I know myself – writing papers assigned by youthful and elderly professors alike is, regardless of my attraction to them, like pulling teeth – and I will write them. I will turn them in and if they are graded by professors, will garner generous grades. If not the professors, then bitter, stingy GSI’s (graduate student instructors), who, if the holiday spirit vacates their hearts at the wrong moment, will damn my papers and final grades to scholarly hell (any grade below an A minus). I don’t want to be cast into that hell, especially not in my last semester, but while it’d be great to leave Cal with an academic bang (3.9 decibels loud!), I am wearied by all this relentless reading and writing and listening. I have waited six years to tune out higher education and on the 17th of this December, 2010, I will finally plug my ears and walk away.
My dear aunt called from Taipei two evenings ago. It’s been my spoken plan now, to leave the States for one or two years and fashion a little expat life for myself on the seventh floor (the most modest penthouse there ever was) in our family’s building on Dong Fend St.
“There’s a fine English cram school near my work,” my cousin told me happily. Both she and my aunt anticipate my return, as though my presence would somehow breathe fresh life into their self-perceived dull ones.
“There’s no one here to make waves,” my aunt sighed into the phone, “And Karen wants to live with you on the seventh floor. Perhaps things will be more exciting this way.”
And I’ve no doubt things will be exciting – I’ll teach English, make a killing (especially now, with my degree!) and shop, dine, watch movies whenever I please – it will be a more mature, more fabulous version of my life in Taipei nearly five years ago, when I tutored privately and taught at the National Taipei College of Nursing. Karen and I grew up together and the plan is to continue growing (or perhaps halt the aging process) while living out our single girl life in Taipei. Is this viable? Is it possible? Am I merely planning some elaborate escape? Taipei, despite its cloying humidity and bustling streets, is my mental cryogenic freeze. I go there to pause. To put “real” life, whatever that is, on hold. Ought I do that for more than six months not to mention a year? Or two?
I have my concerns, not least of which is Taipei’s dating scene- a veritable pond sans fish for a big-boned, deep-voiced, giant shark like me. (I believe I did, yes.) The year and twenty-three summers I’ve spent in Taipei have revealed that my “type” of man does not exist in Taipei. And if he does, he is there only briefly, on a stopover perhaps to bigger and more important cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong or Tokyo. No, Taipei gets the stringy foreigners from Europe and middle America – the guys who are misinformed about but endlessly by idiot Taiwanese girls. They come with pale, blotchy skin, holey t-shirts, and those disgusting sandals with the velcro straps and in the heat, break out in the worst cases of yellow fever known to man. Speak perfect English and their eyes glaze over – they don’t want communication, they want dumplings spooned into their mouths with submissive coos.
Equally repulsive are the wealthy ABC’s (American Born Chinese) and TEABRGHTWFD (Taiwanese Educated Abroad But Returning Home To Work For Daddy). When we were younger, my cousin and I studied my aunt’s wealthy friends, dreaming that marrying into one of these families was certainly the fast track to wealth, power and consequently, happiness. Thank god we developed brains along the way. Despite our meager (future) jobs and pitiful paychecks, we still have, in our fathers and other men we admire, standards to adhere to. And I confess there’s a bit of self-loathing going on here – I’m terrified of being my parents’ charity case (hence the plan to teach English in Taipei) but I would hate to date or marry another charity case, regardless of how lucrative the source of the charity may be.
Thus one setback Taipei might pose is the potential throwing away of two perfectly good years of my twenties. I’m not getting any younger. The crows feet that have stepped into the corners of my eyes are only getting deeper (and funny, I’m not laughing all that much). I’m not thinking too much. I’m thinking critically about my situation as a woman in the world.
Another crux: professional progress. Of course I can pledge to write everyday about the sights and sounds of Taipei and of my family – and most likely, I will, but how diligently will I revise? And how ardently will I complete the applications for the MFA programs I’ve also been crowing about? That was the whole plan, after all – graduate, move, teach, write, apply, enroll (Brown, UCI, Iowa – in that order), learn, write, publish, teach at Harvard. The master plan.
And now that’s it’s written and will soon be posted, I feel better. Now that it’s written, I can see how far this plan is, how strange my fears sound and how very achievable it all is. My imagination is quite vivid. My age still young.
My essays all due in less than three weeks, still unwritten. As long as they remain unwritten, the master plan will seem hazy and far. I can’t have that now, can I?
To Nabokov, Milton, Hitchcock and Wagner (the last not a famous writer but an adorable professor with an unfortunately dull class) – may you all see me to the end.
This past weekend I caught a glimpse into the focused mind – a brain capable of tuning out and zooming in on whatever task or idea sits before the body. Ben, old Ben, changed but unchanged, with a sprinkling of gray hairs on his young head, stood a little straighter, dressed a little neater, walked a little faster than I remembered. He welcomed me with open arms to his new Alma Mater, Stanford University, granter of his future Doctorate in Computer Science. We walked through the campus; I saw everything and nothing.
But he unlocked the door to his office, which he shares with another PhD student and I began to pay attention. It was a narrow room with a large window at the end wall providing a refreshing vista of Stanford’s campus. “I like the view,” he said, and I nodded, knowing the need to look up from one’s screen sometime and wish to see something far and natural, like a tree, mountain or glistening lake. But whatever respite the eyes require, the focused brain at work can stop only for a minute, if at all.
The focus I speak of manifests itself in surprising ways: a dirty dry-erase board with a mysterious “Daruma” written on the top left corner; a messy desk nearly smothered by half-empty coffee cups and Gatorade bottles; conference papers spilling out of paper grocery bags and onto the floor. It was intoxicating. I imagined myself standing in a still life: “Genius at work”. I was lucky that the genius stood there with me, but had he been somewhere else, I would, by the contents of the room itself, have been bathing in the aura of genius.
His is not the only office I have seen that paints a passionate, concentrated mind at work – my lovely professor, the Nabokov expert, has a similar workspace. Every shelf crammed with books (all with creased spines indicating they have been read and reread) and every inch of flat surface covered with papers both his and his students; mine, the product of hours and hours of sporadic, half-hearted research, floating lightly on top, weighted down only by the ink and paper rather than solid ideas. In both offices, dust coats certain areas, but it does not matter – the true activity takes place in their skulls.
Contrast those still lifes with another of my room: consistently spotless; my desk, my closet, even the bottommost drawers of either, everything neat as a pin. Never an item out of place; the only thing on the floor are the legs of my furniture and a rug, which, if wrinkled or flipped, immediately straightened and righted. This is not only the sign of a budding (or full grown) obsessive compulsive, but also a dead giveaway for an unfocused, wandering mind. The brain that can’t focus must generate the illusion of being able to do so by making the physical environment seem orderly.
A decade ago, I was the same way, my symptoms in some ways more acute. My aunt asked me, after marveling at my various systems of organization, why I felt compelled to keep everything so neat. I thought for a long while, mulling over a suitable response before settling on a fact: I was, at least to my young self, quite “messy” inside. I understood my need to clean and wipe and stack and fold as an outlet to some inner rumblings – the confusion that comes with being as optimistic as I was, yet also painfully self-aware of potential limitations.
I wanted too many things, pursued too many interests, swam in a million shallow pools so that I would never have to get my hair wet. By keeping my room neat and my belongings pristine (for some reason, I was never one of those kids who wore out the soles of her shoes or came home with muddied, torn clothing – even after long afternoons spent in trees) was a precaution – I was creating a safe haven for my body to return to in case the clutter of my mind somehow reared its head and emerged. It’s the root of my many evils, this desire for superficial perfection, and rather than promote productivity or creativity, it constrains, corrupts, and desiccates whatever streams I might have flowing within so that I cannot write or read or do anything worthwhile without fretting that my clothes are not in order or that my desk drawers are not perfectly partitioned off. Staples here, paper clips there, empty stationery for letters I will never write, here.
I am getting better. Better at letting little things go here and there (people are now allowed to sit on my bed) and no longer worrying about letting papers pile up or books topple… but even these little allowances seemed forced, as though I am testing myself to see how long I can go before I reach out to straighten, no, completely reorganize everything in one long, dusty afternoon. But I am learning. I am learning to apply these methods of organization to my mental state. And I am writing. It is hard for me, but I do it.
As we strolled through campus, I asked Ben if every morning he walked to his office.
“I do,” he said, “I drive sometimes too, because I do get lazy, but I like to walk. It takes me roughly thirty minutes to get to my office and in a way, the walk saves me time.”
I nodded, about to say something about not having to go to the gym, but he continued.
“I like to use that time to process my thoughts. It’s a good time to think and organize. I can’t really do that effectively when I’m driving.”
So this was his reason – a far cry from mine, which had everything to do with the body and nothing to do with the mind. This was before he showed me his office, and already I was in awe. Later, we stepped out of his office and into Hoover Tower, a Stanford landmark which, I was pleased to see, was less aesthetically pleasing than Berkeley’s Campanile – but the view was pleasant, despite the greyness of the sky and the chill of the wind.
I remarked how lovely it was to see matching Spanish tile roofs. “So orderly here,” I said, “Unlike Berkeley, where the buildings don’t match.”
He looked at me for a minute, “Really? I like that the buildings in Berkeley don’t match.”
In the two years I’ve spent at Berkeley, I learned to find my pockets of neatness and order. There are certain houses I like to look at because the paint is not chipped, the windows are whole and clean and the lawns are not overgrown to the point of resembling a small jungle. I smile at these houses and wonder how they can stand to neighbor the more unsightly edifices. Walking to campus, I prefer the right side of my street to the left because the sidewalk is more even and the row of houses more favorable to me than the over grown students’ garden. Certain restaurants top my list not only because of the food, but because the tables, floors and bathrooms are clean and well-lit. I hate the smell of garbage, piss and shit (all of which occur in abundance in Berkeley) for the same reasons as everyone else does, and also because these odors transcend the membrane of my nostrils and threaten to sully my insides. The homeless, even though I feel for them, truly I do – I too, would talk to myself and yell obscenities – invade my vision. They remind me day after day of what I am not capable of cleaning.
I’ll end here, at the top of Hoover Tower, where it was strangely quiet despite the wind and a group of laughing Chinese families. I gazed out across the red tiled roofs, feeling happy and sad, composed yet on the brink of disintegration. Dear Ben with his gray hairs and kind smile that masked a gleaming mind and I with my shiny hair, my bright orange scarf – the first carefully brushed the second carefully selected – with my muddle of thoughts. A jumble of millions. The buildings with the matching roofs calmed me a bit. I stole a glance at Ben, who smiled at me. Tumble tumble crash crash. I wanted nothing more right then than to clean something.
Even as I was applying for the gaggle of internships I wouldn’t get, my mind was thinking unemployment. How nice it would be, I thought, to get rejected from everywhere and end up at home with nothing on my agenda but to wake, eat, sleep and occasionally, swim. Continue reading “The Last Summer”
It is noon. I’m sitting in the colonial style lobby of the Best Western Independence Park Hotel, surrounded by the trappings of early 19th century genteel living: there’s a marble and wood-paneled fireplace, next to which is a heavy wooden easel displaying a framed, yellowed map of North America circa 1800. A faded tapestry depicting an 18th century hunting scene hangs above the computer, which was until ten minutes ago, occupied by an elderly gentleman in faded denim shorts. Continue reading “Rejected by Google in Philadelphia”
On Saturdays I work eight hours at a bridal shop in San Francisco. Continue reading “New Pitchers Have Big Ears”
Interviews totally come in waves. In the beginning, after securing an unpaid writing internship and a part-time job at a bridal salon in San Francisco, I leaned back with my head in my hands and thought, “I’m settled for a while.” Ha – the job hunt, once you start, never stops because unpaid internships are often about as fulfilling as cold, meatless salads for dinner and part-time jobs (Saturdays only), paid or not, are about as mentally stimulating as Justin Beiber songs. About two weeks into both positions, my brain was like, “Geeez…I think you can handle more than this.” And I said, “Gosh Brain, I think you’re right!” After all, I am twenty-four, in relatively good health (aside from this hacking cough that may lead into pneumonia) and in constant conversation with my brain – so I decided to apply to a few more places. A tiny part of my self-esteem with a rather loud voice said, “Aim high! You’re a generalist (with that damned useless English degree!) You never know what you might get!” And the larger, more conservative, mechanical part of my being obliged, selecting famous companies with enormous, shiny headquarters in dreamy, smog-covered cities and harried peoples – click. click. click. sent. sent. sent.
Immediately, you get cold, computer-generated instant gratification – the fruit of a long day’s labor in front of the computer.
“Dear Betty” (the feigned connaissance…)
“Thank you so much for your application! We are presently reviewing your materials and will contact you should we find you suitable/fitting/semi-employable/not a complete waste of our time etc. etc. etc.”
(Please do not respond to this email. It is automatically generated).
But this email signifies a connection sent. I did my part, is what my application states. Now, they do theirs. The thing – the ball, that is – is in their courts.
Well, casting one’s net widely ought to yield a few fish, and as my writing internship spirals towards its timely end (“Would you like to continue to write unpaid, un-thanked, unread, forever?” Why…I thought you would never ask!) and the only “work” that remains is found on the fifth floor at 23 Grant Avenue , I’m now searching for a more fulfilling summer internship to fill my summer Monday through Fridays.
I have applied to several dozen more jobs and internships – mostly in PR and Marketing, perhaps falsely deluding myself that I have enough hamming skills to relate publicly, and get paid to do so. And as the bulk of these applications went out over a month ago, I had given up home when April rolled around and my inbox remained desolately empty save for coupons and groupons that I haven’t the money to employ.
Thankfully, as I said before, interviews come in waves. The wave hit last week. They’re phone interviews, the bulk of them – a preliminary testing of the waters. They’ll see if they like the sound of my voice and the way I arrange my sentences. They’ll test whether I know the distinction between a pregnant pause and a well-timed clearing of the throat to develop a thought.
It’s already Sunday, which means next week is tomorrow. I still have this horrible cough and an entire colony of phlegmy bodies living in my nasal passages. Two days ago my friend said, “My, you sound like a man!” And although it would be one of those stories I’ll tell over and over again, “They though I was a man named Betty! And then declined to offer me the job,” I would much rather prefer to have this boast ready: “I was sick as a dog! I could hardly hear the man! But I got the job!”
We’ll see. Wish me luck!
Me, waiting for the bus at the cold bus stop.
Me, waiting for the BART at the dark BART stop.
Me, waiting to cross the street – Continue reading “Interviews, A Poem”
VERY HIGHBROW 