Hello everyone (and to all my new subscribers). I apologize that I haven’t written in so long; you must have been wondering if you had subscribed to a ghost newsletter. Every once in a while, I thought, I must write something, and then days and months slipped by.
Right now I’m sitting in my living room, barely awake after a sleepless and anxiety-riddled night. I received my first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine yesterday, and while the physical side effects—insomnia, a sore arm, aches and fatigue—were expected, I didn’t fully anticipate the intensity of emotion that immediately followed.
After I received my vaccine, I was told to wait in the clinic area for a further 15 minutes, just in case any adverse reactions occur. In those 15 minutes—a period that became elastic, loose with meaning—I oscillated wildly between grief, guilt, relief, anxiety, and extreme sadness. Others in the waiting area chatted, exchanged stories. I sat there in a small, beige chair, trying not to cry.
It has been a year of global non-healing. A year of endless trauma; of erasure; of death. For us in Hong Kong, this timeline extends even further back.
Yesterday, I published a short story in The Margins (Asian American Writer’s Workshop) that I had been working on since May of 2020. The story—which deals with authoritarianism, disappearance, surveillance, and escape—had come to me in drips and drabs and putting it together, finalizing it, felt oddly similar to assembling a care package, only the package was to be sent out into a void. You never know who’s going to find it, but you hope that someone, somewhere, will find it useful for whatever they need—whether it’s a space of grieving or just to be seen.
In this newsletter, I wanted to highlight the different types of care packages that have come my way over the past few months, in a time where healing seems impossible. Some of these care packages nourished me a little, fed me (literally); some were powerful simply in their acknowledgement of the harm and trauma that exists around us. They were all created, written, or put together by someone who cares. I hope they are helpful to you.
Take care. And as always, thank you for reading.
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These stickers by Hong Kong artist Tiffany Tam formed a literal care package and a reminder to slow down:
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This Tin House talk featuring Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio really dug deep into navigating mental health, memory, and writing. I appreciated how these writers talked about anxiety, medication, and institutional trauma in very specific terms. Shoutout to the amazing ASL interpreters, Mak and Rorri.
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I haven’t been able to travel, but I can explore NTS playlists, like this one, this one, and this one. Also, I don’t know why these dark royalty and dark academia core playlists on Youtube are recommended to me, but I honestly don’t hate it.
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Mika Rottenberg’s video work “Cosmic Generator” (2017) which I saw at Tai Kwun’s contemporary art space, was a fun and disturbing watch. It speaks to global consumption, commodity, trade, and power. Also, I don’t know why watching a woman crush hundreds of colorful light bulbs soothed me, but it did.
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Yanyi’s unexpected newsletter on Wednesday following the murders of six Asian-American women felt like a message straight into my soul. He has a special talent for this; in “The Year of Blue Water,” it felt like he was repeating some of my own thoughts about community and radical kindness back to me—articulated in a far more poetic cadence, of course. (I should also disclose here that in the past few months, he has been mentoring me and his guidance and encouragement has been one of the very few things that has kept me going in my own writing practice.)
In this newsletter, he writes of the exhaustion of death, of being told that one is invisible—that you will, and should, die. These lines I won’t forget anytime soon: “I am tired of death. I want to write as a way to live—to get past the broken bits; to supersede not death after life but death in life, the temptation to give in to that blankness forever. I want to write over what is murderously invisible—I want to write over my own death. I want to write over my grief.”
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I’ve been cooking a lot the last year and discovered this website, Woks of Life, run by a an Asian-American family of four. The recipes are pretty good. In particular, I’ve been making this wood ear mushroom salad a lot when I’m exhausted and just need something crunchy, bright, and full of flavor, to cut through the fugue.
Also, I love that on their about page they say that this is a place for people “interested in going beyond Cream Cheese Wontons.” I have had said cream cheese wontons (accidentally), and they are really not pleasant.
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Christine Sun Kim’s “Stacking Traumas” is a drawing of three tables or extended musical notes stacked on top of each other, and symbolizes the different levels of anxiety and accessibility issues for Deaf people, such as Dinner Table Syndrome. The top tier references Alexander Graham Bell, the famous who opposed teaching sign language to Deaf children, instead believing that lip reading should be sufficient enough to access the world around them. It’s ironic that this man, lionized as the person who gifted us the telephone—the connecting line of communication—was so close-minded when it came to accessibility.
While I am not Deaf, I have gaps in my hearing due to a very frustrating condition called Ménière's disease. This past year has been terrible for me, in terms of being able to understand people properly and to properly voice my concerns about hearing.
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It’s not new, but it’s always a good time to watch this film about fungi. Life, out of waste; a whole infrastructure that might teach us how to survive. As mycologist Paul Stamets says: “Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.”