All posts filed under: Personal

Ready/Unready

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Can you ever truly say that you are ready? What does it mean to be ready? I thought, I always thought, it means that you have prepared for scenarios. You have practiced, trained for what is coming. Yet, what is coming? Life, never comes in a straight line. When has a significant event in your life ever been something you can practice for? Everything, despite lessons from history, is unique when it occurs. As they say, “the only constant is change”. A reinterpretation, recombination, reformation of what we already know leads to something unexpected. Sometimes, you really do encounter something you never have before. I know I have many times. (Am I lucky or unlucky?) So how can you be ready? Perhaps being ready is a mindset. It means you recognize you are unready but you have the ability to adjust accordingly. Yet, how do you know you have the ability to adjust to something you have never encountered before? Maybe, we are all and always unready. Ready is just a framework in hindsight. When …

Uncertain Nightmares

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My mind is in a dark place, encroaching my nightmares every day. The dark is not quite the oppressive black veil that you can’t escape from. The sort of black so black it distorts light and sound. It’s not quite that. The darkness in my mind comes from the various closets and cabinets I have forgotten about. I have long lost the keys to them, after I sealed them shut. Yet, I now hear knocking on the old doors. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft with splinters echoing down from the farthest reaches of my remodeled halls of memory, over and over again. I feel my way along the walls, to find these lost doors down the hall, blackening by whatever is knocking behind them. The dark on the doors spreads like old mold, slowly creeping when I’m conscious and paying attention. It spreads faster like an infection when I drown myself with poison, dripping from little windows that peer into other worlds. I worry about the unaffected doors of newly built rooms. Touching a blackened door …

Why I Write

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In my life of twists and turns, 我沒想到我現在可以用中文. I turned to experimenting with writing in Chinese six years ago. I started to incorporate pieces of it into my work – something more representative of the amalgamation that is me. Spoken word became more of a medium I explored. 從 “三歲離開台灣” 到 “回家”, 每一篇都是我獨特的中西合併, 語言摻雜的作品. Again, it functions as a mental puzzle. Every rhyme, every cadence was a hurdle to overcome. 如何讓中英押韻, not just random add-ins, 一種和平的共鳴, like the peace I started finding.

回家

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I must make decisions for regret For my decision isn’t mine The multitude of spacetime Allowed only in the silences of timespace Set forth By the past Formed By the present Limited By the future I made a decision to regret 拿著吸塵器 我打掃著似曾相識的客廳 一張黑沙發 石牆上一排欄杆 右前方廁所的燈亮著走廊 Brrrrrm om om om 就在這時 他們回來了 茶几上放下一桶切過的蘋果 表哥坐在左邊的書桌 繼續打著沒結束的電動 我收好坐在沙發的一邊 外婆微笑著 在旁看著電視 一起吃著那蘋果 How I longed to see her As I woke up I knew I will soon be back Next Thursday Then I remembered 原來一場夢 Time flows Right through your soul As the wind blows Softly through your cloths What is this feeling

The Years

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On the windowsill, my cat sits staring back at me — staring deep into the dark blue abyss of the night sky lit up by the skyscraping lights. I cough, he blinks. It isn’t a flinch but a look of curiosity at his sick man, feeling the icy chill of a wildfire spreading in his body. I should turn on the lights but I can’t. I couldn’t, bedridden alone. My mind is filled with foggy, gray memories of times long past but shouldn’t dreams be in color? I remember being eighteen gazing with wonder at the green plains, the first snow on the lawn just before dawn, ready to be carved by hands and shoes. Yet somehow, the memory of those years stops there. Just the pristine white snow. Next thing I know, I was in the shower, head down and angry. Angry and sad. Sad and broken. Or was it unfulfilled? I do not recall.  The mind fog carries me through the next ten years. There was the heat and the humidity somewhere in …

Ramblings

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In the dark of the night, under the faint city lights, my fervent thoughts whisper through my alcohol-soaked mind. My thoughts scream; nightmares that remain primordial and waiting to unveil. They linger, throbbing in the ebb and flow of my breathing. Deep inhale; a slow exhale creeping into focus. My thoughts chatter; an intricate description of a tomorrow with loved ones and passion projects to be. The futures I want to achieve, the verses I want to shape for my creative works – all dancing on the edges of my periphery and begging to be captured. Is it hate or regret? Is it hope? All I know is change. All I have is change. Two weeks here; a month there. I know you. I don’t know you. A fellow foreigner in a strange land but you left, just like the others, yet again. It’s restless. We both know how we must struggle to make a stand, to claim a place amongst the supposed numerous opportunities. We are framed. A year has passed. I chose to …

Discourse on Fate and Free Will

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Some ten years ago, Nathan and I were sitting on the floor of our college dorm in St. Louis, waxing poetic about nothing and everything at 3 AM. On this particular night, which I remember vividly, we were focused on the topic of fate, destiny, and free will. Over the years, I kept thinking about what I described and my thoughts have changed much on the subject. Personally, fate, destiny, and free will all fit together as pieces to the greater whole of life. So how do they fit together? The idea is really quite simple, despite debating all night about it. Fate is generally the idea of things happening as preordained by some higher power. Destiny is that specific or necessary events will happen – set points in life like having three kids. An apt analogy would be a book. Fate is the existence of that book while destiny is the chapters of that book. Free will, then, is the unwritten or forgotten details in between the chapters. This seems contradictory, because is free …

This is Not the End

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You die at sunrise; you died in your sleep. Every night, you dream. Every time, you fall in a little bit. Six inches under, six inches deep. Just as the sun is below the horizon, your destiny is in the East. Rise from the last day’s ashes; you find yourself sweating, unable to breathe. Is that fear I see? Yesterday’s knowledge congeals into baggage. Today is another day for mistakes. Tomorrow, you know nothing. So you died in your dream, over and over again, chasing what you want to believe. What you want to believe is the gravity holding you down, the air above. What you want to believe is tomorrow. Tomorrow, the sun will rise. Yet, at sunrise you are dead. You see nothing in the light. You see nothing as the night fades from your blinds. There is only one thing you see. One person you actually see. Who am I seeing? Who I am seeing? The one person you see, staring back blindly, blinking. The face is familiar, the smile is peculiar. …

New Beginnings – Columbia

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The past month has been a whirlwind, from my departure from the City of Los Angeles, my cross-country roadtrip, to my first week at Columbia University. A lot has changed. I am no longer engaged in building public policy or writing feasibility studies. Everything has become a blessing after the hardships I endured the last eight months. There is much truth in the idea that new beginnings allow you to do something new and be someone new or even to feel something new. I have never worked so hard or felt as assured in my life, from handling grad school coursework to really trying to organize and bond our cohort together. This change really came from the lesson during my time at DCP, especially the last months. The importance of knowing the people you see and work with everyday cannot be understated. Babak, Cally, Nina, Jason, Iris, and Angela you taught me so much during the last few months we spent together. I cannot thank you enough. Though everyday has been pretty much a 9 …