All posts filed under: Reflections

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 …

寫曖

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寫的是寫著愛Not love on first sightDo you wake at first light心中會浪漫沒人懂It seeps on in it’s subtle花開也是在不覺中 A faint smile thereBrushed your hairHand in handOnly to find out可能時間還沒到誰說 Say 知道 What’s on your mindHiding if even in plain sight一點提示謎也不一定開The equation of love is yEqual some kind of xPlus some time除於一些些可能的等待磨合的傷害 戀人未滿還是相伴追妳就得 grindPut in the workFor your quirks繳學費來上妳的課Still could be wastedNeed patienceOr waited 曖是曖還就是愛When do you know you are mine有些事說不出來所以有情書的存在How do I know I still have time就算曖寫的是寫著愛Tell me how should I writeWhat’s on your mind

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

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 …

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 …

Flowers for Algernon – Knowledge and Distrust

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Where do I even begin to discuss this book? With everything that has happened over the course of my life, the impact now is more profound than if I read the book any earlier than I did. To put it simply, it is about the journey of a man who undergoes an operation that lifts him from ignorance to knowledge. The book contains a multitude of themes I have yet to ruminate over, but here I want to discuss the issue of knowledge breeding distrust. As Charlie becomes smarter, he wants to learn more to know more about himself. Through that process he realizes that the people around him all have something to hide; they all have imperfections. He becomes ashamed of himself as well, because of his own past and imperfections. His coworkers at the bakery, though they take care of him, laugh at him because of his lack of mental acuity. The professors who performed his intelligence enhancing operation are not motivated by his well-being but rather their own professional advancement. His mother …