Journal Prompt #3

For as long as I can remember, my family has had no stories--at least not the kind with a definite beginning, climax, or conclusion. We operate instead on a concept of less is more, telling just enough to pique interest, to establish a context, but allowing the listener to fill in the details. This way no one can be disappointed, disillusioned. We invent out own stories for each others lives.

My parents' lives are mysteries even to themselves it seems. Sometimes I'll catch mom looking at old photos of China. She'll spread them out on the kitchen table in a fan-like configuration, a spray of faces in variegated grays and blacks. Black hair. Black Eyes. My mom and her two brothers posed in cascading order of height in a Chengdu garden, unsmiling, but happiness beaming from their eyes. There are photos of her and her college classmates. In them my mother is young, fresh-faced, dressed in demure knee-length skirts and filmy blouses, the kind of girl I'd probably be friends with today. In all the old pictures her hair is either braided in a long plait down her back or in girlish pig tails brushing her shoulders. She showed me a picture of an old boyfriend of hers once. He was swarthy and handsome with hard, attenuated features--nothing like the softness of my dad. It was hard to imagine my mom as the kind of girl who would date that kind of guy. Had she walked hand in hand with him in between class? Did they go on dates? Had her parents approved? These questions had flitted briefly across my mind but I let them lie fallow their, burgeoning on the thickness of my tongue, unsaid and irksome.

I wish sometimes that we had learned to talk, mother and I. Like Maxine Hong Kingston, I have things I'd like to say to her, accusations, confessions... the kinds of things I imagine other boys may say to their moms like I love you, I miss you, I'm sorry. I have questions I want to ask, about China, dad, her family (my family). But instead we communicate in meaningful silences. We call each other with requests and petty problems, dancing around the questions we'd never ask each other. How are you? Are you scared? Alone? Are you in love? Have you met anyone? Our stories are the trivial, the harmless, the desultory.

I've spent so long making up stories in my head. Stories about my life and that of my family. I watch television shows and read books to piece together from them what is happening next door where parents are nosy and the kids trust themselves to speak. And then I look at my house, my family, and imagine a castle of mute minstrels, stories raging unkempt and vicious behind locked doors.

Mothers

Mom is coming tomorrow. It's parents weekend on campus so she (and legions of other Asian mothers from across the country) is flying up to Boston to see her son who she hasn't seen for two months and will not see again until Christmas time when the first snow has fallen over the Smokies and I come back home, spent from my first semester as a college freshman.

She'll bring food with her I'm sure. Food and money that she will slip nonchalantly into my hand. "It's okay, just take it. Don't spend it on clothes you already own!" She'll appraise my room in that motherly fashion, tidying a little in each corner, sniffing pointedly at the damp, mildewy air, flicking the light switch on and off and pulling the sheets straight on my bed.

It'll be strange for me to see her here. She is incompatible with my experience here, anachronistic, emblematic of another place, another time, another me. When I think of mom I think of dumplings floating in a boiling froth, thick rimmed glasses shielding a face that is young but old at the same time, her raven hair swept back behind her ears, oddly mismatched ensembles in monochromatic color schemes and piles of dogeared biographies cluttering the coffee table in the parlor. As a college student, I've made strides towards  independence. Without mom, I wash my own clothes, budget my own time, meet with whoever I wish at odd hours of the night. There are no rules here, no arbiters watching over my shoulder. But then again my mother (especially in the last years of high school) never was the type to dictate with any real force. Where dad would rage and pontificate from his middling perch, mom resigned herself long ago to my choleric temper, my maddening stubbornness. So she watches instead, working behind the scenes. Even with her miles away in Tennessee, I feel her presence, guiding me with a phone call here and there, a gently rebuking email in my inbox.

"now is that what your really want to do?"

Mom is hard to describe actually. She's not like most mothers. I mean she does the normal motherly things. She worries about me when I could care less. She stays up late nights watching Chinese soap operas, waiting for the sound of the garage door opening so she knows that I'm home and she can at last close her eyes and sleep. But she's distant, aloof. I know nothing about her past life, who she was in that first blush of girlhood. And she likes it that way.

I bet she's finishing packing right now. I bet she's looking down at all the neatly squared off jackets and candy bars in her suitcase, ticking off the things she knows I forgot to ask for in our last phone conversation.

A fistful of air

I'm at the edge of a place. In the indefinite greyness I call out my name, letting it echo, reverberating along the boundaries of this world. I'm at the brink of understanding, of knowing my place in this fraying memory, this protracted segue into the future. Transience does not suit me. I seek strong, solid earth beneath my feet. The realization of home anchors me to a place. But no home presents itself here. A dorm is a shell, a rest stop along the way. It is not a home. A college is an organic institution, a sentient, evolving body of life, but is it a home?

Questions rattle against my mind, shaking loose bits and pieces I thought I had lost.

My progress feels slow, but rapidly accelerating. Soon I'll have reached that terminal velocity, soon the interface of my life and this place will disengage; I'll soar or fall flat.

This is just my roundabout way of saying that I'm feeling the pressure. This is just my way of saying that I miss home. I miss my friends. I wonder if they miss me.

This is my way of relating a memory.... leading the reader through so much extraneous information, hoping to ground them in my thought process, the why of this recollection, the context in which I have framed this image just so--as propaganda for my you and I to digest in tandem. Because as I tell a memory in my head, I'm reassuring myself again and again that I am alive, that I've done this and that and can remember doing so.

Sometimes I remember so vividly the memory feels touchable, like a dream come to life, all sinew and bone and gossamer strands of hair. Reading Nabokov has compelled me to think of themes in my memories, to trace the slow, gradual branching of my life. What are the overarching tropes of my existence? What series of circumstances brought me to this point? I started out so simple. Just a boy with a bulb cut on his way to school. And now I'm something all together different, something I can't really describe with much eloquence right now.

So I race back in time to gather clues, to speculate and wonder. What if I had never taken that class? What if mom had stayed in Pennsylvania and never gone back to Knoxville. What if dad hadn't been so cold? So busy with his work and his own mind. I try to condense down into a sentence, a phrase, just who I am. And I come back empty handed.

Somehow, I'll work through this. I'll piece together all these colorful pennants of life I have shored up in my mind and make a picture for myself. I'll find the threads that hold it all together. I'll snip them off, and watch the picture unravel about me, so beautiful in its dissolution.

The first thread then is this: Water both still and moving

The second: strong female figures

The third: Summers layered like rock strata

The fourth: Clothes hanging in my closet

The fifth: the continuity of place and time

The sixth: long drives and airport terminals

Final Paper Beginnings Part 2

I haven't had much time to write lately. It's both my fault and not. Time seems to be conspiring against me, blowing me away as the seasons change, due dates loom and classes accelerate their pace. And frankly, I've been lazy as well, letting things fall as they will, never taking the initiative to push just that one inch further. I've had this feeling before, this creeping panic, this galling inadequacy. I've been able to overcome it before, to squeeze by just as the semester shudders to a close. It's just the stakes have never been this high.. and I have never before been this easily distracted.

So in an effort to be efficient while procrastinating important work for other classes, I want to lay out an outline for this illusory paper I'm framing in my mind. I have great hopes for this project. I want it to be nuanced, artful... but original as well, not just another one of my perfectly fine but demure papers. I want to put myself out on a limb, explore a little bit what it is to write with abandon but through an academic lens. Perhaps find a synergy between my reflective, personal style and the structured rigor of an academic paper?

Outline

Intro: opening marks about memory and its connection to humanness, establish idea of humans being the product of their memories. segue into Never Let Me Go.

1: Introduce the book, outline its major themes, conflicts, characters, and plot lines.

Thesis: by showing the character's collective memory of a place and each other, their humanness is established.

2: Launch into the analysis of place, Hailsham, how it connects to Kathy's memory, how our memories embellish and tint how we remember specific locations.

3: incorporate personal experiences that correlate to Hailsham into paper: Farragut, the pool, the field.

4: Second point about how their interwoven memories of each other bridge the gap between clone and human.

5: Similar parallel in my own life: Our group... our summer... our times together our memories.

6: so what does it mean? To be human? To remember? To NEVER LET ME GO?

Final Paper Beginnings

So I watched Never Let Me Go in theaters as a prelude to the paper-writing-frenzy that will soon engulf my life. To be honest, I wasn't greatly impressed. Carrie Mulligan was sufficiently wonderful and Kiera delivered in the fierce, deadpan looks department per usual but the movie just lacked a certain... I don't know spark?

Either way, I'll be rereading the book over the next week or so, just to reorient myself to the major themes and events. I definitely have a lot of ideas I wanna play with in this paper. Firstly, I want to do a retrospective element that ties in with the symbolism of Hailsham, what it represents, the parallels I see in my life etc. I want to examine the title as well, along with the interactions of the characters and the part they each play in weaving their collective memoryscape. I want to delve into their questionable humanness as well, to make the point that memory encompasses human identity and perhaps imbues life in that sense.

I don't know... obviously I have some work to do... In the meantime, I'm gonna try and get some sleep before my midterm tomorrow in Chinese!

A Pattern of Leaves

I was assaulted yesterday with a most peculiar memory. The time frame of this particular recollection was nebulous at best, dated to a period of my life that I generally label as quasi-memory, those years from five to seven, even eight, from which I still preserve lingering sensations but very few discrete, lucid memories from. What's more is that all these vague apparitions of this sort are supremely hard to sharpen without great leaps of imagination making prodigious use of Gilbert's "filling-in" technique.

But from time to time I feel like ambling farther back in time than I'm accustomed. I seek in these long, solitary walks through my mostly cloistered life to perhaps limn my existence in something bordering on novelistic beauty. And as I go I sweep together little shards of what was once extant (or at least what I hold to be such) and conjure from such paltry evidence a grand narrative arc of whimsy and internal metamorphosis.

I digress. My point in starting this now much too attenuated post was simply the remembrance of a certain pattern of leaves, and the exotic taste of salty upholstery in my juvenile mouth. Somehow these two sensations come entwined in my mind... so much so that I must infer at one time that I chewed on the leafy upholstery of an old couch, one that I can almost remember my family owning but am cautiously skeptical of declaring as absolute existing in my life. Yet how can it not be? I remember its taste--acrid and moist--its color--ochre with dull brown leaves--its standard  span and the bedraggled nature of its cushions. I remember all these things; I swear, I hope, I declare.

Speak, Memory... and tell me something new: Prompt #3

Nabokov can write the hell out of a memoir. His prose is intensive, meticulous, the kind of writing that manages to be both expressive and controlled. Reading his memoir, I felt as if he were not only elucidating me as to the relevant figures and dates of his life, but also indoctrinating me into the Nabokov way of thinking.

His words wound circuitously about my mind as I read, and I feel almost sad that I haven't had the time to fully appreciate his writing. A bout of strep throat laid me low this past week and reading Nabokov unfortunately was usurped by my need to both get well and ace my OEB midterm on Friday (both tasks I failed at!).

However, from what I have read, I can begin to discern certain nascent themes in his memoir. From the very first chapter, Nabokov establishes his own presence within the memoir. His voice acts as both the narrator of the work and as its main protagonist, and his rich memory is the setting in which Speack Memory's narrative arc arises. The theme that struck me in what I have read thus far is Nabokov's seeming fascination with death. There is first and foremost the beginning sequence in which Nabokov describes life as "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." And as the book progresses, Nabokov heralds with equal parts reverence and introspection the lives and eventual deaths of many of his family members. Yet death in Nabokov's world lacks morbidity. He refers to the deaths of dear family members with elegaic beauty but with no hint of grief. If there's an emotion present it would be a serene calm if anything. Nabokov seems to be more interested with perpetuating the legacies of his ancestors (and by default his own) than he is with the tragedy of their passing. Death is thus made immutable and expressive. There was life--wondrous, explosive, explosive and raw--and then there was death, by execution or heart attack or all manner of assorted causations.

And tying it all together is Nabokov's crisp, clean voice and you the reader can feel yourself falling into the pages like leaves of his life and feeling loamy, black earth between your toes.