I am thinking it is 2021.

In less than 48 hours, a crew of movers will place most of my belongings in a Bay Area storage facility.  My partner and I will then pack our Nissan Versa and attempt to drive it to my hometown for six months.  Thereafter, we’ll figure it out.  It’s the first leg of my sole New Year’s resolution for 2021 – to live as flexibly as possible, going wherever life nudges me.  Although I believe all roads will lead us back to the Bay Area in the fall, the possibility of being anywhere in the latter part of 2021 is both exciting and terrifying.

This piece is not about the many irritations of moving, which are made more confounding by a global pandemic and the digital hostage interrogation that is cancelling your Comcast service.  This piece is about change, risk, fear, decision making and the inertia that comes with age.  Most of all, this newsletter is a tale of multiple moves over a period of 10 years – same girl, similar destinations, drastically different dispositions. 

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As some may know, I am no stranger to moving.  The last decade of my life has been a shuffle of boxes and suitcases and the shedding of the extraneous physical bullshit that comes with living a single place for a few years – the random bobbleheads), the stuffed animals I forced my partner to win at claw machines, the…I don’t even know how to describe this:

My moves have a regular 2-year cadence and revolve around 3 hubs: Houston (my hometown), the San Francisco Bay Area (my adopted home), and Washington, DC (where I went to school).  Despite getting older and being more familiar with the world, each subsequent relocation has felt harder and more fraught.  I jumped at the opportunity to move more than a thousand miles to DC for college and another several thousand miles to San Francisco immediately after graduation.  The last move I made was a 13-mile shift from San Francisco to Oakland, two cities that are separated by a single bridge with each respective skyline visible to one another on a clear day.  Despite how blatantly advantageous I knew the change would be, I spreadsheet-ed and cost-benefit analyzed the fuck out of that move.

This temporary, upcoming move to Houston is within my definition of a “well duh” decision.  My work is remote.  My organization is supportive.  My partner is excited to come with me.  We have very little locking us in one place.  We have the means to travel and the ability to be closer to my family.  Yet, what transpired was not “well duh” decision making.  It was a month of weighing pros with cons (both real and fictious).  By the end of our process, I didn’t recognize the girl I had become – so steeped in fear, so anchored in the known.

Along the journey, I developed a proclivity towards risk aversion and a decision making calculus that is more convoluted and conservative.  If I could describe my decision making process in my 20s, it would look a little something like this: 

Now, in my 30s, I no longer have a very clear decision tree.  Instead, the “process” has morphed into a cloudy amalgamation of considerations that can block my ability to move forward:

I’m unsure how I became so fearful and so conservative with my lifestyle.  I am hoping to explore the edges of that fear in 2021.  My big takeaway of 2020 is that the certain and known aren’t really as certain or as known as I had thought to be.  I am hoping a year of living a little more flexibly and freely will beat back the fear just a little bit.

I wish you, your family, your chosen family, and your community and safe 2021.  Here’s to a new year of living with less fear and more youthful wonder and possibility.  Always stay hydrated amid decision making via coffee and alcohol, folks.

I am thinking that Thanksgiving is the worst federal holiday.

I want to wish you and your families – both chosen and obliged – a wonderful Thanksgiving.  I hope you all enjoy this objectively mediocre* holiday that has become an odd, unnecessary political flashpoint.

*Hella Long Editor’s Note: Thanksgiving is a vastly inferior holiday to most of the other federal holidays.  If we were fighting over the cancellation of Christmas (like we do each year), I would understand the impassioned pleas for a stay-of-holiday execution.  After all, Christmas is the season of poorly chosen, age-inappropriate, mildly endearing gift giving.  In addition, it is also a day that celebrates the BIRTH OF CHRIST.  Thanksgiving arguably commemorates the death of a lot of people, turkeys, and civil familial dialogue.

As “evidence” of Thanksgiving’s inferiority, I have created a hand-drawn tournament graphic outlining most of the federal holidays in a March Madness-esque competitive bracket.  The power-protected seeding is determined by pairing the first federal holiday of the year (New Year’s Day) with the last federal holiday of the year (Christmas Day)…and so on and so on.  Let’s assume that the holidays are engaged in an elimination-style competition of either dressage or extremely violent cage fighting.  Your imagination, your choice:

You may be wondering why a left-leaning person like myself would choose Independence Day (the day of obnoxious American exceptionalism and excessive meat eating) over Labor Day (the day of worker’s rights and labor organizing) and Martin Luther King Day.  I have no eloquent answer other than my love of lighting fireworks in a public school parking lot located in a lawless unincorporated Texas county and drinking beer in a tube while floating down a river surrounded by drunken San Francisco tech workers.  None of this wonder transpires on Thanksgiving, the most overrated of American traditions.

 Let me elaborate further.  Thanksgiving is:

  • a late November occasion and often subject to the “wintry mix” weather pattern – the ficklest and most indecisive of weather patterns.  Is it snow?  Is it rain?  Is it snain?  Whatever it is, it hasn’t quite decided its own queer identity and so we are left with its waffling implications: not enough snow to throw, yet too “snain” to prevent slip-n-slide ice.
  • aside from the food, a holiday popularly symbolized by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  I have never encountered a parade that I actually liked and I fear that one day, when our civilization is excavated for future generations to analyze, the vestiges of our society will be represented by 50-foot Snoopy balloons and all the things that refused to decompose from the Pepperidge Farm float.
  • on a personal note, memories associated with poor college student loneliness.  Specifically, Thanksgiving reminds me of my financial inability to fly home, resulting in my spending the day in a cafeteria eating turkey wedged between a kid from Senegal and a kid from Azerbaijan.
  • a conduit for pumpkin spice.  As many know, I have waged a decades long campaign against pumpkin products, particularly “pumpkin spice”.  Pumpkin spice is a misnomer – there is nothing spicy about pumpkin.  Additionally, it is quite telling when the best use of pumpkin is to carve its flesh and let the carcass rot for the delight of children.

Finally (and warranting its own non-bulleted paragraph) is the food of Thanksgiving, which centers around the epitome of pedestrian fowl – turkey.  I have a lot ire towards turkey – ire best embodied by my favorite Thanksgiving story.  When my family arrived in the United States after fleeing from Vietnam, my mother was captivated by American traditions.  For our family’s first Thanksgiving, my mother spent the entire day preparing a giant turkey.  She was excited to serve it for family members that all survived a civil war, only to find safety and refuge in the United States.  However, at dinner, my jungle-ass uncles and aunties went straight for all the dark meat and tendons (drum sticks, thighs, etc.) and left the entire turkey breast – all 10 pounds of it – uneaten due to its dry, bland flavor.  It would remain uneaten for weeks.  From that day forward, my mother, bitter from her unappreciated labor and a disappointing American experience, vowed to never to cook turkey ever again.  What an American story, eh?

All jokes aside, despite the weird food, the weird politics, and the weird traditions, rest and gratefulness are so important this hectic year.  So on that note, happy holidays, y’all.  You deserve it. 

Also, please enjoy this TikTok.

[Fin Editor’s Note.]

I am thinking about survival.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to survive, especially amid this moment when life feels very precarious.

A few days ago, a colleague of mine sent me this article, which profiles a community of 14,000 Vietnamese people who call East New Orleans home.  This small but resilient group has survived every form of disaster including:

  • The catastrophic Vietnam War
  • Forced migration as a result of said catastrophic war
  • The innumerable challenges – poverty, racism, food insecurity, intergenerational trauma – that come with assimilating to the United States
  • The BP Oil Spill, which ravished Vietnamese fishing communities along the Gulf Coast
  • Hurricane Katrina, which sent this community into seeking refuge again
  • And now a global pandemic that could economically destabilize the community and threaten an elderly population that has survived everything listed above

I write out all of these barriers not to solicit dread, but to revel in awe.  Despite the dire circumstances impacting this multi-generational Vietnamese neighborhood, I have little doubt that the community will continue to survive.  This East New Orleans neighborhood, known colloquially as “Versailles”, has been the subject of several documentaries and research papers because it is the embodiment of “community resilience” – the ability of a collective to organize and use physical, human, and political resources to recover quickly from an adverse situation.

Historically, Vietnamese people have survived and endured to an astonishing and dangerous degree.  That isn’t to say that all Vietnamese people are doing well – I’m not into that model minority bullshit.  However, Vietnamese people are a part of a culture and a nation-state that has withstood a thousand years of Chinese tributary rule and has overthrown French, Japanese, and American occupiers – not to mention our ability to persist through incredible heat, high humidity, awful traffic, warm beer, obnoxious uncles, and terrible karaoke. 

Vietnamese people are like that big ass spider that freaks you the fuck out when you step into shower – the one that makes you think “Oh shit! I’m naked and in a tub with a spider!”  We’re that spider that makes you reach for the shower head, drown the shit out of it, and feel momentary relief watching its balled-up body swirl around the drain.  We’re that spider that slowly unfurls right as you expect us to disappear – that’ll survive even as you pound us with the shampoo bottle and douse us with soap.  We’re that spider that will causes you to scream, “Why won’t this thing fucking die?” and then conclude that it may just be better to give that spider some space, walk out of the bathroom, and shower at another time. 

That spider is probably Vietnamese.  Perhaps my cousin.

But how?  What does community resilience, self-sufficiency, and survival look like in practice?  When I think of the absolute fortitude that comes with living, I think a lot about my own mother.  Ali Wong jokes that Asian women are bad drivers because “we’re trying to die” – a truism for my own mother who is an abysmal driver and who has literally told me that “dying is really hard to do”.  That’s a bold statement coming from someone who has had many opportunities – too many opportunities – to test that hypothesis.

If I could distill her formula for withstanding life into a few ingredients, the first would be her general life disposition.  She approaches life with a laidback “whatever will be will be” attitude and couples it with a strong sense of curiosity and wonder.  Successes and struggles are pieces of data that drive and iterate a life-long learning experience.  Life is too busy and hard for over-analysis.  While most people recoil while watching the news, here’s how my mother is taking it in:

Second, my mother is able to harbor a relaxed attitude because she has learned to be incredibly resourceful.  One could also say that she is just completely extra – an over-planner, over-preparer, over-everything type of woman.  She’s her own presidential Defense Production Act, her own stockpile, her own reserve.  In fact, here’s a comprehensive list of her responses to COVID-19:

  1. Stockpiling 2 freezers of frozen food – one freezer specifically dedicated to individually wrapped (why?) Costco bread
  2. Stockpiling at least 2 dozen containers of vitamins, including at least 3 bottles of Vitamin D (why?)
  3. Teaching herself how to make her own antibacterial soap l out of essential oil, rubbing alcohol, and aloe vera – and sending her own daughter out in the middle of a pandemic to acquire all of these materials
  4. Putting her homemade antibacterial liquids into travel sized Tresemme hair gel containers
  5. Somehow accumulating and having the foresight to save several travel-sized Tressume hair gel containers
  6. Hand sewing her own masks
  7. Hand sewing her own 2-sided reversible masks
  8. Hand sewing her own 2-sided reversible masks with adjustable ear bands
  9. Borrowing a sewing machine to produce more than a dozen 2-sided reversible, adjustable ear band masks in assorted colors and patterns including bunny rabbits and pandas!
  10. Sending a care package of 2-sided reversible, adjustable ear band masks in assorted colors and patterns to her daughters

Let’s talk about over-resourcefulness as a response to unresolved trauma next time, eh?

For now, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to survive – emotionally, physically, socially.  And although times have been incredibly trying, I am trying to lean on the incredible community and familial examples of surviving and thriving in my life.  I hope you are too.