ON THE PROMISE OF TRANSFORMATION

(in the new year)

Dear friends,

Here it is, the new year. Along with which comes all the expectations of something new and intentional, a dash of hope, a refilled glass; I believe in the new year as an open window, I believe in it the way I believe in the day's arrival, and I woke this morning slightly disappointed to find that I was still in my own body, crushed under the weight of three blankets I had piled on to try to keep myself asleep.

I've been having trouble sleeping more than three or four hours at a time, and last night, at 2 AM, which is earlier than most of my bedtime, I got into bed and longed to be immediately asleep. But my brain was buzzing from the new and old friends I had just seen, and the excitement from the crowds outside my window made me feel like everyone was in a conspiracy to celebrate that I was left out from.

Whenever people ask me about my time in China over the past four years, I tell them I feel like I lived three lifetimes. And it feels true, for each year, I was in a radically different position and job and social circle, and I felt as if I was shedding old skins so quickly I was cannibalizing any stable sense of identity. And it was true, although I had old childhood friends in Shanghai, I had to relearn how to make new friends, navigating a completely different set of social expectations and boundaries, in a mother-tongue I was stubborn to speak in every situation even when I felt completely alien to it, and no one in my life in Shanghai knew about who I had been in America and vice versa. And yet, it didn't feel like a conscious fresh start, Shanghai haunted me with memories and a feeling of should-ness—I should be spending time with my family, I should be a good daughter, I should behave and look and speak in these ways.

(still from the documentary I made for my exhibition, on nvshu, a secret women’s language)

I was determined to make Shanghai home. And the more I settled in, the more I dug myself into a loneliness, though I find myself wanting to assure you that yes I did have friends, and a nice apartment, and a loving family, and all my favorite foods, but somehow there was a hollowness to it all that felt breakable at any moment, and I had no space for myself, I could not even imagine reading a book or writing for myself. Because amidst all the expectations Shanghai had of me, I had become a slip of my former self.

"It's cruel, to be forced to adapt to this world here," my mother's friend said to me when she heard about my decision to leave Shanghai. I was surprised to find my experience recognized so cogently that I immediately burst into tears. It felt like such kindness to have my experiences be put into words I would never have chosen for myself, and to take the burden of responsibility away from my own inadequacy to be happy.

So I sat down today to think about my resolutions for the new year and found myself writing to you.

Last year was a year of loss and change. I lost the creative studio I had been building in Shanghai for the past few years (along with the team I had been nurturing), I lost a meaningful relationship, and I lost a plagiarism lawsuit against a friend I once trusted with my life-- and yet, this was also the most hopeful year, full of light and joy. I had my first solo-exhibition which reorganized my work from the Watson research that I had been working on for the past eight years; I decided to go back to school at Bard studying film, spending a magical summer in upstate NY; I swam in the Red Sea for a month healed by the salt; and I moved back to NYC into my old neighborhood in Bushwick, living with a friend and her dog and sharing an art studio. All of this happened at the cusp of turning thirty, which cliche as it sounds, immediately gave me a sense of groundedness and purpose.

(from my exhibition at How Art Museum in Shanghai, 2023)

My shared art studio has become my happy place in the city, where time and self doesn't appear to exist, which is ultimately the feeling we are all yearning for. I feel a sense of purpose when I am there because there are so many things I want to write and make and bring into the world!! After moving to NYC in October, my friend from Bard said I look much lighter, compared to when I had been going through the depth of the struggles a few months prior. This feels true, as there is such light when I am making the things I want to make, and such purposeness in being. I feel much more grounded— it feels obnoxious to describe this state of being as happy, because that’s what I’ve been saying recently to anyone who’d listen (honestly who wants to hear about happiness on the regular in this grey city) but it feels impossibly true, that this is the feeling of happiness.

I am hit with clarity. Now that I am out of these years I feel more able to write about it. At times I feel like I should work on a novel due to the absurdity of events and how fiction feels the only way I can make sense of it.

In the past few years in China, I think I came into the power of my imagination and ability to get things done (ie. ability to bullshit my way through anything). One of my core ideas about myself is that I am especially inefficient, unorganized, and time-blind, which is all still utterly true. But as I found myself in a variety of job environments in China, working with high-powered people I'd only seen before in interviews and on TV, I realized everyone was making shit up throughout life, that no one really knew anything about anything, despite how successful they may appear. Everyone is really a mess (and a mostly unhappy mess!) trying to make it through each day, each task, while holding onto some glimpse of future happiness, and sense of self.

I say this about myself because I fell into a variety of jobs that were increasingly high powered and high stakes, in which I had no experience and training for, and yet, it came easily once I realized the formula is to sound, and thus be, self-assured; anything can be done once you think your way through how to do it, and then put the plan into motion. Whereas writing a poem (a good one) is much harder!

The funny thing is, I never applied to any of these jobs...they kept being forced onto me and I guess I didn't know how to say no (I am learning to say no now that I am freshly thirty)... The first real job I had in Shanghai was directing LIFE magazine-- that was at its core a literary and cultural magazine but wielded its cultural power by providing the "highbrow" backbone to fashion houses and luxury brands, which is how I found myself directing fashion campaigns and photo shoots and video production with fashion and movie icons, and one day found myself filming in the Gobi Desert driving a G-wagon while flying a kite live-painted by a famous artist. It also began raining in the desert as we were filming which apparently only happens once every two years so the film ended up being a surreal thing with this artist holding an umbrella in the desert (cue car, cue kite, cue caves).

(lifting a one-ton light in the middle of the night in the rain during the ferrari shoot)

Other totally out of the blue places I found myself in— curating a large scale exhibition of one of my favorite artists in an iconic old house in Shanghai (with no curatorial experience); being trapped out in Qinghai Lake with Tibetan nomads due to Covid restrictions; filming, producing, directing, acting in a Ferrari art-film to celebrate their 30 years in China (with no real filming experience) with a crew of 100 men who were angry at me for getting the job and not them, which resulted in harmful rumors about me and not allowing me to sit on the equipment because it's superstitious to have a women sit on anything on set (we were on a boat, and there was nowhere to sit after standing for 30 hrs straight). I then had to lead their Buddhist incense lighting thing on set to pray to the gods-- too many things could go wrong on set--to appease the crew, but then I was yelled at by my mother's Christian friends for leading witchcraft on set... after which we filmed for five days and nights straight moving from bamboo forests to the largest interior studio set in Shanghai..

(following the ferrari car on a snaking path… my friend watched the film and said I’ve never seen a car film where the car comes out finally in the fifth minute..)

"This is the hardest I have ever worked," my dad said, during which he was helping me on set because I was anxious to be the only woman there, and then immediately afterwards my dad retired in my company (the whole time on set I was emergency looking up youtube videos to figure out what to do.). A month later I found myself working on a documentary in a French chateau after being caught up as a pawn in a corporate war in a large fashion houses, and working so much from day to night that I was getting nose bleeds from the stress because the designer who invited me expected me to be her full-time "sister, assistant, best friend, co-founder," all together. My friend Alicia came to visit me at the Chateau, which also had a revolving roster of celebrities and people who think they are famous, and she brushed my hair at night as I cried and realized I had been too busy and overwhelmed to even cry.

I will spare you the absurdities of all the other situations I found myself in, but the Ferrari and Chateau snippets encapsulate some important qualities of my experiences in China-- I did not sign up for, nor did I want to work on this thing, but I was convinced to do it by people who absurdly thought I was the only person for the job, I struggle on it for half a year and think it is the hardest thing I will ever do, I meet the strangest of obstacles (including the immense stress of being responsible for a million dollar car (the only one of its kind in the world!!) trapped in a mudslide at midnight in a bamboo forest while the crew of 100 men ask me to make the call, right now! on the spot! of whether to switch to a replacement car, which could put the whole shoot at risk, and every minute I delay my decision we have to pay the overtime of 100 people), and then I realize ok perhaps I am the only person insane enough for this job, and then the next day I find myself in Germany accepting an Ottocar award at an automobile convention, surrounded again by 100 white men who are all "industry leaders in the car world"-- and telling them I do not care about cars I cannot tell any of them apart.

"How cruel," my mother's friend had said, not about the opportunities I was given, (blessed by even), but about the social expectations I was made to navigate as an unplaceable young woman in these situations, which I was utterly unprepared for because I was educated in a Western education in Shanghai from a young age. I never learned how to speak to elders the proper way, the way I was supposed to raise my drinks to higher ups and wait for them to drink and call on me. I was expected to bribe people on the set as the director, but it was unbecoming to do so as a woman, so I had to ask my dad to do it for me. And then all of these older men who had years of experience in this realm were looking at every opportunity for me to fail. Even now, I would hear rumors that circle back to me, about how everyone thought I was undeserving, and all the things I did wrong.

And "cruel," she meant, that I had to do it again and again in every field I was in. When I rose too quickly in the publishing world, I was seen as not having paid my proper dues. When I wanted to make art, these circles of art school intellectuals/ wielders of art world power felt that I had no properly risen through the hierarchies, and did not deserve my own show, because I had not gone through the system properly, and they could not determine which "school" or category to place me in; I had no advocate for me, I was alone in these battles.

And yet after all of this, I came to the realization that I was in fact qualified to do these jobs, that this pretending to believe in my abilities soon transformed into a real belief. And thus, now, after all of this, I can start saying No to jobs, to situations, to people, so that when I do say Yes, I mean it, and Yes I will commit to what I really want, for myself.

I was inundated with so many jobs after the Ferrari thing that I had to open my own Creative Studio out of my apartment with a team that gradually grew into a team of ten people, who would wait for me in my tiny living room every morning as I dreaded another work day of telling people what to do. While there are things I am learning to understand that I am qualified to do, my fatal flaw is that I an way too scattered and random to lead a team of people consistently. This completely drains me of my mental energy -- if I didn’t even know what I wanted, how was I supposed to lead a team! I have always dreaded group projects! I have completely different ideas everyday! I just want to be alone with my poems, alone!

It is all too easy to mark a year by these big happenings. I want to remember, too, the insignificant and the mundane, the way my curtains kept falling over every time I pulled on it, the water bowl that the dog I live with slurped out of every time he got excited, the way the candle lit beneath the Yemeni milk chai kept its warmth for an entire afternoon, how my grandfather at 94 walks 10,000 steps a day and then poses with a bicycle in order to photoshop a new years greeting onto it.

I want to remember the prayer lantern Hazar and I sent into the sky for Palestine and how she tells me to not call the victims, death toll or dead, but as Shaheed, martyr, witness, because they are witnesses of injustice. I want to remember the martyrs, the unnamed, the witnesses. I want to remember the hope as the lantern lifted right before it burst into flames.

How we continue to live and live each day, this immense freedom and responsibility to make ourselves happy, to try to build a life that makes sense to us. How free we are.

At last, here is a picture of my Christmas with Anne Carson, Jiaoyang, and Will Aitken, where in an enthusiastic gym in Ann Arbor, we went boxing Against Parkinson's (I highly recommend this essay she wrote: “A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.”)

Wishing you big and small freedoms in the new year.

love,

JinJin