Hello my dear friends,
This is the first time you are getting a letter from me on Substack, the new platform I am moving my tinyletter to. I will miss the intimacy and familiarity of tinyletter which has kept my company for the last four years, throughout the solitude of Watson travels, the anxiety of the pandemic, the joys of suddenly launching my chapbook into the void. Thank you for coming with me, I write because of you on the receiving end.
I began 2021 underwater with grief, immersed in a heavy trudging of time, the surface breaking for breath. At eight a.m. on the first day of this unblessed New Year, I found out that T has died, sudden and without warning. It felt like whiplash to have long buried memories emerge, fully formed. The trajectory of his life now reformed to lead to death. He was my first relationship in college and I felt like I had already said goodbye to him and these memories when we ended things — even now, break ups feel unnatural to me: I remember how strange and difficult it was to harden my heart that first time, the learned effort to let affections go cold.
In the days after, I apprenticed myself to hunger. T had been vegan, though that was not the immediate reason I realized I could no longer stomach meat. I remembered my friend who followed the Buddhist grieving tradition and ate vegetarian for 30 days after her grandmother’s passing. I needed to cleanse my body, though there was also a punishing desire to let the hunger and its lacking bloom, to stay with that emptying feeling. I felt as if I could taste the soul of meat, and everywhere I looked I saw its cruelty, the death lurking beneath the surface. How cannibalistic everyone appeared, happy and roiling in meat juices, unaware of our aliveness and the stink of death in everything we touched.
I was by the ocean when I found out, newly off duty as the maid of honor for a childhood friend’s wedding. For the next few days, I was lucky to stay by the beach, to drop my anchors underwater and let the waves take hold. The red flag was always staked in the beach due to the winter waves, and so I had the ocean’s anger to myself. The waves pulled apart my limbs, pushed me forward in unknown directions, poured ugly gulps of itself into my mouth-- I felt comforted, held by its predictable anger, drained of my own.
On land, I was angry. I yelled at the leering lifeguards, at the coconut seller overcharging foul juice. My voice stunned the men, deep and guttural and breaking. I apologized into my father’s soft shoulder. He forgave me easily, the way he used to wipe my nose on his shirt in the wind’s sudden chill. Let It Out, he said. The look on his face stopped me short, his pain bruising my own. When my mother heard about my outburst, she said, Don’t you know what those men could do to you?
On land, I obsess over the very public grief of his very public family. The saintliness of their accounts, the man they painted familiar yet unrecognizable to me— true, I hadn’t known him for many years, and what I knew of him was stuck at nineteen years old, an age so achingly tender to me now. I remember the terrible hurt I once experienced with T, and yet all that is awash in gouache. I read over and over the obituary his family writes, how his father is adamant about specifying his death was suicide, to not shy away from that taboo, I am moved by his public grappling of Acceptance vs Respecting one’s choice to commit suicide. I let myself feel pain through his family’s grief, and I am grateful for their public sharing, though it must have been the most difficult thing—it’s the opposite of H’s family, the privacy his family needed, death mired in Chinese taboos and shame, which once upon a time, four years ago, I began my tinyletters writing about, and which strangely, circuitously, the poems in my chapbook led me back to.
My friends call, text, friends who I haven’t spoken to since freshman year, friends who shared the immense glee of leaving home for the first time, of laying claim to a place not of our own, this immense, stabbing, delightful freedom that Bhanu Kapil describes as “settler’s glee.” I am overwhelmed by my friend’s messages, the sudden affirmation that Yes, We were real, He existed, I existed, Together, We shared that joy of arriving, wide-eyed and open to our lives’ possibilities.
I share his father’s tribute with my friend, H’s sister, who in turn shares it with their father. I share it with my parents, too, who are also learning the gap between Acceptance and Respect, that irreconcilable gap between life and in whose hands it belongs, how dying tangles up the living inside the unspoken parts of cultures and languages. In Chinese, there is a saying that there is no greater grief than a white haired having to send away a black haired.
It is now more than a month later, and I feel numb and gross at the days’ cruel normalcy. Earlier today, my friend - since the gleeful freshman days – asked me for pictures of T for a memorial photobook, and I made myself dig through old social media posts. The photographs were beautiful and tender and forever preserved on the interwebs, shockingly easy to find. I cried and something opened inside me and now I am writing to you here.
I last wrote you the night before launching my chapbook. I am so grateful for all the joyous faces who shared little zoom boxes with me on that day. My heart still feels so full and held, and as with most ephemeral, joyful moments, I am careful about revisiting it too much — rather, I tuck it into a little box and hold it close to my chest. My friend tells me that it was the most genuinely celebratory Zoom she’d been to, and I want to affirm that the joy was certainly collective and shared, culminating from all of your care and love.
The little glitch of the day was that the organizer accidentally set a 100 person cap to the meeting— I apologize to those who were locked out!
Please join me in some belated celebrations: here is the the launch party recordings, with subtitles.
During the party, I read my poem “To Your Brother, Who Is Without Name” — I had written the poem to my friend, H’s sister. Terrance Hayes wrote to me after, “To Read a poem in the presence of the one it was written for: no better gift to get or receive!”
I agree, what a gift this journey has been.
After the launch party, I felt drained from all the intense activity leading up to the launch—and a strong pull to put my hands to clay, to make something with my hands. I left my mother’s hometown to go to a nearby town, Jing De Zhen, the porcelain capital of the world, where the clay underfoot is named after the glow of jade, and thousand-year-old kilns burn throughout the night. Wherever you may be, the bowls in your kitchen were likely made here.
At Jing De Zhen, I fell in with a group of Jing Piao, “Jing floaters,” ceramics artists from all over China, lost souls who found themselves here, trying to find a different way of life away from the cities, to return to their hands. I loved the earnestness of their relationship to clay, and I was lucky to be welcomed into their lives.
I learned to throw on the wheel, watched wooden kilns burn all night, scavenged for clay on the mountains, learned to kick feather jian zi after lunch. This was the first time I lived by myself outside of my family in China, and the first I tried to settle into a city and make friends away from the ones I grew up with in Shanghai. Three weeks in, I was shocked to find I had a routine of writing and throwing, friends who lent me rides on their mopeds, showed me where to get the best hand-pulled noodles.
So this is what it feels like to try to make home in a country I call home, so different from the “settler’s glee” of arriving at college or to New York, the seemingly pristine, unwritten snow, my projected ideas of another self in another country—now, I am learning to make home in the city next to the one my mother left all those years ago, learning to make friends in a language I am returning to, a little less lonely.
Here are a few places my chapbook got to go recently:
@ The Rumpus, where I talked to Sasha Burshteyn about writing poetry as the seeking of out of body recognition.
@ Ligeia, where I spoke with Ashley Wagner about red dust as this raw, blasphemous feeling of being alive, the questioning of it.
@ Washington Square Review, where Amanda Larson asked me about the responsibilities I feel towards my friends in my work.
& The first review of my chapbook was published by CHA, which was coincidentally the first place that published my poetry, back in 2017 :’)
Lastly, I would like to invite you to a poetry session I am hosting next week, on Wednesday Feb 10, 8:30 AM EST (details below). The timing is early for American friends because it is facilitated by Insight Pact and my friend Irene, a Thai friend based in Berlin who I once wrote about during my Watson years. We hope to make space for collective healing through a series of noticing, sonic, and somatic exercises.
I will leave you with a cheery image of my grandpa, on his 91st birthday, with some lucky peaches I made him in Jing De Zhen. Happy lunar new year my friends!
Please let me know if you have any questions about this new Substacks or anything!
love,
JinJin