the words “i love you” feel strange in my mouth
like molasses they roll over my tongue feeling around for a way out
slowly filling up all the space they can inhabit
afraid they will not find safety anywhere else except
behind my molars, as cavities
the words “i miss you” feel strange in my lungs
they are the flint that sets fire to the O2 and burns it all up
nothing left but ash: i want you everywhere and
you need me nowhere
the residue is fear
the word “stay” feels strange in my hands
when i stretch out my fingers, they shake, expecting skin
i’m sorry, there is no one left for you to touch
i’m sorry, you have to forgive yourself someday for burning every bridge
birds’ hollow bones help them fly but you are a human
the words “i’m sorry” feel strange in my head
it doesn’t mean what we think it does: instead we spit it out, hoping it takes its own form
because we are never truly sorry: my defence system tells me i mean forgive me
but i understand that i crave a deserved negation of your forgiveness
i couldn’t bear the negation if i were truly sorry.
There is something really liberating about puking out the side of your friend’s car while they stop to get you some water at a gas station in Ladner while your prof sits in the backseat telling your friend how great of a teacher you’ll be.
I wish I was making this shit up.
I regularly think about my insignificance in the world. You’d think that the fact that everybody is collectively insignificant together would make me feel less lonely, but I don’t think my anxiety about my existence has subsided at all despite the fact that I constantly acknowledge that the only meaning my life will ever have is the meaning I create for myself (as opposed to any intrinsic meaning).
The liberating thing about the spray of vomit on the side of my friend’s car is the fact that it’s a physical reminder of the fact that I am alive despite the fact that I don’t want to be, despite the fact that I haven’t wanted to be for a long time. It’s a reminder that no matter how much shame you have for yourself for being a sorry excuse for a human being, you’re here, now, and life isn’t going to stop for you so you can hose off your friend’s car in sincere apology or rewind your terrible decision to switch back and forth between beer and hard liquor.
The pain of being alive doesn’t stop so you can try to deal with it. The pain of feeling like you’re watching your life play out in third person doesn’t stop so you can settle back into your own body for two seconds. The pain of wondering if you’ll ever be enough for anybody doesn’t stop so you can rationally theorize about the words your significant other says (or doesn’t say) to you, it doesn’t stop so that you can wonder if they actually love you or if they’re saying that because they’re five beers in, it doesn’t stop so you can consider why it sounds the most sincere when they’re drunk, it doesn’t stop so that you can think about whether or not their inebriated sincerity is a bad thing, it doesn’t stop so you can question whether you’re even a good thing in your significant other’s life when you’re so caught up in your own shit and vomit and when life is projectile-hurling you into the pit of despair you know like the back of your hand without any means of getting back out.
This is a lot to take in. This is a lot to process. Have we considered imagining Sisyphus puking out the side of his friend’s car (or maybe off the side of his friend’s horse, to keep it in line with the era)?
My friend said that our struggle with our existence is like an anthill: in the grand scheme of things, one ant out of billions isn’t going to make much of a difference in the creation of an anthill. But the grains of debris transported by the one ant make a real difference: side by side, though undetectable to us as humans, anthill A and B are not exactly the same, and thus, though we are infinitely insignificant in the universe, somehow we still continue to be impactful within the fabric of relations we build.
I’ve been entertaining the idea of my own death for a long time in relation to this. If I were to leave this earth today, life would keep going. Nothing would change in the grand scheme of things. No one would think of my vomit on the side of their car. No one would think about the awesome paper I wrote in my last year of my undergrad. A small selection of people would care. I guess that’s kind of liberating in itself, the fact that you won’t linger forever, like a red wine stain on white carpet.
I think what’s scary is the thought that my life isn’t meaningful to myself, the only person that my life should be meaningful to.
I think what’s scary is that every source of meaning I have in my life is fleeting and temporary.
Because even in the grand scheme of things, is the anthill even important?
Dictionary dot com defines resilience as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties”. This was a good thing to most of the people in the room. And for the most part, I think it’s a good thing too.
But a growing feeling that I’ve spent most of the day wrestling is how incredibly unnerving the idea of “resilience” is to me.
We’re referring to “risk” in conjunction with resilience and through the lens of child development (i.e. domestic violence, abuse, neglect, and so on). And in the existence of risk in a child’s life, according to studies, there are certain factors and qualities that can help a child build resilience to overcome the risk (i.e. positive adult relationships, enough sleep and nutrition, etc.).
I felt angry when someone said that building resilience gives children the ability to overcome risks. I felt angry when they called these children strong. I felt angry when they talked about how children would eventually pursue positive paths to success.
This is a strange feeling because I finally have the words for how I’m feeling, but I sound very contradictory (and frankly, really bitter). How could I not be happy that someone – a child, no less – is strong and has persevered through so much hardship?
I caught myself in that moment thinking about the word I used to describe myself to my therapist when she asked me what I wanted myself to know after a really difficult session. I called myself resilient. And thinking about this made me angrier.
I don’t want my strength to be measured by how much pain I’ve endured.
Maybe I’m upset because I don’t really think I’m resilient, according to the definition. Or maybe it’s because my resilience as a child/teenager was merely a glorified coping mechanism that masked a lot of deep-rooted trauma that I’m having to face in the present. And facing this trauma as an adult has not been easy, nor has it been insightful. It’s painful; I feel like I’m picking at my skin to reveal what I already knew, what I had put aside and shoved away to protect myself. I have not yet recovered, and I don’t know if I will.
I had to grow up thinking my environment of risk was for my own good and that I deserved everything I had gone through. I had to grow up believing the risks in my home were risks everyone had to live with – how was I strong when I had nothing out of the ordinary to endure? I ended up dissociating and isolating myself from the people that could have helped me, but instead I was blindly resilient for 22 years. Is it ironic or just depressing that I had no autonomy and I also did not get to choose to be resilient?
I keep thinking about this pain and writing about it. It’s a bit like a bad bruise: you poke at it, even though it hurts, just to see how much you can handle. Nobody expects you to cry when you poke at a bruise, so you don’t. Your body puts the pain into perspective for you: at least you didn’t break a bone. Babies might cry because all they do is feel. Somewhere between infant and adult, we get lost and stop feeling pain in its purest form. We feel uncomfortable, but we don’t realize that it has made itself a home where your neck meets your chest as you choke up and assume it’s because you haven’t fully formed your opinion yet. My therapist practices body-based therapy and she says that when you feel choked up, it’s because you were not able to say something when it was most crucial or express yourself adequately, so it just becomes trapped in your throat. I believe her.
I caught myself getting angry at the dichotomy that the mainstream idea of resilience brings. Resilience is ‘good’, so how do we understand the lack of resilience, or resilience that takes an untraditional form? How do we measure resilience? I survived because I was afraid of the pain of suicide, not because I wanted to persevere and continue to experience trauma even though I knew I could handle it. I survived – I’m alive – but I carry with me everything I’ve persevered through. Is that a good thing? Do you have the authority to tell me that my pain has made me strong? Do you hear yourself telling me what my experience has been without even knowing what I’ve experienced? Has my resilience helped me in any way other than to keep me alive and miserable?
Forgive me – this analysis is coming from a place of distress and spite.
Recently I wrote a short creative piece for my philosophy class that was supposed to mirror the style of Albert Camus. Who’d be able to do that besides Camus? It goes against my own philosophy of writing, but it was fun to try and take the concepts of absurdity and identity and shape them into something (slightly humourous? heavy? surreal?).
Queerness and the AIDS epidemic is something I’ve thought a lot about. This piece was built upon a dream from Rabih Alameddine’s text Koolaids.
I recently received an email from my faculty regarding calls for papers to literary conferences in Quebec and Portland. These give undergraduate students chances to present research they’ve done with the rest of the academic community.
Over the summer I took a course about Children’s Literature and wrote 3 (!) A+ papers, and one, in particular, that I wrote has an especially soft spot in my heart because I didn’t think it was very spectacular at all. But my prof for the class thought otherwise, and still thinks otherwise (as she has since reminded me of its rigour – not to toot my own horn or anything).
Anyway, I’m sure you’ve put 2 and 2 together by now: for the first time ever (!!), I’ll be submitting my papers to academic conferences and journals across North America, which is a big deal considering how in-despair I was feeling about my academic abilities only a year or two ago.
Some of the conferences/journals I am considering submitting to (so far):
The Garden Statuary Journal – UBC
The F-Word Conference – UBC
Criterion Journal – Brigham Young University
Madison Journal of Literary Criticism – University of Wisconsin-Madison
Queen City Writers – University of Cincinnati
Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference – Bishop’s University
Northwestern Undergraduate Conference of Literature – University of Portland
This is super exciting for me because I feel much more connected to my work this year, and I feel like I have a lot to say about the things that I feel strongly about. The title of my paper, for those who are interested, is “The Power of the Graphic Novel and the Young, Japanese-Canadian Lesbian in Love” (long and Fall Out Boy worthy), which talks about the relations of resistance between the format of the graphic novel and marginalized people (in particular, LGBTQ+, racialized youth).
Most of the people I’ve come in contact with in the last two years have told me that they are tired of all the bad news littering their news feeds.
“It’s all too much!”
“The world is surely coming to an end!”
“I’ll sooner die than hear the last of all this terrible news!”
And, of course, the bad news has yet to stop. It’s ironic that the anchor-person on the nightly news wishes you a “Good Evening” and then proceeds to tell you why it isn’t.
I, too, have felt the sting of all of the bad news, and part of me wishes that it would cease – even for just a day – so that we can sit back and enjoy all the nice things in life, like NYFW, and puppies, and tropical fruit.
But most of me also remembers what happened the last time I chose to “block out” all of the tumultuous worldly happenings.
Trump was elected in 2016, much to my (and many others’) dismay, but it was also to my (and many others’) surprise, which it shouldn’t have been. America has had a long tradition of racism, segregation, and injustice, just like the rest of the world. So why, then, was his election such a surprise to so many people?
I want to maintain that the surprise was solely due to ignorance. I was a perpetrator of this blissful ignorance in that I felt that if I wanted to alleviate myself from all the atrocious (and, quite frankly, ridiculous) happenings surrounding the US Presidential Election, I might as well brush it off and make a joke out of it than take it seriously.
And to most people, Trump is an actual joke: his easily caricatured demeanour and features, paired with his oftentimes hypocritical ideologies, made him out to be a laughing stock among many people around the world (I travelled to Asia and at the mention of the name “Trump” they started to giggle and roll their eyes).
But we forget that many of the people who could actually exercise their right to vote did not necessarily see him as a laughing stock; in fact, Trump’s proposed policies and solutions were exactly what many people in the USA were either hoping for or misinformed enough to follow, and this encouraged the exponential growth of the problems we are seeing today, including the cuts to the national education budget, the white supremacist rallies, and most recently the repeal of DACA.
Being able to brush it off as a joke was such a privilege that I didn’t realize I had. And it got me to think about exactly what I was doing when I was “blocking” all of this important (but awful) stuff from entering my conscious mind.
Think about it this way: when you encounter problems in any relationship, whether it be with a partner, or with a friend, or perhaps with a parent, the healthiest solution is to find time to sit down and talk about the problem, and propose a solution that works for both parties, rather than ignoring it and letting it muster. So why should our relationship with society work any differently? Although you’re not having an intimate relationship with everybody in your community (and less so your national community), you are still part of it and thus have some level of social responsibility as well.
Or perhaps this way: I once had a teacher that hinted that reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf would turn me into a Nazi. Whether it’s true or not that me becoming a Nazi would be the case, the problem lies in the “blocking” of Hitler and his ideologies entirely. Part of the reason that we still study Mein Kampf in particular is not to incite a new generation of Nazis, but rather (for example) to point out the rhetorical unification tactics used to create a common identity among people who possessed similar, anti-Semitic beliefs.
This can be exemplified as such: perhaps, one day, you have a child, and you want them to be a decent human being (obviously/hopefully). So, in order to do this, you feel that not teaching them about racism is the best way to combat the act of racism because if they don’t know about racism, how will they ever possess racist ideologies? Even if it is the case that you manage to teach your child that everyone is the same and that they are of the same value, this idea of “sameness” might also lead them to believe that saying the n-word is okay because “everyone is the same” and because they were sheltered from the concept of racism and what it means to be racist.
I am not saying (obviously) that people who voted for Trump actively teach their kids to be racist. But what I am saying is that simply removing yourself from an unpleasant situation just because you don’t like how it makes you feel is contributing to the problems that, frankly, the world is facing. While there are many other reasons why Trump got elected (ex. institutionalized reasons, such as lack of access to higher education, elitist systems of governance, the dependence on capitalist structure, etc.), these reasons are often pushed further due to people ignoring the problems right in front of them that they are able to help mitigate, but do not out of their own interests.
To sum up my argument: blocking will never be an effective form of coping with reality. The fact of the matter is that if you are able to ignore a problem – especially a pervasive social issue – then you are in a position of privilege and thus have a social responsibility to aid movements towards peace and (at least) societal wellbeing. The momentary discomfort of the privileged is nowhere close to the suffering that so many people must endure as part of their everyday lives.
Happiness and I share a complex relationship. Part of me believes that when people say that all they want is to be happy, I feel like what they actually mean is that they don’t want to be uncomfortable – a curious distinction.
In my last term of school for my critical theory class, I wrote a paper called “I Purchased Fairness and Happiness from Starbucks for $4.25”, which was about fairness and happiness in the context of a capitalist society. Below is an excerpt of the essay that deals with happiness in particular, with reference to Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Bolded elements are key points:
“…[D]oes a cup of drip coffee from a corner store satisfy us more than a gentrified, $5 latte? Why must we seek a Starbucks for our coffee over a mom-and-pop shop for the same product? We feel that one is of better quality because we pay more for it, and that that will make us happier because we are spending our spoils in a way that satisfies our values.
However, nothing about coffee has any inherent value to how happy we are. Like fairness, happiness is sold to us by companies. Sara Ahmed states that “[t]he very promise that happiness is what you get for having the right associations might be how we are directed to certain things” (2).
In a recent Starbucks commercial, branded coffee is juxtaposed with the idea of friendship (cups placed side by side, with names of friends or partners on the cups) (Starbucks, “Starbucks Commercial #2 – 2017”). It is not the coffee that provides us the benefits of friendship or partnership, but since it is paired with the brand of Starbucks coffee, we connect our purchase of our daily coffee to the short supply of things we actually need to make us happy – tenderness, understanding, and community.
Like fairness, we often settle for the bourgeois concept of happiness, and in their eyes, happiness is ultimately about money. This manifests itself in oppressive ways, just as the concept of ethical capitalism does – Ahmed focuses on the notion of “the happy housewife” and “the happy slave” (50). Ahmed also works with the Hegelian master/slave dialectic to formulate her thesis: that happiness, as a construction, is used to keep black women (in particular) complacent and in fixed positions, and that unhappiness is a resistance against oppressive states of being. The following can be compared while reading her text:
Master
Slave
Self
Other
Happy
Unhappy
Man
Woman
White
Black/Indigenous
Good
Bad
Ahmed suggests that anger and unhappiness are so unpleasant to society that we attribute it with only the worst of qualities: ugliness, savagery, sub-humanness, and so on. And such language has been used to paint black and indigenous people in a very negative light (Ahmed 80). Thus, your body is only as worthy of existence as your emotions that benefit the bourgeois class: when you are happy, complacent, and understanding, you are more likely to be productive and less likely to question authority. But when you are unhappy, you will be subject to silencing and retaliation in hopes you will not resist the super-structure you are upset with.
Two years ago, I applied to work at the first Nordstrom in B.C., and in the final round of interviews, the manager of the store sat us all down for a group interview. He told us that the happiness of the customers was his number one goal, and that he would work to ensure all his customers attained the same level of happiness and comfort that he would expect going into any store. He exemplified this with the explanation of Nordstrom’s return policy, which is unique because they don’t have a return policy. No matter how old or damaged a product was, it would always be refunded to the customer so that they would be happy. His reasoning was that getting a refund to the customer would keep them happy – and, more importantly, shopping. I questioned this in front of the group, and I did not get hired at Nordstrom.
The story highlights two aspects of my argument thus far: one, that the fairness of getting a refund no matter what is still rooted in capitalist motivations, and two, that happiness with the capitalist system must be preserved so that people do not question authority (and thus, they are punished accordingly).
However, we are all kept in the cycle of unquestioning because we are fed images of what happiness should look like. This is rooted in Adorno and Horkheimer’s model of the Culture Industry. They say that “executive powers…let pass nothing which does not conform to their tables, to their concept of the consumer, or, above all, themselves” (96). This is to say that the normalization of working until we die and finding one person that satisfies all our inner, heterosexual desires is delivered to us by our media.
This is part of the reason why Pepsi’s recent ad campaign featuring Kendall Jenner ‘curing’ society of white supremacy and police brutality with a can of Pepsi was so distasteful and ‘tone deaf’. Adorno and Horkheimer say that “[i]n film, the outcome can invariably be predicted at the start – who will be rewarded, punished, forgotten”, and the ad campaign was much the same (98-99). As consumers, we see the disconnect between the intentions of a corporation exploiting the emotional and physical labour of activists and resistance movements for a profit, and between what people are going through every day. The culture industry wants us to believe that the media is on our side – we are relatable! We’re in the now! But really, all the ad campaign proved to us was that the people in power are exploitative, will actively try to shape our concepts of resistance movements, and will commodify even the most powerful feelings of resistance and anger to sell it back to us in bite-sized portions: this is Activism Lite, this is Resistance 2 Go, this is Fair Trade, this is happiness – this is our society stuck in the same cycle.
Why haven’t we solved the problem yet? If we can critique the faults of Capitalism and the cyclical nature of it, is there no way to cure it of its ailments? Part of me believes that we are capable, but we don’t utilize the necessary ideas in order to get the process going. Undoing/replacing capitalism, to many people, means COMMUNISM, which evokes scary images of Russia and China, and grotesque images of universal healthcare and sharing wealth. Capitalism put in place a culture of toxic individualism, and thus all the things we think we know are just reflections of the economic system in which we operate and exist.”
“…I am…not saying that we should always be unhappy to be conscious, but rather, we must recognize that there are social structures in place that allow for “justified” punishment for being unhappy because of the associations that come with being angry. I am saying that we should not simply buy into the norms, and that we should question everything we encounter. And this may be met with opposition, and anger may arise due to frustration. But we must also remember that anger and frustration, along with unhappiness, are valid emotions that have been suppressed by society to keep us complacent.“
I feel like as a society, we are obsessed with being happy. We do things to achieve happiness, we want others to be happy – and, of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. But when happiness is treated as the ultimate goal, or as the stagnant medium between delirious and depressed, we run into feelings of inadequacy and insecurity because we cannot keep up with the standard of happiness that others have set for us, and, simultaneously, that we have set for ourselves. We also then become very uncomfortable when others are not also happy, because we have been taught to have an aversion to such feelings.
Happiness is seen in conjunction to wealth, to success, to stability, to people who are driven, to women who have kids, to the monogamous heterosexual couple pre-divorce, to those who bounce back from failure – what I mean is that happiness is portrayed as a very static and structured feeling. Likewise, happiness is manifested in many people as a construction: that certain things must be done or attained for happiness to really be present. This makes the concept of happiness feel like it’s a jar or container that needs to be filled, but there’s a hole at the bottom of the container so all the contents eventually leak out – thus needing to be refilled again and again: happiness can only be maintained with the constant addition of stuff, whatever that stuff may be.
I’ve realized that people don’t necessarily notice a lack of happiness – what they usually notice is a presence of something else, whether it be anger or sadness or discontentment. And this is a bit problematic to me because we all value our own happiness in some way, but we usually only ever pay attention to its “antithesis” of sorts. Usually this is triggered by people verbally or physically showing that they are upset – but the problem is that many people are very good at keeping a straight face about it (until they don’t – then they can get scary, but that’s an aside).
The absence of happiness is not the same as the presence of anger or discontentment, although I understand why they are seen as synonymous. Needless to say, they are not dichotomous feelings, nor are they exactly opposite. When happiness is absent, one could be passive or neutral, disillusioned, and perhaps they might feel something other – such feelings are fluid and dynamic. People react to the presence of discontentment because that is usually when it is most obvious that there is a lack of happiness, but people don’t often react to the person that’s bored, unstimulated, uninspired, exhausted, silent, annoyed, lazy, etc. – someone who is not exactly happy, but not angry either.
Some people live with the expectation that their lives, someday, will be exponentially happy, to which I say good for you! But in recent years, my own outlook on happiness has gotten me to question how that exponential happiness will be achieved. I feel like people who are always happy, without fail, are robots that have come from space to brainwash us.
As a personal anecdote, I have had very few instances of extreme happiness because it’s been shared by feelings of anxiety or annoyance or exhaustion. But this does not mean that I don’t find things that make me happy. Happiness, like most of my feelings, is fleeting and temporary – but it always returns in portions that I can enjoy for the time it is present. And I feel like that’s how we should think about how we define happiness (instead of having happiness control us and our decisions).
Also, because I imagine that someone will ask, “Well what DOES make you happy then?” in a super whiny voice: dogs, ice cream, and watching Bob’s Burgers.
Featured image: Smiley Face is in the Public Domain (CC0).
I’ve recently been reading essays on the power of naming, and I thought I would respond to them with a post of my own. Here is a post that coalesces them into a handy-dandy discovery list:
Names, I think, hold the most vital pieces of identity we can muster. And this isn’t just a comment on our given names, but also within our surnames, titles, and so forth. Names attribute so much of our identity to a single word, so it’s important to get it right. It’s who we are boiled down to a couple of phonetics – it’s a lifelong story in the span of several letters.
Actual Names (and non-names)
My name (AKA: please call me this)
My full name is Melissa Siew Yik Teo, with the Chinese portion of my name amounting to Teo Siew Yik without the English transcription. I don’t really tell people my middle name in fear they’ll butcher it (because they’ll definitely butcher it), but also because rarely has anyone made the effort to learn it when I tell them what it is (the only person outside of my family being my partner). I only use my full name on legal documents and most ID cards (like my driver’s license and my credit cards). Otherwise, Melissa Teo is what I feel most comfortable with.
Some people call me Mel, which I’m not a particular fan of, especially now, because it reminds me of Mel Gibson, who I despise. I didn’t always despise Mel Gibson, but I’ve always disliked the name Mel. It was a nickname only used by online friends for a time, which was okay because it was probably easier to type out Mel than Melissa, but now it has started to bleed into some of my social groups in that they’ve verbally called me Mel (insert clip of The Ting Tings’s song, “That’s Not My Name” here).
I spent a lot of time as a kid searching up the meaning of my (English) name because my parents told me they just chose it out of a baby book (kind of wish I had a cooler story – alas). It’s Greek, rooting from μέλι (meli), which means honey. Maybe I wanted to craft a new meaning, or perhaps I wanted people to feel like I had a good grasp of my name (and therefore myself and my identity). Whatever the reasoning was, I knew my name was Melissa, not Mel, and it was important to me that people understood that.
I suppose I can’t blame anybody for calling me Mel since I haven’t explicitly told anybody not to use a shortened form of my name, but it’s still annoying because I’m spiteful and petty. Perhaps it also annoyed me because I’ve never introduced myself as Mel, nor do I respond to it if someone hasn’t called me that before. I’ve also never called myself Mel on social media (i.e. it has never been part of my screen names, usernames, signatures, handles, and so on). Whenever I go to input my name for a website or username, my default goes to the form of [first initial + last name / mteo] or [first name + last name / melissateo], but never [short name + last name / melteo] or anything of the sort.
It’s kind of the same thing as pronouns and using the right ones (which I still struggle with!). If you don’t consent to being called Clarence, why would anyone call you Clarence? Similarly, if you don’t consent to being called “Miss ____”, would you expect someone to call you “Miss ____” anyway?
Wrong names (AKA: just don’t)
I always try to compare the importance of naming to the act of spelling people’s names correctly. My name isn’t extremely hard to spell (I think?), but I’ve gotten the following misspellings over the last couple of years:
Melisa
Mellisa
Mellissa
Messila (?)
Milessa (?)
Milissa (?, as seen in the header image)
Malisa (?)
Malissa
Mellessa (?)
Melyssa
Melina (??)
Michelle (rather common, unfortunately, even though this is a completely different name???)
Some of the above are ridiculous (hence the “?”) given that most of the time these misspellings occurred, I had an email signature to go along with it. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who have a name that’s difficult to spell, or an alternative spelling. To me, not taking the time to get someone’s name right is like saying that they, as people, are not really worth the time (so Starbucks is off the hook for the most part, because they simply write down what they hear to the best of their ability, although that doesn’t make it any less annoying). To me, it feels like a homogenization of individual people into a collective glob of names and faces and personalities.
There was a post I read a long time ago (perhaps on Tumblr) about how someone wanted to name their child something super particular, with a certain pronunciation that would be difficult for most people to pronounce. Their reasoning was that their child would know who they could trust based on who could pronounce their name properly.
Titles
Pet names
Pet names are something that used to bother me a lot. My rule of thumb is that if someone isn’t willing to learn your name (and/or learn how to pronounce it), you probably shouldn’t let them call you anything else until they learn it (also you probably shouldn’t date them, but that’s an aside). Then they’ll be able to get away with calling you things like “babe” and “cutie” but won’t know the tonal patterns of your name – your identity to a great extent!
My partner and I frequently use boo as a pet name, which started off as a joke to pay homage to Aziz Ansari, but over time it became more common for us to call each other that (albeit sarcastically, but we use it more than any other pet name). He also calls me my dear, while I frequently use my darling. These are more affectionate terms, but I also wonder about the possessive “my” in these cases. In the past, I was generally referred to by the relationship I held with a person (“my daughter”, “my girlfriend”, etc.) but it bothered me because every single time I was introduced that way, eventually that’s how I would have been known.
Maybe I feel more comfortable with my current partner using the term “my dear” because I know that he most regularly uses my actual name to refer to me and not a relational title or a pet name.
Relations
Familial
My mother got me a summer job with her company when I was 18, and occasionally they’d bring in customers for a tour of our facility. When they’d come around to my department, they’d introduce everybody by name and title except myself: I remained “Sophie’s daughter, who’s just helping out here for a couple of months” until I left the job (about 4 months ago, to date, which was altogether a span of about 2.5 years) instead of “Melissa, our Junior Transportation Coordinator”.
Spousal
Some family members have also asked me about marriage plans since I started seeing my partner, which includes what goes into deciding what my (or my child’s) last name will be. I always get weird about questions like this because it assumes that A) I’m going to get married (and/or have a child), B) I’ll have enough money for a marriage (and/or a child), and C) I’ll change my last name.
My 12th grade AP English teacher told us about a time when she received mail from family members addressing her and her husband as “Mr. and Mrs. {His First and Last Name}”. She wrote back to the family members with the message: “Mrs. {His First and Last Name} does not live here”.
I don’t think I’d be able to settle for being called “Mrs. {My Partner’s First and Last Name}, let alone take on my partner’s last name, simply because of its historical roots. When a woman got married, she lost her surname and was known as “wife of {her partner’s name}”, as a possession of her husband, and only known in relation to her husband. And even if I did take his last name, I would want to keep my own as well (which would be cumbersome since he has an amalgamated last name between his mother and father’s last names, so adding my own last name to that would be a tri-partite coalescence).
Choosing, Changing, and Restructuring Names and Titles
The most drastic name choice/change I’ve ever done was through my social media handles, and even though it wasn’t anything like a legal name change or anything, it still feels like a bit of an identity. Prada Hag (or PRADAHAG, pragahag) is my latest online alias, and I feel like I’ve grown attached to it in the last little while, which is cool because reflecting back on the other aliases I’ve had, I didn’t feel as strong of a connection to them as I do now. I used to have many aliases, ranging from spacecaptainmelissa, avocadoenthusiast, tres-spooky, hella-noel, quinoaprincess, lildaddio, petitparapluie, among other weird ones (please do not ask me why I chose any of these because the answer, after some deep thought, is “I don’t know, I thought it sounded cool” for each of these). Perhaps it’s because all of my social media handles are under the same name, whereas before I didn’t, but I still feel a certain attachment to my “hag” persona.
The “-hag” portion of my current handle came with a bit of self-depreciation. My sense of humour is usually self-depreciative, but this came after a previous boyfriend decided to use the word to describe me in conversation with some of his friends. Of course, this was shitty and annoying and obviously I wanted to be spiteful about it, so I “took back” the word and turned it into something funny instead (and made it a play-on-words – I imagined myself living in a hut in the forest with a collection of Prada bags).
This notion of “taking back” hurtful/oppressive names is not new – people of African descent have been called the N-word by White oppressors and have been taking it back – it is a word that they (and ONLY they) are allowed to use as a collective because of the historical context of the word. This also goes for the F-word that is used to refer to people of the LGBTQ+ community (in particular, as I’ve seen/heard it used, towards gay people), the G-word in reference to the nomadic Rromani Peoples, and the B-word, in reference to “angry” women.
As a general note, if you’re not Black, don’t say the N-word! If you’re for gay, don’t use the F-word! If you’re not Rromani, don’t use the G-word! If you’re not a woman, don’t use the B-word! Just don’t! You have a vocabulary! There are many words out there you can use! But not those if you don’t belong to those groups!
Positionality and Identity
It’s all in the name, and it’s also all in positionality – what are you known as first and foremost? This was a question that was extremely important to me when I considered how I would represent myself. Most of it is my own personal preference as to how I like to be addressed, but I think the following introductions hold entirely different pragmatic meanings despite being similar syntactically:
Hi! I’m Melissa, his partner. I’m a pre-education student.
Hi! I’m his girlfriend, Melissa. I’m an undergraduate student.
You might be wondering, “What’s the point? You’re getting annoyed over something small! You still have your identity whether or not someone calls you the right name!” The point of being called the right thing is all about recognition – when you recognize others as subjects, as individuals, you are in a better place to understand, respect, and empathize with them (at least that’s my reasoning for learning people’s names). How you use someone’s name (and pronouns, and titles) is a comment on how you see the person as a whole (and likewise, how you use your own name is a comment on how you see yourself, or want yourself to be seen).
Some people have chosen not to capitalize their names so they focus less on their own personal identity and more on their work and what their work encompasses. Such individuals include e. e. cummings and bell hooks.
Furthermore, in a country like Canada, maintaining the respect of other people’s identities and cultures is important (or is supposed to be important – we still have people who think that Canada is somehow White Man’s Land despite the fact that colonizers stole it from the Indigenous Peoples – anyway). Thus, knowing what someone wants to be called and how it’s supposed to be said is vital to sustaining that connection between one’s roots and surroundings.
It’s also important that we call people the right thing because someone’s name can subject them to social erasure and violence. This is exemplified through the following acts (which is not necessarily limited to these two acts):
Calling a transgender person the wrong name and/or pronouns, especially if they have explicitly stated that they prefer to be called a certain name and/or use certain pronouns. Failure to recognize the proper name and pronoun of a transgender individual erases their identity and ignores their rights as an individual. However, in choosing to be called a certain name and use certain pronouns, the act of naming has also placed transgender people in vulnerable positions, where if people realize that they are transgender they are more likely to suffer violence and abuse because of the “discrepancy” between their sex and gender.
Calling someone with a racialized name the wrong name subjects racialized people to erasure, but possessing a racialized name can also subject the racialized individual to stereotyping, discrimination, and violence based on the social connotations that certain “types” of names maintain (ex. in particular, names that derive from the Middle East or are “associated” with Islam, or names of African descent).
How do names impact you? What is the importance of your name? Is it all in your name as it is in mine?
Anybody who has spoken to me before knows that cultural identity is a very important issue in my life. There are various posts on this blog that focus on how I’ve tried to understand who I am and what my culture and race mean to me on a larger scale, which you can see here.
In an older blog post, I wrote about the difference between surface and deep culture, and how that was manifested in things like food and language, and familial relations (respectively). Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between culture and environment, the interactions people have with my culture, and the problem of cultural erasure (even in academic contexts, but really, who wants to read anything more than 160 characters long? Anyway). I think it’s time for me to revisit the topic of food after taking some time away from it.
Of course, as always, it’s not my duty to speak on behalf of anybody but myself, nor do I claim to be the knower of all things about my culture – in fact, I personally feel the opposite is true in that I probably know less about my culture than I make it seem. But that does not mean that my experiences are less valid than someone else’s.
A Bit of Cultural Background
I was born and raised in Western Canada, and grew up in a predominantly South Asian community. My parents immigrated here in the 90’s from a small country on the South East Asian island of Borneo named Brunei.
My grandmother is the first real star of my experience with food. She was a young girl amidst WWII and spent a lot of her time running from Japanese soldiers during their occupation of the island. She learned to cook to help keep her family alive during desperate times, and when she was older she worked as a chef for a brigade of the British army (who were of Nepalese descent – the Gurkhas, as they were known; both Nepal and Brunei were affiliated with the British at the time, with Nepal as a buffer state between China and India, and Brunei as a colony).
My grandmother was Malaysian and Borneo Native, but with through her experiences, her interaction with food was naturally a “fusion” because of the area in which she grew up, the people she was around, and her ties to her own background. Her cooking had its roots in her native cuisine, plus the spices of Malaysian cuisine (which were influenced by India with the expansion of trade routes across the Indian Ocean), and the inspiration of Nepalese cuisine.
The second star of my experience with food is my dad. My dad is a great cook, and has always urged me to appreciate cultures firstly through their food. My dad took on after my grandmother’s fusion-type cooking style – every ingredient is tied to some part of history that both of them could recount. There is always a reason why a certain dish is the way it is.
Growing Up
This is a bit of a reiteration and condensation of my older post mentioned earlier, but there isn’t any harm in repeating for those who don’t care too much about revisiting.
Public school was the gateway into the initial deterioration of my relationship with my culture. Of course, there are many aspects of one’s cultural identity that aren’t affected by external environments, such as notions of courtesy and cleanliness, but a lot of the surface culture aspects had to be set aside to assimilate.
This meant that I could not speak Mandarin because it made me sound funny and because there was no one else to speak it to, and that it was probably better if I kept my “smelly dog meat” lunches at home. Traditional Chinese dresses (Mandarin: qipao; Cantonese: cheongsam) were also not as pretty as western-styled dresses, and thus, they shouldn’t be worn to school during special occasions.
I internalized a lot of these sentiments as I grew older until at one point, I refused to speak Mandarin and wear anything traditional. I became very racist towards myself and suffered a lot through the shedding of my culture, and the re-identification with it years later. The only connection I had with my culture that I could not forcibly escape was food.
Food was and is the center of most family functions. Food is a means of communication between generations of people, a reason to sit down together and focus on something other than ourselves, and has a way of surfacing many subtle aspects of deep culture. For example, politeness is exemplified in the act of asking everybody to eat, waiting until those who are older than you have eaten before you start, and having the youngest capable person at the table pour tea for those older than them (generally grandparents and parents).
Despite the importance of food in my culture, I still felt immense shame because of it. I remember bringing baos to school, which are a type of stuffed bun (and a very tame food, I might add – nothing saucy or smelly about it), and being degraded for how weird it looked, and it struck me as odd because people could eat chop suey and beef and broccoli, but could not stand the sight of something non-westernized.
Note: Chop suey is the Cantonese equivalent translation of “leftovers”, and broccoli is an Italian vegetable (thus beef and broccoli is not a traditional Chinese dish, although it was imported to China as a delicacy when trade was thriving and made its way into the cuisine). Chinese food and American-Chinese food are completely different.
The Problem of Orientalism, Erasure, and Fusion
Gonna sneak in a bit of post-colonial theory in here.
Orientalism and the Myth of the East and West
Orientalism is an academic term used to describe a critical approach to the representation of the Orient (encompassing Asia, or the East) in comparison to the Occident (or the West). In particular, it describes the Western scholarship of the Eastern world. Edward Said, theorist and author of the text Orientalism (1978), said that orientalism is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it – that “the East” is not a concrete thing, but rather a social construction – and is therefore always engaging in an imbalanced power dynamic against the West. Orientalism IS the exaggeration of difference, and thus the source of inaccurate cultural representations. While Said focused his theory on the Middle East, such is also true for other areas encompassed by the umbrella of the Orient.
Language
Do you know any words that have no equivalent translation in English? Sometimes known as “untranslatable” (which is inaccurate because they’re translating them, just not in the equivalent), these words often describe experiences that are specific to a region or culture – hence we end up with “untranslatable” words for “untranslatable” experiences.
Colonial language marks the Orient as other (other to the self – the Occident), and in Canada, assimilation means adopting the oppressive colonial language to describe culture, practices, and so on. Colonial language does the culture and language of racialized people a disservice because it takes Western concepts and attitudes and tries to fit them into a very “foreign”, Western framework.
An example of this is the idea that fusion food is “modern”. Modernity holds specific connotations in the West, and because of the power imbalance between Orient and Occident, conceptualizations of modern, Western food (or modernized cultural food) imply that traditional food is in the past and outdated. This value of modernity is centred around the capitalist structure in that being “up to date” is a measure of productivity in regards to competition, and productivity is good within capitalist frameworks for those that own and maintain the means of production (thus, more profit).
To me, fusion food comes with the image of more people coming together to create such dishes, implying mass immigration towards “tolerant” societies, but this also is paired with the idea that Asian countries are not the places in which that happens. As you’ve seen at the beginning of this post, fusion is not a modern device – it’s been done since trade routes became accessible and people started immigrating and emigrating. So why must we commend “the modern West” for being able to bring cultures together as if it’s the only place/time in the world that does that?
Erasure
Because of the power imbalance, erasure of specific cultures/cuisines becomes possible. South East Asian cuisine, as well as its people, are often blanketed as East Asian, which erases unique cultural experiences and practices, as well as the history of those societies.
People in the “modern West” don’t realize that there is another level of power imbalances between East Asians and South East Asians, where East Asia is seen as superior in many aspects (such as language – a popular sentiment is that East Asian languages are more prosodically harmonious and therefore purer than South East Asian languages). Noodle dishes are not made the same in Vietnam as they are in China for both geographical and cultural reasons.
For example, when you search “Asian Food” on Google Images, you’ll notice that half the dishes on the return are Chinese dishes and/or are paired with chopsticks (compared to one image that contained any utensils at all with the search, “American Food”). This discrepancy targets the “otherness” of using chopsticks to eat, the homogenization of Asian cuisine, and it assumes that all “Asian food” is eaten with chopsticks (which it isn’t – Thai food is eaten with forks and spoons, and Malay food is eaten without any utensils, for example).
Screen cap of my “Asian Food” Google search: take note of how many photos include the use of chopsticks.
Fun (?) note: Google images has a function where you can see similar searches just underneath the search bar once you’ve retrieved something. Upon my search of “Asian Food”, one of the suggested searches was “Dog Meat”. Go figure?
My problem with fusion food is not necessarily the fusions themselves – I don’t believe that a cuisine of a certain culture must never cross over into another or adopt influences. However, with that being said, the way “fusion” cuisine is spoken about and carried out in the West, and particularly by those with privilege, plays on the experience of social oppression of racialized people, and profits off of this oppression.
When Bao Down, a popular eatery in my area, introduced a new and modern bao that looked like a sad taco (sorry), many of the people who criticized the traditional bao I’d brought to school a couple years prior raved over how new and exciting it was, uprooting much annoyance in me. This sad taco bao thing existed more comfortably in my own society than I ever will.
I also don’t like the fact that there are many local, family-owned businesses close to Bao Down that make homemade baos every day and sell for a fraction of the cost of “modernized baos“, yet these modern baos make much more revenue and promote gentrification within the area (based in Gastown/East Vancouver/Chinatown).
Edit: My friend Johnny informed me that Bao Down’s bao style are “another traditional variant” known as the gua bao, from Taiwan. You can read more about it here, and see the resemblance between the picture in this post and the picture on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gua_bao
Again, I think the issue still remains that the notion that these baos are modern and Western and not from Taiwan, which is false.
“So what’s the point?”
If this was too long and you didn’t read it because your brain is only capable of reading 160 characters at a time, this is your chance to get a quick and easy TL;DR.
My point is that when culture becomes a means of profit for people in power regardless of who’s doing the cooking, especially when it is done without understanding the roots and history from which it stems, “modernized food” can become a place of appropriation and theft rather than comfort.
My point is that there are people out there creating “fusion” food every day because of how they’ve grown up, because of their environment, or because of the people they are surrounded by, and are not making as much as the cheap, bastardized versions of very surface-level aspects of culture rather than its nuances.
My point is that there are ways to fuse food (and support this type of fusion!) without sacrificing culture. Here is a video of Jamaican-Korean fusion restaurant, Spicy Belly, in Philadelphia run by two brothers whose Korean mother and Jamaican father influenced their cooking as they grew up:
I’d love to hear what you think about this post! Please feel free to leave a comment or send me a message. This is definitely a watered down version of the argument at hand – questions are very much encouraged to promote open learning on both of our ends.
Life, Partially Examined 