The Hyphen: An Intimate Identity Crisis

TL;DR: Transnationality (or transcultured-ness) is a distinct form of existence characterized by culture and environment simultaneously. In an existential context, this means that the transcultural individual is embodied by the Hegelian self-other model. However, although this type of individual is characterized by others and the outside, there is still freedom and selfhood in the chaos that defines the concept of the “hyphen”.

This essay was inspired by my previous blog posts on the hyphen, which you can read here and here. The title was also inspired by this post.

Note: This is an essay that works to understand, but not explain, the abstract nature of transnational existence and thus, the language used will be difficult to parse. Places that require explanation will be block-quoted; otherwise, the essay itself will be in standard format.

Final note: contrary to my CC BY-NC 4.0 licensing on the side of my blog, this piece is specifically copyright Melissa Teo, 2017. Please cite accordingly if using any ideas presented by this piece. Thanks!

Learning vs. Education: A Post-Finals Thought

There is an indescribably pleasant numbness that washes over me every time I finish my courses: a certain oh God I must be a masochist because I kind of enjoyed how rough that was, or an inkling of I might miss this intolerable (insatiable?) suffering during the summer.

My final essay of my third year in Academia was handed in about 24 hours ago. If you’re curious, it was titled, “I Purchased Fairness and Happiness at Starbucks for $4.25“, which I am quite satisfied with. But I feel a certain void forming again – how shall I keep my brain busy this summer especially when I’ve got no school for the first time in three years?

Whatever the feeling may be, I think I can safely say for myself that my degree is starting to mean more and more to me the longer I persist through my education – mostly, in part, because I find more and more connections between my formal education and the things that interest me outside of school – which is why I always miss being in school despite loathing how stressed it makes me feel.

At the top of my blog (which may change soon – read this post to find out why) is a small About section that talks about who I am and what I like talking about, and if you’ve followed this blog for a while, then congratulations! You’ll know that I am a very bland and boring person with no original interests whatsoever.

However, if you’re new to this blog, new to me, or new to my writing, or rediscovering the things I just listed, you’ll come to learn that what I’m studying often garners a few popular responses:

1. “Oh! That’s interesting!” (read: I have no idea what that is, nor why it matters, and I don’t care about it enough to ask you to explain it to me),
2. “Cool!” (read: Why aren’t you in Sciences or Engineering?), and
3. “English and Philosophy? What are you going to do with that degree?” (read as is, intonation and all)

Firstly, why do people question what I’m going to do with my degree? What will you do with your life? What are you going to do about your hair? What about your cooking skills? It isn’t very nice to ask such existential questions to people who are unprepared to tackle such heavy topics.

Secondly, what do you think of when you think of an English Literature/Language & Philosophy student? Do you think of liberal communist swine? Do you think of a librarian? Do you think of the coalescence of disappointment that everybody has ever felt in the entire world represented in a single human being?

You’re probably not wrong, but unfortunately you aren’t right either (sorry, I know people love being right – I would know, because I’m always right). My degree, I’ve learned, is not simply a degree that wraps dead white poets, grammar rules, and Socrates under the same belt, which are the most annoying parts of the degree I’m pursuing, and you can fight me on this. Rather, my degree has gotten me to consider the following:

• How semantic analysis can help understand systemic racism
• The rhetorical unification tactics used in divisive hate speech
• Forms of story-telling in diaspora literature
• How happiness as a social construct is used to suppress marginalized people
• How history, philosophy, and literature are inextricably linked
• How our values are merely reflections of the economic system under which we operate
• Understanding transcultural existence and how it manifests itself in society
• How common figurative language is in every day discourse
• and so on…

If you haven’t closed this page yet, thanks! If you decided to skip that daunting list, you saved yourself from about a minute of reading – pat yourself on the back. If you read it and didn’t understand it, it’s okay – I only really understood them three weeks ago when I was applying to run a Student Directed Seminar with a colleague.

What I’m trying to say is that for the first time in a long time, my education feels applicable, not just theoretical. And yeah, people might say, “Your degree will never get you a real job!“, to which I respond, “You’re just brainwashed by capitalism! The real goal in life is not to work, but to partake in leisure!” Thanx, Marx (ha ha).

Learning is something that will always persist, and I’m very thankful (and privileged!) to be able to receive a higher education at a fraction of the cost that most people in the world will receive it for, but learning never has to be seen in conjunction to higher education.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year that can’t really be taught in a formal setting, it’s that empathy and understanding are two very difficult things to put into practice. Over the course of the year we’ve witnessed some pretty awful things occur around the globe, and while anger is a very valid reaction, empathy is often pulled into the undertow of the division between people – not absent, but also not as resonant, of course. This is not an apology for Nazi-punching or Mother-of-all-Bombs-dropping, obviously, but we often ask ourselves, “How can I help?” without knowing if we’ll ever answer the question we pose.

The problem, I think, is that most of us – myself included – love humanity. In fact, we love humanity so much that when anything horrific happens, we end up hating individual people, and with that mindset we can never really love humanity because individual people are part of humanity.

Then it becomes very easy to blame individual people for the downfall of humanity when really, are we not all responsible for each other? This is a hard concept for some people to grasp, so if you feel your blood boiling at the mention of shared responsibility (or universal healthcare, or social housing, etc.) don’t worry! Most people are also individualistic to a fault; Dostoevsky and Sartre explained it best. My point is that we forget that empathy does not have to exist in the form of grandiose gestures and donations, but rather, taking the time to reach out to your community and instil an attitude of caring, and bettering yourself so that you can, in turn, help promote the same kind of betterment in society.

Question things that don’t make sense, take time to read, and always, always listen. There is so much out there happening that can’t be taught to you through a textbook, and that, I think, helps alleviate the numbness that I talked about at the beginning of this post: you are never done learning, which sounds scary, but the idea gets better when you realize most of your life-learning is free (read: free from the chains of capitalism, thank God).

Rebranding! Revisions! Re-everything!

I spent a chunk of the morning fiddling around with my blog (instead of working on my final assignments for the end of term!) in hopes to change up how I am received by my audience because I’m hoping to purchase my own domain this summer. I almost changed my domain name for this, but realized that /pradahag/ is too #iconic (and that I’m not creative enough to come up with a better domain).

So instead, I have changed my blog title to “SUPER INTERNET SENSATION IN THE FLESH!” as an ironic nod to both the fact that I will probably never be a SUPER INTERNET SENSATION (caps imperative) and that this is on the internet and therefore will never be “in the flesh” (and I probably don’t want to meet any of you in the flesh because I’m too anxious that you’ll murder me).

Along with the change of title came revisions to my “ABOUT” section, and a small logo-making moment on my favourite site, Canva, which ended up looking weird on WordPress:

The small box within the 500 x 500 px space makes for weird sizing on a white background.

But that’s not why I decided to write a post (almost 3 months after my last!).

The reason why this post is being written is because I spent a good chunk of the chunk (ha ha) reading through my older blog posts, which run back into mid-2015 when I was 19.

A lot changes in two(-ish) years. I blogged about a lot of things, ranging from love and relationships, to racial identity, to feminism, to mental health, to which I have replies to my past self regarding these topics:

On relationships and love: why are you so annoying and down about a guy that wasn’t good for you? Why are you so obsessed with extrapolating the absurd? You think you know love and yet what you don’t know is that you’re going to meet a guy on a whim that revolutionizes the way you think about intimacy, and you’re going to be much more satisfied with how safe and accepted you feel. Remember how you used to write about things that moved you? You’re going to have that again (and he’s going to read it, and you won’t feel afraid of letting him do so).

On racial identity: You think your racial identity is complex? Wait until you learn about the concept of the hyphen and have an existential crisis because of it. THEN wait until you take a course on existentialism and have a meltdown.

On feminism: Stop speaking on behalf of people, you dunce. Feminism (especially in an intersectional sense) is always going to be uncomfortable because you’re consistently learning and unlearning. You have a long way to go.

On mental health: your anxiety will get worse as you realize that you’re kind of stuck with it. There’s no point in trying to fix it because there’s nothing to be fixed. But once you learn that it shouldn’t impede you or your thoughts, you’ll be a lot more open to conversations about yourself and why you are the way you are. Bonus: once you learn that despair and misery and anxiety ARE the human condition, you won’t feel as weird trying to justify it to neurotypicals – they’re the weird ones and they definitely won’t get it (extra points if they tell you to “just stop being anxious”)!

Reading your own writing will always be cringeworthy and awful, but that’s probably because writing (especially in an academic/formal context) is super unnatural to most of us (as in writing is something we are forced to do for school, jobs, etc., but if those structures weren’t in place, we’d all probably be fine speaking). So don’t worry if you look back on something you wrote and think, “Gee, why am I paying $10,000 a year for school if I still suck at writing?” because what you should probably be focusing on is how crippling it is to have to pay luxuriously for a higher education when it’s treated as a necessity, and not how badly you suck at writing because everyone does.

Alas, I think I’ll spend more time writing this summer and working on this whole branding thing, not that I need to reify myself, but mostly because if there’s a chance that I do become a SUPER INTERNET SENSATION IN THE FLESH!, I’d want to have some monetary gain to pay off my student loans.

This means linking my blog to my Facebook and Instagram accounts (ew) to gain more traffic and whatnot, and purging my Twitter (ew x2) of all of my hilarious (!) but unprofessional (!!) tweets. But it must be done at some point, so it might as well be now (before people find out about my dom/seb fetish – shh).

It’s a long way to being able to afford to live, but hey, if I can exploit myself to entertain and distract people long enough so they don’t think about how miserable they actually are while reading my blog (without moving towards selling my body because that’s scary, props to the people who do this to make a living) THEN I’LL DO IT.

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Photo credit to Joon Joseph.

“As I am. As I am. All or not at all.”

Sometimes I wish I could extract more quotes from a canon of literature that didn’t have so many dead white men in it, but sometimes you just have to suck it up and admit that you’re channelling James Joyce at the moment.

A few days ago, one of my friends sent me a quote from a science fiction novel written by a writer who is NOT in the dead white dude canon:

No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself. – Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

I have been thinking about this a lot in terms of how to describe how I’m feeling. So far it’s something along the lines of “weightlessness” or “unvoiced-ness” or “numbness”. Self-destructive is also a close contender.

It’s been tumultuous, the last couple of days, with this on-again off-again feeling of a lack of control/auto-pilot bullshit, and some people have taken to the standard 3 step model:

1. Ask if person is alright
2. Person responds “I’m fine!” or along the likeness of such
3. Subsequently, person will probably ask you the same, to which you also reply, “Good!” or similar

But what happens when people are not alright?

I should start by saying that it’s difficult to talk about mental illness when you don’t really understand it yourself. I know what it is objectively, I can define and describe all the usual qualities, but to talk about how it affects me? A task meant for someone else (or at least an older, wiser, more observant version of myself).

My biggest problem with people is the instant discomfort they experience when you say you’re not alright. This discomfort doesn’t usually happen when your answer needs to be pried from your mouth, but more often when you proclaim your discontentment freely, without doubt.

Why are you so sure of yourself? Why are you not happy?

One must be happy. Or they need help!

So people will help you out of the assumption that if you’re not okay, then you must want help. Of course, this isn’t a fault of anybody. They care, and they’re just doing what they know how to do. Perhaps they do it because they don’t know what else to do. Perhaps they do it because that’s what they would want others to do. Perhaps they do it because they think that’s what others want them to do. Whether it’s a social pressure or an inner drive, most people will go out of their way to help you when you say you’re not okay.

When I was younger and less affected by whatever’s going on upstairs, I used to tell people that I wanted to help others. Recently, I’ve changed that to helping others that cannot help themselves.

The reason that incited this change is due to my personal dislike of others assuming I want/need help, and acting on behalf of me when they believe I do, whether they understand the extent of their actions or not.

A weaker, pettier example of this is my mother whenever I try to cook. As a twenty year old, I feel like I should have some cooking experience because my parents always insist on cooking for me because they’re afraid I’ll hurt myself, but they also get annoyed that I can’t really cook. So whenever I cook, my mother always tries to fix what I do in anticipation of my making a mistake, which I appreciate, but that in itself will impede me from actually learning.

A more salient example, however, is when I was told my event for my club hadn’t gotten a room confirmation yet, and I said I was stressed about it. Instantly someone started telling me that it wasn’t my fault and that it would work out and be fine in the end and blah blah blah. And I understand why they did that, but please, let me keep my unhappiness sacred without converting it to some pseudo-happiness that relies on a constructed idea of hope rather than acknowledging things that are out of one’s control. I know it’s not my fault, and I know that we’ll work something out, but that doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed by it nonetheless.

Please don’t help me unless I ask for help. But please also treat me like a human being with the capacity to feel and to choose and to be.

I think the remedy to this is active support, which a couple of my friends have taken up and have helped tremendously in getting me to not only open up, but to actually talk and have conversations. I think the last thing people with mental illnesses want is to be treated like someone with a mental illness. Unfortunately we, as a society, haven’t reached the level of erasing stigma from mental illness yet, so we are othered.

Some things they’ve said that I think are noteworthy:

• How are you?
  • no emphasis on feeling, invites more answers than just feeling-based answers, although most answers will still be about feeling
• Let me/us know if you want to talk
• We are here to listen
• Are you okay with ___?
  • more of a consent to ask abut something that they thought might be sensitive or anxiety-inducing
• We support you with whatever you choose to do
  • no qualification, no condition, simply being there in their entirety
• …whenever you’re ready to do _____…

But, most importantly, they’ve just been talking to me as a friend about what we would normally talk about, and I think that has helped the most: normalizing people with mental illness rather than leaving them out of the picture. I don’t think there’s anything worse than being left completely alone when you haven’t asked for that.

This is a working model for me and I’m sure I’ll run into something or other that I’ll want to change, but knowing how I want to be supported  and what works for me when I become destructive is probably the best thing I can do for myself for the future. I’m very thankful for people who are “all or not at all”.

An Intimate Existential Crisis

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time on auto-pilot – going through the motion of things without really taking the time to think about them any more than I needed to, doing things because they seemed like the sane, rational things to do, and so on. I thought a lot about God, both as the scary, looming figure of doom and as the thing above that probably tripped on acid one too many times. I also thought a lot about myself and the black hole I’ve become, constantly taking things in but never reciprocating and spitting anything back out.

One of my professors this term told us about the “existential psychoanalysis” experiment, where people would pay to stare at their therapists for twenty minutes. Apparently some people freak out, fall in love, etc., etc. What did they discover?

We did a shortened version of this in class and stared at the person sitting beside us in class for two minutes and it was the most discomforting feeling I’ve felt in a very long time. I stared at someone whom I later found out was named Alison, a sixth year Biology/English Lit double major. She wore twelve rings, a rose lapel pin on her jacket, and had a small tree branch pendant hanging from a pewter-coloured chain from her neck. She has freckles, high cheek bones and a prominent chin, blue eyes, crow’s feet, brown hair, and a fantastic smile.

I think I fell in love for a brief moment. It was fleeting and fancy and whatever.

But, more importantly, it reminded me that I was staring at another human (about which I knew nothing). I realized that every other stranger to me was a passing shadow in the void I threw myself into, and I was one of the same passing shadow in most other people’s realities. They had no faces, no past/present/future lives, no purpose but to be filler bodies on the seats of the busses and trains I take five days a week. They might as well have been crafted solely to make sure my reality is as real and in sync with my vision of reality as possible. This is starting to sound like a strange conspiracy theory, and it might as well be if I continue to be so detached from everything around me.

I’m at work as I am writing this, and I’m watching the people that come in and out of the gym. No one looks at you for more than three seconds, and if they do it’s because they either want to talk to you or they need something for you. Not that this is a bad thing, obviously. But we don’t spend enough time recognizing that the people we interact with are actually people with lives, as odd as that may sound.

This realization threw me into a panic about what I thought Alison may have stared at when we did the exercise. Did she create a backstory for me? Did she realize that the reason why my makeup was super dramatic was because I spent the prior night bawling my eyes out for some reason I’m unsure about now? Not that she knew me before that day, but alas. Did she catch on to how flushed I became? Did she know she was staring into a black hole?

I think we are all, to some degree, uncomfortable with the amount of imperfection we manage to isolate within ourselves, and we deny we are imperfect, and that makes us miserable. Why not admit we are miserable?

How are you doing today? I’m awful, but I hope you aren’t.

What are you doing here? Just passing through, I guess.

What makes you happiest? Anything that validates the continuation of my life.

Perhaps we recognize people are uncomfortable with how miserable they are, so we spare them. Perhaps we recognize that happiness, when it functions as a construct, is used to keep people in the small boxes of productivity and complacency. Perhaps auto-pilot isn’t the best way to exist.

My goal this year, to help me cope with how exhausted I’ve become, is to do things that aren’t necessarily “required” of me to do (ex. the things I want to do but never have the time to do). I want to be engulfed in writing and art again, I want to spend more time with family, I want to go on hikes and lunch around the city and be okay with feeling lost and directionless. Having so much reliance upon my calendar has given me more anxiety than I’ve felt in a long time, and I think it’s catching up to me.

Someday this will all figure itself out, but for now I suppose I’ll write about it.

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Featured Image: The Abyss by Vitaly S. Alexiuss (alexiuss) at deviantart.com

“This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.”

I’ve always lived in a place where my rights and freedoms as a woman of a visible minority have not been threatened during my lifetime. There is much to be thankful about that in itself. I have to keep reminding myself that though I feel devastated by the 2016 American election results, it is not me who will suffer directly.

This could be a time for a summary of my political stance or how I feel about what happened last night, but instead, I want to talk about morality and something that makes me feel hopeful in times of despair: my good old friend, Fyodor Dostoevsky (whom you should thank for the handy dandy quote used in my title).

If you haven’t read the Brothers Karamazov (from which the quote was plucked), please do. When you get to the middle/end of the book, you’ll come across something known as the mythic prosaic, or the idea that in order to overcome spite and hatred, one must do good. And as self-evident as that is, I fear that not many people subscribe to it. Most people I know, including myself, respond to spite and hate with more spite and hate, and it grows and grows exponentially until we are all overcome with spite and hate.

Such as the election, one could say.

But goodness, when chosen to be reciprocated, has the same effect. And though it is difficult to get started, once goodness gets rolling, it doesn’t stop. Someday, I hope I will be good enough to achieve that.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of days to think about my rhetoric in response to the elections and I can guarantee it was not filled with the compassion I wish I were filled with. Trump’s win makes me feel spiteful, and I continually choose to feel spiteful. I don’t understand, nor do I want to understand.

I feel like this attitude comes from the fact that we choose to surround ourselves with like-minded people, which is why the spiteful act of unfriending people on Facebook because of differing (emphasis on differing, not necessarily harmful) beliefs undermines our ability to see the world in its entirety. Evil exists, and it flourishes when we let it flourish. We feed it spite and hate and it grows. But when we choose compassion, we inevitably choose to embrace evil with a hope of fostering goodness.

Fun fact: passion (subsequently compassion) comes from the latin root patior – to suffer.

I don’t blame anyone for being spiteful when things seem to be horrible. I don’t blame anyone for electing not to be compassionate because it is difficult.

But even if you feel that your romps of compassion lead you nowhere, please don’t feel like that’s the end of it. There are youth right now sitting in their classrooms, watching as this all unfolds, and paying attention to the decisions we, as the older generation, make, hoping to gain some insight as to how the world works. And if we’re careful enough – compassionate enough – perhaps they’ll be empowered enough to take steps towards fixing the mistakes that people have made in the past.

And that, I think, speaks volumes as to the potential of goodness this world has to offer. I remain very hopeful for the future of those marginalized, and I sincerely hope you do too.

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Bigotry is Ugly by Travis Wise is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

In response to “The Hyphen”

I wrote a post (very early) this morning about the hyphen: an abstract concept that I (as well as many others) use to conceptualize a racial/national identity that is conjoined by a hyphen – that is, at least in my case, what it feels like to be a first generation/third culture child.

The experience of growing up as a first generation child is vastly different than growing up as a second or third generation kid, and it is also different than growing up as a migrant. Which is not to say that the experience of people who grow up as such are invalid, of course. It’s just that the hyphen manifests itself in different ways.

It’s strange to think about dysphoric experiences, especially when one comes from a “multicultural” country like Canada. You’re allowed to celebrate who you are – your culture, your practices, your beliefs – with the expectation that you won’t be kicked under the rug for being different.

It certainly wasn’t like that growing up. I remember spending a long time loathing myself for being Chinese in a predominantly South Asian/Caucasian school. The people who identified as Chinese in my schools were East Asian, not South East Asian, and in that way, I was not pure: I wasn’t really Chinese, I wasn’t really Canadian.

The erasure of my Chinese identity started when I was young, slowly eradicating Chinese food from my lunches, refusing to wear traditional garb, and finally, in high school abandoning the language I grew up speaking. I insisted on being called Canadian – who needed the qualifier of “Chinese” anyway?

But no matter how much I tried to erase, I could not shake the fact that I felt uneasy with things like Self-Actualization, a humanist and predominantly western concept of tending to the self; it just doesn’t exist in Chinese culture because as a group, the Chinese are not individualistic (rather, they are collectivistic, and this sways how they view the notion of self).

This, I think, is something that has affected me the most in thinking about myself and my body as entirely my own and within my control – my parents do not view it as such.

The concept of the self, and focusing on the self FOR oneself, is seen as taboo, no matter what reason you do it for. This is part of the reason why mental health issues are on the rise in Asia: we are not encouraged (allowed?) to talk about things that affect us as individuals, especially if they affect us negatively.

When I was younger and was going through depression, my dad told me that feeling that way was selfish. A few years later I found out that he, too, went through depression, but told no one. In western society, mental health still bears a stigma, but at least societally, we have more efforts to promote speaking up about it.

This bouncing back and forth between my surroundings and my roots has always been something I’ve struggled with; I experience invalidation when I don’t like something that is traditionally Chinese, and I experience invalidation when I like something that is.

I think it’s part of the reason why I despise fusion food: alongside the fact that the rhetoric used to describe fusion food is often racist and demeaning to traditional culture, I also feel a little jealous Bao Down’s buns – you exist as a fusion between the East and the West, and people love you! You sad, taco-looking, sorry excuse for a bao are more accepted and comfortable in my society than I am as a human being. Your existence is validated by the high ratio of modern vs. traditional steamed buns on Google Images.

But the thing is that the fusion of culture is not the same as the fusion of food. Once you tear between the hyphen in which you exist, you can’t go back. You can try, of course, but you will always hold values and morals that clash between the two halves of you. You can try to step outside of those expectations, but someone will be looking down on you for doing so.

In my experience, my body has been split in two: I am Chinese now, in a particular surrounding, but elsewhere I am Canadian. I can never exist as both unless I find an environment that allows me to be both. To elaborate, I am Chinese in my home: those who are older than me have authority, and I must respect those who are older than me even if they do not show me the same respect. Outside, I am Canadian, where I show respect to those who mutually respect me and where age does not define your authority upon me.

These values clash. They will always clash. You will do things on one side of the hyphen that will make the other side of the hyphen feel guilty. You will question your parents when they say something you disagree with, and in turn, you’ll be called disrespectful for expressing a feeling or belief that is dissimilar to theirs. You must apologize for being an individual. You must apologize for growing.

As I mentioned, being a woman within these boundaries is even harder because you’re balancing your racial/national identity with your gender identity; I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for someone who must also balance their sexual identity and/or a stereotypically “uncommon” gender identity as well.

There is always a sigh of relief when I find someone who goes through similar experiences as me. The hyphen is isolating sometimes because you don’t know how you can relate to the experience of others, nor how others can relate to your experiences.

In short, the hyphen is something I’m still getting used to, even after twenty years of life. I’m not sure if I ever will, completely.

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Featured Image: Euler conjunction is in the Public Domain.

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There’s a line between identity politics and body politics that crosses the junction, the threshold, the dash between my roots and my surroundings. This is to say that the line exists between Chinese and Canadian. This is to say that to live in the hyphen is to survive. It is a line between who I am and who I should be; we are lucky if they align and we do not experience dysphoria.

But in the hyphen, everything is dysphoric. A woman in the hyphen is worse. One must survive the pull between not only Chinese and Canadian, but also between what a woman should be and what I am. Compounded, there is a pull between what a Chinese woman should be, and who I know myself to be.

How does one survive the question of the decency of a mini-skirt? Is it indecent because I’m a woman, and women should not be indecent? Or is it indecent because of my culture, because Chinese people don’t wear mini-skirts? Is it indecent because I’m a Chinese woman, and a Chinese woman should not wear mini-skirts?

But I’ve worn mini-skirts. And I’m still a Chinese woman. So if those two cannot exist together, what, then, am I?

Another example: how does one survive the question of beauty? As a woman, I am not feminine unless I have long hair. In Chinese culture, a woman’s long hair is a symbol of beauty. Is it a sound argument to say that these premises should lead me to believe I am not beautiful because I am a Chinese woman with short hair?

To live in the hyphen is to survive. It is to walk the thin ice between a culture you erased because of the dominant, erasing culture. It is to feel hatred for who you are and how you have come to be. It is to bear the pull of the different intersections that divide you into the being that you are. It is to feel the pain of invalidation, and to feel pleasure in re-identification. It is to participate in subliminally degrading rhetoric for the sake of your identity, and it is to take on the burden of taking back your rhetoric for the sake of your identity.

To live in the hyphen is to survive. It is to exist in a world of clashing values. It is to navigate the split of your body. It is to remember who you are when you cross the threshold, from one side to another, and to keep them distinct when you know they are interwoven seamlessly into who you are. It is to apologize for how you treat your body because of what the world projects onto it.

To live in the hyphen is to survive. It is to remember that your body is belongs to you in a place that tries to own it. It is to remember that your actions, and morals, and beliefs, belong to you in a place that tries to change them. It is to remember yourself in a world that thinks they understand who you are.

The tear between the hyphen is pain. The mending of the (irreparable) tear is also pain. Everything about the hyphen is pain. Everything within the hyphen is pain. Everything beyond the hyphen is pain. But, of course, pain of this sort should not be felt if you are a proper, Chinese woman.

Living in the hyphen is to feel unfamiliar – you are not really Canadian, but you are also not really Chinese. They made a mistake in grade school when they said two halves comprised a whole; rather, at least in the hyphen, two halves don’t take up nearly as much space as they should.

Living in the hyphen is to be epitomized by dichotomy – it’s either you’re this, or you’re that. You’re either Chinese, or you’re Canadian; you’re either feminine or masculine; you’re either beautiful, or you have short hair. You live in the hyphen, but you shouldn’t live in the hyphen: it is undesirable, it is unnecessary, and it is disappointing.

Living in the hyphen is to survive self-disrespect. You apologize to your body by having sex, drinking, and doing everything one half of you says is absolutely unacceptable. But even your apology cannot ignore the fact that you must also apologize to the other half of your body that bites its tongue during arguments, and that comes home at seven o’clock on a Friday evening because it is indecent for a woman to be out that late. Living in the hyphen is to survive the misinterpretations of your actions; living in the hyphen is to survive body politics; living in the hyphen is to survive identity politics.

To live in the hyphen is to seek asylum in yours and others’ experiences, but understanding none will be quite like your own. The hyphen is both a safe haven and a dystopia.

To live in the hyphen is to stay silent – or to be rendered silent – about the pain of living in the hyphen.

To live in the hyphen is to survive.

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Hyphen by Karl432 is licensed under CC0.

I have historically gravitated towards pain instead of softness

About a year has passed since the terrible happenings of last summer. I mean, retrospectively it was a pretty great happening (for me, anyway) but at the time it was terrible. Anyway.

I catch myself doing that thing where I’m thinking about all the strings of reality that my life could’ve taken, and I’m also doing that thing where I’m feeling like I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.

Yeah, this is a big step for me.

Life has treated me well as of late. My current internal dialogue looks a little like this:

In another universe, apples are my favourite fruit.

In another universe, trees grow downwards from the sky, roots anchoring from the clouds.

In another universe, it’s 4pm on a Thursday and I’m waking up next to you.

In my education course, we were talking about celebrating ordinary moments in a toddler’s life (like being able to curl their toes, or finally realizing that lemons are sour and that people don’t normally eat them like they would oranges), and I’m not trying to imply that I’m a toddler (externally, anyway), but something about celebrating ordinary moments has gotten the better of me in the last month since I wrote my last blog post. I’ve compiled some of them:

• feeling a soft breeze blowing against your face when you’re in an air conditioned car and it’s a little too hot outside
• the little affirming beeps of the POS in shops when your card isn’t declined
• feeling someone else’s skin upon your own after spending the last year feeling afraid to let people touch you
• strangers that don’t point out that you accidentally pulled the “stop” cord on the bus before your stop
• sunrises and sunsets. all of them.
• the sting of the last rep in your set, when your body collapses just enough to let you know that you made it that far
• feeling hot beverages trickle down your throat when you’re feeling stressed
• knowing that even though sometimes we wish death upon ourselves, our white blood cells work their asses off to keep us in check, so really, we owe it to them to stay alive
• feeling chocolate melt on your tongue
• quiet brains
• sitting at a table surrounded by people who love you and feeling gratitude wash over you, because you’re thankful for everything that’s brought you here
• knowing that you can’t know sadness without knowing happiness, so it must exist
• being comfortable with existing, and taking time to appreciate living
• understanding that there are still so many wonderful people out there to meet, so many experiences out there to discover, and so many realms left to explore
• knowing avocados are a thing and that they’re real and that they can be turned into smoothies

God, I feel so happy. If you asked me a year ago if I thought I’d be in this position, I’d probably laugh in your face.

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Pleasant Morning by dualiti.net is licensed under CC0.

The Rhetoric of Racism in a “Post-Racial” Society: An Analysis of Dylann Roof’s Manifesto

TL;DR: Through rhetorical theory and analysis, everyday post-racial rhetoric is revealed to hold many salient qualities of Charleston shooter’s Dylann Roof’s Neo-Nazi manifesto, which can be read here.

My original essay is in standard format below; additional commentary and parts that were edited out in the final copy for length purposes will be block-quoted.

Note: it was really difficult to write this essay due to the nature of the text I was analyzing. Sincerest apologies to anybody that may be/are offended by this text, or if I overstepped any boundaries I should not have in my final conclusions.

Final note: contrary to my CC BY-NC 4.0 licensing on the side of my blog, this piece is specifically copyright Melissa Teo, 2015. Please cite accordingly if using any ideas presented by this piece. Thanks!