Author Archives → Jen

I am getting text messages from my mother.

My recent foray into the world of smart phones has been luminous – the kind of experience that has been so formative, it may be the entire narrative arch of my forthcoming semi-biographical* coming of age novel (which, I have concluded, is to be titled “Choosing Laundry Over Sex:  A Lifetime of Counterintuitive Productivity”).  I am certain that the story of my flip phone losing functionality in 75% of its buttons will rival Holden Caulfield’s, inciting just as many hipsters to stroke their tiny handle-bar mustaches as they contemplate the abject existence of (wo)mynkind and apply to graduate school in Art History.

My smart phone has been imperative to my being, a Maslow-ian need.  Like water, food, air, sex, and shelter that will protect me from rabid beavers in Northern Virginia, I often contemplate how I functioned without this device – a device that has allowed me realize my full potential in being an Asian taking pictures of other Asians who are taking pictures of food only to share said pictures with other Asians taking pictures of food.  How did I ever truly live without the ability to ignore people in public as I satiate my need to simultaneously watch the opening credits to the Ghostwriter series, the trailer of the 1995 adaptation of Ann M. Martin’s seminal novel The Baby Sitters Club, and videos of baby sloths getting dressed in pajamas?  OMG.

Most of all, my smart phone has allowed me to forge stronger, nearly impenetrable connections with my friends and family.  It has especially allowed my mother to inundate me with text messages, reinforcing with each neon green iChat bubble that no matter what I do, no matter how much education I get, no matter how much I accomplish, you didn’t survive the Vietnam War like I did, bitches.  You’re studying English?  Don’t you speak it already?

My inferiority complex via text messages from my mother is split into six different categories, outlined below:

Category 1:  Stop spending money.

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 Category 2:  Baby, I am too busy to talk to you.

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 Category 3:  Update your technology, you Neanderthal.

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Category 4:  I am not impressed.

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 Category 5:  I birthed you from my loins without the use of drugs.  What did you do today?

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Category 6:  OMG, LOOK AT YOUR BROTHER.

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*Editor’s Note:  By Semi-Biographical, I mean completely thinly veiled fiction that is completely autobiographical.

I am writing in Columbia Heights.

One week ago, I moved into Columbia Heights, a neighborhood that has quickly become the subject of significant change in Washington, DC.  Of course, “significant change” is a euphemism for “gentrification,” which, of course, is a euphemism for “the local proliferation of gays, hipsters with giant glasses, and pretentious boutique shops that sell overpriced, impossibly tiny Tres Leches cupcakes that are popular, credible, and ethnic among gay hipsters from Indiana,” which, of course is a gross oversimplification of drastic demographic shifts.  As a gay hipster, I will blame the state of Indiana.

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This week, I attended a class taught by my writing mentor — an incredible, comprehensive survey of literature and theory relating to rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of writing.  As she handed out the  syllabus and the class assignments of the week, I noticed an assignment that looked similar to one I had written as an undergraduate for this very professor.  “Show not tell” was the premise to this piece of writing — “show” but not “tell” a scene of writing.  Write about women scribbling on trains, children piercing cursive “A’s” on their newly sharpened pencils into loose leaf, love letters written with the ferocity of lust, fearlessness, and dire emotion.  She explained the assignment and asked me — someone who had been sitting silently for the entirety of the class — to elaborate on the nature of the assignment.  To my surprise, she had kept the piece I had crafted at nearly 2 AM, caffeinated in the library cubicle as a college sophomore — and used it as a piece of reading on the syllabus.  It was entitled “Writing in Columbia Heights”.

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I found it buried in my e-mail after exhausting all the search terms I could think of.  I had e-mailed it to myself at 3 AM on a January morning:

The aroma of golden brown, lightly basted marinated chicken easily fills the apartment, as do the sound of the blaring telenova in the living room and the anguished, high-pitched cries of the baby in the bedroom.  She sits in the dining room, positioned in the center of the apartment at the intersection of the raucous sounds and ethnic smells.  Her small frame, sun-kissed tan, wafer thin, and the size of someone two years her junior, sits atop a chair with tapestry that is a retro swirl of off-white, faint pink, and light teal.  The chair contrasts with the other pieces of furniture in the apartment – the faded, worn in black leather couch, the grey faux marble entertainment center, and the seemingly random framed Star Wars poster.  The décor is a mess of color, of decades, of styles.

The girl taps her blue mechanical pencil against the plastic sheet covered table with her right hand.  She twirls her brown, tangled hair with her left hand’s index finger.  Her feet, covered in mud-stained white sneakers, hover above the carpet because the legs they dangle from are not nearly long enough to touch the ground.  But, that does not stop the feet from alternating taps to the air.  Her forehead scrunches as she stares at the blank piece of paper consisting of a title:  “Things That are Important to Me”.  There is nothing else on the page.  She lets out a sigh.

“This is too hard for me.  I can’t think of nothing.” She says defeated.

Suddenly, the sound of overdramatic female voices from the telenova changes to a nasal voice attempting to sing a theme song.  Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?  SpongBob Square Pants!  The girl immediately drops her pencil and turns her head like clockwork towards the television.

“Daires!  Preste atención!  Es necesario que escuche a tu tutor y haga tu tarea!  Bueno para tu futuro…tu educación!” Yells her Mother from the kitchen.

The girl returns to the blank page, her eyes squinting at the piece of paper.  She picks up her pencil with her right hand, tilts the piece of paper with her left, and slowly begins to write the words, “My family is important to me”.  She looks at her tutor, her eyes twinkling from the sentence before her.

“That’s beautiful.” Says the tutor

The girl gives a sigh of relief and begins to slowly write the next sentence.

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The girl is the aforementioned piece is Daires, an elementary school student and avid learner that I tutored in an apartment mere blocks from the house in which I currently reside.  We talked softball, read the Wayside Story series, and wrote about “her country” — not the United States, but the Dominican Republic.  This was before the Target, the Staples, the Washington Sports Club and the fancy cupcake shops were fully erected in Columbia Heights.  This was before people — people like me — began to settle in the spaces once rented by the residents of this enclave: Central American refugees cultivating the District as their home.

Today, I am, yet again, composing a scene of writing under very different circumstances in Columbia Heights.  I am living the narrative, but wondering if the one I had written only six years ago is true.  I am still, but not quite, “Writing in Columbia Heights” with questions of my impact both positive and overtly negative.  Here I am — a residential wanderer who is not lost, but may have helped create lost communities along the way.

I am running a marathon. In San Francisco.

In Spring of 2010, I wrote about my experience running the Oakland Half Marathon – the first officiated race of my young running career.  Since 2010, I have completed an additional half marathon as well as 4 full marathons finishing respectively, but falling short of the ever elusive Boston Marathon Qualifying time.  Nonetheless, running has been extremely formative for my twenties – an anchor (and, at times, a lifeline) in college and a series of measurable benchmarks in an otherwise incalculable, nebulous adulthood.

Each race, both half and full, has been 2 to 4 hours of contradictory emotions – at once painful and cathartic, beautiful and cumbersome, invigorating and fatiguing.  Like all things worthwhile, there is a beginning abundant with energy, hope, glitter, and spandex.  There is a middle that oscillates between uncertainty, assuredness, and angry commuters wondering why the fuck so many people want to run 26.2 miles on the day they really, really need to go to Safeway.  There is an end in which the events that preceded the finish line are colored so gorgeously by the stunning hues of accomplishment and retrospect.  Hell yeah, you think to yourself.  I just ran 26.2 miles just as everyone is recovering from their Saturday-induced hangovers.  And good bye marathon-enforced sobriety!

Today, in San Francisco, I opted to run the San Francisco Full Marathon to see, taste, and feel the city, once more, solely on the power of my two legs.  The mist of a cool morning air gently blanketing the Bay, the blur of red dusted beams and rivets in my peripheral vision as I darted across the Golden Gate Bridge, the signs emphasizing some kind of marijuana paraphernalia in the Haight, the scent of smolder from charcoal grills tailgating outside the Giants baseball stadium, the pandemonium of excited, annoyed, and befuddled pedestrian spectators witnessing another San Francisco affair, the embrace of a deeply beloved sign holder at the end of it all.

Like all the races that came before it, this race was inundated with feeling, particularly since I will be departing San Francisco – the city in which I learned what it meant to truly learn – in mere weeks.  In 3 years, I have more or less walked every piece of pavement that was pounded, accumulating memories both wonderful and unpleasant – all significant, unforgettable, and routed along these 26.2 miles.

At miles 6 and 7, when thousands of runners get the opportunity to run in a lane across the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, the striking cascades of the city’s terrain and the beautiful blue palette of the Bay reminded me of my first trip to San Francisco – on a bus filled with old Chinese people and my perpetually motion sick sister yakking in empty grocery bags.  In a concerted effort to block out the actual bus ride, I distinctly remember the awe I sensed when I looked into the Bay’s waters.  It is an awe I still felt as my plane drew closer to the water’s ripples on my first day living in the Bay Area and, today, as I ran with early race elation across the Golden Gate Bridge to a slew of terrible Kelly Clarkson songs.  I suppose if this race does not kill me (which it could), it will make me stronger.

From the early teen miles to mile 20, I traversed a stretch that connected my current residence to the Haight, the neighborhood I lived in for more than 2 years.  It is the sight of my first apartment that I christened by doing the twist against the hard wood floors of my room.  The memories of laughing and endless conversations about books, love, careers, and the oh so difficult existential crises of educated twentysomethings were juxtaposed with the regrets – the friends you never called back, the people you should have gotten closer to, the grandiose promises you never fulfilled, the projects, born of youthful vibrancy, that dissipated with careers and exhaustion, the father you only recently started to understand, the girl whose heart you broke because you weren’t honest with yourself.  Some have asked what I do during my four or so hours of running a marathon – do I just run and listen to Britney Spears express, over and over, that she Wanna Go somewhere?  Between miles 10 and 12, when the initial enthusiasm begins to fade and the realization that I have come so far, only to have an additional…16 miles to go, I settle into a rare space of extended reflection.  This is one of the things I love the most about this sport – suddenly time, runners and crowds fade away and all you can do is think and run.

Run, run, run past the restaurants in the Mission in which you shared meals with friends, toward the ballpark in which you witnessed the home team win the World Series, along the waters that seemed so intimidating and lonely that they provoked homesickness just a few years ago.  Your muscles begin to gesticulate with pain, your joints begin to buckle in weariness, your sanity questioned with each passing mile.  You have to keep moving – past the pain, past the arduous incline of San Francisco’s hills, past whatever preconceived notions you have of your abilities.  Time will not stop nor will the pacer before you.  And to stop, falling short of your own expectations, is the greatest pain of all.

And at the end waits the finish line – as I once described, a raucous crowd of the proud and the confused.  To finish is a glorious feeling, a high greater than whatever those typically San Francisco signs with ganja weed references purport.  This, in my perspective, is the most magical aspect of marathon running: no amount of money spent on shoes, technology or coaching will singlehandedly decide whether you walk away at mile 21 or continue running.  To carry your weight for more than 20 miles, without collapsing in a fit of insanity, on two legs and will power is perhaps more awe-laden than the Bay itself.

Perhaps this is why, after this particular race, I have decided to take a two year hiatus from competitive long distance running as my life veers in a different direction – to sustain the magic for years rather than risk literally running my body out of marathon commission and to only revisit the sport when I am ready for the discipline that comes with it.

Until then, to San Francisco, marathons, and all that is in between – thank you for your terrain, your course, your city of lively spectators and culture.

We shall meet again.