home remedies for emptiness

When lockdown protocols officially began last March, everyone thought the shitstorm of protocols would revert back to normal after a few months, which garnered everyone unprepared and expectant of things to be of normalcy again in no time. 

This included me, who thought that a short excursion to my parents’ house was only necessary for weeks, leaving behind some clothes at my place in the city proper near the office. And so I went home with only three bags carrying some essentials. Four months later I’ll find myself coming back to my place to carry out the rest of my things, eight bags all in all including some books and pillows and stupid trinkets that I ended up throwing away. I also ended up giving up the place. 

Having just quit my job last October, everything seems too bleak and unsure, but I felt rested, at ease and satisfied. It was the rest I very much needed (and deserved) after the mental torture I experienced in my last job. I bought a guitar, studied a little French, wrote a few essays here and there, and took my journaling seriously. On top of that, I was reading four to five books a week.

But between all the mess and the incompetence of the government so blatantly shitting on the country it’s beginning to feel normal, I found myself a safe place I can call my own. Or maybe millions of other fans’ safe place.

Recently I’ve decided to start where I left off back in 2016, just to see how it would make me feel, how their music would push a button in me, or not. It wasn’t really something meaningful per se, but kind of momentous because I have varying interests that grew when the lockdowns began. Apart from reading numerous books, I became passionate about coffee blends, writing on my journal thrice a day, and watching animated adult cartoons on Netflix. (Midnight Gospel is a good one.) I’ve also grown more resentful and angry towards our government if it’s a surprise.

I started off with some “funny moments” videos on YouTube; some I’ve known from the heart since my early college years, some I missed during the four years that passed. It was a rabbit hole from then on; I mindlessly slid down, and a different opinion was already resonating as I rolled off. The feeling was more than just a favorable squeal and excitement; it now resembles a moment of remembrance of a time when everything was falling apart, and yet I am building a new world for myself. 

With their recent Grammy nomination, the prizing fondness just grows, the admiration broadens. I am but a small blip in their radar and yet I am a big person within my own universe where their presence is just as domestic as mine as if they are next-door neighbors. 

I can list numerous situations where I’ll find myself questioning the daily shit I do—from my job, my hobbies, to my everyday choices, if I should still go on—only to circle back to the Spotify playlist containing their full discography. It grows on you, harshly knocking on the temples of your head, reminding you that you can feel shitty and ugly but still deserving of all the good in the world. They literally taught me how to breathe and accept myself, flaws and misgivings included. This all happened within a month; it was a healing experience.  

I refuse to sound deep and high-commanding of the English language anymore, but BTS gives me that feeling of fulfilment every day like I always have something to look forward to, something to get me through the day. Speaking these words at 23 is like going on a time machine: like getting ready for a long yet necessary drive back home to your childhood home after long, draining periods of exams. Packing your stuff after a draining week at the city to come home to home-cooked meals. 

Many still question their influence to this day, still finding it absurd that a non-English speaking group from a (relatively) small Asian country headlines the industry with their music. But I come to the discussion as defensive as any fan can be: it’s that they refuse to differ themselves from their fans, those who are below them. It’s because they never release an album without a track criticizing societal maladies. It’s because they never shy away from self-awareness, of the fact that they are also just human, and that being an idol comes second only to inevitable feelings of human dissatisfaction, disappointment, and fear.

 

In their album “Map of the Soul: 7,” they took it hard upon themselves to admit that their “first death” might already be happening, as they come to terms with the loss of their passion and excitement for the music they write. That their passion is now only a job to fulfill a contract. In one track, the youngest member laments the loss of his childhood due to the extreme conditions the industry has put him (and his group, really) into for the past nine years. One of the elder members also put his disillusionment as an artist who has become less of himself and more of a machine of the show business while pursuing his ambitions in an industry that is already a battlefield from the ground up. 

I feel closest to this album (next to their HYYH era ones) because it resembles so much of Carl Jung’s theory of the multiple selves, where my 2018 undergraduate thesis mostly revolved in. I chose this understudy because 2018 was the year I really struggled mentally about who I was and what I wanted to build myself. Fast forward to 2020, this record harkens me back to that year when I unpacked so much of myself to fit the mold of a job that doesn't fit me. It comes at a time when everyone is lost, with working and studying conditions drastically changed, leaving everyone confused, tired, and literally broke. The record may serve as a gospel for those re-figuring out themselves in a limited world. 

These are just surface-level reasons that endear them to me. I never knew this journey would go beyond finding out their birthdays and where they grew up.

Maybe because I saturated myself with too many posts and videos of them crying onstage over their fanbase, thanking them with such sincerity that one of them even got “ARMY” tattooed on his knuckles. It’s like an ode to how they are always down to throw fists for their fans whom I feel they sincerely care about, with every “ARMY, we did it!” remark every time they win an award. I wasn’t around much with them when they slowly became the biggest group in the world, but I’ll always circle back to when Jungkook and Hoseok hoped that they’ll become the group fans will always be proud of, even when they’re long gone, without any ounce of shame. 

Growing up we were taught that young girls loving boy bands and other “girly” quirks and expending time for it is a stupid, childish, even grotesquely obsessive trait to be decent enough to be acceptable to the dominantly male-gazed society. The internet raised us to view this fixation as a “girls’ world,” something untouchable and embarrassing to think of like it’s something taboo to discuss. But when girls like music from rock bands whose members play instruments and don’t dance with cloyingly sweet moves and pomp, bubblegum beats, it’s real, serious and of immaculate taste. What even is having “good taste in music” anymore, anyway?

Whoever decided that two things are under different spectrums? What is so icky about young girls liking these types of things? 

There may have been some shame that grew when I refused to dabble in their music mid-college. I was barely 19 and was put under the impression by everyone that I only like The Strokes, Wolf Alice, obscure arthouse films and hard-to-find pulp fiction copies of books from Booksale Cubao. Liking something from “mainstream” artist, let alone from the K-Pop genre, I thought, would somehow stain my indie credibility (I feel gross typing this) and my place in everybody’s expectations. This year I still question this (shallow) identity crisis I had; how can you even measure someone’s love for something when you are just looking from the outside? 

Now with more than a month’s worth of time dedicated to extensively bathing myself with their material—Run BTS episodes, V-live streams, live shows, BangtanTV vlogs, and even fan compilations of their funniest moments—I pride myself with the identity as part of the biggest, kindest, even the most chaotic fanbase there could be. I think it's safe to say that I am lucky enough to be alive in the same millenium as BTS are, at such a monumental time for music that taught me so much about community. 

While writing this, I am undeniably still haunted by the choices I have been making lately, career-wise and self-wise. But I’ll never fail to remind myself that I’m one and the same with BTS, not far off to where I am and where they are: human, and also experiencing the same human emotions I go through in my 20s. In their Dear Class of 2020 Commencement Speech, I am reminded that it’s okay to slow down, to take a break, and thank yourself for the road you chose to take, despite the uncertainty that’s manifested along the way. 2020 is a very strange and violent and lonely year, but they refused to treat it with full positivity and fake motivation. Instead, they saw it as an opportunity to remind their fans to sit with their heartbreaks, their misgivings, and move along with the difficulty. 

I can’t count the times I sat on my table while staring at my workload while listening to 2! 3! and remembering its poignant lyrics telling me that it’s going to be okay. Coincidentally, this song also played when I sent out my resignation notice (second time this year) to my very difficult boss. I know there's a stark difference between me and the boys and how they actualized their dreams, but knowing how Yoongi left his hometown with no money to pursue a career in music without a single ounce of support from his parents grounds me. 

As a 23-year-old, it would be presumptious of me to ask for emotional guidance from my parents but I am currently lacking in that department. I long to hear them tell me that they are proud of me, that I am alright. So far all I'm getting is the constant "be grateful" spiels because I am "taken care of" by a company they think I'm still working for (I quit almost two months ago). Nobody here knows that I've resigned twice in a month already. BTS doesn't know that as well but, with each member talking about their struggles, is already comforting. Encouraging, even. 

This is the BTS I came to love and know years ago. Apart from them criticizing those who reign on the struggles of the youth and their commodification, they are here to present themselves as companions who share the same frustrations. It's like we're all in the same universe with similar growing pains. Buying their merchandise means I have something to show my future children, to tell them of a time when their mother was going through multiple heartbreaks at once, that then turned to emptiness and then sudden redemption. And as a million times cheesy this will sound, but as powerful yet calming it is, they were successful in teaching so many people to love themselves.

With their recent release titled "BE," the band emphasized its goal to promote "healing" and taking things slow in a time where everything  both fast-paced and stuck in one place. No one really knows when this pandemic ends and how we'll get out of this alive (or sane, at least). This is their first record without politically-driven songs, which is perfect because it somehow represents a generation screaming to the void how everyone is so fucking tired. Somehow "Life Goes On" and "Blue & Grey" gives you that extra boost of motivation to get up, send an e-mail, run some errands, finish a sentence.  

To say the least, BTS gave me that small push in the back, that hopeful elbow nudge telling me to "hey, you're still yourself." There are so many layers to explain how much I love BTS after years of forgetting about them, but the exact sentiment goes like this: You find BTS when you need them the most. 

I orchestrated my girlhoood and bleached my hair

It is and always will be a universal practice among women my age to go undergo multiple layers of trauma and decide to do something stupid with their hair just to feel something; the burn in the scalp, the thickening of every strand of hair as it fries to total dryness, the tangle in every stroke of the brush.

It was almost two weeks ago when I found myself in my room rubbing the soft blue goo in my hair to bleach it in an unfamiliar blonde so I could dye it to a candy-like lavender shade. Of course it turned brassy the first try. Beyoncé’s “Blue” was playing on my laptop; I had it on shuffle on under Beyonce’s discography because it was, I internalised, gonna be a me-time that should be soundtracked with hits telling me that I am running the world, wearing my freakum dress.

“We can last forever,” Beyoncé croons, while her daughter, Blue Ivy, cameos for a small part in the end. While I was slathering my already dead hair with the bleach solution filling up my room with the smell of chemical funk, I can’t help but think back on the one thing I wish shared with my mother, who went away when I was young. 

There had been a million of moments I’d seen between a mom and her kid; on the train ride to work, waiting in line at the grocery store, walking down the sidewalk. But I recently, once again, came back to the desire of her fingers brushing through my hair as she combs it to a nice, smooth fix. I used to have curly hair then, even wavier than it is today. As a child I hated how it looked, because my classmates all had straight, thin hair. In disbelief I found myself laughing at the thought of me wanting for my mother to comb my hair again, just this once. A connection I was deprived of for the last 13 years. 

I am not kidding when I say I remember all the times she fixed my hair at the quiet stillness of the morning, the sun not yet around before the school service picks me up. She’d wake me up, prepare my bath and breakfast and then proceed to dry and comb my hair, then tie it into fancy braids with these pink fluffy hair pins she bought at a tiangge. This is how I will remember my mother, erasing with effort the pain and trauma. 

The months before she left, I made it a point to always want to stare at her face, and memorize every outline because I was afraid to forget how she looked like. It was a hard feat for a nine-year-old to endure. But because I had this (bad) instinct about her leaving, I did everything I could to be with her, to feel her everywhere. Somehow, back then, I’d known she’ll have other plans—plans that did not involve me and my dad, plans that did not involve her combing my hair everyday. 

Growing up I did not have a hard time, that’s what I always told myself. I was too strong for a kid whose mother had just flew across the globe and made promises. I was too strong for a kid, that I forgot how to be a kid. Every waking hour for me was picturing that one classmate I had whose mother went to school every lunch time to bring her food. Sometimes I’d see them go straight to the church beside our school in the afternoon. I used to follow them, and just stare at the mother. I never imagined that it was my mother and me. I always just thought how this mother endured staying behind for a kid.

I developed a sense of self, and learned a handful of things from women staking their claims in the world. Women becoming leaders, writers, teachers, lawyers, activists. Women becoming mothers. Women who refuse to become a mother. I’m still not as adept to how women should make decisions in a society so built around the practice of complicity but I made it a point to just go about telling everyone that maybe being a mother wasn’t my mother’s destiny. And as a woman of her own, she did everything she can to get away from that job that so weighted her down.

I recently watched “20th Century Women” by Mark Mills. It talks about three different women who have differing ways of surviving the last dregs of the 70s, getting educated by feminism—which was then still a ‘new thought’—and talking about menstruation on the dinner table with men. It was and still is taboo to do so but the scene made me happy and seen. 

In the movie, the three glaringly different women break apart every aspect there is when it comes to moving on—city to city, person to person, and from an old logic to new opinions. I’d like to think that this was when I fully understood what really happened, what really came to my mother: she became a woman, and in becoming one she had to run for another desire. 

The clinching moment was when the pre-adolescent character, Julie, ran away from home, from her mother whom she does not have a relationship with, who never talks to her despite her being a psychiatrist herself. I told myself maybe I have it better than her because not having a mother growing up was better than having her live with you but never forming something solid between you two. But I’m wrong to assume that. Because we may be on the same path of womanhood, we may have taken it on ourselves to be persons of our own upbringing, but the tenderness of a mother will always be yearned for.

I have already forgiven my mother. We talk constantly online. But I will always feel this space, this wide gap between us that I cannot seem to jump over, because I never grew up with her. My step mother, who is sweet, loving and loves me like I’m her own, may be on the same page for me. I’ve been growing with her for six years (and counting) now. We’ve formed a strong bond, and we know each other’s quirks. She calls me out on my bullshit, mother style, and I love it. But I (unfortunately, on all levels) also feel a space between us, a door I refuse to open, a conversation I refuse to engage with. 

Maybe I’m not meant to be someone’s child, except for my father. Somehow all the women in our family who tried to reach out to me growing up, I turned down. I was polite, I was accommodating, I accepted their heartfelt sinigangs and hand-me-down clothes. But I always turned down their warmth, rejected them an access to my heart. Was this caused by the impactful leaving of a woman in my life? I still can’t decide. But I always found it hard opening up to people trying to be a parent to me. To people who have tried to be a parent to me, including my step mother. But she understands, and loves me the same. 

Turning 23, I never thought I’d ask these questions, and ruminate so much on the years I held my own hand, the day I got my first period and not knowing what to do. (I was too shy to tell my dad. So I went to nearest sari-sari store and bought the first sanitary napkins I saw displayed on the grills.) I turned out okay, combing my own hair. I may have failed it when I decided to bleach it and basically fry it to death. But I’m glad I did because I am committing to it. I know I am.

I keep wondering what I’ll be like once I become a mother. But it only ends up to me getting scared, fearing the decisions I have to make. What if I end up walking away, therefore leaving my child so conflicted just like me? But I’ve been so tired and out of breath for the last 13 years now that I know I’ll never stop holding my child until the day I die. There might be roads I have to walk thought, but I thought I’ll never take them unless my child is with me. 

I might not become the best mother. But maybe I’ll be good at committing to it.

In “20th Century Women,” one of the characters get the harrowing news that she might not be able to bear children because of what the cancer did to her cervix. It made me cry, because I have the same fear, the same anxiety of being a woman but lacking the capability to get pregnant. Post-feminism thought tells us that women are not defined by their uterus. But it depresses me, the fear, because I might lose something again that I have lost before—companionship between two women. 

And as I sat in front of the mirror destroying my hair follicles, I remember the first morning without my mother, the first time I combed my hair in the mirror, figuring out how I should part my hair. “The right side should be fine,” I thought, because I looked cute. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but it only took my two hands and a pink comb, already greying on the sides. 

Now I part my hair in the middle. I'm maintaining bangs now. Because I am allowed to leave behind something, I allowed myself to look new, to look different. 

Because I allowed mama to be herself. 

Watching Abbas Kiarostami during isolation

Known to so many a cinephile, his films broadened the space yet tightened the gap between art house cinema and the simple, effortless act of watching a film.

Kiarostami’s movies always ran between fiction and reality, wherein some scenes from his oeuvre show a bite of documentary-like mood. Reversing the stereotype to create his own flavour, the elements of a became truths that one cannot miss—because Kiarostami is a man of urgency.

In presenting his film’s narratives as a bowl full of lies was a cinematic proclivity for him to arrive at the truth without a trace of lie. It is unforced, it did not look like a struggle: it simply just is, and that’s how reality works. 

Marked by scenes of apparent quietness and contemplative, thoughtful conversations, Kiarostami comes to terms with his films both as director and as part of the audience. How he paints the picture of being lost is of another realm: it is not dependent on anything, apropos to nothing, just like loneliness—it can stem from nothing.

In Close Up (1990), the act of blending fact with fiction becomes a blurry experience. Is this a documentary? A drama based on a true story? Kiarostami’s decision to hire the actual people involved a fraudulent crime that actually happened, and reenacting actual conversations, the film achieved a greatness that rarely crowns a director that marks him as prolific. 

Shaping the reality with the words and angling he chose, the film took a turn from being a film to being a slice-of-life sermon masquerading as pure cinematic imagery. You never really learn how to get around Kiarostami’s narrative, and that makes him a positive enigma. 

In Taste of Cherry (1997), the structures of a talkathon engages more than conversations. It is, after all, a man wanting to end his life and talking about his desire to do it three complete strangers he drives around the capital.

The takes flight in long shots, deep silences, and sparse dialogue between the main character, the earth surrounding Tehran’s not yet developed lands, his car, and the people he meets. The emptiness of Iran somehow how filled the story with such grace and meaning that it somehow acts as the purgatory between hell or glory. 

A crucial fact in Kiarostami’s films is its desire to retain its silence yet disquiet treatment of a story and how it should take evidence in the screen. Man’s loneliness manifests in his films like a conversational confession between a doctor announcing to a family that their relative jas succumbed to an illness.

Evening the scope between the personal and the political, Kiarostami never forgets that Iran, a politically challenged nation, also never forgets to clear the coast with talks about the effects of fascism, and what it does to a community, what it does to a man. He never leaves space for cultural myopia to have an exposure. 

In a politically-charged time like this, where majority of the populations is on isolation, it is without question that one must engage in Kiarostami’s features. Because we never know what we find out within ourselves, what we learn about ourselves, in the most intimate ways as his characters find themselves. 

i try to write film reviews. again.

Tokyo Story (1953) by Yasujiro Ozu 

There couldn’t be a simpler film one could see, yet still have so much emotional bearing. In the story of an old couple visiting their children in 50s Tokyo, where urbanity is still a work in progress, we see how the rural Japanese take advantage of the routinely peace they have in their everyday lives—so it’s big feat then to cross the country and disrupt their homely affinities.

Not forcing any emotions to the audience, Ozu’s take on how the couple’s children talk about their parents and how they interact with them recognizes the disparity of both circumstances: in front of their parents they are still respectful but disengaged figures; but behind their backs they seem to be more active in complaining about their time-consuming presence in their households.

But what separates the movie from the vexation of the children, and their clumsy efforts to drive them away in the city, would be the warm and welcoming Noriko, who, if one would pay close attention, could be the film’s driving force and stark reminder of Japanese themes of casting a strong importance to family. Noriko was the wife of their son who died in the war, and yet she seems to be the closest one to the couple, a figure that seems to have never drifted from the family even years after her husband’s death.

Although the parents discuss their disappointment toward their children’s lukewarm treatment of them, we never once hear them compare their actions to Noriko’s, but it’s bluntly obvious. Setsuko Hara, who plays the wonderful Noriko, lays claim and ennobles her character through her coy smiles and shy but prideful ownership of her life as a widow. We see throughout the movie how committed she is making the couple feel at home, which somehow brings in a sour anger towards the children. One could narrow it down to the conclusion that it might have been her way of feeling closer to her husband, or it could be just her nature as person, or both. 

In 50s Japan, family destruction because of the war and modernization is a hard pill one should swallow: Children drift apart from their parents as they move, parents retain their lives as peaceful as they could, and nothing stays the same. Ozu carefully breaks through this sentiment, without leaving out the elements of indifference in the face of the children and familiarity in the person of a non-blood relative. No emotions are forced, and yet the comeuppance of the conclusive warmth between Noriko and the couple greatly speaks of emotional value. 

No other story could be as resolute as this masterful re-telling of centuries-old truths; family is family and yet, it does not always concern blood.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) by Agnes Varda

Women are always (disparagingly) misunderstood in all aspects of life; either though our choices, our actions, the word we speak, even the food we eat and don’t eat. 

In Varda’s first entry come the French New Wave, we see a woman in her ripening years as a pop star in France but there’s a caveat to it: she is burdened by a Tarot reading that says she is about to fall sick from a terminal illness she could not help. We instantly learn that she had been to the hospital days before to get tested for any presence of cancer in her body.

The movie runs on her fear: Of death, of people misunderstanding her, of dying before not doing enough so much as living as a (lonely) singer. Tailed by the many people in her life that see her as a caged, sheltered child, Cléo vexes at the idea that all of these are meaningless and is worried that this could all be there is for her, empty, routinely, and parasitic connections. 

Her fear burns like a wildfire within her, but is only regarded as a niche, womanly weakness by the many, even treated as a portentous attempt of hers for more people to pay attention. But she does not need attention, for she only wants some peace from the things she saw in a span of two hours: Seemingly dreadful masks on display in stores that speak of death, street performers doing feats that verge on the weird and desperate, and the unbelievable people who seem to only know her as the French pop star with a great figure. 

In France, the fifth hour of the afternoon is the hour for meeting lovers, rendezvousing at random alleyways. It is the time for coffee, wine and strolling. But for Cléo, it is the hour she dies slowly. And yet she is disregarded. She becomes hyperaware of her surroundings as the hours go by, and she never seems to shrug off the details—a couple breaking up in a café, the expectant looks of fans eyeing her from head to toe, another couple complaining of the “noise” in the jukebox, which happens to be her song. 

All these disheartening scenes add up to the rising and fattening anxieties she acquired from 5 p.m. going to 7 p.m. But we never see the grand explosion in the end, the conclusive tantrum to a growing frustration. Instead, we see it right before 6 p.m. mark, as she snaps at the two musicians who visit her home and force her to be a lively figure through her music. After all, she’s just a pop star, her beauty is enough. 

“Your beauty is your health,” seems to the case in point of the superficiality of the people who surround her career, including a lover. She finds herself disgusted by this, correctly so. Varda masterfully sewed the moment in the middle to let the audience in on a secret: Cléo is not just another pop star. As with any female singer, being a woman in the entertainment industry is hard enough, so much so as a budding one, unwillingly groomed to impress.

The grand ending would happen some 20 minutes before the feature ends, as she meets a soldier in a garden hidden from the eyes of Paris. Sharing the same sentiments of life over a walk out to the city, a tram ride and long stares, we realize that a doomed connection is building up: Doomed because a soldier is paid to give his life, and therefore sign himself up foe death. They are walking the same gang plank. With this their eyes tell one thing, and love ensues. But the scene ends there, and we are left with the cruel conclusion.

Ever so slightly told, Varda tells us that women are and always will be at the sharp edge of the sword for all the things they are going through. Though regarded as one of the French New Wave’s pillars, it escapes me why she’s not regarded alongside the ranks of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais or Rohmer. It’s always these men’s name. Perhaps the film industry was never ready for the influence of a woman. Because Cléo is the turning point of that ticking emotion for women, and no one can come close to how Varda told her story. 

i've been reading again. here are my reviews:

Books I've read over the past three weeks: 

1. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

In the author’s unwilling rest and involuntary peace, I find myself strictly choosing to read this book during the dead hours of the day, with no noise or the disturbance of having errands hours before I decide to stop reading. I currently live with my parents and my two younger siblings, so one could expect the external cacophonous company inside a two-storey house: it’s invitingly noisy yet too heavy to be in. Sometimes.

The two sides of the book, which discuss the criticism and the author’s critique of the works of some artists she deemed to be evidently troubled by loneliness, results into the explanation of why we, the reader, sometimes choose to be desolate an isolated from all other forms of feeling and connection; after all, humans are most aware of the feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.

In her “maps of loneliness,” Laing zooms into the works of Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz and their harrowing experiences somehow inculcates into those living in isolation in New York and its social and sexual expressiveness as a city sheltering all kinds of people. In the same arm, Laing also lights a spark of criticism of how famous men in the art scene before—and even now—invite women into their world and extremely feed off of their personhood for the sake of expression.

The economy of art, and looking at art as an escape from involuntary solitude comes in at such great, immersive, curatorial conclusions: that if we were to dissect all these famous artists’ works, it comes at the expense of exploiting the loneliness and struggles of their female counterparts (sometimes their wives). 

Reading this masterpiece while experiencing this surreal entrapment inside four walls for months etches something in one’s soul: the human condition brings out some self-aggravating tensions that are uncomfortable unnecessary to unpack in order for you to feel safe in your own triumphs of loneliness.

2. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

The (toxic, convoluted) picture of the American dream across the globe leans itself on the idea that social, systemic and class oppression will retain its power unless little acts of rebellion are done.

In this tale of a pristine family living in a gated, sparkly neighborhood, we are shown how upper class white families live their white-collar lives in a bubble, bordering on grandiose yet gritty in the sense that they have that “I can have what I want” aura. 

Ng laboriously extricates so much of how transracial oppression defeats skill and talent among immigrants in majorly white countries—this time in Trump’s America. She also perfectly presented the narrative that no matter how much you participate in teaching yourself of the rhetoric of suffering among your non-white counterparts, you’ll still end up knowing nothing. You’ll just be a machinized God-complex Karen who thinks the earth kneels at her labor of love.

But apart from the systemic racism Ng narrativized in the plot, class grandstanding is also very much present in all social standings, when two different worlds collide—the rich and poor, the middle and the lower class. And unless you try to stand aside and view something from a state of privilege, you are not doing enough for communities that are still unseen, still unheard, and still suffering from unequal and abhorrent situations that are, unironically, just passing shrugs for those who belong in the high tier of class.

The unforgiving monologue where the white mother hastily categorized the Asian, jobless mother as careless and undeserving of a happy, fruitful life in their country was what lit the novel’s way to introspection self-awareness: was she thinking the right thoughts towards a person, in this economic and political turmoil we are in? Is she coming from a motherly selflessness or a normalized racist selfishness?

3. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid 

Reading this in the middle of a tumultuous political moment in the US, and maybe, across the globe, makes it feel more necessary than ever to talk about issues that are too hard to sit on. The novel starts with the main character, a young black woman, who was accused of kidnapping a white child while babysitting her. Of course it felt angering and riveting at the same time, especially when you know that it happens in real life, and in so much worse circumstances.

The author mentioned she wrote the novel during the period of the deaths of Freddie Gray and Philando Castile under the custody of white policemen. One could only imagine the daily terror black people experience just by walking down the streets. 

I think what fueled the story most was the main character’s boss, the (white) mother of the child she’s babysitting, and her constant efforts to be a hard-hitting figure in a young black woman’s life. Somehow an influencer by account, she’s expected to offer only superficial value to the story, one that centralizes on her whiteness—but Reid carefully mixes in her most of us have: an dark, unnerving past, and a keen eye for correcting it. But as the story progressed it somehow turned in to a noteworthy on how not to correct the past, the white way.

In the age of post-racist and performative white feminism, Reid requires the readers to separate the black and white characters with such care but stern reminders: that white people are mere spectators to the suffering of people of color brought about by centuries of oppression and multilayered history ingrained in the face of racism that cannot be solved with the guilt and non-apology of white people.

4. Normal People by Sally Rooney

Rebellious in its nature of telling, Normal People lives its droll narrative and matter-of-fact storytelling as it explores modern relationships and how young people cope with the heartbreak of growing up and, separately, growing old. 

The politics of love in this novel, for Sally Rooney, is not of nursing it to make it better; rather, it is revived and resurrected every time the two characters, Marianne and Connell, find themselves at a crossroads. Perhaps that’s how pursuing should be done between two people: you don’t coddle and engage, you simply just live with abandon and watch everything fall into place. And in the age of the internet and polyamory, it is in these moments the two find a most wonderful thing, which is friendship, companionship and acceptance. 

Intimacy between the two is another thing; they are constantly drawn to physical touch and affection, and yet you find that it’s pure, spiritual and necessary. After all they are young, so sex is and will be, of utter need. But beyond physical affection and the seemingly electric tug Marianne and Connell has for each other is the dynamics of how they were raised as children by mothers with polarizing roles in their lives. 

Connell, raised by a single mother in a humble home, somehow strikes him as soft figure who knows how to navigate the ever so strange world of high school. Marianne, on the other hand, was raised by an emotionally absent, stern mother in a big mansion overlooking a vast expanse of green fields. Here, we find that Marianne’s resentful yet timid attitude comes from the quiet abuse she experiences in her home life. 

From here we can glean that even though raised in homes that are polar opposites, they find that one complements each other, in both the aspects of friendly and romantic. I don’t think a more honest representation of the reality of relationships has ever been this honest to the readers—the ugliness, the hindrances, the being and nothingness. There were no moments of grand gestures of love, for these are hidden in the words and actions between the two characters, which makes it even more thrilling. 

5. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

As far as general nonfiction of the late 2010s have shown, they are of collapsing language, bordering on personal and political. And yet it escapes me what this book really is trying to say, strangely, judging from the lifestyle of the author: an avid fan of bird-watching who can afford to  live in Oakland without a full-time job. And she’s a writer. What about rent, Jenny?

My takeaway from finishing this “self-help” is that not everyone can afford to just sit down and resist the urge of being sucked away by productivity, not in this economy. Slick in language and and well-researched, it escapes me how one can disconnect in this day and age of post-capitalist economy. Although written with the intention to re-shift one’s psyche from the productive to the idle, I think it’s lacking the foresight that we are consistently grinding to live because after all, we are complete machines ran by our everyday choices. Even reading this book is doing something. 

I liked this book, really, but there are still some salient points I find boorish. Maybe because my job description requires me to be on the loop 24/7, I don’t know.

6. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

Many think that Solnit’s attempt at presenting a manifesto on how men should just shut the fuck up lacks the depth and subconscious reflex, but I think it did enough for me to adore more of my angry deadpan side whenever a man dislocates my position on some issues I know extensively of.

In a few chapters, Solnit weaponised her words to bring the surface what used to be so hidden, so minor. These little things we deem to be topical are now just as scathingly important to be considered when one finds themselves talking to women. How men interact with women, and how women interact with other women used to be this black and white scenario of conversations, but it’s so much more than that; there will always be the innate (and unconscious) ostracism and belittling of women, no matter th circumstance, and although Solnit failed to avoid this, she of course acknowledged it—and it’s enough, for women, like me.

Women are culturally gaslighted and brainwashed into thinking and feeling that they are of lesser standing, of needed patronization constantly. I had, before reading this, some prior beliefs about being a woman. But reading through this provided me the logical armor to guard myself from what used to tear my selfhood and womanhood down, what used to be so normalized in my radar of what is wrong and what is right.

I rarely remember nor take with me some highlights whenever I read nonfiction, but I would specifically run back to this book for some self-grounding. 

7. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

From soil erosion, to irrigation to examining how mountains look from the different sides of a country, I found myself drawn to how this semi-autobiography comes across as a delineative self-introspection and pinning little points to the maps of oneself. How Solnit chooses the words to employ and evoke emotions on the concept of distance marks how connections are formed through both the strangeness and familiarity of landscapes and hometowns.

In those ‘Blue’ chapters, which are personally my favorite, the normal and profound lose itself to one another as Solnit doesn’t restrain from describing things in an act of the whimsy and imaginative—everything is personal, and it’s not the same for everybody, which is the thematic key of this “guide.” 

Reading this while in isolation due to the (harrowing) pandemic, it sets in some comfort that we are all completely lost in our own little landscapes, no matter what we are doing and how we are doing it. The multi-dimensional themes and experiences the author shares reminds us that while we are grieving the loss of connection and physical indulgences we used to enjoy pre-COVID, we are still offering something, but this time within ourselves. And that’s what constitutes, for me, a meaningful moment of getting lost.

8. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

I plan to keep this review short because I know my words (and emotions) won’t do so much as re-hashing what the author wrote all throughout, because we are all running out of time and unless global (and political) action is done, we are all doomed to experience the biggest, deadliest change there is, and it is happening already. Scratch that; we are all dead and dying.

The consequences are manifold and at this moment, no matter how much we try, it will come to pass, and we are at the cusp of the earth falling apart and throwing up what we’ve been feeding it during the last century. Not even using reusable utensils could save our asses. 

Growing up I saw a lot of apocalyptic movies and no matter how dismissive I am of these taking place in the future, sorry to tell you, but it will. And it’s starting. Holy shit, we’re all fucking dying! And I’m not even the least bit upset; I guess growing up really ingrained in me the shrug-your-shoulder attitude towards humans. 

But I do hope beluga whales and dolphins outlive us. I truly do.