Junior Year: End of Fall Quarter!

This will probably be my last blog post of 2021, and it’s quite remarkable to reflect on how much this year has brought me. While I’ll draft a short piece summarizing the whole year, I’m not sure if I’ll finish it in time for the 31st.

In some ways, fall quarter feels like the perfect culmination of the year: at once a homecoming, a new chapter defined by new mindsets and people, and a realization of the kind of person I’d hoped to become for a very long time. At the same time, fall quarter has raised many more questions than it has answered, and this blog post is less a summary of my time on campus than a musing upon some unfinished thoughts.

on accomplishment and art

This year is scattered with unfulfilled wishes. I didn’t launch a writing career, despite receiving requests from dream literary agents—I realized I truly didn’t have a story in me that could best fit in a book. I didn’t push FACES in the direction I’d wanted it to go—recovering recruitment and member engagement after a year online proved difficult enough. I didn’t win any awards, didn’t quite enjoy my internships in China, didn’t get a new research job at Stanford—and I emerged from this year the happiest and most present I’ve ever been.

The thing is, throughout the years, I’ve endured so many routines at so many different levels of rigor that I can draw distinct lines between my selves as I’ve reacted to each environment. Shedding this arbitrary reactiveness, and finding what I genuinely wanted and was willing to work for, proved to be one of my more difficult struggles of 2020 and 2021. For so long, acting on my own accord felt less like an act of control than a brief deviation from normalcy. I’d always alternated between the roles of teacher’s pet, nurturer, and high achiever because being controlled felt like a form of control over myself.

But this quarter, I’ve stopped feeling like time is running out. I’ve realized that it’s okay not to know what I want—paradoxically, I’ve realized that what I enjoy is not the moment of accomplishment, but the single-minded drive of working in a field I love. These three months are the longest I’ve gone without taking a single ballet class, and the longest I’ve gone without a book-sized project to fill my mornings. I’ve discarded half a dozen of my old selves, and I’ve torn out the pursuits that used to define them. I’m still trying to figure out where writing and dance belong in my new mindsets, especially because I’ve only ever learned to embrace my art forms as products of semi-masochistic routines. Dance and writing just don’t seem to belong in a haze of late mornings and nights, impulse tattoos, and weekend parties. While I’ve stopped guilting myself over lost writing sessions or ballet classes, I don’t want this to be the end point of my relationships with either art.

on morality

Without divulging too many details, this quarter also forced me to confront the moralistic framework through which I tend to view myself—and others—and to reckon with the very real ways in which I can hurt those around me. It forced me to confront the realization that I don’t necessarily regret hurting others—rather, I’m disturbed by my ability to be cruel, and by how good I can be at being cruel, because I’ve always been proud of my moral values. I’ve recognized that I’m inherently more selfish and idealistic than I am caring, and that such idealism is untenable for two reasons: the first, that humans are (wow!) un-ideal creatures with a variety of belief systems, and the second, that so am I, and that healing and self-defense and living are processes that are inevitably morally gray. I can’t use my moral system to make blanket judgements of my character at the cost of my well-being. I don’t necessarily believe in taking the high ground anymore, not when the price is suffering with my powerlessness and hurt—revenge, for me, was the single most cathartic form of healing when I was hurt in a romantic relationship; when given a choice of protecting myself and hurting others in the process, or finding a middle ground at the expense of my own time and emotional energy, I’ve chosen the former again and again. The most difficult thing I’ve done this quarter is to learn to give less and to demand more, and to stop blaming myself through a moralistic framework when I began to do so.

Think about the Kataang vs. Zutara debate with The Southern Raiders. For a whole year, I believed that Aang’s moralistic preaching solidified his place as Katara’s meant-to-be SO when she faced her mother’s killer. But—whether his moral system was right or not—Katara did not heal until she underwent a messy process of confrontation, revenge, and regaining her power (also, you might notice at the end of the episode that she side-eyes Aang, but chooses to forgive Zuko—because what she didn’t need was someone telling her to disregard her emotional needs for a moral high ground. Aang didn’t fully understand her throughout the show, and The Southern Raiders just empathizes the way he patronized her while taking full advantage of her emotional support.) I’m still trying to figure out how flexible a moral system can be, or if it’s even worth trying to adhere to one; I’m learning to separate being moral from being good, the latter of which I’ll always try for.

Another part of being moralistic is that it’s always been easy for me: after spending so long viewing myself as a victim in so many situations, I’ve learned to define my own goodness in relation to others who wielded power over me. If the only qualifications for being moral were a defiance of what had hurt me (and considerable yass-ification from my friends), holding the moral high ground was conveniently both a form of healing and a form of self-validation. Contrarily, when my actions contradicted my image of myself as a moral person, I struggled with taking accountability.

Lastly, I will empathize that the onus for being “moral” almost always falls on victims and women. Morality is easily weaponized in victim-blaming (spare the perpetuator—his reputation will be tarnished!) under the guise of objectivity, and I’m not comfortable with that.

on body and performance

Who would’ve thought? Distance from the ballet studio meant better body image! I felt wonderfully at home in my body this quarter, and in an ironic twist of events, it was only after I relinquished total control over my body that I felt comfortable and confident enough to get tattoos—simultaneously a form of asserting control over myself independent from the expectations of others, and a form of consensually giving myself to others’ artistic processes. I also, partially as a result of resuming ballet training earlier in the year, have begun to feel much more comfortable in my own style of dance and my strengths in the studio. I performed as the Rat Queen for CBC’s Nutcracker (it’s ironic how much I enjoyed playing the villain despite all my worries about morality) and thoroughly enjoyed my time onstage. I began to learn Chinese dance, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Learning dance with a more mature outlook, and learning to challenge the expectations enforced upon the art and on me, led me to question the whole concept of femininity as expressed through dance. Dance has undeniably shaped my growth into my sexuality and my version of femininity, and part of my study of the art, from now on, will involve an examination of this.

on academics

In the spring, I’ll be going to Oxford, so I’m using both fall and winter to define my tutorial subject. Right now, I’m leaning towards a creative writing/historical research project, similar to the one I completed for my Chappell Lougee. I’m very interested in the relationship between the female protagonist and the city as a setting in modern Chinese literature, and I’ve been reading more urban fantasy as of late. This quarter, I indulged in humanities classes, and I think that’s truly where my heart lies. It’s a little uncomfortable to be reconciling this realization with that of my approaching graduation: I still don’t really know what I want to do after senior year, and my current interests don’t seem tenable for any immediate options other than grad school and academia. Still, this quarter, I had an incredible time with my academics. My favorite class by far was Dongxian Jiang’s POLISCI235 (Chinese Political Thought), and I’m proud of my final paper (using the Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming to deconstruct the concept of political education as described in Sun Yat-sen’s, Liang Qichao’s, and Ci Jiwei’s writings). While my next quarter will lean towards the social sciences, I hope I can continue engaging with the humanities in some form or another.

In conclusion, it really doesn’t feel like the fall quarter or 2021 is about to end. I feel like I’m just beginning to question my values and interests, all of which are so dependent on my being on campus or at home. Nonetheless, it’s time to take a rest, and I wish you all happy holidays and a wonderful new year!

P.S. I haven’t forgotten my puns. I will write 365 on New Year’s Eve.