Senior Year: Start of Winter Quarter (+ End of Fall)
I swear to god that before tonight, I kept thinking I need to update Punderings and then deciding that I didn’t want to/wasn’t ready for whatever reason/that Punderings had outlasted its use as a outlet for my self-reflection. Too much happened near the end of fall quarter (most of it heartwrenchingly personal), and I felt myself changing so quickly that anything I wrote on Punderings would’ve been dishonest—an attempt to smooth over all the ugliness I perceived in the change, and in myself. I’ve finally emerged from what felt like an eleven-week maelstrom, so—
Quick career/academic updates:
Graduation plans: I’m a 2024 Schwarzman Scholar! I’ll spend next year pursuing a Master’s Degree at Tsinghua University. My thesis will (most likely) trace aesthetic lineages between cultural industries, artist communes, and creator spaces such as Shenzhen’s OCT-Loft and Beijing’s 798 Art District, with the goal of deconstructing how these aesthetics help various Chinese entities embody and envision sociopolitical identities. It’ll be a lofty study—I barely know anything about urban studies, field research in China, etc—but it’s a topic I’ve pursued in my off-time for quite a while. I could go on and on about how the art produced in creator spaces built by private sectors often discursively proceeds political messaging, and about how cities like Shenzhen complicate the colonial-aesthetic-layering/decolonial-aesthetic-deconstruction-reclaimation binary introduced by Western scholars, but mainly I’m just interested in learning and enacting new research methods. I’ve spent the last year unknowingly working in sociology, which leads me to:
Thesis 1: I’ve gathered all my data (interviews and surveys) for my honors thesis with the IR department. I’m currently unwilling to code or analyze my survey data in any way—both because I detest coding in R, and because I’m afraid that all my data will lead nowhere—but as soon as I work through my five million mental blocks, it’ll be all over for you b******. It was an unpleasant shock to move from writing literature reviews (and poring over theories on memory and identity, which I immensely enjoyed) to the quagmire of the empirical social sciences—especially while I was learning R and lobbying for IRB approval and applying for grants and designing my survey. But I have immensely, immensely enjoyed my interviews: letting my interviewees’ thoughts unspool, hearing what emerges first in response to more open-ended questions, seeing them try to explain their own phenomena. I have interviewed 25 Chinese Americans, and I have never been faced with so many ways to be Chinese American. It’s inspiring to hear people consider and reconsider their own beliefs—quite honestly, that’s what gives me faith in humanity. I’m now questioning my aversion towards the social sciences—at the beginning of winter quarter, while trying to assign value points to each survey question, I swore that I’d stick to the humanities once I finished my thesis. I wonder now whether I should give sociology/anthropology another chance. After all, I’ve been working with advisors from the sociology department, and placing my research in conversation with sociologists—if I could redo my undergraduate experience, I would’ve probably pursued a sociology major. The thing is, I’ve spent so much of my Stanford education learning things that I’d never paused to consider methods or disciplines. I’d always based my academic choices off the things that interested me most (U.S.-China relations, memory, literature), and not the methods or schools of thought that’d bring me closer to the kind of thinker I wish to be and wish to engage with.
Thesis 2: My book has become the beating heart of my winter quarter. I had immense writer’s block in fall quarter, and I think all my advisors knew it—but were too nice to comment on my lack of progress, and my determination to spend ten weeks revising the same two-hundred pages. But I did spend fall quarter and winter break consuming a lot of media, and winter quarter has seen weeks and weeks of fluid, easy writing. It was terrifying to switch from my editorial mode of writing into a generative one—to drag myself out of the safe, repetitive rut of copyediting, which gave me a lot of comfort in an otherwise unpredictable fall quarter. My advisors have commented on my refusal to produce original material unless I had “big chunks of time”—enough time to write, edit, edit, edit, and edit a substantial scene—and my complementing tendency to consider each draft/length of unused writing a “failure.” So, I’ve been trying to write with more abandon, and to be okay with letting loose ends lie (or introducing new loose ends halfway through a scene, and promising myself I’ll thread it through the previous chapters at some later date). I’ve also become much less protective over my writing, and I’ve been able to laugh about my characters and plot holes and purple prosing with my fellow Honors writers and my advisors. I’d always considered writing to be a deeply personal activity (in contrast to ballet, which could only be done under constant scrutiny and with the knowledge that my body wasn’t truly mine), so I’ve been slowly breaking that down. I love my book very much.
Summer plans: I will be working with the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) in San Francisco Chinatown. Without giving away too much, I’ll say that my job will have to do with art curation (but not art practice—which is a first for me), researching and reimagining ghosts/rituals/tradition in conversation with other artists in the diaspora, and event organization for Chinatown communities. I’m so excited for this, and I will share more details in spring quarter.
Ballet: I’ve retired! (And my back has finally stopped hurting, although I harbor no illusions of being completely healed—physically or otherwise.) I spent fall quarter rehearsing and performing as Clara in The Nutcracker, a role that was explicitly denied to me as a little girl on the basis of me being Asian. I threw myself into everything I thought innocence/girlishness/childhood was, and emerged from my performances feeling unbelievably young. It’s still impossible to articulate all the emotions of leaving the stage: the terrible grief of realizing, finally, just how much of my body hadn’t been mine, and the jolt of collision as my body crashed clumsily back into my ownership, aching from its ten-year loan; the shock of remembering studio flashbacks I’d forgotten (all those days going from 4:30 PM to 11 PM without eating, all the toenails I wrenched off my feet and the blood that quite literally saturated my shoes), as if my body were just now allowing itself to process its past and its pain; the resentment at my audience members’ awe, and at the young girls who proclaimed how much they wanted to be like me; the cognitive dissonance of staring at my dance pictures and thinking, that body was someone else’s—that girl isn’t me, or is no longer me. I’ve never pretended to be a professional dancer, or to have had a chance as a professional—and so I’d never anticipated just how final my retirement would feel. There’s something to be said about healing the inner child and giving myself closure, but all that is better unpacked elsewhere (a therapist’s office). Dancing as Clara was one of the most beautiful moments of fall quarter, and something decidedly linear and stable and done-for-myself in a way that nothing else quite was.
Okay, now this line spacing is off (on Squarespace, never use bullet points before a chunk of text). But I also wanted to write about my more abstract thoughts on life, and about the mundanities from which these abstractions formed.
Graduation and futures: I often can’t help but feel that I wasted two and a half years of my undergraduate career. I made it a point to not take my academics seriously in freshman year; my defiance of the classroom continued through sophomore year, with online classes and the time difference of living in China; I realized only in junior spring that I wanted to go into academia and could be good at it, if only I sat down and took it seriously. There were many reasons why I was so determined not to pursue academia (or excellence/single-minded pursuit of any kind) as an underclassman/junior. I had come into Stanford believing that I could only be happy when studying Track I dialogue between the U.S. and China, and when I was miserable amidst weapons developers and policymakers, I decided that academia simply wasn’t for me. It was a relief of some sort, to not throw myself at the first field of study that would’ve offered me validation. I’d unknowingly associated excellence/single-minded pursuit with the trauma that had been my childhood and secondary education. I spent years accepting the truth that I’d gone to college a year early because I simply couldn’t stay at home any longer—that the only way I knew how to survive and escape was via academic excellence—and I no longer wanted to be someone who survived and escaped. I wanted to prove to myself that there was more to me than the frameworks that Stanford offered—and yet I craved the validation that I was no longer receiving, and which I could briefly grasp if I stayed in the orbit of the IR department. It was this dissonance that suspended me in a weird sort of not-overachiever-but-definitely-wants-to-be-but-also-most-definitely-doesn’t-want-to-be state of being for 2.5 years, and I only broke through it at Oxford, when I realized the joy in studying what I truly wanted to study, in being given free rein over both syllabus and method. I tend to frame my first years of college as a “waste,” or as a regret (I could’ve spent those years writing and publishing a paper, or at least attending my lectures)—but I can truly say that I am going into academia with clarity and certainty.
Resistance (to everything): Fall quarter was as turbulent (romantic drama, platonic drama, familial drama, grad school decisions, eviction notices, mental unraveling) as winter quarter was mundane (spending most of my time in a classroom and doing decidedly boring work, after a year of deciding my own schedule/avoiding busy work; smoothing over all my relationships)—and yet I met both periods of my life with resistance. I did not want the changes of fall quarter, even if those changes were good. I did not want to be dragged into the mind-numbing stability of winter quarter, even if I’d longed for it in the fall. I simply didn’t want any change I could not control, even though I’d always prided myself on thriving in unpredictability. But I’ve slowly begun to understand that no change is as existentially catastrophic as it seems, although each change is in itself existential. While in a questionable state of mind at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I realized that we are all just tide pools: we harbor ecosystems that are constantly in flux, and we are both subsumed by and resistant to the open sea. The sea brings strange things into our lives, and takes things in strange and sorrowful ways, too. Through it all, there is growth, often bizarre and invisible.
Value, innovation, and spirituality: I’m taking many graduation requirements this quarter, and one of them is an economics course on social change and technology in society. There’s a huge emphasis on innovation and disruption in the syllabus, and an assumption that innovation is an act that inherently adds a “new axis of value” (my own visualization; bear with me) as opposed to adding standardized units to/increasing the efficiency of producing units for previous axes. A lot of this mindset goes against my political beliefs—but also my more spiritual ones. Must value itself be generated and ascribed value by humans? Is “value” something that is fundamentally missing from people and society? I find myself questioning this more and more as I step into academia, especially as I pursue studies that deconstruct the premises upon which certain schools of thought/disciplines were constructed, but which are not free from the methods of these schools of thought/disciplines. All of my work carries as much personal urgency as it does political/social urgency—how is this value translated into the production of knowledge within academia, or distorted by it? (No complete thoughts here—I’ve only just begun to question.)
Invention, inheritance, and identity: Over the last few weeks, a great source of my grief and wonder was in realizing how much I must invent for myself—and, conversely, how much can come from within me. It started at a very personal level, when I realized my capacity for kindness and forgiveness, even when such behaviors had never been taught to me. Then came Lunar New Year, and I organized a celebration with recipes and rituals I learned off the Internet, one which brought together many who felt distanced from their own communities, homes, and traditions. In many ways, diasporic and otherwise, I’ve always seen myself somewhat orphaned, and I’ve always been inclined to grieve what I hadn’t inherited. This is why I find comfort in unprecedented and undisciplined art. Many scholars of “interdisciplinary arts” consider the interdisciplinary an orphaned thing: a deconstruction of or entity wholly separate from traditions and disciplines. But recently, I’ve been reading the work of Fabiola Naguib, who argues that interdisciplinariness is a thing with lineage and precedence—that interdisciplinary art inherits or is connected to the methods and practices of multiple schools, and is the heir to the time-long practice of interdisciplinariness itself. Tradition is often an imagined thing, anyways. It’s a marvel to recognize your own boundlessness, the potential to imagine and create even without any reason or precedence.
Anyways, that’s all! Going back to coding now. :)) See you again in three or four months, I don’t know.