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Sometimes, a lot of words aren't necessary (but a good iPhone camera app is).
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| Charleston harbar at dusk. Photo by Very Highbrow. |
One Photo: Charleston
Sometimes, a lot of words aren't necessary (but a good iPhone camera app is).
Other People Do It Better: F. Scott Fitzgerald
I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922
For once I did the thing I said I would do and reread The Great Gatsby. By now I've heard at least a half dozen people say, "Oh I should reread it too. I don't remember much of it from high school."
I was curious to know, what book did they remember reading in high school? Without hesitation, The Catcher in the Rye. I remember that one. A friend made an interesting point: she had loved Catcher so much in high school that she decided to revisit it a few months ago.
"But I realized I couldn't stand him," she said of the narrator, "I just wanted to say, 'Shut up! Stop whining!' But in high school I felt I could relate."
That's the thing. In the tenth grade, Nick Carraway, who turns thirty in the novel, seemed so very adult, almost another species. At fourteen I didn't quite catch his judgments of Gatsby, of Daisy and Tom and only faintly understood his subtly delineated relationship with Jordan Baker who though "unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age" was also too unlike Nick for them to be truly compatible.
In short, I couldn't relate. Not to that crowd. Not to those themes. The American dream was one of those things that other, older people like my parents strove to achieve so they could raise bored, thankless kids like me. Now though, I'm closer to thirty and have made the acquaintances of a few real-life Gatsbys (though less doomed) along with members of the careless rich, among them young women like Daisy who want "their life shaped now, immediately - and the decision must be made by some force - of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality - that was close at hand." I think I'm getting closer.
And most important, I think, by simply being born into this day and age of careless everybodies, descendants all of the Buchanans and their lot, but who actually really do care and as a defensive measure judge, judge, judge, I've a better grasp of the key points that literally bookend the story:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "Just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
And:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
But it's too reductive not to include the paragraphs that come before (I'd copy and paste the whole novel to prove my point...), in which Fitzgerald illustrates beautifully what he means without bringing it down like a heavy branch over our skulls.
Nick retells Gatsby's falling in love with Daisy with the same symbolic parallels he later uses to elevate Gatsby to a symbol of the American dream:
...One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the house were humming out into the darkness and there was a stur and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he, climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster, as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Nick returns to Gatsby's abandoned private beach on his last night in New York, several weeks after Gatsby's funeral:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor's eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had been made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Daisy's "white face" becomes "the green breast of the new world," of "this continent," America, and Nick turns Gatsby's dream into the American dream, one we can strive for but which if we don't wholly understand why and what for, could fell us with a single bullet.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
And now I'm beginning to realize too, that I didn't appreciate what is quite simply some of the most beautiful writing I've ever encountered, both within the flesh and bones of the story and without, the skin of the writing itself. And I wonder, what was this "something," this "elusive rhythm" that Nick "had heard somewhere a long time ago?" Perhaps it's not at all something he heard but something he will say in the near future, still alive and able to contemplate both Gatsby's memory and what lies ahead:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther... and one fine morning ------
What little I've accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back - but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: "I've found my line - fron now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty - without this I am nothing."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
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| Fitzgerald at work. Photo courtesy of Thegloss.com. |
I was curious to know, what book did they remember reading in high school? Without hesitation, The Catcher in the Rye. I remember that one. A friend made an interesting point: she had loved Catcher so much in high school that she decided to revisit it a few months ago.
"But I realized I couldn't stand him," she said of the narrator, "I just wanted to say, 'Shut up! Stop whining!' But in high school I felt I could relate."
That's the thing. In the tenth grade, Nick Carraway, who turns thirty in the novel, seemed so very adult, almost another species. At fourteen I didn't quite catch his judgments of Gatsby, of Daisy and Tom and only faintly understood his subtly delineated relationship with Jordan Baker who though "unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age" was also too unlike Nick for them to be truly compatible.
In short, I couldn't relate. Not to that crowd. Not to those themes. The American dream was one of those things that other, older people like my parents strove to achieve so they could raise bored, thankless kids like me. Now though, I'm closer to thirty and have made the acquaintances of a few real-life Gatsbys (though less doomed) along with members of the careless rich, among them young women like Daisy who want "their life shaped now, immediately - and the decision must be made by some force - of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality - that was close at hand." I think I'm getting closer.
 |
| Edward Hopper, Automat 1927 Oil on canvas, Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections |
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "Just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
And:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
| Edward Hopper, The Bootleggers, 1925 Oil on Canvas Currier Museum of Art, New Hampshire |
Nick retells Gatsby's falling in love with Daisy with the same symbolic parallels he later uses to elevate Gatsby to a symbol of the American dream:
...One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the house were humming out into the darkness and there was a stur and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he, climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
 |
| Edward Hopper Summer Evening, 1947 Oil on canvas, Private Collection |
Nick returns to Gatsby's abandoned private beach on his last night in New York, several weeks after Gatsby's funeral:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor's eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had been made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Daisy's "white face" becomes "the green breast of the new world," of "this continent," America, and Nick turns Gatsby's dream into the American dream, one we can strive for but which if we don't wholly understand why and what for, could fell us with a single bullet.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
And now I'm beginning to realize too, that I didn't appreciate what is quite simply some of the most beautiful writing I've ever encountered, both within the flesh and bones of the story and without, the skin of the writing itself. And I wonder, what was this "something," this "elusive rhythm" that Nick "had heard somewhere a long time ago?" Perhaps it's not at all something he heard but something he will say in the near future, still alive and able to contemplate both Gatsby's memory and what lies ahead:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther... and one fine morning ------
 |
| Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea, 1951 Oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven |
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Art of Drawing Blood
For months the American Red Cross had been calling my cell and home phones. I ignored them, silencing the phone each time I saw them on caller ID, assuming they wanted money. I made a mental note to make time to donate blood instead. At least I make my own blood.
Last Friday afternoon I answered the house phone absentmindedly.
"May I speak with Betty?" a woman asked.
"This is Betty."
She sounded almost relieved, as though she'd been tasked with tracking me down, and quickly launched into a breathless sentence that began with thanking me for my past three donations and, well, they were now critically short on B positive blood - would I mind coming in as soon as possible to give them a pint?
She didn't use that word "pint," but that's about how much they take.
I was caught off guard - no one had ever called to ask for blood - but as I'd been meaning to do it anyway I said sure and a few days later, found myself laying back in a donating chair at the Santa Ana, American Red Cross. My blood drained from me in a healthy flow as I chatted with the phlebotomist.
She had a Spanish accent - is that what it's called, when from someone's English you can tell their mother tongue is Spanish? - and her voice was high and girlish. When I presented her with my driver's license, she read the DOB and squealed, "Happy belated birthday!" and it was a nice way to begin. She was short, about 5'2" with mousy brown hair tied in a haphazard ponytail and the pear-shaped body that seems to afflict many middle-aged, lower-middle class women who work in healthcare, but she moved easily, lightly, between the low divides that separated the donation area from the canteen from the small offices in which you answered very personal questions about your sexual history. She left me in the room for several minutes while I clicked a rapid succession of "no's" and returned just as Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" came wafting through the clinic air. She sat down and began reviewing my responses, moving her shoulders up and down to the Gaga's voice.
"You like this song," I observed.
"I do," she said smiling, "I just love dancing."
She brought warmth to the cold, sterile clinic air. Though I consider myself a blood-donating veteran, she made me feel at ease much more quickly than other phlebotomists had in the past. She took my temperature, read my blood pressure, pricked my finger and nodded approvingly at my iron levels, all with a sure but soft hand. All the while, she asked what I did on my birthday.
I told her about dinner with my friends at Orange Hill, followed by a late showing of "The Great Gatsby".
"Orange Hill!" she said, "I've always wanted to go there!"
"It's nice," I shrugged.
She had intended to take her mother there for Mother's Day, but the older woman preferred brunch at Las Brisas and her daughter conceded.
"But I've always wanted to go to Orange Hill again," she said wistfully, "I went there maybe twenty years ago, and it was so beautiful. The view..."
By now we'd walked to the donating chairs, all of which were empty except for one occupied by a middle-aged Asian man wearing headphones and staring almost comatose into a small TV screen attached to his chair. The chair she motioned for me to take had no digital amenities, but I had a feeling that our conversation wasn't over. The donation area felt even colder, as these blood donation centers counterintuitively are (unless there's been some study that blood flow quickens in cold weather?), and she asked if I'd like a blanket.
"Sure," I said.
She came back with a bright red fleece blanket with a character from Disney's "The Incredibles" stitched onto a corner. It was the boy Dash, who could move at lightning speed.
"There," she said, draping the blanket over me with a maternal air, "Now you're ready."
She came around to my left, tied my arm with a blue rubber strap and began swabbing the skin with two cold iodine swabs. The color of the iodine - dark and foreboding like blood itself - has always mesmerized me and I imagined that for the faint of heart, watching the phlebotomists swab the puncture area with a blood-colored substance doesn't exactly quell the growing squeamishness. I always force myself to watch the needle though, so I can temper the pain I think I'll feel. Mentally it's torture, but it's never that bad aside from knowing that there's a needle in your arm. It's uncomfortable, but in a vague, can't-put-your-finger-on-it-way. Less a rock in your shoe than that strange feeling of unease you get when you're about to be very very sick. Though I will say, the needle does seem to grow slightly in diameter with each donation.
The needle was in. She gave me a soft stress ball in the shape of a pencil to hold and asked me to squeeze and release.
"That's right," she said, nodding encouragingly, "Squeeze and release, squeeze and release." She patted my shoulder and then looked at me expectantly.
"So, how was the food?"
I looked at her for a minute.
"At Orange Hill! For your birthday! Was the food good? What did you eat?"
I was holding my breath and let it out with an unintended whoosh. Breathing now, I told her I ordered lamb, two friends had fish and the rest steaks.
"Ooh," her eyes widened, "I love steak. What kind? New York Strip?"
Filet mignon, I said, and this weird thick cut I'd never seen before, called Chateaubriand, meant at Orange Hill to be served for two. I tried with one arm to explain how the Chateaubriand was served. The waiter had rolled it up in a cart - an unappetizingly large lump of meat sitting on a hot metal pan - poured alcohol on the pan, lit a blazing blue fire that seared the meat a final time before he sliced it in half and served it with a baked potato.
She loved this and I think, had already made up her mind to order it on her next visit to Orange Hill.
"I like it when they cook for you at the table, like a show, you know?"
She searched for the restaurant that specialized in this and to which she liked to take her kids for their birthdays.
"Hana Bana? Banihanana...?"
"Benihana," I said.
"Yes!" she clapped excitedly, smacking her lips, "Benihana! I love that place! The cooks are so talented," she imitated them, tossing an imaginary shrimp head into the air, "and the fried rice and the miso soup. I looove the miso soup."
"You like Japanese food?" I began to think of restaurants I could recommend her but stopped when she shook her head.
"No, I just like the miso soup. I don't understand Japanese food, the sushi?" She made a small circle with her thumb and forefinger, to show me exactly what she thought of it, "It's so small! It's like nachos and salsa for me, you know? Like a snack, I can't get full off of it."
I burst out laughing, but she wasn't done.
"I can eat a whole California roll but it's never enough and even if I have two bowls of the miso soup...it's just not a meal! It's not a meal!"
I nodded, wondering if she knew that Japanese food consisted of much more than just California rolls and miso soup, (if the former could even be classified as Japanese food), and was about to ask her where she ate Japanese food when she became excited about some memory.
"Oh but you know what, I do like those rolls with the Philadelphia Cheese. That to me, is like the best."
I nodded, debating if I should tell her that the "sushi" she adored was a very American, very bastardized version of "Japanese" food. Our conversation reminded me of an experience I had while visiting the home of my college roommate, who was from a small, mostly white suburb of Connecticut. Her parents had kindly taken me to an Asian buffet, hoping I could tell them if it was "authentic" or not (it was, if only that it was owned by the suburb's sole Chinese family). Standing in line for walnut shrimp, the kind that's deep fried and tossed in mayonaise, I overheard an elderly woman recommending it to her friend.
"That shrimp is divine," the woman said, "The Chinese are so creative. They put some kind of special cheese on it!"
I chuckled at the memory and became only vaguely aware that the needle in my arm was throbbing. This was the best way to donate blood, with a good lighthearted woman who knew her way into a hard to find veins not to mention keep the donor talking and thinking about other things.
"Where are you from?" I asked, turning the conversation away from food.
"Mazatlan," she said.
It sounded familiar, and I asked if it was near Playa del Carmen, a beautiful Mexican beach town I'd once "studied" abroad in during a summer at community college.
She shook her head and immediately grabbed a paper towel and drew a poor but understandable map of her home country.
"Mazatlan is in Sinaloa," she said, pointing to a point in the middle of Mexico's west coast, "Playa del Carmen is in Quintana Roo, aaaalll the way on the other side, near the Gulf of Mexico, by Cancun. It's so beautiful, right?"
I nodded in agreement. I had heard similar things about Mazatlan and she confirmed this.
"Oh yes, it's beautiful too. Also a beach town, with tourists... my mother still lives there so I gonna take my kids there for two weeks this summer. They gonna speak their Spanish because they don't speak it with me no more at home!"
That is important, I said, and assured her that her kids would thank her some day, because my mother insisted on doing the same thing, taking us back to Taiwan each summer since we were toddlers.
"They don't really like Mexico," she sighed, "They think it's so hot, and you know, it's not as clean as here," she waved her arms as though gesturing to the spotless clinic.
Behind her, a plasma agitator rumbled and whirred. The Asian man, still the only other donor, stared unblinking at the screen. An obese blonde administrator took a seat in her office and started clacking away on the computer. Our eyes met and we exchanged smiles. I noticed there was a miniature Oscar statuette on her desk, and various doodads I couldn't make out from where I sat. She returned her eyes to the screen. I became aware of the other conversations going on around us - a hipster Asian guy not much older than I was talking about some concert he'd gone to and how he couldn't wait for a show he was going to next week. Two other blood techs lounged in rolly chairs with their legs crossed and chatted in low voices, bored tones.
"But you're right," she said, bending down to check on the bag, "They will appreciate it some day. And they gotta spend time with grandma, you know?"
She has two kids - a ten year old boy and eight year old girl - with a Mexican man she met twenty years ago in the US when she came to learn English. He was from a small inland town I've now forgotten the name of and studied at the same school.
"We got married back in Mazatlan," she said.
"Your wedding must have been gorgeous."
She nodded, smiling at the memory, "Oh it was, it was so beautiful. So so so beautiful."
Back in Mexico she was certified as a phlebotomist and found work mostly in gynecological offices, not with a huge-nonprofit whose blood came mostly from volunteers. Her husband became a machinist, and after five years the couple decided it was time to move to the U.S. permanently, to get better jobs and raise their children.
"It was so nice," she said of life in Mazatlan, "The beaches, the community, but it was so humid. And here is so much better for the kids. But you know I never want them to forget where they're from."
Her husband has plans to take the kids to his hometown next summer.
"I told him, 'Yes, we gonna take them next year.' But whoo!" she rolled her eyes, "There's no beach there so my kids probably gonna go crazy! They complain when they're in Mazatlan: 'Mama it's so hot! Mama the mosquitoes!' but I think some day they're gonna miss this time."
I remembered a single childhood midnight in Taipei, when my mom, brother and I were all so hot (my mother didn't believe in sleeping with the airconditioning on) that sleep seemed impossible. She shook us out of a sweaty stupor and whispered, "Let's go out for popsicles."
We ate dripping red bean milk popsicles in the guest bathroom so as not to disturb the rest of the house, my mother sitting on the toilet with one foot resting on the edge of the bathtub. It is a single memory, but a perfect representation of "that time."
Something beeped below my arm and she came to my side, bringing up a bulging bag filled with burgundy liquid. I was finished.
I realized I didn't know her name, this woman who liked sushi rolls with Philadelphia cheese and who believed in refreshing, yearly, her children's relationship with their heritage.
"Imelda," she said, bringing up the bulging bag to inspect, "but I don't have so many shoes like Imelda Marcos."
She squeezed the bag a few times as though examining a too-ripe mango and I thought, oddly, of water beds. I looked at the bag, feeling comfortably detached from it as Imelda deftly pulled the needle out, pressed a cotton pad to the puncture and wrapped a stretchy, sticky red bandage around my arm in a big X, instructing me to avoid heavy lifting and to eat plenty of iron rich foods. I thought ahead to a yet uneaten plate of lamb chops, courtesy of cousin Andrew and felt the cold clinic air hit my legs as she lifted the blanket off me with a flourish.
"You're all done," she smiled, "You did a good job."
I smiled back, thanking Imelda for a perfectly enjoyable donating experience.
"Oh not at all," she said, then smacked her lips, "Thanks for sharing your meal with me. I'm still thinking about that Chateaubriand."
Last Friday afternoon I answered the house phone absentmindedly.
"May I speak with Betty?" a woman asked.
"This is Betty."
She sounded almost relieved, as though she'd been tasked with tracking me down, and quickly launched into a breathless sentence that began with thanking me for my past three donations and, well, they were now critically short on B positive blood - would I mind coming in as soon as possible to give them a pint?
She didn't use that word "pint," but that's about how much they take.
I was caught off guard - no one had ever called to ask for blood - but as I'd been meaning to do it anyway I said sure and a few days later, found myself laying back in a donating chair at the Santa Ana, American Red Cross. My blood drained from me in a healthy flow as I chatted with the phlebotomist.
She had a Spanish accent - is that what it's called, when from someone's English you can tell their mother tongue is Spanish? - and her voice was high and girlish. When I presented her with my driver's license, she read the DOB and squealed, "Happy belated birthday!" and it was a nice way to begin. She was short, about 5'2" with mousy brown hair tied in a haphazard ponytail and the pear-shaped body that seems to afflict many middle-aged, lower-middle class women who work in healthcare, but she moved easily, lightly, between the low divides that separated the donation area from the canteen from the small offices in which you answered very personal questions about your sexual history. She left me in the room for several minutes while I clicked a rapid succession of "no's" and returned just as Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" came wafting through the clinic air. She sat down and began reviewing my responses, moving her shoulders up and down to the Gaga's voice.
"You like this song," I observed.
"I do," she said smiling, "I just love dancing."
She brought warmth to the cold, sterile clinic air. Though I consider myself a blood-donating veteran, she made me feel at ease much more quickly than other phlebotomists had in the past. She took my temperature, read my blood pressure, pricked my finger and nodded approvingly at my iron levels, all with a sure but soft hand. All the while, she asked what I did on my birthday.
I told her about dinner with my friends at Orange Hill, followed by a late showing of "The Great Gatsby".
"Orange Hill!" she said, "I've always wanted to go there!"
"It's nice," I shrugged.
She had intended to take her mother there for Mother's Day, but the older woman preferred brunch at Las Brisas and her daughter conceded.
"But I've always wanted to go to Orange Hill again," she said wistfully, "I went there maybe twenty years ago, and it was so beautiful. The view..."
By now we'd walked to the donating chairs, all of which were empty except for one occupied by a middle-aged Asian man wearing headphones and staring almost comatose into a small TV screen attached to his chair. The chair she motioned for me to take had no digital amenities, but I had a feeling that our conversation wasn't over. The donation area felt even colder, as these blood donation centers counterintuitively are (unless there's been some study that blood flow quickens in cold weather?), and she asked if I'd like a blanket.
"Sure," I said.
She came back with a bright red fleece blanket with a character from Disney's "The Incredibles" stitched onto a corner. It was the boy Dash, who could move at lightning speed.
"There," she said, draping the blanket over me with a maternal air, "Now you're ready."
She came around to my left, tied my arm with a blue rubber strap and began swabbing the skin with two cold iodine swabs. The color of the iodine - dark and foreboding like blood itself - has always mesmerized me and I imagined that for the faint of heart, watching the phlebotomists swab the puncture area with a blood-colored substance doesn't exactly quell the growing squeamishness. I always force myself to watch the needle though, so I can temper the pain I think I'll feel. Mentally it's torture, but it's never that bad aside from knowing that there's a needle in your arm. It's uncomfortable, but in a vague, can't-put-your-finger-on-it-way. Less a rock in your shoe than that strange feeling of unease you get when you're about to be very very sick. Though I will say, the needle does seem to grow slightly in diameter with each donation.
The needle was in. She gave me a soft stress ball in the shape of a pencil to hold and asked me to squeeze and release.
"That's right," she said, nodding encouragingly, "Squeeze and release, squeeze and release." She patted my shoulder and then looked at me expectantly.
"So, how was the food?"
I looked at her for a minute.
"At Orange Hill! For your birthday! Was the food good? What did you eat?"
 |
| This is what I ate. |
"Ooh," her eyes widened, "I love steak. What kind? New York Strip?"
Filet mignon, I said, and this weird thick cut I'd never seen before, called Chateaubriand, meant at Orange Hill to be served for two. I tried with one arm to explain how the Chateaubriand was served. The waiter had rolled it up in a cart - an unappetizingly large lump of meat sitting on a hot metal pan - poured alcohol on the pan, lit a blazing blue fire that seared the meat a final time before he sliced it in half and served it with a baked potato.
She loved this and I think, had already made up her mind to order it on her next visit to Orange Hill.
"I like it when they cook for you at the table, like a show, you know?"
She searched for the restaurant that specialized in this and to which she liked to take her kids for their birthdays.
"Hana Bana? Banihanana...?"
"Benihana," I said.
"Yes!" she clapped excitedly, smacking her lips, "Benihana! I love that place! The cooks are so talented," she imitated them, tossing an imaginary shrimp head into the air, "and the fried rice and the miso soup. I looove the miso soup."
"You like Japanese food?" I began to think of restaurants I could recommend her but stopped when she shook her head.
"No, I just like the miso soup. I don't understand Japanese food, the sushi?" She made a small circle with her thumb and forefinger, to show me exactly what she thought of it, "It's so small! It's like nachos and salsa for me, you know? Like a snack, I can't get full off of it."
I burst out laughing, but she wasn't done.
"I can eat a whole California roll but it's never enough and even if I have two bowls of the miso soup...it's just not a meal! It's not a meal!"
I nodded, wondering if she knew that Japanese food consisted of much more than just California rolls and miso soup, (if the former could even be classified as Japanese food), and was about to ask her where she ate Japanese food when she became excited about some memory.
"Oh but you know what, I do like those rolls with the Philadelphia Cheese. That to me, is like the best."
I nodded, debating if I should tell her that the "sushi" she adored was a very American, very bastardized version of "Japanese" food. Our conversation reminded me of an experience I had while visiting the home of my college roommate, who was from a small, mostly white suburb of Connecticut. Her parents had kindly taken me to an Asian buffet, hoping I could tell them if it was "authentic" or not (it was, if only that it was owned by the suburb's sole Chinese family). Standing in line for walnut shrimp, the kind that's deep fried and tossed in mayonaise, I overheard an elderly woman recommending it to her friend.
"That shrimp is divine," the woman said, "The Chinese are so creative. They put some kind of special cheese on it!"
I chuckled at the memory and became only vaguely aware that the needle in my arm was throbbing. This was the best way to donate blood, with a good lighthearted woman who knew her way into a hard to find veins not to mention keep the donor talking and thinking about other things.
"Where are you from?" I asked, turning the conversation away from food.
"Mazatlan," she said.
It sounded familiar, and I asked if it was near Playa del Carmen, a beautiful Mexican beach town I'd once "studied" abroad in during a summer at community college.
She shook her head and immediately grabbed a paper towel and drew a poor but understandable map of her home country.
"Mazatlan is in Sinaloa," she said, pointing to a point in the middle of Mexico's west coast, "Playa del Carmen is in Quintana Roo, aaaalll the way on the other side, near the Gulf of Mexico, by Cancun. It's so beautiful, right?"
I nodded in agreement. I had heard similar things about Mazatlan and she confirmed this.
"Oh yes, it's beautiful too. Also a beach town, with tourists... my mother still lives there so I gonna take my kids there for two weeks this summer. They gonna speak their Spanish because they don't speak it with me no more at home!"
That is important, I said, and assured her that her kids would thank her some day, because my mother insisted on doing the same thing, taking us back to Taiwan each summer since we were toddlers.
"They don't really like Mexico," she sighed, "They think it's so hot, and you know, it's not as clean as here," she waved her arms as though gesturing to the spotless clinic.
Behind her, a plasma agitator rumbled and whirred. The Asian man, still the only other donor, stared unblinking at the screen. An obese blonde administrator took a seat in her office and started clacking away on the computer. Our eyes met and we exchanged smiles. I noticed there was a miniature Oscar statuette on her desk, and various doodads I couldn't make out from where I sat. She returned her eyes to the screen. I became aware of the other conversations going on around us - a hipster Asian guy not much older than I was talking about some concert he'd gone to and how he couldn't wait for a show he was going to next week. Two other blood techs lounged in rolly chairs with their legs crossed and chatted in low voices, bored tones.
"But you're right," she said, bending down to check on the bag, "They will appreciate it some day. And they gotta spend time with grandma, you know?"
She has two kids - a ten year old boy and eight year old girl - with a Mexican man she met twenty years ago in the US when she came to learn English. He was from a small inland town I've now forgotten the name of and studied at the same school.
"We got married back in Mazatlan," she said.
"Your wedding must have been gorgeous."
She nodded, smiling at the memory, "Oh it was, it was so beautiful. So so so beautiful."
Back in Mexico she was certified as a phlebotomist and found work mostly in gynecological offices, not with a huge-nonprofit whose blood came mostly from volunteers. Her husband became a machinist, and after five years the couple decided it was time to move to the U.S. permanently, to get better jobs and raise their children.
"It was so nice," she said of life in Mazatlan, "The beaches, the community, but it was so humid. And here is so much better for the kids. But you know I never want them to forget where they're from."
Her husband has plans to take the kids to his hometown next summer.
"I told him, 'Yes, we gonna take them next year.' But whoo!" she rolled her eyes, "There's no beach there so my kids probably gonna go crazy! They complain when they're in Mazatlan: 'Mama it's so hot! Mama the mosquitoes!' but I think some day they're gonna miss this time."
I remembered a single childhood midnight in Taipei, when my mom, brother and I were all so hot (my mother didn't believe in sleeping with the airconditioning on) that sleep seemed impossible. She shook us out of a sweaty stupor and whispered, "Let's go out for popsicles."
We ate dripping red bean milk popsicles in the guest bathroom so as not to disturb the rest of the house, my mother sitting on the toilet with one foot resting on the edge of the bathtub. It is a single memory, but a perfect representation of "that time."
Something beeped below my arm and she came to my side, bringing up a bulging bag filled with burgundy liquid. I was finished.
I realized I didn't know her name, this woman who liked sushi rolls with Philadelphia cheese and who believed in refreshing, yearly, her children's relationship with their heritage.
"Imelda," she said, bringing up the bulging bag to inspect, "but I don't have so many shoes like Imelda Marcos."
She squeezed the bag a few times as though examining a too-ripe mango and I thought, oddly, of water beds. I looked at the bag, feeling comfortably detached from it as Imelda deftly pulled the needle out, pressed a cotton pad to the puncture and wrapped a stretchy, sticky red bandage around my arm in a big X, instructing me to avoid heavy lifting and to eat plenty of iron rich foods. I thought ahead to a yet uneaten plate of lamb chops, courtesy of cousin Andrew and felt the cold clinic air hit my legs as she lifted the blanket off me with a flourish.
"You're all done," she smiled, "You did a good job."
I smiled back, thanking Imelda for a perfectly enjoyable donating experience.
"Oh not at all," she said, then smacked her lips, "Thanks for sharing your meal with me. I'm still thinking about that Chateaubriand."
The Week's End
Just to give you a head's up, I'm not done talking about Gatsby. A book report ensues, but Sunday evenings ought be kept light.
This weekend I gave two hours of my time to the Cal Alumni Association, participating in an interview panel for the university's yearly leadership awards. I felt, in general, inadequate to the confident, bright-eyed candidates who were variations of spectacularly over-achieving high school seniors. Perhaps you know the type: cross-country running, MUN and Red Cross and Debate Team Presidents, who-also-started-their-own-bracelet-making-charity-in-their-spare-hours-and-raised-thousands-of-dollars-for-orphanages-in-South-Africa-while-maintaining-a-unweighted-GPA-of-4.0. When the interviews were finished, they had opportunity to ask us questions about Berkeley. I could only say, lamely, to not uh, overextend themselves.
One girl who will without question receive one of 200 or so scholarships (out of thousands of applicants) tutored, was active in five clubs, ran as cross country captain, had formed a small business to benefit charity and held a part-time job at a restaurant while also cooking for her family at home because her single mother couldn't. She nodded politely while sizing me up, no doubt thinking, "Silly lady. I'm going to conquer the world. Overextension of self is expected, but my six mile daily runs should keep me in fighting form."
To make myself feel better I watched Newport Beach cougars hit on my friend's boyfriend at a bar called, ironically, The Quiet Woman, (cougars are stealthy, but once they attack, become quite noisy. The bar is now a top OC attraction in my book) and on Saturday morning, attended a graduation party where a friend from Australia celebrated her Bachelor's in English from an American University and was congratulated on being accepted to Oxford University, decidedly English. We ate tacos by her aunt's sparkling pool, which proved to be so enticing for my friend's niece that, whenever our eyes were turned away, the child would cast off all her clothes and jump in. Fully clothed and at the table, a well-dressed older gentleman named Sunny mentioned he'd seen a very good movie by Mira Nair called "The Reluctant Fundamentalist."
"It was thought-provoking," he said, leaning back after contributing to the conversation, "It really dove into these issues about citizenship and identity."
I remarked that the movie titles they were tossing about were very highbrow.
"So you'll blog about this then," commented my Australian friend, turning to others at the table and mentioning that I wrote a blog called, well, you know.
"Yes," I said.
At the same table I was reunited with an old writing professor who admitted, after I asked her how the writing was going, that teaching and writing were, if you allowed them, mutually exclusive. She gave me something to think about.
I returned home, stood in the kitchen watching my father chop up a watermelon, took a pretty photo of said watermelon...
...then made fancy dinner plans with friends in LA, at Rivera, (get the banana leaf wrapped pork shoulder, tortillas florales (seriously, tortillas with flowers charred onto it, and this magical thing called "indian butter" which is, I think, guacamole mixed with illegal substances. A cream based opiate, perhaps), and for your sweet tooth (or separate stomach, as I have) the Spanish Olive Oil Cake, pictured below and the Xochimilco which is a crazy word for Chile Chocolate Cake with Avocado Mousse and lime pepper sauce. I instagrammed this too:
...all the while this song kept playing and replaying in the back of my mind. I felt sheepish, but was ultimately unable to fight the current that is Instagram.
Next Wednesday, I visit the American south for the very first time (unless you count a stopover in Atlanta's airport many moons ago) to a town famous for its namesake dance:
Now it's time for a swim before heading out to watch "Star Trek: Into Darkness" with my fellow Cumberbatchians. Check out the trailer below, but stay away from Cumberbatch. He's mine.
This will be the only time I ever write this on my blog (until "Star Trek III" comes out): Live Long and Prosper. And enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
This weekend I gave two hours of my time to the Cal Alumni Association, participating in an interview panel for the university's yearly leadership awards. I felt, in general, inadequate to the confident, bright-eyed candidates who were variations of spectacularly over-achieving high school seniors. Perhaps you know the type: cross-country running, MUN and Red Cross and Debate Team Presidents, who-also-started-their-own-bracelet-making-charity-in-their-spare-hours-and-raised-thousands-of-dollars-for-orphanages-in-South-Africa-while-maintaining-a-unweighted-GPA-of-4.0. When the interviews were finished, they had opportunity to ask us questions about Berkeley. I could only say, lamely, to not uh, overextend themselves.
One girl who will without question receive one of 200 or so scholarships (out of thousands of applicants) tutored, was active in five clubs, ran as cross country captain, had formed a small business to benefit charity and held a part-time job at a restaurant while also cooking for her family at home because her single mother couldn't. She nodded politely while sizing me up, no doubt thinking, "Silly lady. I'm going to conquer the world. Overextension of self is expected, but my six mile daily runs should keep me in fighting form."
To make myself feel better I watched Newport Beach cougars hit on my friend's boyfriend at a bar called, ironically, The Quiet Woman, (cougars are stealthy, but once they attack, become quite noisy. The bar is now a top OC attraction in my book) and on Saturday morning, attended a graduation party where a friend from Australia celebrated her Bachelor's in English from an American University and was congratulated on being accepted to Oxford University, decidedly English. We ate tacos by her aunt's sparkling pool, which proved to be so enticing for my friend's niece that, whenever our eyes were turned away, the child would cast off all her clothes and jump in. Fully clothed and at the table, a well-dressed older gentleman named Sunny mentioned he'd seen a very good movie by Mira Nair called "The Reluctant Fundamentalist."
"It was thought-provoking," he said, leaning back after contributing to the conversation, "It really dove into these issues about citizenship and identity."
I remarked that the movie titles they were tossing about were very highbrow.
"So you'll blog about this then," commented my Australian friend, turning to others at the table and mentioning that I wrote a blog called, well, you know.
"Yes," I said.
At the same table I was reunited with an old writing professor who admitted, after I asked her how the writing was going, that teaching and writing were, if you allowed them, mutually exclusive. She gave me something to think about.
I returned home, stood in the kitchen watching my father chop up a watermelon, took a pretty photo of said watermelon...
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| That is a lot of watermelon when it's all blown up like this. |
.JPG) |
| Spanish Olive Oil cake with creme fraiche ice cream and raspberry sorbet at Rivera. Photo heavily edited with an amazing app called Afterlight. |
...all the while this song kept playing and replaying in the back of my mind. I felt sheepish, but was ultimately unable to fight the current that is Instagram.
Next Wednesday, I visit the American south for the very first time (unless you count a stopover in Atlanta's airport many moons ago) to a town famous for its namesake dance:
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This will be the only time I ever write this on my blog (until "Star Trek III" comes out): Live Long and Prosper. And enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
Pop Culture Blather: The Great Gatsby
I don't know what happened in the tenth grade when we read The Great Gatsby, but I remember little of it aside from the image of Gatsby dead in the pool, having worked his whole life for a girl who was worth less than a bunch of daisies. I guess I remember too that careless girls like Daisy, for whom the world bent over backwards, really did exist. Maybe that was the whole point.
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| "Are all these flowers for me?" |
"Very much."
"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about - things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was god knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in the world, a beautiful little fool."
I'm rereading the book now, precisely because the movie wasn't great (I have beef with Carey Mulligan's Daisy, who seemed way too genuine and not nearly as careless as Fitzgerald paints her), though I do recommend it for aesthetic reasons, most of them musical; the soundtrack (you can hear Lana del Rey's "Young and Beautiful" below") might be the third CD I will ever purchase. Visually too, it’s a stunning film. Luhrmann exaggerates the colors, the sheen, shine and sparkle of everything from the chrome on Gatsby’s garish yellow car to the shining eyelids and thighs of the sultry speakeasy flappers. Gatsby’s monstrous house and bacchanalian parties seem almost cartoonish in their dreamlike colors and dimensions, but that's what makes it memorable. But you miss out if you rely on the film alone to understand the story, and it makes my heart glad to know that sometimes the original - the written original - is the only way to get to the meat of the story and its characters.
Which explains too why when writing the screenplay, Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pierce were compelled to lift some lines straight from the novel:
When Nick, played by Tobey Maguire hangs out with Tom Buchanan, his mistress Myrtle Wilson and her sleezy, raucous crowd for the first time, he takes a drunken breather and looks out Myrtle's apartment window. In the film Nick sees a sober version of himself standing at the street corner looking up back at him - that was a nice touch. Good job Baz.
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible vanity of life.
And when he first meets Gatsby (played by Leonardo DiCaprio who is a great Gatsby):
He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of external reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
In any case, I'm happy to have watched the movie because it motivated me to revisit the novel. Now on to some trivia:
While Nick Carraway has been accused of being secretly in love with Gatsby the (friendly, platonic) chemistry between actors Leo and Tobey go way back in a friendship I find quite admirable, especially in Hollywood.
Scrubs:
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| If that's not cute, I don't know what is. |
Bosses! Not to mention Leo being a modern-day Gatsby, though neither man made GQ's list. (Really? Mark Zuckerberk? Gatsbys must have style).
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| "We have scruff now." |
Designed by Spanish artist Francis Cugat in 1925 before Fitzgerald finished writing the book. Some other great Gatsby covers, though I prefer the original:
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| This one is a little creepy. |
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| This one is definitely creepy. |
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| Is that ketchup? |
Laughing Hysterically at Dinner
My birthday dinner with friends was held at The Orange Hill Restaurant, located way up on a hill that over looks Orange County. Stepping inside, my cousin Michelle said, "The last time I came here was ten years ago, for prom."
My brother and his wife were supposed to have their wedding reception there. My dad and I had rushed around last fall trying to secure the Evening Star Room and adjacent patio and when we'd done so, placed a non-refundable deposit for Sunday, July 7th, a grand time to have a wedding because the ceremony would be held outdoors against the setting sun and afterwards we'd all be ushered into the dining room with panoramic windows of the view.
Then some things changed. My brother and his wife are now having their reception in Taiwan which left us with a massive question: how do you finagle back the non-refundable deposit? Well, you can't. But you can host "up to four events," the restaurant manager told us firmly.
"Have a good time," my dad said, when I suggested I have a birthday dinner there, "tell your friends to order whatever they want."
So we did, and I spent most of the night looking like this:
Amy was kind enough to put my hair up in a sock bun ten minutes before we left, but from some angles I like I looked a little too kung fu master. It didn't matter; I always look better in person anyway. I had a good time scaring people at other tables, gentle families who wanted to take their mother somewhere nice with fish on the menu and dim lighting. Except the guy behind me couldn't tell a story without peppering it with the F word. My poor friends, I hope they had a good time too, though most of the time they were probably thinking, "What is she laughing at?"
In calmer times, we managed to catch the sunset and pester a kind, patient waiter to take multiple versions of this photo for us.
Mostly I was laughing because that's what I do when I'm happy.
My brother and his wife were supposed to have their wedding reception there. My dad and I had rushed around last fall trying to secure the Evening Star Room and adjacent patio and when we'd done so, placed a non-refundable deposit for Sunday, July 7th, a grand time to have a wedding because the ceremony would be held outdoors against the setting sun and afterwards we'd all be ushered into the dining room with panoramic windows of the view.
Then some things changed. My brother and his wife are now having their reception in Taiwan which left us with a massive question: how do you finagle back the non-refundable deposit? Well, you can't. But you can host "up to four events," the restaurant manager told us firmly.
"Have a good time," my dad said, when I suggested I have a birthday dinner there, "tell your friends to order whatever they want."
So we did, and I spent most of the night looking like this:
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| Thanks for this, Charlene. |
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| Amy: "Betty, you're scaring me." Notice the empty plates of dessert. |
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| Jaime: "I didn't even say anything." |
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| Twenty-seven with some friends, some cousins, all family. |
On Selfies
Courage sent me this link yesterday, after telling me her father had spent the evening taking selfies following the purchase of a new iPhone.
"It was weird," she said, "My dad was so into it. He like, moved the phone around for a long time trying to get the best angle."
I laughed, imagining the awkward Asian man smile and the self-denial that comes with selfies at a certain age, or any age. I'm not one for selfies, mostly because the selfies never hold up to how good I (think) I look in real life, but when I do take them (in the privacy of my room in the not so dark depths of boredom), the resulting images are always sobering. Do I really have that many moles (or "fly shit," as my aunt calls them) on my face? Yes. I plan to get them lasered off some dark winter when I will be antisocial. Am I imagining the right side of my jaw being more developed than the left? No. But asymmetrical faces are more interesting, right? Crow's feet, at twenty-seven? Really?! Sadly - or happily, yes.
But maybe I'm missing the point of the selfie, which at the base of it, is self-love. How else do you explain those people on Facebook (cough *Taiwanese/Korean/Japanese FOB girls e.g. my sister-in-law) who unabashedly post selfie after selfie without the slightest whiff of embarrassment?
"This is me," the selfies say, "Love it or hate it, this is me."
"I see," I think, "Thank you for sharing."
The flip side is of course that the selfie represents the opposite of self-love.
"How sad that she or he (because men take selfies too, and it is like ten thousand times less okay than if a girl does it - just one of the unspoken laws of the universe) needs the affirmation."
We put up our faces to be judged, hoping that our friends will take the bait, be kind, and compliment what we hope are our best angles (eyes up, face down, camera up and up), but the selfie is just that: bait for the compliments we're fishing for. Compliments equal affirmation equals reasons to go on living for a few more days. Okay, that's a little severe, but you get the gist.
And then there's kind of a middle ground, a boring place to be, but a place nonetheless because it exists. I find myself standing there sometimes when I'm dressed well and my makeup is done and my skin looks brighter than usual. It happens before I'm about to leave for a party or some other event where other people will see me and (hopefully) compliment me.
It takes a tremendous amount of nonchalance to post a selfie. I care what people think, but it's a weird magic that happens once the photo is posted: you think "Damnit'sagoodphotowhocaresI'mgonnapostit," all in one breath because it's akin to taking a cold plunge into cyberspace, where you don't know if the selfie, essentially your self, will be sneered or cheered. I don't recommend getting used to it. I haven't.
But when all's been shot and done, I realize that I keep a personal blog. Which, if you think about it, is one giant, long-running, verbal selfie.
"It was weird," she said, "My dad was so into it. He like, moved the phone around for a long time trying to get the best angle."
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| "An iPhone would have made this so much easier." -Sofonisba Anguissola, 1556 |
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| My kind of selfie. |
"This is me," the selfies say, "Love it or hate it, this is me."
"I see," I think, "Thank you for sharing."
The flip side is of course that the selfie represents the opposite of self-love.
"How sad that she or he (because men take selfies too, and it is like ten thousand times less okay than if a girl does it - just one of the unspoken laws of the universe) needs the affirmation."
We put up our faces to be judged, hoping that our friends will take the bait, be kind, and compliment what we hope are our best angles (eyes up, face down, camera up and up), but the selfie is just that: bait for the compliments we're fishing for. Compliments equal affirmation equals reasons to go on living for a few more days. Okay, that's a little severe, but you get the gist.
And then there's kind of a middle ground, a boring place to be, but a place nonetheless because it exists. I find myself standing there sometimes when I'm dressed well and my makeup is done and my skin looks brighter than usual. It happens before I'm about to leave for a party or some other event where other people will see me and (hopefully) compliment me.
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| "Like" away! Perfectly distanced selfie. If you're wondering, yes, my room IS that pink. |
But when all's been shot and done, I realize that I keep a personal blog. Which, if you think about it, is one giant, long-running, verbal selfie.
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