I definitely did not expect my update post to be delayed this long, but life really hit me hard in the face this year, as it did to millions of others, across every continent. The year-long pandemic has sharpened the burgeoning mass hatred vilified by the Trump administration into a willing spear ready to "better" the future with the past.
This is the same nation that infused their Founding soil with blood and by blood and through blood their white oppressive force with their pointedly ignorant racism and most of all their utter complacency... Is still felt today in the blood of Black people being murdered for being Black. So yeah, I've been pretty stressed out with the truth of how morally corrupt racial capitalism is and will still be for generations on if we don't step up collectively against xenophobia, islamophobia, productivity and its attached corporate values, fatphobia, and every other discrimination out there. Enough.
Some days my thoughts go one spiral too far and suddenly, I feel like I'm falling helplessly into a terrifying future robbed from our generational cribs and I can't do anything about it. That's false, though; I can do something about it. It's just so exhausting sometimes. But I have to keep going on. And so it goes. (Could you tell I've been reading a lot of Vonnegut? I'm reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut.)
2021 is shaping up to be pretty eventful, or I'm determined for it to be eventful anyway. After spending close to a year of near 24-hour isolation and very little contact with loved one and friends because, you know, depression and unemployment aren't exactly caffeine for the soul... I am now ready. For what? I don't know. I just know that whatever I have going on right now, just isn't it buddy.
A few things of note that 2020 brought:
1. Time seems contained only in my head, and days bleed into weeks bleed into months. I can't complain, because I truly am still in a very privileged position in contrast with so many others. Having re-installed Instagram and re-activated my accounts earlier this year, I found a surge of Asian-themed and influenced youth advocacy groups, that are now called the Youth Asian Colation (Y.A.C.), on the 'Gram (Instagram). Founded by 13 online Asian group hubs that serve to connect the youth community with organizations that they identify with, Y.A.C. seeks to educate others on Asian perspectives through Asian American narratives, and to empower Asian American youths that may not have seen Asian role models growing up.
2. The advocacy organizations I'm actively involved in, as well as their respective Instagram handles, are:
Asians in the Arts (@asians_in_the_arts), as an Editor as well as sporadic zine contributor
Asian Advocates (@asian_advocates_), as a Research Director as well as active staff writer
Asian and LGBTQ+ (@asianandlgbtq) as a Writer-Research Manager as well as active staff writer
Even though these three groups started pretty recently (during the pandemic no less; ~ May 2020), their efforts to build a network to reach young Asian folk that care about the cultures, arts, nuances, histories, Asian artists and academics that are not mainstream/popular within this white hegemony of a society, and so forth, is inspiring and truly one of its kind. I am very thankful to have found these groups and will continue supporting and contributing my time and effort because showing up matters, and advocacy matters. I met my best friend May Yee when we were 8 because I stood up for her to some kid trying to get her to chug orange juice. May Yee was in tears, and even though she was a new transfer to our primary school and she hadn't even glanced at me once, I knew immediately that I needed to do something. My quick 8-year-old assessment was that I needed to use my best quality to protect the deserving, and what other quality do I possess but the gift of the gap? And so we became best friends ever since my loud outburst that drove the bully away, and we still are best buds today.
3. I thoroughly enjoy being involved with a community that I can be myself with the most, and, weirdly enough, it has brought me closer than ever to my home country of Malaysia, from all the way here in Columbus, Ohio. Me and my home town where I grew up, my street, the itchy grass and wet dirt and fresh chillies glinting in the morning light with the birds loudly exclaiming HELLO! HELLO! WAKE UP! WAKE UP! ANOTHER DAY! ANOTHER DAY!; we have our distrusts, but home is home, and it will always call to me. I don't think distance necessarily makes the heart grow fonder; rather, distance changes your perspectives on things, on time, and on people. Your judgment and critique of reality shifts imperceptibly but shift it does, and so it goes. I miss my family, and am saddened I cannot be with them in February of next year for Chinese New Year, but I am still happy with my bittersweet decision found within the crumbling remains of what COIVID-19 wrought, which was to make the most of the time to myself. I finally "found" the time (as if it magically appeared under my bed, a reverse-monster, terrified of me. Imagine that!) to seek what thrills me, and that is to learn, and to commit to knowledge that piques my interest when presented with it as an option to pursue. Glorious.
4. I completed 5 Coursera courses:
Buddhism and Modern Psychology by Dr. Robert Wright (Princeton University)
Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy by Donald Hornstein (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
COVID-19 Contact Tracing by Emily Gurley, PhD, MPH (Johns Hopkins University)
International Women's Health and Human Rights by Anne Firth Murray (Stanford University)
Queering Identities: LGBTQ+ Sexuality and Gender Identity by Jacob McWilliams, PhD and K. Mohrman, PhD (University of Colorado, Boulder)
And 2 Udemy courses:
Digital Photography for Beginners with DSLR Cameras by Villiers Steyn
Inside Your Dog's Mind with Victoria Stillwell by Victoria Stillwell
And I‘m currently on a 217 day streak on Duolingo for Spanish (phew!).
Also, I started coding on replit.com with the help of a 16-year-old former Kode With Klossy code camper! She's super cool, and I was connected with her through my online Asian advocacy groups that I am a member of on apps Discord and Slack. Our sessions were on Zoom, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Because of my great coding experience with her, I practice and tweak my coding every now and then (definitely not recently) both on replit.com as well as on codeacademy.com.
I was also a participant of a 6-week series lecture hosted by U.C. Davis in conjunction with the university's Asian American Studies Department, the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, and the People's Collective of Justice and Liberation, with the theme of Justice and Liberation in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was an intensive political education program highlighting the struggles that Black, Brown, Indigenous, the diverse Asian diaspora, Spanish, Hispanic, and Latinx bodies, and so forth, face daily living in the same country and reality as that of the elite white billionaires and white-run corporations. There is language discrimination and poverty everywhere around us, and most of those issues are interconnected with deeper ones that screams of the lack of family or public support, and basic human compassion. Racism is happening and people need to accept that fact and move forward with reparations, in any form. Silence is still tacit approval... Anyway I had a certificate from them in the mail for my Zoom participation and weekly readings/write-ups, which was very cool. Like the good academic child I am, I saved all the .pdfs and articles in my Google drive, for future Jaime (always for future Jaime).
5. I won a Halloween writing contest with my short story about WW2 and 9/11 that I originally wrote for my Western Civilization class at HELP University, in the American Degree Program department back in 2015. I get a Funko prize, and can't wait to show it off when it arrives in the mail!
6. Driving 10 hours straight to North Carolina (and 10 hours back to Columbus) earlier this year with the Pastors has robbed me of all fear of driving, good riddance! I am so glad I went on that vacation, primarily because that instigated my rapid progress towards the independence I now find within myself and within my capabilities.
7. I went to Knoxville, Tennessee, to visit Amy, my old friend and undergrad lab mate. I stayed with her and her partner for a week, and visited many Knoxville heritage sites, and more importantly (jk haha), I rekindled my love for PokémonGo (thanks Amy!). Pokémon played such a significant part in my childhood growing up as it was always so colorful to watch on TV and eventually explore the games with (thanks Nintendo!), and so began my slow but steady Pokémon card collection, traded for and expanded at every Trade Day at the local daycare center I was in for most of my young and adolescent life.
8. I have had my patience tried beyond... What I imagined my future would ever turn out to be, but I am happy with my perseverance and tenacity to continue reigniting my happiness. My will to live a life fully content and happy is due to my ironically Buddhist belief: that no one and nothing matters, but that everything is also nothing. So since nothing matters, and you are nothing, instead of just disappearing and becoming an empty void, imagine that you perceive this and understand that you are also everything. Any way you want to spin it, in the end, you die, so my Absurdist philosophy kicks in and wants to make the best of it before I turn off. Dying used to be a thought I could not possibly bear, but now, can, and do. And so it goes.
9. Jenkins had his Bilateral Tibial Leveling Osteotomy surgery exactly a week ago and has healed considerably much since we first picked him up from MedVet in Worthington. His surgeon was Dr. Benjamino, and Jenkins is on the mend and getting better and more and more active with each passing day. I love this little brindle dog so very much, and every dollar spent on him to fix his torn knee ligaments (it's akin to Bilateral ACL Tears for people) is a dollar more than well spent and well deserved. I've never met another dog so sweet, gentle, and as lovely as my good boy Jenkins is, and everyone that has the pleasure of meeting his pure innocent being wholeheartedly agrees with me (I know this because I ask every time, haha).
10. I have read 25 books so far this year! Mohammad and I came up with a list of books to read every month since March when I came back from Malaysia, with themes in conjunction with monthly heritage celebrations, and I can't thank him enough for his participation in this reading challenge of ours. I would have never had the courage to do half the things I have without Mohammad's support, which includes picking up a book again and continuing to read books outside of our monthly list. You can follow my reading progress on TheStoryGraph, which functions just like Goodreads, but doesn't promote Jeff Bezos and his affiliates ie. Amazon, Kindle, Audible etc.
Conclusion:
I am very happy with my growth and maturity this past year. I have learned to hold my tongue when it does not serve me, and I've learned to lean on my community of close-knit friends. I am proud of myself for spending the time I did to Revalue, Reflect, and Redefine (another set of 3Rs that we should all commit to, the first set being of course Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, for a greener lifestyle), and I hope to do a meditation retreat, amongst many other wonderful things, at some point in the near future.
America has been... Interesting, unkind sometimes, but mostly neutral exploratory territory with lots of room to think like a boring Stoic philosopher, and I've decided I want to stay in the States and contribute as much as I can, while I can, and bloom within this wonderful Asian online cohort that mirrors my radical, anti-imperialistic, revolutionary, queer Chinese-Malaysian heart.
Here's to 2021, folks. ✨❄️
[GIF description: A well-groomed cat with a white underbelly and face and dark grey stripes everywhere else is shown jumping into a small white cardboard box. The cat jump jumps head-first into the box and with its bodyweight manages and gravity manages to tilt the box on its back. The cat's reflexes allows it to turn its body the right way up right before landing. This GIF mostly depicts a neutral light brown wood paneled floor, but dark brown shaggy carpet is seen peeking on the bottom left of the GIF. There is also what appears to be blue-purple thin foam tiles on the right side of the GIF.]
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