Shanghai Vixen

I’ve been awol because I’ve been working feverishly - and procrastinating more feverishly - on my fellowship applications. One must be mailed tomorrow, the other on Thursday, but I want them both sealed and forgotten before bed tonight, since I fly back to Cali that day and have people to see stuff to do tomorrow. It’s only 3am. Merely midnight in California.

These require two essays, a personal statement and a study proposal. The latter I still need to expand more for fellowship number two, which allows a longer word count. So, here’s my personal statement:

Shanghai was a sleepy little town when I first disembarked here in October 1998, fresh from college. My plan was to spend a few months teaching there before returning to Beijing. Things did not go as planned. I had developed a fascination with the Beijing rock scene while studying there in 1997, and I arrived determined to find out what was happening musically in Shanghai. I soon was hanging out with a bunch of scruffy Shanghainese rockers and their equally scruffy artist friends.

I was fascinated and impressed by what my friends were trying to do: expressing their experiences by exploring these “foreign” formats then still viewed as suspicious by their families and society. I grew frustrated at the refrain that Shanghai had no original culture, an assumption made because no one was writing, in English or Chinese, about local art and music. So, I started writing about them, and an arts journalist was born. Personally and professionally, I grew up alongside Shanghai’s cultural scene. My career priority has remained to support Shanghai’s artists by telling their stories, and the support and encouragement have been mutual.

In the late 1990s, there was little international media interest in Shanghai, and only one public English website dedicated to the city. I did a few pieces for that site, and as the only writer familiar with this very underground local scene my opportunities expanded along with Shanghai’s English media offerings.

A year of low-paid freelancing for shifty start-ups culminated in being offered a job editing one of them. The online magazine ChinaNow was a product of the Internet boom, and the brainchild of an American and a US-educated Shanghainese. In my year and a half there as city editor, my coverage scope broadened to encompass theater, history, travel and entertainment. Working with freelancers was as educational and rewarding as it was frustrating, and trained me well for a freelance career.

The endeavor folded with the dot-com bubble, leaving me with several months of unpaid salary, which shortened my initial attempt at freelancing fulltime. I reluctantly accepted employment with the Russian newswire Interfax’s China Bureau editing their general business section, which unfortunately was soon thereafter pared to focus on the energy and metals sectors. My assistants and I churned out a minimum of twenty-four stories a day, mostly translated directly from Chinese industry dailies rather than originally reported. I wriggled early mornings and occasional long lunches to continue doing some arts freelancing, squirreling away clippings and savings so I would have more options when I quit.

I did not initially expect to become a permanent freelancer, but no offers came that were as appealing as what I was doing. I gradually established a list of steady clients and became addicted to the variety that comes with a successful freelance career. Juggling a dozen different publications and as many diverse topics forestalls the repetitive boredom that dooms many a foreign correspondent after a few years in a country. I cannot imagine ever getting bored with China. Frustrated? Yes. Bored? Never.

Freelancing also allows me to avoid doing the clichéd stories that dominate American news coverage of China, with the exoticism and gross generalization than I find patronizing of the audience and insulting to the subject. I have passed on several choice clippings because editors wanted me to sexy it up at the price of journalistic accuracy. Yes, China is a crazily complex place, wonderful and overwhelming and sometimes heart-breaking, but oversimplifying it into the stereotypes of old versus new, traditional versus modern, rich versus poor that many editors and fresh of the boat foreign correspondents are so enamored with misses the point and the place so entirely.

What freelancing does not allow me to do is to focus exclusively on my original niches of cultural and social topics. Being a full-time arts writer requires independent means, and social journals pay even worse than art magazines. Well-paying stories can be an unhappily necessary distraction from the fun stuff, but their necessity has also broadened my exposure.

Three years ago, a friend of one of my former ChinaNow freelancers contacted me about writing for Fairchild, the publishers of WWD and other fashion imprints. Knowing and caring nothing about fashion, I was dispatched to interview Giorgio Armani as my first assignment. Fairchild pays well and on time, an iron rice bowl to subsidize the stories I care about, and my editors are total professionals. Moreover, the direct practicality of trade magazine writing, even for an industry as froufy as fashion, has improved my reporting sensibilities in other fields.

I admit I enjoy the easy access past the red ropes, the surrealism of mingling with the glitterati who have emerged almost overnight in my once sleepy little town. It adds one more perspective, one more snapshot to my album of urban change. I have front row seats for almost every aspect of Shanghainese life: from designers, models and movie stars to the old ladies in my lane to the teenagers at Taekwondo class to the musicians and artists I have known from day one.

Additionally, in 2002 I co-founded the Shanghai Foreign Correspondent Club, and I served as its vice president until 2005, growing it into a 150-member organization. I remain very involved with it, and am proud of having helped establish a journalistic community in Shanghai.

I consider myself a community journalist as much as a foreign correspondent, and an immigrant as much as an expatriate. I am trying to write more about the rest of China, of Asia, of the world, while continuing to diversify by subject matter. I hope to eventually shift to writing books rather than articles, allowing more depth than the thousand word feature allows, and to spend more time in the United States, but Shanghai and its arts will always be my foundation, and I look forward to seeing what will happen here next.

I am glad to see this point finally get made in the Shanghai press, and also surprised. It marks an 180 to criticize one of the municipalities’ poorly conceived development projects. Yay.

ASPIRING artists have been squeezed out of the city’s newly created art spaces because of soaring rents, a top designer has warned.

In an interview with Shanghai Daily on Tuesday, Wu Zhiqiang, chief designer of the Shanghai Creative Industry Center and the 2010 World Expo, took aim at the old factories and warehouses converted into upscale art studios, saying Shanghai “misinterpreted” their development.

“Many of the so-called creative zones have turned out to be over-luxurious,” said Wu, who is also dean of Tongji University’s school of architecture and urban planning. “It seems we have focused too much on imitating other’s form, but we didn’t really get the essence.”

Transforming deserted factory buildings and warehouses into modern art workshops and creative industry buildings proved a popular way to preserve old architecture in the West during the 20th century.

“Spacious sites with low rent and low labor costs make it possible for unknowns to produce great innovative ideas. But the model was misinterpreted in Shanghai,” Wu said.

Since 2005, the city has developed 75 creative zones in disused buildings, including Bridge 8 on Jianguo Road M. and M50 on Moganshan Road along Suzhou Creek.

Rents in the zones have soared in recent years.

In 2000, daily rent in M50 was only 0.4 yuan (five US cents) to 0.5 yuan a square meter on average. It now stands at about four yuan.

Rents in some of the more well-known zones have even reached eight yuan to 16 yuan per square meter, on a par with some downtown central business district office buildings.

“The rent is unbelievably high. Almost no single young artist can afford it,” said Sun Xiaojian, who gave up his studio in a converted factory to move to an office building in Pudong New Area.

Jochen Schuster, a visiting architecture professor at Dusseldorf University of Applied Sciences, said it was good for the city to find connections between old buildings and modern art, but zones should be made more suitable for young designers, rather than already successful names.

I am comfortably ensconced at my friend Xiao Xu’s Brooklyn flat. It’s a great little neighborhood, and around the block from Tom’s Diner of musical fame. I went there yesterday on my own; today I met a friend there because it was a safe landmark, and they remembered me. I like that sort of neighborhood feel, although as a traveller I feel I ought to be more anonymous. It’s strange, when I’m a tourist random people ask me for directions, I must look like I know where I’m going, even when I’m totally lost. I must project confidence. The funniest is when people start asking me directions in Shanghai, then stop when they register belatedly that I’m white; they start to apologize, but I stop them and give them their directions.

This relates somehow to Sunday, when Happy took me to Flushing for dim sum. Chinese yelling “laowai!” at me in New York is equal parts disturbing, hilarious, and oddly comforting.

I left DC on Saturday for Long Island to visit Happy, one of my roommates and best friends from college. She’s doing an MD/PhD, living with her large German boyfriend who she met at her lab. (I’m amused that three of my closest friends in America are Taiwanese MD/PhDs. “Yeah, Taiwanese are just smart!” declares Happy in her cute Long Island lisp. “Or just particularly masochistic,” I suggest.)

I’ve seen Happy several times since graduation, but always really briefly. This 24 hours in Long Island was the longest I’ve spent with her these eight years, and it was really lovely. She’s wonderful fun: so energetic, enthusiastic, engaging.  She’s one of those people who just have a very sunny, positive disposition, but is also fabulously blunt, opinionated and unapologetic. She totally geeks out, and then laughs at herself for it.

It was Happy who first taught me to make dumplings, and I was happy to learn that she’s maintained dumpling making party tradition. (I tried, but Jifu early on declared it too much effort. Generally my Chinese cooking skills have declined as a result of living in China.) Interesting to revisit the trajectory of my gradual Asianification. We didn’t have time for a dumpling party this visit, which makes me a bit sad, but we instead stayed up half the night catching up, gossiping about our other friends, and generally blathering about everything. I’d say we’re both doing pretty darn well.

Many of my Taiwanese-American friends are quite aggressively biased against Mainland China and Mainland Chinese, and Happy used to be the worst of them, giving me grief for going to China instead of Taiwan and for dating Mainlanders. Happily, Happy has mellowed out a lot.

One college tale we revisited was that of The Suite, this group of really dweeby Asian-American guys who roomed together. I briefly dated one of them, a half-Chinese half-Filipino kid I dubbed Boy Toy; more precisely, I fooled around with him some once while bored then found him following me everywhere like a lost puppy. Happy dated another one of them, and then a third is King Yellow, one of my closest guy friends. All of them apart from King were lacking on the social skills factor, and their cleaving so tightly to each other created a rather unhealthy echo chamber. By their senior year, after I’d graduated, Happy recounts, they got so bad they had committee meetings to vet who the suitemates could date: acceptable candidates had to be at least half-Asian and speak Mandarin, no matter that none of them could do so. Fucking bananas. I remember Boy Toy sniping at me, “Why are you learning to speak Chinese when you’re not Chinese?” “Excuse me, are you English?” Yeah, he was just bitter ’cause he failed first-year Mandarin.

Ah, yes, the reasons most Asian-American guys have to go to poorer countries and flash that purty blue passport to get laid.

Starting with Happy, I’m staying all with Mandarin-speaking friends, which is nice as I was getting itchy having to remember to stick to English with Jersey Girl in DC. I am happiest operating in Chinglish. My current host is an extra bonus because she understands, if can’t speak, Shanghainese too. I met Xiao Xu in Shanghai - she lived there until age ten before emigrating to the US, and was back visiting her grandparents - but we also went to college together. She’s from a Shanghai literati family, and is far from the usual Chinese-American: majored in creative writing, works in the film industry, is outspokenly leftist, and can handle my martinis. We didn’t know each other all that well before this, and I am greatly enjoying getting to know her better. We talk about politics, art and literature, gender and race, and boys. After this, I’ll stay with an ex-Shanghailander in Boston and then my first year Chinese teacher in Providence. I think it’s cool that I’ve become good friends with some of my ex-professors; then again, most of my friends are pretty cool. I love my friends.

It is already two weeks into the new year. How time flies, at least when one’s being incessantly social and bopping around the largish country of America.

I do not make New Year’s resolutions; those are for weaker mortals. I make plans and priorities. On New Years day, while Peaceful Dragon clacked away on and occassionally swore under her breath at her animation project, I compiled my agenda. Seven for 2007: the matching number is pure chance, while the silly sloganeering suggests I have already been in America too long (“Five a Day!” “Death of a Dictator!”). They be:

1.      Keep up on articles

2.      Write book

3.      Fitness/weight

4.      Fellowships

5.      Relationships

6.      Finances

7.      Assorted fun

Breaking ‘em down:

1. Articles: It’s basic, my first priority must remain doing my job, doing it well, and maintaining a steady income flow. I don’t even need to pursue outlets/clients anymore, they pursue me, and at this point I actually have more suitors than I know what to do with. Which I recognize is a good problem to have.

2. Book: I have been not-writing this thing for four years now, and if I do not do it this year, I think I will give up on writing. My point of doing articles is to eventually shift into mostly doing books, but at this point in my career I am no longer the intrepid youngster but rather the seasoned expert. This bitch has no excuses left. “A journalist goes to China for a week and writes a book. A journalist goes to China for a month and writes an article. A journalist goes to China for a decade and writes nothing.” Well, not precisely, but quite true. Blogging is like wanking, articles are like casual sex, and books are like procreation. Eventually one does want to do something that counts.

3. Health: I’ve gotten really fat, and I’m disgusted with myself. Look, I’m neither the “I’m a whale! Wah!” nor the “I’m fine with how I am, pass the fries!” type. I’m a gym mouse who loves movement; but I also love food and booze, and tend to be busy. Rather, I am pretty honest with myself: I am healthy, athletic, and chubby. A size 6-8, I should be 0-4; currently I’m plump and pretty, I could be slim and gorgeous. And I am getting older and my body less forgiving. I don’t believe in diets, what worked the last time I lost 50 lbs (I only need 30 now) was simple awareness. I’m trying to keep to a 1500 calorie a day, and helping that by minimizing meat consumption. Exercising as much as possible, difficult while traveling, but once home I will target ten hours a week. The target is to lose ten kilos by March, then another five by June. It’s going well so far, I’m already down two, but I still can’t get into most of my clothes.

4. Fellowships: I will apply for two journalism fellowships this year. The applications are due in two weeks, and I have made insufficient progress on them. Getting one of these would be great momentum to my career, not to mention a great experience. But applying, and then completing it if I got one, will be a lot of work. And, the prospect of moving back to America has me terrified, which may be why I am procrastinating my applications. Perhaps I should focus more on the one in Palo Alto, where my two adopted brothers/best guy friends (Franzi and King Yellow) are, rather than the one in Boston, home to the boy-man and pseudo-friend who broke my heart most cruelly of the batch.

5. Relationships: Ha, speaking of. I need to actively make time for sex and romance (possibly but not necessarily in that order) in my life. I was single for two years for mostly two reasons: a. ice queen because too traumatized by Bjoston and Jifu, and, b. couldn’t be bothered. A has melted (mostly); B I need to work on, because I do have a busy job, lots of hobbies, and lots of friends. I realize I have, alas, become rather jaded (don’t knock the jade!) and cautious, but I want to maintain the gleeful, giddy, devil may care, charging of cliffs attitude I had in my twenties. Albeit mixed with the better-honed gut that comes with the thirties. Happy mediums: I won’t angst and anguish, “the sun’s gone dim, the sky’s gone black; for I loved him, and he didn’t love back”, but neither will I allow that brittle wall of indifference. I shall resist the default of “get bored, wander off” (more on that in another post), and give guys a chance.
I have two current contexts. With Biteable, I half want to be like: he’s a gorgeous man, a great fuck, and smart and interesting, excellent belated rebound, so what’s next? and half like: he’s so sweet, really interesting and successful and attractive yet self-effacing and considerate, I really like him, but he’s not emailing me much! Maybe I shouldn’t have fucked him on the second date! Compromise is trying, liking, keeping an open mind, but not losing sleep if he gets bored and wanders off. I also have an American crush, towards whom I vascillate between great affection and great annoyance. Towards him I must resist the impulse to erect the emotional barricades that come so naturally to me, including that greatest barricade of sarcasm. I remind myself that much though I wound easily, I also heal well. If slowly.

6. Finances: I need to stop living check to check. I need to squirrel more away, get insurance before I become older and more decrepit. I have always been so self-sufficient, driven by my own fear of destitution, my own “hunger”, that I have become used to it, but it does get tiring. I shall start saving more, being more organized and disciplined, and prepare to buy my own place by 2010. I could manage as is for the foreseeable future, but who knows whether or when shit will happen, plus I want to have children eventually and need to be able to manage their demands. I am in good shape generally, am hacking away at student loans and have negligible credit cards, but not being a mess hardly means I’m secure.

7. Fun! Like #1, this I’m already good at, but I want it to continue to be a priority in and major part of my life. Photography, languages, travel, Taekwondo, reading, drawing, painting, music, parties, much more yet to discover and savor, all the stuff I enjoy and that make me happy happy.

Makes for a good year, ya? Within these I have a lot of goalposts at end of March, then vague targets for June, vaguer yet for the rest of the year. And then I have longer term stuff.

For Taekwondo, I have a rough but realistic ambition of getting my blue belt by May, my blue-red by September, and my red! by year’s end. Then red-black by June ‘08, and black by the end of ‘08. This will go faster if things go well with Biteable, since hot sex afterwards is a good draw to class; if not, well, I was there first.

In general, starting this year I want to write a book per year. I already write 80,000 words a year in articles; if I do 500 a day I can do 180,000, and most books are 80-100,000. So! Otherwise, the life ambition is:

  2007 (30-31) Book 1 done, out

   2007-8 (31) Fellowship

   2008 (31-32) (early) Book 2 done, out

       Consultancy launched

   2009 (32-33) Book #3

       Hopefully settled relationship-wise

   2010 (33-34) Book #4

       Loans paid

       Buy property

       Time splitting between PRC and US

 2011 (34-35) Book #5

       Procreate

Somewhere in here I want to squeeze in desires including an intesive two to three month Arabic program in Cairo, a Southeast Asia photo book trip, plus loads of other excursions, for fun and/or work. I really do want to have kids, I crave family like some people crave chocolate or air, so have a lot I want to do before my ovaries and I get overripe. The biological clock can go fuck itself, I just want to live as, when, and how I think I want and need to.

It’s my last day in San Diego before flying to the East Coast. It’s been a nice stint.

LA ended well with a night at Theramini’s place: she did a game night with the 1980s edition of Trivial Pursuit. Considering I spent the 1980s in elementary schools and a no-tv fundamentalist family, I expected to lose wildly, especially up against a bunch of hipsters in their late 30s. I was teamed with Theramini, up against pairs of her crush and a colleague and a gay couple. Trust the gay couple to know the random pop culture stuff, although I was horrified when they weren’t sure of the difference between Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson. Team Mini lagged at first, but we made strides relying on the music and news categories, and ultimately we were beaten only marginally by Team Gay.

Afterwards, Theramini and I made our way to the nearby Tiki-Ti, a kischy LA institution. It was as delightfully bizarre as anticipated. On the walk back, there were about six young Latino kids loitering on the sidewalk, blocking our way and harassing us. “Hey there, fried rice!” We attempted to stride calmly through them, but shoved me, sending Theramini flying into the street. “Want me to beat him up for you?” one of them offered about the shover, which rather echoed my sentiments. “Why can’t you be nice and just leave us alone?!” Theramini reprimanded back, also echoing my sentiments. Then a cop car prowled by and our harassers melted away. The next day, we lunched with my Beijinger galleryist friend D to make up for her trying to join for trivia night and Tiki-Ti but being unable to find us due to my mobile not working. D and Theramini turned out to have some other mutual friends, typically enough. Our lunch was crashed by a goofy middle-aged white guy D knew, and he rambled at us about the book he was writing about Dharma. “Eastern stuff is, like, deep!” “Please tell me I’m not like that,” I pleaded to Theramini as we drove to Union Station for my southbound train. She reassured me that I am in little risk of becoming one of those.

San Diego’s highlight this time has been getting my childhood best friend Kaoru started at the gym. The La Jolla YMCA is sooooo nice, with a great gym, pool, and class schedule. The place is SO white, and it rather bruises my concept of San Diego as diverse and integrated; perhaps it was just my school crowd. Entertainingly, the Y is accross the street from Torrey Pines Elementary, where we first met over 21 years ago. We marvel, driving up, that we were once that tiny; in one’s mind, one has always been full-sized. Kaoru has always been chubby, her family are enthusiastic eaters, but she’s gotten particularly out of shape lately, and I worry about her. I’m really glad she’s confronting her hang-ups and taking care of herself.

And I enjoyed using that nice gym and pool, since I so jones for exercise when away from my Shanghai routine. There is no nicer high than the limp exhilaration after two hours of intense movement. Mmm.

I saw my mom, and she was annoying and insane but fairly well behaved. After telling everyone I’d sent her “nasty” emails (see post below), she seemed to have heeded my zero-tolerance of her bashing on poor Camus. I met her at her house and walked her over to a restaurant; her house is scarier than ever. I’ll post some of the photos I snapped. It’s painful watching her, she’s such a wreck, and couldn’t even order a sandwhich without it being a Big Dramatic Thing. Sigh. World’s most incompetent woman; she whined for assistance just getting dressed. What struck me during this lunch, apart from struggling not to wince at how pathetic she is, was how bitter she is, and how intensely she hates men. Hell, spoiled, rich La Jolla society princess devolves into a bitter basket case because she resents her 1950s doctor daddy being too distant. Priviledged, entitled, self-righteous; I suppress laughter when she rants about how hard her life has been. Wow, having family rent you a posh $1000+ a month apartment and otherwise subsidize you for 20 years, and never having to work or take care of yourself, rough life! Poor pet!

She remains adament in her belief that I was molested as a kid and that I need to be in intensive therapy until I remember it so I can wallow self-destructively in my victimization. Um, no thanks. True or false, my childhood sucked, and I’m over it. I am much more interested in my future than my past.

Camus is off in Hawaii, but we had a nice breakfast before she went. She had her flight and I a pool aerobics class to catch, so when we sat down at Harry’s we informed the waitress that we were ready to order already, and didn’t need to see a menu, since we both always get the bisquits and gravy plus coffee there. The waitress huffed off, and complained loudly to the cashier about our being pushy and we could bide our sweet time. Camus got up, marched over, and told the woman off: “I work in food service too, and treating the customer that way is unacceptable.” She explained the reasons behind our request, and then removed us to another waitress’s section. There we were served instantaneously, and she left a 50% tip. I was very proud of her cajones.

I saw lots of the same people as the prior stint, plus my high school friend Cantobabe, who I hadn’t seen in a decade. She’s a lawyer now, currently working in a firm but planning to move to a corporate position in a few months. She’s meh about lawyerdom, but enjoys the tech and scientific aspects of her assignments. Cantobabe is very mellow and wry, and despite not meeting up for so long we immediately hit our old stride over martinis at the Whaling Bar. I remember Cantobabe sending me postcards from her summers with grandma in Hong Kong during high school, one of many ways my friends planted the world travel bug in me back then.

The hardest thing about being in San Diego is that I’m staying at a suburban house with no car and slow to no internet, the former making everything a complicated logistical juggle and the latter making work difficult. Thank god for cafes with Wifi, but I am now way behind on some deadlines. So, so frustrating. Am looking forward to being with urban friends again. Next is Washington DC. I’m staying with Jersey Girl, who I haven’t seen for two years, plus my other first cousin and Dancing Emu, a long-lost recently-refound second cousin from Cairo, also back for a holiday visit. I have a lot of people to see in DC, lots of college and Shanghai friends who are lawyers (yes, more lawyers), and then New York/Long Island/Rhode Island/Boston. I have about 60 different friends and family to visit this trip: am I lucky or what?

“Palm trees are so SoCal,” remarked Peaceful Dragon during the morning ride to work. “They’re tall, too skinny, ludicrously overgroomed, useful only for aesthetic purposes, topple easily, and are shallow rooted.” Indeed.

Last night a whooping storm by LA standards must have knocked a palm tree onto power lines, and several blocks were wiped out. I am aghast that, in this “modern” age: 1. America still has power lines, and 2. that there is no emergency generator to at least keep the traffic lights operational.

The oddities of a “developed” society: America takes so much for granted, things usually work so smoothly that the slightest gliche causes a shutdown. This wouldn’t happen in China, where SNAFU is the default and so people are fairly good at adjusting and adapting. (Not that either government is terribly effective in its responses.) Traffic lights out in Shanghai? No one would notice…

So, I am now ensconced at my favorite Santa Monica cafe, availing myself of the power and wifi. Little neighborhoods like this are among the nicest things about SoCal, and I missed them as much in New England as I do in Shanghai. (The cafe culture there is improving a lot, but apart from Boona Starbucks remains the main game in town. ) Ginger has just emailed that she and the Silver Lining are faring splendidly, a big relief to finally hear since the internet has been down in Shanghai since the earthquake in Taiwan. (And perhaps this is also why Biteable hasn’t emailed me since Christmas; am trying not to be a chick and overanalyse.)

I highly enjoy just hanging out in Los Angeles, although I suspect I am starting to grate on Peaceful Dragon’s nerves, so just as well I’m off again tomorrow. The routine is that every morning I drive her to work and then take the car. I may proceed to a cafe and write in my diary, or lunch with friends, or go to a gallery or museum, or like yesterday all three; I may just go back home and spend all day there, working interspersed with an hour or two at the apartment complex gym. Oh man, it feels great to be exercising again! Two weeks without it, combined with rich American food, has made me disgustingly fat and, worse, sluggish and uncomfortable. Then, come evening, I pick Peaceful Dragon back up, and we go out for eat, home to cook, or I drop her off and head off to dine with other friends.

What’s great is that I get a nice mixture of social and solitary time. Obviously, I like people, but they were an acquired taste, and now as a writer I really require a certain daily quotient of time in my own head to recharge. Being around people, even people I love, all the time is exhausting. But then there are the oldest and best of friends, such as Peaceful Dragon, who are beyond old shoes and we are more like an old married couple. We can hang out without interacting, both doing our own thing, we can descend into giddy spasms of silly jokes, and we can finish each other’s sentences with alarming frequency.

She forms the core of a very good LA corps. She, Theramini, a colleague at the LA office of my fashion magazine employer and who I know via Peaceful Peasant in Hong Kong (the Vietnafia ;), and I form a pretty good trio. Small, medium, large; hyper, snarky, calm. Then there are my artist/professor friends Ms. and Mr. Green, who are well-tapped into LA creative society and have a lovely house with two dobermans and two parrots (and a nice guest room). There are also scattered others: a Shanghai friend’s cousin at MTV, Indonesian Dainty’s ex-boyfriend, a La Jolla friend’s two daughters, various arts people, all enjoyable.

New Year’s Eve I took the train up, always a pleasant ride, and spent the afternoon at Theramini’s flat. Peaceful Dragon met us, we had dinner, crossed town back to PD’s place, and then headed out to a gathering of PD’s software programming colleagues. The Nerd Party was a tough crowd. Theramini and I are journalists and fairly good at socializing, but it was hard to get programmers talking. We tried, we really did. Then we continued to a party held by Theramini’s friends, a designer/architect couple. It was a good, young professional, mostly Asian-American crowd, and in a very nice house. Joshua Xanadu and several of his high school friends joined us there briefly, although he spent most of the night hitting on some chick with a chihuahua, and then fled when the dancing started.

I was oddly exhausted that night, and struggled to keep up, but the girls and I danced the party into the dawn. On new year’s day, I slept well past noon before Peaceful Dragon and I headed to Ms. Green’s house party, where Theramini joined us. It was a fascinating crowd: artists, aging feminist scholars, a Ghanian filmmaker. Mostly older, very artsily eccentric - Theramini loved the wacky outfits - very Santa Monica. We were all exhausted, which was too bad as I would have liked to have met more of the people there. The three of us then returned to PD’s flat, where she worked and Theramini and I hung out, babbled, and watched the Edna portions of the “Incredibles” DVD before going to see “Pan’s Labyrinth”. It was compelling but disturbing, sort of “Dark Crystal” meets “Sophie’s Choice”, if you can imagine that.

Another year off to a good start; last year it was lying poolside in Jakarta interspersed with Nasi Udok from street stalls. 2005 sucked, with the year starting with news of my brother’s death, and not improving much from there. Last year was generally great, and I anticipate this year will be even better.

Dear Mom,

I’m so glad I got to spend Christmas with you, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you again this last stint in La Jolla. Also apologies for not calling you back sooner: I wasn’t home much, and the days got away from me quite quickly, but I should have been more conscientious, and I am sorry.

I did want to have brunch with you on Sunday, but after our conversations on Saturday I deemed that unwise. When you get into that emotionally argumentative mode, I am unwilling to be around you. I am not interested in hearing your accusations against anyone. However, you really crossed a line going after [Camus]. She and I are close friends, and always will be. I would prefer to not have to take sides in any disputes between you two, but if you force me to, I will side with her. So it is better for everyone if you drop whatever perceived grievances you have towards her.

I hope you will enough past this by the time I return from LA that we can spend some time together. I would like to come over, help get you used to using your complex’s gym, and cook one of the recipes in the book I gave you. I’ll call you when I get back to San Diego. However, I absolutely refuse to engage with you in any arguments, and you need to know that I will hang up or leave if you try to drag me in. This is not negotiable: if you want to see me, you cannot pick fights with me.

Happy New Year! I had a very nice time going to several parties with friends here in LA, I am lucky to have a good group of them here, and so far 2007 is off to a lovely start. I wish you equal feliciations for the year.

Love,
[Vixen]

Ah, no place like home! Camus was gamely chauffering my mom home from Christmas dinner, and my mom started ripping into her for accepting some financial support from our sane uncle in DC. This is necessitated because Camus’ dad is now refusing to contribute towards her school fees, ostensibly since he thinks women shouldn’t be doctors, but mostly because he’s a cheap jerk and an abysmal parent. Such criticism from my mom is hysterically hypocritical, since Sane Uncle pays ALL of her bills. Camus defended herself, and in my mom’s paranoied, victimization-obsessed mind, this means Camus attacked her.

So, my mom calls me up at the Buffs. “It’s very important I tell you what really happened,” she insisted, because “[Camus] is trying to turn you against me.” This is a theme she is very preoccuppied with: at any given time someone is always trying to turn someone else against her by spreading “lies” about her. Sigh. I told her I was not going to have this conversation with her, that whatever happened is between her and Camus, but her rampage would not be derailed. “I need you to stop, or I will end this conversation.” She didn’t, I did.

She called back soon after, and I managed to steer her onto neutral topics, but not for long. Soon she was again screaming about how Camus “abused” her, so again after several warnings I hung up the phone. I don’t think I had a choice: arguing with her is what she wants, so that she can add it to her heap of complaints of “Oh, cruel world!” Whatever.

The letter I would like to write her, but of course never will, is:

Dear Mom,

You are a psychotic bitch, and I am sick of your shit. Rather than trying to work through your issues and live your life, you repeatedly pick fights and invent persecutions so you can pass responsibility for your failings on to other people. This is why you are lonely and miserable. This is why your son killed himself and your daughter can’t stand you. Your mental illness is only the icing upon your insufferableness; the fundamental reason is your insistance on remaining immature, irresponsible, self-centered and self-important.

I only put up with you out of pity, and for my grandmother’s sake. When you try to pick fights with me, it is almost a relief, because it cancels out my pity for you and frees me of the obligation to deal with you. Thanks!

I wish I had a family, just one parent who was a parent to me. I don’t, oh well. I can’t bother to resent you, because surviving you has made me remarkably strong, resiliant, adaptable and calm. Learning to deal with you has made me able to deal with just about anything. Again, thanks! I am a happy, healthy, successful person, and your attempts to derail me into your swamp of introspective wallowing just make me appreciate the good place I am at.

[Vixen]

1/3/07

Today she replied:

Hi [Vixen],

I just wrote you an email that I was really pleased with, and I accidently pushed “clear” and it all went away.

I will try to put such a statement together at a different time. I’ve been up too long.

[Vixen], there is so much that you do not know or see. So much that you said was totally backward, and I can only hope and pray that someday you will see the truth of what I am saying.

I’m no longer willing to be pulled into family “pettyness” or the problems of others. I have my own life to live, and I’m getting ready to live it.

I only want friends and associates who are kind, and who treat peole who with kindness and respect.

With [Camus] I was not accusatory in any way, and I know that God knows that.  Maybe in 20 or 30 years you might see who I really am, but I am not going to try to defend myself. Of all people YOU should know me well, but reality is that you don’t know me AT ALL any more.

You are willing to let people “interpret” me to you. You may not see it, but I’ve seen it for a long time.

That’s all I’m going to say.

I hate that which is devisive. I love what is honest and pure and up-building.

I hate pettyness of any kind.

I hate it when people judge things that they don’t know anything about.

I hate it when people talk behind people’s back, trying to sway them their way (wanting power). See Prov. 6:16-19 (these are the correct verses). It mentions the things God HATES.

I better end this before I accidently erase it.

If we spend any time together in the time you are here, I do not want you to mention the “[Camus]” issue. I’m really tired of it all–that and other things.

I want every day to be positive, and I will work hard to make it that way. I will stay away situations that I know will pull me down.

Life is too short for negativity.

I will be moving, as soon as I can, but I’m far from being ready. I’m hoping I can do it.  I cannot have peace of mind here–never for very long. My condo HAS been broken into many times, and my car WAS tampered with more than a few times.  These are not things I have imagined.  If you want any specifices, I can share some with you that prove that the loss had nothing to do with papers on the dining room table or boxes in the living room and in my writing room.

I cannot write when I am frightened, or distracted.  I cannot write without long periods of quiet and peace (I am STILL trying to get to that place, and the slowness is not because I am lazy. I was terrorized for a long time and have only started being able to push it out of me in the past three weeks. I mourned David’s death for a long time, and it was only about 6 weeks ago that I knew I could let go of the grief, the loss (each person has their own healing time, and each situation is different. (I do not wish to be judged for taking almost two years to heal). I am not in a place where I can easily meet people and get to know them on a deep level. I am not in a place where I can do public speaking. I am not in a place where I can build a leadership team. You probably don’t remember me doing these things, but David did, being 2 years older. He was even introduced to the large Tues am audience. So HE knew what I could do, he was used to women calling all the time, and he knew how fond so many women were of me (the husbands too, and even ten years ago the daughters were calling me wanting The CBW. It was easy to do things there when I didn’t feel like I was in a fishbowl with doubtful even critical people watching me.

I won’t say anything more about moving until the time I’m about to move, or have moved. Obviously, I need to get over the agorphobia, the high level of fear, and Dr. Hubbard says I will probably always need medication for the panic/anxiety, and most likely the depression (when one has LOST a lot, and you can’t say that I havn’t, that sadness and sense of loss is always with you.

I hear people on Larry King Live who have lost children say that all the time, that you never really get over it.  No one can know this unless they themselves have had such a loss.

In a real sense I have lost both you and [Gege].  But there is nothing I can do about. If you continue to think/believe things about me that are not true…then we both will LOSE…A LOT.

That’s all.

Mom

Sigh. I really can’t win, can I?