In recent times I've been swimming in the works and voices of writers like Madeleine Thien, John Berger, Bhanu Kapil, and Don Mee Choi. The first two of those writers are writers whose books I consider very dear old friends, whom I've loved since I was a teenager, who are returning through books that are new to me as well as the rereading of familiar words; the second two are names I've known for a very long time but whom I haven't read until very recently, because I haven't been ready to read them—these two "your favourite writer's favourite writer"s whose experimental, deeply conscious, mature, endlessly folded and re-folded works I finally feel I have the patience, open-mindedness, and sincerity to desire to engage with. I know that my journey has only just begun. Instead of frustration when I don't understand something, especially if it's formally experimental, I feel a sense of wonder—"Wow, there is so much to learn!"—as well as a feeling of being staggered, of being given some very heavy boxes to hold, having to put my back and legs into it. Reading Don Mee Choi's Mirror Nation (I didn't realise it was part of a trilogy, the KORUS (chorus) trilogy, and after I finished it I immediately went and ordered Hardly War and DMZ Colony and then sat there for a while, unsure what in the world I was supposed to do with my time now apart from just wait for the books to arrive), I feel delighted, relieved, and terrified because everything matters—everything matters so much—yet knowing that is the easy part; the hard part is figuring out what to do with the knowledge that everything matters, how to live day after day, second after second, in the matter and the mattering.
As I write this, it's 1 October 2025; exactly a year ago, I moved to Provincetown, throwing up repeatedly on the ferry with my head buried in a garbage can for the entire 1.5 hours (two The New Abnormals back-to-back), and started my fellowship at FAWC. I knew that I needed rest, but I also hoped that I was going to finish my novel manuscript. Now, that novel I was working on has been put away for the time being because I've realised it's clearly not the story I want to write right now, and I still need rest, so much of it, even though I've already been so lucky as to have had so much of it so far. I owe so much to the wisdom, patience, and kindness of the friends I met in Provincetown, as I read things that I know they've read, and think about things that I know they've thought about—not like I'm just repeating walks they've already been on, because everything goes in every direction, but more like I wouldn't be reading these words in this way and feeling these feelings in this body if not for the sand, sky, sea, wood, rain, and dust of that time in Provincetown. And like: things take time to settle and make a home in you. Like: I can't read Don Mee Choi without thinking of Lucas, and I finally understood Renée Gladman, reading her while remembering Cherrie holding that same book in her hands, and I keep remembering Acie asking me, "What is the room in which that feeling lives?" as well as thinking, lately, alongside that image, that so, so many things have arrived inside the room.
Alison tells me that ever since Acie and I did our reading in February she hasn't stopped thinking of their poem 'Nonduality' (Shenandoah, Spring 2025), which I reproduce here:
I read The Book of Records and it blew me away, and then I read Do Not Say We Have Nothing for the third time and it devastated me, and then I read Dogs at the Perimeter and it was so good that after I finished it I immediately went back to page 1 and read it again. The second time, I had the time to mark down passages, like:
I remember how the oratory, St. Joseph, held the sun the longest, while everything below it slid into a coppery twilight. (53)
and:
We were the sun going down, we were nothing but projections of light on the wall. (83)
and:
Look back, my mother said, one last time. I followed her through our twilit apartment, walked in the shade of my father, past bare walls and open windows, the noise of the street pouring in. (135)
I've been accompanied lately by images or shots (Aria Aber, Good Girl: there's a moment where Nila, devastated, says something like, I think of every photograph ever taken) of patches of sunlight, of stillness, and of quiet. I thought about Lin Huiyin's essay 'A Patch of Sunlight', which we read in Chinese class when I was a teenager and which struck me so, so deeply. Then I remembered that I translated it into English, and then I remembered that I used to have a different blog, and then I found that blog, and I was shocked to see all the titles of all the different posts I made on it from 2017-2020, and even a glimpse of my interiority (and simultaneous externalisation of that interiority) has generated so many different feelings and reactions in me. I suppose I'll never not be a poster, someone that posts, it's just how I came into myself, how I grew up, as a member of this generation.
Anyway, I found the original translation I'd done, when I was 17:
That brings me to the first patch of sunlight I ever saw. That year, I was six years old. I remember having just caught water pearls –– water pearls are usually called chicken pox, but in my hometown dialect the term was water pearls. Back then I was enchanted by the beautiful name and forgot that it described an illness, feeling instead a mysterious pride. Whenever someone passed by my window and asked me if I had "water pearls", I would feel a kind of glory. That feeling is still imprinted onto my mind today. And because of this, I still remember my luxuriously content mood during the course of the disease. Even though it was no different from all the other times I'd been sick, that time I was quarantined inside a room to wait it out. That was the room farthest from the gate in our old compound; the courtyard was surrounded by whitewashed walls, with a row of three rooms on the north side. The middle room was an open hall. When I was sick I was in my mother's room, on the east side. The west side belonged to my aunt. My mother and my aunt were always doing women's duties with my grandmother in her courtyard, which was closer to the gate, so I was often the only master of those three adjoined rooms.
The experience of staying in those three rooms while sick was unbearable. Time passed extraordinarily slowly, especially during times when I was not sleepy. At first, I would exercise my sense of hearing on various sounds that seemed to be footsteps, yet also didn't. I would try to decipher the sounds' origin, then wait, hoping that someone would appear. Occasionally, I'd press my ear to the wall and listen to trivial sounds, the kind that arose from beneath the foundations of the wall and then vanished. After a while, I became impatient –– I don't remember why. I tiptoed towards the door, pressing down onto the wooden bed so as to make no noise. The door to the hall was slightly ajar, and I leaned against the doorframe, gazing at the outside world with curiosity.
It was approximately two o'clock in the afternoon. A large table that had just been cleared of the previous meal's plates was standing solemnly in the hall. A patch of sunlight had made its way onto the ground underneath the table, where it lay poured out and dispersed on the floor. The silent patch of glittering gold was shrouded in an environment of absolute quiet. For some reason, the sight provoked an abnormal oscillation in my six-year-old self's heart.
There was no extravagantly beautiful and artistic décor –– only a mundane old-fashioned dining table. If I remember correctly, not long ago the table had hosted an ordinary dinner that had consisted of dishes such as salted fish and pickled vegetables. But the child's heart had been stopped. Perhaps two eyes opened wide, looking about, as though looking for the answer to a question. Why was the beauty of that patch of sunlight so touching? I remember that I climbed onto the table text to the window and, intentionally or otherwise, I looked outside. In the courtyard, that same patch of golden color and warmth was scattered onto the whitewashed walls in a wholly different manner. At the same time, I opened an antique lady's mirror that lay near me, and shook the little row of drawers and the small copper weight carved in the shape of a basket of flowers. I could hear the fresh song of birds as they hopped from branch to branch with joy. Inside, I still held a vague wondrous uncertainty about that patch of sunlight.
Don Mee Choi, Translation is a mode=Translation is an anti-neocolonial mode: This miraculous act, taking place in the mirror, is an act of translation, a translation performance. (10)
Don Mee Choi, Mirror Nation: As my father scribbled the stars consciously or unconsciously, did he hear their silent lament? Or did they spontaneously appear to him? A star diving straight to earth, undoubtedly. A mysterious fingertip—possibly a zero—falling alongside the shooting star. The tail end of a comet above a star. I filmed this scene. The same stench of war. A fingertip or zero from the sky transfigures 200 into 2000. The boy who briefly stopped at the inn transposes Gwangju to Paris. The young man’s crisp skin. Strangely 20 degrees forward. Zero lament. A sliver of light from the window. I filmed this scene. The major’s language of American gestures. Index finger curls. Repeatedly. Thumbs-up. Thumbs-down. Repeatedly. A translator’s language of angels. A zero in the sky. A dead city below. Beautiful. I translate it. Sky exchange. (25)
Above: Don Mee Choi, Translation is a mode=Translation is an anti-neocolonial mode, page 16. I am reading this from a free PDF scan I found online, and I can only assume that all the images have been distorted because of the scan. In Mirror Nation, Choi reproduces the same image of her child self on the plane (it looks 'normal'), and notes: "Photo of me by my father on July 7, 1972, on our flight from Seoul to Hong Kong" (102), the day she "became a foreigner" (Translation is..., 16). I, too, became a foreigner while in the seat of a plane, in the year 2000, a few months before the Second Intifada. Don Mee Choi looks so much like herself in her childhood photos, in the photos of the moment she became a foreigner; I don't—as in, I don't look like my baby photos, my baby photos don't look how I look now.
Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records: She stood at the station as the train arrived, but it pulled away without her. There is nothing left but to let it happen, and wait, wait, wait. The train disappeared. All too soon another arrived. She prevented herself from boarding it, as if she were fixed to the ground, the walkway, the platform. Still, the duty of love would not leave her because love was a duty and a reverence, a belief in one's own existence. So she remained in the station. (32)
Madeleine Thien, Dogs at the Perimeter: My father's stories came back to me, all the heroes that persisted in Khmer poems and myths, so many stories that promised us we were braver than we were. I wanted to shake him, I wanted to tell him that the things we try so hard to keep, the beloved, most precious things, keep slipping through. We had always been powerless to keep them safe. I got to my feet, went outside for air, and then I kept walking, kept going. At the junction where Bopha had parted from me, I stood, weeping, trying to will myself to return. Go back, I told myself. She needs you. She'll die without you. (121)
Aria Aber, 'Zelda Fitgzerald': "And so, / most of my life, it passes like this: light" "warmth" "A bottle of whiskey / on a heavy walnut table"
Edward Said: "What I find so compelling about Bach’s last works (the B minor Mass, the Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, The Musical Offering) is that […] Bach seems intent on incorporating every nuance, every twist, every harmony and rhythm."
Wouter Capitain, 'From Counterpoint to Heterophony and Back Again: Reading Edward Said’s Drafts for Culture and Imperialism':
Said’s contrapuntal perspective in Culture and Imperialism can be related quite specifically to the variational structure of the Goldberg Variations, even if this is not acknowledged in the book itself.
From my journal recently: "In all of the images of my life, something that always stays with me is the light—long sunlight cast diagonally onto the floor, and the suspension of the dust in the air." After Don Mee Choi: =stillness=silence=suspension=arrest=the room=arrest=
After Don Mee Choi: =ARE YOU 5.2000?=I AM 5.2024=
Bhanu Kapil, Ban en banlieue: I want to lie down in the place I am from: on the street I am from.