plain tofu

What I’ve learned is just because I’m older doesn’t mean I’m any better at managing my anxiety. In fact it seems like it all builds up.

It was a hard year for anxiety. It was hard to believe the truth when I have such ingrained beliefs about justly already.

But I’ve stayed alive. And I’m still moving on.

Three days before my birthday, annalisa died from cancer. I learned she had been fighting cancer maybe for 15 years.

Again, death throws me into the truth. That so much of what occupies me is ultimately meaningless. That so many of us suffer and find resilience amidst suffering.

So to 34, all I ask is that you keep reminding yourself of the truth. Repeat it until you believe it.

What’s on my mind right now? 

Let me get back to you—I can’t say much has changed—everything is different now. Earlier this week, I felt depressed. It felt the same as it did before at 25, at 20, it felt like the world was bleak. And I couldn’t look past it. 

The world is bleak. I carry the same things inside me as I always have. It seems fitting to end a decade as I started it.

Everything is the same but it is also so different. How can that be so. 

I’m sitting here alone, before the clock turns midnight as usual, writing. But everything is different. I’m sitting here alone but I don’t feel alone. 

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel that alone in this world. I found a family; materialized as though out of thin air. I allowed myself to be bold and it was painful and terrifying—and maybe I’m the brainwashed one here—but it felt right in the moment and still does, so what can you do. 

I haven’t written the things I want to write, but I’ve also realized I don’t know what I want to write, just that I want to. I haven’t summited or completed or finished anything remarkable. 

And still, I feel like I have nothing to regret from this decade. I’ve lost and I’ve allowed myself to find. I’ve made my comfortable in a malaise and embraced warmth and stinging comfort of relationships. 

So all I can say is, what’s done is done. And I’m all the better for it.

Warmly,

Dear 29,

Don’t fuck it up.

That’s all.

Love,

It was so clear—stark against a life of ambiguities and demurring and being stretched between tensions. It was like a reflection of myself, so clear, I could see to the very depths. I could see to my origins and beginnings, I could see to the wounds that started it all. It took my breath away; you laid it all out in front of me.

You told me that ever since I was in high school, I had been fumbling with human relationships. I always end up hurt. I always end up with my heart beaten to a pulp. I always end up confused and damaged. (and you don’t even know the worst of it) I told you that last semester of law school was one of my hardest because I felt so hurt by those I considered my closest friends. I felt blindsided, I felt wounded, I felt unprepared in the face of an impending winter. 

You were exasperated with me. I always get too close, you tell me. I never keep my distance. I never listen. I always fall down the same traps and you are left to pick up the pieces. Only a lack of distance can produce friction, and friction is painful. Never get too close. Never forget to maintain boundaries. God forbid you have a same-sex relationship. 

Wait. I say, a little bit afraid. What’s wrong with a same-sex relationship? 

You say, you’ll inevitably be betrayed. You’ll inevitably be hurt. Anytime there is attachment. Attachment is the worst thing you can have in this world. 

I stared up at the ceiling, realizing finally that we’re not talking about homophobia and shame—we’re talking about all attachment. It was the most honest thing you have ever shared with me. It’s the wound that connects us. Even you, I think, were surprised, when the truth came out. 

I remember all the times in my life you have repeated these same words to me—it’s like magic, it’s like a protective spell, it’s like a curse. Reinforced over and over and over again.

It’s the first time I’ve known the words as the spell it is but I can still feel the seeds take root. I can feel the spell doing its work, I can feel myself frost over. I can feel the seeping of doubt, the dread of the purportedly inevitable. I suppose everyone has trust issues, everyone works to keep other people at a distance to some degree, but I wonder if there is something particularly otherworldly about the practiced way your words can reset my heart. It feels like having a veil lifted from my eyes, being thrown into cold water, reining in the wild temperaments of my heart. It feels cold and aloof and detached and comfortable. It’s my regular state of being. I find it suddenly easy to withdraw into my own inner world.

I tell you—there is always risk, but you can’t live without loving. Even I am surprised by my own words. It’s maybe the first time I haven’t agreed, maybe the first time I haven’t indulged myself in the practical convenience of your logic. Because she’s right of course; only an idiot throws themself into unnecessary risk. 

I think you agreed with me. In your silence. What do you expect me to do then? When you come to me hurt? Over and over. 

I see the benefit of this spell. This protection. I also want to protect you from having to see me like this, from having to watch me bleed and suffer. I realize that this wound is hereditary, because you have been hurt. You have been betrayed over and over and over. You have not had the luxury of choosing risk; of having people there to pick up the pieces. I wish I could have been there for you when you needed it most.   

I’m not sure what I will do. I am realizing that this mindset requires consent on my part; there is a choice in acquiescing to the terms of the spell. I have been indoctrinated one way, I have a wound inside me that tells me one thing, I understand rationally what the right decision is, I have the conveniences of practice at my beck and call. I’m unwilling to take unnecessary risks. 

Law is about tradition. Learning legal doctrine, I am slowly realizing after many months of confusion, is an act not too different from the central premise of “The Giver”—it is the downloading of a hive mind into your mind. It is a recoding; it is the thoughts and decisions of others that have come before you and who you are subject to; it is an act of inheritance. 

So, I’ve thought a lot about inheritance, intertwined intimately with the experience of the imposter syndrome. Because inheritance begets some sort of familial relationship—you don’t leave behind your traditions to just anyone. You find the people who are like you, the people who matter. 

I’ve thought about inheritance far more in law school that I ever did as a student of English literature. The literary canon is, on the surface, not too different from legal doctrine; it is the building blocks of language and images that we find so beautiful we keep rewriting the same stories and evoking the same images. Sure, it’s soaked in Western thought, it’s white, it’s patriarchal—but the ultimate concern is about the human experience, and there is something accessible about that. Even for someone like me. I never felt like an imposter in literature (although in hindsight, my younger self really should have worked harder to decolonize the canon), it actually came so easily to me. I felt so much but I was never given the tools to express, then suddenly here was Milton and Faulkner and Woolf and Butler, their feelings overflowing from the page. I had held my breath so long, literature gave me room to breath. 

Law is different, because it concerns itself with systems of power and this makes me hesitate. Its tools are words, but unlike literature which liberates, law is a process of assimilation and it can end with assimilation. Anything beyond that is subversion and subversion is terrifying. 

There is nothing about who I am that I think has really prepared me to be subversive. When I think of the proud tradition I hail from—my mother and grandmother—it is one of resilience, grit, survival, and audacity. The audacity to find space in a system not designed for people like you to exist and to breathe. Much of the immigrant experience, I think, is lived in the footnotes of the main narrative. To assimilate peacefully, to not draw attention, to be one of the desirable immigrants. A doctor, a commercial lawyer, an engineer—someone objectively useful. You can dream, you can create, you can express, but do not bite the hand that feeds. That has always been the unwritten rule we are beholden to.

The imposter syndrome has given me so much anxiety in law school because I have slowly realized that my outlet for creativity has become intertwined with systems of power. There is a voice in my head that screams for me to back away. Stay with the safer subjects, whatever that may be—commercial work or whatever. This is not your fight, it says. And why should it be? There is freedom in the cracks. As a first generation immigrant, I have the culture and language to feel tied to my motherland, but I am not beholden to it. I have a place in America but no need to play anything more than a supporting role. A spot of color in the background. A best friend. A sidekick. A quirky member of the crew. The background character gets to have her own inner life; it doesn’t have to become public, it doesn’t have to drive the story.

This past week has been something of an experiment of experiencing the imposter syndrome in the vacuum of my own head. Being in Cape Town and isolated from the law school, I have been able to observe how my own mind reconstructs the elements of law school that reinforce my imposter syndrome. It’s been a trip. It’s fascinating. 

All week I’ve worked on a written proposal for the Race Law Journal for a symposium that is supposed to make a meaningful contribution to furthering the conversation on civil rights and racial justice in America. It’s the greatest gift and my worst nightmare all rolled up into one. 

That voice in my head takes on the amorphous form of the professors who will be reviewing the proposal—the unidentifiable emblems of power, prestige, and legitimacy—and it tells me my ideas are derivative. It sees through me and knows that I am just barely grasping at a language and tradition that I am not native to, it knows I’m just faking it. It knows I’m jumping in half way in the narrative and pretending like I know what has happened earlier. The voice takes on the form of what I believe to be real activists and it reminds me that I am not black or brown or white—why should you get a role in this narrative larger than a footnote? 

--

I think back to a moment in a class I took on race and the constitution, taught by one of the leading civil rights scholars in the country. We were discussing a case that is over a hundred years old and the foundation of immigration law—Chae Chan Ping v. United States. The plaintiff was a Chinese laborer and, per usual, Asian people usually appear in the doctrine in immigration cases. 

The professor prefaces the discussion by saying, “It’s terrible. I’ve taught this case for years but I never know to abbreviate the case name as Chae v. US or Ping v. US. It’s unclear which one is the last name.” 

I raised my hand, too brazenly for my usual style, and said, “It’s the first one, ‘Chae’.”

“Oh, how do you know?”

I think about the first time I encountered this case, how excited I was to see someone like me featured. How I wondered who this person really was, how I knew his name had probably been brutalized by multiple layers of romanization, and I wondered what his name really was, in its full meaning. Because Chinese names are beautiful, and that beauty is lost when it is transliterated into seemingly nonsensical words in the English alphabet.

“I looked up the Chinese characters,” I replied. 迟成平.

She seemed satisfied and made some intonations along the lines of, of course, and moved on. “Chae v. US.” 

It was a fleeting moment, what could be a nothing moment. But I thought about it in the aftermath. I relived how legal doctrine erases the very people it uses to define itself. I envisioned the decades this professor had used this case to describe the bases of immigration law, never finding a moment to answer this question. I imagined the colleagues she may have encountered who knew enough Chinese to answer this question, I thought about the generations of students who came before me who could have said something and I thought, perhaps, they were smart to stay out of that conversation. They were smart enough to know their place. Either to stay silence, or to know not to take a class on race and the law to begin with. 

Before this exchange took place, I had previously had a conversation with one of the progressive professors on campus about diversity in law school. We both, of course, agreed it was important. Then she let slip, “It’s important for the students to be diverse to remind professors to consider a variety of perspectives.” 

“Or,” I said with some hesitation, “we should just have more diverse professors.”

“Yes, definitely,” she quickly agreed. 

I thought about this conversation after my little “Chae” interaction. I realized, I had become that very student: the “diverse” student that reminds the professor to be a little more inclusive. At first, I was proud that I was able to instruct a professor, but the more that I have thought about it—up until this very moment—the more I hate it and the angrier I feel. I hate having to be that person to explain exoticism. I hate that it is still exotic and perplexing to have an asian plaintiff in a case name. I hate being patted on the head, and made to feel useful. I hate these seemingly harmless interactions that reinforce what my role is in this whole thing—law school, the legal profession, the legal system—a translator. What a joke.

--

Interestingly enough, working as a translator was what got my mom her green card, despite her graduate degree in computer science. And there is nothing wrong with survival, between the cracks, in the background, as the mediator between the relevant people in the conversation. But, I would like to think we have moved on from that. That we no longer have to earn our place by being a useful tool. 

I don’t condone acting out on anger, but I think anger can be instructive, I think it can be telling. And sometimes my anger overrules my imposter syndrome, and I think, of course I am uncomfortable here, of course I resist this act of inheritance—because I don’t even want what they’re giving me. I don’t want to be a successor and I don’t want to continue business as usual. It’s true that I am new to this conversation of legal doctrine and civil rights and racial justice and I have a lot to learn, but I am not new to the concept of dignity and doing what I believe is right. Beyond resilience, beyond survival, my mother has taught me what it means to fight for your own dignity and the dignity of others. It’s what makes us human, it is the fight that matters.

Samin Nosrat’s cooking show “Salt Fat Acid Heat” is one of the few food shows that gets to the core of why food is important to me. It isn’t about the ingredients or nutrition. It’s hardly even about taste, to the the extent that taste can be objectively assessed. It isn’t about complexity, skill or food as delicacy. 

Food is family, food is tactile, food is remembering that I am a part of something greater, deeper, older than what can be contained in this body. Food is narrative, it is ancient and it is inherited. Food is the unspoken, food is the remembered and the inexplicable. Food is warmth and the air, water, traditions and experience that have existed before you and continue to exist through you. It is the sweat and strength that goes into kneading the dough that becomes the skin that wraps it all together. 

The end of the semester is a transition point. It’s the last moment an instructor has to make an impact on my life, at least in an official environment. 

It’s when she tells me “you are powerful” and she hopes I “can look back and know that I made the law better.” 

It’s when he says that the law degree is a gift, from myself, from my family. 

It’s when I am reminded that, at the highest level, we engage in “analytical politics,” this is not a game of calculating what is right and wrong. It is a game of deciding what you wish to be right and wrong. 

And I am told that to be free.

Out of all this, what I attach to the most is the idea of freedom. Maybe because I have raised in a culture that emphasizes duty, maybe because I have existed in a world that rewards assimilation, maybe because I have felt like too much of my life has been spent on giving gratitude. 

I came to law school because I hypothesized that there was something in the law from which I could find agency and I am told that I am well-trained and I have power and I have been asked to use this power for good. And I have agonized over what it is I owe to this earth and this society for all that I have been given. And I have felt guilty for taking more than I needed. And I have filed my edges to be a piece that better fits this puzzle around me. 

At a certain point I have become resentful of playing the role of the dutiful student, the role of the altruistic privileged. This isn’t malicious but it’s not freedom and I want to be free. 

I don’t want to shape my life around being useful, I don’t want to shape my actions around being relevant, I don’t want to live out of obligation. 

With the close of November, I find that I do not write enough about how thankful I am for my family. I think there exists a tension between the burdens of growing up so indebted to the sacrifices of those who come before you and the immense gift of being shaped into who I am. Growing up is maybe a dual act of clawing through the limitations and living the potential. Both of which came from my family. 

I tell myself a story of the members of my family and often I focus on the tragic elements because, in some way, tragedy is easier. Tragedy make it easier to handle the loss. But the reality is that there were sad times and tough times and rough times, but I grew up so loved. By my grandmother, by my mother and maybe even by my father. In some ways, their ambitions were greater than anything I could imagine for myself in this life. They envisioned a life across the vast Pacific, from the darkness of a closed off society. They believed this world could be traversed, that we are not limited by our own stories and that we can take hold of the pen and bring it into a vast unknown. 

If I am motivated by their courage, I am shaped by their values. Really, my mother’s. My mother who bought me the first two Harry Potter books because she read about them in a newspaper, who took me to the library and the bargain section of Barnes and Nobles so I would never be deprived of reading, who exposed me to art and endless stories in English and Mandarin, who taught me that in this journey of life we must always choose to be those who give more than we take. That kindness, above all, is the deciding factor. That when we are feeling afraid and small and unwanted, we must continue to move forward. 

Dear 28,

What’s on my mind is madness. It could be because I just watched Ian McKellan’s “King Lear,” which fully leaned into any potential of madness inherent in the play, but I had been thinking about madness even before that. 

Madness and fear. Is the fear driving me mad, or am I afraid of my own potential for madness? I guess I can’t answer for you. All I can tell you is that there is something inside of you that drives you creatively and eats away at you at the same time. Maybe something that scares me even more is that I cannot be seen—I am invisible in my madness, invisible in my fear, invisible in both. I think, 28, you have to let it out and trust that ultimately, it comes from somewhere good. Mad, but good. Fearful, but good. You deserve to be seen and you should die trying to demand it. 

I read what 26 wrote me and I find it comical how little I’ve accomplished since then. I am still frozen with anxiety when it comes to language, I still feel nauseas at the thought of words. I still struggle in that in between between the structure of the law and my predilection for the more romantic elements of this world. But, in this dread I feel, this thing bubbling inside me, I feel the potential for something more, I feel ready to break myself a part and create something anew. What would that be? 

To be good though, isn’t to be simple. I’ve felt many a complex emotion this year—resentment, disappointment, hurt. I wasn’t perfect and I like to think I didn’t try to be. I was hurt and I probably hurt others. But, I think, I’ve concluded that I want you to keep throwing yourself into that risk; to build connections and to risk having it broken. Again, to demand to be seen even if you are not. What I’ve learned, 28, is that I need it. We can’t only be alone, we can’t only sit with ourselves. (Despite what we have been told before) It is ok to need another person and it is ok to not know why. 

It is ok to be a little mad, it isn’t a reason to stop living in this world. If your world should fall because you were yourself too much, someone, I want to believe, would catch you. Because, 28, you are good. At the core of it, there is nothing wrong with you, even that which doesn’t go away—it may be sad, it may fraternize with death, but it’s still good. 

I guess, that’s all I have to say. I’m afraid, but I’m also excited for you. Take your time, there’s no template for what you’re doing.

Yours truly, 

My dad died 21 years ago today.

Recently, my uncle in New York City, Chinese (of course) and around the age my dad would have been had he lived (maybe a little younger) said to me, over dim sum, “You have completed the dream I always had for my own children.”

I was horrified. I felt like the arc of my life had been rudely slapped in the face. 

This man was patronizing and an excellent cook at the same time He spoke to me about the legal profession as though he knew everything about it; he was deeply delighted that I had chosen to pursue law, that I was going to a law firm. He liked that I had spent time in rural China, where he was from. He liked that my Mandarin is excellent. 

I hated it and indulged it. I thought, is this a sliver of what it would have been like if my dad had been alive? That he would patronize me and we would argue and then we would all eat together. 

I’ve spent my whole life, not only convincing myself that I do not need a dad, but endeavoring to be nothing like him.  It occurred to me that maybe the irony is, if he were alive, I never would have made these decisions. I would have gone to school as far away from home as possible, maybe I would have studied art or journalism, maybe I would be rebellious, maybe I would have grasped more desperately at the queer community. 

The more he would have wanted me to go to Berkeley and be close to home and save money--the more I would refuse to. 

But instead, I went to Berkeley, I studied science (and English), I completed a service fellowship discovering my rural Chinese roots (not the Peace Corp), I worked at a tech startup, I could have become a doctor (but settled for the wild choice of a lawyer). I’m going to move close to home after law school, I’m going to choose a career with a stable income, I’m going to pay for my mom and her siblings to have a once-in-a-lifetime reunion on an Alaskan cruise because I am a good fucking kid. 

It’s occurred to me lately—did he win? Did I lead the scripted life of a model Asian-American kid that I had always seek to avoid?

Of course, we’re working with the major premise that, if he were alive, he would even have cared what I did with my life. 

If I wanted to comfort myself, I could remember that, in my own way, i try to subvert this image. I have quirks and unconventional interests, I talk openly about mental health, I’m queer, I write. I’ve made each decision on my own; I am my mother’s daughter.

But somehow, all of this is true and still it is not satisfying. I am not relieved. Although he is dead, his presence has loomed ever so large in my life. The more I’ve denied it, the more I’ve thought about it. It’s a problem that, 21 years later, I still have not solved. When a man tells me what to do, when it triggers the feeling of paternalism, I find myself angry with all the absent, entitled, unworthy fathers or soon-to-be fathers in the world. When I see the image of a father being there for his children, being a decent human being, I feel sad and look away.

Sometimes, I feel a rage that has nowhere to go. It goes against the grain of the “normal” “straight-laced” life I perform with too much ease. There isn’t room to be irrational and angry. It has been bottled up inside me for 21 years and it’s occurred to me lately that this, maybe this, is my inheritance. 

This wildness, this thirst for vengeance. This obsession with answers:

 How do you kill a man that’s already dead?

Write your worst.

Sometimes, in New Orleans, I sit in the bathroom for an extra minute listening to the rain outside and tasting the mildew in the air. 

Sometimes, when I walk outside after an onslaught of rain, I pause and take in the gently oppressive silence. The slumbering humidity. The heat emanating from my skin. The beading sweat. I forget who I am, where I am.

Sometimes the blistering crack of thunder still freezes me like a panic stricken deer. 

I remember once when I was a kid, I visited my dad at Stanford Hospital and I refused to leave because I was afraid of the thunder looming, just outside. My sister and I karate-chopped up and down his legs like how kids think massages work, but he was paralyzed from the waist down. The thunder made me want to stay, he wanted us to leave. It’s one of my only memories of our family being all together.

I remember summers in Beijing. Lying on my grandmother’s king size bed, a sloth in the heat. I remember my grandmother fanning herself slowly. Always reclined on the right side of the bed. Her spot. 

Sometimes we would turn the air conditioner on in her room; a crisp cold contrasted with the sticky air of the kitchen. The mildew of the bathroom. 

The sound of raindrops sharp on the tin roofs of the pigeon coops outside. The soft coos of nested birds. A sudden Beijing thunderstorm, over as soon as it arrived. 

There is a special silence that only occurs after a hot rain. The world is still, as though unaccustomed to a world without noise. And then the mosquitos begin to rise from the grass, the pipes begin to drip, the sound of sandals sloshing in mud, avoiding puddles, beat by beat. 

The roar of cicadas somehow amplified by a sunny day, emblazoned by the searing sun. 

Sometimes, when I am in New Orleans, I walk through the solitude of a storm and a feeling as though I am home. And then I remember that home, which was once a place, has disappeared off this earth. Home has become a ghost of a feeling. Sometimes it passes through me and I feel like a ghost myself. Walking in a world I am not quite a part of. 

I am the only ghost I have found in this city.

Childhood, I think, ends when you’ve wandered a bit too far away only to turn around and find yourself lost. Adulthood is a prolonged search for something that is no longer here; but you settle for those fleeting moments.  

“...Again, it is now generally conceded that the most insidious and dangerous enemies to the State are not the armed foes who invade our territory, but those alien races who are incapable of assimilation, and come among us to debase our labor and poison the health and morals of the communities in which they locate.” 

- Brief for the Respondents, Fong Yue Ting v. US (1883)

One of the ironies of law school is that, as I find myself on the cusp of building a career in public service, I find myself more and more entrenched in the anti-Asian and racist roots of this country’s most fundamental legally-protected rights. 

From the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the many attempts (mostly successful until WWII) to eliminate Asian immigration and prevent naturalization and citizenship, to Korematsu and Japanese internment, this country has always viewed Asians as the Perpetual Foreigner. Even as the law finally began to challenge the ridiculous notion of “separate but equal,” this was done so with an exception made for those of “the Chinese race.” (see J. Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.)

I wonder if it is a result of an exposure to Constitutional Law and American history, or if it is simply a by-product of leaving California and feeling like a minority, but I find myself asking for the first time—

How do I serve a country that has actively tried to exclude/deport/other-ize people like me?

***

The conversation fell flat, but I was too tired to try to revive it. 

Perhaps I was too hasty? Perhaps I was too inarticulate. Perhaps I was naive. 

How do I serve a country that has actively tried to exclude/deport/other-ize people like me?

I tried to explain this question to a professor I greatly admired, but who, like most of my teachers, seemed unable to understand the question. (unwilling?) 

How do I choose public service when the choice requires me to affirm my commitment to this country? This country, that actively votes against my rights and interests and existence. This country, that has me living in that space of the third culture kid. Not completely American. Too far gone from China. 

How do I choose public service and practice civil rights law knowing how much the law has tried to erase the Asian narrative? 

Commercial law, I said, feels far more neutral. Commercial law allows me to be an agent of capitalism. Nation-less. State-less. Moving around money. 

Answer: “That sounds like a personal decision.” 

And, against my deepest fears of being ungracious, I nevertheless found this answer unsatisfactory. 

I wanted to be convinced that there was a place for me in public service, in spite of my reluctance. I wanted to be told that this country, its people, its laws are worth committing to. I wanted to be told that devoting myself to this project doesn’t make me complicit in the erasure of history, doesn’t make me complacent in acknowledging the foreign label that I carry. 

I wanted to be told that this was an opportunity, however painful, to subvert the system. I wanted to be told that this country, despite its worst inclinations, wants more people like me in public service. 

But, I suppose, I will just have to find these words somewhere else. 

***

In Fong Yue Ting v. US (1883), the Supreme Court held that Chinese residents in the US could be deported without judicial review and for any reasons Congress should find appropriate. In a brief to the court, the government explained their right to deport at will, especially those “alien races who are incapable of assimilation.” 

I have surprisingly found these words to be instructive. What does it mean to “assimilate”?

I tried so hard to assimilate my first semester of law school. I tried to learn the language, I tried to speak clumsily in it, I tried to write down everything I heard in class—as though it were scripture. I tried to respect everything I was taught. I crowded with other students to listen to lectures by the most esteemed faculty. I wanted to be convinced to buy into the system. 

And yet, as I’ve tried to articulate before, all I have been left with is a feeling of lostness and an amnesia of identity. 

I wonder, then, what it means to be “incapable of assimilation.” I wonder if it’s time to own this idea—to refuse assimilation. I wonder what it is like to live at my own pace and my own whims and my own sense of intuition.

I wonder what it is like to bite the hand that feeds, to reject the wisdom and common sense I am fed. I wonder what it is like to seek out the mentors I deserve and reject the mentors I am told to tolerate. I wonder what it is to seize the opportunities I want, to immunize myself against mainstream prestige, to live a life of discordance. 

I wonder what it is like to refuse tradition and practicality and wonder—why not me?

I suppose if I am incapable of assimilation, I will be told to go back to where I came from. 

I’m from California.

***

In fact, I am named after California. The Chinese character for the golden state is embedded into my Chinese name—a name with no legal significance, but is my name no less. Jasmine—a name with legal significance, and yet merely a placeholder. 

I wonder if this makes me more American or less. 

Nobody can answer this question. It is, perhaps, a question that is not worth answering. 

This was a central theme in Ursula Le Guin’s “Left Hand of Darkness”—a novel about two characters: A foreigner in a foreign land. And a traitor to one’s own country. 

I finished the book this morning; moved and depleted by its end.  Struck by its depiction of foreignness, patriotism and love. I queried—

How do I serve a country that has actively tried to exclude/deport/other-ize people like me?

The alien, Genly Ai, answers:

“’[Estraven the Traitor] loved his country very dearly, sir, but he did not serve it or you. He served the master I serve.’

‘The Ekumen?’ said the king, startled. 

Sometimes I stand in the hallway in school and I’m at a loss for what to do with myself. I feel lost and it’s inherent in “lostness” to be unable to articulate your position. Where did I come from? How did I come to be here? Where was I going?

There is almost an amnesia of identity. 

It’s as though I have been bleached into a blank slate. There is a constant sense of inadequacy and indecision—without the context of a solid identity to give direction. I’m not sure who to be. 

Even reading cases and the law can trigger a crisis of identity. How do I learn the law? To what degree must I buy into the system in order to understand the system? How can I buy into a system that has caused so much pain and suffering in history? How can I understand it without buying into it? How can I understand it and simultaneously be critical of it? How can I practice within a space that I am critical of? I came to law school for a sense of agency and yet, somehow, I feel increasingly powerless the more that I know. 

Isn’t that ironic. 

Sometimes I feel so alone in law school. Perhaps this is just a symptom of the human condition—just an illusion, a moment of psychological darkness. Nevertheless, I feel alone.

I feel like I exist on a different musical meter than my peers, we are moving at different beats. Discordant. I feel unguided, detached and disappointed by those who are meant to guide me—those I am programmed to unquestionably respect. I am lost and do not know what to do with myself. 

And I realize, in writing this, that I have written it before. If you scroll back through the scattered posts I’ve made throughout the years, you will find this moment repeated over and over. Lost, disappointed, confused by the messages around me. Exhausted by my own performance. Half-hearted in what I stand for. What do I stand for?

I’ve had this moment when I grasped for external validation and direction. When I found myself waiting for the world to validate me, to tell me what to do, all I could find waiting for me was the insubstantial, the immaterial—air. And it’s only in these moments when I am reminded—again—that the only person I have to depend on in these instances of darkness, is myself. This is not to disavow the presence of others, but often we are alone in our struggles and to expect anything otherwise is a disservice to yourself. 

More than self-loathing, I find myself angry and furious with what I have been given. To have experience after experience where I do not feel understood, where my concerns are dismissed, where I feel trivialized, where I am given the response “I can’t help you with that”—I find that so unforgivable. And perhaps it was my fault in the first place to have expected more from the world, to have expected substance. But I don’t think it was unreasonable of me. We are offered guidance and support over and over and when I reach for it, I feel summarily dismissed. I feel like I am speaking simple words in a simple language and it all seems to fall flat on ears that cannot be bothered to exercise their imagination and empathy. 

And it is in my upbringing first to blame myself. Perhaps the problem lies in me not being enough, me not communicating properly, me not standing up for myself, me being an awkward human being. Perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with me. But I am less and less convinced by this. I have polished myself so fervently, I work so hard to be considerate, polite, understanding, empathetic, forgiving, earnest. I try so hard to suppress my melancholy; to embrace the positivity. I reach out over and over again. I try so very hard to be better—to be more than who I am. And still, I feel this sense of hollowness. 

This week may have been the first time in law school that we talked about capital-T “Truth” and capital-J “Justice.” It’s interesting, having spent so long thinking about how everything is debatable and the artificial nature of legal standards that I had forgotten it could be—is—possible to have undeniable truths.

In torts, we wondered if it is simply fundamentally wrong to judge women differently from men. To have gendered legal standards. Standards that are not simply flexible to the situations of different people, but rather have inherent judgment about each gender woven into its fabric and creation. 

In constitutional law, the idea of the natural laws. That there is morality beyond what is in our laws and the Constitution. That though we practice the law, we should not be beholden to the law when it is wrong. When it explicitly condones slavery, when it explicitly protects discrimination and the destruction of human rights. No document is sacred, no document captures what is just—Justice lies somewhere else, perhaps engraved in the flesh.

And of course Milton resurfaced again. The writer that I’ve had such a complicated on-again off-again relationship with. But his words are a good reminder of action—to venture forth into the world and debate ideas of Truth and Justice and to face evil head-on and the venture deep within and look shame in the eyes. His words are a good reminder that Truth cannot be Truth and Justice cannot be Justice without complication and conflict, but that they, nonetheless, exist. At the intersection of what is within and what is beyond.

My first memory of shame was on a Valentine’s Day. 

I remember because my grandmother was walking me home from school and I was carrying a paper bag full of paper valentines. That’s what you do in first grade; everyone is everyone’s valentine. 

I stopped walking, maybe to reach for something in my backpack, and pinched my paper bag of valentines between my legs so that I could free my hands. I didn’t want to put it on the ground. But my grandmother scolded me sharply.

She said it was ugly for girls to put things between their legs. Unsightly. 

I dropped the paper bag and my valentines spilled out. I’ve always been a sensitive child, so I was crying at this point as I struggled to pick up the scattered notes. I was upset, I blamed her for making me spill everything. It’s the only time I’ve ever talked back to my grandmother, the only time we ever argued. But mostly, I was ashamed. And I wasn’t even sure why. 

My grandmother was my most important person. She took care of me while my father was sick; she taught me my multiplication tables in Chinese and spun fairy tales of magical horses (while I drew and played with horse cut-outs). I loved her so much I could not bear to displease her. She returned back to China after my father died and I felt like our relationship became one of constructed images. I wanted her to be proud of me, I wanted to be perfect, dutiful, obedient, a good student—the best granddaughter. 

For a very long time, that was the only identity I was comfortable with having. 

I was in rural India when I heard my grandmother was ill. I booked plane tickets to Beijing in a mosquito infested internet cafe, my whole body stinging. I traveled to China in a fugue state. On the plane, a predatory Lenovo businessman tried to make a move on me—a nineteen year old—and said I was too “reserved” when I didn’t humor him. No shit, motherfucker. 

The last time we spoke was in a hospital in Beijing. Her heart was failing. These were the saddest moments of my life because I realized I did not know what to say to her. I realized how single dimensional our relationship had been and I felt, most acutely, the potential of any future relationship fading away. 

I reached for her and she hissed, “don’t touch me. It’s dirty.” What do I make of this moment? Was she protective of me, relentlessly stubborn, ashamed of herself? Did she feel shame in her own dying? Shame to be seen in such a weak state, with so much vulnerability, shame from fear, shame from disgust, shame from life.

I love my grandmother. I inherited shame from my grandmother. 

I am not a revolutionary. Not in the traditional sense at least. That road is cut short. (A thought for another time)

The criminal justice cause has never quite resonated with me beyond an intellectual level. In Chinese, there is an idiom—carved into the bones and seared into your heart. 刻骨铭心。Those experiences so striking they are etched in, or, as I like to interpret, the foundational shape of your internal structure. There are some things in the world that remind you of what has always been a part of your fabric. 

But I grew up sheltered. The fragmented and punitive facet of America was never a part of my narrative. Sometimes I feel I will never want to be a part of a shared mission. The fear of a hive mind repels me. 

In the last chapter of James Forman’s book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” I read the story of Sandra Dozier, a black woman who lost a hard-won job over an unwarranted marijuana arrest that suddenly gave her a criminal record. Sandra sought Forman’s help as a public defender to clear her record but nothing could be done. After she left Forman’s office, he noticed she had forgotten some documents. A high school diploma, a letter of recommendation, intern of the month. The armor she carried with her to job fairs, to the police station, anyone who had the power to declare who was human and who was not; paper proof of her value. 

“And I hated the futility of her effort.” 

Somehow reading these words gave me pause. My eyes burned. The system, the story, the history—it is all foreign to me, but futility, this I can understand. Futility, powerlessness, resignation, the absence of which strips you of your human dignity. I think my mother came to this country because there was something futile about being an individual in China; I think I have seen a sense of futility in my students in China, my peers. It is the most unbearable. I have tried to live in a way antithetical to what feels futile; the things that give me fear and paralysis, those are often the things that i must do. Because I resist futility. 

As a white-collar, result of brain drain, model minority reinforcing Asian American, I often feel cut out of the movement for racial justice in this country. That’s fine, I have never been one for groups, I do not need a part of the ownership. But perhaps our paths will cross nonetheless. When I think about why I want to work in juvenile defense, it is not because I have personally experience the harms of mass incarceration or that I bear guilt for causing or enabling this system. Perhaps it is simply because I do not believe, on a basic human level, anyone deserves to have their dignity stripped, for life to be a futile battle. It’s wasteful to expend effort, it’s tragic to give up. 

Futility is an affront to why I stay alive. 

**

Dear 27,

As our kind sister asks, “How does it feel to be in your late 20s?”

Well, tomorrow feels as overwhelming as any regular day does. I’m trying to finish our marketing course (I will now have to bestow this labor of love upon you), keeping in mind all the law I’ve yet to master. But I guess I never expected to be here (who knew it would be Ann Arbor? It’s very cold and it will only get colder for you), doing these things (who knew I would have such lingering fondness for marketing), stressing about law school (statistically, I’m always stressing, but also, statistically, my chances of going to law school were pretty slim)—and I do appreciate a good surprise. All in all, I would much rather be 27 than 17 any day. 

It’s interesting, I think I got to this point by simultaneously embracing the system and keeping myself just distanced enough to survive it. I mention this because I think this will be a recurring issue for you in the next year. Law school is so incredibly systematic; there is a constant pressure to define what track you are on and where you are going. There are days, I think, when, in the course of playing the game, I forget I forget that I came to law school not expecting, necessarily, to get some fancy lawyer job, I was just curious about what I could learn here. Whether these skills could help further that larger, more meaningful goal we’ve always searched for. I hope you can play a game without needing to earn a specific treasure at the end. 

Language has been on my mind recently. I think there was a point in my life when I believed myself to be an eloquent speaker and writer—that words could come naturally to me. 

I hate to break it to you but, those days are over. 

I suppose I should apologize for having putting you into this position. Just when I became comfortable with the language of marketing and business, two months of law school have destroyed any confidence I have in all words in general. I now second guess everything I say and write. I’m constantly clumsily stumbling over myself. When I begin a sentence, I feel as though I do not have enough time to figure out how to finish it and so I drift off into nothingness halfway through. I’ve imposed expectation upon an art form I used to feel was freeing. I take no joy in writing this. Each word drowns in anxiety. 

It’s not great for a person that has always felt difficulty being understood to have her major channel of communication completely broken. 

And yet, this ugly process of breaking has forced me to look at what the source of our previously-believed eloquence came from. When I look back at the pages of angst that make up plaintofu, I do wonder if much of the substance was weightless. I wrote in hyperbole and simile and metaphor, wantonly utilizing semi-colons and fragments to express, as viscerally as I could, what I felt while avoiding the actual facts as much as I could. I understand that facts and the internet do not mix well but, in this state of brokenness, I also wonder to what degree I developed that particular style of “eloquence” because I was afraid to name things as they are. 

Ever since my friend in India told me (maybe 6 years ago?) that “language is just a game,” I’ve taken that idea and ran with it.  I could write about anything—choosing words at my fancy—and expound on my deepest feelings, as long as I didn’t have to face it in any consequential manner.  I think this was how we developed our voice and that voice has, too often, made all the difference. 

Law school has broken all of this. Suddenly, words have very specific consequences. They are not free for me to give life to and imbue with meaning. They carry a meaning I can only hope to know and use responsibly. I’m not sure what my voice is anymore, but I have desperately been trying to adopt another. 

So I leave you in a precarious position. In my pretentiousness, I would say I have left you surrounded by ugliness. The ugliness of all these insecure words, the void of having been stripped of your voice, the frankenstein-esque language you now employ. 

But maybe this is the price of learning to say things with consequence. 

Good luck. I’m interested to see how things turn out.