diary – Page 5 – Jenneral HQ

Dear me from the past,

(A response to a letter from myself in 2008)

I haven’t gotten my drivers license yet, not the full one anyways. Its okay, you’ll realize soon enough how dumb cars are. Dad’s now really trying to get me to drive though, so there’s that. How the tables have turned.

Thankfully, I have almost no recollection now of sleeping on that board covered with thick carpet. I haven’t slept on anything similar since I visited our maternal grandma in 2014, and realized that there was not a single gotdam mattress in our entire hometown. Even calling it “almost a mattress” is too generous for how awful it was. It also isn’t actually good for your back, no matter what dad claims, because you’re a side sleeper.

In the last 10 years, I have realized that being a vet is too hard, and I unfortunately still don’t have a dog. I’m working on it. Goldens are nice, but I’m thinking of picking up a rescue and not shelling out the absurd amount of money for a purebred. I am in university though, so that’s cool.

Henry’s good. He’s not so dumb now, but he’s picked up the recorder again and I know that you’re doing it at school right now so that seems kind of good, but it’s not. It’s awful. Recorders are awful. He’s also older now than you are at the time that you wrote this.

Harvard’s overrated. I’m not bitter

Maybe you should consider doing more writing and less reading, because I’ve been squinting at this letter for 5 minutes now and I still don’t know exactly what you did with author Loris Loreski. Actually, I take that back. Reading is your first love but it will eventually fade – so slowly at first that you won’t realize it. Revel in your love, and cherish it, as long as you can.

Fei and Stephanie are with me still in University, and we are still very good friends. But I think you already know that you’re going to leave the church soon. I think you already know what that means.

No offense, kiddo, but if time travel has been invented, that would not be at the top of my to-do list. Haha who am I kidding of course it would be. Assuming that the time police didn’t make it illegal!

Nice, mom and dad made it to page 2. They’re good. You’ll slowly realize that they’re also still in the process of growing, like you. It will make your relationship with them sweeter. Try to keep up on your mandarin, okay?

You got into gifted. You made your best friendships there.

The world is still screwed, and I am still on it, but I promise you that one day, you will go to the moon. Unfortunately, we still have not harnessed the 4th and 5th spatial dimensions yet, though.

I haven’t written in my journal in a long time. Thanks for reminding me that it exists.

Carribean blue is nice, but I’ve discovered that forest green is nicer. Ernest should still be standing. No one you know is famous, unfortunately. But give it time.

New York City was a blast all the times I went! I’ll get my butt to Europe eventually.

On Ethnoburbia

I’m writing my term paper on (so, reading a lot about) the Canadian ethnoburb – a relatively new subtype of suburb populated by newer, wealthier Asian immigrants.

I spent most of my life living in Don Mills and Scarborough, two very prominent Torontonian examples.

I’m reading about the ethnic shift in areas near Chinatown that my parents used to rent a basement in. When I still wrote my journals in Chinese as a very small girl.

I remember that even once we moved out from Chinatown, my parents would bus in on the weekends to buy groceries, since they were much cheaper there and it had selections of Chinese vegetables that weren’t available outside it.

I remember the first time a Chinese supermarket opened near where we lived, how much more convenient our lives got.

I’m reading about a place that our family used to go to for takeout a lot before it shut down. It’s located in the first Chinese shopping centre outside of Chinatown, and it’s a block away from where my parents still live. One that sparked massive protest by the then-mostly-white residents of Scarborough. It’s now mostly empty. (We still go to the dim-sum place next door though, pretty much every time I head back to Toronto. It’s really good.)

My parents tell me stories about the struggles they first faced here, and now I see them reflected in my textbooks. And suddenly it’s like I realize another facet to this whole personal-being-political thing.

On going off to uni.

When I was seven, I realized that all the books that I’ve read had happy endings. What was up with that? I wondered. Maybe when I grow up I will write the first story with a sad ending, and it would blow everyone’s minds.

Twenty minutes later, I’ve decided that the world is too large and too strange for there to be no sad books in existence. It’s more likely that they just don’t give that kind of story to seven-year-olds.

When I first discovered the word “tragedy”, I felt a pulse of satisfaction.

When I was thirteen and at the tail end of my listless emo phase, I wondered why no one else seemed to mind the meaninglessness of their existence here on this tiny ball of mud in an infinitely large universe. School, work, children, retirement; is there all there is?

A week later I woke up at 4 in the morning with a revelation: people who don’t follow this american-dream path probably won’t live in the suburbs either. The world is too large and too strange for everyone to choose the exact same path through life, I just happened to live in a place that valued traditional dreams a lot.

Even later on I discovered Nietzsche, was immediately bored by Beyond Good and Evil, and went back to playing Neopets.

All in all, I think I’m pretty good at figuring out how the world works.

When I was seventeen I had exactly one moment of being afraid of university, before I shut down that line of thought. Don’t be silly, I thought, in the millions of people have gone to university, there’s bound to be some dumber than you who also went and succeeded. There’s bound to be some lazier than you, whoalso went and succeeded. There’s also bound to be many who fail, too, either to pass high school or to get accepted or to continue on into their second or third or fourth year, but if they all ended up on the streets our homeless problem would be much, much larger, which means that there’s other ways to make a living. You just haven’t found them yet. If you need to, you will.

Or, that’s how it’s supposed to work. I’m still a little panicky, to be honest. Would I be part of the 33% who don’t go on into second year? That would suck. My family would be so disappointed. It’s a distant fear, but I guess what makes us human is that some parts of our brains can’t be soothed with logic.

Still, I am very very excited about uni. My mom has the best stories of all the things she did there, all the road trips with friends who were not that close at the start, all the passionate arguments about literature and philosophy (have a feeling those might be in short supply at Waterloo tho), a fucking ballroom club where she had the same boy as a partner for four years and they never spoke outside the club, never even exchanged names.

If I have even half the adventures she did I’m in for a fantastic time, but let’s be real, Imma blow her experiences out of the water. I’m off tomorrow!

In the meantime, though, I gotta finish up my packing.