Residual
December 25, 2010 § 2 Comments
Eight years ago, my family was on our way home from a family dinner at the home of some friends who lived in Hoffman Estates, a good 45 minutes away from our own Chicagoan suburb. It was a cold and blustery night; snow and ice covered the ground as more of it blew furiously from the dark sky. My family & my aunt’s family crowded into our green Dodge Caravan, with my parents in the front, my aunt and uncle in the front, and my brother sitting between my cousin and I in the backseat.
We settled in for the customary long drive home. Some of us had probably even fallen asleep somewhere along the endless highway with the other bright headlights.
Suddenly, our world spun, my mother yelled, and just as quickly, everything stopped. We found ourselves on the left shoulder, pressed against the concrete wall of the median, facing oncoming traffic. The van had slipped on ice, swung from the rightmost lane across three lanes of traffic while turning a full 180 degrees, and crashed into the divider.
We sat, stunned.
“Are you guys okay?!” my mom asked urgently, turning around to look at us. My cousin had a bloody nose from thumping his head into the window, but we were otherwise unscathed.
The three of us sat quietly in the back as my dad and uncle went outside to assess the damage and probably call roadside service. I couldn’t properly process what had just taken place.
“What were you thinking when it happened?” my mom directed toward the backseat.
“God, please save us,” I blurted. I don’t think anything was actually going through my mind when we spun out, but that’s what I probably should’ve been thinking.
“Oh, that’s good,” she murmured, turning back around.
Soon enough, a tow truck showed up, its headlights shining into our grounded vehicle. There was a sizable dent on the right side of our minivan, but the car was otherwise okay, so we slowly made our way back onto the road.
“Imagine if there was a semi truck right behind us,” my mom mused. “We could’ve been dead right now. Thank goodness the road was somewhat empty.”
Yes, we could’ve been mangled and bleeding on the highway. It’s probably my closest encounter to a near-death experience; I don’t really count it because it’s not like someone saved me from drowning, but I guess the possibility of death was still pretty high.
Nobody received any visible trauma from that night, but I don’t ever remember being afraid of being in a car before that, even though I had once banged my nose on the hard plastic armrest of our old sedan because I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt when my dad braked.
We’ve been on the road many times after that, and in worse weather too. Hard ice crusted on the road on our way to Florida in 2004, and I was almost too tense to sleep for fear of another accident. I lay awake in the backseat despite the 20-hour drive and prayed fervently to God that He would keep my dad awake and alert. When we drove up a mountain in Hawaii in 2007, I pictured our car sliding over the side of the curving road, tumbling into the empty space below.
Even on our trip to and from Wisconsin these past few days, my mind buzzed with stress at the feeling of the snowy, uneven road beneath our tires. My overly active imagination uncontrollably envisions the worst-case scenario. Our car is going to slip the next moment. Or the next. Maybe around this bend, where we’ll cause a pile-up of Final Destination proportions.
I don’t think I realized this lingering insecurity until the drive back from Wisconsin. Our windshield wipers worked to clear our window of snow particles as my dad made jokes (“Come on, truck, drive faster!”), and I cast my gaze about nervously while typing these words onto a Microsoft Word document, afraid that even as I wrote, my MacBook would be ripped out of my hands by the force of another car smashing into us, bracing myself against the possibility of being the sole survivor of a tragic car accident.
My imagination is morbid, but I guess I’m emotionally preparing for the worst, whether it’s deliberate or not. I wish I just had peace.
Ulterior Motives: Everybody Has One
November 28, 2010 § 7 Comments
As I get older, things become less simple. Family parties lose their glitz & glamor, friendships become tainted with divisions, and problems in my family show up acutely. I am helpless to change most of those and reluctant to take on the rest. But these are some of my observations from the past week:
1. Before coming home for Thanksgiving break, my mom told me that our family friend, a guy who had stayed at our house over the summer while I traipsed around Asia, was going to visit again. She EXPRESSLY warned me not to see him as boyfriend material. It was the first forewarning I’ve ever received, and I laughed. Really hard. He’s 25 and goes to IU in Pennsylvania? Let’s call him JS for short.
i. “He booked his plane tickets for Saturday through Tuesday,” mother told me. “Apparently he didn’t know which day was actually Thanksgiving. He’s been in America for a year and a half — how can anyone be that dumb?”
“Is he good-looking?” I asked.
“No. And he’s short, too.”
ii. My mother’s a blunt woman, but she’s usually not that harsh, especially with people whom I haven’t met before. It seems like she said those things to deter me, even though JS is actually a somewhat distant cousin of mine. C’mon mom! I have SOME standards.
2. Is it REALLY possible to think that Thanksgiving occurs on the weekend? Yes, but what kind of person neglects to look into this matter before booking plane tickets?? I didn’t get to know JS that well, but I figure maybe he didn’t want to stay for the whole week. I mean, all he did was play basketball with my dad and watch my brother play COD. My family’s really not that fun.
3. When mother and I came home from shopping on Monday, we expected dinner to be somewhat ready. After all, it was 5:35, and my mom specifically directed me to call my dad to remind him that dinnertime was 5:30. Instead, we found an empty kitchen table, my hungry brother playing XBox grumpily on the couch, and my dad & JS playing ping pong in the basement.
i. One reason I love watching Desperate Housewives is because despite all the drama [or perhaps because of it], petty feuds and occasional scandals, I learn from it. Lynette and Tom Scavo have stuck together despite all the children, his mid-life crisis, etc. I figured that my dad was just pulling a Tom and was happy to have found a new buddy, especially since his own son refuses to go anywhere or do anything [e.g. Larry spent their 3-week summer trip to China at my grandparents’ house playing on his iTouch, which was bought as a bribe to even go in the first place].
ii. Later, my dad told me what he thought of JS.
“Do you really like him or something?” I asked when we were alone in the car.
“Did you know that his father is overseas?” he replied. I shook my head.
“After JS was born, his father really wanted to go abroad,” my dad continued. “He couldn’t get into America, so he went to Hungary. I’m not sure if he meant to stay there, but he met another woman there and married her.” My eyes widened. “He basically cut off all contact with his family, and JS’s mother hasn’t even known her husband’s location since then. She can’t divorce him because he isn’t deceased. If I’m able to provide a bit of fatherly attention to JS, I’m happy to do it.”
4. My mom got pissed the moment she saw the empty kitchen and remained pissy throughout our dinner of hotpot.
i. The next day, she told me that she wasn’t planning to invite JS back for Christmas break.
“I heard your dad asking JS when his winter break started, but I need to have a talk with him,” she explained. “You saw how he ignored his own hungry son to go play ping pong. That is unacceptable.”
//
Every time I come home from school, things feel cheerful and relaxed. But time & time again, I realize that nothing at home changes. My mom still gets angry at every little thing, my dad lets his frustration build up, and there’s a total lack of communication. Before we left for our final dinner engagement of the week, the two of them had an all-out screaming match in the kitchen. Then mother came outside, where I was watching my white breath dissipate into the rays of the sunset, and took it out on me.
“Why can’t you ever do something useful? You just stay holed up in your room all day while you know your father and I are working hard in the kitchen!”
Whatever, mom! If you and dad insist on behaving like screaming children, it’s not my job to get in the middle of it.
It started before I woke up. By the time I went downstairs at 1:30PM, mother was on her way out the door.
“Where are you going?”
“The YMCA.”
“Where’s dad?”
“I don’t know.” She was curt. He returned from the YMCA five minutes after she left.
Right before we all piled into the car to go to someone else’s house, mother insisted that we take a family photo in the living room with our new Canon T1i. My brother, as usual, had to be dragged downstairs and basically acted like an asshole the whole time, rolling around on the ground refusing to get in the picture. Mother & father both tried to handle the situation from their respective places by the Christmas tree and behind the camera but just ended up frustrated at each other.
“Why do we have to take a stupid family picture?” Larry whined.
“Look at the one we took four years ago,” mother replied, gesturing to the frame sitting by the front door. “You looked so happy in that one!”
But he refused to play along with the façade, and it was yet another reminder that no matter how much mother wants us to try to fake it for the camera, deep inside we all know that this family has been dysfunctional for years. I just thought that my parents would have at least mellowed out with age, but clearly something like that will take more than just passing time.
This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land
November 17, 2010 § Leave a comment
I’m taking a US Environmental History course this semester to fulfill my upper-level social science credit — it sounded boring [what could there possibly be to talk about? Changes in climate?] but I would do anything to avoid taking a political science or economics class.
Once again proving that my assumptions are almost always incorrect, this class has taught me more crucial information than any other gen-ed I’ve taken. It is, in short, a study of how humans relate to their environment and vice versa.
When you look out at a typical American landscape, you see grass, trees, and a clear expanse of sky. The suburbs in which I’ve grown up, at least, differ drastically from the hazy pollution of urban China, and I’ve always consumed the clean air and water of America with confidence.
Yet I’ve never seen the ecological battle that occurs every day on this continent. We’ve learned that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, of which I had only barely heard about in elementary school, was not a freak incident of nature but a result of massive erosion due to poor farming tactics that stripped the land of its natural vegetation. During the beginning of America’s colonization, flocks of birds numerous enough to darken the sky were hunted mercilessly for sport; dams and overfishing have cut off many fish from their natural routes between hatching and developing, not to mention the endless invasive species transported to various bodies of water to keep some semblance of life. The earth is struggling around us.
Our first lesson was about Native Americans. Most people, currently as well as in the history of our nation, have had a romanticized vision of the nomadic American Indian who only kills what he needs and uses every part of a bison, demonstrating a spiritual connection to nature and as small of an environmental footprint as possible. But this is inaccurate, a stereotype, not too dissimilar from the “straight-A student” ones that Asian Americans face today.
When colonists first set foot in America, they stepped into a landscape that had already been transformed by the people living there. Native Americans regularly set brush fires to clear the plains of shrubs, and they also had bison jumps, which were basically cliffs from which they drove herds and herds of bison to their deaths. It was certainly a wasteful way to hunt, since there was no way to preserve the piles of carcasses, but it’s an intelligent strategy much safer than chasing a bison with a spear. The point here is historical agency — our idealized notion of Native Americans robs them of the power to change their environment, which they inarguably did because they were reasoning, capable people.
But the breadth of environmental change caused by non-Native Americans has been so much more devastating.
For the past week, we’ve been watching a documentary called Blue Vinyl, created by Judith Helfand. The film documents the consequences of PVC plastic, primarily in the form of vinyl siding used on millions of houses across America.
A clip:
In summary, this is what I learned:
1. PVC, a cheap and efficient form of plastic, is everywhere from the side of your house to your pipes and toys and other plastic things.
2. PVC is made from vinyl chloride, the life cycle of which makes it one of the most hazardous consumer products in existence due to the toxins that are released when PVC is produced and disposed of.
3. Burning PVC, which is the most common and easiest way to dispose of the product, produces toxic fumes.
4. These toxic fumes are dioxin, which causes tumors in those exposed to vinyl chloride. Factory workers as well as those who live near factories develop angiosarcoma of the liver, a rare form of cancer.
5. European vinyl chloride manufacturers actually signed a pact of secrecy with American companies not to publish scientific reports that showed correlations between vinyl chloride exposure and angiosarcoma.
6. When the documentary was being made, PVC executives in Venice were being charged for manslaughter due to deaths of their factory workers. The thing is…they simply don’t care, and were all acquitted by the jury.
It’s hard to fight vinyl. The plastic is cheap, durable and ubiquitous. Realistically, most people can’t afford to build their houses with another material. Blue Vinyl highlighted the fact that vinyl corporations donate millions of dollars in products to Habitat For Humanity in order to provide families with affordable housing.
But cheap consumer prices don’t reflect the cost to the environment. As Americans, we can’t escape the capitalist frame of reference: our minds are always thinking in terms of cost-benefit analysis. Recycling vinyl is immensely expensive, so is it worth the effort? Is it worth it if the trade-off is the release of cancerous chemicals into the environment?
I have a friend who is adamantly against recycling, something about the effort being more expensive than simply throwing the materials away. But when you pit monetary cost against ecological cost, is it really okay for the environment to come out on bottom?
Vinyl is worrisome, but there are precedents of hazardous materials becoming obsolete. Before 1900, asbestos was a popular building material, but after discoveries just a few decades ago that exposure led to diseases such as cancer, governments began passing laws to phase the material out of consumer products. It’s possible for us as consumers to take control of what is sold to us and how it might harm our world; it starts with educating yourself.
Fear In The Room
October 18, 2010 § 7 Comments
I’m glad to be single. I’m glad that I didn’t have a boyfriend holding me back while studying abroad; I’m glad that I don’t have one to hinder my post-graduation plans. I look at the two of my roommates who have boyfriends and think, I’m glad I don’t have to set aside time for a boyfriend because I feel like I barely have enough time for myself.
In short, I’m selfish.
A relationship is very rewarding, but it’s also draining, full of giving. You don’t know how tiring it is until you’re out of one.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it. It’s nice to have someone to talk to immediately, a free dispenser of hugs and kisses and dates that’s hard to find in anybody else. But most of the time I shun the thought of a relationship, instead exaggerating the superficial.
Spending half a year in Asia turned in a little boy-crazy. I mean, the guys in Hong Kong weren’t that good-looking, but they were skinny and well-dressed and had long hair, and if I just focused on a positive physical trait, it was enough for me. Lust is a very real and enduring struggle. Kpop has also instilled this weird infatuation for younger guys, which I’m having a harder time hiding lately. I’ve been wielding my sexuality unapologetically, creeping on cute guys and commenting on them shamelessly. And I keep everything superficial.
In the end, I think what I have is fear.
I’m afraid to want more. I’m afraid to give myself and my time and have all my effort ultimately go to waste. I’m afraid to be emotionally invested in another person. I’m afraid to take that risk.
So for now, I’d rather stick to boy-watching, to compartmentalizing, to keeping things from getting messy. I’d rather ogle photos of Korean idols, people who are a fantasy. Safe.
Who can tame this wild heart? I bet it’s not you ;)
auradis 