I Almost Became Something & Then I Changed My Mind

All fun is okay fun

2007-12-23T20:56:00.001-06:00

The world of warcraft is on this computer also words I don't know, also I don't know, also I left my camera at my ye ye's house, I asked my brother to wheel me around in his wheelchair and he said, okay, but first I gotta go spit that dirty cake that someone left outside. Why did someone leave a dirty cake outside our door?

Picture one:
Ａ　ｐｉｃｔｕｒｅ!

Ｔｈｅｒｅ　ａｒｅ　ｓｏ　ｍａｎｙ　ｔｈｉｎｇｓ　ｔｏ　ｅａｔ　ｉｎ　Ｃｈｉｎａ!

Ｐｉｃｔｕｒｅ　ｔｗｏ:
Ａｎｏｔｈｅｒ　ｐｉｃｔｕｒｅ!

Ｔｈｅｓｅ　ａｒｅ　ｔｈｅ　ｆｏｏｄｓ　ｔｈａｔ　ｗｉｌｌ　ｓｕｒｅｌｙ　ｇｉｖｅ　ｙｏｕ　ｄｉａｒｒｈｅａ／ｃｏｎｓｔｉｐａｔｉｏｎ／ｕｎｅｎｄｉｎｇ　ｆｌａｔｕｌｅｎｃｅ／ｗｈａｔｅｖｅｒ／ｗｈａｔｅｖｅｒ／ｗｈａｔｅｖｅｒ,　ｂｙｅ!

Do I seem like the kind of person who gives a shit about chronology, place, or synchronicity

2007-01-23T08:00:00.000-06:00

Or how about:

spelling, grammar, sentences where the comma is used properly, the smells of places, savory or bad, being nice to people who should really get a proper slap to their face, recording life's best moments with a camera! copying ricky gervais' moves, dressing up like a nun, a chinese lady in waiting, boobs propped up curse of the golden flower style, writing poems in my sleep, singing them to loved ones when I'm awake, dancing underneath the stars I've pasted up on my ceiling, taking them down when I turn twenty, putting them back up when I turn twenty three, walking upside and facing a blown up picture of myself in blue overalls, twin pigtails, puffy eyes, flowers for miles the wrong side up, right side left, cheese, any kind of cheese, nostalgia for unconscious beings like a desk, or a peice of paper with a drawing on it, the time we had a yin family reunion and I woke up to the sound of basketball shots and scuffed sneakers, the answer to the question of why our names all sound the same, johnny, tony, annie, jenny, jimmy, winny, linny, tinny, okay so some are fake, some are real, trying four times to go to the rodin sculpture garden and missing it everytime which stinks because by the time i get myself back to that city it'll be gone, who knows what else will be gone, fishing, bowling, singing the right words to songs I know how to dance to, paying my repects, respect, confidence, wit, or graduating from school with the image of my sun reprinted on my back in one big sprawling red splash?

So I met a girl with a pony at the airplane

2007-01-21T15:30:00.000-06:00

It's in her suitcase, she lives in South San Francisco with her dad who I mistook for her granddad, and when she danced, she was a little swirl of pink! And I petted her pony love through her suitcase, and then we were off, each to our separate cities.

I had this horrible dream and then it turned out it was no dream

2007-01-09T10:31:00.000-06:00

I think this is a common occurrence for most people--you know you have a dream that you have no friends so then you call up someone to tell this to, but oops, you really don't have any friends.

And to celebrate this, I propose unintelligible mumbling rumbling complaining looking at tony's flickr and posting a picture of my grandfather!

What a great catch.

He was looking good and then one day my grandma snagged him!

I think my mom looks a lot like her mom, my grandma who put so many pieces of fish into my rice bowl today that I am filled with fish bones that are as tiny as a line that I could draw across my stomach with a really really fine pen, so I am hoping now that my insides are growing another skeletal frame, a miniature one this time!

Right, part II

2007-01-08T07:23:00.000-06:00

Forgot what part one was. I went to a my first wedding. There are some sexy qipaos out there. But whyforenot anyone show cleavage?

Forgot to bring my camera, but I noticed a few things:

1) I went with my cousin and she wanted me to wear a white turtleneck underneath this very nice dress that had potential to show a little boobybittytit but was of course made impossible by the addition of the white turtleneck.
2) So I said no thanks.
3) Everyone who is not extremely ridiculously wealthy and Chinese is terribly afraid of the cold and is not convinced that an indoor wedding held at a nice restaurant/hotel is capable of having warm enough heating to wear a formal dress.
4) There were 28 tables and we were seated at the very worst one.
5) So I didn't see anything.
6) And thusly, missed the part where they showed a slideshow
7) Recapped how the groom originally proposed
8) Had this cheesy bit where the groom and bride sang that song that sounds kinda weird to me in both English and Chinese to each other
9) When everyone else was not paying any attention and smoking, eating, toasting, drinking, jabbering while that song was playing and the bride and groom possibly had a few tears in their eyes.
10) Chinese guys don't seem to really look you in the eye when they talk to you, and neither do Chinese girls, and also no one says their names, which is maybe why my mom still doesn't know the name of that woman who has a really rich house that takes like 40 minutes to get to after you get off the Northern State, and also her friend who works for the UN and told me I'm too good to work for the UN, and then I was like, hahaha yeah right. Still, hahaha yeah right.
11) I want to ask my cousin if she's already had sex or not, because I don't see how if you date someone who doesn't have their own apartment (90% of her friends and herself, in fact, she sleeps in the same bed as my auntie) and you don't have your own apartment, how can you make sweet love to each other?
12) The naughtiest bit was when the bride said she was going to nuli everyday from today on towards her goal of having a baby.
13) Wonder if her parents liked that joke?
14) The most important thing to Chinese people is food.
15) We ate for 4 hours, and like, said congratulations and other stuff for 10 minutes.
16) Wouldn't a western, traditional Christian wedding in Minneapolis be more like a bunch of boring ceremonial stuff, then a buffet and mostly boozing?
17) Wouldn't know. Never been. Just making generalizations.
18) The whole thing wasn't as joyful or festive as I expected.
19) Who was the fucking idiot who wrote that story about the Chinese bride and groom in San Francisco kowtowing in front of a Buddha and the woman wearing a fucking red veil which could not be lifted until consummation time, because the wedding I went to was not set in 1891 Idon'tknowshitbutIwillOrientalizeallmyfakeknowledge-ville.
20) How come the wedding also reminded me of being in high school and going to a dance where everyone is bouncing around and acting stressed out about really small things and making it obvious that they are sort of proud but also uncomfortable in their fancy get ups and high heeled shoes by clicking them so hard on the ground and running around with clipped feet and talking fast about all the things that went wrong, and also
21) I saw this girl who was 25 and already someone's baby momma, and she was so skinny and made all the same lude jokes as everyone else but she had to leave at 8 pm and everyone else who didn't have a baby didn't have to, and then it got me all nervous and I had to put my hand over my heart, pledge of allegiance style, to keep it down.

All in all, no astute observations made, no snappy pictures taken.

The crying of getting a lot of haircuts, the crying lot of getting two haircuts in two days and wanting a third

2007-01-08T06:47:00.000-06:00

and yeah yeah blah blah blah blah, not a direct wordplay on the novel, but who cares, I read one page of that book and got much more interested in taking a dump or putting grains of sand into my fingers than reading another sentence, and let me tell you something else. Or ask something else.

WHY DOES EVERYONE LOOK AT ME AND THINK, DANNNNG, SHE WOULD LOOK SMOKIN' GOOD IN A MULLET????????????????????????????????

Hello to the world, I don't look good in a mullet, I don't want Jennifer Aniston's circa 1992 Friends shagcut, I don't want to look like the pretty Chinese girls who shop on Xinle Lu with their intensely layered, banged up, really fucking cutting ass chunky great hair, I just want to look exactly the same way I looked before you gave me a mullet but with less hair all around, IS THAT SO HARD TO DO?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Well here's a blast from the past, when I looked normal and not like the piece of shit you avoided when you were walking through the part of Dolores Park where all the nice dogs play.

This was from the time we only had two more days in London and all my momma wanted to do was go to Buckingham boringcrap Palace and then I got mad and made her take a picture of me with all this horse doo doo. Okay, less crap, doo doo, dookie turd talk in future posts.

And this was also from when I didn't have a mullet and was happy because my parents went with me to the British Museum and were happy as little sun-soaked plants going through the Chinese Civilization Room and then they saw the nice gold expansiveness of the Reading Room and they were happier still and I also learned my dad has a lovely eye for taking photographs and remembered that my brother did too before he hated everything that was not getting a really great score on some game he plays online.

Eeehahahoohoohawhawhaw

2007-01-02T06:31:00.000-06:00

Can you believe they served champagne here on New Year's Eve?

And also, what was up with the two guys who stood up on chairs and counted down to New Year's Eve and then a woman in the tallest bun I've ever seen with my own eyes came and gave me a hug and I was like, hey you're Chinese, you shouldn't be friendly towards strangers and felt the pangs of being a bigot. The two boys who stood up were a tall blond man who looked vaguely Dutch and a guy who reminded me of the half-Italian, half-Portuguese, 100% frat boy weirdo ickypants coworker of mine who would show up to work at 6 drunk and proud.

I like that Zion I song that goes, "When you're young and Black and proud like me/ Black and proud stop crowdin' me."

If only a nice little faerie could fly into my ears right now and sing that song to me. Otherwise, I don't know what other way there is?

Have you ever pretended to go to the bathroom during lunch or dinner

2007-01-02T06:27:00.000-06:00

and then lurk around the front desk and when no one is looking ask for the check and pay it yourself and then when you get back and half an hour later lunch or dinner is all done and your friend goes to pay the bill he finds that you've already pay it and then he gets into a big argument with you and he's like, "So you won't let me pay the bill, you think I can't afford it, how could you do this?" and you're like, "Don't say those words," or I'd like to know if you've ever physically wrestled someone to pay for the bill, and I'd also like to know if you've ever bumped your chest against the chest of another (ladies, this sadly excludes us) to get at a bill, or have you ever thrown someone's money across the table and say, "Don't make me do that again because I can do it endlessly?"

If your answer is no, then we're in the same club!

Oh by the way

2007-01-01T08:33:00.000-06:00

I'm calling off my search for pervvy, shameful, doughy, cracked skin, cracked brain European men who forget or don't know that Suzie Wong was a 1960's hapa chick and think when they cup their hands together and say, wo mei you qian le! in the kind of accent that I don't see Chinese girls laughing at even though it's horrendously incomprehensible, or when they say "Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello," one more hello and that'll wet my shorts, just kidding scum-of-the-earth, or when they say, "I can only look at you, but I can't listen," or when they say, "Humma humma," that those sort of brilliantly thought out words, as brilliant as sitcoms with laugh tracks are to a stand up comedian, (Jerry Seinfeld I never liked you, Michael Richards, always knew you were a racist!) are going to attract them a nice Chinese honey with a flat ass and a burning desire for a man whose buttcrack has more depth than their daily thoughts--yeah, that search is off, because as of yesterday at 11:00 PM on New Year's Eve, I've found them all!

They were all milling around Xintiandi, drinking off their 400 rmb cover charge and smelling like my college boyfriend who didn't use deodorant, soap or shampoo because he believed in a 'natural smell', and talking like frat boys who were skinny in high school and got away with date raping girls, and then got fat in college, and then even fatter after college, and one of them waved this flashy gold thing at my cousin and I, and my cousin turned me to me and said, "How is it that sometimes you can just tell by looking at someone for a split second whether or not they're trashdirtscum? They don't have to speak, react, or breathe, and you know." And we sniffed at the air around us and had to put plugs up our nose as a result.

Phew, thought it would take a lifetime to find these sorts of delectable men, but turns out, it only took going to an Asian country--my motherland, of all places!

2007-01-01T08:20:00.000-06:00

So anyways, here are the pictures:

In the afternoon, we had lunch at my gonggong's house. For some reason my grandparents taped a McDonald's french fry guy on their fridge and there's nothing else on it but that.

I think we were arguing about John Cena and WWE.

Me: It's fake.
Him: No, it's not.

Me: Yes, it is, and every knowledgeable, non-ignorant person has known for years that it's fake.
Him: Then how come my friend Edgar says he watched a documentary with John Cena where he showed an FBI Warning, "Everything You Are About to See is Real."

Me: What? Hahahaha. Your crazy. Why'd you bring that up? That's fake too.
Him: How could it be fake? F-B-I Warning.

Me: It-is-fake.
Him: F-B-I Warning.

Me: Fine, then let's go look up the number for the FBI, call them up and see if they remember allowing John Cena to put up that warning.
Him: Hahahaha. Anyway, I bet the FBI wouldn't remember something like that. They probably have other things to deal with.

Me: Leave me alone.
Him: I win.

On our birthday, we went to a restaurant.

That's pretty much everyone.

Just my grandparents, my parents, brother, and hey, how did my jiuma auntie get in there? She's a country girl and she made me turquoise earrings once, bought me a Mariah Carey cd, and a pair of J.Crew shorts, all in one swoop.

Thanks to the one-child rule, these are all the sibling/cousins I've got!

In English: Johnny, Jenny, Grace, Young Jenny
In Chinese: Zhang Zhongling, Zhang Jianing, Zhang Jing, Zhang Jiayan.

WHY DO OUR NAMES ALL SOUND THE SAME????
More later.

Oh yeah it was my birthday, I think like a few days ago (yeah right, like I forgot

2007-01-01T07:15:00.000-06:00

that my birthday is on December 25th, like I forgot my brother's birthday is on December 25th, because where I'm from (United States of America) December 25th is a day like any other day.

So I suppose I should commemorate the joyful awfulness of life and its yearly celebration that culminates on the day of loneliness for atheists, fairly unsavvy immigrants, people in the Zhang family under 21, which currently only includes my brother, by putting up some photos of my birthday dinner and the time last year when my I came home on Christmas smelling like poo poo, and the other time when it wasn't my birthday but I was really happy because my brother was paying attention to me and talked to me, and also this time in Shanghai, when he talked to me about everything and he didn't say things like, "Why are you always asking me questions," or "I knew it, you were going to ask me a question," and I don't have to stoop down to say, "When people ask you how are you, it's not meant to harm you. In fact, you could see it as me caring about you and wanting to know more about you."

And also, I have to say I was happy all of last week when I had my dad, my mom, my brother, my two cousins, my two grandpas and two grandmas, my uncle, my three aunties, and the only one missing was my favorite uncle who lost his teeth, but yesterday he called and he pretended he didn't know what I was saying on the phone so that he could hear me ask him who he was a few more times so he could say, Hey your Chinese is astounding, and that's why he's my favorite uncle, all the compliments, you know. My mom and dad and brother left two days ago, the night before they left I pulled my brother's arm and rested my face on my mother's shoulder, and ate seeds, don't know what kind, but they were toasted and took forever to eat, and looked at my grandpa when he wasn't looking, and touched my second aunt when I thought she wouldn't feel it, from underneath the dinner table, and ate another crab even though I'm starting to get hives I think and told my grandmother I wanted to eat more of her food, and told my cousin she was beautiful and told my big auntie she was beautiful, and thanked my littlest auntie for taking me to my other grandparent's house, and slid right into bed and felt a caved-in sigh pulling the life out of me, so I had to look at my dad's camera and look at the pictures I brought with me to stop that long breath from letting the air out of me.

2006-12-30T21:40:00.001-06:00

The Shanghai Department of Culture gave my grandparents on my mom's side a nice apartment in the longtong alley on Fuxing Lu, and the apartments here also house the students from the Shanghai Conservatory of music, so from 7:30 in the morning until 8 at night, I hear someone practicing a sonata, and someone singing soprano, and then violin piano duet, and low bass, and the cello, and another sonata, then a sonatina or fugue, or whatever it is, my vocabulary way too limited to properly describe it, and sometimes I hear someone making a mistake on the piano and it gets me thinking that maybe I wasn't so terrible in middle school when I performed at the annual recital and made three mistakes and why did my mom have to dress me in a big fat pink bow on the top of my ponytail and then seven years later when it was my brother's turn to play he got to wear a sweet little bowtie and suspenders and when we took a picture of him from the side, boy oh boy, did his head look like big round apple or what!

The apple effect seems to have diminished, I think:

Maybe I should have kept practicing?

So there is this type of crab that everyone is obssessed with and we went and saw what a thriving industry based on crab looks like

2006-12-30T07:49:00.000-06:00

We went on my second day in Shanghai. My big auntie's husband took us to CRAB CITY! Also known as Yangcheng He, a very nice lake town where they grow these crabs that everyone in Shanghai wants me to eat so so badly.

The ride to Yangcheng He takes about an hour and a half and my father, mother, brother, and I immediately set ourselves apart by wearing the thickest jackets of anyone in the twelve passenger bus that my cousin Jing rented.

In the summers, we set ourselves apart by walking stoutly and my father wears shorts and sports socks halfway up his calves, and I don't comb my hair and my mother wear short shorts shorter than my shorts so that my grandmother says, look at you, unsightly thing and my mother says, so what. So what.

In the winter, we bring our warmest coat and we take up four passenger seats just by taking off our coats and laying them down. While the little minibus is still moving I take a running leap down the aisle and jump on our coats and my brother says, that's racist! I school him on the meaning of racist and he waves me aside.

--I know, I know.

--So admit that it's racist when in Yo Mamma, a white guy says to a black guy, 'Yo, is that a black hoodie on your back or just some extra skin?'

--How's that racist?

My guofu uncle takes us to meet a guy who has his own crab hut, and he seems to be on familiar terms with him because I think we are just going to buy some crabs but instead we go on a boat, no lifejackets, no warning, and we start to weave our way through the crab huts and I feel happier than I can remember. I really do. We get into an argument with a woman who has low cheekbones and she looks sun burnt even though I have never remembered seeing the sun in China in the times that I have been back, only dust, fog, and gray, but the man steering the boat calls her some bad names and tells her to move her fucking boat aside, and she says, what the fuck, I'm going to move it, you don't have to fucking yell, and I do the translating for my brother and stop midsentence because my cousin Jing might be listening and I don't want to sound so obscene on the second day.

We go back to the crab huts and buy twenty crabs, each one at a 100rmb, but the pretense is that these crabs are a gift, and the owner says he'll come for my dad when he goes to the US, and my dad says, of course, just ask for me, and I'm so fucking dumb that I tug at my dad's shoulders and I almost say, dad, but you didn't give him your name, and then I realize my guofu uncle has paid for these crabs way in advance, and then to make up for my lack of insight, I pretend to push my brother into a crab cage.

You know what, if I could fly above YangCheng He in a small helicopter and take an aerial view of the restaurants and huts, I could show you just little tiny dots of crab faces and the character for crab like a constellation map of orange stars. Long ago, I remember my dad coming home to Shanghai for the first time in fifteen years and our two families, my mother's family and my father's family were sitting down at a round table, and my father was explaining the utter absurdity of American and he said:

--Here's the ridiculous thing. In America, people want to go and spend time at farms. People drive two-hundred miles to get to a farm so they can pay to pick strawberries.

And then the collective, "Really."

--Yes, they pay to go to the country and do work. Imagine that. They pay to 'rough it' in the woods. They call it 'camping.' If only we could take a couple million of these fools back in time and dump them in the rural camps and have them do that work for us, we could have actually gone to high school and learned something.

And the collective, "Hahahahahaha!"

And the other thing about these crabs is that they have this bundle of hair around their big legs, and I waste the first ten minutes trying to take the hair off with my chopsticks. At lunch, we eat in a farmer's house, only it can't be a farmer house, because it has been renovated to look like a restaurant, and I don't see a farm, or farmers, only a few young women who work in the kitchen and bring us our food, and a very old woman who either walks very very slowly, or paces back and forth, I don't know, because in the hour that we walk into our room, eat, and come out, I see her only steps ahead of where I saw her last.

Toothless at forty-six

2006-12-29T12:28:00.000-06:00

My mom has one brother and he's my favorite uncle and he used to put me up all the way to the ceiling where the helium balloons hovered and I used to scream, "Put me down," because the sound I hated the most was the sound of a balloon popping, and two days ago at dinner, my aunt who is married to my uncle told us that my uncle blew out his last two teeth sneezing, and now he has a row of fakes, and we all said, Eh-yeuuuuuuuu, which roughly correlates to Oh God! and my mom, his sister, said, Forty-six and already an old man.

When my father took me and my mother to Fudan, his old university where he spent thirteen years of his life, there were some kids on bikes, who were wearing sweatshirts and shivering, and had pimply faces and fairly unwashed hair who seemed like the other side of the globe equivalent of Stanford kids in red sweatshirts on their way to IHUM, and one kid said to the other, "We'll want to remember this when we we're forty and fifty," and the other agreed and for just a split second I thought we'd all just think about this in our minds, but my dad changed that by saying to my mom, "That's us. Forties and fifties," and I have to say, that felt strange, because my father was wandering around the place he spend 13 years of his life trying to reconstruct the buildings that had been razed, changed, or built over, and when we entered the Building of Foreign and International Studies, his building, we walked in on a man who seemed suspicious, and he came out from a haze of smoke to sort of greet my dad, mostly shoo him off, and watching to the two of them talk was painful.

Haven't you seen those movies or documentaries where they built up this meeting, this return home, some adoptee, or someone returning to a place that has been important to them, only to realize no one remembers him or her, nothing is quite the same, and even the people he or she had been secretly hoping to embrace are not interested, don't even know what this is all about.

But we did get to go in the library, and a man with missing teeth, and the rest completely brown black and yellow, wearing his sweatpants very very high on his waist told my dad that he had been a staff at the Foreign Languages Center the longest, and now it was its own college, and my mom and I were like, Dad, did you know that guy when you were here, and my dad was like, Of course not, and I wanted us to wait there because the earlier uncaring guy had said that some of my dad's colleagues and former friends who were now heads of departments or professors were in a meeting together but my mom was ready to go back and maybe my dad wasn't really so invested in the kind of ending I thought he wanted, so we went back and met a girl on the bus who called me little sister, and said a lot of words and I only half listened and half read my book, which Karan recommended me, and thanks Karan, it's a pretty good book!

I thought it was a leisure trip with ten other men to see the US but turned out he went on business

2006-12-29T12:13:00.000-06:00

The last thing the man on the plane said to me before we part ways was this:

--Hey, do you want any more of that alcohol that you asked for before?

--What? You mean the red wine?

--YEAH!

--No. Not now.

--Okay.

I really don't know if this man was too friendly, and too little self-conscious or if he was trying to get me liquored me.

Actually, the last thing he said to me was:

--Well, this is it. I'll be getting my luggage now, but here's my card and give me a ring sometime.

He worked for the The Administrative Committee of jilin National New & High Technology Development Zone Science & Technology Bureau, and actually to be honest, the very last thing he ever said to me was:

--Hey! Let me help you with that.

Which, I was really grateful for because I did indeed, need some help with my big freaking piece of luggage that took a little bit of top skin off the part of my hands where my fingers join my palm.

And then, I was in Beijing.

And then, finally, I was in Shanghai.

And then my parents came and greeted me and my mom had dark circles around her eyes that I had never seen before and I didn't know if it was the airport lighting, but we took a bus to Xinan Shi, where Shanghai was all night dust and lights, and on the ride back I slept on my mom's shoulder and my dad slept with his head thrown back, and when we got home my grandmother was in the hallway, cooking handmade wontons, and my grandpa was in my dad's old windbreaker and he said what he always says when I come back, "Jianing hui lai le!"

I wrote a travel guide to Shanghai in my little tiny brain and it came out all like a raw egg, all weird, and here's the first part

2006-12-28T00:49:00.000-06:00

I sleep three or four hours before getting on BART to try my luck getting onto a SFO to Beijing flight and it turns out I’m sort of lucky, sort of unlucky. When I arrive no one takes any notice of me and no one understands the kind of ticket I have.
--It's a standby ticket.

--Don't look like it.

--It's an employee ticket.

--Why did you say standby?

--It's a standby employee ticket.

--What? Wait over there where no one is going to pay any attention to you.

I’m wearing two sweaters and a new coat that makes me look like a green pillow and it’s hard to swear and look upset in that state, but I do my part by banging my head against a column while the only Air China employee, a man who looks like my friend Hanzhi’s grandfather circa 1992 is tending to all the passengers who are bringing overweight luggage on board, and for some reason, they are all South Asian, except for one man who has a dog, and he is a nice Chinese man who looks concerned when I start hopping around and leaving my luggage unattended. Anyone who stands behind me in line gets to A)be attended to before me by the only Air China employee at the Air China counter, and B) have my suitcase fall on top of their foot while I say nothing.

At 1 pm, twenty minutes before my plane is schedule to take off, I get my boarding pass and race through security and to the gates. Air China stewardesses all have straight black hair which they wear short or in a bun. They wear scarves around their neck and I am reminded of the time my poetry teacher asked me, “Hi Jenny, are you subbing for a Singapore Airlines stewardess today?” and I pulled at my purple-flowered necktie in response. A good response at that! Pulling! Brilliant.

I sit between a woman who wears five or six tiny tiny small braids in her hair and I can’t tell what her ethnicity is but when she sleeps her lips are fixed in such a way that I think of the Pringle commercials—I can’t elaborate further, and a man who is so overeager to help me with my bags that he doesn’t even mind when my jacket and my laptop falls on his head. He looks confused for a minute and then grabs my bags out of my hands and takes it to the front of the cabin. I’m gladdened by his good-heart but as all seemingly innocent things, they have a sinister undertone. As for my seemingly good thing, he talks to me every five minutes. He reads one newspaper throughout the entire twelve hour flight and he analyzes the butter we receive with our meal and puts it in front of me.

--That's for your bread if you like to have some cream with your bread.

--And this?

--A towelette if you'd like to wipe your mouth after or before the meal.

I don't fault him for not knowing these things. In about another few hours most people I encounter will think I'm a retard of sorts. A grown woman, 22, now 23 years old, but with a vocabulary of a first grader, and the linguistic ease of a third grader who has a speech impediment. That's my fate. My current fate is trying to sleep while the man on my left reads a newspaper with great relish and with his two elbows greatly jutting into my side so I sleep towards the woman on my right who has the little tiny braids, as if she were my mother, and she's not because she's very very strange, and the only thing she does is sleep and at one point mention that at a mall she got a free gift, which was most certainly not pertinent to whatever topic of conversation was presently at hand.

The minute I wake up from my nap the man next to me shows me the duty-free catalog and asks me to pick which makeup case I find more impressive, the Lancome makeup set or the Shiseido makeup set and I say the Shiseido because it has more colors and will have a greater chance of being liked by whoever is receiving the gift, but I personally find the Lancome to be more elegant and he shakes his head with a great big smile and tells me that if I were awake he could have asked for my advice but left to his devices he picked the Shiseido set.

--That's the one I got.

--Oh, great. Good choice. Very good choice.

--And you? You would have picked?

--That one too. Yes.

He has a funny accent and it turns out he's from a very cold place near Harbin and Heilongjiang. My mother tells me today that my grandfather on my dad's side spent ten years in Heilongjiang working on the farms during the Cultural Revolution. The weather channel says it's -12 to -18 degrees Celsius and I feel embarrassed each time I complain about the cold. The entire flight tires me out. I sleep for one hour and then talk to the man next to me for ten minutes. When I wake up the fourth or fifth time I find him standing up next to a few other people and looking out the emergency window.

--It's good to stand up and stretch huh?

I say this in a meaningless kind of way, but I feel bad that I keep turning away from him in mid-conversation to pretend to sleep and then to actually sleep, so I say this to him.

--Yeah. All that sitting is bad for the legs. You should stand too for a while.

--Oh. Haha. Yeah.

Speaking of hahahas, the story of how my cousin Jing met her boyfriend is a delightful story but the kicker climax is when my younger cousin Jiayang, aka Young Jenny, writes my cousin Jing's now-boyfriend an email that goes like this (but of course, in Chinese!):

Hello you!

So you met my cousin today. What'd you think of her hahahahahahaha!

Young Jenny

Here's the reply:

Dear JiaYang.

So good to see you and your family. Your cousin is very pretty and seems like a nice girl. Hope all is well.

Yours Truly,
My Cousin's Current Boyfriend Whose Name I Do Not Know

When I see my cousin Young Jenny on my 23rd birthday she is all smiles and she says this: something something something something something something something something HAHAHAHAHA!

It's official. I'm a dunce. When my fifteen year old cousin talks I can only understand 10% of the things she says.

D-U-N-C-E. Everyone's afraid of me.