on dreams

they call it 存在主义危机

what feels like a few weeks ago (but actually on may 7), on one of our regular sundays calls

my mom, casually: 你对未来有什么计划吗?

me: /poor british accent/ not really…

mom: 不能怎么早就躺平了???

me: 我没有躺平！i just don’t have any strong ambitions to develop my ~career~… or make a lot of money… or have my own family at this moment…

one can hear the internal and/or audible groaning of my mother at this point eh… when i share this with friends (and many of you may already have heard some version of this), this is the part in which i explain what 躺平 is, how it is a response to the highly stressful competitive work culture in china right now where people our age are working 996 and the 内卷 that results to the point of deteriorating physical and mental health, and so this counter-movement to lay down and do nothing, some resolving to just go home and 啃老.

the only semblance of a 梦想 i could give my mom that day was my recurring desire to move to china and live there for a little, a dream that preceded even coming to new york, something i thought about before covid hit and that possibility was out the window. of course my small thought was met with the classic barrage (perhaps symphony) of questions: why would you go there? what would you do? where would you live? what’s your 目的? 你不能拍拍脑袋就去啊?? on and on and the thing of healthier relationship with our immigrant mothers is realizing the older i get that her questions were not meant to 否定我 on sight (as much as i have felt that before lol) but what i took to heart was 你如果一直有这想法那你就要认真考虑一下

these weeks i have embarked on many threads of thought, in no particular order:

• why do i want to go to china so much? 琢磨了半天也没想出来 frankly besides wanting to become even more of a chinese language boss. but if that’s the only reason well yaji and i went to flushing (where i fondly refer to as “my favorite place in the world”) in this time and she was like why don’t you just move here?? the point is if it’s just for the language there are other immersive ways

• sometimes i come to the conclusion that what i want is to absorb some of the 1.4 billion people 斗争 vibe, the necessary chinese fight to work hard because to 生存 there requires it. anyone who is my true friend has un/fortunately had to listen to my life lessons from 这就是街舞 lol and if u want any insight into chinese societal rhetoric note the framing of everything being a BATTLE

• often i recognize how privileged i am to want to “absorb this vibe” when i grew up in america and i can come/go as i please to china when this is real people’s lives over there. i’ve learned a lot (much of what is written here) from my chinese tutor, who has been helping me learn medicare/healthcare/insurance vocabulary for work, but who i feel a friendship with (whether or not he recognizes it lmao). he came from china 10 years ago, and i won’t divulge his life story and struggles here, but i had asked him about his dreams — he described wanting to have a vacation in france, which meant having time and money to do so, to just enjoy life and to be himself, in his words “高度的自由和自我” — he said this after i had casually talked about my dad going to 北大, doing his phd in paris, us speaking french, going to europe very often, etc etc. to me this did not hold enormous weight. to him, he said, it was a potentially unreachable dream.

• we talked about the idea of 资本, the word literally meaning “capital,” but my tutor said it also connotes a certain level of resources, a foundation allowing you a certain freedom. tbh 我有一定的资本才能想这么多. i know i know the stories of how our families busted their ass so we can be where we are now, but i suddenly understood why my family 会对我失望. i was having kakigori with fion at the little one, on a beautiful summer new york day, our biggest struggles of that moment having to write a thesis (fion) and having to work on a chinese medicare powerpoint (me), and it felt so dissociative as she told me her parents’ movie-like stories of 从广州逃到canada. all of us have our own iteration. i thought about my grandpa making it from rural hunan to beijing, his father killed in the war against japan, going to college during the great famine, living through the cultural revolution. i thought about how hard my parents worked to 出国, to make a life here, to slowly earn and build their way to where they are now. to where i am now, me who has never really had to 吃苦, who didn’t think too hard about where i went to college, who chose to do nonprofit work after they paid $300k+ in full for my tuition, who has existential crises, silly or not, when they didn’t really have the 范围 to entertain such things.

• sorry to rehash what is likely a tortured narrative in our chinese daughter lives. our lives are never our own, which is made very clear to me in every conversation i have with my 姥姥姥爷, and to a smaller degree with my parents. we stand on what they built, etc etc. still, i feel like we all choose the contours in which we accept or reject our family’s expectations for our lives. my job was one in which i insisted on my own, as much as they want me to work at google or whatever. my mom’s original deadline for me was if i wasn’t able to support myself/have my own work and health insurance by 26, i would learn how be a sas programmer like her. ha! luckily i have passed that milestone. the next is if i don’t have a reason to stay in nyc (aka a young man) by 28, it’s time to go home and 找对象. 这个我也就认了, and i have widely told friends that i have this deadline in mind. not that i am required to return at this age, but this is an expectation from my mom that i plan on responding to.

• anyway, back to my regularly scheduled second-gen questions of “what do i want??” — the china dream, whether or not it is fulfilled, has been a greater means of trying to consider this, with of course no true answers. i’ve taken to asking many friends 你有什么梦想? what are your dreams? i have loved listening to their answers, big or small, concrete or abstract, things i wouldn’t have known otherwise they hoped for, things they may feel are too grand to hope for.

• personally i come back to the answer i gave my mom in the beginning of this post. i alternate between thinking “life goals” are a product of capitalism and its productivity/efficiency/maximization blegh, and thinking it’s lovely to have something to work toward. i bought the unbearable lightness of being because my chinese tutor had mentioned it in our chat about how life can’t be 太沉重 or 太轻松. i think he’s right. sometimes i feel like i’m floating in my existential thoughts, and waiting for something to happen to push me. i feel like since i don’t have internal drive, maybe i need a change in external circumstances to grow (like coming to nyc, like going to china). maybe i miss necessary grounding weight.

• in my china imagination, i started looking into programs at 北大 and 清华 that would give me a reason to go. i lamented that everything has to do with leadership ugh and global whatever and words that say a lot and nothing at all. i wonder why i insist on 北京 and not a much more fun less surveilled place like 台湾 or 香港. i watch beijing vlogs and idk if it looks all that exciting lol.

• my dad got laid off almost a month ago. of course he said it like oh by the way! i got laid off. 你妈不想让我告诉你因为不想让你担心. and then of course i 担心-ed and honestly shed a few tears wondering what my dad was gonna do with all this time now. my mom was in peru when this happened and i imagined my dad alone at home all day. i felt in that moment that it really might be time to go back soon, 去陪他们. maybe this china dream is farfetched.

• one potentially useful byproduct of looking into programs is wondering what i would research, say if i did do a masters program that involved a thesis. my mom has also been asking what i want to do next in work in general, like if i went home, what job would i try to find? i have been glad to find in myself not an answer, but increasing support that i care about connecting people to resources, i care about public benefits access, i want the average person to be able to find and receive the help they need. sometimes when people call medicare rights, they’ll say i don’t know where to go with this question. i didn’t know where to start. i didn’t know there are programs that can help when i have limited income. — i hope i can be someone along the way to those answers.

• a few last notes. when i was in lisbon, eating 炒年糕 by myself staring into space thinking about china and wondering about the greater trajectory of life and whether it’s enough for me right now in nyc to pursue my hobbies and enjoy my communities/friendships or should i be planning ahead… i wrote down: “life as nurturing our identities and values. this includes for me being chinese, being Christian, the keeping of memory, this growing desire thru dance of humility and willingness to learn and experiencing discomfort and newness.” these were the things that readily came to mind in that moment, but i kept this idea in my heart. not things to do or plans to make, but the nurturing of the person

anyway my friend, this marks a self-decided 段落 in the dreams journey, though really it comes and goes as it pleases. sometimes i think, “maybe i’ll start dating and then forget all of this bc i’m so distressed in trying to interact with some man” HAHA but luckily there is no 前进 in this area.

i’ll leave with this, from one of my favorite youtubers nao. she makes these beautiful videos of her home life/routines in japan, and she does the exact same things in all of them, which is exactly why i enjoy it so much. she writes:

when you live an ordinary life with no change, you sometimes envy those taking on big challenges and growing visibly. but i want to be a person who finds small opportunities for growth and enjoyment in everyday life that only i can understand, and i want to be able to recognize them for myself properly.

为你加油的,
patty