island world, pineapple planet
my second national academic conference, behind me. the verdict: work + hawai’i = futile.
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only one panel engaged me multiply – for the AAS star-studdedness of its audience; the rigor of the work presented and the political intensity and passion that runs through it; the physical idiosyncrasies of the panelists.
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this muscle-y, gruff filipino-american man could be straight out of WestCo (close: Riverside). his studded ears stick out slightly from his shaved head. when he speaks it is with intense, wide-open eyes, his tone not angry but forceful. he wields muscle-y academic and abstract terms, throwing them combatively but with precision, like a long-range missile meant to inflict maximum damage in a specified area. the words come heavy, ‘fundamentally, ‘epistemes,’ ‘eurocentric rationality’; always, though, swiftly, like rapid artillery.
S whispers in my ear, ‘he’s dreamy.’
i can’t follow his argument because of the distraction of his physicality, and because when said aloud, the string of academese flies over my head; i’m a words in front of my face kind of person. i think i get the gist of what he means to do, relayed in my own clunky way: to see the instability of fil-am subject formation in the very acts of producing this subject (specifically, areas i don’t know enough about: state violence, genocide) and the inadequacies of the way the fil-am subject is conceptualized by everyone – Fil-Am studies, AsianAm studies, Philippine studies.
[my problem and love with academese: these terms are precise because they access ideas and concepts that are unnamed by popular or everyday discourse, but they’re also opaque because they reference concepts that are/seem to be illegible to everyday discourse]
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in the woman seated at the panelists’ table, i can hardly believe this was my mousey bespectacled TA who 5 years ago gave me grad school advice and recommended some fil-am novels i never wrote down. she’s here now, speaking with fierceness and precision about gang members, a population whose value her work tries to recuperate. now she goes without glasses, is the sharpest dresser among the three panelists. the tattoo lacing her upper arm occasionally peeks from the sleeve of her blue shirt dress. she is the older cousin i wanted to be, or to hang out with, when i was 10 years old.
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the first speaker is a prof i lobbied to fund a campus visit for, and her talk tells me i wasn’t wrong. her paper tries to make sense of an outmoded racial theory that doesn’t allow us to understand a simultaneity of grievances and discourses from two differently racialized communities – southeast asians living in a housing project in SF, the building of which displaced a chunk of the area’s AfAm residents, which in turn spurred a slew of AfAm on SEAsian crimes.
her default face is something like tearful; it seems like she’s going to shed some halfway through her talk. she gives a meandering, excessive presentation, in that she exceeds her time limit; her last words are injected from her seat, as she interrupts the second speaker before she even starts. but her crinkly eyes translate to passion, I think, and a certain pained perplexity at the two wronged populations at the center of her talk. her appearance is like her presentation — within the range of smart, but a little disheveled. her hair is pulled up, but the wavy thick bangs keep sweeping over her face, so she’s constantly shoving them out of the way. i remember liking her blazer.
[oh god. if our personal/physical appearance is analogous to the work we produce, this will be me: sometimes put together, but mostly lazy or careless; pedestrian; barely dressed up for special occasions, and even then, grudgingly so; defiant for no reason; a change of clothes 4+ times a day]
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the panel redeemed the conference, made me want to get my exams and diss behind me and join the big kids. At another extreme, it made me want to abandon 1920s literary concerns and tackle more immediate problems – different, potentially violent value systems; crimes against the unprotected; excessive penality.
just tell me how it ends
these days, a folding into myself, a resetting of fortified walls to surround, secret passwords to enter, enigmatic responses to decode: a series of protective measures.
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already there’s a tumult around what will likely be a jarring, out-of-body next few months — i leave for a 2.5-month trip to the philippines a couple of days after my oral exams in june. to anticipate your next questions: yes, i’m excited; and nervous, and dreadful, and uncertain.
let’s just skip to the end, can we? straight to the promises of a september after a long, unordinary summer: to catharsis in the form of a long drive down the i-5 and back; to some sort of synthesis of what has transpired and hopes for what will come; to reunions with familiar friends who will register for you how you’ve changed (and to assure you you haven’t changed at all); to naps in my armchair before lush trees on 10th st., sun and breeze reaching into the open window.
i like the way you merge
the lovely people of makipag make me want to write, make me want to write better.
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LA by number: 5, 134, 210, 2, 110, 10, 105, 405
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this will sound regionalist, but i mean it when i say that LA has the most competent drivers.
exhibit #1: the ratio of immaculate (non-dinged) cars to number of scary maneuvers attempted on the road. in other words, during my travels to other big cities like boston, nyc, and chicago, i’ve seen my share of dented and scratched cars. drivers in these cities either don’t care about their cars and/or don’t have enough know-how to drive them. maybe by dint of that socal car obsession, even the oldest cars in LA are cosmetically spotless.
exhibit #2: one of the most frightening aspects of driving is merging into traffic, especially in LA where the average speed on the freeway in the exit lane alone is probably 60 mph, the speed limit on the I-5 through seattle. in seattle, drivers seem to take ‘yield’ to mean ‘enter timidly, at a crawl; stop if you see car approaching; puttputtputt onto freeway when free.’
in los angeles, the freeway is a sight to behold. aside from criss-crossing highways and soaring, stacked interchanges, there’s this: on-ramps that feed into lanes that feed straight into the highway after a few hundred feet, leaving no time for hesitation. the unwritten rule is to floor it when entering the freeway, leaving it to cars already on the freeway to make their choice — floor it with equal vigor to beat you, or do the courteous (ungame?) thing and slow down for merging traffic. i’ve never seen cars in LA do what east coast drivers do, and what i’ve started doing — switch lanes to allow mergers time and space, clearly in fear of collision. call it an initiation to LA driving or a dare to recklessness: LA drivers move as if to say, ‘merge like an angeleno — fast, headlong, at near-risk — or don’t bring yourself on the freeway in the first place.’
when it works, it’s beautiful: cars in the left lane spaced a vehicle’s length apart from each other, matched to their right with a lane of alternately spaced cars. at the opportune moment — in the .25 mile stretch where the on-ramp becomes freeway — the cars in the right find their rhythm, their interval, their spaces, and in a delicate dance they nestle themselves into the nooks that open up just for them at just the right time. no puttering, no hesitation, no awkward pauses.