intro

i don’t like the way this newsletter has turned out. i just wanted to preface with that. i really liked how my last newsletter read, so maybe i’d gotten my hopes up thinking i’d be able to replicate that. silly me, waiting for it to happen again. silly me, waiting. this is all i have to offer you guys.

i know nobody even really reads these newsletters but—i’d wanted it to be better. i did.

part 1

i shouldn’t be writing now. i have to leave for work in thirty minutes, and i haven’t started my makeup yet. (i like doing makeup before i go to this job—job #3—because it’s a bit fancier than my other jobs. i make sure to slick back my hair and everything. on that note, i need to find a better hair pomade/lifting powder/gel. my hair doesn’t have a lot of volume naturally, but it looks better when it does versus glued slicked down to my scalp, if that makes sense. okay, aside over.)

with this being said, there are a lot of things i’d like to write about, so this newsletter update might run a bit long. the first is that i accepted a new financial aid offer that requires me to work roughly ten to fifteen more hours per week during the school year. the work i’m doing will hopefully involve art and helping unhoused youth, but there’s no guarantee that’s the specific position i get; it’s all pretty up in the air since i accepted the offer so late. i’m really hoping to be able to keep my work study writing job, and more than that, my food service job at the local japanese restaurant on campus. but i’m not sure this is realistic, considering that i’m a club officer for my japanese american student union and an active member of my film club. last semester i was a director for the latter, so i was about as busy as i could possibly be, but even knowing that, i’m worried that taking on a smaller role such as screenwriter or art department still might take up a lot of time in my already jam-packed schedule.

i told my twitter circle about my new financial aid offer and one of them—whom is about a decade older than me, and whom i very much look up to—cautioned me against burning out. i’m trying to take their advice to heart, but i have tendency to bite off more than i can chew and only realize once i’m choking. i tend to crash and burn, to not go quietly.

“if i knew” by bruno mars is playing now. it’s part of my playlist “birthdays” because it features a lyric about being a specific age:

baby, i

i wish we were seventeen

so i could give you all the innocence

that you gave to me

my sister is probably the one who kindled my obsession with the age seventeen. i know we have a tendency to romanticize the past, but i will say this: i think i romanticized seventeen while i was actually seventeen too. i discovered my favorite musical artist, harry teardrop, the summer after i turned sixteen. one of his songs, “strawberry,” was on my sister’s new music playlist, and then we listened through his entire 1000 backyard pools ep. i can still recall the feeling of the sun against my skin that afternoon, the way my speaker seemed to almost sweat. as we listened to the lyrics of the title track, “1000 backyard pools,” my sister remarked to me, “i may have found this album, but it’s meant for you. i’ve already been seventeen; i can’t go back to it. but you’re turning seventeen next year. so this song is for you.”

i anxiously waited to turn seventeen, and once i did, i screamed the lyrics to “1000 backyard pools” at the top of my lungs. i still do, sometimes, but it’s different. it’s different now that i’m nineteen. all of this is to say that seventeen is a special age to me.

my sister wrote me a letter a while back that talked about seventeen. it ended something like this:

i’m telling you this because you’re seventeen. seventeen ends. and i wish that when i was seventeen, someone would’ve told me that endings are beautiful.

she’s right. and here’s the part where in the past i would’ve written something like “she always is,” but right now, i can’t. i saw an art piece the other day that referred to a sibling as one’s deepest, most tender wound, and i think that’s right. maybe that’s the only way i can describe it.

*i wrote a lot more here and then deleted it all. some things are best left unwritten.

part 2

i’m sitting on a bench outside of my work now. my back hurts, and i’m tired. i was scolded by my managers three to four times during a two and a half hour shift. i feel kind of pathetic for it. my back hurts. i already said that, but i’m thinking about it again. sometimes i think about how i have a bad back, and about how i’m going to have it for the rest of my life, and then i feel like crying. (i have the strange inkling that i’ve written that exact sentence before but i can’t be sure.) i’ve been working so much lately and it’s still not enough. i’m still going to have to work my three jobs during the school year and feel guilty that my parents love me enough to let me be happy at my incredibly expensive out-of-state university. 

there’s a soft breeze blowing now, and it feels nice. i’m waiting for my mom to pick me up. tonight we’re going to see barbie at the drive-in with our odd house stay guest. earlier this week i tweeted that she was normal, but i think spoke too soon. she isn’t really that normal. she doesn’t always respond when we call her name, and she doesn’t eat all day unless we explicitly make food for her, and she doesn’t seem to understand what my mother is saying when she speaks to her, even though the best part of my mother’s japanese is her accent. 

“that girl is another dud,” my mom told me last night.

i felt that that was a bit harsh, but then i remembered how our guest responds to me when i speak in japanese but not to my mother, and i realized that if in her shoes, i would probably be harsh too. my mother has lived the last two and a half decades as a near-fluent japanese speaker, and time and time again, people fail to recognize and respect her abilities. my mother isn’t an angel, but she’s a good speaker, and i get sad thinking about how part of her strained relationship with japanese culture and language and the country itself is probably because of these experiences where heritage speakers refuse to even acknowledge her words, regardless of how clearly they’re spoken. and almost always, they’re clearly spoken. this situation happens to me occasionally, too—with convenience store employees in japan and such—but not as much as it does to my mother. my poor mother. 

my poor mother. i feel so strongly for her. i’ve been trying to write her a letter for about a week now, but i’ve been thinking about writing her a letter for several months. i didn’t get her a gift for her birthday or for mother’s day, and so originally, this letter was going to be apologizing for that and trying to make up for it, even though things aren’t that simple. (thinking of that line from the fault in our stars where the main character says something like, “not everything can be fixed with a peter gabriel song and an apology.” fun fact: i used to watch the trailer for that movie every night before i fell asleep, alongside “you look disgusting” and “if things were opposite.” i couldn’t tell you why. but at the time, it was unspeakably important to me.)

but once i put pen to paper, i knew i’d have to write about The Thing.

content warning / childhood sexual abuse

i want to type out what happened to me, and to type it clearly in one go, but i can’t. i can’t even finish the sentence aloud. just eight words, but i can’t. to be fair, i guess i’ve only said it aloud about five times, and during each of those times, i was in such a panic that it tumbled out on its own accord.

part 3

and now i’m coming back to this newsletter for the first time in three days, frustrated but unsurprised that i’d left off trying to process my trauma. (always feel icky writing that word. always feel icky.) i made a comic two days ago about my inability to address my trauma aloud, and that was cathartic. still, though, i feel 悔しい。悔しい—that’s the best way i can describe it. it goes like this:

“i am a victim of—” and i can’t finish the sentence.

“i am a survivor of—” and i can’t finish the sentence.

“as a child, i was—” and i can’t finish the sentence.

“since coming to college, i remembered that i was—” and i can’t finish the sentence.

“for over half a decade i was—” and i can’t. finish. the sentence.

even when i’m speaking alone to myself in the car, or sitting on the shower floor. i just… can’t say it. i can’t say it. i must sound like a broken record on this newsletter, writing about the same three things every week, but maybe that’s what being a writer is about, at least to some extent. maybe that’s what being a person is about.

i still haven’t started on the letter to my younger self. i’m still worried it won’t be enough, and never will be. i did start on that letter to my mother that i mentioned earlier, though. and i did write about The Thing. i wanted to be graceful with it, to ease her into the mention of it (because even though she’s aware of it, it’s still an understandably difficult topic for her), but i couldn’t. i just word vomited all over the page: about how bitter i get when i really sit and think about what happened to me, how angry i am at the person who hurt me, and how i worry she’d think i’m a monster if she knew how much rage i truly possess.

i think that’s all i’ll say about this old scar for this newsletter. onto new things.

my family is watching hawaii five-0 as i write this, and our house stay guest is sitting on the couch next to me, hands on her cheeks, gasping. she’s kind of adorable, if not a little dopey. the reason she’s staying at our house is a bit convoluted: she’s the daughter of my father’s former neighboring elementary school swim team’s underclassman. she is sixteen-years-old and childish in a way that both makes me want to protect her and rattle her around like a piggy bank. i’ve been keeping a list in my notes app of things to write about and our house stay guest is one of them. more specifically, my thoughts on speaking japanese around a native speaker who’s close to my age, my father, and my mother. i’ll go off of something i scratched down a few days ago:

“there’s a sixteen-year-old japanese girl staying with us for the next two weeks. she is kind and laughs a lot. my mother and i take care of her for the first day. japanese feels a bit more clumsy on my tongue than usual, but i can still hold a conversation without strong anxiety. then my mom speaks, and i remember why i feel so bad about myself. my mother’s japanese flows so much easier than mine. she doesn’t have to think about her sentences.

‘of course this is the case,’ she tells me. ‘i lived there for ten years, after all.’

but does this mean i have to live in my fatherland for ten years to reach her level? shouldn’t there be some kind of cheat code for me, an exception considering that i’m a so-called heritage speaker? that i started learning the language two and a half decades before her? i suppose life is not that simple.”

i am trying to study abroad in japan the year after this school year. i worry that it will not be enough to make me fluent. actually, i know it will not make me fluent. but i worry that it will not satisfy me. 満足: satisfaction. i learned that word last week.

my mom showed me a song last week while we were roadtripping to visit our white extended family. when she gave the title, i told her i hadn’t heard of it, but once she played it, just as she had suggested, i instantly recognized. the song is “fast car” by black queer artist tracy chapman. there’s just something about chapman’s voice that is so hauntingly beautiful. so much soul and—and sadness, i think. that’s probably what it is: sadness.

“fast car” is a song about a woman yearning to escape her life in the suburbs and all that it entails by moving to the city with her love, and then upon moving to the city, yearns to escape to the suburbs. it’s about wanting, and getting, and realizing what you got isn’t actually what you wanted. it’s about the kind of love that bleeds like an open wound, and about disappointment. (“i got a plan to get us outta here […] i been working at the convenience store” + “you still ain’t got a job […] i know things will get better” + “you stay out drinkin’ late at the bar […] see more of your friends than you do your kids.”)

among the lyrics, the chorus and the refrain stick out to me in particular:

you got a fast car
is it fast enough so we can fly away?
we gotta make a decision
leave tonight or live and die this way

and i-i, had a feeling that i belonged
i-i had a feeling i could be someone, be someone, be someone

i had a feeling that i could be someone. i had a feeling that i could be someone. oh, how gorgeous.

visiting our white side of the family was nice because i got to see one of my favorite relatives: a baby who has just turned two! maybe he doesn’t even count as a baby anymore! he’s going to have a little brother soon, which means he will be an official big boy.

one of my favorite pieces of media is the midnight gospel, an animated television series adapted from a podcast called the duncan trussel family hour. the last episode is titled “mouse of silver” and features a conversation between the protagonist, clancy / duncan, and his actual mother. in it, they discuss the impact of having a younger sibling on an older sibling.

“there is something that happens for that firstborn child that changes them forever with that.”

“because suddenly you just have to share resources.”

“well, suddenly you are called ‘big’ when you’re actually little. and so, you know, it’s a mind fuck right then and there.”

“right.”

“and they have to… i mean, an eighteen-month-old is in no way ‘big.’ they’re still in diapers and they’re still babies. and, all of a sudden, they’re really required to be something that they aren’t, and it changes them forever.”

“‘be a big boy.’”

“a big boy or a big girl. be unselfish. help mommy with this baby. don’t ask for anything. don’t wake the baby up. try to be something that you aren’t. and it changes people forever.”

my little baby is growing up so fast. and soon there will be a new baby to welcome! i think of this when i am feeling down and remember that sometimes life is sweet.

and this is where i leave you.