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For once this semester, I have a stretch of time to give to this blog, so here's a (very long) collection of snippets I meant to publish before school started:
¿Y andas sola?
August 16th, 2018
“Qué valiente,” people would tell me when I responded that yes, I’ve been traveling alone. Yet I’m not sure if it’s bravery that’s led me to travel unaccompanied, so much as ignorance of how dangerous it is, and the desire to travel outweighing the issue of having no one to travel with. Also, having arranged flute lessons with professors in each city somehow gave me an anchor, making me feel less vulnerable and tourist-y.
“Andas sola?” can be translated to “You're alone?" or "You walk alone?” Some people would say, “solita,” as if the diminutive form takes a little bit of the loneliness out of “alone.” When my roommate heard this, she shook her head resolutely and said, “Oh, no, I was sola.”
In a couple cities, I let go of any inhibitions regarding being too tourist-y and bought those activity packages — even though I dislike the way they reduce the experience of a city into a checklist. This happened in Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, Chile, and Mendoza, Argentina.
On a bus tour through Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, there were people from Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Spain, and Chile. I was the only estadounidense — and a curious sight too, the youngest-looking (other than two small girls with their moms), yet by herself.
At first, the tour guide insisted on repeating everything to me in English, which infuriated me beyond belief — I’d told him I could understand Spanish (luckily, he spoke very clearly), but he said he wanted to practice his English. So although it felt like being pampered, it was more for him than for me, and he ended up translating less and less through the day.
Also, I got to wade into the Pacific Ocean!
It will not surprise my family to read that I was the only tourist crazy enough to wade into the sea in the middle of winter (the water felt the same as in California in the summer), nor to read that, shortly after taking this photo, I turned around and was hit by a wave that drenched me from the waist down.
Last word on boliches
August 17th, 2018
To my surprise, I genuinely enjoyed myself the first time I went to a club, el boliche. I ordered fernet con cola, a popular Argentine drink, and again to my surprise liked it a lot. I talked to a lot of people, mostly in Spanish. There was live music, and afterwards I danced a lot with my friends and several boys. Around 3am we went out to the patio for fresh air. There we met students from around Latin America and spent the next hour talking, until we left close to 5am.
I left knowing the boliche was not really my style of socialization — I prefer spending time with people more intentionally. Yet when my last weekend in Córdoba came, there was no question in my mind — of course I was going out, it was my last time.
This time we went to Estudio teatro, which as the name suggests was once an elaborate theater. It’s a beautiful space. Because I had another early morning the next day, I barely drank and spent most of the time dancing, while keeping an eye on my friend (who didn’t have an early morning). However, there came a point when suddenly I couldn’t enjoy myself anymore and left the dance floor.
The truth is, I want to be seen. People come here because they want neither to see nor to be seen, for to see confers responsibility, and to be seen is to risk rejection. Yet what I desire, too deeply, is to be seen. To blind myself by getting drunk and stepping into that crowd is to lose myself from the sight of those whom I love.
Before leaving the US, I wrote first on a list of goals that I wanted to dance through the night. I didn't entirely realize that throughout the night, people just get more and more drunk.
We got there "early," so around 12am.
Around 4am, we saw a couple men getting kicked out of the club for being too drunk. Others were staggering away. One girl was sobbing. This place suddenly became so abhorrent to me. I know that nightlife can be glamorous and fun, but the ambience pulls you towards an endpoint that is frankly despicable; it’s the point where people become powerless, hurling themselves from one mistake into the next.
We got back around 5am, and a few hours later I got up to attend a children's festival for my service learning. The festival felt oddly similar to the club, in the sense that there was loud pop music and I was surrounded by strangers. Yet everything was so wholesome, so constructive; instead of disillusionment and disgust with reality, the air seemed filled with contentment and excitement.
I have no idea what clubs are like in the US, but I’m sure of a few things: 1) they play less Latin music, 2) they close before the sun rises, and 3) people come with the same mindset: to forsake sight and being seen, which is why I have ni ganas de volver.
Nevertheless, to close, here's a screenshot of one of the bilingual poems I hinted at posting back in July. I'm not entirely happy with it, so it might look different within a year or two:
Cri-yo-yos to go-go
July 29th, 2018
As you may know, the chances of me composing a title like this ("cri-yo-yos" as in criollos, the pastry to the right) are slim. And it's true, I didn't compose it, one of the girls in my program did, but that's the point: a weekend trip with four other girls in my program was an unforeseen case study in different types of diversity.
We went to Mendoza, west of Córdoba. After 48 hours together, there exists no enmity among us, but there's no ignoring that I was almost perpetually the fifth wheel: I couldn't relate to a lot of things they shared, such as an outgoing, sassy personality, actively partaking in US pop culture, and Greek life. However, during the trip, I felt tempted to over-simplify our differences, finding unexpected resonance in the silent exclamation, "They're such... they're such white girls!"
I knew better than to believe this, but it's worth noting that I've spent most of my life within a certain racial and cultural dynamic: Asian-Americans, overachievers, very nerdy, from middle-to-high income households. From growing up in the Bay Area, I moved to a college that draws more students from California and New Jersey than from any other state. In contrast, through this program, I've met people from Louisiana, Ohio, Missouri, Texas, and New Hampshire. They've had a difference experience of the US, to say the least.
So that at least partly accounts for the gap between those four girls and me. Another part is a clash of personality. One of them remarked that she feels "less of a culture gap" between her and her Argentine host-brother (they bonded over Drake) than between her and her roommate, a girl from Chicago who is more of the reserved, nerdy type like me.
So although it looked like the gap between me and them had to do with their whiteness and my being of color, I know it goes deeper (otherwise, I know plenty of "white girls" who aren't white at all).
View from a short hike on our first day in Mendoza
If I weren't still abroad, I'd ramble about the connotations of "white" and how race becomes a way to perform one's cultural identity, but it's getting late, so instead, I'll write a little about Mendoza.
It was more beautiful to be there than words can express. The city is so clean and spacious, the air is so fresh, and being in the presence of the Andes took my breath away. Even though the Andes are ancient in comparison to human civilization, I kept wondering about the civilizations that evolved around the Andes, as if the mountains belonged first to them. Perhaps it was the other way around, and the people felt as if they belonged to the mountains.
With one full day in Mendoza, we fit in as many touristy things as we could — wine tasting, riding bikes between vineyards, horseback-riding, asado, and more wine. In being so unreservedly touristy, I couldn't help wondering what lay behind the gazes of the locals I encountered: disdain, indifference, or something else?
Although the city of Mendoza itself looks clean, one of the gauchos said that underground canals sweep all of its trash into the countryside.
For two nights, we stayed in a youth hostel for foreigners. Among the few people I met, there was a sense of recklessness and total abandon. They didn't know how long they would be in each city, nor in each country.
"I'm here just... just doing life," laughed one girl from Europe. She had gotten tired of searching for a job back home and decided to travel.
I admire how she has thrown herself from the comfort and security of her home country into the precarity of wandering South America alone, but when "doing life" means, as she related to us, getting drunk beyond belief before having sex with a different guy in every place, I have to wonder, is this the epitome of youth and freedom?
On language
sometime in July
In the past month, I've been exposed to a world of Spanish that simply does not translate into English; and this is the Spanish that confuses me, the Spanish that has such rich potential within bilingual poetry. Because I understand it so little, I know I'm only scratching the surface of what bilingual poetry can be, and I'm not sure if I'll ever understand Spanish deeply enough to explore this realm.
Response to Manos anónimos
July 17th, 2018
* This is about an art exhibit on La guerra sucia, or the Dirty War, a period of violence and disappearances on a massive scale during the 1970s into the '80s.
I feel moved to write in response to “Manos Anónimos” (by Carlos Alonso). While I can’t capture the experience of these tortured women, I can find words for what it’s like to be sheltered my whole life and glimpse the worst humanity is capable of. I can find words to express my helplessness.
No se pueden soportar las imágenes
bringing to life the walls that trap my gaze
Soy atrapada
in the gaze of a time
que no pudiera haber
Tell me that it could not have been
But they are too vivid: these drawings
del secuestro, de la tortura, la violación,
me rodean por todos lados — déjenme!
Let me escape, te ruego,
escóndeme de los paredes
que me rodean. I am trapped
within the walls of a man’s resolve to dive
into the loss that haunts his memory,
bringing us with him
hasta que veamos lo que le espanta.
Así me agarró la mano, soy atrapada
in what he wanted, he who lurks
behind the drawings, the walls:
que nos envolviera el espanto,
para que nos quedáramos atrapados
Entonces, ¡que el espanto fuera el atrevimiento
of this man, to thrust unbearable images
de mujeres torturadas a nuestros ojos!
But instead, it is that what I see
could be more than memory
— que siguiera viviendo en la vista de algunos —
que me espanta, que no puedo escapar.
The more I dabble in bilingual poetry, the more I’m challenged to define what writing in two languages achieves that writing in one couldn’t. In this poem, I want the switching between languages to capture the sense that I am trying to escape what I’m seeing, art related to something that happened in a Spanish-speaking country, but the reality of what happened transcends language.
Eduardo Moisset de Espanés, Sinfonía en cuatro movimientos (1995)
On being a foreigner
towards the end of July
I know I left my homeland
para que me abrieran los oídos a otra lengua, otra música,
para que conociera la incomodidad,
para escuchar
pa' compartir la vida
but now I feel empty-handed
the last bit of summer that I brought with me
has fallen from my fingers,
sucked into el frío del invierno argentino,
parched and dry like the earth that lies,
ready to burn, in California.
También están por quemarse
los que me trajeron acá:
las ganas mías de escuchar y compartir,
los sentimientos de la generosidad y la vulnerabilidad.
No pudieron soportar la sequedad de ser extranjera,
de estar fuera de lo propio
A lo largo del tiempo,
lo extraño se convierte en lo íntimo,
pero llevaría tiempo que no traje conmigo,
tiempo que se pasará en mi patria
que extraño, aunque no quería volver tan en seguida
Solo es que se me perdió el equilibrio,
y estoy conociendo la inquietud
que quería conocer
porque creía que le ahonda a uno
Nada salvo el frío seco me entra por los oídos,
y se va por la boca
Bien sumergida soy, y extraño demasiado
a lo que me sumergió toda la vida, lo que quería dejar
Pero antes de que lo sepa,
my feet will hit the dirt of my homeland,
and I'll be drowning in the sounds I was never
in love with, yet are mine
this is mine
y ojalá que hubiera traído más
of who I am and where I'm from
para sostenerme
Because there is a point
when the foreign melts into the intimate,
but it takes time I left back home with loved ones
it takes time to let the dryness envelop you,
burning away the sense that
no soy de acá, soy extranjera,
para que te derritas
melting into the sounds of another life
en otra vida
Learning coplas from the musicians from Salta (photo from Teresa (again))
Giiiiiiirla, ¿para qué has ido?
6 de julio 2018
I didn't actually write anything about this, but what happened is that, on the day I was crazy enough to keep walking until I saw the ocean in Buenos Aires, there were some construction workers who saw me from across a tiny inlet. One of them yelled those words across at me (something like "Girl, for what have you gone?"). I definitely caught the "para qué has ido," but I'm not sure what he actually said in the beginning ("giiirla" is just my guess).
I didn't say anything, just kept walking, but that night I wrote it down and felt rather tickled at how well it harmonized with my anxieties about having entered a foreign continent alone.
(deleted from "De Buenos Aires a Córdoba")
7 de julio de 2018
Gabriel and Elizabeth had told me to take Uber instead of taxi to save money, and though it took almost half an hour for the driver to find me, he eventually did. In the car, he initially tried to talk to me in English, but I kept replying in Spanish, and eventually he switched back and told me my Spanish was very good. I hope this is proof that when given the chance to speak more than a couple lines to a stranger, I'm not so clumsy in the language as the past few days had convinced me.
He said he had lived in the US for ten years but returned here (and didn't know why, "la gente son loca acá"). I asked what he'd done in the US, and he said, "haciendo pisas" — a janitor, like my grandpa when he migrated from the Philippines, I told him. "Trabajo dura, pisas," he told me. It's hard work.
Back in October
Lastly, here's something I scribbled down recently:
Mientras me hallo aún pensando mucho en este momento — y por alguna parte adentro extraño a todo de ser extranjera estudiando en Suramérica, no me puedo imaginar no estar acá donde pertenezco, acá donde están quienes amo. Extraño a la precariedad, el sentido de que siempre haya posibilidad de descubrimiento y enriquecimiento, de que yo ande por maneras desconocidas viendo vistas no miradas por quienes conozco en los EE.UU. También el sentido de que a lo largo de tiempo suficiente, empezaré a pertenecer, sin perder el atractivo de ser “Otra.” Extraño a un poco de esto — a veces, mucho. Pero a la vez no puedo salir otra vez de lo que me rodea y me quiere. Pertenezco acá. Es una riqueza que te lastima cuando se te pierde, aunque perderla te libre.
While I find myself still thinking often of this time — and part of me inside misses the whole experience of being a foreigner studying in South America, I can't imagine not being where I belong, here with those whom I love. I miss the precarity, the perpetual possibility of discovery and enrichment, the sense that I walk by unknown ways seeing things unseen by those whom I know back home. Also the sense that with enough time, I will begin to belong, without losing the lure of being "Other." I miss a little of this — sometimes, a lot of this. But at the same time, I can't leave again from what surrounds and loves me. I belong here. It is a richness that hurts you when you lose it, even if to lose it frees you.
Photo from San Cristóbal in Santiago, Chile