I know you...
but I don't.
A few days ago, I posted on Twitter:
I tend to say what you need to hear, not what I want to say. #randomfact #INTJ
It’s a personality trait of mine, which makes it super hard to write newsletters. That’s because I know you… but I don’t. Really. I don’t know you <the collective> and I don’t know what you <the collective> want to hear. So, it’s going to take us getting to know each other for this newsletter to work.
Most of you who are receiving this first newsletter signed up about five years ago, which in newsletter years is really about fifty. Much has happened in the last five years, which is why you never got any emails from me. I hope you’ll give it a chance and stay for a few pieces. If you find yourself enjoying the reads, then do consider inviting others or upgrading to a paid subscription where there’ll be more content.
I’ll aim to write about once a week with a variety of styles of content, all around life and fiction. You can read more about that in my introduction to this newsletter in this piece titled, ‘What’s wrong with you, Yen?’
The following poem can be found in my book, A Suspicious Collection.
Aquilae
To view the world from afar;
to accept what is seen and not mar
with subjective ideologies, the journey of the human race.
To learn to be individual,
accepting things that are factual
without enforcing representation through cultural malaise.
To be free and alone,
not have to worry or to hone
instincts, practices or superstitions on the surface.
To respect everybody
but not rely on anybody,
to neither love nor hate, but be neutral to every face.
To resist fear,
to listen and hear
what each opinion, insult, compliment, really says.
To be able to see
that our ability to flee,
nurture, feed and struggle, is the ultimate grace.
To be humbled by the stars.
All that’s been happening in the world in the last months has got me thinking about this poem. When I wrote it, we were living in Tokyo where culture shock grew into a kind of numbness and the more fluent I was in Japanese, the more I needed to shout about my foreignness. It was an odd place to live, but it opened my eyes and thoughts in ways that only Japan could.
My journey as a writer and reader has always been pushed along by my inability to understand humans - why do we always think that we’re so different from each other when we’re not, and why can’t we move on from the basic instincts of greed, anxiety, jealousy and the likes.
It’s been nearly three months now that the world has known about Coronavirus, and yet, there is so much complacency among humans in accepting what it can do to us as a community. Even when cities and nations are dying, there are still so many ignoring it.
When China suffered in January and February, the world looked on, mediated by TV, internet, social media. There was lots of criticism, but not much support. There was a sense that many believed that it was a China issue that would not happen to them, because they were clean and they were not barbarians, like people in China.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the Chinese government… or frankly, any government, but this othering is problematic. It is the result of a long history of racism amalgamated with the fruits of capitalism in the dramatisation of journalism that puts real-life issues into the realms of fiction, so that they are more palatable, more sell-able. We know about refugees’ plights, but it’s not close enough for us to experience, so we’re able to move on from it. We walk past homeless people on the streets, trying our best not to make eye contact, because society has driven out our basic instinct to help.
How did we become like this?
With all the bleakness of reality around us, I choose to find my answers through stories; books, films, TV, games…
So, tell me, is there a book or a film that you instantly thought of when Coronavirus started? (Not the obvious Contagion [Soderbergh, 2011] please!)
