abre los ojos/i saw a shooting star in inner mongolia

in the back of a taxi,
my head out the window,
rain on my tongue,
eyes open enough to see gray concrete buildings
and the left side of beijing blurring by.

from above i was staring at the ground,
by the rosebush crying, with bruises on my chin.
just a tree and a concrete wall,
freshly rained upon dirt,
black dirt and choking up my insides.

lying on my right side,
blinking slowly at two seats in front of me,
dirty beige, ripped, and bumping drunk
in the back of a bus somewhere.

“i love you” slides off my tongue
dripping with heavy,
the lingering taste of alcohol,
my stomach empty and filled with sad,
and, i loved you suddenly after i said it.

from the earth i was staring at the sky,
a sudden sobriety, eyes open to
une année sans lumière, pitch black earth,
and blinded, i had been blindsided. then
lying on my back, in inner mongolia
i saw a shooting star.

all walls are great if they don't fall

sometimes i still think about the emptiness in my stomach, leaving my stomach in the air and my breath hovering around my ears, sucking in the world through my mouth. it passes right through me.

bungee jumping is like this:
a heaviness around your ankles
falling into absolute nothingness
and by contrast falling into everything.

the stars above the great wall of china are like this:
explosions in the sky
falling into absolute nothingness
and by contrast falling into everything.

the great wall of china at night; looming towers above us and spotlights on the mountain.
i am on a ledge and i can see everything and i can see nobody until we are all under a blanket shivering with the stars.

i am happy.

there are things i want, people i miss, an emptiness in my heart
but also a duty, also a feeling of fullness
all so full in my heart.

i will stand on this ledge and see the world displayed on the great wall of china.
the great wall of china, tumbling into nothingness, falling into everything.

things i miss while in beijing

+ milk
+ cheese
+ cereal
+ clean/non-polluted air
+ public bathrooms with toilet paper, doors that lock, and actual toilet bowls
+ a shower that sprays into the bathtub and not onto the floor
+ facebook
+ clean drinking water
+ bagels
+ friends and family

otherwise, i don't ever want to leave. actually, just get me some good milk and cereal and i'm happy.

nostalgia forever bike

Hello, this is Laura. Emily's in China and can't get to Blogger because of the Great Firewall, so I'll be posting blogs she sends me from now until she gets back. xo

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dear friends,

beijing is strange/amazing. parts of it are super modern and fancy, and other parts of it are just...exactly what you might picture when you think of china. there are these small streets where people share the road with bikes, scooters, cars, rickshaws, food stands, and restaurants. there are no stop signs or street lights or lines dividing the road in half. cars will honk but they won't slow down and my number one fear is getting my toes run over. but the street food is so good. they have these long grills where they grill meat on a stick and it only costs 2Y (about $0.25). yesterday i bought one and it was so spicy but so delicious.

on sunday we went to the silk market. it was like canal street in new york city times 1000, but in a mall. there were different floors for all kinds of fake things. one floor was devoted entirely to shoes and bags, and every stall had the exact same shoes. every time you walk past a stall the vendors try and get you to buy things in broken english. i think there were more white people than chinese people there. on our way back to the subway (which costs 2Y one way, btw), i passed someone selling photographs on the stairs. there was a sign that explained how the pictures captured all of beijing, including "nostalgic Forever bikes". languages are weird/beautiful.

mandarin is hard to learn but fun. i had my first class this morning and all we did was learn the basic phonetics. there are so many, and half of them aren't pronounced the way they're spelled. there are even some sounds that sound like french words, which makes it easier. there are also 4 different tones in mandarin. so the word "ma" can mean 4 different things depending on how you pronounce it, which means that half the time i'll probably be saying completely random things.

i'm taking a lot of pictures and walking a lot. my feet hurt and i'm still jet lagged, but everything is so incredible that i don't mind. i woke up at 530am this morning which is kind of a nice habit to have, but by 5pm i'm exhausted again.

tonight i walked in a big circle twice looking for the street with all the food and eventually gave up and had some disgusting flavoured milk for dinner. too tired to even make an effort to eat.

nostalgia Forever bike,
emily

So I'm Going to China This Summer

I might have told you already, but I guess it's time for me to "officially" announce that I'm going to China this summer!

This is what's going down:

It's an 8 week program with Concordia, kind of like an exchange except I don't think anyone is coming to Montreal. I'll be getting 12 credits, taking a 9-credit Mandarin course and a culture course. I'll be staying at the Communications University of China in Beijing with a bunch of other Concordia students and also other students from who knows where. The dates of my trip are May 20-July 16 so mark that on your calendars.

I don't speak any Chinese and I've never been to China so this is really exciting and I'm 95% sure I will start speaking to people in French when they don't understand me in English.

Because I'm going to China for 2 months, I'm also moving out of my apartment on May 1. I feel sad about this because I've really enjoyed living in my little room and living close to downtown. I'm happy to be closer to work for the next ~3 weeks until I leave, but doing anything besides work is going to suck because it'll take me an hour to actually get anywhere.

When I get back I'll probably live with my parents for the rest of the summer, or I might get an apartment for August. I'll probably be looking on craigslist again because I don't want to sign a lease, but if you know anyone who needs a roommate for the fall (in the Plateau area) let me know!

That's basically my life right now, besides working a lot because going to China is expensive and I have a lot of summer shopping to do.

Greenland is Projected As A Giant Land Mass But In Reality It Is Not

Laurrrrita Wooley Mammoth showed this to me when she was in Montreal.

This is a map of the world. Did you know there are more than one different projections of maps? I did not, which was probably naive of me. Forgive me for thinking that map making might be objective/accurate.

The photo above is a mercator map. You might recognize this type of map as seen in all your classrooms, my bedroom which probably never been in, textbooks, etc. It has its uses. It's good for navigating the seas. It shows the shapes of countries accurately. But it also distorts the size of countries the farther away from the equator they are. For example, in this map, Greenland is almost as big as Africa, when in reality Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland. The problem with the mercator projection is that it tends to make the West seem a lot larger than it is. Does this sound like some sort of familiar colonialist rhetoric?

This is the Gall-Peters projection.

If you notice in this map, Greenland is tiny, and Africa is HUGE. China is HUGE. Brazil is HUGEish. And Europe, and Canada, and the United States got a little smaller.

This is apparently what the actual size of countries are. I don't know. (I'm finding it a lot harder to trust map-makers now). It's likely that I'll never know unless I find a way to go into space and position my rocket in a way so I can compare the size of different countries. The problem is that you can't show both shape and size accurately. You have to pick one.

Now this is a site you want to read. I'm serious. It's well worth your time.

Okay so the picture I wanted to show you doesn't work because my background is black. But here it is.

Greenland is 0.8 million square miles. China is 3.7 million square miles.

Go. Go read this right now. Have your world view changed.

Identity Crisis

I've never seen myself as particularly "Western" before, but that's because I live in The West. I identify as a Canadian partially as a reaction to the things surrounding me that are Not Canadian, like the United States. I notice my "Chineseness" because of all the Non-Chinese people around me. And I identify as gay, or queer, because of the "divide" between queers and straights. If there was no such thing as heterosexuality I wouldn't need to identify as queer at all. I would just be. Even though I'm Chinese, I'm also mostly Canadian, or Western, or North American. I wouldn't fit in in China at all!

That's sort of how I feel about living in the West. Prior to this semester I had never taken any courses that taught me anything about places further east than Europe. Africa was just this one chunk of land that was full of starving black people and South Africa had some white people. "South Africa" could basically have referred to the lower half of Africa.

But now I'm learning things about The East and it makes me feel really self-conscious of my North American Status. I've never felt that before because I don't feel like I'm an embodiment of "capitalism", but I guess I probably am. It's really hard to talk about things that are not Euro-centric without bringing in my own presuppositions and attitudes and I feel like I'm interfering in something that isn't mine. I feel like Stuff White People Like: Being an Expert on YOUR culture. Like, look at me, some North American with enough money to go to university and listen to another North American talk about Asia.

I think I feel weird about this because I've never been a "majority" before. I can't look at myself the same way anymore. I can't ask the same questions anymore. I don't wish that I was Eastern. I wish that being labeled as "something" wasn't so important. I wish that I didn't have to feel "American" and that democracy is the best and everyone should have democracy. I feel weird about having "power" but also I don't feel like I have power. I don't know. This probably stopped making sense a long time ago. I'm having an identity crisis, I'll get back to you on my feelings later.

Across the Universe

Traveling is one of my passions. I was on a plane before I knew how to walk, I hope I didn't cry on the planes, I know how annoying that is. I wonder if planes were as unpleasant then as they are now? Probably. Except now they have these tv things on the seat in front of you and you can check in online or at a self check in booth to save time because time is money and since no one has money or time, I guess these additions are in fact a great stress reliever and an advancement in technology. Although they don't stop the planes from being delayed or do something about the recycled air in a pressurized cabin or turbulence which scares the holy hell out of me, sometimes I have inner panic attacks when it's really bad. I'm not complaining about planes though, seriously, in the grand scheme of things they're quite helpful, imagine having to row a boat across the atlantic? Or riding a donkey to Vancouver? Five hours on a plane is not as bad as say, 3 months to get to the same place.

Anyways, what I was saying is that traveling is a very rewarding experience. I'm infinitely glad I've had the opportunity to visit other countries, I feel priviledged and cultured. There are still loads of places I'd like to see, here are some of them.

Germany/Poland

Yes, I know these are two separate countries. But they're right next to each other so I figure I can kill two birds with one stone, yeah? Yeah. What attracts me to these two countries is the WW2 history, I'd really like to see Auschwitz, in a totes non-creepy I'm-interested-in-history kind of way. There's also things like Oktoberfest in Germany which, you know, is fun when you bring some friends. Also In grade 7 I read a book about this boy in Poland, his name was Jan.

Australia

It has been a dream of mine to visit Australia some day. In grade 8 I went around at recess and lunch and asked people to donate their change so I could go to Australia, I probably made about 10 dollars! I wanted to go so badly I even looked up flight info online, it cost $4000 for one person, I was like, "I can totally (not) do this!" I didn't think about coming back, I didn't even know that you have to stay there for like, a month, or else it's not worth it. Also I didn't take into account the gigantic spiders and bugs they have there, when I go I'm going to wear a body net like that guy whose picture I'm not allowed to post but if you scroll down you'll see it.

Greece

I took a Graeco-Roman class last semester and now I want to go to Greece. I want to drink their wine and lie on their beaches and get a mediterranean tan. For a while I didn't know that Greece was to the east of Italy, one day I looked at a map and was very surprised. Anyways, there's tons of shit to see there, like Delphi where they used to have the Delphic oracle with "priestess'" inhaling vapors from the ground that made them high so they could, you know, be "wise" and stuff. Sounds like a nice job right?

India/The Himalayas

Even I find this really random. I want to see the sherpas and yaks and eat Nepalese food and see Mt. Everest! I also want to see elephants in the streets of India and go in their temples, but I really don't want diarreah or other sicknesses you can aquire there, I just realized I'm not educated enough to go there yet. But the Taj Mahal is defs on my list of things to see.

Also I really want to go to Portland, even though I've heard there's nothing there, I just want to chill with Chris Walla.

"I've been traveling a while
haven't found a place to call my own.
I've been a million miles
still feeling all alone.
And I'm on my way back home, again."
- Jim Ward "On my way Back Home Again"