A Note to Candy Girl

Since your presence entered my life I have lived nothing but trouble. You wear a sweet-faced innocence and present yourself as a crusader of an all-encompassing love. You like to instruct; people mistake your steely selfishness as determination. They fail to detect that muted anger in your voice, for you are always angry at the losses you have suffered. Others have suffered way more than you did, but not everyone takes people into their wings in the hope of turning them into slaves.

In your heart you are a desperate woman and a control freak, same as many women of your breed. Most of the time you manage to mask your pathetic streak with calculated kindness, or those under your control trade their free will for treats--after all, you are the Candy Girl, though you are by no means the sole candy distributor in this world.

You remind me of Emma in Madame Bovary. I do not know if you are as shallow as the tragic heroine, but you do not have the ruthlessness of one of my all-time favorite protagonists. You love money and the illusion of security, while you make small adventures in your stagnant universe. That would have been just fine if you did not pull certain unfortunate folks over to the dark side. You blind talented souls with the hem of your pretty dress--you sure know how to pick your preys.

Your entry into my life is an unwelcome reminder of one thing: it does not pay off to be genuine and truly kind. But I have no interest in borrowing your tricks. Like Emma Bovary you live in a loveless world where love is a name for self-deception and weakness. Those who fall to you deserve everything they get. As for me, I have found my exit and I bid you farewell.

p.s. this post was inspired by a story I recently read and the song Candy Girl by Low, my favorite slowcore band.

Choice

At home on a Saturday night. Steam in my studio apartment. A voice calls from behind: 'There's a bug hanging from the ceiling.' I look up. I cannot tell if it's a bug or a knot of dust; I cannot keep my eyes on it without being blinded by the light.

The other day I was reading 'Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi', a book I bought in Istanbul years ago, while I was waiting to see a band show. Every poem in the book moves me. These two resonate with me the most at this moment in time:


A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets: Everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.


After being with me one whole night,
you ask how I live when you're not here.

Badly, frantically, like a fish trying to breathe
dry sand. You weep and say,
But you choose that.

For Clyde

Clyde insists I write a post about him before he skips town. I'm destroyed after cranking out an art review today, but I don't say No to my best friends unless it's something I absolutely can't do. So here's my sleepy-eyed attempt in writing about Clyde and me.

My story with Clyde began with Tom Waits and a marriage proposal. A mutual friend of ours B., who plays a mean piano, wanted to play 'Jersey Girl' to his girlfriend as he proposed to her at his home studio. The first time I saw Clyde, he was standing at the corner of B's studies, hugging his double bass like it's the most prized and secure possession--it's an air he has with almost anything he comes to hold in his life, as I've discovered throughout the years. Clyde eyed me for a minute in silence. At last he held out his hand. 'I was waiting to see if you'd crack,' he told me at the end of that evening. 'Most people can't look at you in the eyes for long without getting all nervous.'

For a week the boys played music and I sang. We moved on to a few other favorites like 'Falling Down' and 'I Want You', but 'Jersey Girl' was still our standard. B. was playing his piano like we'd never heard him play before, dreaming of the moment when he'd stand up from his second hand Steinway (passed down to him from his aunt, a concert pianist) and present the ring and flowers to his woman and see her smile. Clyde and I thought it was a tacky idea. What kind of woman would say Yes to her boyfriend in the presence of two irrelevant, childish characters, when she only expected to turn up at his place for home-cooked dinner?

'What do you guys know? Clyde is 20 and you're 17!' B was infuriated at my questions. On the long-awaited night B.'s woman arrived in her knitwear glory, the shape of her breasts showing through that baby blue top. Clyde and I blinked; he played the double bass and I sang. Our curly haired goddess went wide-eyed as B. presented the ring. She forced a smile.

The music continued. B. was heart-broken for a year, so we did a collection of Tom Waits songs to pass time. For a brief while we had a drummer. The boys' idea was to get us gigs in some local bars, but Nicole was 17 and couldn't get into the bars they had in mind. To compensate for my youthfulness, Clyde found a red, frizzy wig that looked somewhat middle-aged. But the wig was too small for my head or my head was too big for a Chinese girl--it kept falling sideway and I looked like the naked singer who covered her bits with a guitar, rather than the mysterious young lady in a long black dress they had envisaged.

To commemorate the end of our musical aspirations, we threw a rocker party at B.'s. I found a Fuschia pink shirt at a second-hand clothing store as a gift for Clyde, the kind of shirts few guys can wear without looking gay. Half-English and fair-skinned, Clyde looked a little gay in that shade like Morrissey looked sizzling in The Smiths. Clyde and I jumped on to the couch and sang This Charming Man. There weren't any flowers around, so Clyde swung his leather belt the whole time while he stammered out the lyrics. I gave up halfway and made my way back to sanity: 'Clyde has no right to spank me!'

Clyde and I have never been lovers, though by all appearances we should have been. The only reason we could agree on is that Nicole doesn't date womanizers and Clyde is a womanizer. 'Of course it is true! You and I have always been ourselves,' Clyde said two years ago, fantasizing about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. In our first few years of friendship Clyde was only in Hong Kong during summer holidays--he studied design in the UK. I lost track of his girlfriends; once I confused an old flame with a new one. 'I've met you before, no?' I said to that poor girl as Clyde threw me an angry look.

One thing that I've always considered 'unfair' in our friendship: Clyde has seen many of my sad moments, but he's rarely broken down in front of me. When Clyde comes to me in sadness, he'd sit down beside me, lean back and look at me in the eyes before he speaks. Unlike most people who wallow in self-pity by dramatizing or hiding the truth, Clyde talks straight--most events have their hidden logic, or illogical behavior has its impetus, let's do what has to be done and live. To most people Clyde must come across as distant and self-contained. To me Clyde is a deep, independent person who doesn't waste his time.

I have proof too. Two and a half years ago Clyde bought me a goldish lantern, the type kids carry around at Mid-Autumn Festival. I just had one of those recurring moments where the guy I was with lived in a different world than I did--to be happy where I was, I must change my self-perception and natural responses to love. After listening to my tearful monologue, Clyde asked if he could come by my neighborhood in two hours. 'Look out of your windows,' he called as he reached my building. There he was with that sharp pink lantern under the lamp post. The lantern looked inflated and it had a note attached to it: 'You're the light.'

Over the years I've heard Clyde play his double bass a handful of times. He also plays piano and guitar. For a couple years he relocated to San Francisco and he played a Bach tune on classical guitar on Skype. I had no music to offer, so I promised to write something about him one day. The last few years Clyde divides his time between China, Hong Kong and Singapore, and we only get to meet once or twice a year. Last week Clyde woke me up with a morning phone call. We went to a wildlife park to look at the birds--years ago we had made the plan to go, but it didn't happen for some reasons.

Yesterday Clyde and I hit the beach. We laid down on beach towels and I had a book of Russian poetry with me. I flipped the page to a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva and showed it to him. Clyde used to be an avid reader in his school days. Now he reads on the plane, and when he has a quiet moment with a friend like me.

'Refusal,' he said, 'but I know you're more generous than me.'

'Am I?'

'Yes.'

'I hope so.'

Double Lives

Thursday night I had the biggest shock I'd had in a long while. For a minute I put my hands on the computer screen to trace the outlines of my fingers so that I could believe what's happening was real. It'd been a year and a half since S. and I ran into each other when he had a stopover in Hong Kong. When we said goodbye I didn't ask for his contacts, but left him mine so that if one day he wanted to find me, he knew how to reach me.

In his email he told me briefly about his solitary trip around the world, the snowy mountains, the passage of time between flowers and smiles. He stopped by an internet cafe to write to me. The night before he had a dream of me: I was dressed in a white shirt, half bracing myself and walking down the street in the rain. He didn't see himself in the dream, but I was looking for him. 'You told me about this dream back in those days. Tell me what's happening with you,' was his last line. Like me S. has the most amazing memory. Seven years ago I had the exact same dream. I described it to him on the phone during that last conversation we had, until we met again by chance.

Seven years ago I let S. walk out of my life. By the time I met him--I was 23--I'd already had a fair share of romances. Yet my fear erupted once we touched: I was in a place where I'd always wanted to be but was too afraid to go; if I fell and he left, I'd be shattered. Rather than fall into his arms as I might have liked to, I'd sit on his couch and talk to him for two hours every time I went over. It was my way of seeing him and letting myself be seen, of coming to believe that our connection was real. It was my way of delaying the inevitable: once we kissed a beautiful fire would burn up my spine and I would be lost. I had no reason, no control over my mind or my emotions. The danger was too imminent.

When S. was out of sight I never called or wrote. I waited for news from him--his business trip to Dubai, his Sunday hikes with friends, his cheery or gloomy moods. For me they're proof that he's a part of my life when we weren't always connected and that he liked me. In my fear I had a list of reasons why S. was 'just playing' me for a time or why we would end at any moment. I updated that list many times a day, as people do when they're falling in love but living in denial. Even when things were perfectly good with S., at times I still created a distance between us that I couldn't begin to cross the line. I'd waited to see him again, I was happy to touch him, but I must stay safe where I was.

All this might not have been a real problem if I wasn't involved with another man at the same time. A most honest, caring, patient and straight (i.e. moralistic) man who talked to me every day, showed me how special I was to him and how much he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me--that his love was complete and his loyalty resolute. Up to that point in my life the idea of a 'partner' had never crossed my mind. Here's an offer of love that was true and secure. We were comfortable in the same space. I could trust him. No more drifting around, no more feeling lonely and unloved. I thought my life would be sorted and happy as long as I committed myself to such prospects. And so I did.

The night S. had to listen to all this drama, he's seated in his couch and I was sitting on the floor, watching him. His eyes went dark, hiding anger and hurt that I hadn't foreseen. When he looked at me again, he asked me to talk about him and me. 'Why exactly did you do what you did, and why did you come to think what you think about us. Tell me and I'll try to understand,' he said. Finally I had to confess: my true feelings, not the logic of things, not the roles everyone played in these stories I created. We talked for hours; S. listened to more of my grief and shared some of the stories from his past. At the end of the night he said, 'You must be sad. Why don't we go to sleep?'

S. and I spent another day as lovers. I was wearing a long skirt, the kind of skirt one has to hike up walking down the stairs. S. being S.--he liked to talk and smile--even seemed thrilled to see me. We had dinner, talked, joked around and went to bed. All the while I was half holding onto him, thinking we could patch things up if we spent time together and talked like we did. The other half of me had retreated behind my guilt: I had no answer to this mess, I must back off and get ready for him to leave. S. was sad and cheery, smiling in between my sorrowful looks. The next morning we parted on the crowded street. I walked off; I left it to S. to think about what he wanted to do with me.

Every day I waited. Hoping against hope I believed that S. would, by some miracle, send me a word to say, 'I still want to see you. Let's try again.' In my guilty state I felt I had no right to call him, to ask for any more of his understanding than what he'd already shown me. From the moment that new dimension of my personality sprung open, S. was the only person--not my close friends, not the other man I was with--to whom I could show my true self. I had no immediate answer, but I had an inkling of what I'd eventually do if S. came round. Yet I didn't call because I'd bound myself to this other prospect: I'd made promises to someone and myself that our story was the truth. How could I turn against myself now?

Two weeks later S. sent his words. We met briefly for me to pick up my stuff from his place. A few weeks later we're on the phone. When he asked me how I was, I told him about my dream, knowing he'd decipher its meaning--S. is a psychologist. We changed the topic to this girl he'd just met. I listened. What I left out was the second part of my dream: in that dreamscape I did find him, but he was already with someone else. He asked me to go to his place out of kindness and he wrapped me up in a big white towel. I wanted to hold onto him but there came a couple strangers, laughing. I slipped away when no one was looking. I was alone again, walking in the rain.

My other relationship continued--it's a love that had its many failures but also wonders and strengths. Eventually it died a prolonged and painful death but that's another story. In the days after S. was gone, I drifted in and out of bookstores a lot. One day I picked up The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster and read it from dusk till dawn. I read that book several times in the next few months. It's a story about a solitary writer in his room, writing to violate space, to seek the understanding that one can only find in a fellow writer with a similar narrative in their souls. In those months I wrote a lot of fiction, including that story about my alter-ego which is still one of the better stories I've written so far.

Years later when S. and I ran into each other on the streets of HK, we hugged and went to get a coffee. We talked about what we'd been up to during those years when we're out of touch, until he finally asked: What happened with me and that other guy? I told him that the story grew and died, and that it shouldn't matter between S. and me. After S. left I fell into a deep loneliness: no one knew who I was anymore or what I was going through. It's a loneliness I couldn't share with the man I was with, like I couldn't show him some of my writings, for he would never understand no matter how much love and comfort he gave. That I missed S. for a long while but that's something that existed on a different plane.

S. remembered many fine details about me, even details of a story I'd shown him. Towards the end I had to ask: if you liked me that much at the time, why didn't you make me do what you wanted me to do? He gave the reasonable answer anyone would give. I was still smiling and stirring my coffee when, after a pause, S. looked up at me and said, 'It's because you didn't try.'

A few days before I got the email from S., I walked down the streets in the rain with someone by my side. Except this time I was the one who had to go. The night I saw S.'s email in my inbox, I thought life was as good as a Kieslowski's movie. It threw me into an eerie silence where I laid my thoughts before me to examine them, one by one, reflecting on every word and move before I had to get out of the trance. For now my silence is broken.

Stay

In recent days I have gone quiet on this blog. I don't really talk about my life here--not in any concrete details--but let's say it's mostly about work. In the last two years I've been an art writer, first in the commie castle and since last Nov, on a freelance basis. I cover art shows in feature articles and reviews; now and then I do interviews with artists. A recent one with a young Portuguese artist living in HK, Joao Vasco Paiva, is here. These days I have another writing/editing gig with an art institute in Hong Kong, which isn't as fun but it serves a good purpose.

The mention of 'art writer' sounds glamorous to many people. Often times, when I introduce myself in my professional capacity to strangers, their eyes light up and they look at me as if I belong to a special species of human beings--which is true in my town. The art industry in HK is small and just starting out, so people working in this field are a definite minority. There're artists, curators, art administrators, gallery owners and staff, and whoever else works for art-related organizations. There're reporters who cover art shows, professional writers who do brief reviews and a handful of art critics.

I'm probably one of the few who are categorized as 'art writers' simply because I've decided this is my role and I pick up whatever art writing jobs that are out there, or these jobs come to me since there isn't anyone else. Like most other glamorous sounding jobs, mine pays practically nothing and even getting work is a problem. As for the upsides, I get exposed to different aspects and forms of art and culture, meet interesting people for drinks and chats, go to work in jeans and bright lipsticks. Another pay off for my eating peanut butter sandwiches: I have a flexible schedule and plenty of free time.

No, I don't like to work--if I could I'd spend all my time reading, writing, dancing and meeting friends, but since I have to work to pay bills, what I'm doing is the only thing I want to be doing for now. At this point in time, art writing is about the riskiest choice a professional writer can make in my town. The 'art industry' has developed somewhat in recent years and there're talks and plans about the future, but the prospects are utterly uncertain. There's no telling if my efforts--or anyone else's--will fruit or if they will come down to nothing. All anyone can hold onto is a genuine interest or passion, and something akin to blind faith.

My faith doesn't stem from expectations or even hopes for achievements. It'd be nice to think that one day I'd be at a better place, but it's a distant prospect and it's not my concern. My passion in life is my creative writing, not work. I do it because I'm cut out for it. When an artist and I sit down to talk about making art, we're in the same channel: the thoughts, the creative impulses and our temperaments. Once they entrust their words to me I turn them into something concrete and accessible on the page--and it makes sense. And all this, I think, beats anything else I can get from other kinds of work.

My work situation has been stressful lately. The past week, in particular, I was stressed out over all these erratic arrangements and pay checks. When I saw my friends I stayed cheery but in my head it's all a little cloudy, and I haven't been as receptive or responsive to people as I usually am. This kind of living in a daze is no fun, but there are worse work-related things to endure.

* * *

Tonight I was walking around my neighborhood--something I often do when I want to get some air--and thought of my poet friend Steven in NYC. His new chapbook (Ir)Rational Animals is out. You can also check out his beautiful chapbook, State(s) of Flux, which was published last year on his blog.

Last September when I got the tattoo on my left wrist (which says 'courage' in Hebrew), Steven was very surprised since he'd never heard about my desire to get one. Once we even had this chat about how tattoos are 'ugly'. I don't have any opinions about others' tattoos, though I certainly don't think it's 'sexy'. I got mine because it means something to me. It's a reminder--rather blatant, yes--that I'd always stay true to myself in what I do and I'd have the courage for it. One of you commented on my post and wrote, I hope you don't regret it one day, to which I said I should be old enough to be certain about such a thing.

To my surprise, Steven wrote a response that said Nicole wouldn't regret her decision--she's very in tune with the longevity of her wants. For a moment I was puzzled: How did he come to this conclusion about me, when I always had something going on in my life, like I was an erratic soul drifting from one story to the next? For all I knew, I was always too busy in my head with too many conflicting ideas and impulses. Most of the time I managed to wait it out and take measured steps. Sometimes I jumped into it and dealt with the aftermath. Still, I was hardly the most 'stable' person, so how could anyone be sure?

Tonight I remembered Steven, some of our exchanges over the last few years, and what I've been doing since last summer. In a comment on a post from last December, I wrote that Steven is one of the few people who can always make me smile with something they say. Yes, Steven, you're right. Whatever wants I've decided to pursue, they stay. So, my dear friend, when are we going to get coffee?

Everything's Fucked

Tonight a girl friend came to me with the story of her life. As her black hair was fluttering in the spring breeze, I avoided looking into her eyes where our minds slid on different sides of her sadness. I have witnessed the cruelty she has yet to see, though she's the one who's living it: the reverberations, the cuts and threats lurking before everything gets torn into shreds.

There should always be a new start. Her story reminded me of a line from a classical Chinese poem--I think the poem is about love, but does it matter anyway? It says if you're a river that flows through the terrains, once you've been the ocean you can never go back to being a river.

The title of this post comes from a song by my favorite instrumental rock band Dirty Three. If you're into this kind of music as I am, or if you're curious, check out this electrifying live version.