a very late post
last newsletter, i said that i might show youse the comic i created for the mixed-race anthology Everything that Moves, Moves Through Another.
i’m actually going to cold open this two-month post with that comic! i promise it’ll make sense in a moment.
never quite home
comic, of course, first published in the aforementioned anthology by Selcouthbird Press. there’s some remarkable work in the anthology by artists and writers far more skilled than i — do consider borrowing it from the library or picking up a copy!
transcript under the cut, below each image. i’ve opted to do this instead of alt text — let me know if you need both.
page 1 transcript
a few years ago, my parents gifted me a taonga.
mum: “there’s something in your mailbox. we forgot to give it to you on your birthday.”
me, thinking: my birthday was months ago.
me: “huh? okay, thanks.”
i walk down the driveway and retrieve the gift. it’s a pounamu.
me: “huh. it’s tiny. …cute, i guess.”
my chinese mum didn’t wear jade, but the family we saw once a year while we still lived in singapore did.
me, aged about 7: “um, 新年快乐…?”
as a child, i had read a book by a family friend, an aspiring novelist. it talked about the cultural significance of jade.
“as you wear jade over a lifetime, it grows with you. it absorbs all the impurities of life into its hue and markings. it bears witness to your entire life.”
a record and constant companion. i liked the sound of that.
i had no other connection to my chinese-ness because my 中文 had never been good enough to make up for the colour of my skin.
relatives: “it’s a shame she married an indian, isn’t it.” “it’s ok. they’re ugly but they’re smart.”
page 2 transcript
i think the last time i wore that pounamu was last june.
my paatti was visiting on what she knew would be her last trip to new zealand.
paatti: “it’s just too long a flight to do again, even with your uncle paying for business class. but i have a present for you! let me see… here, [deadname].”
the present is a gold bracelet; i remark in surprise as i open it: “oh! wow.”
dad, whispering: “it’s worth at least a grand, you know. real gold.”
paatti: “ignore your father. you like it?”
me: “yes, paatti. it’s beautiful.”
paatti, speaking over my interjections: “good. you know, i asked the girls at the shop what women your age like these days. but i’m getting old, you know? you’re nearly 30 and don’t have a boyfriend. too focused on your career, isn’t it? it’s ok. but settle down eventually, ok? this is my last trip, so i cannot attend your wedding. i don’t want to fly any more. so it is an advance wedding present, ok? wear it when you get married.”
me, finally getting a word in: “thank you, paatti.”
page 3 transcript
i had been bracing myself for impact for months by that point.
years earlier, when my thaaththa was still alive, my father had forbidden me from telling my grandparents i was married to a woman.
dad: “he had a stroke when your uncle divorced. if he finds out, you’ll kill him.”
thaaththa was the conservative patriarch. despite disappointing his parents by converting to christianity, my father modelled himself after him.
that said, i had always heard: “…so your grandparents had a cross-caste love marriage. and when we asked for their blessing, they saw that we loved each other, so they said yes. who knows, [deadname]. your father and paatti were both eldest children. maybe as ours you’ll marry a white man.”
but i married a white woman.
my parents didn’t come to the wedding.
years after my thaaththa’s death, my paatti was still being told that i was single, and just didn’t have time for men.
she wanted so badly to see her eldest grandchild get married.
and i had. and she didn’t know.
page 4 transcript
paatti being here demolished the uneasy stalemate between my parents an di.
speech bubbles from my parents’ house overlap with thought bubbles from mine:
“why isn’t [deadname] living here?”
“i was forced to leave when my parents found out i was gay.”
“but why live two houses down then?”
“i moved back close for my siblings. all we have is each other.”
“why doesn’t she have a boyfriend? is there something wrong with her?”
“yes.”
years in therapy had forced me to confront my parents’ abuse and my immense cultural isolation.
my siblings still lived at home, and i could not burden them with the breadth of my grief.
my white queer friends didn’t get that i couldn’t cut my family fully off.
nobody in this godforsaken country understood the threshold i stood at, between many worlds which didn’t want me.
a text chain with a person saved as “baby sib <3”:
them: [a video]
them: look what paatti taught me!
them: it’s been so fun hanging out, she has sooo much goss about our family lol
them: oh yeah btw parents are out tonight so just paatti and other sib at home
them: if you wanna come over
me: perf ty i will
sitting on the couch knitting while paatti reads:
paatti: so what about the girls you live with? do they have boyfriends?
me: …they’re both gay, paatti.
paatti: huh. i guess that is ok these days.
paatti asked after me a lot. my parents never explained why i wasn’t around.
i knew she found it too cold here, so i knit her socks. it was the most honest thing i worked up the courage to do or say to her. i wish it wasn’t.
i haven’t had the stomach to wear that taonga since.
page 5 transcript
mum: merry christmas! wow, haven’t seen you since… june, is it? when we saw paatti off at the airport. reminds me! don’t forget, we need to plan the trip home for my 60th.
“home”, my mother says. i say it too, sometimes. “back home,” as many migrants say. but it isn’t home. the closest i have is this street, where my parents own and i rent. where i grew up. where i avoid them as much as i can.
the next panel is a fictionalised map, showing locations in close proximity: my parents’ house, my house, pounamu shop, their church, our miserable first nz rental, fundie high school #1, public high school #2.
below it, a map of the pacific, pointing out the indian side of the family in peninsular malaysia, the chinese side in singapore, and the flight route over from where we live in auckland.
speech bubbles, from auckland:
me: “don’t book flights for me, ok? i need to see how much leave i can take. i’ll book a hotel, not staying with ku-ku.”
someone: but in malaysia you’ll stay at paatti’s with us, right?
me: of course, yeah.
i haven’t been back since i was 16 and closeted and compliant.
this time, i want so desperately to reconnect with people and places without my parents as the world’s worst intermediaries, but i don’t know how much my grief will let me.
i feel that distance crushing me. there are parts of my person and history which will never be mine to have, because of the things my parents have done, the person i was born, and the person i have become.
page 6 transcript
my wife came home from a conference with the concept of “cultural freeze”. migrants remember their homeland as very conservative, frozen as it was when they left. but it’s moved on without them.
in that sense, i’m lucky that fleeing my family home didn’t ruin this neighbourhood for me forever. i lived further west, then more central, but i kept coming back.
and because i brought my wife and flatmates with me, i watched it become home for them, too. i learned it anew as a place where i live, now, as the person i really am.
maybe going “home” will be the same. the cousins i remember as bright children are grown now. they follow me on social media. maybe they’re as curious as i am.
you know what? i guess i’ll find out.
my wife and i wash dishes at our messy west auckland sink.
wife: do you want me to come with you? back home, i mean.
me: i’m not sure.
wife: would it help?
me: probably not.
wife: okay. let me know if you change your mind.
me: actually, babe… it’ll be ten years since we started dating this year. do you wanna go somewhere else together? later this year, after i get back. make our own memories.
wife: yeah, we could do that.
so! i spent late June in Malaysia, and early July in Singapore. this comic was finalised in February, but it was a real struggle to get it complete.
my original pitch was about geography — the part of it that made it into the final work is that silly, fictionalised map of my neighbourhood. what does it mean to live two houses down, to have geography take me so far away but keep me so close? i spent weeks doodling on bus route maps, deleting Clip Studio Paint drafts, and complaining at online friends in fanfiction servers, until a little of the grief and fear i was carrying about the upcoming trip poured out with my frustration that the pain i hold around my parents and racial identity was too close to the surface to mine for art at the moment.
(an aside: isn’t it always. and yet isn’t that what white people demand from makers of colour, that ritual disembowelment for consumption. it’s so hard to figure out making something that has the glossy, pink texture of freshly healed wounds, without wounding ourselves specifically for it.)
but i was, as i have been for a while, in the midst of self-discovery. talking to my friends, i discovered the heart of the piece in all the bits and pieces i’d been carrying all year. paatti’s visit; the pounamu i still have on my dresser; the trip, looming ever larger.
even then, it took a while to create the work. i’m entirely self-taught as a visual artist, and comics are a medium entirely their own which require skills that illustration and writing don’t contain between them. (if you’d like to learn more about appreciating the art of comics, read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.)
i struggled with the ever-present undo button. dozens more CSP drafts wore me down into digging out an old 1J5 exercise book and some drafting pens, bought in malaysia when i was sixteen and still miraculously ready for inking. i laid my lines down, words and all, with barely any pencilling. scanned the work, cleaned it up, and sent it off for edits. it came back needing none at all — forcing myself to draw boxes on paper, i discovered that i was finally able to say what i wanted to say, and to do so quite effectively.
(the final work has been redrawn digitally, but is very, very true to the original. i’m very proud of it.)
home-but-not-home
i did meet my cousins. i pored over photo albums of my parents at my age; i talked with cousins and uncles and aunts as an adult cautiously shaking off the shackles i’d willingly worn around extended family for so long. but mostly, i watched, and listened, and tried to be myself.
that is to say: i got a quick, small sliver of revelation. my parents were people, too, whose families had to negotiate their foibles and failings and idiosyncrasies. the position of a child is a vulnerable one, but i was grown. i didn’t have to say what they wanted me to say, and i found that quite impossible in any case. my cousins knew who i was. my uncles and aunts knew i was married to a woman, at least some of them.
my foul mouth, perfectly normal in the New Zealand context even if i didn’t live in a ratty little West Auckland punk stoner flat for several formative years, was noteworthy there, unstoppable. painted me more courageous than i truly felt. my tattoos drew attention on the street: you look like you’re from here but went somewhere else for a long time, the drinks stall proprietor at a kopitiam said to me while making my teh C kosong ais, eyeing them up, hearing my fluent order but the kiwi vowels that code switching can’t quite eliminate. you staying this time or not?
not staying, i said. visiting family only, then going home to New Zealand. but i was in Chinatown, then, and outside of the dinners with family and expeditions with cousins and siblings i was taking most of my twenty thousand steps a day alone, camera raised, eating my way through a hundred things i’d missed that my body couldn’t handle any more. visiting family only was a lie. i was there to locate myself, half-obvious-tourist and half-wayward-local, and i did. and then i went home.
coming back was miserable. i was exhausted; predictably, most of the rest of my family had fallen sick, and my choice to get a hotel and to generally take as many precautions as i could paid off. i still felt quite unwell after two weeks of ignoring my gut’s usual limits and the transition from 30 degree heat to 4 degree nights, but i slept as much as i could until i came back to myself.
it was interesting trying to pick my routines back up. i’m new to having emotions, in that it’s only been this year that i’ve been un-repressed enough to experience them organically, and it made that disconnect, that post-travel malaise and ambivalence, quite startling. i’d never noticed how disconcerting it was not to care — not to feel care with my body, at least, because i did care a lot about many things, and always have.
i’d left work and organising in a difficult place, and i didn’t want to come back. it’s taken the rest of July, but i think i’m very nearly where i need to be for the rest of the year, stepping back into momentum and flow. this is something i’m learning, too: to be patient with my feelings and energy and body, to give myself time. to unlearn the urgency that underpins trying to get anything done as a “gifted” “waste of talent” child and teenager, where self-loathing and looming catastrophic deadlines are the only ways to fuel success.
i’m getting there! i’m learning to say yes to opportunities from a position of abundance and not of scarcity. i’m learning my limits, learning to speak to editors and colleagues and comrades about where i’m at in ways that are both professional and honest. there’s still a long way to go.
what’s on my plate
life has been coming at me hard, and it hasn’t stopped coming. this post is pretty late, and the massive disruption to my schedule and processes means it’s a little hard to recall what i’ve done!
drawing: i need to update the rest of this website so it’s not just samples from 2021 — here’s a couple of quick posters i’ve done for PAPA this year, one in late July:
come along to that August event if you’re in Tāmaki! it’d be good to see some of youse.
in general, i do feel blessed to have been able to churn out quick, silly posters for PAPA‘s Tāmaki branch (and other graphics, logos, websites or illustrations for various campaigns etc etc) for so long. i don’t think i’d have the creative chops i do otherwise!
i’ve also just been accepted onto a project i’m very excited about, and begun storyboarding the comic for that publication. it’s… quite challenging, and very different from anything i’ve done to date. hopefully i’m well underway this month!
reading: more Agatha Christie, i’m afraid. i brought my Kobo with me on my trip, but didn’t end up reading much at all.
i’m still trucking along with the Artist’s Way, though i’m a few weeks behind now! i do still feel myself being altered by the choice to take that time, energy and attention toward nurturing my artistic self, and i think it shows.
gaming: i’m back into Slay the Spire, and finally beat the Heart while sitting in my paatti’s spare room!
i also solved my first cryptic crossword at the end of July, with help from my cryptic-fiend wife and from a few days with minutecryptic.com — i go through phases of playing Wordle-like daily games, and puzzling over individual clues was actually harder than doing full crosswords, where i can pick where i want to start!
watching: in part due to not reading on this trip, i’ve now watched all seven seasons of Elementary. season 5 and 6 Joan Watson is a sartorial dream in those distinctly feminine tailored suits and waistcoats. one day i’ll be a good enough sewist/tailor to look like that.
on the Dropout front, Never Stop Blowing Up took a bit to grow on me — i deal very very poorly with second-hand embarrassment, so the two episodes spent getting through the premise were an ordeal — but it’s been fantastic ever since. if you’re a Dropout subscriber but haven’t tried Play it by Ear yet, and you like musicals at all, give that a go as well.
music: Japanese band Lamp has been a lovely companion for travel.
song of the month, however, is yet another the Mountain Goats song, for reasons.
crafting: i finally finished that vest! okay, so bindoff happened in August, because the original bindoff wasn’t stretchy enough and i had to frog back (difficult with this yarn, which is a little bit splitty), knit another inch, and work Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bindoff. JSSBO, as the knitting world sometimes calls it, was surprisingly stretchy indeed.
the previous bindoff barely got the vest over my shoulders, capping out at about 37″/93cm circumference; this one let me stretch the whole vest out to two feet/60cm in width/diameter. (laid flat unstretched, it’s about 8″/24cm wide.) ribbing is magical. this way, it’ll likely fit even if my body changes a fair bit.
the ribbing is a disaster — i’m terrible at picking up stitches evenly and neatly for one, but you can see the impact of having to frog back to the first 6ish rows on the bottom as well with a yarn that remembers that kind of thing. but there’s plenty of other mistakes here, and i’m the only person who’ll notice them when it’s worn!
oh, and i’ve gotten into fountain pens. you can buy a two-pack of Jinhao 777s or 599s with converters and ink cartridges on aliexpress (or a local importer, Bigface) for $5-$15, and i’ve somehow now acquired four fountain pen inks (Diamine and Pilot Iroshizuku) which dry fast enough for my left-handed self.
it’s surprising it took this long, to be honest! i’ve had an Ergodox for a long time, a JJ40 i don’t use much, and am halfway through configuring a Kyria; you’d think that as someone who’s worked to configure my digital writing tools so that they work perfectly for my needs (and aesthetics — my Ergodox uses DSA magic girl keycaps), i’d have realised i could do the same for physical implements, too.
but fountain pens are messy, and i had no idea jinhao existed until last month, so i’d written them off as expensive. they are fussy, especially for a leftie, but i’ve been journalling in diamine teal with a hooded 0.38mm and it’s been amazing. it makes the act of writing a sensate journey in itself, which helps keep me from getting as distracted, and adds a new source of small everyday pleasure and discovery to my life.
writing: i was fortunate enough to participate in a private life writing workshop run by Working Girls Press, the result of which is this month’s poem. i found it quite confronting, and very nourishing, to write in community with other disabled sex workers about our bodies and experiences, and share, and critique, and cry, and grow.
poem of the month
this poem was written for this prompt:
Write a letter to your body. What kind of letter is it? A letter of gratitude? A secret message? An apology or invitation? (15 minutes)
a letter to my body
let’s be real,
neither of us expected to get this far. you, me,
coming to terms with
the inevitable demise we knew was on the horizon,
bracing for impact. muscle fibers
shredded to pieces, tender and ill used. tendons
tight-slack-tight giving way, making
room. crumpled carpal tunnels
just another cunt a scalpel can
open, remove.
you, me, the
bag we kept packed, heavy but not
too heavy to carry. ready to
run. tools and poultices. potions for
precipices and predestined purposes. privacy
never an option, sleeping in
car boots and the space
between someone else’s bed and
the wall. our
bones don’t
like that any more, can’t live like that,
a thousand years of pain compressed into
nerves that are beginning to wake.
beginning to remember:
neither of us expected to get this far.
but here we are anyway,
you, me, your resilience, my
curiosity. indomitable,
impenetrable. coming to
terms with the relentless road toward that inevitable
horizon, starlit. sunstruck. walking on water. building
a new life piece by excruciating piece: french
seams, compression socks. noise-cancelling
headphones. clothes that keep us
warm. keep us
here. keep us
believing that things will get better. keep us believing
that nerve endings aren’t fried for good, rotator
cuffs beyond repair. we breathe together now. six
vertebrae long-trapped
awaken.
you, me,
together. we feel pain now. we feel alive now, we
feel alive.
pain is an interesting one. as a child and teenager i prided myself on how well i took a hit without flinching; these days, the work of becoming aware of my emotions has involved becoming aware of all the ways i’m sensitive physically as well, autism and sensory sensitivities and intolerances and the pain my body carries, easily-wounded. but pain is a love letter. pain says: i love you, i’m trying to keep you safe. pain says: i remember everything that has happened to you. it says: i believe that things can be better than they are now. i write this on day four of having somehow tweaked my neck badly enough to finally have to cancel plans, but i do still believe it! or at least, i’m trying to be kind. i have one body, and i have to live in it. i may as well give it the love i’m always looking to give others.
that’s all from me — this has been quite a long post, i’m aware! thank you for following along :)
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