356. I wrote a blog post for the Guardian
August 30th, 2010 § 16 Comments
You can read it here. The commenters on the Guardian are clearly not the crowd who read Jezebel & Racialicious & would probably never see themselves as every archetype in Cultural Appropriation Bingo… but it’s all right for me to get a dose of how most people probably react to any mention of ‘racism’ that isn’t as cut and dry as beating up a Muslim taxi cab driver for being Muslim. I had a word constraint, so unfortunately, I had to cut over 1,000 words from the article. I have to go now, but later I’ll be back & I’ll post the longer version of my Guardian blog post.
355. Renaissance Nubility
August 29th, 2010 § 6 Comments
Sometimes I wake up from dreams so banal and ordinary that I forget it was a dream. For example, the other night I dreamed I texted my friend about a frisky car ride, and the next day on the phone, I referred to my dream texts, and he was so confused. I think I dreamt that I wrote a blog post about going to the Renaissance Faire in Iowa, (see what I mean about banal dreams that are so lowly and lacking in magic that they feel more like memories than dreams?) because I went to delete these photos from my ‘blog’ folder and I suddenly realized that I had never shared them with you in the first place.
I’m wearing my favorite Gunne Sax dress in the above photo and a pair of espadrilles that I gave to my friend Eli before leaving Iowa. I bought the Gunne Sax dress from a thrift store in San Francisco in 2005, and I’ve probably outgrown it, but I can’t bear to part with it because I’ve had some of my happiest days and nights in that dress. Like this day, when V, K & I went to get brunch at Boogaloos, and V was wearing this kick ass sweater from Wasteland, and the metal eye of Mordor hadn’t yet fallen off of my tooled purse.
I had a really happy day when I wore this dress to the Ren Faire. My friend Tal came too, and she’s going to be a very famous writer very soon so you better remember that name and that face! There were a lot of nubile women in faux-corseted velvet and lace dresses. There was a dreadlocked dog (so non humans can also do cultural appropriation, huh?) One dude spent the entire Ren Faire laying on his back and pulling out clumps of grass. I spent it eating cannoli’s and greasy fast food renamed as some mixed-up Medieval pun that ought to have offended Ren Faire purists.
With love,
Jenny
354. Trying to be whatevs about shopping even though that poses an existential dilemma if I identify as a fashion blogger, right?
August 28th, 2010 § 8 Comments
Talking about shopping is sometimes a depressing subject for me. I can’t help but feel enervated and shameful afterward if I think, discuss, or do too much of it, but it also seems disingenuous to completely avert from shop-talk when I’m posting outfits and talking about clothes all the time on this blog. So here goes.
Two weekends ago, my parents & I took my cousin and my auntie to the Woodbury Outlets in upstate New York to find some comfortable walking shoes. My mom got some really beautiful Miu Miu flats on super clearance, my cousin & my auntie found sneakers for each of them and some work attire for my cousin’s new law internship (congratulations!) and I did what I always do, try on a bunch of things I know I can’t take home with me and then come up with imaginary fancy scenarios where I could wear the clothes, like say what if I had to attend a Midsummer’s Night Dream-themed party with the cast of Jersey Shore? Then surely, I would need this slightly trashy-dress-but-at-the-same-time-diaphanously-elfin-dress-with-a-push up-bustier-top-and-wispy-skirt-bottom! Or what if Werner Herzog wanted to host a Labor Day barbecue with me? Wouldn’t I have no choice but to buy this white crop top and these high rise jean shorts with a weirdo ruffle trim from this tiny boutique in Chinatown?
I’m sometimes able to talk myself out of getting something and sometimes my mind is as weak as a dried leaf. My cousin suggested I take photos of the clothes I tried on. I know tons of bloggers post dressing room photos, but the thought of doing it on this blog used to make me feel violently ill. But whatevs. Here are some photos from the French Connection dressing room:
Teal dress in a thick knit cotton with two gold zippers running down the side. I liked it a lot, but I knew deep down I’d like it a lot more if I could have Kim Kardashian’s booty stapled onto mine, and who knows when they’ll invent that technology.
Another dress in the same thick knit cotton. Basic bodycon style, but as a plus, it didn’t have a thousand arrows pointing out my pancake ass.
I was crazy into this dress because it made me feel one step closer to JWoww and Snooki’s style on Jersey Shore, which is one part HELLO BREASTS and one part HELLO BOTTOM HALF OF MY ASS. If I sound as if I’m trying to be clever or ironic or funny about my admiration for Jersey Shore style, (especially in that ‘Even though I’m praising this thing right now, I actually have a lot of ironic distance from it and it’s clear that I’m smart and refined and for those reasons no one would ever pity me for liking this thing, which is why it’s so hilarious and easy for me to proclaim my love for this thing,” that I think a lot of people are good at, and surely myself included,) I promise I’m not!
I once tried to organize a Destiny’s Child listening party in my freshmen year dorm room because I loved their music that much (my favorites were “Bills, Bills, Bills,” “No, No, No,” and “Say My Name,”) and I put up little dinky posters encouraging everyone in my dorm to stop by for the listening party, and then these other kids in my dorm were totally enraged (perhaps in a joking kind of way and perhaps in a serious kind of way) because they thought I had taken my little Destiny’s Child joke too far, and put up rival posters for a Bob Sagat viewing party and sabotaged my Beyonce plans and afterward, I wept a little bit for Beyonce because I had no ironic distance.
This is the kind of dress I always want to have in my closet–a simple, floral, tent dress, but I always pass it up in favor of something flashier. It’s like how I always want to get imperial rolls with vermicilli at Vietnamese restaurants, but then I can’t help but get the pho anyway because I think it’s fancier and harder to make myself, but in truth I wouldn’t mind eating an imperial roll every now and again, and I wouldn’t mind having a dress like this, but I passed it up once again.
I did get the black shoes I’m wearing in all of the pictures Do you like them/sorry for the blurry.
I wore these insanely wrinkled scalloped shorts and a 50′s canary yellow shirt that has buttons too small for the button hole so I was walking around clutching my chest all day and the shoes are Toms and the scarf says Coca-Cola and it’s vintage from my momma.
All right, it’s time to sing karaoke songs no one else likes/knows.
Love, Jenny
353. Protest & shyness (protest shyness)
August 24th, 2010 § 17 Comments
I had to scan some old photos for a forthcoming publication and I thought I would share these two photos from a Tiananmen Square protest in New York’s Chinatown. I guess you could say back then, my father and his friends were intellectuals. Most of them came to the States in ’86 or ’87, when China was letting students like my father and his friends immigrate to the US to pursue masters degrees and Phd’s. They all studied literature. All of them had completely memorized several books of English literature and could recite at will (or boredom.) One of them had memorized the entire Webster dictionary (whatever tattered version he had back in China,) and when he got to New York, the first store he walked into was a bagel store and he was utterly befuddled because ‘bagel’ had not yet made it into the super old 1960′s copy of the English dictionary that he had in his possession, and he went nuts for several days trying to track down the dictionary definition of ‘bagel.’
I’m not sure why my parents let me go with them to this protest. My dad and his friends made signs and tied rags around their heads to symbolize their solidarity with the students–alive, injured, and dead. I wanted to tie a rag around my head so badly because I didn’t want to be left out and I thought it looked cool. My mother thought it was too gruesome for a child to walk around with faux-bandage around her head but she let me hold up this sign which mentioned spilled blood and our country’s conscience. Everyone was in dark spirits and everyone was also surprisingly/unsurprisingly lonesome for home.
I saw grown men crying in the streets, which scared me into a shyness that up until that point in my life, I had only previously experienced on the day a family friend accompanied me on a trans-Atlantic flight from Shanghai to NY to reunite with my parents. (My father went to NY first and then my mother and then me, two years later.) I’m thinking a lot about my family right now because I’ve been home with my family these past few weeks and I love them. I will be a scared, shy mouse when I fly to France in a month. And I’m thinking a lot about China because a lot is happening right now in China, and a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t changed for China and as usual, the mainstream media’s coverage of China has been disturbing me to no end.
I’m also thinking a lot about protest and anger and how I haven’t participated in enough of either, lately. But I’ve always been shy and tentative about anger. My best friend Hanzhi was also there at the protest with his dad–they both ended up on the front page of a local Chinese newspaper looking very solemn. I wish I had the picture of him and his dad. Hanzhi and I also flew on the same flight from China to NY and didn’t know it until a year later when we became best friends. People in both our families want to think of it as an incredible coincidence but that’s just what happens when you become close to someone–suddenly, it feels like you are connected in a thousand million astonishing ways and you can hardly believe that you didn’t know each other sooner.
My dad is the crazily slender, handsome guy second from the right. My friends would tease me about having a hot dad and once I punched my friend Lata in the butt for threatening to flirt with him and that kind of ended our friendship right then and there. Although, sometimes I would still go over her house for rotis and samosas.
I promise I won’t disappear for two weeks again. I’m here now.
Love, Jenny
352. Our San Francisco Apartment
August 20th, 2010 § 17 Comments
Chris and I just moved into a new apartment, which has meant nabbing wireless from neighbors — it’s only yesterday that we got some Internet of our very own. My apologies for the quietness around here, which has been driving me stir-crazy as well; I finally got some writing done yesterday, which was better for my brain than I ever could’ve imagined. Not that these days haven’t been pleasant enough. I’ll be glad, though, when my apartment is actually a place where we can invite people over. I’d like a love seat. Maybe two.
xo, mw
351. Forthcoming thought vomit
August 13th, 2010 § 9 Comments
It’s rare for me to take other people’s advice, no matter how convinced the advice-giver is of his or her wisdom, but today my brother told me something that is probably the most profound and immediately relevant advice that anyone’s ever given me: “You should be more insensitive.”
Thanks brother, and thanks for taking these pictures of me while we waited forty minutes for a bus, only to be told that if we didn’t have quarters then we had to get off the bus, so we got off the bus and bought black beans and onion powder, and tomorrow I’m going to make fish tacos and pico de gallo. By the way, the number of times I’ve been kicked off an MTA bus in New York is officially in the double-digits now.
My brother and I are exactly nine years apart. He’s in high school and already knows how to drive. When I was his age, I was so terrible at driving that I’d regularly drive onto my neighbor’s lawns (and once onto my own.) We were both born on Christmas Day, and it’s something my mom is proud of because she thinks it means we’ll never forget each other on our birthdays. It’s also fun and sad to use the first person plural when the holidays come around. ‘Should we get an ice cream cake or a regular cake for our birthday?’ or ‘Why are you being so bossy to dad? Because it’s our birthday?’
The post office dropped off about twenty boxes of books and clothes and shoes to my parents’ house in New York over the past week. I think there are still a few more. I don’t know what to do with all of my boxes. Open them and feel defeated? Or just deal with not having any of my stuff except two stuffed suitcases that I mistakenly filled with winter coats? I love the post office. My family once spoke to the Postmaster General because a ring of identity thieves who only stole the identities of Asian men were coming to our house on a regular basis and stealing our mail so that we wouldn’t find out about all of the credit card accounts they opened under my dad’s name. I wrote thousands of letters to my best friend Diana when we were kids and then teenagers. We used to sign the outside of our envelopes with, “Thank you Mister or Miss or Mrs. or Ms. Postman or Postwoman for sending my letter to my best friend!” What dorks.
This silk romper from Alexandra Grecco came into the mail for me yesterday. I love it so much, and will take some better photos at some point to do this number justice. By do justice, I mean give myself as many excuses as possible to wear this baby. It doesn’t even burn my crotch like most onesies. It’s actually cold enough in New York to not be naked, and I dug into my suitcase of winter clothing to find this leather jacket that I had forgotten all about in the months that came before this month.
Love,
Jenny
