gods among men

I saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey this past opening weekend, which probably wouldn't surprise you if you know that I was once a classicist and recently read the new Daniel Mendelsohn's translation of The Odyssey. My alma mater organized a virtual book club with the Classics department to discuss the text this past spring semester, and even though I inevitably fell behind on the my readings by lecture days (ah, it was like being back in school again), I did manage to finish about a month ago before the movie came out. The only other time I read The Odyssey before this spring was in freshman year of high school, so this was my first time reading it in proem form. The Classics department chose Mendelsohn's translation for this book club because his version preserves the form and feel of the original Greek while still modernizing the language over the Lattimore or Fitzgerald renditions. However, it's Emily Wilson's translation from 2017, which simplifies the poetic form into shorter lines in order to make the language more accessible to modern readers, that primarily inspired Nolan's film adaptation.

Wilson's version opens with the line: "tell me about a complicated man." Complicated is unique to Wilson, with the original πολύτροπος more literally describes this to be a man of "many turns." A movie can be a challenging medium to faithfully render the complexity of a story with so many characters and side plots; between the time constraints and production budgets, I think it's possible to have an epic story or a complex character, but it's impossible to have both. Nolan's Odyssey prioritizes the former, featuring nearly all of the monsters and mystical creatures Odysseus and his men encounter in the first two thirds of the film. The scale of the film is undeniably impressive in its commitment to preserving the odyssey of it all. By my count, only Odysseus's final stop to the land of the Phaeacians was cut from this adaptation so that the lengthy exposition of his journey happens during Odysseus and Calypso's conversations on a deserted beach instead. We learn that Calypso has been feeding Odysseus lotuses to forget what happened to him until one day she finally tells him to stop; it's time to start remembering again. 

The setting where we meet our protagonist for the first time is an endless expanse of sea and sky. Odysseus is all alone save for Calypso—or is he? 

Athena, as played by Zendaya, is the only god presented as a character in Nolan's Odyssey, but even her depiction is made ambiguous. While other gods like Zeus and Poseidon are invoked and it's referenced in one scene that gods may disguise themselves as mortals, at no point are any of the other gods embodied or depicted as actual characters throughout the film. This is a significant departure from all the god-to-god interactions in the original text where Athena appeals to Zeus to help Odysseus or Zeus holds Poseidon back from killing Odysseus at sea, not to mention the god-to-man ones where Athena disguises herself as other characters to convince mortals like Telemachus or Penelope to take action or to grant Odysseus with unworldly abilities or powers. In contrast, Athena in Nolan's Odyssey functions as sort of an angel-on-your-shoulder who is seen by Odysseus only, and perhaps he's only imagining her as a projection of his own guilty conscience. In the final flashback to the sacking of Troy, we see Odysseus watch as his fellow Greeks forcibly take a priestess—portrayed by Zendaya, looking just like Athena as she appears to Odysseus's mind's eye—and behead her.

The omission of the gods fundamentally changes the framing of the story: to remove the gods is to remove the manipulators of fate. In a world where gods can do as they please, a man like Odysseus can be complicated in that morally grey way that comes with hypocrisy, savagery, adultery, and wrongdoing so long as the gods favor you, intervening and allowing you to get away with it. But if there are no gods here scheming in a world apart to shape mortal lives as they see fit, then that means men must face the consequences of their actions on their own. 

Nolan's depiction of Odysseus, a man who struggles with guilt over the destruction he helped bring upon Troy, is only possible in a world where Odysseus feels the weight of the war and the death of his men on his shoulders and struggles to bear it. I'm not sure that this is true of the original text. The movie gives purpose to why Odysseus is stuck on Calypso's island spiritually: Odysseus can't just go home as he is; he wants to return to Ithaca as a good man, one who deserves respect as a king and leader of men. (Whose judgment?) Perhaps he also seeks forgiveness as someone who failed to protect the innocent. (Whose forgiveness?) It's this moral conviction, coupled with a godsless framing of agency in the grand scheme of things, that suggests Nolan has imparted an implicitly Christian interpretation onto Odysseus's character.

Making Odysseus out to be a moral man necessitates sanding down his rougher edges in order to tell a more coherent narrative. He is certainly kinder, more merciful, and more trusting than how I read him in the poem. Can this version really be characterized as complicated though? The movie's Odysseus is stripped of his humor, his hubris, his deceptions, and his penchant for telling lies. Gone too was the penultimate recognition scene between Odysseus and Penelope, where she proves she can out-trick a trickster. On a practical level, Penelope needs to test him in case the man before her is actually a god in disguise; on a spiritual level, she proves that she is truly his equal in cunning intelligence and that the two deserve each other. It was one of the scenes I was looking forward to the most. 

I'm not a purist: I don't think an adaptation is successful only if it remains faithful to the source material. I'm glad Nolan made the story into something of his own, breathing new life in ancient characters and sparking a curiosity among moviegoers to watch this strange and marvelous tale unfold, even if there are elements I wish I saw in this blockbuster rendition. Everyone inevitably brings their own biases and interpretations into the movie theater, so even if the adaptation didn't capture everything I wanted, his version gives me more material to react to when I discuss the film with others and ultimately revisit the joys I once found in studying classics all those years ago. 

xoxo, vivian 

recalling things we never did

Last week, George and I went to the Angelika to go see Before Sunset, a movie I had never rewatched despite having seen Before Sunrise at least half a dozen times since I first watched the full trilogy when I was still in high school. It's funny how the media we encounter for the first time at certain points in our lives become such a formative part of how we see the world. That same weekend, someone at a party asked me what my favorite books are, and I found myself rattling off titles I read from around the same era as my first Before viewing: late high school, early college, that time before I felt like I was really living my own life so much as planning what I wanted my real life to be like, thinking it hadn't quite started yet because of all the experiences I hadn't had. 

Before love, there was Before Sunrise: this movie was the framework for my conception of romance years before I ever fell in love, and I measured every spark against the conversational chemistry between Celine and Jesse ever since. I realized while watching that even though Before Sunrise was the movie that led to a decade of me chasing the most sparkling conversations I could possibly hold, Before Sunset was the one with the line I always thought about in the moments when those possibly life-changing conversations were unfolding: "When you're young, you believe there will be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times." 

Before Sunrise is a fantasy of serendipity. What if life really was that brilliant, that you could just meet a beautiful stranger on a train and stay up until dawn talking and falling in love? You never want the moment to end, and maybe inside your head it never does. The ending of the original film is naively hopeful: we won't exchange contact info but meet me here again in six months, and let's see then what happens next. 

Nine years pass. 

I have mixed feelings about sequels to works I love, especially when it's not clear that the author or filmmaker intends for a sequel to follow in the first place. There are some sequels I refuse to read or watch because I consider the endings of the original works to be perfect. Even though I watched the Before trilogy in short succession the first time I saw the series and I knew the subsequent films were faithful to the characters and spirit of the romance between the two, I held off on rewatching Sunset and Midnight because I was afraid it would ruin the magic of the first film for me. For most of my twenties, I wasn't ready to witness the ensuing cynicism and stilted politeness of a second encounter nine years after the original fantasy was left unfulfilled. I suppose I also waited nine (ten, eleven, twelve) years to fully appreciate the fantasy of second chances presented in Before Sunset, and that crucial passage of time has made me love this movie now even more than the first. 

Before Sunset opens with a Q&A with Jesse at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, where he answers questions about the book he wrote based on the night he spent with Celine in Vienna. He wrote it for her, really, and in the crowd, near the back, she appears. The sequel spends the next 70 minutes—tracking almost exactly a real-time match to the limited time Jesse has left in Paris before he needs to catch his flight and go back to New York—acknowledging what that night meant for both of them and how it's shaped who they are now, all those years later.

During this rewatch, I was struck by the way Before Sunset captures the feeling of after: what happens after a promise made was broken, and how do you reckon with the fact that you're never the same after your heart breaks the first time? All those subsequent heartbreaks trace the same fault lines from the first break. Celine and Jesse gradually move from conversation about big-picture issues to reckoning with what that night in Vienna night together did to each of them as they wander through Paris. Both of them slowly admit to having replayed that night in their heads over and over again and spending the intervening years searching for that original feeling and wondering if maybe your most cynical self is right: you're only romanticizing that moment because you never had a real chance to find out if this love is real or just some fleeting thing.

And yet Before Sunset says maybe you do get a chance. Maybe the dreams and terrors and second thoughts about all your other life decisions have been leading you to this afternoon, when you only have an hour before the flight to try and say everything you've held onto for the past decade because life is short and what are the chances? More than anything, the conceit of time is what drives the tension of the first two films: it let's you imagine the what-if fantasy of a single day changing you irrevocably. A single day can break your heart and break you open, and isn't life about living moments like that to savor every last second in the moment, before your time is up?

We are reminded throughout the film that Jesse is on borrowed time and that this golden hour before sunset is suspended from his real life. He has a driver waiting outside and a plane to catch. In the end, does it matter if he and Celine are still madly in love with each other all these years later when he has a wife and kid to go home to? Can love ever be enough to propel you to change your life in all the mundane ways, or is it only beautiful and precious because it's wrapped up in the fantasy of romantic idealism?

These are questions for the final sequel, I think. But it may take me another nine years for that rewatch.

xoxo, vivian

your american dream baby

I was eight when I read Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. That was the year I first started hearing the family stories about my great-grandfather, who was once one of the wealthiest landowners in his province until the Communists confiscated his land and assets after they took power in 1949. There was talk of how if only he had fled to Taiwan with the friends he helped sponsor to get across the strait he might have been able to keep some of his wealth; because I was too young to understand what the politics meant, I used to have these blue-blooded fantasies that someone would come find me to tell me that my family's old money would be restored, and I too could have the sparkling emeralds and beautiful dresses my grandmother recounted from her childhood.

The money was long gone by the time my mother was born. One of the only remnants of my great-grandfather's legacy was his insistence on picking my mother's name; she was his first grandchild, and because he didn't know if he would live to see the birth of a grandson, he deliberately chose masculine characters that mean intelligence so that people would know that her family wanted her to be smart instead of just pretty.

When I was born, I became the first U.S. citizen in my family. My mother chose the name Vivian because it means "full of life"; this was a new country after all, and she knew I would live up to it because I was born into the land that promises the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a Chinese-American, my birthright was the freedom to choose who I want to be on my own terms.

— 

Something they never really tell you about is the opportunity cost of the American Dream.

The price of the birthright to being a hyphenated-American daughter of immigrants is the paradox where you're not enough for one culture while simultaneously being too much for the other, where people from either culture are constantly trying to tell you who you can and can't be because they recognize your un-belonging to their's right away.

For the first time in my life, I watched the anxiety over having a dual identity that I've nursed for so long play out in Rachel's narrative in Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians (2018).

Crazy Rich Asians is, for the most part, a spectacularly fun movie. I've been texting my friends "BOK BOK BITCH" and sending them heart-eyes emojis every time I think about Astrid Leong (approximately three times a day, six days a week) for the last three weeks, and I've been listening to the soundtrack on repeat whenever I find myself on long walks across the city. I could come up with at least dozen things I absolutely loved about it when I walked out of the theater on opening weekend, and even though most of what I love about it is lighthearted, I was caught off guard by how poignant Rachel and Eleanor's mahjong game near the end of the film was for me.

After a whirlwind week of finding out that her boyfriend Nick Young is the favorite grandson primed to inherit the fortunes of one of Singapore's wealthiest families, that everybody in his world—especially his mother Eleanor and his Ah Ma—thinks she is unworthy of his interests, and that her mother lied to her her entire life about her father's existence, Rachel hasn't been given much of a chance to prove herself to Nick's unforgiving family. But right when Nick proposes to her in spite of Eleanor and Ah Ma's explicit rejection, the scene cuts to Eleanor walking into a mahjong parlor and leaves the question of how Rachel answered up in the air.

"You didn't like me the second I got here. Why is that?" Rachel asks, confronting Eleanor for the first time once they begin their game. "Was it because I'm not rich? Because I didn't go to a British boarding school, or wasn't born into a wealthy family?"

The mahjong scene is stripped down both visually and emotionally relative to the rest of the resplendent lavishness that dominates the rest of the movie. Beneath the layers of pretty jewels and incomprehensible wealth, the game scene stands out because it explores the deep-rooted cultural differences between Rachel's Chinese-American immigrant upbringing and Eleanor's more traditional Chinese values. Eleanor's disapproval of Rachel was never simply about her socioeconomic status—it was about the fundamentally different value systems that shape their world view.

"There's a Hokkien phrase koki lang. It means our own kind of people, but you're not our own kind...you're a foreigner, American. And all Americans think about is their own happiness."

The scene itself establishes two layers to the game Rachel and Eleanor play against one another: the literal one played with the low click of the clacking tiles, and the symbolic one over Nick, the person both women love the most.

Strategy games are Rachel's professional forte. She is first introduced to the movie playing poker against her TA as part of her economics lecture, where she bluffs and goes all in, intimidating him into folding even though we find out he had the better hand. Rachel teaches her class an important lesson in game theory right before class is dismissed: you can't play "not to lose;" you have to play to win.

In the middle of the game, Rachel finally reveals the answer she gave to the proposal. "I turned Nick down," she tells Eleanor as she picks up an eight of bamboo tile, the one that both Rachel and Eleanor need to win complete their hand and win the game. "Only a fool folds a losing hand," Eleanor says upon hearing this, quick to judge both Rachel's decision and her game play.

There are always going to people who will underestimate who you are because of the judgments they make about who they think you are; they will underestimate your ability to love, especially in a world that views young love as ephemeral and family legacy as immortal; and they will try to tear you down and make you feel small and like you don't belong, because deep down, they've had to fight that feeling too—they've been playing not to lose because they saw no other choice.

"There is no winning," Rachel explains. "You made sure of that. Because if Nick chose me, he would lose his family. And if he chose his family, he would spend the rest of his life resenting you."

"So you chose for him?"

"I'm not leaving because I'm scared, or because I think I'm not enough, because maybe for the first time in my life, I know I am. I just love Nick so much, and I don't want him to lose his mom again. So I wanted you to know that one day, when he marries another lucky girl who is enough for you, that it was because of me: a poor, raised-by-a-single-mother, low-class, immigrant nobody."

As Rachel gets up to leave the table, she reveals to Eleanor that she had the better hand all along and chose not to play it: she discarded the eight of bamboo tile to let Eleanor win instead, proving to her on both the symbolic and game level that she doesn't need the literal victory to walk away from that table with her head held high. Rachel accepts and has confidence in who she is without compromise: playing to win was never about "winning" Nick; it was recognizing that in spite of Eleanor's accusations, she was always enough.

The last shot of Rachel in this scene shows her finding her mother to walk arm-in-arm out of the parlor, finally ready to go home. Even though none of us get to choose our family, love is always a choice. It doesn't matter what cultures we came from or how much money our families have: all that matters is who we choose at the end of the day, and who we choose to be.

—

When I was thirteen, I asked my grandmother if she thought my great-grandfather would have liked me. I don't remember if she gave me an actual answer or not. I later learned that my great-grandfather's preference for sons led him to give away my grandmother's two younger sisters at birth, because his patriarchal China still held traditional values close about how family—especially important wealthy ones like his—should be ordered. The only reason my grandmother remained in the family at all was because she was the firstborn, and he didn't know if he would have a male heir to carry on the family name, and that was all that mattered to him.

I can spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if the war had gone the other way, but history didn't happen like that. No one has the ability to change that. But the older I get, the more I appreciate that I was born in a different world than the crazy rich Asian one our family lost all those decades ago, and that my parents have never forced me to be anyone or anything I didn't want for myself.

I've lived my entire life fielding comments from other Chinese, other Chinese-Americans, and other Asian-Americans who tell me I'm "too American," that I fundamentally don't understand Chinese culture, that I must not be a very good Chinese daughter because I think too much for myself.

Maybe that's all true.

But the American Dream as I know it is about having the privilege to be who you are without apology and trusting that the people who truly respect you will love you for who you are. It's about mothers and daughters walking together arm-in-arm and not turning back toward the world you left behind, because there's still too much life ahead to give in to being who other people want you to be.

xoxo, vivian

Photos of Constance Wu and Michelle Yeoh—who play Rachel and Eleanor in Crazy Rich Asians—from The Hollywood Reporter.

I never watch the stars

I once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken... 

- "Ride" monologue, Lana Del Rey 

I wish I had words to convey the magic I felt that Sunday night on the coach back home to London when Andi and I spent hours talking about boys and debate (and boys in debate) and high school and college and all those memories we'd made in places we thought of as home thousands of miles away from where we were. Growing up, I was always the kind of girl who dreamt of the glittering city lights of Paris or Prague, but that evening I realized that maybe I never gave the night sky a chance. I pulled back the mesh curtains on the bus window to see thousands of stars shimmering against the cool blackness above the Scottish countryside, and it was the kind of moment you remember as a snapshot in a dark room of memories waiting to be developed.

—

The closest I'd come to understanding that feeling of magic and insignificance in recent years was in 2012 in Indianapolis when I was preparing for NFL Nationals in policy debate. The resolution we were debating that year was the United States federal government's hypothetical expansion of space exploration and/or development; it was 3am before the first day of the competition and I was desperate: I asked one of my friends if I could read his critical case on reducing light pollution as my Plan B because my Plan A, the case I read when I won my bid to nationals, was no longer inherent.

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't have the guts to read "the United States federal government should mandate the use of full-cutoff shielding on all outdoor light fixtures with a hard limit of 20-candle feet" as my resolution even after frantically writing 70 pages of 2AC blocks that weekend (I ended up going with Plan C to bring Constellation back when I went into my first round Monday morning, which was a decidedly safer (read: more boring and predictable) case), but the evidence I'd read in the early hours of dawn about the "underview effect" was some of the most fascinating astronomy-related lit I'd encountered. If astronauts experience the overview effect when they glimpse the fragile beauty of the Earth from space, the rest of us stuck here in the gutter can experience its inverse when we look up at the stars.

In Dr. Glen Mazis' essay on chaos theory, he explains how our encounter with the darkness in night sky forces us to realize our position as single "threads" in the "fabric of the world" that expands into something greater than ourselves through Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of ontology:

Woolf writes, at the beginning of the stunning 25 page interlude that details time's passing, that "a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness...there was scarcely anything left of the body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he' or 'this is she.'" It is because each person is only a rhythm in the beating of these forces, a way in which they come into a certain rhythm for a time, known as Mrs. Ramsey or Lily Briscoe, that suddenly, by some absurd little occurence that rhythm can cease to be. However, it is only in this same sense of precarious reversibility, what Merleau-Ponty called a "thread" in the "fabric of the world," that one is also part of a resonating, circulating, and cooperative articulating--dialogically--with the world in perception, in speech, in love, in art, in thought, etc. The illumination and the darkness are inseparable, moments of a fragile process which transforms in differing moments of its shimmering rhythms. Reversibility not only means that both sides of the relationship make each other be what each is in its discrete identity, but also that this relationship is itself double-sided: both comprising the illumination of "this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 139) as a shared power of human-world, but also yielding darkness, disintegration, and recalcitrance.

 - p. 10

This intersection in academia between physical science and the humanities crosses somewhere in our conception of the night sky, and what I loved most about that affirmative case was that it really struck a chord in my understanding of why we go to and look at the universe above in the first place: what do we live for? What is our purpose? What are we doing? Why are we here? Mankind has looked to the stars for answers to questions of our existence for as long as human memory can remember because we believe in illumination in darkness; we believe that the rust and stardust from whence we came and will one day return to mean something, even if we can't understand it.

I saw Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) a few weeks ago, a spectacularly dizzying and nearly three hour long film about physics and hope for a dying Earth. Amidst crop failures and dust storms in the American Midwest, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) stumbles upon what's left of NASA and makes the decision to join a team of astronauts following up on a reconnaissance mission to a different galaxy, promised to be capable of sustaining human life.

For all its clinically clean spacecrafts, intergalactic silences, and grand ambitions to save the world, Interstellar never lets go of the importance of the individual's attempt to make sense of his or her personal significance in the ever-expanding universe. I've spent this semester studying moral philosophy (the origins of political economy theory) and perhaps the most frustrating conflict in this discipline is trying to reconcile the desires of an individual vs. the desires of civil society as a whole. This film reverberates around the reason why practice is where theory fails: we say we want to save the world, but when we're pushed to the brink of our humanity, our desire to save ourselves is what we ultimately live and die for.

—

Seeing the stars in Scotland last August reminded me of a different night almost a decade before: when I was nine, my dad brought my mum and me with him to one of his favorite fishing spots on the remote shores of Camano Island about an hour's drive from my hometown one clear September night. It was nearly midnight when the high tide reached its peak, and when I woke up and looked outside the car window, I saw stars by the thousands for the first time in my life.

In my memories I consider that night to be the first definitive moment I'd ever truly been inspired to want to become a writer when I "grew up." I couldn't stop myself from dreaming up stories I intended on writing, and somewhere in a cardboard box beneath my bed back home in Washington, I still have fragments of story ideas that ran through my mind jotted down in an old journal I half-heartedly kept back then.

Even though I never watch the stars (there's so much down here), I'm endlessly fascinated by the way we ascribe meaning to things and moments we don't quite understand.

xoxo, vivian

NOTES:

- The photo at the top of this post was my favorite of many similar shots I took throughout the day I toured the Scottish highlands by bus, which was alternated between rain-drenched and crystal-clear at various hours and points in that twelve-hour journey. The coach ride from Edinburgh to London I mentioned in the post was from the same day (or night, I guess is more accurate) but my digital camera is far too inadequate for shooting stars. 

- The underlining/bolding of the Mazis passage is intentional; it preserves the formatting style of policy debate evidence.

- The alternative title to this post is "poetic shit about stars," inspired by the title of one of Joyce's blogs (hi Joyce, thanks for liking/saving my posts on Bloglovin') The title I ended up using is a line from Lorde's "Yellow Flicker Beat," which was first performed/released online the night of her concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley a few blocks from where I live.

dreaming of a different life

All my life I've been scared, and I didn't want you to be scared. That's why I wanted you to go to Oxford. So that if someone asked you out to a nice restaurant, you wouldn't panic about what was a starter and what was a main course... 

London, 1962. The UK had emerged from World War II as victors only to find itself at war again; the quiet threat of a nuclear holocaust became the sword of Damocles hanging over the people of the world as they continued to go through the motions of living. Those of the older generation who remembered the state of uncertainty that they had lived through during the years of war might have been content with the mundanity in their current lives, but those of the younger generation, like sixteen-year-old Jenny Mellor, an ambitious suburban schoolgirl, were utterly bored by what was expected of them.

When I get to university, I'm going to read what I want and think about what I want and listen to what I want. And I'm going to look at paintings and go to French films and talk to people who know lots about lots, Jenny says, bright-eyed and dreamy at the beginning of the film. Lone Scherfig's An Education (2009) has become my most re-watched movie since the first time I watched it the summer before my senior year of high school, and I think the reason for this is because I relate to Jenny more than any other fictional character I've come across. High school Vivian was certainly bored beyond belief; like Jenny, I was always dreaming of the day I would finally escape that suburb by the Sound and be a part of a more colorful world, one where I could look at art and watch avant-garde films and talk with people who know so much more about the world than I do.

Nowadays, it seems like such an indulgent desire to want a life of the mind even at a top-ranked university; I've come to dread when ask me but are your degrees going to get you a job? The recent economic downturn has ensured that the only important question to be asked of millennial college students is whether or not they're employable and can achieve some sense of security post-graduation. It's a different world than the Cold War Britain An Education is set in, where girls who read English at Oxford are expected to marry the successful men they meet at university and then go on to teach secondary school after graduation, but in many ways it's still the exact same. We all want assurance that everything will turn out all right; that's the way it always has been, and I suppose that's the way it always will be.

The last time I re-watched this movie was on a school night in August when I was still studying in London, and although it'd never been remarkable to me before, the scene that I've capped in the images above, where Jenny's father explains to her why he pushed her to study hard and get in to Oxford, really resonated with me for the first time. I saw a bit of my parents in Jack Mellor; I understood a bit better why my parents were always so hesitant to support my interest in fashion or pursuit of a degree in classics; enthusiasm for John Galliano and studying to read the Iliad in its original Attic Greek aren't very practical, you see, and in a world where security is not guaranteed, we've become more fixated on practicality than ever.

One of the things immigrant parents tell you when you're growing up is that they came to this country for you so that you could have a better life, and even though my parents had achieved the American Dream before I was even born, I know they expect me to exceed their achievements because I started out with more. I didn't grow up during China's Cultural Revolution like they did: I have no memory of food rations and totalitarian regimes and class trips to labor in fields in the countryside, but they do. And it's this memory of what their life was like before that drives them, whether consciously or subconsciously, to push me to live a more comfortable and secure life, one that a good education and a decent job after college is supposed to guarantee. It took me a long time to realize that the reasons I don't always see eye-to-eye with them is because I never remembered but they never forgot.

Now that I'm a month into my second year of college, the magic I initially felt when I first came here last year is starting to wear off, but I'm trying my best to bring it back again. 2014 has forced me to grow up, however reluctantly, and the dullest parts of adulthood are slowly seeping into my life as a college student. I'm working five days a week, I'm buying groceries every weekend, I'm cooking for myself, I'm paying utilities and rent for an apartment—it hasn't quite hit me yet, but some day soon it will: this is what it's going to be like for the rest of my life, and if I expect something less lackluster than this, then I'm going to have to seek out those art galleries and movie screenings and the best conversations over bulgogi and soju-mojitos myself.

Aut viam ad astra inveniam aut facium—either I will find a way to the stars or I will make one.

xoxo, vivian

so don't forget you are stardust

All right. I have an admittedly insane idea, but if I don't ask you this, it's just, uh, you know, it's gonna haunt me for the rest of my life. I want to keep talking to you. I have no idea what your situation is, but I feel like we have some kind of connection. So you should get off the train with me here in Vienna, and see the city with me.

Picture this: it's summer. You're on a train on your way home when the person sitting across from you starts a conversation by commenting on the book you're reading. He's from abroad, but he manages to keep the conversation going, and eventually, you start to notice how he smiles easily and doesn't shy away from making eye contact with you when you speak. You always thought of yourself as someone who enjoyed taking train rides alone, but now you wonder if it was because you've never talked with a stranger like this before. For the first time, you realize that you wouldn't mind if the train pulled up at the next station half an hour late just this once. He makes you smile, and you already know you're going to miss him and his anecdotes when he leaves.So what if, when the train pulls up at his station, he asks you to get off with him and continue the conversation? Do you do it? Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) takes that question of 'what if' and turns it into pure cinematic escapism when Celine (Julie Delpy), a French woman on her way back home to Paris, and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American tourist heading towards the airport in Vienna, start off as strangers on a train; while their conversation begins as stilted as any first encounter, they slowly open up their hearts to each other as they ease into one of the most beautiful and believable on-screen relationships I've ever had the pleasure of watching.Unlike the formula of many other boy-meets-girl Hollywood love stories we've come to expect, the magic of Before Sunrise is in its screenplay. The dialogue between the two protagonists is endlessly fascinating because of its sincerity but also mundanity: over the course of one night, they mull over everything from love and spirituality to fortune tellers and sex, but don't necessarily come to any final profound moral conclusions. The act of sharing itself is what matters; as Celine puts it: 

I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.

Before Sunrise succeeds is because it captures the serendipity of falling in love without any of the messiness that comes with commitment. Both Celine and Jesse are incredibly conscious of the fact that they only have this one night together before heading off in different directions come sunrise, unlikely to ever see each other again. Knowing that these star-crossed lovers must part ways at the end of the film that's why their relationship is heart-wrenching, and yet it's this kind of subtle suspense that keeps you on edge until the final scene. I've been a little obsessed with the dichotomy between mundanity and fantasy lately, and this movie achieves a really satisfying balance between the two. The premise of Celine and Jesse's romance starting by chance with a simple conversation is so ordinary, and yet there's just enough indulgence in the idea of meeting someone away from home that makes this story feel like an escapist fantasy. While I should mention here that this is actually the first in a movie trilogy (the two sequels are Before Sunset and Before Midnight; I highly recommend watching all of them—each film is uniquely wonderful in their representations), Before Sunrise haunted me with questions of how I can make the most out of the limited amount of time that I have. ...I swear I didn't mean for that to come out sounding so morbid, but you already know I've been thinking about the end of my college years since halfway through my first semester, don't you? Spring break ended last weekend; in hindsight, it was all a blur of catching up on sleep, marathoning Teen Wolf, and stress-eating to Hannibal (glamorous, I know). I don't even know why this last week of school has been so exhausting, but I'm so relieved to be able to catch up on sleep...again. I'm still working on being more spontaneous and doing things I normally don't do so I won't be left with as many regrets like in high school, but old habits die hard, and curling up in bed with coffee ice cream and TV is so tempting.I think the most indulgent thing I've done recently is buy myself a bouquet of roses when I went to the supermarket over spring break. (I may or may not have bought those roses instead of buying more food, and I may or may not have run out of things to eat a day early because I'd spent my money on said flowers. Judge me, I dare you.) A friend of mine pointed out that buying those flowers was a waste of money because "they're just going to sit there and die," and I distinctly remember exclaiming "you know what, we're all going to die" in reply...

...so maybe I am just a tiny bit morbid. On that happy note, I hope you all are having a lovely spring! ;)

xoxo, vivian 

champagne and stars

At about 10:57 AM PST, my last AP free response booklet was collected by the test proctor. You guys, I AM DONE WITH AP TESTING FOREVER! This calls for some celebration.

have a glass of some virtual champagne and celebrate with me!

No (real) champagne for me though! I went to go see the Moët-fueled Great Gatsby instead. I know I blogged about my anticipation for this movie in my last post, but to be honest, I was a little hesitant to watch it in theaters at first; I contemplated waiting until the DVD comes out, especially because Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring is coming out next month and I can't afford to see both in theaters, but I ended up caving in for Gatsby after all. 

And you know what? Despite the mixed reactions I've heard from people I've talked to in the last week since the premiere, I thought it was brilliant. Afterwards, when my friends asked me how the movie was on the way back home (they'd gone to see Star Trek: Into the Darkness instead), I told them that my spoken words wouldn't be able to do my opinions justice; here, let's see if my written words do a better job.

I should start by saying that it wasn't perfect. I didn't expect it to be—few things are. The amount of buzz this production created in the months before it finally hit theaters generated excitement, sure, but it also set the bar and expectations pretty high and up for criticism as well. But because I generally enjoyed this film, I want to talk about the things I loved about it.

First, I thought that Luhrmann captures the essence of the 20's brilliantly. Of course it was loud and smoky and jewels dripped from the throats and wrists of pretty women; the excess was chaotic, the people were feverish, and there was a war going on—not the war that had just been fought in Europe half a decade before, but a war inside the American spirit born of a newfound wealth and dreams still unrealized. Those of a certain age and generation thought they were invincible, inventing rules that those who came before couldn't understand—just like youth today and every decade. The struggle between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan is very much a struggle of generations as well as of money; the stark contrasts in the elaborate, no-expense-spared sets make you both gawk at the indulgent splendor of Gatsby's West Egg mansion and sneer at the pretentiousness of Tom's East Egg residence. 

Of course, while Fitzgerald's characters weren't meant to be likable, I could almost believe in Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal of Jay Gatsby's great American dream and Carey Mulligan's foolish Daisy Buchanan. Almost. I normally don't have a problem with characters that are hard to like: arrogant and excessively wealthy? Love it. Beautiful and vain? Even better. I like my stories the same way I like my fashion: bold, pretentious, and a little bit fantastical. And yet, the acting by the cast of this adaption fell a little short for me: the characters were almost too likable and too pitiable, all ambitious dreams and innocence in a world filled with vice.

But oh, how beautiful everything was! Every scene, from the billowing white curtains when we first meet Daisy and Jordan to the haunting eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg in the waste land between Manhattan and money, was absolutely breathtaking. But it was a different kind of beauty than Fitzgerald's prose: while the latter is celebrated for his unrivaled lyricism, Luhrmann's screenplay failed to translate the true beauty of Fitzgerald's novel into the big screen. Instead, his movie succeeded on a different aesthetic level entirely.

And speaking of aesthetics, the soundtrack was incredible! I had been listening to Lana Del Rey's "Young and Beautiful" on repeat in the weeks leading up to the premiere, and I was very happy with how it had been played in the movie. Not only did it underscore Gatsby's obsession with loving Daisy in the fairytale that he had dreamt, but it also evokes a question of beauty and youth and its transience, a theme Fitzgerald explores in all of his novels, and one of a few themes I plan on studying more about for my final author study paper for English Lit.

Yup, I still have a few more weeks of finals and papers, but I have a feeling that it'll go by pretty quickly. It's a bit strange and bittersweet to think that high school is ending soon and I'll be hundreds of miles away in college at the end of August. I don't think I've mentioned it to you guys, but I've committed to UC Berkeley. Go bears!

xoxo, vivian

souls of different ages

After finishing Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet towards the end of my freshman year of high school, my English teacher showed us scenes from both Zeffirelli and Luhrmann's film adaptions of the play. We took a survey afterwards on which adaption we liked better, and I was surprised to find myself as one of the few who chose Lurhmann's R+J over the by-the-book Zeffirelli movie. Seriously though, I loved Luhrmann's fresh approach to one of the oldest and most famous tales in the Western canon: the California beaches! Claire's white angel dress and Leo's suit of armor! that cathedral! the guns! the pop soundtrack! I could go on forever about all the good things in that movie.

So when I found out that Baz Luhrmann was doing an adaption to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, I was beyond excited. Everything—from Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan (loved her in An Education and Never Let Me Go) to the Moët and Chandon champagne bubbles—evokes a new, more decadent, more splendid, and more colorful Jazz Age in the mind's eye. That's what a good film adaption should do, after all: it should transcend and create a new soul for an age-old story.

I'm currently reading Fitzgerald's last complete novel, Tender is the Night, as part of my author study paper for English Literature this year, and I can't help but to think that people don't really write books like that anymore. There's a certain lyricism in Fitzgerald's prose that's beautiful and tragic and reflective of his protagonists themselves: even though Amory and Anthony and Gatsby and Rosemary's lives are filled to the brim with extravagance and luxury, there's that pervasive sense of sadness and discontent. It's the transience of life, after all; my favorite scene in The Beautiful and the Damned is when Maury delivers a speech about the meaninglessness of his life and the lives that they all led.

Anyways, my first AP exam of the two week testing period is this Thursday (English Language and Literature, ironically enough), so I should get back to studying. I probably won't be posting any new posts until after exams are over, but I'll be sure to get back to your comments as soon as possible!

xoxo, vivian