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

forget what I had in mind

It's the end of the year and I'm back in Seattle for another week and a half. These six-hour flights feel like they're getting longer, but maybe I'm just out of practice from traveling coast-to-coast. Being back where I started this year sharpened the contrast between me at the start of this year and me now. 

I was originally planning to make this another year-end book roundup, but in the spirit of creating better best-of lists, I've decided to reflect on some other highlights of 2022 too. 

BESTS

Best walk I went on: New York in August, from Midtown to Tribeca

I love visiting New York, but I can't see myself happily living in New York. Visiting New York once every few months preserves the magic of the city for me without letting the small things wear me down: the smell of the subway stations, having to find time to do laundry, the lack of big, open spaces that feel like they belong to you. August was the first time I spent more than a full week in the city, and that day that I'm thinking of made me feel like maybe this was the kind of day I could have countless iterations of if I just moved there properly. But maybe then it would be the kind of day I wouldn't remember on its own, just another night in a blur of street lamps beneath skyscrapers.

We started the night at my friend's apartment in Midtown heading out for a late dinner. The sun had set about half an hour before we hit the pavement, which meant that the heat was finally dissipating into a bearable kind of balmy night, a welcome reprieve from the heat wave earlier that week. Sean made a good point about how summer nights on the East Coast feel better because you don't have to worry about a precipitous temperature drop after sunset. It wasn't any of our first summers on the East Coast by that point, but we still felt like we couldn't comfortably call this home yet.

The thing that made this walk stand out to me isn't so much the walk on its own but everything it reminded me of after the fact: how much less lonely this city walk felt compared to my last walk across London last summer (from Soho to Bermondsey, walking mostly along the Southbank side of the Thames after crossing the Golden Jubilee Bridge); how many more friends I now have on this side of the country compared to three or four years ago; how so much can change in five years, six years—but here I was, on a long walk with my friend I used to go on long walks with at the Berkeley marina and my boyfriend I was (re)introduced to last summer by Sean, taking in the city lights.

Best new habit: Working out regularly

George taught me how to lift this year and I'm the strongest I've ever been. Thanks for bringing me with you to your gym and using all your free guest passes on me. The biggest shift has been mental: these workouts feel good in a way that I couldn't figure out how to achieve when I used to push myself through weekday 6am spin classes (the cheapest ones on ClassPass outside of my regular work hours). 

Best art experience: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Nicholas Party L'heure mauve

Nicholas Party's "mauve twilight" collection brought together dozens of different pieces by Party and works by other artists in the MMFA's collection, arranged by color across various rooms tied together by palette and thematic resonance with nature. This exhibit had a good balance of texturally soft pieces with occasionally unsettling sculptures or portraits interspersed. It was deeply satisfying to walk through the color coordinated rooms. 

Best thing I cooked this year: Three ingredient tomato sauce

This pasta sauce is very tasty and so incredibly easy to make to the point where I don't think I can ever use store-bought jars again. I came across this recipe years ago and made it once, but it wasn't until this year that I started making it on a regular basis. I love how simple but balanced this recipe is: the sunny brightness of the tomatoes with the smooth fat of the butter and the aroma and flavor of the onion all pair beautifully together.

I always halve this recipe (enough for two people with big appetites, possibly up to four if you're having this as a side dish), using one 14.5 oz can of tomatoes, half an onion, and about a quarter of a stick of butter. My favorite pasta shape for this sauce is bucatini. Cook the pasta to almost al dente and then finish simmering it in the sauce with a bit of pasta water. Serve and garnish with parmesan. 

Best rediscovery: That I can still ski 

I went skiing last week for the first time in thirteen years. It was gratifying to feel the muscle memory kick in; forgetting how to ride a bike last year really made me doubt if I had muscle memory for anything I haven't done in more than a decade. I'm lucky that I learned to ski before I came to terms with how scared I am of falling. I think what really scares me is the thought of losing control. Skiing feels like a balancing act of being in control and then losing it just enough: you trust that your body will move the way it's supposed to while you chase the rush of gliding down the mountain. 

This recent trip gave me the confidence to step out of my comfort zone and left me with a better understanding of my relationship with fear. I also discovered the joys of après-ski and watching eight inches of snow fall in a day. Even though I don't live close enough to the mountains to go regularly anymore, I'll travel seven hours to do this again someday. Here's to hoping that my next ski trip won't happen during another arctic overflow.

BOOKS

I read and I forget. There are simply too many books in the world I want to read and not enough time to read them all. I've recently come to realize that I have a below-average retention of most of the media I consume unless if I write my thoughts down somewhere where I can come back to reference later. So since the start of this year, I've made an effort to record my quick thoughts on books I read as I finish them so that I have some notes to look back on. Here are some of my book highlights of the year:

Couldn't put it down: the Cormoran Strike series, but especially Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith

The Cormoran Strike series got me out of a reading dry spell this summer after I came across the TV adaptation (Strike) on HBO. I read the first three in rapid succession one winter in Beijing years ago and the latest two this year, and every book in this mystery/true crime series has been a page turner for me. The main characters, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, are likable and developed slowly across volumes in a believable way, and most of the self-contained mysteries themselves are complex enough to build momentum without abrupt shock-factor twists. The revelations are well-paced and feel earned. While I admittedly haven't read many mysteries, these books have consistently been ones I've had the most fun reading, even for the ones where I wasn't that into the premise. 

If you're only going to read one, The Cuckoo's Calling (book one) is the most approachable but my personal favorite is Troubled Blood (book five). Troubled Blood had the most gratifying slow-build character development for Cormoran and Robin running in parallel to the unraveling of a decades-old cold case that takes the two detectives across Cornwall and London. The sheer size of this book was intimidating but I finished this one in under a week, faster than some of the "normal" 250-page novels more frequently found on my reading list. 

Comfort read: Either/Or by Elif Batuman

I read this book in September around the peak of back-to-school nostalgia season, and this book is refreshing and funny about all the anxieties a precocious 19 year old entering her sophomore year of undergrad feels about the confines of the world around her. The protagonist, Selin, is immensely relatable as an awkward immigrant kid at an elite university falling in love with college for being what it is:

How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

The title of the book comes from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, in which "either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically." Selin frames the philosophical lesson from her literature classes to reexamine her life as a student at Harvard in the 1990s, finding "the idea of an aesthetic life to be tremendously compelling. It was the first time I heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money or having kids." Selin has the kind of thoughts on life you can only have when you're still coming into your own in young adulthood, pondering questions about life and all the awkward growing pains that come with independence, while you still have the luxury of spending your days listening to brilliant professors teach new ideas that change the way you look at everything, from how you email your crush to deciding to go abroad for the summer. The writing was thoughtful, funny, and the right amount of pretentious, just enough to pique your curiosity to peek at the Works Cited list at the end of the book for a syllabus of recommended reading. 

While technically this book is a sequel to Elif Batuman's The Idiot, I felt like I came at it as a standalone novel because I read The Idiot two years ago, and as I said, I read and subsequently forget. Read one, read both, read them next September. 

A book I'll remember for a long time: The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

The Lonely City is part biography, part cultural criticism, and part memoir on loneliness in art. Laing’s memoir parts were the parts that hit home the hardest. There were times, especially in cities I didn't have anyone in, when I felt like my loneliness would swallow me whole. Even though it never stayed that way for long—the way it must have consumed the artists she writes about—the experience of new city loneliness preoccupied my thoughts when I was by myself in those places.

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. if I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant’s wail: I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held. It was the sensation of need that frightened me the most, as if I’d lifted the lid on an unappeasable abyss. 

The first time I moved to DC I spent my first week delirious from actual jet lag and metaphorical motion sickness, trying very hard not to think at all. I just needed to get through each day with a sense of routine. The people I told about what I did said I was brave for everything I mustered up the courage for that month, and the people I didn’t wouldn’t have guessed. I wrote somewhere two months in that I was getting good at pretending like there wasn’t this gaping hole in my chest. I’ll fake it every single day until I don’t need fantasy / until I feel you leave. But in those moments when I caught my eye in my own reflection I couldn’t help but wonder why I wasn’t enough, and when I would ever get to a point in my life in this new city where I finally felt close enough to someone to spill my secrets to, someone I didn’t have to hop on a four hour bus or five hour plane ride for just for a hug.

The second time I lived in London was good until midsummer when the few friends I made during the height of the pandemic moved away one after the other. I had those lines from Lorde’s "Ribs" this dream isn’t feeling sweet / we’re reeling through the midnight streets / and I’ve never felt more alone / it feels so scary, getting old stuck on repeat in my head in those moments of alone-ness in London last summer: this dream isn’t feeling sweet / this dream isn’t feeling sweet / this dream isn’t feeling sweet—

because in the end, London without the people I loved was just another concrete jungle when you strip it of sentiment. It was just a city, and going home back to my second flat every night made me want to go home properly after all, for the first time in my life, until that became the only thing I could think to do to reset my life again, even if it meant giving up on a dream I had for the better part of the past decade. 

Those periods of loneliness never lasted as long as I thought they would when I was right in the middle of it all. But reading this book captured what it was like, and for a moment there my breath catches, remembering.

While the memoir transitions were my favorite part of this book, most of The Lonely City is about artists and art, and how art is inseparable from history and politics. Works about art are really a question about why art, and Laing answers: "the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive."

We create for ourselves and for other people, so that maybe someday, someone, somewhere, might possibly connect with what we have to offer up. "What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last."

Honorable mentions:

• Writers & Lovers by Lily King
• Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
• Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich
• The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvater
• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
• Babel by R.F. Kuang

What were some of your bests and books of this year? Let me know; I'm collecting recommendations for 2023. In the meantime, happy new year!

xoxo, vivian

reading 100 books a year

Some exciting news to round off this year: I have now read 100 books in 2020!

I already wrote about reading 50 books a year when I hit my original reading goal in August; not a lot has changed about my overall reading habits, aside from maybe the volume and pace. I wasn't planning to reset my goal to 100 because I expected my appetite for reading for fun would diminish once I started grad school in September, but I truly underestimated how much the 14-day self-isolation and now my second lockdown since moving to London would make me read more just to stay sane. 

To reflect a bit on what I've read and to attempt to answer the question "do you have any recommendations?", I categorized a few dozen books I've enjoyed over the years for your consideration. Most of these recommendations are fiction, although there are a few nonfiction titles scattered throughout as well. I'm still working on reading more nonfiction in general so I don't have a comprehensive list to draw from at the moment, but I'm hoping to change that in the years to come. 

Let me know if you have any book recommendations for me—would love to hear them! 

books for getting lost in: 

• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin (trans. David Hawkes) 
• The City We Became by N.K. Jemison
• A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin

books to remember, so that we may never forget:

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
• Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

books to feel nostalgic for a past you* wish you had: (*if you're like me, anyway)

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
• Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

books that feel like a fever dream:

• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Godshot by Chelsea Bieker
• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
• Severance by Ling Ma
• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

books to make your jaw drop:

• Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• White Ivy by Susie Yang
• The Rook by Daniel O'Malley
• How Much of These Hills Are Gold by C. Pam Zhang
• My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

books with fascinating protagonists:

• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
• The Idiot by Elif Batuman
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
• Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
• Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan

books that complicate the way you see the world:

• Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
• There There by Tommy Orange
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

xoxo, vivian

it's not enough to feel the lack

One of the silver linings to shelter-in-place has been having more time to read. I've noticed that other people in my library system feel the same way: all of my library ebook loans have been coming weeks ahead of schedule these days so I'm usually reading multiple books simultaneously when I'm not busy with work. I've read a lot of great books lately, and in the spirit of Asian American Heritage Month, I wanted to highlight some of my favorites by Asian American writers who complicate the representation of Asian American identity.

—

Everybody talks about Pachinko, but Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires is the book I wish I had discovered five years earlier when I really needed more stories about protagonists with ravenous ambition and no sense of real purpose to point her due north. I saw a lot of myself in Casey Han, the Korean American protagonist, as she navigates her mid-twenties as a young professional in Manhattan. The novel itself is fun: the cast of characters and their subplots remind me of some of my favorite TV dramas with their moneyed lifestyles, illicit affairs, scandals and family intrigues. But what makes this novel so good is the way Lee's characters migrate across cultural, intergenerational, and socioeconomic borders as well, channeling the overarching themes that make being Asian American feel so fraught.

From the very first chapter, Casey struggles to relate to her immigrant parents' dreams for her bound by their definitions of success. She craves the easy comfort of the American Dream, that life could be whatever you make of it, and yet she doesn't know what to do with the accumulation of guilt from letting her parents down with her life choices again and again. And for what? The most frustrating part is that she doesn't even know what it is she really wants for the majority of the novel, and that casts doubt on whether fighting with her parents has been worth all the pain in the first place.

The unnamed narrator in Chemistry by Weike Wang faces a similar dilemma. She is so close to having everything she's supposed to want—a proposal from her successful and supportive boyfriend, the prestigious PhD in chemistry, and the hard-earned approval from her Chinese immigrant parents—but instead of reveling in it, she slowly abandons it all instead. The narrator is paralyzed by a newfound sense of ambivalence towards her picture-perfect life, and over the course of a year she struggles under the weight of having to live up to her parents' success:

"My father's is the classic immigrant story. 

He is the first in his family to go to high school and college and graduate school and America. He is the first to become an engineer. 

Extraordinary, some people have said when he speaks now of how he got here. 

Through hard work, he says, and the learning of advanced math. 

Amazing, others have said. But such progress he's made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon." 

Stylistically, Chemistry is like a book of proverbs on navigating the gulf between other people's expectations and finding your own way forward. Like Free Food for Millionaires, this novel contemplates the cultural heritage of filial piety with American values of self-determination and individualism. How do you reconcile the person your parents want you to be with the person you're discovering you actually are? As the child of immigrants, are you personally obligated to live your life in a way that makes your parents' sacrifices worth it?

I am grateful for E.J. Koh's memoir The Magical Language of Others for telling what feels like a nontraditional immigrant story but is heartwarming all the same. In some sense, Koh's story is a reversal of the unnamed narrator's in Chemistry. Rather than valorizing the ways in which immigrant parents sacrifice their best life so that their children have a better chance at success, Koh's parents are the ones who ask their children to let them go pursue better opportunities and leave them behind.

Koh has to shape her selfhood around the absence of her parents' immediate presence starting from the second half of her teenage years: after immigrating to the United States and establishing a successful career in the Bay Area, Koh's parents leave her and her brother behind in California while they go back to pursue an even better professional opportunity in Korea. The offer was supposed to be only three years, but as the company extends their timeline for more years to come, Koh recounts stories from her late teens and early twenties with letters from her distant mom interspersed throughout.

With improved Korean language skills and the benefit of hindsight, Koh discovers her mother's desire for forgiveness and her daughter's love through translating the box of letters over a decade later. Love is expressed in both the tender, explicitly written love you miss yous and the sheer act of writing about the daily vignettes in an attempt to share a life from thousands of miles away.

But how do you share your love and your life with your mom when language is doomed to fail you? Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a beautiful and haunting semi-autobiographical novel that's framed as a letter from a son to his Vietnamese immigrant mother:

"Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are."

This is a novel about trauma, race, violence, masculinity, war legacies, drug addiction, and sexual identity; it's also a story about love and identity and what it means to become American. Vuong strikes an extraordinary balance between the big, sweeping themes and the intricacy of all the details that make a life feel true. The main character, Little Dog, tells the story of his life to his mom in richly poetic English, despite the fact that she only knows basic Vietnamese and is completely illiterate in both languages. The lack of a common language underscores the desperate desire we have to be seen, to be known; sometimes the ones we wish would understand us the most are the ones who never truly will.

—

In addition to these four titles, I put together a quick spreadsheet with about sixty other books by Asian and Asian-heritage writers I've read over the last five years here. If you've read and loved any of these books, want to know more about any of these books, or think I'm missing a book (or two, or ten) in my repertoire, let's talk!

xoxo, vivian

paris address book

Earlier this month, my best friend and I finally fulfilled our decade-long plan to go to Paris together for the first time. Even though I've had a whirlwind few weeks since I got back, I had the good sense of writing down all the notable places we went before I start forgetting. Below is a map I put together on Google Maps and notes for your reference. Photo diary coming soon!

Vivian's Paris Address Book

To see / do:

Musée de l'Orangerie: A small but beautiful gallery famous for housing Claude Monet's water lily paintings. 1st Arrondissement

The Louvre: Perhaps the most famous art museum in the world, and for good reason. Yvana and I spent over 10 hours here, thanks to extended hours on the first Saturday of the month. They have extended hours every week on Wednesdays and Fridays as well. 1st Arrondissement

Musée d'Orsay: A Beaux-Arts train station-turned-art museum on the Left Bank of the Seine. It has the largest collection of impressionist art and 19th century French art. 7th Arrondissement

Musée Rodin: The Hôtel Biron is home to Auguste Rodin's sculptures, drawings, and photographs. Many of his most famous sculptures, such as The Thinker and the Gates of Hell, are in the gardens in the front of the building. 7th Arrondissement

Jardin de Tuileries: Located between L'Orangerie and the Louvre and directly across the Seine from Musée d'Orsay, this garden is a perfect break between galleries. 1st Arrondissement

Jardin de Luxembourg: Another lovely garden located in Saint-Germain. Stop here to sit, relax, read a book, eat some chocolates (see chocolatier recs in my "to eat" section). 6th Arrondissement

Shakespeare & Company: Iconic independent English-language bookstore next to Notre Dame. If you've ever asked me for travel recs in my most-frequented cities I always sneak some bookstores and libraries when I can. 6th Arrondissement

Existentialist cafes - Les Deux Magots and Cafe de Flore: These classic French cafes are known haunts of French existentialists and American expats from the first half of the 20th century and right next door to each other in Saint-Germain. We went to Les Deux Magots for breakfast when it was less crowded. 6th Arrondissement

Champs-Élysées: "The world's most beautiful avenue" certainly has some of the most prettiest stores and storefronts on one street. 8th Arrondissement

Shop at Le Marais: Seemingly endless streets of international chains to local boutiques. Come here instead of Champs-Élysées for your one-stop-shopping fix. 4th Arrondissement

Wander around Montmartre: One of the best views of the city can be found on the steps of Sacré-Cœur. Charming neighborhood to walk around. We found a patisserie that won best croissant here before heading over to my favorite meal in Paris (Le Table d'Eugene). 18th Arrondissement

Château de Versailles: A short train ride outside of Paris this palace is well worth the day trip. We went on a Wednesday, one of the least busy days of the week, so the crowds were quite sparse by late afternoon. If it hadn't gotten so windy Yvana and I would have spent more time exploring the sprawling, impeccably manicured gardens behind the palace; something for next time.

To eat: 

La Table d'Eugene: My personal favorite of our Michelin-starred meals. Delicate, flavorful, and gorgeous presentation of a modern interpretation of French food. We did the prix fixe lunch and made reservations in advance. 18th Arrondissement

La Truffiere: Although the restaurant name implies truffles, we opted for the six-course discovery menu which was largely truffle-less aside from the black truffle caramel at the end of the meal. There's a separate €220 truffle tasting menu if you're up for the splurge. Still a fantastic Michelin-starred experience. 5th Arrondissement

Benoit: The third and most traditionally French of our Michelin-starred meals. The ambiance, decor, and food are comparable to what you would expect from a classic French bistro. 3rd Arronidissement

Les Comptoir de la Gastronomie: A shop and restaurant known for all things duck. Foie gras ravioli and duck breast were great. 2nd Arrondissement 

Jin Xin Lou: A Chinese takeout restaurant featuring four-course French dinners. Yvana's family friend in Paris invited us to their partial class reunion here on one of the nights where the son of the mom and pop owners of the Chinese takeout side was putting his French culinary skills to use by serving French food to dine-in guests upon request. Worth a visit if you find yourself on this side of town! 13th Arrondissement

Le Mechoui du Prince: Get Moroccan food while you're in Paris. The tagine and couscous here were excellent. 6th Arrondissement

El Nopal: My boyfriend had been telling me about the cactus quesadilla he had at this hole-in-the-wall stand by the canal for a full year until I finally made it out to Paris. Turns out it was a 5 min walk from one of the hostels we stayed at! The tacos were alright but the aforementioned quesadilla really was that good. 10th Arrondissement

Patrick Roger: My favorite of the half dozen or so chocolatiers we went to. Don't be intimidated by the avant-garde chocolate art and sterile displays—the dark chocolates are exquisite and they balance unique flavors, from jasmine green tea to yuzu citrus, very well. I recommend the Saint-Germain location so you can try them by the piece; the Marais store we stopped by only sold bars and pre-assembled boxes. 6th Arrondissement

Henri Le Roux: Best caramels I've ever had—after all, they invented salted butter caramel. Pick out a bag full of your favorite flavors or take home some chocolate bars with caramel au beurre salé. 7th Arrondissement

La Maison du Chocolat: Another amazing chocolatier worth visiting. Our favorites were the ones with pralines. 1st Arrondissement

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.

all of you is inherited

I miss reading/sleeping at Morrison Library between classes

My mum likes to tell this story of how when I was less than a year old and we were living in Wyoming, my favorite thing to do was pull out books from the bottom shelves at bookstores and libraries when she set me down to look for books for her psych class. I didn't learn how to read for another few years, but once I did I never stopped. My childhood and early adolescence was filled with weekend afternoons spent at Borders or Barnes & Noble reading a book or two in one sitting and copying down titles for a dozen more to put on hold at the local public library; I had my 14-digit library card number memorized by the time I was six, and when my parents tried to limit my reading time during the day in favor of practicing piano or doing Chinese homework in my elementary and middle school years, I would alternate between staying up and hiding in my walk-in closet to read at night or getting up at dawn to read beneath the giant skylight before school.

I don't think you can be much of a writer if you're not also a voracious reader. If I was going to take a break from writing the least I could do was read more; by the end of 2015, I started actively using my Goodreads account to track my progress and set a goal of reading 50 books in 2016. Even though I fell spectacularly short, I tried again in 2017, and I'm happy to say that as of two weeks ago I surpassed my goal and will be upping the ante to 60 books in 2018.

Here's a list of some of my favorite books I read this year:

1. OVERALL FAVORITE: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

"Bang bang was the sound of memory's pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon."

Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut and Pulitzer Prize winning novel is absolutely brilliant, and this is one of those rare books that I would recommend to just about anybody. This novel is a war story, a spy story, a commentary of America and the American Dream, a contemplation on moral philosophy or the origins of theories on political economy (because theory is where practice fails: we say we want to save the world but in the end we really desperately want to save ourselves), a revelation on what it means to belong to places and people, and an exploration of love, identity, loyalty, and deception.

The prose is beautifully written—rich without being decadent—even though I had to pause and resume again sometimes because this isn't the kind of book you can devour in one sitting. I think my only qualm is that this book makes me wish I knew more about the world going into the one Nguyen creates: I lost track of the allusions I felt like I should have known (as a student of American foreign policy and political theory at Berkeley, as someone whose best friend wrote her college honors thesis on the Vietnamese immigrant experience and legacy), but that said, I'm in awe by how many hard and important questions this novel is able to comment on.

2. MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING: Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

I couldn't think of a non-profane way of expressing this, so let me just get this out there: Invisible Monsters is the most f*cked up book I've ever read (so far) and I love it. This writing is bold, the characters are provocative, and the plot structure is non-linear; it's presented in a way that makes you feel like you were told to trace a line connecting incongruous points to reveal a linear plot after all, only to look down and see you were drawing circles the whole time.

I have a particular fondness for stories about people who have everything before losing it all and Invisible Monsters is no exception: the unnamed narrator was a model with an enviable career, boyfriend, and best friend before getting her face blown off in a freak highway accident. This book is about what it means to be beautiful and to be seen when you're a material girl in a material world until one day you wake up and suddenly you're not anymore; to love and be loved and more importantly to belong in romantic, familial, and platonic relationships and why we hold on to people when they hurt and betray us; to take control over your own identity and subsequently your life and to live it on your terms and not anyone else's.

"I'm only doing this because it's the biggest mistake I can think to make. It's stupid and destructive, and anybody you ask will tell you I'm wrong. That's why I have to go through with it...we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes. I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

This book shocked me, made me laugh, and took me on one hell of a ride I can't wait to get back on again. I dare you to read it. If you do, let me know: I've been dying to talk about it with someone since finishing it in March and I'm looking for an excuse to reread this again sometime.

3. MOST PERSPECTIVE-CHANGING: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi's memoir about the secret lessons on forbidden Western literature she gave to seven of her most committed female students in the Islamic Republic of Iran is a breathtaking love letter to literature itself. This was one of five books my favorite high school English teacher recommended when I got in touch last month, and reading this reminded me of being back in his classroom five years ago and studying so many great works for the first time and was just starting to piece together why we read fiction at all.

My mum and I have very different ideas about what books we should be reading and why; she reads almost exclusively nonfiction to learn about anything and everything she's wanted to know, from personal finance to wine to studying Romance languages, while I read almost exclusively fiction to be fascinated and escape the mundanity of my own life for a glimpse at another world. My mum and I also come from very different worlds: she grew up to the extreme censorship of the Cultural Revolution era in China, while I had the privilege of growing up with limitless access to any story I wanted to engage with in the suburbs of Seattle. For her, literature was a luxury she rarely afforded; for me, literature has been a passion I've hungered for for as long as I could remember.

"A novel is not an allegory. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."

Nafisi's memoir is inadvertently a story about what a privilege it is to be able to engage with and understand great works by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Austen, and other greats of the Western canon, especially if you live(d) in a world that will go to extreme measures to stifle the questions and perspectives these works offer up, like Iran in the mid-1990s or China in the mid-1970s. When I was telling my mum about the nonfiction books I read this year, I realized I would have a hard time selling this one to her because it requires familiarity with Lolita or The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice to appreciate the relevance of Nafisi's commentary, and that maybe my affection for this book comes from a love of literature I've taken for granted.

Half a year after graduation and I'm again left with questions (but not answers) about education, what it means to continue to learn and grow, and how to empathize not just through reading and but also through engaging with people from dramatically different perspectives and experiences in life.

4. MOST HEARTBREAKING: Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

"We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only."

Everything about Call Me By Your Name is beautiful in the way Abraham Van Beyeren's banquet still life paintings are: decadent, vibrant, sensual, ephemeral. This love story between Elio, a seventeen year old boy, and Oliver, his father's graduate student, set to the backdrop of a cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera is achingly picturesque, and I'm not sure if it's the intimate stream-of-consciousness writing style perfumed with obsession or its haunting and deeply unsatisfying answers to questions of love and happily ever afters that get to me more.

Aciman's attention to detail builds tension in a painstaking and breathless pace: from the very beginning, this novel makes you aware of the passage of time, every click of a ticking clock and every soft breeze sighing through peach tree leaves in the still heat of summer on the Italian seaside. The eroticism in this novel isn't so much in the acts themselves but the extent to which Elio and Oliver must lay themselves bare to each other in order for the spark of intimacy to truly ignite.

This book devastated me because it asks: how do you deal with knowing you risk your heart breaking when summer ends and this space between us can no longer exist or be recreated like this ever again? How do you rationalize that the pain will be worth the remaining time we have left? Call Me By Your Name reminded me that you have to say yes anyway, even when you risk breaking your heart, because it's those moments of sheer bliss that are ultimately our raison d'être.

5. MOST HEARTWARMING: Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang

I have big, complicated feelings about Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart, a collection of stories about six Chinese American daughters of immigrants growing up in New York in the 1990s. I've been following Jenny's writing since her Rookie Mag days six years ago, and Sour Heart is the only book I actually bought for myself this year. Her writing is sharp in that tangy, juicy, flavorful way akin to sinking your teeth into a firm green grape, and although her stories are at times vulgar and downright disturbing, they are also remarkably poignant and genuine and real.

"How did we end up with such a sour girl? How did we get so lucky? they'd say, clearing away the frantic voices of who I thought I was supposed to be, and though I knew it wouldn't last forever, I stayed between them until I remembered who I was again and no longer felt lonely."

It wasn't until I got to the final story "You Fell into the River and I Saved You!" that I started feeling like I was reading a story about my life. Or more accurately: here is the story of my life that I never thought that people would ever care about, the small, awkward, intimate experiences of growing up in an immigrant family and the diasporic community built on family friends and relatives few and far between, finally validated by a writer, a publisher, and booksellers who decided that these stories are important enough to leave their imprint on the world.

I think the crux of how I feel reading Sour Heart is a sense of relief that every story, but especially my story—the life I've lived so far—is worth telling. As a teenager I was so terrified I wasn't living enough for a life worthy of being storied. Now I'm starting to understand that it doesn't make me a better (or worse, or less worthy) person that my past was exactly what it was, even if sometimes it feels boring or small or unremarkable: it simply makes me me, and if I'm going to use my voice I have to also embrace who I am and not discount my own experiences.

Sour Heart is a book on my forever shelf, the one I wish I had six years ago when I first announced that I am a writer, the one that gave me hope and strength to be a writer of my own stories, and the one that inspires me to write with empathy and honesty. Stories matter because people matter, and I will never forget that quiet moment of validation I felt by my own possible significance in this world as I did in that waiting room in Virginia when I finished this collection of stories for the first time in September.

xoxo, vivian

PS: Leave me a comment with a book (or two, or three, or ten) you love and why. I'll add it to my 2018 list and send you a message when I get to it so we can talk then.

I'm someone you maybe might love

"Thought you said you would always be in love / but you're not in love no more" Lorde sings in "Green Light," the first track of her second album Melodrama released last Friday. "it's the first chapter of a story i'm gonna tell you, the story of the last 2 wild, fluorescent years of my life. this is where we begin" she tweeted the night before her first single from the album was released. For a song about trying to get over an ex-lover "Green Light" is surprisingly buoyant, its major key and building crescendos balancing out the pointed anger and betrayal felt over the all small things we fixate on after the end.

The rest of the album is filled with moments of lucidity cutting through lush instrumentals and breathy background vocals. Lorde is hyperaware of how melodramatic her narrative construction is, but that's what makes this album so powerful. What I love about Melodrama is that it's complicated but it's also not: it's about the stories we tell ourselves and other people, memories bubbling to your lips and spilling over, spilling out with laughs and tears on the dance floor of a house party you'll never quite forget.

1. GREEN LIGHT
"it's very different from her first album. more intense and raw, less ethereal" I messaged a friend when I found out the first new Lorde song in three years just dropped. The music video to "Green Light" is overlaid with green cross-processing, muting the reds, magentas, blues, and greens from appearing too bold against the sparkling city lights backdrop. I wasn't sure if I liked this song the first few times I listened to it: it sounded too happy to be properly angry, and I'm a sucker for quiet tragedy. It took me until I started listening to the full album on Saturday to fully appreciate its brightness. The line I whisper things / the city sings them back to you makes me feel a little less lonely, because even if I don't have you to listen to me anymore I feel like I can trust that the echoes of my words will reverberate back to me somehow.

2. SOBER
I'm acting like I don't see / every ribbon you used to tie yourself to me because it's easier to play pretend, isn't it?

3. HOMEMADE DYNAMITE

So let's let things come out of the woodwork  

I give you my best side, tell you all my best lies 

See me rolling, showing someone else love  

Hands under your t-shirt 

Know I think you're awesome, right? 

"Homemade Dynamite" is that moment your eyes meet across a crowded room, a sudden and unexpected spark of recognition. That's all it takes for you to decide you've found your reason to stay. You smile for him—a smirk, really—because you like the way you look through his eyes. "Come with me" he says, or maybe he doesn't even have to say it before you find yourself getting up and following him into another room.

It feels important.

It feels wrong too.

You didn't realize how much you wanted to know what destruction tastes like until now. (It tastes like the whiskey shots you weren't going to take because you took cold meds earlier that night but are knocking back now anyway, in case you were wondering.) You light the fuse.

Blowing shit up with homemade d-d-d-dynamite.

4. THE LOUVRE

I think that in spite of our cynicism, we all want to believe that love is significant in some cosmic way, and that those summer obsessions and memories made in the still heat are worthy of being put up on display, that the wild beating of my heart is proof that we're the greatest / they'll hang us in the Louvre (down the back / but who cares / still the Louvre). "The Louvre" is poetic but sharp, an attempt to justify being a sucker who let you fill her mind and get her heart broken by someone who shouldn't have had that privilege to begin with. 

5. LIABILITY

The opening lines baby really hurt me / crying in the taxi reminded me a little too much of the voicemail I left my best friend not too long ago, the quiet bravado of trying to keep the tears lodged behind the base of my throat when I knew it wasn't my fault but I couldn't help but feel like it was. It didn't work, by the way. The tears I tried to deny started falling by the time the second sentence tumbled out of my mouth, but thankfully there was nothing else left to say because the story is so startlingly simple. "Liability" captures the paradox of simultaneously being too much while somehow still not being enough: 

The truth is I am a toy that people enjoy 

'til all the tricks don't work anymore 

and then they are bored of me

The ending two lines: They're gonna watch me disappear into the sun / You're gonna watch me disappear into the sun reminded me of Medea, one of my favorite characters from classical antiquity. For those of you who aren't familiar with the myth, Medea, a sorceress and former princess of Colchis, falls in love with the Greek hero Jason, sent on a mission to steal the Golden Fleece. She gave up her family and her kingdom to marry Jason, only to watch him leave her for the princess of Corinth instead. The vengeance she exacts aside, the image of Medea flying off into the sun at the end of the play is triumphant if not a little lonely. She never needed him, but that doesn't change the fact that she wanted him and was too much for him in the end. 

So I guess I'll go home into the arms of the girl that I love

the only love I haven't screwed up 

...

We slow dance in the living room, but all that a stranger would see

is one girl swaying alone, stroking her cheek

6. HARD FEELINGS / LOVELESS
Go back and tell it Lorde whispers. I still remember everything / how we’d drift buying groceries / how you’d dance for me.

7. SOBER II (MELODRAMA)
They've gone home but who am I? The spell is broken, the magic fades, the lights come on. "There’s such a sadness to the lights being on after a party, you know, this whole room has sort of been washed in this dark, and to see the corners of the room again can always be a little bit heartbreaking," Lorde explains in an NPR interview. 

When morning light breaks through your window, you only remember fragments of that momentary heartbreak. Mostly, you try to hang on to the feeling of being on the dance floor, with those strong hands on your waist pulling you closer whispering words you don't remember into your ear, the pulse of the bass vibrating through the very core of your being. 

8. WRITER IN THE DARK
The stripped vocals and witch-like croak of the high notes in this song make me uneasy, not because I've ever broken a writer's heart but because writers have a way of remembering everything and insist on having the last word; because I'll love you 'til my breathing stops and you should be terrified of that kind of devotion.

9. SUPERCUT

In your car the radio up

We keep trying to talk about us

I'm someone you maybe might love

I'll be your quiet afternoon crush

be your violent overnight rush

make you crazy over my touch

When you think back to that night, you think about how you crossed into a place of no return when "400 Lux" was playing in the background. We're never done with killing time / can I kill it with you? was all you dared to ask for right before the space between you disappeared. You almost believed got a lot to not do / let me kill it with you was true then, even when you knew it wasn't. 

You kiss him anyway.

If "400 Lux" is the moment you're driving down the streets where the houses don't change and realize just how desperately you don't want this to end, "Supercut" is the the highlight reel of a string of perfect moments in hindsight, memorized one last time as you're driving away from the city you made your home in the last four years because ours are the moments I play in the dark / we were wild and florescent come back to my heart. 

10. LIABILITY (REPRISE)

Remember this: you're not what you thought you were.

11. PERFECT PLACES
"Perfect Places" takes us back again to the house parties we used to imagine when we were seventeen and innocent, only now we're actually invited and are laughing and drinking with the rest of them. The problem with growing up as an outsider is that you never quite believe it when you make it in. You feel like an imposter, always just a little too sober to completely let go and let loose, and you can't help but see how hard everyone is trying to escape their demons for just one night. Are you lost enough? / Have another drink, get lost in us they say as they hand you another red cup. 

You drink, but you don't forget.

xoxo, vivian

Photos from behind the scenes of Lorde's March 2017 SNL appearance. Listen to "Melodrama" here. 

baby love me 'cause I'm playing on the radio

I think I wanted to taste blood in my mouth that time when my high school debate coach told me—and looked me in the eyes no less—that he didn't expect I would ever do so well in the activity I'd spent two years pouring my heart into. The trophies I held in my hands felt almost as hollow as I did; somehow, it didn't matter anymore that my partner and I were the only ones from our team to break to elimination rounds, or that I was the only one to win a speaker award at the largest tournament in the state that weekend. All I could remember thinking was how I wanted to roll out the map of the known universe I'd won (it was the space exploration topic that year after all) and be anywhere but there.

No one even knows how hard life was / I don't even think about it now because / I've finally found you Lana Del Rey croons in "Radio," the eighth track of Born to Die. This song has a special place in my heart because it was the first song of her's I'd ever listened to back in high school in the months before graduation. The honeyed sweetness of her voice lured me in, but it was the bitterness in the line like a f*cking dream I'm livin' in that made me hit replay. 

American dreams came true somehow / I swore I'd chase until I was dead tells the story of the greatest lie the promised land ever told: happiness is yours if only you work hard enough to deserve it. This is a country forged on the big dreams of determined youth, and you grow up being told you can be anything and everything you ever wanted. But the thing your father forgets to tell you when he says the streets are paved with gold is that once you make it—because you will make it, I promise—you're supposed to leave where you came from behind. 

"Radio" is the song of a woman whose confidence in her newfound fame seeps through the slow sugar venom melody of her path to glory. It's at once unapologetic, arrogant, but also surprisingly fragile. While she's not ashamed of her ambition, only she knows how far she had to come to get to where she is now. Part of the game of success is that you don't let people know how hard you worked to win—you have to make them think it came to you effortlessly; you have to remind them that you made it against all odds, no thanks to them. How do you like me now? she whispers, challenging everyone who told her no. 

And yet, it's the line baby love me 'cause I'm playing on the radio that betrays the vulnerability of it all. It could have been posed as a question: baby, do you love me 'cause I'm playing on the radio? but instead it's a command: it demands you for your affection, your admiration, your adoration. Love me because I need to know that I was too good for you. Love me even though you didn't love me then before I got famous; love me because I'm playing on the radio now.

Memories of not being good enough always hits that spot of tenderness where it hurts the most. It doesn't matter that now my life is sweet like cinnamon or even that I've finally found you: there was always that moment of weakness I can neither forget nor change, no matter how hard I try.

xoxo, vivian

he hit me and it felt like a kiss

"Lana Del Rey's music has only fueled my obsession with discovering both a past and a future I haven't had yet," I wrote last year when I first discovered the 28-year-old singer. I'll be the first to admit that I don't really listen to much music (blame it on my NPR-is-the-only-radio-station-we-listen-to-in-this-household parents), but when I first heard some of Lana's most popular songs, I couldn't get enough of how her voice ached of nostalgia and the American Dream, found and then lost again. When I heard that she was coming out with a new album this year, I did a bit of a happy dance. Ultraviolence was everything I expected it to be and more, and I'm still trying to understand how I feel about how beautiful and thought-provoking this album is each time I listen to it.

The thing I love most about this album is the way it revolves around the less pretty aspects of love, appealing to our secret desires for all-consuming passion: Ultraviolence is obsession, infatuation, addiction, desperation and ambition, and it says "I love you" in a way that means "f*ck you, f*ck me, make me feel alive again."

It's this kind of raw intimacy pulsing through the album's slow, hypnotic beats that keeps us hooked and wanting more. "Everyone told me that the next record has to be bigger and better, to which I replied, 'no, it has to be more personal,'" Lana explains in an interview with Metro. She allows us to explore fantasies of reckless ambition with unwavering crescendos ("Money Power Glory"), experience desire on both sides of an affair through confident verses and lonesome pleas ("Sad Girl" and her cover of Nina Simone's "The Other Woman"), and feel our heartbeats quicken to the catchy "yayo" hook at the thrill of loving a man who loves drugs ("Florida Kilos").

But more than that, Ultraviolence lends itself to an unexpected degree of introspection beneath the performative melodrama she croons to us precisely because of how personal her songs come across as. In an age of post-feminism where everybody tries to make heroines and strong, independent women from pop singers to fictional characters alike, we're supposed to be shocked at how openly Lana sings "he hit me and it felt like a kiss" ("Ultraviolence") and asks "are you gonna hurt me now? / or are you gonna hurt me later?" ("Flipside"). Even toying with the idea that women would want to go back to surrendering and playing the role of a mistress on the side seems regressive, and yet it serves as powerful running commentary on where we are today. Her lyrics dare us to answer the question is it wrong? for ourselves; after all, as Anton Chekhov claims: "the role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them."

You can listen to Ultraviolence here. Let me know what you think of this album or Lana Del Rey in general; I'd love to hear your thoughts!

xoxo, vivian

Images from this post were edited from: Ultraviolence promo pics from the Idolator.