Author: gigiesteechang

I wake up. I make breakfast. Eggs, tomatoes, chopped onion, whatever greens are in season and market-available. I boil some water for coffee or tea, depending on my mood. I sit on the carpeted floor of my room to eat. I haven’t purchased a table or chairs. I keep telling myself that I’ll do it next weekend, and then I forget. So far it’s been alright. I rarely have guests over, and I don’t mind. Sometimes my colleague/boss S visits me. Sometimes the son of the houseowner, who lives one floor below me, comes up to talk and to laugh at me flailing around in the kitchen. One time, he and his friend felt sorry and showed me how to roast the garlic first. Then add the onion. Wait for it to brown. Chop the green veg (I’d just been throwing it in whole or cut in half). Use spices. He told me to purchase cumin, which has gone the way of the table and chairs. By which I mean the purgatory of Next Time I’ll Do It.

I go to work after breakfast. I open my laptop and do some reading on the day’s news on Digital Governance. I edit yesterday’s work. I’m helping to write some of the country’s first digital standards. I notice how similar all the standards are, country to country. I notice that the UK recently updated theirs. I double back to our draft. I wonder if I’m qualified to do this, and then I remember that they hired me for a reason, right? The best I can do is my best. I think about what sacrifice means. I think about what making the right decision means. I think about navigating your 20s. And I think about doing good work. I want to do some great fucking work. That’s always my goal when I start a project. I go back to editing. To dreaming. To thinking about how we can do things better. And how I can help.

After work, I walk home. It’s a seven-minute walk. The sun is still going strong at 5:30 pm. I’m careful not to step on any of the cow patties. There are many. The roads are shared with pedestrians, and tuk-tuks, and motorbikes, and the rare car. There aren’t any lines on the road, but there are rules. Stick to the left side. Walk in a straight line, no sudden movements. When you need to cross the road, do it with intention and confidence. I mostly avoid eye-contact. Is that a city-person thing? Growing up in Toronto, in a rougher neighbourhood in Scarborough, I perfected the art of looking without really looking. It’s a combination of glazed-over eyes and some shiftiness.

Once home, the first thing I do is turn on the ceiling fans. Heat rises, and I’m on the top floor, which means I get double heat from the sun that bears down on the roof all day. It’s usually 35-40 degrees Celsius. I’m told that it will get cooler in around two months. I count down the days.

Counting down the days. There really isn’t much else to do. And I don’t begrudge it. I live in my head, mostly. I spend time with the family I live with. I spend time with S. There’s something going on in this country, the youth are leaving in droves in a mass movement of brain and labour drain. The public spaces are all full of men. I miss female friendships. I am grateful for A, and H, and S, the three counterparts my age who I’ve become close to. But I miss the particular joy of girls giggling over something.

But I like being alone. I’m not an only child, but I grew up one. Just me and my mom. I spent a lot of time by myself in my youth. Days to weeks on end. In my room, just me, my books, and my imagination. I remember sitting in front of my mirror and talking to myself. In fact, I did that just yesterday. It’s a ritual. It’s calming. I am my first friend. Sitting with yourself is freeing. I’m glad to have gotten away from the noise of the city. The noise of too many around you. I have space to move. I have space to dream. I have space to simply be.

Today I read a segment that delighted me.

“She laughed. Grocery-store laughs are pretty much the best kind. Top ten, easy.” (Richard Morgan, NY Mag)

The “top ten, easy” is what got me. A delightful topper on a delightful train of thought. And I thought about all the ways that joy can come from good writing. I’ve been reading Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Which, although not easy in its themes, has moments of absolute delight in them. Like anytime she writes about her brother, really. Or the vignette of the enthusiastic church-goer who knocks the preacher, quite literally, off the stand. You’re drawn into that world. I was once a kid in church who stifled her laughter behind closed palms, the dullness of adult lecture in the child’s world heightening the most ordinary of circumstances into hilarity. Angelou brought me back there, and while I didn’t break out in deep belly-laughs alone in my room, I did crack a smile and felt warm all over.

Words that delight, sentences that evoke joy, and the rare story that makes you laugh out loud. The two hours after I bought the last Harry Potter book, I smiled so hard my face hurt. I remember wondering WHY DOES MY FACE HURT? And realized it was because I’d been smiling the whole time. I was 10 years old at the time, and in high heaven.

So, here’s to a break from the usual angsty contents of my blog (why am I most compelled to write when I am unhappy? Alas). Turning instead, to the opposite end of loving words, and writing, and the intimacy and power of baring one’s soul – what a gift it is to talk about happiness. What a gift it is to share in moments like these. Just as powerful as words that make you cry, or reflect on the state of humankind, or whatever kind of thing that good, hard-hitting writing makes you feel, are the moments that make you crack a smile. Like the single ray of sunshine streaming just right through the window. I think I’m going to bask in it a little while.

 

 

There is nothing to say about living except that we exist. For my part, I want to exist in a way that is worthwhile. I want to be happy. I want the world to be good. I want equality – across all factors – to exist. There is so much to the world. And how scary is that? We are on a tiny, floating rock, amidst much larger floating rocks, located in a solar system, located in a galaxy, located in the universe. The UNIVERSE. What matters? Nothing but that which you decide to put on a pedestal. Live freely. Live truly. And try, oh try, to be kind.

I’ve stopped counting the number of mosquito bites on my body. If I close my eyes in a rare moment of quiet, alone in my little room in this bustling border town, I can feel the individual fires burning on my body, pricks and reminders of the ecosystem that I’m a part of. Each bite, a meal; I am sustenance for another organism. I guess I could spin this into some kind of big romantic realization filled with all kinds of purple prose, but I’ll leave it at this:

Whenever you’re feeling a little useless, a little hopeless, remember:

Your veins course with life, not just for yourself. You are fertile ground. You are a part of many living things. Generations of mosquitos family lines have continued becuase of your offering. You are a giver of life. You are life itself. So let the little fires burn. As with all else, this too shall pass.

Yesterday, we were driving along the road, my father, my step-mother, and my two siblings, 7 and 13. The 7-year old was talking about all the things she wanted to be when she grew up, and she mentioned wanting to work several jobs to earn lots of money.

My dad, driving, turned around and said, “Gigi worked three jobs in high school,” with a touch of pride in his voice.

No. No, you do not get to be proud of me. In fact, you should be steeped in deep shame. “Gigi worked three jobs in high school,” you should have said, “because I told her when she was 15 that she was on her own, and that she had to take care of herself because I can’t.”

You may not remember that conversation but I do. It was the same car ride where you were pulled over for making an illegal U-turn, but talked your way out of it. When the police officer had driven off, you turned to me and said, “See, I got out of that because I’m a genuine person. That could never have worked for you.”

Now, you love talking about how self-sufficient I am, how independent, how much of a survivor. No. You do not get to be proud of me. You only have shame. I became who I am not because of your incredible genes (more on your obsession with the novel The Selfish Gene later), but because of your irresponsibility. Before me, you had two other kids by two other women. You speak about what “quality” women they were, how they “gave you no trouble,” after they realized that you could never own up to the responsibility of being a father to the children you saddled them with. You bragged about how you were able to select quality women, how their quality traits jumped out at you and how you wanted to reproduce with them so you could pass on your wonderful genes as well.

Children are not experiments through which you can fulfill your ego. It disgusts me that me and my siblings were made because the Selfish Gene told you that reproduction is the meaning of life. Today, on the couch, you told me that you belong to the school of thought in psychology where there is no right course of action, because what is right today is not necessarily what is right for tomorrow. That it is simply the intention that matters.

Upon that philosophy, you have skirted responsibility. Upon that philosophy, you have justified having three children, by three different people, and then leaving them to chase what you wanted instead, in the world. You say you love us. I say: your love useless to me.

There have been a few times where white colleagues of mine have encouraged me to do something, and I said no. They weren’t terribly bad things; just things like leaving a few hours early, or taking a break by watching a video online, or just even chatting about the day, loudly, with abandon.

Transgressions mean more when you look like me. A woman, a woman of colour. Although, and I struggle with this, the concept of East-Asian people being the “model minority” is pervasive, and the social effects are real. I am undeniably a woman of colour, but I am a woman of privileged colour, a colour that does not immediately yell danger, or low achiever; quite often, it denotes the opposite.

I think about it often, when I refuse the invitation to slack off a little bit at work in a loud way. It’s harder for me, not just because I am a goody-two-shoes, not just because I want to work hard, but because I want to be seen to work hard. I must be seen to work hard.

Because when you are a woman of colour, it is not enough to simply do your work. What doe sit mean to work twice as hard? It means that your work shouldn’t be on time; it should be early. It means that your work shouldn’t be double checked; it should be perfect. It means that your work shouldn’t just be done; but that you should always be doing something.

I often get comments on the way I dress. Less so in Toronto, but quite often here in Cape Town, where my colleagues in the program are predominately white. They ask why I always look dressed up. I shake it off and explain that where I’m from in Toronto, people usually are dressed up. That how I dress is normal.

I have to rethink that. Where am I from in Toronto? I move in professional fields, at an elite university, at the bank, in the city. I move with diversity, with other women of colour, with queer folk, but also with white people, with layers of privilege. I did not lie when I said that people in Toronto dress up. It is true: my people in Toronto must dress up. From Scarborough, the colour on our skin as stark as our postal code: if we do not dress up, we are not treated the same. And that not the same is often insidious. That not the same is denial of entry, is added suspicion, is violence, is micro-aggression.

I love clothes. I love beautiful clothes, and I love fashion, not just in a shallow way, but in a way that can identify the season of your Gucci loafer, that can tell you the marred histories of Lagerfeld and Galliano, and the pheonix like rises of Donatella and Miuccia. I can name models, I can recite history, I can predict trends. I love fashion, I do.

But clothing is an armour, and it is simultaneously a concerted choice and a lack of it. When I put on my blazer and strap in my heels and pick up my designer bag, I am sending a message to the world: that I belong to a certain class, a certain circle, a certain ability. What I choose to wear is a plea to the world to treat me better.

And it has. It does.

I don’t know where I read this – but somebody – somebody famous, I think, once said that if you are thinking about killing yourself, to go to a different country, see the wonders, travel, and then decide. Chances are, you won’t anymore.

I thought about that quote as I stood at the Cape of Good Hope, in the Southern-Western-most part of South Africa. An edge of the world, if there ever was one: birds swooped above the crashing waves of the sapphire sea, the sun just setting over the surrounding mountains. Powerful cliffs meeting endless sky. I thought about that quote as I stood at the Cape of Good Hope, feeling sadder, more helpless than other. I have walked the earth and not once has the void been filled. Suicidal ideation seeps into my brain, whispers, tantalizingly, of stillness: finally.

I am 21. I earn a good income – well above minimum wage – with job security and opportunity for advancement. I get good (no, I’ll say it – excellent) grades at University, now drawing to the finish line of an undergraduate degree at one of the best schools in the country. I have secured a highly desirable internship in my field every summer since I started school: first, as a Policy Assistant at the Ministry of the Environment, then with the Girl’s Empowerment Network in Malawi, and finally, now, at the Health Systems Trust here in South Africa. I have a great many number of good friends. Amazing friends, loyal friends. My relationship with my family is not bad. I am 21. I have a long way to go, but I am well on my way. And I have traveled the world.

Is it a problem of gratitude? Am I not thankful enough for my blessings? That can’t be it, surely not – because I am fully aware of how lucky I am. How wonderful this life is. Especially in comparison to the plight of many others – who do not have the sort of opportunity, support, and stability of being in a war-free country. A Canadian passport: passport to the world, to free health care, to good education, to a social security net, to a special kind of freedom that comes from being raised unafraid because there is nothing immediate to be afraid of.

I am grateful. But I feel like a shell of a person. Don’t tell me how good I have it. Don’t tell me about how much I’ve accomplished. Don’t shame me, cajole me, or offer your words – your useless, stupid words – which I have to smile at in order to convince you that I am “okay” so you’ll get off my fucking back. Depression, they tell me, is a product of the chemicals in your brain telling you to feel a certain way. Fix those chemicals to fix yourself. Is this what they mean by “find balance?” Find balance not in your soul (what’s a soul, anyway?), but in your neurons?

As I sit here, at the pinnacle of a wonderful life, I want to die. Perhaps the truest thing I’ve heard from “them” (whom I keep quoting today), is that sadness is not depression. They are right. Whatever I have, whatever you call it, I carry inside of me, in everything. In everything, I am sad beyond all measure. I am tired. And sometimes, it’s true, I think of dying.

My first day in Cape Town. I meet two other interns at the Observatory train station, and we head down to the city via the subway system. Three stops, and we’re in Cape Town’s city center. We go to an independent coffee shop, get cappuccinos, and board a hop-on/hop-off sightseeing bus. Everything is good.

Except that it isn’t. I need the washroom, but after I go, none of the taps are working. This, says the signage lined around along the sinks, is purposeful: South Africa is going through a country-wide water shortage. And so, water is being conserved.

After a long tiring day, I go home. As I’m relaxing in the common room, I feel that particular feeling in my bowels that tells me: it is time to go to the bathroom. I run up to our bathroom and begin to relieve myself. It is a big one – one that had been held through the six hour flight from Toronto to Amsterdam, the four hour layover at Schiphol Airport, and the eleven hour flight from Amsterdam to Cape Town. It had been held through the unpacking, through a night’s fitful first sleep in a new country, through a day’s worth of touring the town. It had been held through purchasing a charge adaptor, held through the using of $12/mb emergency data, held through the ducking from bird poop at the bird sanctuary. Held through a breakfast of scrambled eggs and croissant at the corner café, held through the lunch of personal smoked salmon pizza. Held through figuring out the subway system on our own on our way back to the house. And now, it had come out.

What then? Well, I flushed the toilet. But when I looked down, to my horror I saw the remnants of my colon still sitting there. A big, brown, solid log. So? I flushed again, holding down the handle and hoping – no, praying that it would slide down. I hardly dared peek. And I was right to be nervous: because that stubborn motherfucker was still sitting there. Still as solid. Still as brown. Still as present as when it first touched the porcelain.

It was a that moment that I remembered the water shortage. Restaurants and airports had shut off their general water supply, and here I was, trying a third flush on one washroom trip. Three times the charm? Yeah, fuck that, the little guy was still there. It was time for desperate measures.

I take the plunger, and I push on it. Except (of course), it doesn’t go down solidly. Instead, it disintegrates into pieces. Now it’s on the plunger too! Frantically, I flush. To my relief, the water becomes clearer. But what the hell was I supposed to do about the plunger? I flush again, rubbing the plunger against the toilet. The chunks fall off. I flush. A little clearer. I flush: finally, finally, FINALLY, nothing.

Tomorrow, I poop again. But I think I’m going to wait until I get to a public toilet. After all, South Africa is going through a water shortage, and we all have to do our part.

I am ready to speak of coming out, but how does one describe the discovery, the growing in of something, the pain of explaining feelings that you know are wrong because the propaganda of your youth tells you so?

You do it by starting with the first and most prevailing feeling that you’ve had on the matter, and that feeling is guilt.

So this is chapter one, and it is titled guilt.

Chapter One: Guilt

I knew she was pretty. I was six years old, she was my only friend at elementary school, and when she moved to a different part of town, I cried. We played games together. She would make us go in to the same bathroom stall, and she would pee, her eyes boring into mine, holding me there. I felt shame. I wanted to run away. But she was my only friend, and there was that small feeling that was something more than pure, childish curiosity. Let me take you there, to 2002 at a forgotten bathroom in Secord Elementary School: two girls, one blonde and blue eyed, confident in who she was even at six, and the other, hair and eyes both pitch black, scared and excited and confused and oh yes, ashamed, very ashamed – the blonde stands up, smaller than the tall Chinese girl, yet somehow much larger, and she says, the blonde that is, she extends a finger to the toilet and a eye to the Chinese girl, and she says, “your turn.”

Feel the roundness of the toilet around your bum, still warm from its previous occupant. Feel the challenge in those deep blue eyes. Feel the pee trickle down, hear it flow on to the toilet water, disturbing the surface and steadier than your heart will ever beat.

You can understand now why I cried when she moved away.

If you do, you are one step ahead of me.

I still do not.

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Fast forward to the summer of grade six, 2007. I am with my friend Rajavi, who is now Jade. We all go through our own journeys, and this one is not mine to tell. So out of respect, although she is still Rajavi when this happens, I will call her Jade, because that is who she is now, and perhaps it was who she was always.

We are talking about Ellen DeGeneres. Jade is a huge fan of Ellen. Everyday after school she watches the 4:30 show with her mother without fail. She loves the fervour Ellen has for life and the good deeds that she does, but she especially loves how she turns off the TV every afternoon feeling happier.

I am derisive. I don’t like Ellen, and I tell her so, “I can’t believe you actually like her.”

Jade is smart. Of our group of four friends, Jade was always the most mature. She was the first one of us to have gotten kissed. She had been in advertisements as a model. She had aspirations to be an actor at a time when the highest of the rest of our aspirations was getting the 50 cents needed to buy a corner store jumbo freezie.

Jade says, “Why not? Why do you dislike her so much?”

I remember this moment because for the first time, someone had asked me to describe the tangle of hazy feelings I felt in my conscience. I knew that Jane knew. But she didn’t know the extent of what she knew. She was challenging the prejudice that I held against gay people, one that had been nurtured carefully in my heart from growing up a church child. But why was I so uncomfortable? Why did I defend myself so vehemently, making up a blatant lie? I have traveled to that summer many times since in search of answers that have only become apparent with acceptance.

“It’s her eyes, her blue eyes. They’re so piercing. I feel like she’s looking right through me. Like Mr. Crother’s eyes, you know? She’s just scary.”

And Jade, bless her kind, knowing soul, Jade let the subject drop.

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Church.

I did not fit in at this church, because I was quiet and shy and different in too many ways for my presence to be easily swallowed.

1. I came from a broken family.
2. My single mother was struggling to make ends meet.
3. I joined the church at 7, whereas everyone else had known each other since birth.
4. I was a different kind of Chinese; they were Cantonese and I was Mandarin.
5. I was hopelessly shy.

“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Leviticus 20:13 KJV

That day, there was an energy in the air that descends so thickly only in circumstances of collective disapproval. Collective disapproval? Targeted hatred. Targeted hatred? Vehement self-righteousness. On that battleground I joined them. Finally, a common enemy that wasn’t my poverty or socio-cultural difference; finally, a target that I too could deride, scoff at, bully and tread on with permission! I hated gay people because the exclusion of them meant the acceptance of myself into a powerful club that I was desperate to be a part of. Never had I felt so guilty. The strings of hurt and confusion and sadness and fear tangled tangled tangled, hazy hazy hazy, and grew and grew and grew. I felt the mess sit in my chest, pumping guilty blood; I felt it in my wrists, bleeding guilty blood; I felt it in my head, swirling guilty thoughts. Pumping. Bleeding. Swirling. Swirling around and around, bring me back, bring me back to 2002, bring me back to the forgotten bathroom, to the toilet seat, the steady pee, the guilty flush, the flush, the water, the pee, the stare, the guilt, the swirl. The swirl. Down and down and down and gone. The surface is flat again. Ready for its next affront.

My surface is flat. When will I be ready?

 

 

 

Chapter two forthcoming

I am always nervous. Each moment more precarious than the last, I am nervous about what my next step will be. Will my foot find solid ground or will it find nothing but emptiness, that disorienting feeling of leg going down on air instead of on the last staircase that should have been there, that you were so sure of being there that you bet all shots on it? I am betting my shots on a lot of things.

This is a scary thing, betting your shots. At least for me, because the targets that I dream of are high – plausibly higher than I can honestly hope to reach. I have sowed seeds, and I will provide water, and I will cut the weeds, but I cannot guarantee my flowers of hope that they will feel the warmth of the sun, that they will blossom and become, I cannot guarantee myself anything. I am in that peculiar position of knowing my goals, know them from the yearning in my solarplexis, know them from the space they take up in my thoughts, know them from the willingness I stay up, late late late, every night, every night, every night hoping that one day they will become tangible. But not knowing if the haze will ever clear. Never sure if I am good enough, actually, pretty sure that I am not. That some goals are too high for me, Gigi Chang, to touch even with my smallest finger, even for a fraction of time. I am Icarus, and my wings are burned before the sun’s rays ever find me.

Making what I have accomplished look easily done is a calculated move on my part. Of course I’ve achieved an almost perfect GPA. Of course I have a great job that I love. Of course I get to travel. Of course I go to fabulous restaurants, exclusive events, have fun loving friends; of course I have the full support of my parents, of course I look polished while doing it all. Of course I do it all. Someone who is dear to my heart now once said to me: “You know Gigi, I used to really dislike you. You just seemed to have everything. You made friends easily, you got great grades easily – I was jealous.”

It is hard to admit it, especially here on this blog, which is public, and where people will see, yes, it is hard to admit the ugly truths of my heart, but I will. I do it on purpose. I make it look easy so other people wonder why they can’t. But here is another truth: it is not so fabulous. I too am human, no matter how hard I try to make it seem like I am not. I perpetuate the image of a perfect high achiever, of an enviable life, but oh honey, oh honey just say it because we’re here already, aren’t we? I am insecure; the reason my legs are so strong is because the ground is constantly crumbling from beneath them.