All – Page 2 – Kati Chen

April 16, 2020May 28, 2021

a love letter

I wrote this for you last year. I used to write love letters often. I remember we went to East Side King’s that day. I remember I got a rose on campus and gave it to you. You asked me if I told my parents that I had a Valentine. I said, “Do I have one?” Then I said, “Do your parents know?” And you said, “Of course they do.” And I remember thinking that we were going to be okay.

Did you know that the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for the color blue? I wonder how they described the sea, or the sky when it was a particularly blazing day. How did they say “I’m feeling terribly sad?” Maybe: “I’m feeling green.” Or “lavender”. Or maybe even “yellow” on opposite days, if they had those. Probably they just said, “I’m feeling terribly sad” without using colorful euphemisms.

April 16, 2020January 25, 2021

concept playlist #3: it’s a pandemic. and time moves like syrup. and the sun still shines so brightly in suburbia. and everything feels so far away…

1. “i have hypnotized myself into peace.” – Mary Butts

2. “Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful! – Federico García Lorca, from “City That Does Not Sleep,” Lorca & Jimenez: Selected Poems

3. “We are getting stale. I call us stale. I can feel us getting stale and it sickens me.” – Jillian Weise, from “How to Treat Flowers,” The Book of Goodbyes

4. “”This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” – T. S. Eliot, from “The Hollow Men”

5. “And make death proud to take us.” – William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

6. “Last night the sirens sounded like airplanes and the airplanes sounded like leaving.” – Kristina Haynes, from “Your Face is the Clearest Thing”

7. “”The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.” – John Fowles, The Magus

8. “April is the cruelest month” – T. S. Eliot, from “The Waste Land”

9. “God is not death. God is what survives.” – Mark Jarmon, Unholy Sonnets

10. “I had a dream
about a crystal blue pool.
I felt stupid when I saw the ocean.” – Wendy Xu, from “The News”

November 21, 2019January 25, 2021

concept playlist #2: for when thursday feels like the beginning. it feels like emerging.

1. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” – Agnès Varda, The Beaches of Agnès

2. “… Anything worth dying for… is certainly worth living for.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22

3. “We’re all just walking each other home.” – Ram Dass

4. “Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet, it is.” – Cecil Palmer, Welcome to Night Vale

5. “If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.” – Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

6. “It’s funny how the days slide along and you find yourself still living – living – living! – and wanting so badly to go on living. Because you do love life.” – Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

7. “What’s the use in worrying? It’s inevitable. “Ghibli” is just a random name I got from an airplane… It’s only a name… How pretty.” – Hayao Miyazaki, when asked, “Aren’t you worried about the studio’s future?”

8. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

9. “I am always doing things I can’t do. That is how I get to do them.” – Pablo Picasso

10. “The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. And remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.” – Ocean Vuong, Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

September 25, 2019January 25, 2021

concept playlist #1: sitting in a bustling coffee shop at 3pm on a wednesday and having the sudden, terrible realization that you’ve been stuck in an 90’s-movie-esque time loop for the past two months

like your other mood playlists, but for quotes.

1. “The trick is to keep moving. If I stop my mind settles. We don’t want to sink. Being higher is a hurdle we can leap over.” – Raych Jackson, Even The Saints Audition

2. “So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” – James Joyce, Ulysses

3. “If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since we’re bound to be something, why not together…” – Mary Oliver, West Wind

4. “As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.” – Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

5. “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.” – James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

6. “… how I long for the time to ripen fully, and the spring to come again after this long and appalling fall and winter.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

7. “Better not to think about / the unimaginable distance / I’m at these days.” – Bella Akhmadulina, The Garden

8. “Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it – living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.” – Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Field

9. “My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?” – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

10. “Reality is very strange, it’s entirely unreal.” – Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

June 23, 2019January 25, 2021

Snapshot

A snapshot of a day in a young boy’s life when he is suspended from school. Short story.

I wrote this story for my Creative Writing class. I wanted it to be set in a laundromat, and I wanted to incorporate spaghetti Bolognese. Throughout all the revisions over the past few months, those two elements have stayed the same.

The day after I got suspended from school, I started coming with Carla to the dry cleaners. Carla told me that I could be her business associate for the next week, and she even let me write the labels for each customer’s order. I made sure to write real neatly because I wanted to do a perfect job, except I forgot to attach the labels to the clothes the first time. We didn’t realize it until Jeffrey Hubner came in to pick up his suit two days later. My chest burned iron-hot when I found his tag underneath a pile of papers on the front counter, and I had to go into the back room because I didn’t want to get in trouble.

The fourth day was a hot day. It was September and the sun went straight through me. I was sweating a lot in my armpits, which Mom said would start to happen more and more. This made me feel uncomfortable, so I sat in my chair next to the register and the AC vent and tried hard not to move.

Carla was loading solvent into the machines in the back. I was thinking hard about what it might feel like to go into a washing machine, to be spun around and around and come out clean at the end.

July 23, 2019January 25, 2021

Running Report: My First 5K

A lot has changed from middle school to now. My innate lack of talent at running has not.

There’s a lot that I’ve managed to selectively forget about middle school, but one track meet will always stay with me. I joined track in eighth grade because I was tall, and because the basketball and volleyball teams were filled with white girls who went to church camp. It didn’t take me long to realize that “tall” did not equal “fast”. I had tiny lungs and bowlegs. There went my sprinting dreams.

July 24, 2019January 25, 2021

Australia Trip Report: 6/27 – 7/14

A recap. Wanted to experiment with a cut-and-dry vacation log. Lack of proper paragraphs quickly becomes overwhelming.

Austin – Dallas: Left work early and flew with no issues. It was around 8PM when we arrived in Dallas, and we were missing Night 2 of the Democratic Debates. I was hungry, and decided to go buy a pretzel at Auntie Annie’s. The cashier asked, “Are you Korean?” “No,” I said, pleased. “Do I look Korean?” She nodded. I told her about our 17-hour flight ahead, and she said, “When I go home, I have to fly 21 hours.” I couldn’t believe it. “It’s too long,” she said. “When my father was sick, I couldn’t make it back in time before he died. 21 hours is too long.” Her face was pinched. I began saying something about keeping his memory alive. “I was never close with my mother. We always fought,” she said. “But with him… I haven’t been back since.” I said I was sorry. She said, “You know what? We’re almost closing now.” She got another pepperoni pretzel out of the case and handed it to me. I thanked her and we got on our flight.

June 23, 2019May 28, 2021

The Paddy Fields

A persona poem written in syllabic verse for a class assignment.

(FYI: syllabic verse = all three stanzas have the same number of syllables in each line. It’s a huge bitch to write, especially when you start forty-five minutes before the deadline and you only have 10 fingers to count syllables.)

Based on the following photograph.

June 24, 2019January 25, 2021

Why I Ride

On the topic of why someone with zero athletic background would want to bike 4500+ miles to Anchorage, Alaska. Also featured on my rider page.

I’ve never met my grandfather. Even so, I feel like I intimately know him. When my younger cousins were born, my mother told me about how he adored children. When I complained about our mandatory family dinners, she told me about his emphasis on family bonding time. When we were in China on the Qingming Festival, we laid his favorite foods down in front of his tombstone. Through her descriptions of him, I feel the presence of his warm heart and steady character.

She’s told me a lot about him, but what she doesn’t have to tell me is how rapidly leukemia began to destroy his body, and how devastating the news was. I’ve seen pictures of my mom, barely 30, sitting next to his hospital bed wearing a flimsy surgical mask. I’ve studied her face and wondered what she thought when she heard the diagnosis from halfway around the world, or when she boarded the plane back to China, or when she saw him again for the first time in that tiny hospital room.

June 23, 2019May 27, 2021

Middle Ground

An essay about second generation immigrant blues. In short: culture clashes and Mommy issues.

I wrote this piece for a college literary magazine, and rode quite the high afterwards when it got over 100 likes on Facebook. Unfortunately, I have yet to collect any royalty payments.

My first memory of making my mother angry starts with a mirror. When I was a kid, I spent countless hours staring at my reflection, pinching and poking my face. Everyone told me they saw my mother’s features in my brows, my eyes, my long, slender fingers. I didn’t get it. Was my face mine, or was it hers?

I would trace the shape of my eyebrow. “This is ma ma’s,” I’d try. My reflection’s brow would furrow up, and I’d try again. “This is mine.” Neither sounded right.