Never forget

The famous eM wrote in her newsletter about her various grudges. I used to be a fan of the Catholic (?) doctrine of forgiveness, but as I age, I find myself happy to hold grudges. Or rather to accept that some scars take longer than usual to fade and one does not need to pretend to let them go. So here are some of my favourite grudges:

1. My most recent is this woman who has a locker next to the area in which we sit in office. She tends to be chatty with a couple of people on our team, but I am convinced she is ignoring me. To test this theory, I once tried to join a conversation she was having, but she said something somewhat withering to me (admittedly, this could be because I butted in). I took umbrage and now I am ignoring her but I still want to definitively know if she’s actually ignoring me. Ugh.

2. Our apartment complex used to have a little garden where people could rent plots to grow plants. The kids liked to look at the vegetables growing there. One evening, they were looking at the plants – and one of them may have reached a hand out to touch one – when I vaguely heard shouting in Chinese. I didn’t pay much attention; I tend to tune out Chinese. Then the yelling switched to English. Turned out that a woman was yelling “Stop!” or some such in a dramatic way. I turned and gave her an incredulous look and we walked away. Later, I could see her muttering to another old man. Apparently, she thought that we were plucking the plants as has been done before – we weren’t. Overreaction much.

3.  I have written before about the woman who routinely stops Nene from playing “unauthorised” ball games in the basketball court (even though I have never seen Chinese kids getting stopped from doing so), to the extent that she has called security on us, even when we moved far away from her to an area where there were no people. 

4. In my first job, my boss was unnecessarily mean and would yell using profanity. Her sidekick supported her. I survived this hazing and they accepted me as one of them, but I never forgave them.

5. This is my longest-standing grudge: When I was in college, some friends invited me to join a choir that would perform at a Christmas concert. The practices were held in the late evening, and this being India, we had to find a male to walk us home. This guy, who happened to a friend of my (much older) cousin offered to walk me home. Later my friend told me her boyfriend would walk both of us home, so I let my cousin’s friend he needn’t walk me home. Choir practice went on, at one point, I realised that I couldn’t really hit some of the notes, so I would just mouth them without singing. One day, I noticed my cousin’s friend staring at me, and during a break, he came to me and whispered, “I know what you’re doing.” Later, the choir conductor came to me and told me that she thought I was singing false – someone had been, but I knew it wasn’t me because I made sure to mouth notes I couldn’t sing – and that she didn’t think I should sing at all! This, being after months of practice, she offered to let me stay on the condition that I do not sing at all but mouth everything. I politely declined and stopped going. I still hold a grudge against the cousin’s friend (who I am convinced ratted me out unnecessarily because I turned down his offer to walk me home. I later figured he might have had a crush on me – he seemed strangely disappointed – a possibility I never considered since he was so much older) and the conductor (who I believe did not sufficiently investigate who the source of the false notes were).

After writing this, I realised:

1. Grudges do fade in time. I was sure I’d have a longer list than this – and I probably do – but I struggled to remember some (though then they started to pour. A couplethat I do remember – this Indian woman in our neighbourhood whatsapp group who interrogated me about my name “not sounding Indian” and some teachers in our school  – I found I do not care much anymore.

2. My most persistent grudges are related to my children.

3. Grudges related to strangers persist longer than those related to friends, because the latter have many chances to redeem themselves and often do.

What are your favourite grudges?

Everything is stupid

Tags

come onavirus, Hong Kong, India

You know how foreigners keep coming to India to seek enlightenment? With the right attitude, they could save themselves the trouble and a fair bit of money and just stop at the visa application stage itself.

So I went down to the office that has been contracted to handle passport and visa applications for the Indian consulate. I had to renew Nene’s passport which meant that I had to take him along.

We went back and forth on this given the coronavirus outbreak and finally I decided to go ahead because who knows when this is going to end and there might be fewer people at this time.

Turns out I was wrong. The place was packed.

The contractor has moved to a smaller office which means people were more packed in that ever. There’s no place for signage so everyone crowds at the counters to ask anything. Even getting a token requires asking for one from a human being.

They also said on their website that the closest MTR to the new office is Wan Chai when it’s actually Causeway Bay so we ended up being later than I would have liked.

I had made the rookie mistake of checking the Indian consulate website and not the contractors website. Turns out (surprise! Not.) there are a whole lot of other documents needed, including one that required me to back to Wan Chai to get some affidavit done. Because god forbid there be an Indian bureaucratic process without an affidavit.

I admit that I snapped at the girl at the counter – and by counter, I mean she was manning the photocopy station as well as taking photos. To her credit she kept cool and explained to me everything and was very helpful. It’s hardly her fault that the Indian consulate doesn’t update their website or tell people to check elsewhere for the updated instructions or has ridiculous requirements.

So then we walked back to Wan Chai, huffing and puffing in our masks. Turns out the Indian consulate has happily outsourced this process to the Hong Kong government which provides this service free of charge. Basically you write your name and address on a form and that you swear the info is true. Then you wait half an hour and swear before someone that what you wrote is true.

How is this helpful? Why is this even a thing? Would this deter anyone from lying?

Who knows? Who cares?

Only saving grace is that the Hong Kong government is very organised about this. They even took my name and contact number in case anyone who visited was found to have contracted the dreaded virus.

Please note Indian office not only did not do this, there was not even a bottle of hand sanitiser in sight. Oh HK I will miss you.

Anyway.

Take all forms and go back to Causeway Bay. On the way, eye buses speeding down empty streets longingly thinking of throwing self in front of one. Think of children and desist. (By this time had sent Nene home)

Back in the Causeway Bay office, all the same people seem to be milling about. Turns out their computer system is down.

Gweilo man at counter keeps asking how long it will take and grumbles that he has to go to work. Arre Mr, you want to go to India no? This is India only. Learn zen and the art of twiddling your thumbs.

Indian aunties who I asked what was going on got very agitated at the thought that I might be trying to cut the queue when I went up to the counter to inquire and kept hovering behind them. O aunties, take a leaf out of the Buddha’s tree and chill.

I was curtly told nothing would get done that day and I left quietly. Hopefully the aunties were satisfied.

I had an epiphany of sorts on my journey from the notary (or whatever it was. The woman at the counter got a bit agitated when I said “notarized”) and the passport office. The ridiculousness of being shoved off to a different office to stand and say I was telling the truth just seemed too much to bear.

What are we doing really in this life? Just shoving around pieces of paper and trying not to die till we die.

Honestly, I’ve had enough. I turn 40 this year and I feel like I’ve had my fill of life’s delights. I sure there are more left to sample but I’m not greedy. I’m sure it doesn’t get exponentially better than this. Everything we do is just our genes trying to survive by convincing us that we must stick around.

I mean, yeah, I’m going to because I brought two people into this world to do more of the same paper pushing (my bad). But it all does seem rather pointless.

I suddenly stopped caring if I got the passport done or contracted the coronavirus while doing it.

Speaking of which, the streets were lined with people queuing up for some “necessity” or other. I was willing to understand the quest for masks (up to a point) but now people are stockpiling toilet paper and rice. In one of the richest cities in the world with an almost 100% literacy rate. Still at the slightest hint of trouble, people seem to lose all sense of reason. It quickly devolves into me me me.

If this is Hong Kong, then fuck it, I have no hope for anywhere.

I floated home listlessly, didn’t bother with my son trying to do his homework or trying to correct his substandard answers to some poetry analysis (poetry analysis! At age 9!) and played a board game with my daughter, going along with her attempts to give herself the greatest advantage.

Obviously this state of mind will not last. But who knows?

Hong Kong protests: coming full circle

Tags

hong kong protests, India protests

Today, when I came down from my building, having decided to leave work early, not because it was New Year’s Day, but because of the threat of protest violence and MTR shutdowns, I saw groups of people in black with masks on, including some children, with huge Pepe the Frog plushes hanging from their bags.

While most people spend New Year’s Day lazing about and recovering from the night’s festivities, Hongkongers came out en masse to push their government to do the right thing.

And after six months of an emotional rollercoaster since the protests began, I came full circle, finding myself once again awed by their spirit.

When the protests started out in June, I was inspired by the sheers numbers with which people took the streets, largely peacefully.  I was elated when they made what I thought was the impossible happen – the government backing down on a law it insisted it would push through, with the might of China at its back.

But as the protest violence escalated quickly, I grew disillusioned, not because I am against violent protests per se, but in the dishonesty with which violence was wielded.  There was violence from day 2 onwards when protesters threw objects, including bricks, at the police but the narrative insisted for quite a while on not acknowledging this violence and then on not condemning the most egregious examples of it while turning Cultural Revolution-style against anyone who voiced criticism of the movement,

While the international media presented a uniformly highminded picture of the protesters, I saw at the ground level a great deal of pettiness and stupidity.

Then the protests in India began. From afar, my sympathies were obviously with the protesters. But then the uniformity of the narrative coming out of India began to make me suspicious. Reading newspaper reports carefully, including the liberal ones, I began to see a similar pattern to the Hong Kong protests. Conversations with friends also highlighted to me how people cleave to the narratives they are drawn to, refusing to admit inconvenient truths.

And yet, I supported the Indian protesters fairly unconditionally. Why? Well, for one, I’m more ready to believe worse of the Indian police than the Hong Kong police. But also, because I supported the cause behind the protests.

Now, in Hong Kong, I also initially supported the cause behind the protests – the withdrawal of a law that would allow the extradition of people accused of criminal activity by China. But when that law was withdrawn, I was not sure that the protests need go on with this level of intensity, including violence.

While the Western media insists on portraying the Hong Kong protests as a pro-democracy movement – and I don’t deny that a demand that Hong Kong’s leader be elected by universal suffrage has long animated Hong Kong, having been the core of the 2014 Umbrella Movement – the current protests are about something more … basic. They are a protest against police misconduct in dealing with protesters and that those who were targeted in the initial crackdown not be charged and jailed.

The logic is: when violence is the only language the government responds to, those using that language in pursuit of a just cause should not be criminally prosecuted. Moreover, that those tasked with upholding the law must be held to the highest standard of the law.

This is a more complicated logic than a simple demand for democracy or the freeing of the innocent. However, I do believe that except in the most extreme cases of violence, those that put their own bodies on the line in defiance of the state should not be allowed to go like lambs to the slaughter through the prison industrial complex.

We are not in Gandhian territory anymore (and may I say how sick I am of hearing the Gandhi-Luther King-Mandela triumvirate cited at every turn). We are in the territory of righteous anger that refuses to accept the unjust power of the state.

Since Hong Kong’s historic district council elections (Western media please note, these are held by universal suffrage so it’s not like Hongkongers never vote. Heck, I have voted more than once in a single year), I was unpleasantly surprised to see the Hong Kong government continue to pander to the pro-Beijing camp which lost heavily in the elections instead of using the opportunity for some kind of reconciliation through concessions to the other side. Again, the government made it clear that peaceful expression of the public voice counts for nothing.

Interestingly, in conversation with a friend in India, she said that people were protesting not so much against the Citizenship Amendment Act but against the police treatment of the initial protesters, particularly university students. So a very similar logic there too.

After the siege of Polytechnic University, when thousands of students were rounded up after being holed up the university for days, many people thought the protest had fizzled out. But on the first day of the new year, Hongkongers showed us that this fight is far from over.

I can only humbly salute them.

 

Flying the coop

On Tuesday, I took a mental health day and went to office.

I felt guilty, of course, for abandoning my children at home to two helpers and a husband, but after eight days of being a stay at home mom – albeit one with the full load of office work – I was ready to bolt.

I feel like those famous Japanese men who are bereft when they have to retire. I need to go to the office as silly as it sounds. I need to space out on the MTR. I need my two screens and desk and office coffee mug. I need to make polite chatter with my colleagues and go out to lunch. I need to need to dress up.

Two things I learnt this week:

1. Apropos the above, I’m not an extended work from home person

2. Homeschooling is better than school:

After disappointing results of an entrance tests in Bangalore and a not-so-great parent-teacher meeting, we realised we have to take matters into our own hands. I’ve been functioning under the illusion that having carefully selected a school, paying quite a steep price, I would leave the teachers to do what they presumably know best. So if this means, no homework, so be it. Heck, no homework is what I think education should be, in an ideal world.

The problem, I discovered, is that no homework and no textbooks coming home on  weekends means that you have no idea what your kid is up to at school, what they are learning and how they are doing, until two months into the term when you meet their teacher and he says, “er, not so great.”

And you realise you need to do something, and again the teachers are not much help. For example, I have known for a while that Mimi is atrocious at spelling but all of last year her teacher told me not to worry. Now, her teacher says, worry, but not how I can help her.

Thankfully, the internet exists, though it turns out there are a lot more resources for teaching pre-schoolers spelling than kids in grade three. So I’m having to invent my own method and I’m actually having some success.

It feels a bit like groundhog month because I went through this in their final year of kindergarten when I realised the much vaunted Jolly Phonics was quite ineffective in teaching my kids to read (and now I recall that epiphany was prompted by the need to do primary school entrance interviews, so I guess I never learn). Finally, the internet, common sense and some kind people here who suggested Starfall helped me get them on the right track, and now I’m wondering again, what the point of expensive schooling is when I end up doing the groundwork?

But so it is. This episode has taught me that I need to tiger parent it up a bit and teach my kids at home. My ideal would be reinforcing what they’re doing at school, but that’s only possible if the teachers cooperate and send their books home on weekends (Mimi’s teacher has agreed to, I’m still waiting for a response from Nene’s).

In the meantime, we took the opportunity of the kids being home a whole week to print out worksheets and basically drill them. Again I knew this, but they forget everything over the holidays, so there was a lot of refreshing of basics to do.

Thankfully, there’s a fair bit of free material available online, but it needs to be sifted through and because I’m not a professional teacher, I’m not sure what to teach when.

Unfortunately, V and I have sort of fallen into the gendered daddy is the math person, mommy is the English person and even more unfortunately both my kids prefer maths but it is what it is.

Onwards and upwards.

But by day eight of this I was exhausted (and the kids insisted they don’t do this much work at school, even though they were essentially doing just three hours or so put together, while they spend six hours at school) and after losing it on Mimi for refusing to take a bath, I decided I needed to get out and “adult” again.

So I fled, took the MTR, schlepped to my own desk and breathed a sigh of relief.

The next day, there was transport chaos again, and I found myself working from home, but sometimes all you need for your mental health is a day at the office.

Last week in Hong Kong

1. The police shot two protesters. My opinion on this is not popular.

2. The two protesters were putting up barriers to block a road. They were doing so because two days before that a young man had fallen to his death, while the police were doing a clearance operation nearby.

After weeks of claiming people had died in a railway station, that a young woman found dead in the sea had been killed, finally, an incontrovertible death linked to the protests.

3. The protesters were shot near my kids’ school. My helper had just dropped them when it happened. We had decided to send them because Mimi had a camp scheduled and the school didn’t cancel it that morning. I asked our helper to wait around for a while and told her to leave. 15 minutes later, the school announced why it was closing and asked us to pick up the kids.

I must say I’m not impressed with them. Our MTR station and bus services had shut down, and it was nigh impossible to get a taxi. But the school not so subtly pressured us to “come as soon as possible” (as if we wouldn’t) by calling.

Finally, I requested Nene’s friend’s mum who lived nearby to take them home.

It took V three hours (taxi + ferry + train + bus) to get to them and another couple of hours to get them home.

Since then school has been closed and we’ve been working from home.

4. A man tried to argue with the protesters and was set on fire

5. An elderly man got hit by a brick during a clash with protesters and people trying to clear their barriers. He later died.

6. The police stormed a university campus. The protesters’ side is that they did not nothing; the police’s is that protesters were throwing stuff onto the highway below to block it from the university. Over subsequent days, there was touching footage of protesters setting up their own canteen and organising food in the university. There was also footage of protesters making petrol bombs in the university.

Right now, the police have surrounded another universities from where protesters were throwing stuff onto the highway. One can only hope that the police don’t go in guns blazing, but one also hopes protesters could just come out.

7. The Western media portrays this as a democracy movement. Universal suffrage is one of the demands, but this is only by-the-way a democracy movement. At its heart, it’s an anti-police movement. What people are most angry about is perceived police brutality. If you read local reports, the police gets mentioned all the time as a reason for public anger, then perhaps China. Democracy comes in a poor third, if at all.

Simmering beneath is mistrust of China and an (impossible) desire for independence. The distrust of China is supposedly about high ideals and fear of authoritarianism, but is really fuelled by more petty concerns such as “mainlanders” overruning Hong Kong.

None of this fits the Western narrative, many esteemed outlets calling the (local) police Chinese police. For however long it lasts, the Hong Kong police are not (yet) the Chinese police. Heck, they aren’t even the Indian police or the American police. (one line of argument goes that the American police would never shoot protesters. But they would shoot unarmed black kids, but that doesn’t count I guess.)

8. The protesters have successfully won the media war by claiming to be peaceful and wrongfully targeted long after they had begun throwing bricks at police, trashing public premises, setting fires and roughing up the odd soul who dared challenge them. I get it from a PR perspective, but the dishonesty still rankles.

Guess I’d be useless as a politician or an academic, because academics seems quite comfortable cleaving to the version of events that suits the narrative that suits their theory.

9. The writer Haruki Murakami once said, “If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.” It’s a precept that’s appealing in its simplicity, and one that protesters occasionally quote.

This series of events has taught me that I’m not cut out for that kind of simplicity.

The saga continues.

 

Flaneurie 1

Tags

baudelaire, flaneurie, smartphone

Every now and then I hear my colleagues grumbling about people walking while on their smartphones.

I say nothing. I am one of those people.

Why are you always on your phone? V asks. Disingenuously, because a) he is also “always” on his phone, my usage annoys him when he looks up and I am not sitting up awaiting his attention like a geisha, for example when a commercial comes on or the video buffers a) this is just a modification of his other lament (“stop reading”).

I’m actually reading on my phone, I tell my colleague/V . If I wasn’t on my phone, it would be a book.

Ah, that ok then, she says. (V’s having none of that).

But why is it ok? Why is a newspaper ok (these days) and not a phone? Why is a novel? (Most people have forgotten that novels were in fact triggers of moral panic back when they were in fact novel).

Is it because a phone does not allow the judge to see and thus to judge and therefore the worst is assumed? Surely these people are like cattle, following the dim light of prurient entertainment. What if they were reading philosophy? What if they were not?

If the principle in question is lack of attention to the world or lack of attention to the person one might bump into (more on that later), then shouldn’t philosophy be as unjustified as Paris Hilton? Isn’t the crime here that one is not paying sufficient attention to at worst incoming traffic, at best the bounteous sensations of the “real world”?

Would it help if we wore little stickers as we navigate public transport: forgive me, I am studying Proust.

The French have a saying – metro, boulot, dodo (eat, work, sleep). Are we not to be forgiven for not finding the metro scillintating? Why do I find my peevish colleagues less interesting than the elderly woman vehemently absorbed in candy crush?

Baudelaire invited us (okay gentlemen) to be flaneurs, wandering the city, open to impressions. (What if I were reading Baudelaire, then is it ok?).

I am passing through the worst part of my commute, a stuffy rare unairconditioned space made worse by an incline, I can only see the backs of people. I look up to see a woman with green flecks in her perfectly coiffed hair. It brings me joy but is it better or worse than the Baudelaire I could be reading? Do I have to choose?

I stare fixedly ahead of me and find nothing surprising, no moment of epiphany in the Joycean sense (I am showing off. It is my version of the “forgive me” sticker).

I have almost never bumped into anyone while on my phone. There have been a couple of near misses followed by loud sighs, always from Westerners. Chinese people seem tacitly accept that life is boring/hard – ok fine nasty, brutish and short – and we just have to endure it as best we can with whatever glowing anaesthetics we have.

Also that sometimes the world and people inside the rabbit hole are more interesting. Hence literature.

I have also never been bumped into by a person with a phone and if I have I reckon I would take it in the spirit of flaneurie.

The trick is though to get down to the nuts and bolts of it that when you walk while looking down at your phone (bow head syndrome and resultant neck pain notwithstanding) you can see the feet of approaching people and swerve in advance. You’re welcome.

All this to say that I will try my own excercise in flaneurie. Not that I’m going to stop reading and walking (podcasts have helped) but because I do observe a fair bit nevertheless and perhaps we do need some joie de (“real life”) vivre.

I wrote this post on the MTR, while walking. No humans were harmed in its making. Thank me, dear reader, for the judgement I endured to bring you this missive.

Situational angst

Tags

bureaucrats, family, Hong Kong, language

There are some traumas that are linked to experiences that are specific places that linger long after you left them:

1. One India-related trauma that I recognised when I moved away (apart from the obvious – the trauma of being a woman) is a morbid fear of bureaucracy. In Hong Kong, despite what people say, the bureaucracy is largely efficient and not to be feared. Sure, there’s the filling up forms and submitting stuff. But even if you make a mistake, it can be corrected without going through seven circles of Kafkaesque hell. Nevertheless, when I had to submit my documentation for permanent residence, I went crazy with the paper. V told me I was an open and shut case and didn’t need to worry so much. But I did.

I do this every time I need to submit a visa application even though the chances of being rejected for a visa are quite low. It’s the fear of the runaround that could come if you have one tick out of place.

I recognised a kindred spirit in a Russian friend. If anything, he is worse. He was so paranoid to be not one toe out of line on his visa requirements. And was like, my friend, I hear you.

2. A Hong Kong related trauma is spending extended periods of time around people who are speaking a language I can’t understand. It’s one thing to not be able to understand what exactly happened in the fight that broke out on the MTR or what the TV announcer is saying, although this does cramp my eavesdropping style, but the thing that really gets me is being at a two hour or more lunch surrounded by people speaking Cantonese (the language is not important here, just that I can’t understand it) and having to smile and nod and pretend you kind of understand or don’t mind. My patience for doing this has waned so much that I rarely consent to meet more than two Cantonese speakers at one time and studiously inquire about language of presentation before any event.

I recognised my aversion to this kind of linguistic limbo when the prospect of visiting V’s relatives in Kerala. Now this a family that will make no effort to converse in anything but Malayalam although the younger generation does speak English. Something about being made fun of if you stick your neck out and speak English. Or maybe they just think it’s too much trouble in the way Hongkongers (and possibly English speakers do). The point is – I don’t want to volunteer to be the resident Ms Blank.

I have literally avoided visiting Kerala for this reason (and the fact that I suck at performing conventional Indian femininity and will stick out like a sore thumb if I hang out with men while unable to say a thing to them). In the end, I have capitulated under the condition that we stay in a hotel and not someone’s house (to limit the time I have to spend playing Noddy) thereby branding myself the bitch in law.

I also realised the language issue is what I dread about moving to Bangalore. Sure, in my social circles, English will be the lingua Franca which is a step above Hong Kong, but for the man on the street it’s Kannada so basically Hong Kong redux. In the process, I’ve discovered a secret pleasure – that of being in a place where everyone speaks English.

Another year

Beach or mountain?

Beach.

But Hong Kong doesn’t make you choose.

Long ago, when a grey cloud seemed to be taking over Broom’s life, I commented on her blog that she needs a patronus. And she said her patronus would be an island, I forget where. But I remember thinking, a patronus should be animal, not a place.

But now I know a patronus can be a place. It can be a stretch of beach not that far from home, nothing fancy, the water temperature just right, the waves not too choppy, the sound of the wind and the squeals of your children, with a buffalo strolling by for good measure to show you how it’s done. It’s a place that can literally wash your worries away.

My patronus is Lower Cheung Sha Beach, Lantau.

This has been the year – dare I say it – when things settled down.

The job.

The marriage.

The sex.

The job is no longer in the honeymoon period. People get on my nerves, my boss gets on my nerves sometimes. But I like the job. I enjoy it. The people I can deal with, even if they make me roll my eyes. They’re not the worst.

The wisdom these days is that you need to learn to cope with situations. True, you can’t run at the first boo. But sometimes, you need to get out. Cut your losses and run.

That’s what I did with the teaching gigs. My principle with work is that I don’t get out before I have something else lined up. Which can take time and is stressful, but I need an escape route not a new situation to fester in.

And yes, I was lucky. But also, I kept at it. Sometimes applying to jobs was so painful, I eased off, and sometimes V edged me back in and I hated him for it, but it had to be done.

But I do feel like I have the job that is the best fit for me. And I thank my stars for that second chance every day. Okay, every other day.

The job helped me calm the eff down and the extra money helped V calm the eff down and that helped our overall situation. Ironically, I work longer hours, I work public holidays, I have less time with my kids and it’s not ideal. But the time I have, I’m not in a mindfuck and that matters.

One of the girls I met on the first academic conference I ever went to wrote a post about how regardless of whether she ends up working at a make-up counter after her PhD, she did a PhD because she wants to be a philosopher, and that’s what she will be regardless of her actual job. That’s the way I’m coming to feel too. I know people in academia won’t see it like that – that you can’t be a thinker unless you’re surrounded by people who are paid to think. And I get it, academia is different, I don’t deny it. Different good and different bad. Too much for me, I guess.

I have been told that 40 is the best age. My colleague told me that 40 is the year you stop giving a fuck. The fucks I give have been slowing to a trickle – literally, ha! – but I still get riled up by people and situations. There’s definitely an element of ‘this is me, take it or leave it’, not quite the full on aunty quality of saying the first thing that comes out of your mouth not shits given, which I don’t necessarily want to be, but there’s only so far I’m going to change. I can also spot people’s defensive BS a mile off and it just makes me shake my head that people older that me still have stupid hang-ups, still trying to be too cool for school by being a bitch.

I’m not quite 40, so I have some way to go, but I’ve stopped caring. I have more grey hair and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to dye it, though I still occasionally want to get some cray hair colour, so I’ve not grown up enitrely.

I think I’m better at staying alone. I look forward to being alone. Because I’m not.

Three books on groups of ‘cool kids’

Tags

cool kids, Donna Tart, Muriel Spark, reading, Tana French, The Likeness, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Secret History

Reading Tana French’s The Likeness reminded me of two other books which deal with groups of precocious youngsters – Donna Tart’s The Secret History and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Let’s talk about The Likeness. The most obvious parallel is Donna Tart’s The Secret History which I really did not think was all that. If the main point of that novel was “the secret”, it was a let down. If the main point was the group, which I suspect it was, then meh. Maybe because I’m always slightly impatient with those “too cool for school” kids.

I think it is the deliberate crafting that goes into their individual and collective existences that puts me off. I tend to admire the illusion of effortlessness and I can respect the Kim Kardashian/Paris Hilton extreme artifice but with these “cool kids”, their stylishness is always showing. It’s like they try as hard as your average Kim Kardasian just in a relentlessly counter-cultural sort of way. The problem is that somewhere along the way, the counter part is lost in the conformity. Do I sound like I have a massive chip on my shoulder about “cool kids”? I’ll own it.

In both novels it’s not exactly clear to me what is so special about the groups involved. Okay in The Secret History, it’s that they are obsessed with Ancient Greece, but I dunno, they seemed to be to so closely role playing that it comes across as more odd than charming. I vaguely remember that they’re supposed to be beautiful, but the only one that sticks in the mind is the female twin, just as in The Likeness Rafe stands out for his looks. And then they’re mainly defined by being “chosen” by this one difficult teacher, which for me is a turn-off. Being a groupie/teacher’s pet does not a cool kid make in my book.

Thankfully, in The Likeness the group is not beholden to any particular teacher. They are wrapped up in each other and the whimsical desire to live some kind of communal life in the house one of them inherited. They are all Lit postgrads – thankfully not Classics majors again – and they seem to reject the trappings of modernity – the internet, texting and the pursuit of money.

The problem though is that although each of them has a different research interest which is spelled out, they don’t seem to talk about it or literature at all. Rather, they all blur into one amorphous lump of people lying around idylically stroking one another’s hair, repairing odd knickknacks that they find in the attic and occasionally painting the walls. Okay.

The Likeness is an improvement over The Secret History, both in terms of the fleshing out the individual,  making them somewhat likeable and also in the actual mystery at the heart of it all. But the novel that I think does ‘cool kids’ the best is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

This classic by Muriel Spark is about a group of chosen one’s by a schoolteacher in Scotland. Each of the girls is special in her own way, even if one of them is special for being mediocre and basically the runt that gets picked on. Miss Brodie stands among them as a towering figure – one that we can admire even as her flaws become increasingly apparent.

Miss Brodie reminded me of our revered English Lit professor in college. She too had an aura about her, was a rebel who flouted authority and who edged us towards rebellion ourselves, whose life was a slap in the face of conventional morality that she saw herself as superior to. She also had her chosen ones – and the casual but cruel way that Miss Brodie goes about her choice reminded me retrospectively about this teacher too. If you were not in her inner circle you always felt slightly like a fish out of water. I wonder if she sneered at us like Miss Brodie did. I hope she was kinder, but Miss Brodie makes me suspicious.

I liked how each of the girls were allowed to grow up and outgrow Miss Brodie even though she remains the most profound influence on their lives. I loved how even as children, some of them defied her and how each of them had a personality, even though the whole thing is narrated through one surprising perspective. These girls too were defined by their choice of Latin in senior school – what is it with these classical languages – but somehow they are more interesting than the “too cool for school” types of The Likeness and The Secret History.

It just struck me – the only “cool kids” I can bear are the ones in Clueless who are such over-the-top parodies they are genuinely funny.

So, were you one of the “cool kids” in school or college? Did you want to be? Did you like The Secret History?

 

 

Elena

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#thegoldfinch #reading #justread #elenaferrante

When I read Elena Ferrante’s novels, I feel like my nerves are on edge, like I’m in a world of complicity, that they are – through strangers in a strange land – saying what I feel, telling my story. For the one and a half day or so it takes me to inhale the novel, I am in a fog, emerging only reluctantly to the ‘real’ world. V senses this, maybe I get a certain look, and he gets angsty. This too mirrors the world of the novels.

I was predisposed to like Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Books about the strong bond between two girls – it sounds quotidian like this, but I know from experience that it is always more – sign me up.

But it was The Story of a New Name – which ironically is the story of an old name, the names that both girls keep – that really swallowed me. My Brilliant Friend seems almost like backstory, the childhood of poverty and the family and neighbourhood connections that made these women who they are. I did not love the writing, which I suspected would be better in the original Italian. There were powerful sentiments in that novel and the writing conveyed it, despite itself.

[spoilers alert]

The Story of a New Name yanked me in from the start. I’m glad it began where My Brilliant Friend ended – at Lila’s wedding. As we learn what happened to her in excruciating detail, I have flashbacks of my own. No, I was not beaten bloody on my wedding night, but I did have a similar sense of disconnection, this idea that the one one had chosen for stability, for being different, after a heady and charmed courtship that only soured towards the date, was more of the same and the only way to cope, was to detach emotionally if not physically.

Which one am I? is the obvious question, the question a female reader would ask, a tradition at least as long as Little Women, a book Lila and Lena too discovered and that triggered their ambition to write themselves to a better place. The two girls are distinct and yet their names lend themselves to blurring. Lila is Lila only to Lena; she is Lina to everyone else, just as Lena is Lenu.

I identify with Lila’s cold rages more than Lenu’s self doubt. But overall, I’d say I’d identify with Lenu, the bookish wallflower who slowly discovers her place in the world. I’m not sure I had a longstanding Lila. I did have one friend who would qualify in terms of both looks and impetuosity if not intelligence (Lila is a prodigy). In a sense, it is both their intelligence and their emotional complexity that defines the two girls.

In the matter of love, I am more Lila. Lenu stays with and makes out (for want of a better word since they significantly did not have sex) with Antonio although she considers him her inferior. She likes and is attracted to him but balks at committing to him forever. Been there done that.

But Lenu has her sights on the cultivated, intellectual type symbolised by Nino, and it has always puzzled me how I do not share this attraction. From early on, I saw Nino for the self/absorbed brooding intellectual male that he is and hoped Lenu would not pursue him. I was almost relieved that he met his match in Lila, though I empathised (somewhat) with Lenu. Why she didn’t just tell Lila early on or even a bit later what her feelings were is one of my frustrations with her, but I guess that’s how people are. They don’t always do the logical thing and sometimes the face-saving gesture turns into quicksand. But apart from disliking the arrogance and essential selfishness of the intellectual male type, I’m also rarely attracted to that type at a baser sexual level. It’s like a mind body split with me. Or maybe at some level I’m just scared of a competition I will lose and prefer to be the admiree not the admirer in love?

Like Lila in her choice of Stefano, I tend to choose the classically masculine and seemingly safe type. That this safety does not always last is probably part of the package and our (Lila and my) outsized drama at its crumbling is also of a piece.

I am all about female friendships and yet I have only once had that kind of intense singular bond with a woman. Maybe the intensity of it is why I have usually deflect the possibility of such relationships with women, because the potential heartbreak so much more searing.

The thing that set me apart from these characters is of course their poverty. The book makes the reader identify with Lenu and so with her struggles to make it through the upper middle class milieu or academia. Her realisation is of lacking what Pierre Bourdieu called the cultural capital of the middle class; her experience is akin to that described by Dalit students in India, the feeling that no matter how hard you try, you lack something undefinable that is essential to success. Ironically, the reader would have to be of the privileged class, just to be reading the book.

This book engulfed me so totally that having digested and spat me out, my nerves tingling, I’m actually holding back from reading the next one. For one day at least.