Nostalgia

Every time I watch Family Outing Season 1, a Korean variety show that I'm a huge fan of, I become uncontrollably nostalgic for the 4 months I spent living in Isaan. Especially when we had our homestays with ดาวดิน ("dao din," meaning "the stars [and] the earth"), the social justice club at Khon Kaen University, in two villages in Loei province.

We would wake up absurdly early, spending our morning feeding the animals, doing some rice and/or rubber harvesting, and coming home to eat lunch before noon so that the hot, afternoon sun wouldn't give us skin cancer and damage our eyes. Then, sitting on the front porch with my friend ทราย ("Sai") who was a part of ดาวดิน at the time, homestay sister, homestay grandma, and a three-legged dog, talking about life. Eventually, ทราย would get bored, so we would go down the road to the village general store and grab two homemade red bean popsicles, which would both be suffering badly from freezer-burn, but we wouldn't care because at that time of the day, it would be upwards of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. We would walk around the village, talking about girl stuff and eating our popsicles before eventually going back to the homestay house. Our homestay sister, who would how bored we were, would take a break from hanging up the family's clothes on the clothesline in the backyard and tell us to take the motorcycle around the village. Since I can't drive one, I would sit behind ทราย on the motorcycle and silently rejoice in the coolness of the wind whipping at us at the sadly sluggish speed of 20 miles per hour. We would drive past the homestay houses of my American friends, and their homestay families would kindly offer us some food and snacks, as was customary in every other rural village I visited. ทราย and I would eventually find a mountain somewhere and do some hiking, with me completely unable to keep up with her pace, despite the fact that I grew up in the middle of the Great Smokies. We would eventually go home and eat dinner, maybe watch a movie, talk about who would dump icy cold water on ourselves from a small bucket shower first the next day, and go to sleep. Or, as ทราย and I experienced at another village in the same province, the village would have a gathering at someone's house, and everyone would get drunk, sing karaoke, gossip, and just generally have fun. There would always be "that guy" who had a guitar and sat in a corner with his friends and some of the villagers, singing songs about love and sadness. And eventually, the most alcoholic of us Americans would try to go shot-for-shot against the 80+ year old grandmas who supplied a homemade moonshine-like concoction that they had made from rice. We wouldn't be able to stand a chance against them.

I miss that.

I miss that a lot.

And I really hope I'm making the right decision in going back to Thailand.

I've been really aiming to go back to Bangkok for the wages and the friends that I already have there. Maybe it's the North Carolina in me, but it's at these moments where I wish I was at a financially stable place in life so that I could just take a low-paying job at a school in a more rural setting. It would probably be better for the soul, too.

My mom already says that "my mind is over there," referring to Thailand, when I complain about not being able to find a job at home or elsewhere in the US. To an extent, that's true. But that's not to say I won't miss some things about home.

I'll miss being able to order food from a menu rather than from a person who can pretty much make any dish you want, but oh, it has to be Thai, and oh, it has to have so much MSG that your mouth becomes numb, and oh, we don't have tofu today, and oh, are you sure you don't want meat in that??

I'll miss the comfort of leaving out a napkin full of crumbs in my trashcan without worrying about hordes of ants invading my room during the night.

I'll miss the mild, 70 degree weather that we get here throughout most of the year.

I'll miss the lack of mosquitoes. 

I'll miss being able to comfortably speak English every day.

I'll miss my betta fish.

But mostly, I'll miss seeing and talking to my parents every day.

I really hope I'm doing the right thing.

All the things.

Hi again.

I write to you from Big Girl Purgatory, in which I have graduated from NU and am out in the "real world," but not actually the Real World. No, not yet.

My placement in Big Girl Purgatory rather than in the Real World is not because I'm unemployed and subscribe to the culture of entitlement or because I have some weird aversion to business casual clothing. After my jobs at the university became unable to support me as a non-student worker, I moved back home to Someplace, North Carolina. More importantly, I had no obligations with work or school or anything at all for perhaps the first time since infancy. And because I was rejected from all of the Ethnic Studies and American Studies PhD programs to which I applied, I became extremely disappointed with myself and my future.

In fact, thinking about the future terrified me -- my heart would race, my insides would tie themselves tightly into knots so gargantuan that I wondered how they fit in my abdomen, and my body would regularly suffer from panic-induced chills. And let's just not get into the stress- and allergy-induced hives that I got from time to time. I was lost, and I had no motivation to find myself. So for a while, I just focused on healing my physical and emotional selves, mostly through taking long walks in the woods by my house, with the cool mountain air filling my lungs, and watching k-pop and Korean variety shows in my stuffy room filled with Pokemon plushies and Beanie Babies.

This happened during the first full week that I lived at home.

Which was last week.

And you had better believe that it felt like the longest week of my life. Thankfully, now I can start thinking about the future without turning into shivering, jelly-like bundle of nerves. After a few repetitions of, "This really isn't the saddest moment of your life," and, "It has only been a week," along with my mantra of, "Really, Emily??" I'm beginning to take bits and pieces of ideas and plans and ruminating on them for a while. That and learning how to read Korean exclusively from variety shows.

First off, I know I want to be a professor. I know it. I can imagine myself as a researcher, an activist, an instructor, and a mentor. In fact, one of my dear friends who considers me one of his mentors made his decision to abandon the science-based career path that he was only pursuing to placate his family and uphold a certain image of success that his family had for him to instead focus on his real passions of Asian American Studies and higher education. And I doubt it would have happened if not for his friends' support and my nagging at him constantly to declare a minor in Asian American Studies and join the Pan-Asian American student group on campus (which he is now the co-president of). Although he and I might not necessarily be the poster children for filial piety, I feel like a natural advocate for Asian American Studies and the ideology behind the now-viral slogan #yolo. Indeed, I feel pride in being a mentor. I like being a mentor -- just as much as I like calling out racism (and if you know me, you know that I like that a lot). But most of all, I want to blow peoples' minds with the transformative knowledge and even lifestyle changes that Asian American Studies offers.

But when this friend gchatted me asking for advice as to how to move forward down the higher education path, I had a million ideas. But at that point, I couldn't share any of them with him. I mean, who am I, an unemployed nobody who didn't get into grad school, to advise an undergrad who has so much to offer to the field and to show (nay, prove) to his parents? That was the point last week where I just threw my hands up in the air and said, "I just can't with people right now. I just can't." Yes, you read that correctly. I lost my ability to Can. And with that, I lost the one thing that I pride myself on: perseverance. No, not natural-born intelligence, not diligence, not attention to detail, not clarity in thinking, not eloquence and articulation. I have none of those traits. But what I can do, and what I've always been able to do when push-comes-to-shove, is work. Work hard. And with that, my ability to Can is slowly coming back.

So I need to first and foremost formulate a plan to get into grad school for sure next cycle. I looked to my professors first for some advice, and the most common piece of advice I received from all of them was that having a year off is actually perfect to establish your viewpoints and personal opinions (and to read A LOT and revise your writing sample and personal statement several times and to show that you can do research on a specific project but also zoom out and explore broader themes, but yeah).

Alright, cool. Doable. So, I need to pick a position. Will I be a social policy-ist? Economist? Marxist? Neoliberal? Postcolonial? Asian American-ist? Thai American-ist? ?!?!?!

Okay, okay. I don't have that quite figured out yet without consulting more literature, but I WAS able to come up with lists of things that I like and dislike, which might eventually inform my views in a broader way.

Things I dislike (with the understanding of why people would differ from my views):

• The word "Indochina" to describe Southeast Asia
• Using the Eastern/Western dichotomy of thinking and living as a means to generalize and marginalize
• The word "Oriental" in all situations ever ever ever (it elicits a negative but largely Pavlovian response in me, so thanks for that, Edward Said)
• Cultural appropriation (this one is complicated, but I'm not going to get into that)
• Colonialism
• Racism

Things I like (with the understanding of why people would differ from my views):

• I mean, I don't know... 2NE1?

Okay, the lists are pretty short. But I'm getting there.

Second order of business: I need to go do something for a year. Anything. Mostly because, as previously stated, I don't subscribe to the culture of entitlement, and my 22nd birthday is exactly a week from today. So, the length of time that I stay at home is directly proportional to the amount of guilt that I feel towards my parents. So, the one thing that I would do to pass the time and would actually enjoy would be teach English in Thailand. The barrier to that is the basic tenant of filial piety, which is to not make your parents worry. This idea is, in part, the basis of the model minority myth; Asian Americans are often seen as "model minorities" by mainstream America because of successes both economically and socially, and those who perpetuate this stereotype choose career paths that will ensure economic and social security so as not to worry their parents. Of course, this is just a simplification (and that is not to say that other racial/ethnic groups don't hold filial piety in high regards, but think about it for a second before calling shenanigans on me), and I am quickly digressing. My point is, my parents REALLY don't want me to go to Thailand. They believe that the entire country (!) is unsafe, and plus, my mother is ill, so my parents would like me to find a job close-by and spend time with them instead.

My desire then begs the question: why do I even want to go to Thailand? When I went in 2010, I had my ups and downs, and this blog can certainly speak to that. But for some inexplicable reason, I feel drawn to the country like a nostalgia for something I never experienced; perhaps I would even go so far as to call it sehnsucht. I hypothesize my attraction has something to do with the fact that I feel less of and am labelled less of an other when I am there. In America, I am seen as an other almost every day (especially in my part of NC), but it happens less so in Thailand because of my appearance. Though if I open my mouth, it becomes abundantly clear that I am a foreigner in terms of language, so, part of me obviously also wants to work on my Thai skills. But I digress again. I also fear that I will still be seen as an other while in Thailand because of my nationality as an American. Of course, I often have fears that "You're only talking to/wanting to date/hanging out with me because I'm _______ (Thai, American, Thai American, Asian, you name it). These fears indicate deeper insecurities, but, I mean, it could be true (trigger warning: sexual violence). Anyway, besides the obvious rewards such as teaching experience and patience among myriad others, I feel that I need a reprieve from that sort of labeling here in America.

So what's holding me back besides filial piety? I said I'm an advocate of #yolo, right? Well, I'm holding myself back. Let me explain with an anecdote. One particularly windy day a few months ago in Evanston, I entered this quiet, unassuming sandwich shop that had just opened. The walls inside the place looked as though all the neon posterboard you used for your elementary school book reports puked. But artfully. The menu claimed to be Southeast Asian-inspired, so I cautiously ordered a sandwich from the man at the cash register, who turned out to be the owner of the shop. As he was ringing up my order, the back room burst open, and a woman chased a little girl down the cramped seating area. It was around 1PM, so I was concerned as to why the girl wasn't in school, but then I remembered that kids under 5 years old don't need to go to school and that I'm a particularly awful judge of age. The woman picked up the little girl, who was still giggling from her epic escape, and the owner said, "Thanks, honey," to the woman, who turned out to be his wife. We made some small talk, and as usual, my racial background came into question. I told him that I was Thai, and he looked surprised. He greeted me with a bold สวัสดีครับ and told me that he had gone to Thailand several times just to travel. He asked me what my post-graduation plans were, and I told him that I was hoping to go to graduate school (at the time, I was blissfully unaware of my numerous rejections). With that, the man shook his head and said, "Forget about that book stuff, you should just go somewhere." I laughed and asked where I should go, as he seemed to be a well-traveled man. He said, "No, just go. Just go. Somewhere. Anywhere. Everywhere. Don't limit yourself." As he handed me my tempeh sandwich smothered in carrots, daikon radish, and a most-likely bastardized version of Burmese curry sauce, he continued, "Don't waste your youth. Just go." As I left the shop, muttering, "What a crazy dude," under my breath, I wondered why I didn't Just Go. And today, I'm still wondering why I Haven't Gone.

So, I've been looking into English-teaching certifications and possible teaching opportunities in Thailand. Looking back on the past few years, I see my experience in the CIEE study abroad program as possibly my greatest personal failure in undergrad, so perhaps I should give myself another shot at success in Thailand. Not to mention that I would like to do research on Thai Americans for my PhD (surprise!). But that's another blog post. ;)

Things still aren't all happiness and rainbows for me still, but I'm getting there, y'all.