Writing with all the languages

an introductory post

Hi, I’ve made a new blog of some sort.

My name is Viola, or 早早, Leqi, v10101a, sandpills, whatever identification you might know me by. How do I even start to explain myself? I’ve held onto many roles, fallen into a lot of them as well. A livecoder, an adjunct, a student, a musician, a performer, a “new media artist”. A worker, a maker, a technician. Once a filmmaker, a designer, a director, a translator, an intern, an assistant, an assistant to the assistant. A dancer, a comedian, an organizer, an internet neighbor. A daughter, a friend, a patient, an expat, an American only for tax purposes, a lover learning how to love.

Amongst all these labels, there’s a writer of them all.

dithered image of young viola writing on a desktop (with internet!)

When I got into high school I applied to be in this special “experimental humanities program” — unlike the other two special programs in science and mathematics, our class was supposedly the staple of our school’s infamous “liberal arts education” in Shanghai. I had to put together a volume of writing samples for the application, a so-called self-selected anthology, the first and only book I’ve ever published. My 15-year-old writings were ridiculous — I had a poem about being in love in Taipei (I haven’t been in love), a short story about catching fish in Rural Guizhou Province with my sister (I don’t have a sibling), political commentary about a fire in Shanghai (It wasn’t that deep), among other delusional teenager thoughts.

Somehow I got in. Maybe my ability to make things up was perceived as creativity. My classmates were also ridiculous, but so much smarter, eloquent, equipped with phenomenal experiences and knowledge, and most them brilliant wordsmiths. The program took us traveling to historical cites across China during summer and winter breaks. We wrote Chinese poetry, ancient and contemporary, and read them for each other on the long, sleepy bus rides under the stars. I felt invincible — like a character living inside Dead Poet Society, or Totto-chan, stories I’ve consumed about alternative education that I'd dream about — and simultaneously invisible, like someone looking from the outside in, to a world where I don’t fully belong. I didn’t know it quite yet, but over the next 9 years this feeling grew to become a theme of my life across the Atlantic Ocean, a familiar narrative of immigration.

All of this is to say, I was never sure if I was a writer. I definitely wasn’t seen as a *good* writer. But I was a part of something better, and was inspired to keep writing. I wrote about those high school experiences on Chinese Quora and it blew up a little bit. In 2015 I started a blog for movie reviews, pop culture, political commentaries, and general life… things, using a “subscription account” on WeChat, and had a small following of dedicated readers. I had a couple bylines in Chinese VICE and a column in a random local newspaper. I was short-listed for a non-fiction writing contest. I had written a lot…

…in Chinese, my first language, my mother tongue, until I couldn’t anymore.

pathetic notes of half-written pieces in both languages I’ll never finish, 2020-2022

It happened vaguely around 2019. I had been living in the U.S. for 5 years then, mostly residing in Los Angeles. One of the last things I’ve written around that time, before I stopped updating the WeChat blog, was about being a year out of college and learning the rhythm in life (The Graduate, for curious Chinese-reading friends). At that point I was merely translating my experiences back into Chinese, a life that I live almost entirely in English. A life upon layers of contexts and confusions that had started to lose meanings in translation.

My Chinese had also gotten rusty — I was having a hard time writing a play (for a Chinese theatre club that I ran) to put out for Spring 2020, updating the blog, or even writing my mom a message. But how could I? It felt so wrong. So dramatic and self-loathing. LA does not lack Chinese people and communities, and whenever I surround myself with the buzzing soundscape of familiar languages and dialects it stung me how I was losing my voice.

Or rather, I think it was more so losing a will to write. Who was it for anyways? “Mother tongue shame” was so real — the longer and further away I was from home, the heavier my language became. It didn’t help how feelings were already difficult to articulate with it, growing up in a culture where “我爱你” (I love you) was not even heard spoken in movies, with a language that was constantly used to lie and deceive, to fabricate narratives that became a part of me that I resent. Perhaps similar to how Jack Kerouac couldn’t write in French yet Samuel Beckett couldn’t write in English, my growing inability to express in Chinese was deafening.

It frustrated me how compartmentalized everything felt, that being bilingual somehow meant losing the languages in both, that despite trying so hard to mend the gap I have divided myself, with half of my story illegible to the other parts of my identities.

But I was also learning to be ok with it. I held onto writers and scholars that wield their second language by choice like hugging friends I’ve never known. Yiyun Li. Svetlana Boym. Embracing the complexity of language-identity entanglement is embracing the messiness of intersectionality, defined by a specificity to first-generation immigration experiences. A friend once asked me if I dreamed in Chinese or English — and to this day I don’t know. Maybe my dreams are silent. Maybe they’re in every languages there could ever be, or maybe they’re simply non-verbal. Maybe they’re in bird chirping, in ambient noises, in some alien language or maybe in JavaScript???? (though most common coding languages are based in English, except for some localization attempts, but that’s for another time to tackle.)

HD-image of current day viola writing on a laptop (with code)

We can dream in all the languages and so can we write in them, with nuance and patience and sometimes oscillating intentions. Just like the long paragraphs of shroom thoughts I found lying in my Notes app, which I apparently documented predominantly in English, with some scribbles, some numbers, and occasional intrusive thoughts in Chinese, then an attempt to articulate why that was.

I hate throwing out questions, observations, over-arching pessimistic theories without providing a conclusion. But often times the curated thoughts reach an end here, hanging over the edges a little bit, despite the larger chunks of life buried just a little bit under, uglier and less structured (but more fun !!!) with a lot of knotted, exposed wires jumbling under the lid. Untangling these bits and pieces, I figured, would be a fun addition to the 9000000 pending tasks already on my plates.

So… here we are. I’ve been living in New York City for 3 years (?!) now, expanding creative medium and doing way too many things at once, to fill the void of my language paralyzation, as well as studying different modes of communications. Here are some things I do now to keep me afloat, perhaps you’ll hear about them.

• Making music with code! Here’s a recent conversation with Anna (@hard_boiledbabe) on her podcast where we talked about livecoding and lots more.

• Organizing shows with livecodeNYC and elsewhere.

• Doing comedy in English and Chinese! Here’s a recent mini-documentary on Wainao (in Chinese) about NYC’s Chinese feminist comedy community featuring me and some other brilliant comedians :3

• Making small DIY electronics to explore feral frequencies and alternative communications.

• Teaching.

• Working and learning in institution™️ ’s Art and Tech™️ departments and feeling complex about it all.

• Probably a lot more tbh.

Subscribe to get sporadic updates on my whereabouts, upcoming events, releases, performances, as well as thoughts and critiques and reflections and angsty reviews on Art and Tech™️ adjacent things.

If you made it all the way here: Thank you, I love you, stay hydrated! Ok bye (⁎⁍̴̛ᴗ⁍̴̛⁎) ✧