花样年华

These are all meals I can put together when I’m exhausted and brainless. Life is hard and work can suck me into a vortex where I get home and the lizard inside me wants to eat now.

(Note: I garnish and season heavily because I like crunch and spice — I always have scallions, nuts, toasted sesame seeds and furikake on hand, so it’s no extra work for me to add in. All the recipes below can be further simplified, I'm a true believer that cooking doesn't have to be authentic as long as it gets eaten :D)

recipes

• caprese salad
• chachim deopbap (tuna rice bowl)
• variations on cabbage
• gimbap sandwich
• kbbq at home
• steamed egg (korean and chinese)
• steak with couscous and asparagus
• breaking down a rotisserie chicken
• congee/juk (rice porridge)
• ochazuke
• soy bean meal set
• malatang / jiggae / sukiyaki / nabemono / one pot wonders
• cilantro lime rice with seared fish
• crisp gnocchi with brussel sprouts and brown butter
• cold noodles: bibim guksu / taiwanese sesame noodles / ma jiang mian

I’m renaming my reading/media review to consumptions because it’s really about everything my brain has eaten and what my imagination is feeding on.

2022 was cynical but 2023 was paradoxically both a dumb-jock and theatre kid era. It felt like I didn’t have braincells to go around because I was doing so much sport and socialising every weekend, but I also met a friend who got me into plays and musicals.

As always, there’s a bunch of sci-fi here because it’s my comfort genre.

Hyperlinks indicates I've written about it in a separate post.

I was writing this up for a media round up but it got too long and I would really love to talk to people who are also consuming his content!

Dr Andrew Huberman (Huberdaddy) is a science youtuber/podcaster who posts (1) lectures on scientific topics and explains its human effects on everyday life (2) interviews academics/professionals about their practice and their knowledge. He is a tenured professor at the Stanford school of medicine so he has this fantastic, measured way of explaining difficult concepts thoroughly. Episodes are between 1.5 - 3 hours so it is great for a commute or a wind-down routine.

Criticisms about the man aside (and I know there are plenty), I appreciate anyone who tries to make science accessible. Like I vaguely know the science on good sleep, attachment theory, or trauma recovery, but Huberman pulls the people who are actually a leader in that field, and gives them the platform to explain the concepts and share their knowledge. This is how I found Dr Sinclair, and also Esther Perel and Dr Matt Walker. And through their work I find other academics.

(The longer I’m alive the more I try to focus on people’s work and not their personality or their fandom. This is especially true for academics and authors. Huberman also has the additional issue of being associated with productivity influencers who summarise and commercialise his content rip.)

I am still mind-blown that this is free and accessible. This is the stuff they should teach in schools. My favourite episodes are:

• how to sleep
• controlling your dopamine for motivation, focus and satisfaction
• how to build and maintain healthy relationships>

One evening after work, I attended a writers panel during Pride (February 2023). It was super fun, there was plenty of laughter and food for thought. I love sitting in on discussions between people who are so deeply involved in their craft and their community. The rapid-fire references made me realise there’s so much in the queer ‘canon’ I have yet to read. It’s like when one of the writers reference a book and the crowd murmurs in familiarity and another writer fertilises the discussion and I’m sitting there clueless realising that there’s so much more in this world I have yet to enjoy.

Experiences like this are grounding. I always feel like adult life keeps me so busy I live on autopilot and forget about how much literature means to me. Out of university, it’s quite easy to plod along the same path without adding anything new. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything because there’s so much to do and take care of as an adult. But I don’t want to become the kind of person who only references the texts I read in school! I want to keep reading and keep having original ideas!

So I was furiously scribbling notes throughout the whole thing. Below are some thoughts which left an impression, and very many book recs. (If any friends have read one of those, I would love to hear about it)

Reading Murakami is like a fever dream, like one second I can absolutely understand why he’s Nobel candidate material and the next second I’m reading about ghost pimp Colonel Sanders offering sex for a magic rock and completely accept that it is necessary for plot purposes.

I’m feeling a little crazy, this post started as a musings download after reading Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, but I finished reading it in 2021. And gentlemen, now we are in the year of our Lord 2023.

With Kafka, something unlocked in me about all the other Murakami books I’ve read. Stray cats, mysterious women, supernatural quests — all of a sudden the tropes in his previous books became a theme. And the themes transformed a language by which I could use to understand the message in Kakfa. And then after Kafka I read Killing Commendatore and started screaming when I saw the same themes re-appearing, and then I read Sputnik Sweethand and dog-eared the library book so desperately, it took me half an hour to undo my crimes.

So this post is a Kafka essay hijacked by a Murakami thesis. Or, this is how I read Murakami.

What can I say about the English Patient? I had borrowed it from the library and left it so dog-eared that my notes took weeks to write out. My loan got renewed twice and was about to expire for real and I still haven’t finished thinking through what I liked and was already 3 pages deep. So I bought it on kindle :) and just :) highlighted my heart out :)

(Goodreads: would you like to make your 165 notes and highlights visible?; hwa: no I would not)

Four people in a villa in Italy at the end of World War 2. The war lives on in all of them. You have the English Patient upstairs who is obsessed with the past. Then there’s Hana, the young nurse who is obsessed with the English Patient and Caravaggio, the reformed thief who is obsessed with her sanity. And there’s Kip, the Indian sapper obsessed with defusing bombs for the English. And then there’s the past.

( Death means you are in the third person. )

My summer clerk recommended this and lent me a copy!! (Alas I have not returned it). It came up because we both loved literature in translation and post-colonialism.

The book is structured as a dictionary of words used in Maqiao, a tiny village where the narrator was sent to during the Cultural Revolution. Each dictionary entry is a vignette from life and the collection of entries form a snapshot of an era, a microcosm of culture.

Encanto, to me, is like a deliciously cooked piece of prawn. 5 stars on yelp, instafamous, word-of-twitter recommended. I read the reviews and expect to love it. I walk to the restaurant and order the famous shellfish. It comes, it looks and smells amazing. I eat it.

My face contorts. I gag. The chefs fingerprints secrete a type of oil that reminds me of a ditch I fell into at 16. It’s seasoned with a specific brand of tears that have spat on my favourite teacher. The sauce has truffle. I love truffle. This truffle was sniffed out by a pig which walked over my ancestors’ grave and I’m hit with divine acid reflux.

But I went in expecting to adore Encanto. When I first heard We don’t talk about Bruno in December, I scoured youtube for the full version, then failing that, every other song and interview, trying to catch a glimpse of all the voices and characters. I loved the colours, the choreography, the animation of Felix’s face as he dances with Pepa. I loved the trope reversal for the main character. She’s ordinary, she’s giftless, and she wants to belong in a family of magical people. Yes please.

As it released and the tweets came in, my excitement grew.

Colombia. Intergenerational trauma. Magical realism. I’m immediately thinking about Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yes yes yes, there is so much history there. Well done Disney, shoot for those stars. Everyone is loving it and I thought I would too.

Lmao bitch you thought.

I hated it. It just reminded me of so many things that were a sore spot. Lazy story-telling and forced resolutions, protaganist-centred stories, selfish altruism, the magical realism/cultural appropriation debate… anyway, here’s 6k on why my beef against Encanto is personal and corporations can’t write nuanced stories.

Mid-way through 2021 I started being more reflective after reading. I usually read things once and move on but I found that I barely remember what I thought about a book. I remembered whether or not I enjoyed it, and maybe some quotes because I took notes. But that was it.

I finished the last episode of Super Vocal and I was gripped with a feeling that I’ve been trying to sort out ever since. Seeing other people work for their dreams makes me want to reflect on my own, and figure out what I’m doing with my life, where I’m going.

Ah, let me go back first.