How Much Can Your Life Change In One Year?

Hello, readers!

It’s been a year since I last posted anything on my blog, and lately I’ve been thinking to get back to writing. After a busy year filled with food and booze, my writer’s block finally resolved itself. I want to experience the joy of creating once more, and I want to write little essays that make people feel relaxed and connected. Thus I made a return to this blog to say hello again.

Ciao!

How much can your life change in one year?

To me, the world just became bigger and smaller. Last spring, I attended a spontaneous meet-up in the backyard of a barbecue place in Brooklyn, filled with people from all over the world who just recently moved to New York. One year later, the people I met there became my core friend group in the city.

Last October, I replied to a message from a cute guy who played guitar on his Hinge profile. We went on our first date taking walks and people watching at the Washington Square Park. A few months later, he became my boyfriend and my best friend.

In my first few years in New York, my friends and dates mostly came and went, moving to new cities and establishing new routines. This year, I finally had a group of friends that stayed, in a city that I can finally comfortably call my home.

For the last 3.5 years, I couldn’t travel outside the U.S., because my H1B visa stamping was too tricky to sort out during the pandemic. This March, I finally did my visa and started traveling.

For my first trip, I flew to Milan to celebrate my British friend’s 30th birthday, and then to Paris to reunite with my best friend from college. I got to admire the white marbling on the magnificent Duomo Cathedral, the golden hour at Lake Como decorated with colorful houses, and moonlight reflected from the river Seine just like the movies. I got disoriented in the Paris subway, and I ordered breakfast in Milan with 5 Italian words and many hand gestures. The world is my oyster again.

Lemon gelato at the Milan canal

It is pretty unreal to think about how much change can happen in one year. A lot of serendipities occurred and grew into amazing relationships, and a long-lasting norm ended within a few weeks. I came back from my blogging hiatus, and I’m ready to write regularly again.

How has your year changed? Can’t wait to reconnect with you again and hear about all your stories :)

Stay tuned,

Xoxo

Before Our Moms Became Moms

A writing workshop I have been attending over the last two months had been asking us to write about a mom we knew when we were a child - not our own mom, but our friends’ moms. Together, we marveled at all the different personalities that revealed under our pens - the one that would rush out of her showers naked to answer phone calls, the one that was always looking for things in her house, and the one that visited all the street vendors during family trips.

And I realized this one thing: now that we are adults, having reached our own child-bearing years, we saw these moms as if they were one of us. The moms that we wrote about are no longer distilled to the giant, larger-than-life figure that made noble sacrifices of themselves to take care of their kids - they had real personalities that belonged to real human beings.

Today, as I browsed through all the mom photos that my friends shared on social media, I also discovered this trend: almost everyone shared a picture of their mom when they were young. The mom before they were born, or the mom that just got started with motherhood, before years were taken from them to nurture a baby. The mom when they were still mostly themselves.

To put it in other words, it was the non-mom traits that attracted us to them in the first place, and it was the non-mom traits that we inherited from them, which made us proud of being their daughters and sons.

My mom is the most living-in-the-moment person I’ve met in my life, and I proudly inherited this trait from her. A great bundle of joy bursts through her like sunshine, as she smiles and dances, just eating a piece of candy. On another day, a little bunny-shaped calendar at a gift shop would humor her enough to make her day, which she would end up taking home for her to stare at every day in her home office. This joie-de-vivre attitude was part of what drove me to cooking, as I chased after the deliciousness that would make me smile and dance just like her.

She was also the most adventurous and courageous person, having lived in North Africa and the Middle East as one of the only Chinese women there, back in the 1980s and 1990s. Growing up admiring the handicrafts she brought back from all over the world, I never questioned my dreams of studying and living in a foreign country. I now have spent almost 9 years in the United States, 7,000 miles away from my hometown, Beijing.

Most of the time, a parent’s biggest influence on their kid was their non-parental traits - their love of fashion which inspired a kid to later become the editor of a major fashion magazine, or their firm belief in social causes which inspired a kid to go into politics. Yet, a lot of the times, a woman’s traits would only be reduced to a mom figure, once she had a baby. She is expected to devote most of her time, if not all, nurturing a baby. If she chooses to take time away from her baby to pursue her personal interests, her career, and her dreams, the society put blames on her. And nowadays, if a woman finds out she is accidentally pregnant when she’s not prepared, laws in certain states may even force to take away her rights to pursue a life she wants, because she is obligated to her undeveloped fetus that needs her body to grow into a baby.

And in return on Mother’s Day, we paint a holy picture of this larger-than-life mother figure, who sacrifices herself in order to care for her baby.

But today, I hope to celebrate my mother, and all the other mothers, as the person she is, despite of being a mother. Let’s celebrate her qualities that deeply influenced our lives, and giving us a world that we experienced, as a result of all of her pursuits in her personal interests, her careers and her dreams. Let’s all create some space in the society for the moms to live outside their mom life, so that we all can catch some breath.

'Tis the Season for Spontaneity

A few hours ago, I showed up at a barbecue place in Brooklyn to meet with a group for brunch. It was a chilly 50 degrees spring weather, and I just came from my date, so I was still in last night’s clothes. I wrapped myself in a large black coat hoping I didn’t look like a huge embarrassment, and like this, I pushed the door and entered the restaurant.

The brunch was an invitation from a girlfriend, and I was expecting a typical girly encounter - like the one you see in West Village, with three, four girls sitting at a small table, making small talk. Instead, I walked into a day-drinking party, with 10 people I didn’t know all chilling under the sun at a long outdoor table, holding their glasses of beer. Which was great, because it was cold outside, so I didn’t have to take off my black coat and reveal what was going on last night.

Meanwhile, these people had already been there for 2 hours.

I introduced myself to a French couple who had just moved to New York from Madrid, and a guy who had just flew in from Geneva to visit his girlfriend working in the UN. I caught up with my girlfriend, and saw another friend that I last met 3 weeks ago at a bar. We chatted under the sun for 2 hours about everything and nothing - the Shanghai lockdown, Sunday scares, the best Italian restaurant in the city, and then we ended up at a courtyard of a cafe. We said goodbye afterwards.

And just like that, spring is back with its full spontaneity.

The other day, me and my friend were walking along the East River on Queens' side after work, when we decided to try out a new Malaysian restaurant nearby for dinner. Google map led us to this block behind all those warehouses right next to a homeless shelter, and it became questionable whether we should go back or not.

The sky was already dark at around 7:30pm, and the only lights we could see were the car bumper lights on the road. Tempted by the food, we decided to still give it a go and head to the restaurant on full speed, by foot. Suddenly, a random dude across the street started yelling at us. It sounded scary, and I didn’t even dare to look his way. I was about to grab my friend’s arm and tell her to walk faster, or even start running, except that she realized the guy was actually her boyfriend, trying to say hi.

So, all three of us made it to the restaurant, located deep inside a warehouse, and discovered that the place was just an industrial kitchen - with only one guy sitting at the front to greet all those delivery people. We watched him heat up all our food, took it away, and had dinner at the rooftop of my apartment building, overlooking the amazing Manhattan skyline. The food was great - we were definitely ordering it again - but probably just online only next time.

After a winter of hibernation, I, or we, start having escapades like this again. We get spontaneous, and give it to the world to guide us to where we are gonna go. Both you and I know that we are aching for things like this just as much as our afternoon naps, and we’re excited to have more of it this summer. After all, there are only so many days of Netflix and chill we can stand, before we get bored out of our mind.

So, there’s that, and cheers to the beginning of everything fun in the year of 2022.