journal entries
by Amanda Zhang
11/03/2020 | journal writing
7/19/19
I think heartbreak takes on many forms. Yesterday I dreamt about Eunice, the only other Asian girl on my team at work. I can’t remember the details specifically anymore, but I remember feeling scared and in awe. She holds power and I oscillate between despising her and admiring her refusal to be soft in the presence of white people. I dreamt we went on a date or something. I felt fearful and full. Then I woke up to a text from Sandy to go to an event in NYC.
I need to find spaces where it is safe to feel. Everywhere feels like a war zone and I never know when I’ll step on a bomb to the heart. If I had it my way, I’d be crying every damn day, when I walk by the homeless, when Eunice feels cold and immoveable, when Sarah yells on the phone, when, and this is painful because of how much of a permanent reality this is, white people invade my boundaries every day at work and simultaneously treat me as invisible.
Writing feels like I’m digging up held pain and allowing the page to hold it instead. And also somehow, wrapping it in a blanket of some form of tenderness. Like holding a precious jewel.
I’m at the part in my book where 19-year-old Audre Lorde hooks up with a 47-year-old breast cancer survivor. I read it as her making love to her older future self, unable to pierce the cloud of sadness surrounding this woman despite all her eager loving, because Audre had yet to experience aged sorrow. As have I. And I thought of Rose, in all her power, genius, and wisdom, that cloud of sadness that Alice and I can’t wrap our minds or hearts around, no matter which way we turn it around, like a glowing orb of magic. That’s what Rose is, some felt and lived magic that contains stories and powers if unleashed and shared would change the world.
I think heartbreak takes on many forms.
7/20/19
I just got home from the city where I met Randall after their dance practice to go see a play called The Box Owner, performed by a recently graduated Chinese international student from Sarah Lawrence College. Randall has an enormous presence. They draw people in like they’re going to make them laugh and also take care of them.
They sat next to me in the dimmed audience seating section. We watched together as this Chinese girl with a Chinese accent painted her suffering on stage with her body, glittering under stage lights. She was fierce, embodied, and unapologetic. I think there were things we both longed for in that moment, and I had not felt so accompanied in my otherness for a long time. There was a real and genuine exchange happening between us and the performer and I knew and saw the places it touched in Randall as if we had eaten at the same kitchen table as children.
Audre Lorde echoed multiple times throughout her book that love could not fix everything, and sometimes was not enough, despite all that it did give. Love isn’t enough, and yet it is the source of everything that could ever be so. I felt awkward in my body and voice today. And Randall was so extensively embodied, shadow overlapping their self perfectly and boldly. They felt like a hand smacked on the table. Nothing else to it. I struggled to catch up to myself. Why was I running away? Or what was I running toward?
Love is having somebody to walk with. I look for Audre everywhere.
7/25/19
Audre Lorde told me: allowing myself to feel the deepest most subterranean parts of myself is like slowly lowering into a warm bath full of snakes. I can do it as gingerly as possible but the danger is inevitable. In fact, it is and will always be there, and one day we will all be pushed into it whether we like it or not. And avoiding looking into their reptilian eyes will not protect me anymore than ignoring all of the unspoken words I have for those I want.
I keep having visions and dreams of people in my life where they are witnessed. I dreamt I was walking through the empty hallways of a college frat house and couldn’t tell if there were people around or if I was feeling a memory. At the end of the hallway was a dimly lit room where I found one of Nate’s old frat brothers sitting fully clothed and dripping wet in a bathtub half full. I got in to sit next to him, only to find that his face was twisted with grief. I leaned in to kiss him, his hand cupping the back of my neck, and he stopped me when our foreheads touched, just crying and crying until I also started to.
I got dinner with Leo and Charlie last week in Koreatown. Leo stood with all his confident stature and business attire, having just commuted in from Connecticut, and yet his eyes were someplace else. Charlie wasn’t there either. He kept going on about his work stresses, words punching their way out of his mouth, tumbling down onto the dinner table, rolling onto the floor like water. Leo and I tried to hold it all but it kept spilling over. And I see how Charlie reaches out to people in the office, as if extending oneself to meet one-on-one with strangers in a daily happening, or maybe something he needs so much for survival it doesn’t register as something that takes social programming in others. The hurt he expressed was armored with thinly veiled classism around whether our boss was competent or not. So I left too, and looked for where they went, and found them, and kept walking while looking back. I wondered what would have happened if the two men sitting across from me suddenly embraced and kissed and held each other and demanded each other’s presence. I wondered where I was going. I think there’s only so much I can say sometimes.
It was about 9:30pm. I texted Eunice knowing she would be in the city, asking her if she wanted to hang out and head back to Hoboken together. I wanted so badly to sit next to her on an empty train and feel her late night energy. She said she was still out getting drinks and dinner, but thanks, and how was the Korean restaurant. After I left, I hugged Leo goodbye and wanted to text him that I loved him, and that I was there for him. But what I felt was a longing much bigger than the both of us, and our college days were over, and I didn’t know where he stood, and the snakes were everywhere. So I didn’t.
Eunice approached me today on the way to our team lunch. She was wearing a white button up short sleeve top with light wash jeans that fit perfectly. I frequently wonder about the clothes she wears, what she must have been thinking when she bought them, what kind of white people would be looking at her when she did. She came up to me from behind, a little cautiously and asked how I was doing. I wondered if Eunice was the kind of office Asian that only speaks when spoken to, like me.
8/12/19
Yesterday was Saturday. The week reminds me so much of swim practice when I was a kid. Like treading water furiously trying to keep up with everyone else who seemed to stay afloat with ease, and as the clock hits 5:30pm, going home like I can reach for the bank of the pool and catch my breath only to swim back in the next day. That’s what lunch with Nate feels like in the middle of the work day, his hugs a respite from the cruelty of office politics.
I walked Nate to work at the grocery store next to my corporate building. Looking at him gives me so much peace and calm. He’s the kind of person who exudes calm, nonviolent, joyful, and consistent energy, what I somehow can never evoke within myself. His eyes are kind and curious and he’s a good story teller just because he enjoys finding things out and sharing with people. It has always taken the pressure of talking away and a welcome relief when I’m mute due to the backup inside of incommunicable feelings, usually due to the disconnect of racial experience between us. I also like that he doesn’t watch me when I’m being weird and neurodivergent, he just listens and responds without judgment regarding my erratic behavior. Maybe that’s why I never make eye contact with people at work, I hate to see the way they watch and study me.
I rarely communicate my thoughts to him, and I know it’s because of our different racial identities and that he won’t understand or know what to say, but also maybe because it’s just inappropriate given that most of my immigrant racial suffering is inseparable from being born into the horrifying culture of the American upper class.
Cate in grade school always took my questions seriously and answered them with great consideration even if they were abrasive, intrusive, and sometimes downright accusative. Maggie in high school was the first person I think truly loved me and who I fully loved back, because she knew what I was about and what I was searching for even though I made her cry sometimes. Janet in college always listened to my darkest thoughts and some bullshit around “reaching enlightenment” even when mental illness made me harsh around the edges and uncomfortable to be around. And Ivy always said my weird behavioral quirks were her favorite thing about me, because it made me real and unpretentious. I think they all thought these things because I gave them more than I hurt them, even though I literally could not comprehend how at the time as I drowned in self-hatred, and even during moments when I did bring them real pain. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of them are Asian women even though up until recently I had mostly white friends. I wish I had taken the time to think of them more in the moment, instead of being so consumed by the vortex of my feelings. I wish I took more time to process the lessons they taught me, I wish I took the time to write them poems and camp out in their lives too. I wonder if the ways I hurt them was the collateral damage of me fighting whiteness within. I know I have a lot to apologize for.
After I dropped Nate off at the grocery store, I headed into my building for some free coffee and big empty space to wander and think. Opening my computer I was relieved to find that Alice had messaged me asking if I wanted to video chat as she cleaned her apartment. Watching Alice do mundane tasks and share details of her life sometimes feels like the only connection to reality I have.
I feel like I need to move away. I could move back to Chicago and do a service industry job again and make art.
8/15/19
I’m crystal clear we are in a war where the stakes are life and death. It’s hard to write these days, I’m spending so much energy strategizing to stay alive. I feel like death and evil are so near, so palpable. Every day I wake up and walk into the battle field knowing I’m subjecting myself to violence and their cruelty. But Toni Morrison said evil is mundane, uninteresting, simple. Cruelty is not complex, deep, nor profound. The pain is only as complex and deep as the goodness inside me reacting to it is. I think that’s why it has been hard to put words down, there is simply nothing to say other than to try to stay alive.
12/13/19
I think it’s time to get in touch with my crazy, my too much, my I need to make you understand but if you don’t I will have to kill you. I want to be truly disgusting to others but not myself. I want to reach the image of maximum disgust while still being able to trust and understand myself.
Yesterday I had a phone call with Ivy where I felt a pain in the deep place of my chest, the hollow, echo place that resonates like a drum. I see how identity politics can blind a lover in one eye but can’t understand what they see out of the other. Why couldn’t we tell the truth to each other and what were we really avoiding? There is a place where self betrayal eats at you on the inner rinds until you spend the rest of your life clawing back to that core only to find more bricks in the way every time you feel you’ve found the answer.
The process of forgetting is sinister, from the habits we make out of our silences. A self destruction ritual. Between my two hands I hold a glowing stone that is the reminder that I hold warmth in the frigid world. There are some things that aren’t choices and we must show each other the pieces that light the way.
When I was in middle school I loved the imagery of a pearl made from the repeated rubbing of sand inside an oyster, and the irritation created a beautiful gem. If every piece of sand met an oyster we would have beaches of pearls to sink our feet into. Iridescent deserts of transformation.
How do I incorporate pain into the very substance of my living and make it work for myself?
12/23/19
I had a dream where I got Jeff Bezos and Mitch McConnell mixed up but that’s the point. My dad and I sat down for a meal with JeffBezosMitchMcConnell and were trying to convince him to let the Senate bring Green New Deal and other issues to the table. We did the whole POC trying to talk civilly to white people performance, dancing like monkeys, and at one point after a brief silence my dad said, “You know, sometimes there’s a cardboard box inside you, and it holds other boxes, and eventually you keep them shut long enough, you realize it’s just boxes all the way down.” I jumped up onto the table, “What the fuck do you stand for??” And JBMM looked straight at us unblinkingly, eyes glinting, opened his mouth and laughed and laughed and laughed.
“The difference between poetry/and rhetoric/ is being willing to kill/ ourselves/instead of our children.” — Audre Lorde
1/15/20
Valerie said that when we message over chat she feels like we are emotionally cuddling without touching. This sparked a deep feeling within me of secrecy and understanding. I told her we created an invisible and floating island where we stand together at the shore, and when nothing makes sense and everything feels bad, at least we are looking out from the same shoreline.
Audre Lorde said, I write because I want to create something which is not there. How do we create something which is not there? And how do we learn to recognize it as the currents rush us toward a finite ending and before we can grab hold of one another.
So many painful ripped apart memories.
The boat man in the Chinese countryside when I was no more than 8 years old. His face I recognized and loved immediately.
If I could have wrapped my 8 year old love and anguish into a ball and handed it to him I would have. Instead I had an unbearably inadequate question. “Zhe shi hen lei ma?” Are you tired? I see you. He turned his head up from where he was sitting and that stare I will never forget. What do you mean? What do you mean?
The intolerable temporality of passerby through the bus window. You look like my mom, good bye forever.
When I was in 3rd grade I thought Jackie Simmons was a witch with powers. She was a Chinese girl adopted into a white family as a baby. Things worked out for her in ways I couldn’t seem to make work for me. In glitter pen I scribbled into my spiral journal, Jackie is a witch! Jackie is a witch! Taped a candy corn mini eraser to the page and closed my journal.
There is a way to hold onto a passerby on a motorcycle on a moving bus. If I focus hard enough and want it badly enough, I will meet this man some day again. This is not the death of us.
Amanda Zhang (she/her/hers)
Chicago-based Chinese-American poet barreling toward self-creation. Accountable to the lineage of Black Feminism. Student of Audre Lorde.
instagram: @keyboard_smashh
twitter: @amanda_zhangg