What follows are three excerpts from my in-progress memoir Lights Go Down.
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My maternal grandfather’s high school graduation gift was a drafting table and a swing lamp to me at the auspicious time in which I’d be heading to art school in Minneapolis, led by a desire to be near snow, to see the band Low play, and to be where Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame had grown up. The lamp is dusty now but it hangs over my ash-covered messy desk as I write.
I made comics for many years. I recently started mentoring my cartoonist friend Alaina at her request, and I find myself affecting a gravelly voice, imitating my Long Island uncles, saying “I remember when I folded minis and brought them all over for consignment dollars.”
When my sister and I were young, our grandfather made us a three-story red dollhouse, ornate and full of life. Being a Chinese and Colombian immigrant to the U.S., and being a lover of art and craft, I believe he lacked the machismo of many men in this country who might have written off the idea of a dollhouse to be shared between a sister and a “boy.”
That would be me, the gender that I have to put in quotes because I’m 33, I identify as a trans gal, and the image of my past is one I must place in parentheticals or air quotes. If I bury my past underground, it’s only to protect it from the fallout.
I thought of my grandfather as I walked through Chinatown in Philly, where I live, one day and noticed for the hundredth time the twisting Chinese myth dragon statues. For the first time though, I noticed a European dude had sculpted them. I got up a whiff of my own private performative rage about it, not unlike the sweet, acrid scent of poppers, where you get a rush but you realize that it’s bad for you.
Philly’s Independence Library acts as both its Chinatown branch and its “Gayborhood” branch, a sanitized, real estate agent’s term that my first Philly boyfriend hated. He was a social work master’s student who researched the closed gay bars during the height of the AIDS crisis in Philadelphia, which fell heavily upon bars frequented by gay black men. I met the boyfriend in question off of Craigslist Casual Encounters. We huddled from the cold fall at The Dive Bar, ate free happy hour pizza, and made out at the table. He asked me if a was a writer, because my intro email to his ad seemed so composed. We kissed outside in the brisk air for a moment before he noted that queer PDA made him nervous.
It was at Independence Branch that I picked up the inconspicuous but restored to filth edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Joe Brainard’s epic poem, more blowjobs than Beowolf, called “I Remember.” The latter falls under the conceit that each line begins with the titular phrase, and it’s a great exercise to nick if you ever feel dry. All prose writing owes something to poetry, the language of religion and song. I don’t have synesthesia but I often visualize a lilting, curving line as I compose sentences. I have doodled such lines. When I would first get high, in college, my writing would get loopier as I got up the Wonkavator of weed. A handwriting expert once told me that my writing was tight, confined, stressed. This could point to why I hem so tightly to cannabis. However, I love all drugs, and if I had the time, the assurance that I wouldn’t die, and the budget for it, I would be so cross-faded that it would be the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 roster of drug cocktails. Cocaine, ketamine, tree, poppers, cigarettes, mushrooms, coffee or green tea. I’d do anything except opiates, not because I have a moral thing against anyone who uses them or anything, but simply given my absurdly addictive personality, I believe I would not live through “trying” opiates if I were to ever do that.
Voids figured heavily in my ten plus years of comic book work. I tried to be a graphic novelist. I tried very hard for a long time. In my hubris, my youthful foolishness, perhaps I thought the world owed me a living, as the Smiths lyric goes. In any case, I wrote pitch after pitch, wrote to publishers through editors, through my first agent, and directly to the head honchos. But in my decade of trying to earn a living wage with comics, I never got a solo or collaborative graphic novel off the ground. I have been blessed, privileged, and lucky to be included in several anthologies, and to be published in a comic for the Ley Lines series by Grindstone and Czap Books. For Ley Lines, I made a dense 24-page comic (later expanded in my PDF book Pink Juice) about the Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, and how I’d “failed” to make a graphic novel about him just after college, following a student exchange-type trip to Vienna and Prague.
I had a girlfriend in the mid-2010s who said once to me that she wanted to move away from her current artistic discipline to writing because, in her eyes, no one respected her chosen medium of video games. I wonder if I am giving up comics—to the degree that I am “giving up” comics, I’m not good at quitting things to be honest with you—to try to get, as Erasure sang, a little respect. I’m going to peel that onion of honesty back, though, and stings my eyes a bit before it sweetens when it caramelizes. I need money, and I tried to sell publishers my comics, and they didn’t bite. But I love drawing with every pore of my yearning body. Heck, if I could get better known with writing, I would be happy leveraging that newfound fame to make comics.
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m happy to be here, writing to you. I’m happy you’re reading.
That dorky Catcher in the Rye book, I’ll always remember the beginning: Holden Caulfield states that he doesn’t like what he calls the David Copperfield stuff, referring of course to Charles Dickens’ classic semi-autobiographical novel. Caufield doesn’t want to get into that stuff, how his parents’ parents’ met and all that. And he doesn’t like digressions, at least not too much. I digress, like Whitman I hope I digress. As far as bloodlines go, well what could be more relevant? The writer Eudora Welty said that any story, to be relevant to adults, needs to contain talk of blood and money, that being family (of any kind, I believe) and work.
I sobbed and sobbed when I watched the Studio Ghibli anime movie Kiki’s Delivery Service, directed by Hiyao Miyazaki, a film about a little witch girl whose supportive parents see her off on the outset of her journey to live on her own in a big city. I cried for the supportive framework I’d missed as a child, and I cried because I wanted to, as Tim Curry’s character sang in the crescendo of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “I wanted to look just like her.” Since then, I have dubbed the genre that Kiki’s belongs to as “people being nice to little girls.” The Wizard of Oz falls under this category. No kinds of stories fill my heart as much as little girls trying their toughest to make it, and others believing in them and helping them along their path.
Another Studio Ghibli movie that affected me and my view of artmaking is 1995’s Whisper of the Heart. In it, a young girl obsessed with fairy tales discovers her passion for writing. An old antique shop owner, grandfather of the boy she likes, mentors her. When the girl cries and says that her story is terrible, the old man reminds her that it’s like the rough-hewn stone that can be then carved to allow the sparkling gem to come out from underneath the grit. Hiyao Miyazaki, who wrote the film, improvises each movie he writes with storyboards done straight ahead without too much pre-planning. Whisper of the Heart director Yoshifumi Kondo succumbed to an aneurysm in 1998. It would be the only film he would helm in his long career in animation, and its quiet nostalgia remains a sparkling gem in the rough.
I like slow movies. I like boring movies. Whisper of the Heart with its lilting, quiet tone. Star Trek films with the ever-present hum of the Starship Enterprise. Solaris with its long, purple-tinted scene of cars driving down an expressway and inside futuristic tunnels. And Edward Yang’s new millienium masterpiece Yi-Yi (And a One and a Two…) Taiwanese New Wave director Edward Yang, who sadly passed in 2007, turned to films in mid-life, as my friend Ben informed me. I think of him as I try new things, try this piece of writing.
However, no filmmaker has ever pierced my heart as wholly as the Bengali director, writer, illustrator, and musician Satyajit Ray. His films, from The Apu Trilogy onward to The Music Room, Charulata, and Mahanagar (The Big City)—burrowed into my the depths of my soul, viewing after viewing, on Blu-ray, rented from the library on DVD, and on FilmStruck, then when FilmStruck crashed and burned, The Criterion Channel. Director Akira Kurosawa said that not having seen Satyajit Ray movies was like not having seen the sun, the moon, or the stars, and the snotty thing to say would be that he would know, yes the director of Ikuru and Rashomon would know about film stories.
1964’s Charulata shows us the title character, played by Madhabi Mukherjee, as beautiful as a woman can look on film. From the first frame of this film adapted from a story by Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is making things. She sews a “B” for her husband’s name, Bhupati, onto a handkerchief, and she soon looks for a book, singing an author’s name, “Bankim, Bankim.” (I could imagine another character singing in another context, “Baldwin, Baldwin”—one of my favorite authors.) Charu observes; she looks at people outside through a telescope, and she even looks at her own husband through the same device.
Charulata becomes a tale of an artist’s awakening when her cousin-in-law Amal, played by the charming Soumitra Chatterjee, comes into her and her husband’s life during a terrific downpour. Chatterjee, like his Apu in the beginning of Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), welcomes the rainstorm and appears blissed out in it, shouting with glee upon his arrival. Amal is a young writer, and through Bhupati’s urgings, Amal subtlely encourages Charu’s artistic tendencies, her strong connection to narrative, memory, and the village of her childhood.
Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (spoilers for a book from 1899) features a protagonist who commits suicide by drowning in the ocean—at least, that’s what I remember from classroom discussion during feminist literature class in high school, I couldn’t be bothered to actually read through the book because I found it pretentious at the time—but Charu’s literary awakening, complicated through an affair of the heart, strikes me much closer.
I’ve known those who’ve offed themselves. I don’t know if it freed them. It sure didn’t feel freeing to me to hear that someone you’d said talked about music with, or hugged after a show, decided to not be around anymore. I don’t get mad about it like some people do. I feel frustrated when I hear someone get pissed at someone who committed suicide, even though I know it can be just part of the grieving process. I don’t think it’s fair, even though the person isn’t around anymore. I just get sad, when I think about all that. When I think about everything they might have missed out on.
The best films, like my very favorite film, and yes it’s Apur Sansar, take this tack: choose life. You choose life, whenever you can. Near the beginning of the film, Apu gives an impassioned speech to his friend Pulu, who has taken him out to dinner. Apu describes the novel he’s working on: it’s about a poor boy from a small village, who remains poor but it’s no tragedy because he wants to live! Later in the film, Apu suffers a terrible loss, one that he could not have imagined at the beginning of the story because the relationship he came into was one he could never have expected. Apu reaches his lowest point; he loses the bliss energy that made him exercise with glee in the pouring rain. The losses of his life have built up (he has no living family at this point), and he is once again alone. At one juncture, he awaits a train, standing on the tracks, to hit him; later, he sits on a cliff and lets the pages of his well-loved novel fall to the trees below, scattering. By the end, he’s smiling again, and no longer alone.
Jumping back to Akira Kurosawa and to 1952’s Ikiru—the title, translated, means To Live. Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe sits, dying slowly, sitting on a swingset on a playground that he helped to build, wringing meaning from the last act of his life.
I landed in Minneapolis in 2005 at a fresh-faced eighteen to study making comics at MCAD. I graduated four years later, and I made the commencement speech, having been voted by my classmates after pitching my speech in the auditorium during lunch break one day. The day we were to graduate, I walked down 25th St. with a friend who was visiting for the occasion. She ducked into a bookshelf-laden place that she thought was a bookstore, but it turned out to be the office of this sweet old gay guy. I clocked him as being queer because he had Tom of Finland books on his shelves. He welcomed us in, saying that he was playing a text-based Roman empire RPG online. I mentioned that I was graduating with a degree in comic books, and he foisted Donald Duck and Tintin comics on me as gifts. I looked handsome and fresh-faced then, a butch dreamboat.
I played fast and loose with the graduation speech, doing my Christopher Walken impression (the line a friend had quoted: “Bruce Wayne, what are you doing dressed up as Batman?”), and repeating my grandfather Al Choy’s perennial advice: “Now remember, don’t do anything stupid, unless you really like it.” If you remember what I said about drugs and drug cocktails (anything but booze and opiates, for me), I follow that advice he gave me on the phone when I was a teen, I follow that advice to the T.
During my years at MCAD, I had several wonderful mentors and teachers: Kinji Akagawa in sculpture and interdisciplinary work, Ruth Voights in psychology and literature, animation teacher whose name escapes me (sorry, you were great—I loved how you gave everyone an “A” if they finished an reasonably-detailed animation within the semester’s time), photography instructor Rio Saito, Margie McGee who was my boss when I was a peer tutor at the Liberal Arts’ department’s Learning Center, John Gaunt in drawing, and comics and figure drawing instructor Terry Beatty (“a proud high school graduate,” he said in reference to himself) who had the particular distinction of having inked the Batman: Gotham Adventures Bruce Timm-designed animated-style comics I’d adored as a kid.
Over the four years I was there, I grew into myself a little bit. I quaffed my hair like Moz, I opened my shirt down a few buttons.
One summer night after the end of the semester, I hung out with my friend Sean, his brother Ian, my friend Lauren, and her friend. Ian is disabled, and with no wheelchair ramp up to their apartment, Sean carried Ian up the stairs. Ian, who is a Paralympic basketball player and as of this writing has won two medals, had been playing a game and he said over and over, “I’m so sweaty, so sweaty!” The two brothers, who looked a lot alike, couldn’t be more in contrast; Sean, lanky and bespectacled, studied classical figure drawing and sat at his kneeling desk obsessively, days and nights washed in the blue-white light of his light box. Ian had Thor’s arm muscles and a chiseled jaw. After Ian washed up in the bathroom a bit, he rolled out without a shirt and soap bubbles around his nipples. “Who wants to lick me off?” he yelled and we cackled. Ian and Sean and I went to Little Tijuana, and I asked if they wanted to go to this rager happening that night, but they declined. As I walked to the party house past the lights of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, I got a weird, lingering feeling that I was about to wander into a strange night.