A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

CONTENTS

A Gesture ........................................................................ 4 On Booze and Why We Drink It............................................. 7 On the Common Room ....................................................... 9 On the Playground ........................................................... 11 On Maturity ................................................................... 13 On Love ........................................................................ 17 On the MTR ................................................................... 19

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

While it may have an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or gesture.
- Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

A Gesture
It is English class in room 1802. Ten of us sit in a rectangle, eyes scanning lines of text in the soft and beige December sunlight. The book we have in front of us is Michael Ondaatjes Running in the Family, the writers semi-autobiographical attempt to make sense of his distant Ceylonese past. In the passage we are reading, Ondaatje is stirring in his sleep on his friends couch in Toronto, hung-over from a Christmas party the night before, yearning for his childhood in Ceylon. We take turns reading aloud, self-conscious, careful to pause after the right clauses and enunciate each syllable with precision. It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia. As Isabella reads, and Ondaatje shifts on his impromptu bed, suddenly I think about the ten of us a year from now shifting under our cotton blankets. Children of the sub-tropics, breathing in brittle Anglo-American winter. Sitting in dining halls, kept warm by a handful of new friends and thick collegiate hoodies, eating instant noodles and fruit punch for dinner, dreaming of Asia. I think of our dreams a year from now, of the delicious Hong Kong humidity, of cops n robbers on black and blue turf, of the common room on a Monday morning; think of my brother coming home for the holidays thin, hair unkempt, looking more prisoner of war than college boy. I realize how hungry well feel a year from now, for Asia, for Hong Kong, for home, for childhood. I want to take the last 18 years of our lives to the taxidermist, or pack them all in a Tupperware box or capture them in a glass bottle with a stopper, the kind entomologists use to store butterflies. I want to put them down in words. Write about them. But memories are easy to write about. Sights and smells and names can be jotted down effortlessly, with the flick of the nib. Theres something else that I want to capture. I scan the room watch us trudge through the memoir page by page. Running is a difficult text. It is all over the place, neither fiction nor memoir as Ondaatje himself equivocates on the back cover. It is, as Ms. Yeo exclaims, raising the book above her head as if it were a goblet of holy water or baby lion, a delightful mix of I have no idea what to call it! I pause at each face, watch us underline and circle, browed furrowed with effort. We are seniors. We chat with teachers like we do with our friends. Start our mornings with cups of bitter latt from the 9th floor caf. Walk the corridors with a senior swag. And yet, despite our confidence, during every class we struggle to make sense of the text in our hands, to distinguish right from wrong, to give meaning to our thoughts.

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

Was that love, when Hamlet yelled at Ophelia in Act II? Was that love, yesterday, when he was talking to me? Is there anything beneath New York other than the Valley of Ashes? Beer and fried chicken? Will Lily Briscoe paint her picture? Will I? Will I ever know? After English class that day, I realized that it is not Asia, nor the Hong Kong experience, nor childhood memories that I want to preserve on page (although what I have written may reference them all) but this tenuous age of adolescence. This limbo period of both and neither child nor adult, this grappling with everything, this knowing nothing, and the feelings, thoughts, fears, ambitions, doubts and sources of happiness that come with it. And so I decided to put together this collection a messy throw bag of narrative, poetry, lab investigation, snapshots and quotes that I have gradually compiled over the past year. I tried to trim, edit, beautify, give it some cohesive shape and form however, the text proves to be just as unknowable and unwieldy as its content. Like Running in the Family, it is neither fiction nor memoir, and unlike Running, has no logical order some things may make sense to you, some may seem like me wailing on about nothing at all. What you do have here is simply a portrait or gesture, a humble attempt to salvage with words one persons adolescence, or as Ms. Yeo adequately put - a delightful mix of I have no idea what to call it. Enjoy and make of it what you wish.

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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A Gesture

On Booze and Why We Drink It

Yi-Ling Liu

You are just finishing up dinner with a couple of friends - a small dinner not a big one because big dinners make you feel too slow, too lethargic for nights such as the one you anticipate today. You drink booze, because wine tastes good with a pasta pomodoro dinner. It is 10 oclock, your cheeks have already begun to flush and the grooves of your earlobes are glowing. Glowing with that rich and familiar warmth brought about only by a few glasses of Pimms or cheap wine or the whatever on the top of the happy hour menu. The booze, you can hear it too, in the conversation and easy laughter booze talk, booze words, tumbling freely out of your own mouth like confident and clumsy toddlers only a couple weeks after having learnt its first steps. You leave the restaurant at five past ten, when the night is still young and your footsteps sober and tentative. The bar hopping starts. Chocolate shots, tequila with salt and lime, White Russians with sickly little glac cherries, fruity concoctions at the 10-shot bar, Tsingtao beer, gin and tonic your repertoire is arbitrary, eclectic, ambiguous. Your taste is experimental just like every other kid out there under-18 who doesnt know what they want, doesnt really care what they pass by their lips as long as it contains the reckless tang of anything remotely alcoholic. Now the greasy and dirt-flecked street of bars looks to you like the Milky Way. Faces tremble under the neon lights and the dozen crass club soundtracks meld together into one smooth symphony. Youre gliding down the street now, and everybody is smiling, smiling at you. Cousins friends friends, the dude at your afterschool tutorial class, the kid you met two summers back at Andover you greet these acquaintances like long lost identical twins, like old Nam veterans from the same regiment. How ARE you? (your voice is a little shrill now,) the embrace is exchanged and the he or she drifts out of your life as quickly as they entered, relegated to the back of your mind along with all the other trivial slivers of Lan Kwai midnight memory. Now youre dancing. Its well past midnight and anything goes. The world is a carnival, camels become weasels become whales. Your arm is around somebodys shoulder; somebody else mid-dance misses your cheek and plants a fat kiss on your ear. Half the wall has dissolved into the lights and all faces have morphed together into an incoherent jumble of flesh, except for one face, at the far end of the room. That face, the twitch of its smile, the curve of the jawbone youve memorized it long before you took your first drink. You know youve had enough, but when somebody passes you another, you take it, you drink the booze because you wonder how soft her hair would be against your cheek, what his hands would feel like on the curve of your waist.

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

But an hour has passed and that one face still remains on the other end of the room, a distant and intangible silhouette, and suddenly you feel so damn tired. You make your way to the nearest stool, and as Dionysus charms your friends, you think of the old woman you saw earlier in the night, cross-legged at the corner of the steps, shaking a tin bowl of one-dollar coins, watching the ankles of the partygoers as they pass by. She sits alone waiting, silent and wordless. Shaking the tin bowl like a broken tambourine. You sit alone, wordless and waiting. There are secrets lodged firmly in the back of your throat and you drink booze because it invites you to talk about the things that one can only talk about in the comfort of the deep night. Invites you to confess. All the words that youve kept to yourself, thoughts that youve carefully concealed, little ugly things, hamsters with two heads, crudely cut gems somebody else has them too. Somebody else is just as strange as you are, loves the way that you do. You want somebody, in their inebriated splendor, to hear you, really hear you and say I get you man, I get you. You drink booze because you want people to know. You want people to know, to know. And if you really are a deviant, and instead of a flash of recognition, you get from the other person an awkward smile or chuckle in return, you can always claim the next morning, having risen from bed, mouth dry, eyes aching, hair still laced with the smell of somebody elses cigarette you can claim that no, no, I had no idea what I was saying, you can claim that it was the booze although it was really you talking all along.

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A Gesture

On the Common Room

Yi-Ling Liu

April morning. The sky a palette of pale grey. The room is silent. Hollow like a cave until eleven oclock and the room erupts! Erupts with 100 or so 17 going on 18s, the opening and closing of doors, the hustle and bustle of break time, the pick and strum of guitars. Red swivel chairs are sat on in a dozen different ways planked, stood on, straddled Mahjong tablets clank; the vending machine runs out of coffee. This is the common room at breaktime. On the crimson sofa: big plush shark, sprawled bums, sweat and grime from cross country five months ago. On the wall: a menu from the roadside daipaidong, an imperial costume from the south stand days of Qianlong On the whiteboard: scrawled illustrations and in neat, black letters Please help yourself to chocolate and biscuits Veronica although our dear friend Veronica has transformed over the course of the past year from Veronica to eronica to erotica. At twenty-five past eleven, Rooster Breistroff screeches - aliwitt youre so slow hurry up youre so slow! florence gets ups in two seconds and you get up in a million! The signal is made, the herd groans and grumbles eff biology I hate biology another five minutes of struggle on the couches until the room thins out and the last few brave soldiers ditch truancy for another day, sling on their bags and trudge off to class. The doors shut. April morning, the sky is one palette of pale grey and once again, the room is silent and hollow like a cave.

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.
- Once More to the Lake, E.B. White

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A Gesture

On the Playground

Yi-Ling Liu

Every morning, at seven-forty, Meiz and I stroll hand in hand into the school gates. We are no doubt a strange sight. A 57 senior lugging a massive backpack, eyes dulled with senioritis and a first grader half her size, clad in mary-janes, eyes glinting like opals under their lids. Two years ago when my sister enrolled in reception and I was onto my sophomore year, he was three-quarters of what she is now, shy and incredibly nervous. After walking into the schoolyard, wed sit together on a bench and observe the kids running around on the playground. This was the primary school side, a realm that I had not explored in years, a snapshot that shone with the illusory, nostalgic quality of an old photo. Now that I had returned after years of middle-school exile, I reveled in the hopscotch squares and lively games of cops n robbers. Ten minutes every morning. For ten minutes, I rekindle a feeling I thought had all but faded away - the irresistible urge to dangle on the monkey bars, holler like Tarzan and just play. Every morning, Id watch the playground activity, as my sister would sit doe-eyed, clutching my hand tightly. One year later however, Im clutching hers. At seven-fifty, she sees Jenny on the other end of her playground and I feel her hand slacken instantly. Leaving me already Meiz? She smiles, a sheepish, apologetic smile, and begins to skip away. Meiz? I stay seated on the bench, one hand limp and empty, the other clutching a plastic cup of coffee. I want an iced chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles, damn it, and yet I am drinking an espresso the exotic elixir of the grown up world, for working dusk through dawn, for the jaded and the world-weary. I sip the bitter coffee and feel what my mother mustve felt when I grew out of my old shoes, feel minutes multiply into cancerous hours, feel days and months and years proliferate. Bye Meiz! I shout weakly after her as she runs off. Perhaps I should shout louder, catch her before she sprouts like a long, green bean and flourishes beyond my reach. I stand up and my bag is full of bricks. Before I leave I see from a distance that her uniform is rumpled. As she fixes her crooked collar, I instinctively reach to fix mine only to feel the surface my bare collarbone, cold with the chill of death.

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

Im standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliffI mean if theyre running and they dont look where theyre going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. Thats all Id do all day. Id just be the catcher in the rye and all.
- J.D. Salinger, A Catcher in the Rye

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A Gesture

On Maturity

Yi-Ling Liu

An Investigation: maturity levels of CIS students at a school dance Introduction: Maturity is defined by a state in which one is aware of ones responsibilities as a human being and in full self-control. Age is often an indicator of increased maturity. This experiment will attempt to confirm this perception through observation of CIS school children at a school dance. Aim: Investigate how age of a CIS student affects its maturity. Hypothesis: As age increases, maturity increases. Variables: Independent: Age Group (7,8,9,10,11,12, 13) (Year) Dependent: Maturity (Scale of 1-10) Controlled: Temperature (Like a third-rate sauna) (Measured by sensation) Equipment: Dance Floor x1 Disc Jockey x1 Teacher Supervisors x2 Do-gooder extra-curricular group with pizza and soft drinks (must be overpriced) Method: 1. Set Up Dance 2. Observe Data Processing: Age Group Maturity (Year) 7 9 Observations The youngest are the most reserved, the most mature, dressed up and dapper, idling at the perimeter of the dance floor, talking in hushed tones as if at some upscale cocktail soiree. Not a fan of fast, impetuous, childish movement. Prefers slow dancing, and demonstrates an unusual

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

9 10 11

7 6 5

12

13

interest for the opposite gender. Bops politely to the music. Decide they are too cool for the dance and go to the Stanley waterfront instead. To admire the rocks. Slightly less cooler than the Year 10s. Dance confidently, move meticulously to rhythm. Affected. Self-conscious. Utilize conventional every-night-ata-club type dance moves. All over the place. Interspersed throughout the dance floor. Neurotic, capricious. May have something to do with the bottle of lemon tea that they seem to be passing around with unusual enthusiasm. Center stage. Wearing garments appropriated from the costume closet nearby experiment location. Feather boas. 18th Century gowns. Inebriated on what seems to be happiness. Arms flailing like rabid monkeys, or seven year olds.

Data Processing

Conclusion Evidently, the hypothesis was incorrect - maturity is in fact inversely proportional to age. There appears to be a sudden and rapid drop at the Year Group of Year 13. This trend may be attributed to the Theory of Living Only Once (YOLO), which states that young people, as they age, increasingly aware of their pending adulthood and mortality, and the burdens that these new developments bring about, are driven by an urge to let loose, contradict this trend and relinquish any form of responsibility. Result: maturity declines. Evaluation

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

Ensure fairness in intrusiveness of supervisors. Presence of supervisors may affect levels of maturity. In order to ensure a fair experiment, relatively non-intrusive supervisors i.e. Keith Sanders or Brian Mulcahy, are recommended.

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

Human beings are funny. They long to be with someone but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worse, returned.
- Sigmund Freud

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A Gesture

On Love

Yi-Ling Liu

When I walk in I already know that you are there. My eyes sweep across the room from the dull throbbing glow of the vending machine to the tangled mosaic of backpacks and winter jackets and sprawled adolescent frames on blue couches I look everywhere, but at you. I give you nothing, not even a sliver of a gaze, so that if you did look my way itd seem like I really didnt give a shit about you at all. Didnt give a shit about the comment you made in class 2nd period or the pattern on your socks, dont give two shits about the title of the novel you clutch in your hand or the flavor of toasted sandwich that you picked up at the 9th floor caf today. Perhaps youd glance at me and think I was indifferent, content, going about my life heedless of the whatever going on in yours. And yet, the indifference is so feigned and theatrical and ridiculous. I hold my posture erect, an actor on stage, conscious of you as if you were conscious of me. I talk to the whoever on my right but whoevers words are muffled, inaudible I cannot hear what is being said, cannot concentrate. I nod, yes, blink, nod again, but you have charged the room and put me on edge. I do not look at you, push you out of my periphery. I nod, yes, blink, give the whoever my whatever, give her my polite attention, but all I can hear is you. I nod and reply and find that my voice has strained to an octave higher, I mouth my words like some bad dubbing job on an obscure matinee Filipino TV show that nobody ever really watches. The other day, HBO was playing a re-run of Sherlock Holmes 2, the Guy Ritchie one with Downey Jr. as Sherlock and Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler. Theres this one point in the movie where theyre bantering about something stupid but for no more than a second he looks at her and feels such a longing, and all of a sudden I feel this pulse, this ache that runs from the bottom of my jaw to the edge of my collarbone. And then the action continued. Sherlock probably whipped some fancy wordplay out of his ass and found some hidden locket and punched some guy in some martial arts19th century brawl hybrid only Hollywood has the means of choreographing, but I stared right through the screen as if it were made of mesh. I do not look at you. Yet the pores on the side of my cheek, the thin tips of my ears, my toes, the vacuum of air welling within my lungs stretch towards you like the delicate points of a magnetic compass quivering towards the North. You stand up, and as I watch you leave the room my collarbone throbs, painful and yearning.

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear. The tide is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which. His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
- Elizabeth Bishop, Sandpiper

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A Gesture

On the MTR Doors shut, train rolls on, my world falls away into the backdrop. I forget that I am late to class, forget my heartstrings and what tugged on them that morning, forget all and become spectator to somebody elses life - my own is on standby. Train rolls on and I become an archeologist, digging in the soil for hidden gems, scouring among the crude grains for diamonds, ruby and amethyst. Digging, I find the middle-aged woman with the clasped fingers, soft frown, hand clutching rails, yellow Adidas jacket faded to mustard after too many cycles in the wash and I hold her with my eyes like Id hold a chunk of soil in my hands. Chip away at her, unearth a job as hair-washer at the local salon, a broken marriage, a love for Korean soaps, a son who forgets to visit. Pick in one hand, trowel in the other, I wonder what her favorite TV show is, who she loves, what she would die for, knowing that in an hour when the doors open again Ill go to my desk, find pen and paper and take the jacket, the handrail, the crease between her eyes, the broken marriage, the son, take it all and thread them into words and sentences and stories. She is a gem to me, a semi-precious stone and I cradle her story with my pen like I imagine I would Cradle my first child. I cradle her story because I have no stories of my own. I am young and green like a cabbage, with no stories of my own. No scars of trauma to lament upon, no ache of profound love to set four chambers aflame. So I go to the MTR and I sit and watch.

Yi-Ling Liu

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A Gesture

Yi-Ling Liu

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