A lot of it is my own projections. But leaving LA (my only other home besides Virginia) has begun to free me from that looming sense of judgement. I’m trying to peel away at it, piece by piece. The cage is built of skeletons from all sorts of different corners of my closet. The preppy southern white majority in my small town middle school. The judgmental alternative white kids I’d surround myself throughout my life after, thinking that being in their club, laughing at those who aren’t, offered me sanctuary from the out-of-placeness anchored in my soul since my experience with the former.
LA is built for rumination and contempt. You are your own planet, occasionally pulled into a gravitational orbit of another, but ultimately spinning down the 110 again, returning to your secluded solar system of a neighborhood. All the time wondering, “Did I talk enough? Did I talk too much? When they said that thing about so-and-so, was that targeted at ME?” And then you proceed to not see any strangers again, until you strap your shoelaces on, get in your car, spend twenty bucks on a sandwich. All this while, in isolation, your sense of reality remains unchecked. It mutates and evolves into a new life-form. These anxieties become gravitational truths. And say, you get a ticket from a grouchy cop, or maybe a service worker was short with you at the 20$ sandwich store. You begin to rot, thinking the world may not be that good of a place after all, statistically proven in the minimal interactions you have with it. It’s an expensive game of Russian roulette.
I’m talking about the kind of people whose houses—both spiritually and physically—don’t have open doors (which I feel like would be the only way I’d be able to stay sane remaining in LA; with a perpetual friend or two crashing on my couch, some sort of Seinfeld-Kramer situation). My most cherished memories in Los Angeles aren’t of any fancy Hollywood event or crazy hard-to-get-to rave, but late nights on living room floors with friends packed like sardines, not afraid to speak their minds.
So far in Chengdu, people might be gruffer and impolite (at least by LA white people standards, take that what you will), but still go out of the way to help. The security guard might have a Sichuanese accent so thick and loud I feel liked I’m getting yelled at by my grandpa, but he’ll walk me all the way to where I need to go and if I walk by later he’ll ask if I made it there okay. Even when people act up, if someone honks at me to get out of the way, if a worker acts like the question I asked was the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard, it’s easy for me to keep it from changing the lifeforms of my planet, because the owner of the Thai place under my apartment always offers me a cigarette when I walk by, and the cleaning lady at the University buffet I frequent notices if I haven’t eaten there in a few days.
I’ll probably write more about LA, I have years worth of rumination and contempt. I don’t know if anyone will have access to this, but I’m content burying it gently in code for now--Goodbye!
