From: "Wendy Fang Yu Hsu" <wendyhsu@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: composing about a past based on the present in Webmail
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 14:04:45 -0400
To: "Wendy Fang Yu Hsu" <wendyhsu@virginia.edu>

My perception of time is inspired by the Buddhist notion of an ephemeral present. "Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form; sensation, thought, impulse, consciousness are also like this." Both past and future exist as merely concepts, virtual entities in life's reality; the only real existence is the present itself, the NOW, which is ever flowing into the past! Each subtle moment in time, representing its present, is impregnated by the pastness as well as the futureness of that present, as constructed memory and vision, respectively.

The purpose to present a few contemplative moments in my personal history in the email environment is to echo the elusive nature of these moments (of past or future). The idea is to compose a moment at a time in a single message and to eventually collect these moments in a temporal progression in a chained email message to myself. Each message, an impromptu construction of a particular moment of my past, is a closed-ended entity in itself, as history is irreversible, but the entire chained email is of course an open-ended one, which contains interpenetrating points of the different I's that exist in different points in time, sustaining a dialogue between 3 subjects: the historical I in the past (as the subject of a past event), the I in that "present" of composing that particular moment in Webmail, and the I in this "present" of writing and responding to former 2 I subjects. Thanks to email, each message has a record of when it is sent, serving a convenient means to delineate between "presents." And as a rule, once a finish composing a message and push the button "send," I cannot revise the already written messages and I can only respond to them, if it's relevant. My hope is that each message should serve as a penetration point into my past, present (and perhaps future), seeing the 3 I's as described above.

I'm a little nervous about doing this because it is sort of an improvisational writing my own history; but what the heck, it's fun anyways. And my coffee doesn't taste that bad anymore.

anxiously,
wendy

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On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 23:01:23 -0400
"Wendy Fang Yu Hsu" <wendyhsu@virginia.edu> wrote:

I remember thinking to myself, “this can’t be that bad.”

It was August 1991, three weeks after my family (my father, mother, brother and I) moved to the US from Taiwan. We were staying with our grandparents in their condo in the suburbs of Newport News. The Virginian summer was nothing I couldn’t handle. Plus the condo’s air conditioning was forever reliable. My days were preoccupied with my acculturation with cable television; Nichelodeon, the Weather Channel, USA Network, everything on TV fascinated me. And of course, cheddar Doritos, which my aunt called the “healthier” junk food, sat beside me as my couch buddy. I gained weight, my friends in my Taiwan told me, after seeing photos of me. But it really was a piece of cake. “Ha! The American life is easy!” But hey, isn’t every summer supposed to be “cake” for every kid?

At night, I awoke from a series of dreams to hear the thundering silence of the night. It was so quiet that it actually hurt my ears. I came from the center city of Taipei where one could hardly escape its noises. The songs of the streets kept me companied at night. I remembered listening to cars zooming by, hollering pedestrian, the buzzing of the window AC unit, before drifting into sleep. The nights in Virginia felt long, dark and quiet. And I kept to myself.

Inevitably, school started in no time. I started to immerse myself in the culture and found that it was not that easy. “Do you know Karate?” “Which is your favorite Chinese restaurant?” Yes, in fact, I do know Tae kwon do. “Stop bothering me before I kick your butt,” I said to myself. The ESL classes went by like a breeze. I was a star student. But the moment I stepped outside of that “International-friendly” refuge, it was a battle between retaining my dignity and losing face. For an English assignment, I wrote about my piano. That inspiration came to me rather shockingly: for the longest time I resented having to practice those stupid scales and play those “precious” little Sonatines. In my composition, I even gave it a name “Big Red” (didn’t know about the gum then). My true affinity to my piano began only then, of course, after years and years of frustrating moments. And soon enough, I joined the school’s orchestra and chose the viola as my instrument. But everyone knew that I could really play away with some Turkish March on the teacher’s piano.

Alas, that piano thing was possibly a surrogate for a good friend, I now realize…
Wendy

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On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 10:29:58 -0400
"Wendy Fang Yu Hsu" <wendyhsu@virginia.edu> wrote:

My coffee this morning isn't a bad one. But it is messy that I imagine if I were to hand write this passage, I would get coffee stains all over my manuscript.

This was autumn 2001. The half-shed trees on the sides of 64 showered me with a wabi-sabi melancholy. The ruthless percussion competed for a moment of glory with the moonlight horns. Then the grand chorus barged in and took me away...until a siren sounded. It felt surreal. In fact it was real. I looked beside me, there was a cop signaling at me to pull over my car.

"Can I see you driver's license and registration?"
I handed him those official documents.
"Did you know you were speeding?"
"No, officer, I was only following the car ahead of me."
"Well, I clocked you and got 78, and that other car got 77. Where are you going?"
"To UVA. I've got a class at 2 o'clock."

The conversation lasted longer than it was supposed to because of his irritating nosiness. But I didn't panic and for once, I thought getting caught speeding was rather comical. I thought to myself, didn't Dr. Edwards' (a religious studies professor at VCU, my mentor) teenage son warned him just yesterday that Mahler 8th is "the stuff that would mess you up." And to save his dad, he popped in his Hootie and the Blowfish CD. But man! It did actually mess me up today. I was so engrossed in the music that it charged up my entire being, including my foot on the pedal.

I then turned down the Mahler and took cautions for the rest of the way from Louisa County to Charlottesville for my Chinese Buddhism seminar. Class was class. I never found it as fulfulling or inspiring in any way that Mahler was. To contexualize the myths behind certain key figures in the history of Chinese Buddhism didn't really do anything to me. I was taking the class as a citizen scholar after I graduated from college. After ditching the idea of going into osteopathic medicine, I gave myself one year to test out the idea of becoming an academic. Taking a graduate-level seminar at UVA, TA'ing for Dr. Edwards, sitting in on a class at UR,working at a florist. I had a ridiculously idealized vision of an academic life: reading and writing, conferences abroad, summer and winter vacations, etc.

A life sprinkled with intellectual conversations "couldn't be that bad." With 9/11 tugging my sleeves in the near hindsight and a no-meat diet as a self-disciplinary means for cultivating compassion, I felt, more than ever, the burden to make the world a better place. Cliche it might have sounded. Reflexive thinking took me here, the realm of cultural studies, long before I realized that the term actually exists as an academic area, a year after I was charged with speeding on I64 because of Mahler. (And I think it was then I became a definitively caffeine-driven social being.)

music, religious studies, East Asian studies, or what?
wendy