CAW

The personal is political.
Committee for Asian Women Executive Committee and Secretariat
2009

Van Morrison Afternoon

Laundry goes in the tub with soap and suds

Heating up yesterday’s food on the stove

Sighing, got to really scrub the floor

Or fix the picture frames by the door

Had a 3-hour night’s sleep on a high-noon Saturday

Busy body making sure of a full day’s chore

Somewhere in the room there’s a film screen showing

That scene last night when I left, of you and her dancing

Counting my money, changing the lights

Intermittent internet signals keeping me online

Somewhere at the back of my mind

You are holding her hand instead of mine

The fruit truck has come by but there are still apples in my fridge

Maybe tomorrow I can grab the usual treats

Thinking I should be having a telephone

Somewhere some shadow wonders where you went home

There’s good music playing tonight, friends invite me to come and delight

They are the ladies’ lonely hearts club out to have a good time

I prefer to watch my videos alone to help me sleep

Whispers gossiping you’re probably giving her a kiss

Happy Birthday

There is your angel, it said to me
And I saw your shadow past the door
From your breath lilies fell to pad your steps
Your eyes gazed at me and I looked at the floor

I have no angel I replied to no one in particular
As though it is the most normal thing to do
Certain that the daily demons that surround my life
Would shield me from whatever it is coming from you

“He comes from paradise” once again it spoke
Taunting me to argue “there is no such thing”
I kept my silence, and, in case you should look
whispered softly: “what does he bring?”

Just as you smiled, all is understood
This angel from paradise is only a man
Come to play with the mortals on land
So I stepped aside to let you through

Solidarity

I really should be writing a solidarity message for May 1 and not a message to Stephanie Meyer, who in 2008 disclosed that a close friend has leaked 12 chapters of her draft of Midnight Sun on the internet. The heartbreaking part of her statement, issued on www.stephaniemeyer.com is when she said two plus two always makes four regardless of how you feel, but that writing is completely different, depending a lot on the writer's state of mind and emotional well being. She felt so betrayed that she did not even commit to other writing projects, saying she just wants to spend time with her family, to 'cool off'. How she kept from killing her so-called close friend I do not know. But I know how violated she must feel. Indeed, how does one go back to what was being written with all the hurt and disappointment riding one's creative space? I can understand if she would never look back on the Twilight series at all, for all the fame and fortune it created for her, only to end up like this.

Thus I am also saying goodbye to the Twilight Saga, knowing full well that the "officially disclosed" draft of Midnight Sun over the internet by Meyer herself would be the last of it. Ironically I can't decide whether to read the draft in my computer or not. Because of its very incompleteness, it has doubled if not quadrupled its value among us Twilight fans. But that is where it is most painful-- reading from page one, something which is no longer, and forever undone.

Sleepless in Bangkok

Two dreams in two consecutive nights: The first one, I was sitting in the passenger front seat of a brown car. It feels as if I do not even know the driver, who is in a black leather jacket. Suddenly a motorcycle carrying two, also in black leather jackets and head bonnets comes to my side of the car, one gun pointing straight at my face. The second dream the following night finds me in the same car with the same driver, but the motorcycle riders, instead of pointing the gun at my face, insert the gun in the window and fire at something behind us. My knee tries to maneuver the window handle to slide the glass up and trap the hand with the gun. I fail in my efforts, the gun swerving to my face again....then I wake up. I thought "too hollywood, and I don't even get to see if the gunmen were cute".

Vita Brevis (Life is Short)

“Was I nothing more than a woman’s body to you? You know that is not true. And how can you distinguish between body and soul? Isn’t that bungling God’s work of creation? …When you clawed me with your sharp caresses, you were also tearing at my soul”.

-Floria, in her letter to St. Augustine, denying his confession that what they shared was merely lust

Jostein Gaarder’s Vita Brevis was based on letters he found in a second-hand bookstore. The letters were written by Floria Aemilia to a certain Aurel as she called St. Augustine, by that time a prominent Bishop. In her pained writings, she attacked the Church’s dogma about celibacy for the religious as an affront to the gifts of God, the gift to love and be loved. She agonized over St. Augustine’s confessions that his life of fornication included his life with her. She cried that her love kept him faithful and that they were living in happiness until the theologians decided that he should marry “abstinence”. She laughed at his invitation to abandon life’s pleasures in order to live a holy life. This, she maintained, could both be accomplished without wasting the beautiful world that God has given humankind.

“On the other side of the bridge we passed some vendors, and I stopped to look at a beautiful cameo. Then you bought it for me, and now, now I sit with it in my hand. I clasp it, tightly. So God will have to forgive me for holding on to the ‘physical’….But life is short and I know so little. What if there is no heaven above us, Aurel, imagine that this life is what we were created for!”

Fascinated by the lives of saints, I liked this ‘other’ side of a story. St. Augustine’s life is one of those drilled into Catholic girls’ minds during my schooldays. If they weren’t dead already, I’d like to throw this book at one of the nuns at St. Paul and ask them first, if it was really humanly possible to renounce all sensual feelings (apparently St. Augustine was ready to renounce the sense of smell), as was propagated during St. Augustine’s time, and not be considered ‘retarded’ today. And second, if the letters were to be believed that Augustine did in fact love only one woman and stayed with her albeit unmarried, that the Church may have been responsible for ripping a family apart (they had one son); and that this may have been the cause of tremendous trauma St. Augustine suffered during his “formation” (described by religious books as terrible bouts with the devil).

Floria cleverly cited Augustine’s wish to have all Songs of David removed from the Church. She correctly pointed the contradiction because the Songs extol everyone to laugh, sing, and dance in praise of God. Living in those times she was brave to reject the Church based on her criticisms to St. Augustine’s confessions. She claimed she already has her God who created her and he comes with no theologians who judge her happiness.

In Floria’s description of their life together, I wondered whether St. Augustine’s experience had been exaggerated by the Church to once more stress the sinfulness of sensual pleasure. Some confessions of St. Augustine quoted (translated) in the book, about the many women he took to bed, was questioned by Floria as perhaps mere boasting like of a young man among his friends. Floria thinks this may have been done to emphasize a misplaced guilt in the man. After all, wouldn’t she know whether he’s really experienced with women or not?

Towards the end of the book Floria unwittingly predicted a reality that was to claim thousands of women’s lives by the hand of the Church, when, upon meeting her (and sinning) again, Augustus beat her up and sent her away without seeing her son.

“I shiver, for I fear the day will come when women like me will be done away with by the men of the universal church. And why will they be done with, your Grace? Because they remind you that you have denied your own soul and gifts. And for whom? For a God, you all say, for him who created a heaven above you and also an earth which actually holds women who bring you into the world”.

Centuries later, the Catholic Church began the Inquisition, which tortured and killed millions of women throughout the Christian world.

Sex and the City, the Movie

What struck me most was Samantha’s confession to Smith that she loves him but she loves herself more. This was after her disillusionment with the domestic life she had with “the one”. It grabbed me in its bold difference from the rest of Samantha’s friends’ dreams. She wanted to be with herself more than with the one she loves. This is honesty rarely heard of in my part of the globe. Indeed this is often considered selfish, foolish, and ‘whorish’ of her if she had been Asian. Yet I feel many women feel this way about their relationships. Even when they have the one perfect person, the life they shape with one another takes away from who they are. For majority of women I know, marriage IS shedding who you are. It is living for another forever. And if one loses oneself in the process this is considered a ‘necessary sacrifice’. No wonder so many married women grow bitter, insecure and judgmental towards others during the course of their married life. Somewhere in the back of their minds they remember what life was before the “sacrifice” yet are too ashamed to claim some of that life back.

Too often women had to see how marriage almost never changes anything for the husband, while it completely overturns the world of the wife. Indeed why should the husband go home immediately after work to a house he has been living in for twenty, thirty years? The furniture and spaces surely have not changed. Keeping house is almost automatically the responsibility of the wife. Except for the occasional chores, or during social functions or to watch the game, or indeed when there is an appointment with the wife in bed, what else is there in the house that needed getting home early to?

“I changed who I was for you”, said an angry Miranda to Steve. In order for them to get back together she had to forgive herself and her husband for that. I think this message makes the movie. It doesn’t pretend to predict a ‘happy ever after’ for the girls. It only provides glimpses of happiness from the choices that they make.