to all the boys i've loved before (not about boys)

This has been a summer of rediscovering things. It started when I went back to the UK this summer and finally confronted the jumble of objects I had left behind at the start of the pandemic. I thought this would be a horrible experience; that encountering these half-abandoned objects would bring me right back to being Hay-in-college again, who found very little joy in that fact. 

But it was fine, actually. There were no irreconcilable differences between the past and the present. No haptic memories surfaced from my unconscious. Sometimes stuff is just stuff, and Hay from 2020 and Hay from 2023 love mostly the same things. Loving feels less precarious now, although I need to remind myself of that fact often.

Here are some things I've been loving lately; some old, some new.

'Peanut Butter' by Eileen Myles

I am always hungry / & wanting to have / sex. This is a fact. / If you get right / down to it the new / unprocessed peanut / butter is no damn / good & you should / buy it in a jar as / always in the / largest supermarket / you know. And / I am an enemy / of change, as / you know. All / the things I / embrace as new / are in / fact old things, / re-released: swimming / the sensation of / being dirty in / body and mind / summer as a / time to do / nothing and make / no money

I've read this poem every summer since I was nineteen. Every summer, I fall in love with the opening for its casual hunger, and then with the rest of the poem for the way it implies plentitude and rest, in a world which would rather us desperate and starving.

How did I find Peanut Butter? Was it one of the many Noah knew off by heart and would recite when we hung out? Did it crawl into my inbox one day, courtesy of the Poem-a-Day newsletter? Or (and this is most likely) did I just find it while scrolling twitter?

What I do remember is that when I first read Eileen's poem it made me think of Kaamya's organic peanut butter—the jar they bought from Berkeley Bowl and found almost impossible to eat, always too excited to mix the oil properly into the peanut paste before scraping it onto toast. I remember how much I adored the lightness of each line, how the poem seemed to stretch out forever without being a drag, how much I wanted to live in the world it made. I couldn't get over how unbearably cool and sincere it was, and wanted to figure out how Eileen had done it so that I could do it myself.

The year after, I was obsessed with the middle section of Peanut Butter. The speaker (let's be real, Eileen) is in love, and this love is a kind of constant and secure affection. It is a relation in which one can wander and still be sure that there is someone to return to, a kind of fondness that grows with familiarity. I sent this section to someone I was trying to stay in love with and cried about it. At the time, I thought it was because I was overwhelmed by the way Eileen captured the feelings we shared for each other. Actually, I was just desperate. I wanted so badly to believe that this person still cared for me, and that the version of our relationship I told my friends about was true. Peanut Butter prodded at my fantastical thinking about the situation; a gentle, brutal reminder that being in love could be generative; that love need not strip you bare of yourself.

And right now? An obvious one, maybe: All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released. You have to be careful with this line. Take too much from it, and it becomes a way into complacency. Take too little, and... well, you miss the point of the poem entirely. I don't know. I'll have a better idea of what it means to me next summer.

The First Slam Dunk dir. Takehiko Inoue

Sam can attest to the fact that I started crying at the twenty-minute mark of The Real Slam Dunk and then alternated being lightly sobbing and yelling for the rest of it. This is the greatest compliment I can offer a movie.

The First Slam Dunk is an OVA for Slam Dunk, which, according to those in the know, is the sports anime for the basketball-inclined. The movie centres Ryota Miyagi, the point guard for Shohoku high-school's basketball team, and follows both Ryota's origin story, his fundamental role in bringing the Shohoku team together, and the season final between Shohoku and Shannoh, reigning champions of the high school basketball circuit. And fuck. The final match is so good. Ryota and his teammates struggle against the limits of their body, against their feelings of inadequacy, and with each others' egos throughout the course of the game. And yet—they are never alone. Whether in harmony or at odds with each other, they exist as part of a team, part of a whole for the course of that final match, and watching it play out in dramatic slow motion was a beautiful, beautiful experience.

I am not really a sports anime person (yet), but watching The First Slam Dunk reminded me of a moment in which I glimpsed what a good sports anime can do to your life. 

Last summer, I went for karaoke with some old classmates in a situation I would describe as 'meeting your friends-in-law'. My old classmates weren't people I knew on a deep, fundamental level, just some guys who had circuited in and out of my social life depending on who had a crush on one of my friends. When I visualise them in my mind's eye I always think about how they laid claim on a sheltered corner of the playground, playing volleyball every lunchtime. They were on the edges of my world, and I was on theirs.

We still don't really get each other, but I learnt two things about them that night. The first was that they had started playing volleyball after getting massively into Haikyu!!, and then egged each other on to join the school team. The second was that they really, really loved each other. I think they love each other as much as we love each other, I told Eva (one of my own high school ride-or-dies) the day after. I was surprised, as if our high school friendship group was some manifestation of the feminine divine that only we had arrived at. 

Watching The First Slam Dunk has made me wonder if these two facts have something to do with each other. I loved learning these new things about my old classmates. It was a new, tender thing I grasped about them, cutting through all my blurry impressions of their teen selves. I wonder what loving a sports anime together did to help form their time-tested love. How that love might have grown through doing a team sport together, where some forms of hiding become impossible. 

17776 (What Football Will Look Like In The Future). Experimental digital fiction by Jon Bois for SB Nation

If you haven't experienced 17776, please do. This is a silly work of speculative fiction told from the point of view of a space shuttles who becomes sentient in the year 17776, and discovers a post-scarcity Earth. Humans are immortal, the United States somehow still exists, and American football has been taken far, far beyond the logical extreme. 

Let me explain why I like 17776 by means of a tangent: speculative fiction has become so trendy in the contemporary art world lately. We are all imagining alternate futures, post-human narratives, the post-Anthropocene–to understand our precarious present, of course. Why the hype? Maybe it's because shit has hit the fan with the climate crisis. Maybe lots of people got into le Guin after she passed in 2017. Maybe all the 2000s sci-fi TV and movie remakes have gotten to us. I find these all to be compelling reasons for getting into speculative fiction. My main gripe with this trend is that if you're going to do spec fic, then where's the fucking world building?

I imagine that there's a productive tension between the need to stage an encounter between the work and the viewer in contemporary art, and the way speculative fiction yearns for text, the way it demands time from the reader. It could be so good if a work got this right. But most attempts to use speculative fiction in contemporary art get stuck in a hellish in-between spot. They deliver the visual references, and lay out the major kinds of questions—if not in the work itself, then in the exhibition description. Then the work comes to a conceptual end. This is disappointing, given that What if the world was different? is a question that could ostensibly be used to frame any work. When I'm looking for spec fic, I'm hoping to find an articulation of how things might play out, in extensive (and perhaps excessive) detail.

17776 is a great work of spec fic, then, because it is so rich in lore. Jon Bois has clearly spent an incredible amount of time designing as many iterations of American football as he can while trying to retain some sort of resemblance to the present-day sport. This is something only a die-hard fan can do. What if we existed forever? is an abstraction I give up on after a minute or two; how would we keep American football spicy if we played it forever? prompts me to think thoughtfully about the former question, despite and perhaps because it is funny. Jon has fixated so hard on American football that the what if behind the work becomes compelling. It's explained to me why American football is compelling: this is a ridiculous sport with too many arbitrary rules, and sometimes caring about something with obviously artificial stakes can make life easier to bear.

I also think 17776 does digital fiction so well. It's starting to feel a little dated now, its 2017-ness showing in the use of text, images, gifs, pdfs, and (most tellingly) Youtube clips. It wasn't pushing the bounds of what a webpage could do then, and could literally become obsolete in a few years, given the way apps have been pushed onto our digital lives. But it does think thoughtfully about what can be done with a web page—how the experience of time might be captured through long scrolls, how being in space might be captured by a flow of text that moves down, then to the right, and then right back up again—and integrates it in a way that feels essential to the story. I really want to make something like this one day.

Snooze + Dear My Friend, AGUST D Concert in Seoul, 6 Aug 2023

Earlier this year, Agust D–aka SUGA of BTS, or Min Yoongi–released D-DAY. The third in a trilogy of albums, Agust D started as a way for Yoongi to share work that didn't fit within the framework of BTS. By turns cocky, angry, insecure and uncertain, the songs released under this persona have granted Yoongi a reputation for being the most confessional writer of the BTS members.

When Yoongi announced that D-DAY was coming out, he said that this would be his last album as Agust D. The project had allowed Yoongi to explore his depression and anxiety, class rage, trauma, fears of fame, and more, and now he was ready to let go of those heavier narratives. But what makes D-DAY feel like the end of a trilogy is not the sense that Yoongi's trauma has been resolved. Rather, it explores how we respond when past pain comes to find us again, and how we learn to be more adept in confronting this pain. How pain might allow us to more open to the future, not less. 

So Yoongi released D-DAY. Then he took that album, and all of his other solo works, on a world tour. 

The thing that I've been really stuck on is a section from Yoongi's very last performance on the aforementioned tour. He's back in Seoul, at the KSPO dome, and he's put three emotional heavy-hitters right next to each other in the middle of his set:

• Snooze, an anthem dedicated to the next generation of struggling artists;
• Dear My Friend, an song about a deteriorating relationship with a former best friend; and
• AMYGDALA, which is literally about post-traumatic recall.

Many fans have described this as the crying part of the concert (I am many fans). What I didn't expect was that Yoongi would cry too. I didn't expect a momentary lapse of emotion to turn into bawling; to witness an idol clawing his way through his own songs, which are precisely about what he was going through in that moment—the emotional weight of disclosure, and the precarious balance between wanting to share yourself with the world and the terrorising fear that this act of disclosure might break you.

Yoongi is struggling in this performance, and he knows it. I believe he was prepared for it. He prepared for it when he put together D-DAY, and prepared for it again when he stuck Dear My Friend, a song he has described as particularly difficult to write and speak about, into the final set of concerts. You can see it in the way he handles his body in this performance. When it becomes apparent that the tears won't stop coming, he allows himself to crumble—trusting the fans to keep the melody afloat—before propelling himself into the next verse. He sobs his way through the chorus, frustrated and upset; and yet the performance remains full, the emotional force behind his songs potently felt. 

I want to be clear that it is not authenticity I am after here. I am not hunting for a moment of rupture in Yoongi's idol persona—BTS (and idol culture at large) have done enough to cultivate new modes of intimacy between celebrities and fans as it is. Rather, what moves me is the way Yoongi permits risk into his performance, and the way he allows the consequences of those risks to unfold. He writes songs about being overwhelmed by feelings, and when the feelings come up in performance, he stays. He lets himself struggle, and then comes back into the moment to see what can be made of the situation. How much do you need to trust yourself to let that happen? How much do you need to trust an audience—or reader, or witness—to believe that they will be kind in the aftermath? 

That show of trust is what gets to me about this performance. It's so fucking bold, and expresses something I find hard to hold on to in my own life: faith in my own capacity to carry the things I am grieving for, and faith that the world will carry it well alongside you. 

Afternote

This entry started because I needed to write down some of the ideas I've been thinking about lately, but of course I got side-tracked. I still need to remember the ideas, so here are a few: a reflection on an article I wrote about the increasing persecution of feminine masculinities and BL in mainland China. A craft piece on a poem I wrote in July in which I went a little hard on form, but have weird feelings about. A conversation with my dad about Cantopop a few months ago, in which he got a bit emo about Hong Kong and his shiny, optimism for the world back in the 90s. A zine titled WIP where I get contributors to write about a half-baked idea that they still care about, and asking another contributor to ask thoughtful questions about the idea. Loving peer-pressure to reignite the flame of an old thought, or something like that.

There are a some old ideas, too. I thought I was done with my work on malls but some excellent malls lately have made me reconsider. I've been thinking about this quasi-anthropological piece of writing I did on Berkeley's open mic readings back in 2019, and wondering if I could translate it (haha) to a Hong Kong context. Still, these projects take time and consideration, and time is my enemy, so I'm leaving them here for now. Maybe I'll work on them, maybe I won't.