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Movie Review: Spencer

July 8, 2022

I just got done watching the film Spencer, which came out last year and is directed by Pablo Larrain. I saw an Actors on Actors Zoom interview that Nicole Kidman and Kristen Stewart had done with each other, and in the interview they were discussing their films, Being the Ricardos and Spencer respectively. I really loved this interview and it made me even more excited to see Spencer. But I haven’t been to a movie theater since 2020 and may not plan to go back for a while (I might just try wearing a mask but who knows. The COVID-19 situation is always changing.) so I decided to wait until it was streaming to watch it. I found it on Google Play for a good deal, I could rent it for $1.99. Seeing as how I’m saving money and finding a new job (also, it’s hot down here and I was too lazy to go to the public library and get a copy), and I craved a movie to watch, I couldn’t resist the temptation. So I got Spencer and I must say, it was a really good movie. I have seen Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan in Twilight and Joan Jett in The Runaways but seriously this was one of her best roles yet. She played Princess Diana with the utmost concentration and it kind of reminded me of Natalie Portman playing Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie. It’s a similar genre: both are psychological dramas that get into the private minds of these public figures, and how they grapple with being in the public eye and telling their own stories without anyone trying to speak for them.

One key theme that I got from the film is the theme of freedom. Everything in the film, even the smallest details, is about how Princess Diana felt constrained by her environment and in the end found her freedom by saying no to it. I don’t know much about Princess Diana other than what I learned in history class in high school, and of course the film is a biopic so it was based on true events but is still fiction, but the film gave some glimpse into how Diana might have lived life and the effects it might have had on her self-image and her views about life and the world. Throughout the movie, Diana struggles with her mental health, in particular bulimia. She also encounters Anne Boleyn in many of her hallucinations, and Anne seems to constantly tell her that she is not free in any true sense and that she needs to get away from the pressures that everyone puts on her. In one scene Diana is eating soup with her family and it seems that everyone around her is looking at her in a strange way, and she sees Anne Boleyn, and then seems to rips off her pearl necklace and eat the soup with the pearls in it. She stumbles to the bathroom and vomits. In another scene she goes into the kitchen after hours and eats many of the food items from the fridge. Alistair Gregory (played by Timothy Spall) finds her and tells her to be careful about what she does in the palace since there has been a lot of publicity, particularly about Diana not keeping her curtains closed. Diana tells him to mind his business but he reiterates that he is only doing his job. This shows that even though Diana has all this wealth and prestige by being part of the royal family, she can’t just do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, because everything she does–what she says, how she behaves–will be reflected in the press’s stories about the royal family.

This movie shows that even the seemingly everyday things that we as humans take for granted can have profound significance to someone who doesn’t just get to move about and freely take those things for granted. The house that Diana grew up in is another example. She keeps telling the royal staff that she wants to go home, and leaves the grounds of the palace to go back to her old home, but the guards and everyone tells her it is boarded up for a reason and that she’s not supposed to go in there. When she finally finds a way to break into the house, she relives a lot of her old childhood memories. When she walks up the stairwell, she nearly falls through the steps because they are so old and she remembers when she was a young girl being free to play with her friends outside and dress the scarecrow in the field. Even just spending time with her children is a pleasure that she cannot take for granted because the family is supposed to abide by certain meal times, bed times, etc. So when she gives her children their presents early and is playing a make-believe game with them late in the night, they even began to wonder if their mother is truly happy with her life because they start to see how she is really suffering from mental health issues and spends a lot of time withdrawing from people. Even just trying on her clothes is a huge liberty that the staff don’t allow her, and she tells them to back off and let her try her dresses on by herself but they don’t let her.

There is also a powerful scene where Diana is talking to a pheasant while sitting outside on the steps before she is called to dinner. She sees the men shooting the pheasants for sport and we can see the deep discomfort on her face as she sees them being killed. It’s as if she can feel their pain at not being free. Sure, they are birds and they have wings, but in the end they aren’t free because humans rob them of life by shooting them for sport. When she finally can’t take it anymore, she takes her sons away from the pheasant shooting grounds and takes them into the city for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fortunately she doesn’t have to go in the actual store, she can just drive up and give a different name (“Spencer”) so that no one knows it’s her ordering. This was pretty important to reflect on because you think about all the celebrities who can’t walk out of their houses to do every day things like get ice cream or go to the grocery store without photographers taking photos of them. I used to be really into Us Weekly and People and would read sections in the magazine like “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” and would be both wowed and humored. As I grew up though I started realizing that celebrities were just regular everyday people, it’s just that the work they do gains more publicity (although since the pandemic, the jobs that didn’t gain as much news, like working in hospitals and in food service, have gained more recognition than in the past since many people realized how much they depended on those services for survival, especially during a period of mass deaths in hospitals and quarantines). I think watching Actors on Actors helped me change this perspective on celebrity because the actors are just regular people having regular dialogues, and the bottom line I got from watching these interviews is that acting is a regular job for these people but they also have families, friends, hobbies and household chores just like everyone else. I think this especially helped when watching The Oscars because before I just viewed it as this glamorous thing, and I still am dazzled by the red carpet, don’t get me wrong, but what watching Actors on Actors taught me is that the acting work doesn’t stop once you get the Oscar, even if it is your big break in the industry. It’s just the beginning; at the end of the day, it’s a job so they still need to show up and do the work no matter how many awards they may win along the way.

After watching the film I read this chapter in the book Discussions on Youth by Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, and in the chapter “What is Freedom?” he talks about what freedom means from a Buddhist perspective. After reading the chapter it gave me a more profound perspective on what freedom is. There’s a really cool quote in the chapter that resonated with me: “…no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, our hearts can be free; we don’t have to let our spirits be shackled or confined. We need to have the strength to soar on inner wings of hope and freedom and never be defeated by anything.” (Daisaku Ikeda, p. 279, “What is Freedom?”, Discussions on Youth) I thought about this when looking back and thinking about the movie. Even though in the movie Diana was in a state of suffering because she had all these pressures from the outside, she broke through that suffering and was able to savor true joy. I thought about the scenes where she becomes free and then dances to her heart’s content in all of her gowns and when she runs through the fields savoring that freedom. Honestly that was probably one of the most touching scenes of the movie.

I also really loved the music in the film. It combines elements of jazz and classical, and after the film I listened to the soundtrack because it is so beautiful and has all these incredible unique sounds. Overall, this film was amazing and I definitely recommend it!

Spencer. 2021. 1 hr 57 m. Rated R for some language.

Movie Review: Turning Red

June 24, 2022

A few weeks ago I watched another Pixar movie called Turning Red. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is a must. I saw the trailer and the billboards and posters advertising the film around the city, but I didn’t really care at the time. Then my friend recommended it and we watched it together and it was better than I expected. Even though I couldn’t exactly relate to Mei’s life, I could relate a lot to her struggle to achieve and please others.

The movie takes place in Canada in 2002, and Meilin “Mei” Lee is a thirteen-year-old young woman who seems to have it all together. She aces all of her exams, she is number one in her school’s band, and she wins at pretty much all competitions, and she has a group of friends who love her company. She brings home report cards with all A’s to show her mom and dad because she wants them to be proud of her, and she also helps her parents with the Buddhist temple they run. She lives by the principle of filial piety, and everything seems to be going smoothly. But Meilin is a young woman growing into her sexuality and puberty, and her friends and her are huge fans of this boy band called 4-Town and can’t stop dreaming about them for days. Moreover, there is a cute boy at the local store that Meilin likes and she is struggling to navigate her romantic feelings for this boy, drawing in her private journal sketches of her falling in love with the boy. Her mother thinks that Meilin needs to focus on her academics and work at the temple, and anything that has nothing to do with that is not a priority. When she finds Meilin’s journal she is appalled and thinks that the boy did something wrong to Meilin, marching up to the store where the boy works and threatening him if he touches her daughter. Meilin tries to hide her embarrassment but she is furious, and she ends up turning into a red panda. Not surprisingly, she is freaked out and tries to hide from her parents so they don’t see her, but then they find out and her mom isn’t surprised at all because there is a family history of the ancestors turning into red pandas. Meilin goes back to being a human being but any time she feels a strong emotion like anger or fear she becomes a panda again. Her friends come over to her house and they see her as a panda and at first they freak out, but then they tell her they are going to support her no matter what and they figure out how to get to 4-Town’s upcoming concert. They get the idea of fundraising for the concert tickets, and at first the students are freaked out when Mei becomes a red panda after her mom comes up to the school to look for her, but then they come to see her as the cool kid and only end up liking her when she is a red panda. They raise money for the concert but it ends up not being enough, and moreover the concert is the same night as the ceremony where the ancestors gets rid of Mei’s panda form so she can be fully human. Mei is invited to a party by a kid who doesn’t like her for who she is, but only wants her to come if she promises to turn into a red panda. But then Mei’s grandmother and aunts come in preparation for the ceremony and tell Mei that she is forbidden from turning into a panda and needs to control it from now on. Mei goes to the party dressed in a papier-mache sort of panda costume but then the kids think her costume is lousy and she finally gives in to peer pressure and turns into a red panda. At first she is happy she is getting more attention from the popular kids and people like her, but then things take a turn when her mom comes up to the party and finds Mei turned into a red panda and disobeyed her family’s warnings. She scolds the kid who threw the party and also Mei’s friends for making her sneak out and disobey her parents. Mei’s friends turn on her, feeling betrayed.

The night of the ceremony, Mei is hesitant about giving up her red panda form but she tries to stay calm as the family members make their preparations for the ceremony. Mei’s dad finds Mei’s old camera and sees videos of her goofing off with her friends as the red panda and he finds it funny. Mei is at first embarrassed and freaks out when he finds them, but then he tells her they are hilarious and that she is having fun, and encourages her to make the best decision for her, and if she wants to keep being a panda that is up to her. During the ceremony, they try to get rid of Mei’s panda but with little luck. Mei ends up escaping to the 4-Town concert and finds her friends there so she can rekindle their friendship (she even finds out the guy who invited her to his party is a fan of 4-Town). Mei’s mom is furious that she ran off to the 4-Town concert without her permission and transforms into an even larger Godzilla-sized version of the red panda. She busts the concert and wrecks the auditorium and scares the concertgoers, and goes at Mei for sneaking out to the concert. Mei fights back at her and tells her stay out of her life and that she is too controlling, and she ends up knocking back her mom, causing her to fall unconscious. Mei realizes what she did and regrets it, and the aunts (who have transformed into red pandas, too, and her try to get her in the middle of the auditorium so they can change her back into a human. The aunts chant a mantra but Mei keeps struggling and doesn’t chant, but she soon does it because time is running out. Her friends and the 4-Town singers provide some acapella singing to back up Mei in her efforts to save her mom. They end up getting her mom in the circle and the chant ends up working, and Mei finds herself in this forest where she finds her mom as a 13 year old red-haired version of herself crying and saying how her mom wants her to be perfect all the time. Mei realizes that her mom treated her the way she did because her mom also treated her that way, and the two of them walk through the forest, Mei’s mom transforming from a teenager into the grown version of herself at the beginning of the film and they are at the point where they need to decide if they want to give up their inner panda or not. The aunts go through the portal, giving up their inner red pandas, and Mei’s mom decides to give up her panda, too, but Mei hesitates and explains that she doesn’t want to give up her panda because it’s part of who she is. At first, Mei’s mom struggles to agree with her daughter, but then understands and lets her keep her panda identity. Mei’s family ends up embracing her for her true self and the temple actually gets more business because everyone loves Mei as a red panda. She also makes things up with her friends and now they’re tight again.

This movie kind of reminded me of Encanto a bit because the theme of both movies is what to do when you don’t fit the expectations of others. In Encanto, Mirabel is the only one in her family who doesn’t have a magical gift and she makes a lot of mistakes, which infuriates her abuela. Her abuela is the one who holds the family together and covers up any imperfections that might tarnish its reputation, but Mirabel tries to alert everyone that there are cracks in the foundation of the house and everything they hold dear isn’t perfect and is falling apart, but people don’t want to listen to her because they’ve spent so long trying to put on this image of perfection. But Mirabel ends up actually saving the family even if she didn’t meet their expectations at first because she knew that there were things in the family that needed to be fixed. Mirabel’s struggle with self-confidence kinds of resonates with Mei’s struggle with self-confidence because despite being a high achiever and perfectionist, Mei is like any other human being and teenager. She likes boys, she likes pop music, but she also loves her family. It’s not until she goes through her own struggle with her emotions that she finally realizes her true self, because before that every time she felt strong emotions her inner critic would kick in and she would berate herself and tell herself that she needed to stop feeling certain ways because she didn’t want to disappoint her mom by not meeting her expectations. I definitely could resonate to some extent because I often at times would get self-conscious or self-critical whenever I felt strong emotions. Of course, I’m working on not letting those strong emotions negatively affect my relationships with people but it was only when I got in touch with myself and my emotions that I learned that I’m a human and I, well, feel things. I would often try to hide my emotions under more work, more smiles, more “I’m good” and “No it’s fine” but after a while as I chanted I started to see my emotions as they were, good or bad, and realized that I needed to get professional help to deal with those emotions because I was feeling anxious and depressed and would beat myself up for feeling those things, like they were things I needed to magically wish away. But after seeking help, I learned to understand my humanity and that I can manage my emotions without pushing them under the rug or the other extreme, lashing out at others.

Turning Red. 2022. 1 hr 40 min. Rated PG for thematic material, suggestive content and language

4 Reading Recommendations

June 22, 2022

Here is a random list of books I have read so far that I recommend:

  1. The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel by Ruth Ozeki- I finished this book a week ago and I literally could not put it down. It is my first time reading anything by Ruth Ozeki (a fellow Smith grad 🙂 ) and her writing just blew me away. If you haven’t read the book yet, it’s about a young boy named Benny Oh who lives with his mom Annabelle, and both are coping with the death of Kenji, Benny’s dad. As Benny grows older he struggles to fit in at school and is bullied because he hears voices from objects. He finds refuge in a mysterious corner of the library, where he meets an artist named The Aleph and a poet and philosopher named Slavoj, who help him navigate his journey through his grief and his ability to hear voices. I thought it was pretty amazing how Ozeki let the book be the narrator of the story and have a back-and-forth dialogue with Benny. The book also helped remind me why I love reading so much, because they really do open you up to different ways of viewing the world. It also talks about clutter and how it’s connected to grief and loss, and how getting rid of clutter is a challenging emotional and spiritual process. Annabelle struggles to get rid of a lot of things in her home that are taking up space, such as news clippings from her job and Kenji’s belongings, because many of these things play a crucial role in how she grapples with the grief and loss of losing Kenji and her dealing with Benny growing up and changing as he goes through adolescence. There is a clear-your-clutter expert in the book who is based on Marie Kondo, and it alludes to a lot of the backlash that Kondo received from critics about handling books (there’s a Bustle article that talks more about the racist and classist overtones of these criticisms.) To be honest, I haven’t yet read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I will say that organizing my bookshelves has brought me peace of mind, and when I was in 11th grade I decided to give away a lot of my old books because I had read a book called Clear Your Clutter with Feng-Shui by Karen Kingston and it said that clutter affects the way people treat you. For some reason I thought that the reason I was struggling to make friends was because I was holding on to too many books (which, looking back, probably wasn’t the reason at all), so I gave a lot of my old books away. Even though I thought I would miss those books, I have since accumulated more books and still have yet to finish even those, in addition to my stack of 12-13 books from the public library. Overall, The Book of Form and Emptiness is an amazing read and I recommend it.
  2. Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole: Susan Cain– Wow. This book. It really helped me unpack, heal, reflect and understand myself. I often thought my sadness and depression was things to be ashamed of, but this book taught me that sadness is human and that it can help give meaning to life, especially when it comes to dealing with the inevitable truth that we will experience loss, death, grief throughout life and it’s the not absence of these events but how we make meaning of them that matters. Honestly I wouldn’t mind reading it again. It helped me understand why I love the key E minor so much or why I love dramas and sad music by Sam Smith and Celine Dion so much, and why I cried as a kid (and still do) whenever I heard Celine Dion’s music (especially whenever the theme song to Titanic would come on while I was ice skating at the mall at 4. Golly geez.), or why I spent a month crying over George Michael’s death, why I cried for the longest time over anyone’s death (I recently broke down a few months ago while chanting in front of my Buddhist altar because Madeleine Albright passed away and I had finished her memoir Hell and Other Destinations some time before that and really loved it. It gave me a lot of insight into her diplomacy and dialogues with leaders and the life she led.) And unsurprisingly, this being a book about sorrow, I definitely teared up at some parts and even after reading the book got a little choked up just thinking about it. It also helped me understand that love is a process, not a one-and-done thing. I found myself resonating with the chapter in the book on longing because I had been struggling with romantic feelings for someone and reading the chapter helped me understand on a deeper level why I felt those kinds of feelings for this person. It’s still a process I am going through, but I’m growing so much emotionally and spiritually in the process of learning to love myself. Susan Cain gave me the space to tap into my authentic self and be honest about my emotions, just as she gave me the space to be comfortable in my skin as an introvert with her previous book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (ironically, I’ve become an extrovert when I write, as you can see from this long-winded blog post.)
  3. The Count of Monte Cristo: Alexander Dumas (there’s a lot of editions out there; the version I read was the Penguin Classics version)- I remember reading the abridged version of this book in 10th grade English, and while I enjoyed studying it I would get a tinge of envy whenever I saw the pre-IB (International Baccalaureate) kids toting around their 1,000 page copies of the unabridged version and decided one day that I was going to finish the unabridged version, too. Fast forward and that desire still held sway over my bookaholic imagination, so I finally asked my aunt to send me a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo for my birthday (in addition to a copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, another big-ass book. I’m in the middle of reading it though and it’s pretty good.) As you can guess, I was positively elated when I received them, and decided to finally open those first pages and dive in. Just to give a brief summary if you haven’t read the book yet, it’s about a young man named Edmond Dantes who lives a pretty happy life with his fiancee, Mercedes, but at their engagement ceremony, he is unjustly arrested and accused for a crime he didn’t commit, and is imprisoned in the Chateau d’If for several years. He meets an old priest named Abbe Faria and escapes the prison under the disguise of The Count of Monte Cristo. From there he gets revenge on the people who tormented him. Like I said, I loved reading the abridged version and I loved the 2002 movie with Guy Pearce as Fernand Mondego and Jim Caviezel as Edmond Dantes/ Count of Monte Cristo, but the unabridged is like a big juicy Big Mac fresh off the griddle and is just dripping in meat juices (as a vegan whose never had a Big Mac in my life though, I’d need testimony to see if I’m telling the truth.) It is juicy with detail and also violence, sex, revenge, and other intense moments. I took a long hiatus in the middle of the book, and darn did I forget some key plot points! But I finally finished it because well, I wanted to know what happened at the end. I’m glad I took my time reading it though because it is a pretty thrilling read and something that I kind of wanted to savor.
  4. Finding Me: Viola Davis- honestly, right after reading this book, I tried to articulate my thoughts and failed miserably. Ho.ly. shit. I remember Viola Davis coming to speak at my alma mater during a free Q and A panel and I was sitting in the balcony and she made eye contact with me. I was looking at her briefly but as I tried to put on a calm composed appearance, inside I was screaming with joy and jumping around as if one of The Backstreet Boys had kissed me on the cheek at a concert. I. was. fangirling and almost burst with excitement. But as this was a public event and I knew I wasn’t the only one fangirling in that auditorium, I kept quiet. But oh god, during and after the event I was in heaven and was deeply appreciative that I actually got to attend a free (key word: FREE, not just Turbo-Tax free-free-free, not just Free-Willy-free, but free.) event where Viola Davis was talking about her work and career. When I finally read her memoir, though, I slowed down and reflected. Davis gave me the real about having an acting career and that it takes grit and a long process of building your self-worth and overcoming imposter syndrome when you get that big break, and then continuing that process throughout your career. She also gave me an honest portrait of acting, because I didn’t know much about the field, so until I read Finding Me I didn’t know that theatre acting and film acting have as many differences as they have similarities. The salary range of actors was also a new statistic for me, because before I had always had this naïve idea that actors made billions and billions of dollars for each movie they starred in, but the reality is that a small percentage make somewhere around $50,000 (please correct me if I’m off the mark though) each year. Even though I’m not a professional actor, Davis gave me some lessons about the career and business of being a working actor to think about as I figure out whether to have a professional music career or not. One lesson is that you need grit and need to take rejection well, and not every gig is going to be stellar but it is an opportunity to work so take it. I was fortunate to have been paid for some music gigs, other times I played for free, and sometimes I think, “I just want to get paid for what I do” and other times I play tug-of-war with myself and my ego and say “It’s for my career/ for exposure/ I need to put myself out there.” Davis taught me that whatever the ups and downs of my music career, I need to just keep doing my best and not worry about how I measure up to others or whether I deserve success or not. I really loved the part where she meets with one of her idols, Meryl Streep, though (they acted together in the film Doubt), and I thought the same because I’m sure I would have been internally squealing with joy and a bundle of nerves at the same time if I met, let alone got to collaborate with, one of my favorite actors or musicians. Davis said that Streep is a very down-to-earth person though and even though she thought she was the only one dealing with imposter syndrome, Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and the other actors that Davis worked with admitted they, too, struggled with imposter syndrome during their careers. This part really encouraged me because I struggle with imposter syndrome, so reading this made me feel less alone. After reading Finding Me, I watched an interview from one of my favorite series, Actors on Actors, and Viola Davis and Samuel L. Jackson talk about their careers and the daily work that goes into them.

Movie Review: The Pianist

Written 6/9/22

Two days ago I decided to watch The Pianist. I was going to rent it, but then I saw it on YouTube for free, so I watched it there. I probably should have rented it though because there was some dialogue in German and the YouTube version didn’t have subtitles so I didn’t know what the characters were saying in German. As much as I want to re-watch it though, it is one of those films where I need to take at least a couple of weeks to process it. My parents told me it was going to be an intense film. Then again, any film about war and genocide, particularly about World War II and the Holocaust, is going to be hard to sit through. The atrocities that the Nazis committed against Jewish people during that time were very real, and the lasting trauma that this genocide left for many survivors is still very real today, and as someone who isn’t Jewish I needed to continue to educate myself on the Holocaust. Also, in middle school we weren’t allowed to see R-rated films, so there was no way that any of my teachers would be able to show The Pianist for our curriculum.

I think especially it was important for me to watch this film because to understand how bad the Holocaust really was, I had to listen to and watch first-hand accounts by people who lived through it. The film also showed me events during World War II that I had studied in world history class but had forgotten after a while. I am sure I studied about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was depicted in the film, but I hadn’t studied about it in depth. Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911-2000), the pianist and Holocaust survivor whose memoir the film is based on, witnesses the uprising at the same time that he is in hiding. It really is a story of one man’s survival and trauma as he witnesses the Nazis commit some of the worst human rights abuses in history. It kind of reminded me of the film 1917; even though of course the former takes place during World War I and the latter takes place during World War II, both movies depict the horrors of war. In 1917, we see how horrific the war and its aftermath were from the perspective of two British soldiers fighting in the war. The camera follows their perspective; we don’t see the perspective of other soldiers. These young men make their way through all kinds of destruction; they wade through trenches where human and non-human corpses lie ravaged with flies, they make their way through bombed-out buildings, and one of the soldiers is stabbed and killed by a German pilot, so the other soldier has to survive on his own. Even as he meets people on the way who try to help him in some way, he knows that the security given to him won’t last long and that he is still very much in a war zone where his life and the lives of other civilians are in jeopardy. The film shows him becoming more and more hopeless each time he has to navigate and survive the moment-to-moment traumas of war. There is no time for him to stop and process the psychological toll that witnessing the war has on him; he is always moving through this constant trauma and like his fellow soldiers, he loses hope for humanity.

In The Pianist it is similar. Szpilman, like so many Jewish people, is fighting for his life and even though the couple he meets takes him in and provides him shelter, he knows it won’t last long because soon after, he accidentally shatters a bunch of plates in their cupboard while they’re away, and a non-Jewish woman who lives in the apartment bangs on the door and tells him to come out, and when he comes out she accuses him of trespassing because he is Jewish, even when he tells her that the couple let him stay in the apartment. Another scene that stuck with me is when the SS guards force Szpilman’s family and other Jewish families onto cattle cars to be taken to the Treblinka killing center, but Szpilman is forced to stay behind. Soon after, he is seen walking through the city of Warsaw and breaking down in tears. Like the soldiers in 1917, Szpilman is forced to witness trauma and loss moment after moment. He witnesses corpses in the streets, a dying child caught in a wall dies in his arms and he has to leave his dead body there, and towards the end when he is in hiding, he sees some SS officers burn several dead bodies in the street while two other SS officers casually watch the bodies burning and eat their food. The film’s depiction of the trauma that many Jews faced will be engraved in my memory for a while. There is a scene in particular that stuck with me, which was when the Jewish civilians were held in a blocked off area to be taken to the Treblinka killing center, and a woman is sitting there and just repeats over and over again “Why did I do it?” Wladyslaw’s sister says aloud how it’s annoying that the woman keeps saying that over and over again, but then someone who knows the woman says that when the Nazis invaded her home, she smothered her baby and killed it. The woman has to relive this trauma and grief in her mind over and over again. This is just one of many moments in the film that sat with me.

The film reminded me of a quote that Buddhist philosopher and writer Daisaku Ikeda says at the beginning of the novel The Human Revolution: “Nothing is more barbarous than war. Nothing is more cruel.” In Buddhism, there is a concept called The Ten Worlds, which are different life states that humans experience at any given moment. The lower life states are Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Heaven and Humanity and the higher life states are voice-hearers, cause-awakened ones, bodhisattvas and buddhas. This film clearly shows that the Nazis were in the life condition of Hell. Hell is a life condition in which everything around you is suffering, and it feels like there is no way out of it. War is a manifestation of the world of Hell because people who commit atrocities during war are in a state of life where they feel hopeless and feel that the only way to address their internal suffering is to hurt others and cause destruction. Another life condition in Buddhism that everyone has is animality, which is where people put others down who they think are inferior to them and act servile when they are confronted by people in higher positions of authority. I’m pretty sure all of the SS officers were terrified for their own lives and terrified of Hitler so they felt they had no choice but to make the Jews feel inferior to them and murder them. There is a scene in the film where Szpilman is in the ghetto and is a laborer, and the SS guards force him and the other men to line up, and for no reason other than they just felt like it, the SS guard has six or seven men from the line lie down and he just shoots and kills each of them. It was hard to look at that and think “Oh, it’s just acting.” As much as I tried to tell myself it was acting, it still felt way too real and it was a reminder that yes, the people playing these men were actors but the crimes the Nazis committed were very real.

I know I am stating the obvious, like “of course the Holocaust was a real-lived genocide where many people were murdered and treated as scapegoats. Most people know that already.” But after this film I reflected on the anti-Semitism that is very much still alive today and how there are still people who say the Holocaust never happened. This film also forced me to overcome the apathy in my own heart and understand that human rights and social justice requires persistent efforts to educate oneself, especially if you’re not a member of the community that is being marginalized, so that I can overcome the indifference within my own life that causes me to dismiss injustice and human rights abuses. I remember when I was ambivalent about watching 12 Years a Slave for an African-American history course in college, especially because everyone had said it was a very sad and painful film to watch, but then my professor told me that it was just acting and that while the atrocities that white slaveowners committed were true, the people reenacting these atrocities were actors. Like, Michael Fassbender isn’t actually whipping Lupita Nyong’o. And so I watched the film at least four times, thinking, “It’s just acting.” I somehow thought I needed to watch it more than once, but each time I watched it I found myself pushing down a lot of those uncomfortable human emotions that I normally would have expressed. I would have felt fear, disgust, anguish, and I would have cried loads of tears. But I just watched and casually thought, “It’s just a movie.” I honestly couldn’t do that with The Pianist this time; I had learned that I don’t necessarily need to watch the movie twice to understand the depth of the pain and trauma that Szpilman went through during his life. It will pretty much stick with me for a long time. I don’t like horror movies, but this film was pretty much a horror movie for me because everything in the film really happened and a human being, along with other human beings, was forced to see the most ugly darkest sides of humanity.

In our June 2022 issue of the magazine I read called Living Buddhism, there is a section with excerpts from Daisaku Ikeda’s peace proposals, and one of the excerpts is called “Removing the ‘Arrow of Fundamental Delusion'” (2013). It talks about how Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni Buddha, found that the fundamental cause of conflict between communities of people was fundamental darkness, or the inability to see the inherent preciousness of each person’s life including that of our own life. This fundamental darkness manifests as an egocentric worldview where one is only focused on self-interest and cannot put themselves in the other party’s shoes. I have this fundamental darkness and we all have this fundamental darkness, too, just by virtue of being human beings. The solution to overcoming this fundamental darkness is realizing the interconnectedness of life and that each person’s life has inherent dignity and thus each person is worthy of respect no matter what their ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. When I look at the history of World War II and the Holocaust from a Buddhist perspective, I realized that the root at these atrocities committed against Jewish people and other minorities was this fundamental delusion about life and the value that we place on life.

The Pianist. 2002. 150 minutes. Rated R for violence and mature, upsetting themes.

Being True to Oneself

Written I think about a month ago:

Tonight I went to a study meeting on Nichiren Buddhism, and we studied this really beautiful article from a book of speeches and essays that Buddhist philosopher and SGI president Daisaku Ikeda wrote called The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace. It is an excellent book so far and has a lot of beautiful wisdom. I read it during lunch because I’ve been struggling a lot with self-confidence at work and reading it was encouraging. In Chapter 6 of the book, Ikeda talks about the principle in Buddhism called “cherry, plum, peach and damson”, which comes from the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin called The Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings, and it basically means that each individual has their own personality, their own strengths and weaknesses, but everyone has what is called the life state of Buddhahood, which is a state of life where we have boundless courage, wisdom and compassion just as we are. In “Live True to Yourself” (the material can be found here), Ikeda says that the purpose of religion is to understand the human condition and the meaning of life, and part of living as a human being is experiencing both joy and suffering. Ikeda says that it is important for each of us to be true to ourselves, but that it’s easier said than done because most people tend to be easily swayed by their external circumstances. The purpose of Nichiren Buddhism is to build an unshakeable self, a strong inner core that, whether the circumstances are favorable or unpleasant, we can confront these circumstances head-on and create the most value out of them. In the second part of the study material, “Appreciating Your Uniqueness,” (the material can be found here) he says that it’s important to keep growing and developing ourselves in a way that is true to ourselves, and that we are each unique and have our own precious mission in life, so there’s no need for us to compare ourselves to others. He says that chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, which is the name of our innate potential, lets us bring out that potential just as we are. Even if we’re going through difficulties, we can challenge them using our inner wisdom, courage and compassion. I remember printing off “Appreciating Your Uniqueness” and keeping it with me in my purse and on my desk at work after reading it because every time I read it, it reminded me to not compare myself with others, which is a lot easier said than done. I’m a human so I still struggle with comparing myself to others, but then I think about this part of the book and it just reminds me I have my own unique mission to accomplish and to just keep doing my best at it every day. Even when writing this personal blog, I wondered whether my writing was good enough to publish, but after just practicing my writing, even on days when I didn’t feel like writing, I became more confident in writing in my original voice. Of course, there have been days when I don’t pick up the pen or go to the computer to write, but after some days or months pass I just have to remember to just refresh my determination to write consistently no matter what outcome the writing produces. Again, this is an ongoing process but I have to go through this process to grow as a person.

I also really loved this study material because embracing my individuality has definitely been a journey, and while there were many painful moments I have had to confront while on this journey, each challenge has helped me build my self-confidence and conviction that I have the potential to overcome my challenges each time through chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and making efforts to encourage my fellow SGI Buddhists and other people. In 2016 I didn’t really know what to do with my life, but I knew that I still wanted to play the cello even after college graduation. I thought that I wanted to have a job as a cellist in a professional orchestra, and while I still am working towards that dream, I have been able to use these past few years to develop more confidence in my abilities as a musician, and moreover, my self-worth. In another book I love called Discussions on Youth, Daisaku Ikeda says that self-confidence isn’t something you just magically have overnight, it’s something that you develop through challenging yourself in something, and that one can’t be said to have true self-confidence if their opinion of themselves see-saws based on others’ opinions. I think this is especially true these past couple of years, because before the pandemic hit I had this big glamorous vision of moving to New York City and playing at Carnegie Hall and having this glamorous career where I played with many different musicians and got all these awards. While some part of me is still striving for that, I also have done a lot of inner transformation, called human revolution in Nichiren Buddhism, over these past few years and I have come to understand that success isn’t just about glitz and glamour. Genuine success comes down to making earnest daily efforts even if they aren’t glamorous. When I first started working at Starbucks I struggled to take my work seriously because I thought that because it wasn’t related to my music career it wasn’t important, but as I polished myself through my SGI activities and efforts in my Buddhist practice, I gained the confidence to keep doing my best at my job whether or not I was going to be at the company long-term. I also came to understand through studying Buddhism that it’s about developing my inner self and letting that self shine so she can bring her best self to any area of her life, be it work, school, friendships, other relationships, and faith activities. It’s not about keeping up appearances, it’s about embracing who I am and understanding that I’m always going to be growing and improving and always have something to learn about myself.

Honestly looking back, I am glad things have worked out the way they did. I am still striving for a music career, but I’ve gradually been able to build a skill that is essential for anything in life, and that is learning how to embrace failure. As a recovering perfectionist I had to learn how to embrace rejection and failure so that I could grow, because the truth is, life isn’t always going to be fun but you can use those difficult moments, the seemingly un-glamorous moments, to figure out what your strengths are, what you can improve upon, and figure out how to use that in your career. Also, I learned through studying Buddhism to see things from a broader perspective, so I realized over time that rejection is part of any career, part of life itself, not just in the world of orchestra auditions. When I auditioned for my first professional orchestra audition I played to the best of my ability, and frankly I almost didn’t go to the audition because I was battling serious mental health problems and broke down crying while I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo before my audition. I played “The Swan,” not knowing until a little later that most people probably choose a concerto for their solo piece when auditioning for professional orchestras, but what did I care? At this point, after literally fighting to the death against depression, suicidal thoughts and anxiety to get my ass to the audition place, I was willing to just cut the perfectionist bullshit and just do my best for the judges. And it turns out, when I let go of trying to put on airs and just played my best, the judges at the end of the day listened to me play and looking back, I appreciate them even just hearing me play, mind you without a curtain separating me from them. I look back with appreciation that I even got to play for them in person and also talk with them on a heart-to-heart, human-to-human level. At that point it wasn’t about me being perfect, but about connecting to another person’s Buddha nature through my music.

Movie Review: Encanto

Oh my gosh. This movie. I saw it twice and I still cried each damn time. I watched it a couple of weeks ago (6/6/22: as of today, it was a couple of months ago when I saw this film) and my gosh, when I say I bawled through the entire movie, I literally did just that. The colors. The music. The storyline. Just, like, oh my gosh. I honestly think I cried, too, because I hadn’t seen a Pixar movie in a while and forgot how much I love them. Coco and Onward were the last ones I had seen lately.

So just to give you a synopsis of the film if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s about this girl named Mirabel who is part of a renowned family called The Madrigals. They are known throughout Colombia for their incredible gifts. Her mom, for instance, makes delicious food that can cure just about anyone’s ailments; Luisa is the strong one and can literally lift anything, whether it’s a house or a bunch of donkeys; Isabela is Mirabel’s sister and is the perfect sister who doesn’t want anything to do with Mirabel; Pepa can make weather; Delores has super-sonic hearing and all the other family members have some sort of magical gift. And the matriarch holding down the fort is Abuela, who keeps everything together and makes sure that nothing falls through the cracks and damages the long-held reputation of the Madrigals. In the first musical number Mirabel is telling all the neighborhood kids about her family members’ gifts, but then after she is done they ask her over and over again what her gift is and she keeps dodging their question, instead preferring to talk more about her family’s gifts. Finally, Abuela catches her dancing and singing and asks her if there is anything wrong, and Mirabel hesitates, but then one of the kids blurts out that they were asking Mirabel about her Gift. Abuela then tells Mirabel and the kids that Mirabel didn’t get a Gift. A delivery guy then comes and has Mirabel carry a huge basket of goods for Antonio’s gift ceremony (Antonio is Pepa and Felix’s son) and mentions in passing Mirabel’s giftlessness. Crushed but trying to keep an appearance of I’m-doing-ok, Mirabel tries to help with the preparations for the ceremony but ends up damaging some of the decorations, prompting her grandmother to tell her to not help because everything must go perfectly during Antonio’s gift ceremony. Before the ceremony, Mirabel finds Antonio hiding under her bed and gives him a present to celebrate his ceremony (this scene really made me tear up because it was so heartfelt) and she tells him the ceremony is going to go perfectly. He doubts this and asks her what if his gift doesn’t work, and she helps him cheer up. When the ceremony finally arrives, Antonio is walked down an aisle in front of lots of people, but he finds Mirabel standing on the side and motions to her to come and escort him to his door, where he will be tested to see if his gift works. As Mirabel walks, she remembers when she herself was at her own gift ceremony as a little girl and nervously walking towards the door. Antonio ends up succeeding and opens the door to find his gift is that he can communicate with animals, and he finds this incredible jungle of animals when he opens the door. Everyone is celebrating, but then Mirabel stands on the side and remembers that when she tried to open the door for her gift ceremony, it disintegrated, meaning that she wasn’t given a special gift by the family Madrigal. She wonders if there is ever a hopeful future for her since she doesn’t have super crazy cool gifts like everyone else in her family does.

However, she does find something that the other members of the family don’t seem to perceive. She finds cracks in the foundation of the family home, but when she brings it up to people at Antonio’s ceremony no one recognizes the cracks and once again Abuela looks embarrassed that Mirabel even brought it up, leaving her feeling even more dejected. There is a member of the family that the Madrigals don’t talk about, and that person is Bruno, who they portray as this creepy guy who caused everyone’s misfortunes. Mirabel sets out to find Bruno but ends up bringing some glass back from Bruno’s lair and piecing it together, which is a big no-no because the family isn’t supposed to bring up Bruno. Unfortunately this happens at Isabela’s engagement dinner, when Dolores, who hears everything, finds out Mirabel visited Bruno’s lair and then tells everyone at the dinner table. The dinner is ruined and no one trusts Mirabel anymore. Before that, there was a brilliant number by Luisa, who is supposed to be the strong one in the family who lifts houses, donkeys, basically anything heavy. Mirabel tries to get some information from her, and Luisa tells her she feels pressured to lift everyone’s burdens. She then tells Mirabel that she secretly felt weak when Mirabel revealed there were cracks in the foundation at Antonio’s ceremony, and says that she often feels she carries too many people’s burdens.

Honestly, I really felt I could relate to Mirabel. She feels like she doesn’t possess a gift and often struggles with self-confidence just because there’s so much pressure on the Madrigal family to put on appearances of having these supernatural gifts, this supernatural strength, and trying to keep it all together. But later on, we find out that no one in the family is perfect and everyone actually just wants to live in a way that is true to themselves. Even Abuela realizes that neither she nor the family are perfect, but to get to this realization she had to go back and face her painful past where her husband was killed by an army of bandits and she had to fend for herself to protect her three children. Carrying this grief and trauma inside of her while keeping an appearance of togetherness was probably one of the more painful moments of the film, because Abuela really was trying her best to keep the family together and happy, but she realized that by alienating her daughter and Bruno for being different, she also kind of suffered because she couldn’t truly be happy knowing that her granddaughter felt like an outcast and like no one cared about her just because she didn’t possess the gifts they did.

This movie also reminded me of this TV show I used to watch called The Good Place because there’s a character in the show named Tahani and she has a sister named Kamilah. When they were growing up, Tahani’s parents favored Kamilah over Tahani because she got good grades in school and was an all-around perfect child, while Tahani didn’t live up to their expectations. One particularly painful moment Tahani recalls is when their parents had her and Kamilah compete to see who could paint the best picture, and Kamilah’s painting impressed the parents while Tahani’s did not. Tahani finds Kamilah put on a successful art exhibition in Hungary and is impressing all these people with her talents in art and cooking, and it angers Tahani because she’s always been compared to Kamilah for most of her life and she doesn’t want it to continue. However, Tahani realizes that she really just wants to have a loving relationship with her sister, one that is free from cut-throatness and perfectionism, one where they can just love each other for who they are, and Tahani ends up giving Kamilah a hug and telling her that their parents want her and Kamilah to keep competing with each other and it’s getting in the way of their sisterly bond. I thought about this moment in The Good Place because in Encanto, Mirabel’s sister Isabela is the perfect sister and she is just keeping up appearances of being perfect because that is what Abuela and the community expect from her. Each time Mirabel tries to talk with her or be near her, Isabela sees this as a threat to her image of perfection and gets angry and tells Isabela to stay out of her life. However, there’s a crucial moment when Bruno is helping Mirabel see into the future what she needs to do to save her family’s foundation from crumbling, and in the future she sees her hugging Isabela. At first, she is repulsed that she would even do such a thing because Isabela has been nothing but mean and condescending to Mirabel, but when she visits Isabela in her room, Isabela confesses to her that she just wants to be free to create what she wants. Her room is expected to look a certain way, but she ends up using her gift to express herself however she wants even if it’s not the perfect image people see of her. She ends up producing all these colorful powders and gets them all over her room and all over her and Mirabel and when Abuela sees this she is distraught that Isabela would ruin her image of cleanliness, but Isabela at this point doesn’t care because she’s now happy that she doesn’t have to live up to other people’s expectations of her.

This is totally random, but do you remember when they had the Oscars pre-show this year? The cast of Encanto was on the red carpet and they were talking about how they were going to perform the song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” For some strange reason, I thought they were talking about the 2009 mockumentary called Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen because I haven’t met someone named Bruno in a long time and that film was one of the few times I have encountered someone named Bruno (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the film Bruno so I of course can’t talk about it, no pun intended.)

Overall, Encanto was an excellent movie and I recommend it if you haven’t seen it. Also, Stephanie Beatriz, who played one of my favorite TV characters Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn 99, plays Mirabel so I was really happy when I read she was played by her! 🙂

Encanto. 2021. Rated PG for some thematic elements and mild peril.

“Naive” by The Kooks

The other day I was at work, and a song called “Naive” by a band called The Kooks came on. It reminded me of when I first heard the song, which was the summer before my 8th grade year of school. That summer I went to Western Europe and we had a chaperone who was British and really cool. She had a Red iPod nano just like mine (the one that was part of the Product (RED) campaign to fight AIDS in Africa) and had a lot of epic songs on it. The very first song I heard her play on our bus ride around Ireland was “Naive” by The Kooks. It sounded pretty cool, and I pretty much remember listening to all sorts of other British artists and consuming British stuff when I got back home. I even started begging my parents to buy me Weetabix cereal, which is a popular cereal that was often served when we were in the United Kingdom. It’s actually pretty good with soy milk and fruit, and I wouldn’t mind eating it even now.

The chaperone also had a lot of other cool music by The Kooks on her iPod, many which I have fond memories of listening to with the other people on the trip. “Seaside” was one of them, and it’s just such a peaceful and beautiful song. It made me want to go to, as the song title suggests, the seaside. Another was “She Moves in Her Own Way,” which is a really fun tune I love. After listening to these songs I started loving The Kooks. The chaperone also had some songs by Gnarls Barkley on her iPod, specifically “Crazy” and “Smiley Faces,” and listening to these made me fall in love more with Gnarls Barkley’s music.

This is the one of the first songs I listened to on the trip by The Kooks:

Review: Drive My Car

I first heard about Drive My Car when my parents told me about an article they read about it. I thought it sounded nice but at first wasn’t so gung-ho about seeing it. Then my aunt told me she fell asleep through it because it was such a long movie, so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see it. But I’m glad I did see the film anyway, because it is truly a deep film. It does require patience to get through the movie but it is totally worth it. I definitely recommend if you can reading the short story by Haruki Murakami first. The story is from a collection of stories he wrote called Men Without Women, and while I haven’t read the entire book I really loved reading the story “Drive My Car.” Honestly, I don’t know how to describe Murakami’s writing. I’ve read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle; After the Quake, another of his short story collections; 1Q84 and now I am reading a novel he wrote in 2017 called Killing Commendatore. The books are pretty intense and it definitely takes patience to read his works, especially 1Q84, which is more than 1,000 pages long. But they dive into very deep human issues, and each of the characters you meet in his writings are so complex in their own unique ways. I really love reading the philosopher Daisaku Ikeda’s writings on the importance of literature because he says that reading literature gives us insight into the human condition. Reading Murakami’s works showed me how complex human life is because the characters find themselves in various situations that would be fantasies in real life.

The film Drive My Car opens up with the protagonist, Yusuke Kafuku and his wife, Oto, having sex. She is telling him this really wild story and he listens to her tell the story (my description of the story she tells wouldn’t do it justice. Also, At first I didn’t even know that the opening credits hadn’t rolled until they started rolling 40 minutes into the film, and I thought, Dang that was the opening. Anyway, back to the plot.) They seem to have the perfect life together, but then when he comes home one day he finds that his wife is having sex with another man named Koji Takatsuki. Still he continues to stay faithful to her even after she slept with another man. He is driving his car one day and then gets into an accident. He and Oto go to the doctor and the doctor tells him the accident messed up his eyesight and to take eye drops for glaucoma or else he will lose his eyesight. Later on, Yusuke goes into the living room and finds Oto dead. The rest of the film is about how he handles her death. He takes on a position as a playwright-in-residence in another city and the people in charge of the residency program tell him he needs a driver because it’s their policy (they add that one time one of their artists got into a bad accident and so they made it a rule that any artist in residence needs someone to drive them.) They hire an introverted young woman named Misaki Watari to drive him, and at first Yusuke refuses but Misaki refuses to let him drive and has him get in the car so she can go on a test drive in his car. She doesn’t speak for most or any of the drive, but she lets him listen to his tape to prepare for the Anton Chekhov play he is in charge of called Uncle Vanya.

The film also navigates the challenges that Yusuke faces as a playwright. He auditions different people for the roles in the play, and it’s awkward because one of the people trying out for the play is Koji, the man who slept with Yusuke’s wife Oto. The movie also navigates how Yusuke confronts Koji about sleeping with his wife, and how Koji also misses her instead of just seeing her as just another woman to have sex with. During rehearsals for the play, Yusuke is harder on Koji than he is on the other actors because of their shared history with Oto and Koji always initiates these conversations about Oto because both of them are processing their grief at losing her. However, Koji has his own complicated history because he was framed for a variety of crimes, including sleeping with an underage woman. He gets arrested when, while at the bar with Yusuke, he beats up a stranger who took a picture of him. At first I didn’t understand why the person was taking a picture of him, but then I remembered Koji got framed for something.

One scene that was really poignant to me and my parents were the scenes where one of the actors, Lee Yoon-A, speaks in Korean sign language. After getting really excited for CODA, which is a film in American sign language, it really gave me hope to see someone who spoke sign language being included in the play. Her audition was incredible and moving and it was the first time for me seeing a play where the language was communicated in sign language. Normally the plays I see are in English (or if it’s an opera, in Italian, German or French). There is a beautiful scene where the casting judge working with Yusuke takes him and Misaki to his home, and he reveals that Lee Yoon-A is his wife and that he learned sign language because they were together. The dinner scene where Lee communicates with her husband, Yusuke and Misaki is very beautiful and is an every day conversation but was just so profound and heartfelt.

Misaki doesn’t talk much during the film and she keeps to herself, but she has a keen sense of empathy and relates well to Yusuke, and ultimately helps him process his grief over losing his wife. She can relate because she lost her mother at a young age, and her mother was abusive but she taught Misaki how to be a good driver so she carried this skill with her throughout her life. After watching the film I had a lot of respect for Uber drivers. I know that sounds random but watching this film made me think about all the Uber drivers who drove me when I went to L.A. for vacation, and one person was super quiet but they were trying to get through L.A. traffic. At first I was put off by the driver not engaging me in conversation but at least I had my book on hand to read during the drive so that was nice. The film also gave me a new appreciation and outlook on driving in general. It’s an everyday activity that people like myself do, but lately this week while driving to work I started thinking a lot about life and death, and I started chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo while driving and it helped me a lot with my anxiety. I’ve realized in the few years I’ve been driving myself to work that driving can actually be a chance for self-reflection. Of course, I have to concentrate while I drive so I need to pay attention to the road but I still find myself contemplating a lot about the meaning of life when I drive. Kind of like the Saturday Night Live skit where Jim Carrey parodies Matthew McConaughey driving with this contemplative look on his face in the commercials for Lincoln cars.

On Leave, Chapter 11

I opened my email. I wanted to know if they had an orchestra I could join while I worked as a barista. I got a Facebook message from Sharon. It popped up on the side of my computer, on the bottom right hand side.

Hey, girl, I just wanted to check in one you. How are you doing? I really miss you. Call me sometime, okay?

I looked at my phone. I dialed Sharon.

The phone rang a few times, then I heard, “Hello?”

“Sharon, hey, it’s me, Natalie.”

“Hey Nat! Can I call you back in a bit? I’m heading over to Professor Blumenkorpf’s office hours. I got an F on my–puff–last—puff–essay exam, and I need help distinguishing between all the chord progressions. The class is hell without my bestie there to support me.”

“Yeah, sure. Okay…well, have fun at office…”

I trailed off because she hung up before I could even say “hours.” I flopped on the bed. Why couldn’t I just go back to school after this stupid medical leave was finished? Wait, would it ever be finished? What if I ended up at 30, still making lattes and letting my cello rust and wither until the bow hair exploded from lack of use?

I eyed my lonely cello. My lonely companion, so lonely without me. I heard myself singing the song “Lonely” by Akon in my head as I looked at the sleek curvy case. She was beautiful and she was mine. She was the one friend through which I could communicate my innermost thoughts, and yet I was throwing a pity party for myself.

I vented aloud to her.

“Why can’t I just go back to school? Why are Mom and Dad putting me under this life sentence called medical leave? All I did was drink some gin, it was no big deal. This is punishment, I tell you, punishment. And work today–it freaking sucked. We made thirty drinks in less than fifteen minutes and my coworker shouted at me. My life sucks.”

The cello listened intently. It was such a good listener.

But it called to me. It called to me to play on it, so I struggled to lug my lazy depressed self off the bed and play some tunes. I placed my bow on the string. The cello was getting caked with rosin and I needed to get it cleaned, but I didn’t really have the money to do so. Well, I thought, at least I have a job where I can make enough money to pay a visit to the local luthier once in a while. I started with a C major scale, bowing the string close to the bridge so it produced a beautiful resonant sound. I envisioned myself performing the C major scale for everyone in Carnegie Hall, where, after I returned to school and received my diploma, I would perform the Saint-Saens Cello Concerto in A minor for everyone to hear. I then played some random notes. A, C, F sharp, G sharp, back to A, E flat, F double sharp…before I knew it, I was improvising.

Then I took out my blue book. The Cello Suites by Benjamin Britten. I remember struggling through them during my first semester of conservatory. They are truly a delightful challenge to practice and perform. I bowed the notes with an astounding grace befitting to that of a queen. I didn’t feel depressed when I played. I felt like I was on top of the world. I continued to play.

“Natalie! Come help me put up the dishes.”

I groaned. My idealism, my dreams, shattered by a mother’s shrill voice, telling me to put up the dishes. But I walked down the stairs and went over to help her. I really couldn’t afford to be a brat. After all, Mom and Dad were letting me move back in with them so I could get myself together. I had already scared them by getting alcohol poisoning.

I had my headphones in. I heard muffled talking as I put up the hot and steamy dishes. And I felt a sharp yank as my mother grabbed my headphones, letting them dangle in the air as I looked at her with a face of embarrassment.

“I said how was work, and you pretended not to hear me,” she snapped.

“Oh, it was good, I guess,” I shrugged. I didn’t really want to talk about it.

“Oh, I see how it is. You can talk to your friends about anything and everything, you have this illustrious career ahead of you in music and everything fine arts. And yet you can’t just stop acting like a brat and have a single heart-to-heart conversation with me while we do the dishes.”

And with that, she left the room, trying not to let me see her cry. I know I let Mom down easily, but this must have been the final straw for her.

I looked sadly, put away my headphones and my phone. I was going to put up the dishes in silence. No music, no TV, no nothing. I was going to reflect on how bad of a daughter I was to my mom, how stupid I was to not talk to her or treat her like a human being.

List of International Films I Watched This Winter Break

January 8, 2022

Some friends of mine and I watched these films over these past couple of months. They rented them from the library and all of them are really good.

  1. A Borrowed Identity: This movie takes place in the Israel-Palestine area and it’s about an Israeli-Palestinian boy who grows up during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is conflicted about his identities since there is so much tension between Israeli people and Palestinian people, and he ends up going to a school where most, if not all, of the people there are Israeli. He meets a young Israeli man who has muscular dystrophy and has to use a wheelchair, and he strikes up a friendship between him and his mom. The Israeli man at first doesn’t like him because he is Palestinian, but as the protagonist shows this young man his compassion and friendship, they develop a deeper bond, but that bond is jeopardized continuously by the ongoing war between Israelis and Palestinians. Also the guy falls in love with this girl who is Israeli, and they have to keep their relationship hidden from the public. The young man ends up adopting an Israeli identity by taking his friend’s ID and passing as Israeli.
  2. Julieta: this film is by Pedro Almodovar, a Spanish film director who has directed numerous films, such as The Skin I Live In, I’m So Excited, Volver and other films. There was recently a New York Times article about him that I still have to read, but basically the film takes place in Spain and it’s about a woman named Julieta (played by Emma Suarez) whose daughter has gone missing. She goes through a long process of grief and memory, and discovers many haunting things about her past.
  3. Young Ahmed: This film is set in Belgium, and it’s about a young man named Ahmed who practices Islam, and he takes what his imam tells him to the extreme and puts together a plan to murder his teacher.
  4. The Way Back: This film is set in South Korea, and the film was released in 2002. It’s about a little boy whose mom takes him to live with his grandmother, who is both deaf and mute. At first he rejects her kindness, but then he learns to love and appreciate her because she shows him unconditional love. It was a deeply touching film.
  5. The Keeper: This film is set in England after World War II, and it’s about a German prisoner of war who falls in love with football and an Englishwoman. It’s a true story about Bert Trautmann, who was a professional goalkeeper for Manchester’s football team. At first the woman doesn’t trust him because of all the bad things the Nazis did, but then she falls in love with him and the movie is about how he overcomes a lot of prejudice from others and wins the trust of his teammates and the fans of the football team. It was truly a deep movie.
  6. Honeyland: this is a documentary set in Macedonia, and it’s about a woman who lives with her aging mother and harvests honey for a living. She goes to the city and sells her honey to people, and is happy with her life in general. But then a family moves in next door and takes on the art of beekeeping to help their business run. At first the woman who lives with her mother is fine with it, but as the family starts to overstep their boundaries and take control of the area, tensions build between her and the family and it becomes harder for them to live harmoniously. It is a beautiful moving film that also made me appreciate bees so much more. In the film, there’s several scenes where the people eat raw honeycomb that the woman freshly pulls from under a large stone fixture in the earth, and it reminded me of these ASMR videos (autonomous sensory meridian response) where people in the videos eat raw honeycomb from the store. I actually really love the chewing noises when people eat honeycomb and find it calming, so the scenes where the people are eating raw honeycomb were pretty relaxing.
  7. True Mothers: this one was deep. When I first watched it with my mom and dad I was super tired and had very little sleep, and so I unfortunately started nodding off. But I watched it a second time, and holy smokes it blew me away. It’s about a couple named Satoko and Kiyokazu Kurihara who tries to get pregnant but end up not being able to conceive, so they contact an adoption agency called Baby Baton, where mothers who can’t raise their kids give their kids to new parents who can raise their kids. At first, the biological mother of the baby the couple adopts lets them raise her baby, but then later on, when Asato (the child’s adoptive name) is six years old his biological mother, Hikari Katakura, calls Satoko (the wife of the couple) and says to give back her child. The movie explores Hikari’s past as well as the difficulties that the mothers at Baby Baton face in giving up their children. It truly was a powerful movie, and there were a lot of intense plot twists.
  8. In Between: This movie takes place in Israel, and it’s about three independent-minded young Palestinian women who share an apartment together in Tel Aviv. In the movie, they navigate the complex social norms of womanhood that people expect of them while trying to remain true to themselves.
  9. A Tale of Love and Darkness: I watched this today (1/8/22) and it was a really deep movie. It takes place in the British Mandate of Palestine, and it’s the film adaptation of a memoir by Amos Oz, an Israeli author.