I am disturbed. Not that this is anything new, I get disturbed often, stupid things people do that I witness or hear about sends some poison up my bloodstream--I get mad, a little crazy. But recently it's just thoughts I have been turning over and over again in my mental rotisserie. THey keep dripping every time I'm on a bus, trying to just look out the window with that wonderful blankness, everytime I'm on the bart with nothing but blackness outside the window, when I'm in the showers. It is a discussion I had on what art means to the public, it is the things I have been learning in school, it is the fact that I am already turning 24 and feeling no wiser, it has to do with my Chineseness which not being a big deal back home is a bigger deal here than it should be. It is the people I see on the bus, immigrants like me who I try not to get angry or irritated at, it has to do with not belonging, it has to do with me liking a guy who is in all probability gay, it has to do with having alot of anger and not being able to articulate them. It has to do with living with family obligations, it has to do with freedom or the lack of it. It has to do with how mute I feel I am becoming and how I am losing control of my voice--the voice which I can use to bring all these feelings to light give them all a proper home so that they can rest somewhere instead of floating in and out with their nauseating frustration. It is hearing about friends as unhappy and confused as I am, and seeing others my age with their well-planned independence and new found success and confidence of being in their "Prime". Because the only other word I can put behind this word is ribs.

I am disturbed and it is all my greasy mess up there, the place I could always escape to for some clarity and beauty when I need some and can't find any out in the world, when I turn to myself for solace. That space I can still find some magic and peace when all around is disenchantment, tiredness, cynicism and worldly wisdom and superficial "beauty", where there is still light, unsoiled sunrise and innocence that is not being mocked and I am not judged. And most importantly I do not need to be understood or try to make myself clear, I can just be.

I am tired of being defined by my age, my gender, my sexuality, my race, my accent, my difference. No, people are not racist here, it is how they try their darndest not to be that drives me insane, like trying to accommodate, learning to appreciate "Chinese culture" which I myself have no idea what that is really, it is handing me and my sister chopsticks because to be honest that is wonderful service but totally unnecessary. It is as if asking me questions about my difference would bring us closer. AND Asian American studies--when all the time I am made more confused about what the hell is Asian? And worse Asian American? And then going on to talk about history of immigrants. Why not just call it HIstory? It can't even be properly called a discipline. It is all these fake divisions and categories. I have no Asian pride of forced loyalty, i don't really care about Chinese new year except for the fact that I enjoy my friends' company and the food and the ang bao money. I can't write in Chinese all that well, but I use it every single day. All of a sudden these things which don't actually matter becomes so important and I don't see why it should be at all significant. I am just a person trying to be in this world that has troubles enough. Shouldn't I be better able to try to explain all this? Shouldn't I by now have come to an understanding of what I mean and stand for? I don't know. All of a sudden I understand why I should hate Amy Tan.

Everyday I take the bus overcrowded with all kinds of Chinese, most can't even speak or understand the most basic of English. ASking for the driver to open the backdoor is like an impossibly difficult mission. And their fear is a silent one, they are glum with lots of complaints, as if their uncertainties and darkness can be eased with their nitty gritty complaints about each other about the others and their desperate attempt to hide their "unenlightenedness" as they are always defined by the others. They grumble about the Blacks while they Blacks teenagers holler that they stink. And then I am filled with a dark fear too, that I am the same, because, I am in a way. I am Chinese too, but I don't want to be forced to have to take sides in a society, in all bloody societies that force us to be in boxes one way or another so you can be understood. But no it does not increase understanding because all everyone is concerned with is just that box not what is within.

San Francisco is supposed to be really liberal and multicultured, but what are all these when they are all paper thin rhetorics? Sometimes I really want to ask what the fuck is this liberalism you all talk about? Marching nude on the street when those homeless people are as visible as your showoff tits and dicks? And that Chinese woman still cannot get the bus door to open in her unintelligible "English" and all this talk about gays and lesbian rights. Yes Of course it is important, everyone's right is, all we really want is to be free to live the kind of lifestyle we want and be happy but then why does it all just degenerate into a lot of noise? And I still don't understand why someone's sex should be a precondition for love? IT doesn't matter if your lover is a man or a woman,does it? Who you love is the person. Perhaps we are all still confused between politics of sex and the politics of love. Because for me, quite frankly, the latter should not exist. That was the same day when I went to BORDERs and tried to find the poetry section to find that it has been pushed out by the Gay and Lesbian studies to some other corner in the bookstore.

And then there was that discussion on art and its place for the public. I got so scared when I felt that perhaps art no longer cares for those people, people I feel I can start to identify with. People who can't even speak their frustration and may not be able to read a single word in the definition of "civilization" in dictionary. That art will never speak for the downtrodden, in a way that is not noise or anger, but a beauty that can reach across our divides. That if there is anything genuinely worth talking about our human condition then, we all as human beings should be able to understand and appreciate it. Because more than anything political in the form of rights, what we all hunger for is beauty to make our existence tolerable. And everyday I am on the bus feeling the lack of it, in the ugliness of people's sadness, fear and loneliness as I try not to fall into that general snarl of an expression but finding it impossibly hard to smile.