I was in the GATE program (Gifted and Talented Education) where select public school students identified as gifted are given educational opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise.  The California Department of Education describes that

Special efforts are made to ensure that pupils from economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds are provided with full participation in these unique opportunities.

Like almost all of of my peers, I fell into the demographic of “economically disadvantaged” and being of “varying cultural background”.  Much of the GATE programming leaned toward the arts.  In fifth grade, I worked with paints and learned about Vincent Van Gogh (French Impressionism is still my favorite period of art for this reason). In junior high, I went to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Downtown Los Angeles.  It’s still one of the best days in my memory.  Without this program, I know I wouldn’t have the appreciation for arts and culture that I have today.

When I was also in junior high, we put on two short adaptations of William Shakespeare – I was Juliet in Romeo & Juliet and in Macbeth I portrayed the different apparitions.

In Romeo & Juliet, my suitor Tybalt was a fourth grader when I was a seventh or eighth grader. He stood a good foot shorter than me (I’m sure he’s much taller now).  In part of the play, using our basic English translation of it, he literally looked up at me, saying:

“Hello, my love.”

In Macbeth, we didn’t really have much of a cauldron. You had to be creative with your props with limited resources and funding. We made due with a trash can that generally carried PE equipment. I was dragged onto stage while in this trash can. I went through my different incarnations as the apparitions and then the trash can was dragged off-stage.  I’m not sure why, but I tried to get out of this trash can in mid-movement. I think I was embarrassed due to the audience’s laughter of seeing me in a trash can in the first place. But my exit only made made it worse. Instead of escaping my embarrassment, I very “elegantly” fell out of the trashcan…in front of the entire Community Center audience.

In retrospect, it’s really funny.  At the time, not so much.

Remembering Shakespeare in my life reminds me of how important it is to support arts in education, to let it simmer while you’re young. While I don’t advocate that more students fall out of cauldron trash cans (though it does make you learn to laugh a little more), I do advocate the importance of arts education.

There’s value in knowing how much it takes to put on a production. There’s strength in knowing how much is at stake to be a performer or the teamwork required of a cast, even if you’re never going to be a performer when you grow older or you’re okay that your last claim to stage fame was being a tree in your first grade play.  Maybe you learned how much you liked making that tree, rather than acting like one.  There’s depth in how the arts can bridge gaps of self and social awareness and understanding, how teachers can help you learn lessons through the arts themselves.

Drawing, acting, singing, dancing, film making, writing – these are spaces where students are made better by exploration and the opportunity to learn and thrive.  These are spaces that should be available to all students, not those selected to be in a program or needing for something special to happen for it to exist in their lives.

So on your birthday, Shakespeare, I raise my glass to you, but really I raise my glass to teachers who work in the arts.  I raise my glass to everyone who makes arts something more accessible every day.  Without teachers and arts education, I really wouldn’t be here, and – I’m thinking – neither would you.

-cct

*I’ve been told that he was baptized on the April 26th and his DOB is unknown

My friend from high school Carolina passed away on Saturday.  I wrote this poem “Star Bright” about remembering her memory, but it was also about not remembering.

But in truth
Offline
We rarely crossed paths
And I do not remember
The last time I saw you
Face-to-face

I don’t remember the last time I saw her.  Even if someone told me what/when it was, I don’t think I could really confirm that it was the last time.  We interacted online – liking statuses, making comments – and while I’m glad we always stayed connected…it’s not the same, y’know?

But I remember her well and I think that’s important because even though she was so young, it says something about her impact in this world.  It was positive.  She was beautiful.  And I am blessed to have known the brightness of her spirit while she was here with us.

-cct

Today I dressed in mostly red – a coat and rain boots – and declared that red was the color the day.  This flower is what I found after I struggled to open the door to the building, brightly sitting on the lobby floor, as if brought by the wind and even – if by random chance – brought to me.

-cct

None of these stories relate to the Guggenheim, but the spiral dome looks like a vortex!

According to 2010 United States Census, New York City is the most populous city in the country with over eight million people.  Furthermore, according to NYC’s official guide, over 40 million people visit this city annually.  You might begin reading this thinking “It’s a small world” but by the end, I wonder if you would think that is the most appropriate phrase.  I am by no means a math major, but I feel like my most recent trip to NYC over President’s Day weekend has to be a statistical anomaly.  In fact, I think I may have flown in and out of a vortex.

Friday

After a visit to the 9/11 Memorial, my sister and I made our way to a late lunch at a pastry shop that she had just tried the other week, Financier Patisserie.  We had a couple of detours and got there sometime in the mid-afternoon.  I would find out later that we were at their first location on Stone Street, but there are 11 locations in New York.  I mention this because this wasn’t the only Financier Patisserie we could have gone to and that we weren’t exactly there for the typical lunch hour either.

I sat enjoying my soup and sandwich when I noticed a familiar face walk in the door.

“Kimberly?”

I already knew my friend Kimberly would be in New York City the same weekend I would be, we had no plans to meet up or visit the same tourist spots together.  If I had run into her at a tourist spot, perhaps the story for this particular day would even make some sense, but there we were in Financier Patisserie.

“Kimberly!”

At first, I wasn’t sure it was her because she hadn’t heard me – too preoccupied by the desserts behind the glass.  After verifying with my sister that this was my friend Kimberly (via a Facebook photo nonetheless) and her significant other (also in the same Facebook photo) – essentially that I wasn’t seeing things – I got up to order coffee.  When she turned around, I waved.

Cue: Girl squeal and insta-hug.

To add to the strangeness, it turned out that we had both been at a NYC tourist destination, having gone through the 9/11 Memorial earlier in the day.  But our timed tickets were differentiated by at least an hour, so odds were that we wouldn’t have met there either – let alone nearly half a mile away from the Memorial in a pastry shop.

Kimberly would later post a photo of us on Facebook where some friends suggested that we had planned meeting up.   After finding out otherwise, they thought this incident was as crazy as we did.  I wonder what they would say about the rest of my trip.

Saturday

One of my favorite places in New York City is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The first time I made a visit there years ago, I went there specifically to look at their permanent collection of armor (long story short: I used to be a fencer…as in epee, not stolen goods).  This second time through the museum I was able to go through what felt like Ancient Egypt had been transplanted, the American Wing of amazing Tiffany glass, and the collection of historic musical instruments from around the world.  I had a glimpse of the musical instruments collection before my more thorough exploration that day; in this glimpse lies my second vortex story.

I left my sister in Ancient Egypt to go find a bathroom – and of course, didn’t take a museum map with me.  Though we really weren’t in Ancient Egypt, my museum wanderings for a bathroom felt like I had traveled across time and space.  I eventually found myself at a stairwell and thought that perhaps I could find a bathroom on the second floor.  When I got to the second floor, I got distracted from my journey at the sight of glistening golden organ pipes.

As a church member of First Congregational Church of Los Angeles – home of the world’s largest church organ (based on the number of pipes) – I wasn’t surprised that the sight of this instrument made me detour on my mission.  What I was surprised by was walking into this area for a closer look at the organ and finding Bryon, one of my church choral members, standing by it taking pictures.

“Hey – what are you doing here?”

“What are YOU doing here?”

Neither of us had known the other was in New York City, let alone expect that we would run into each other in front of the organ of a very large museum.  It was fitting though, that of all people I would run into in front of an organ in New York City, it would be someone affiliated with my church.  There are a few things that help diffuse the oddness of this incident – we were in a tourist spot, we both had a vested interest in organs, and we would later run into each other again in the museum.

Small world?  Perhaps.  Adding to the story from the day before?  It’s beginning to look a lot like a vortex.

Oh, and a note: if you happen to be lost in the Metropolitan Museum of Art without a map and looking for a bathroom – just ask a museum employee.  Though perhaps not as adventurous, it’s easier.

Sunday

One of my favorite dessert places in NYC is Serendipity 3.  Partly because I love the movie, but really because their frozen hot chocolate is worth the wait.  I had made plans to go to lunch there – to meet up with my friend Sarah who I hadn’t seen in five years.

It would turn out that Serendipity 3 was a two hour wait – so we ended up not going there for lunch, but perhaps we had already used up the serendipity of the day earlier.

We were both running late.  There were text messages back and forth.

The train my sister and I were on stopped so that people could transfer to the other car.  And apparently we were among the people that needed to transfer.  So my sister and I headed to the train cars across the way, entering the one exactly parallel to the one we were in.  Prior to leaving the train car, we joked about who I would run into next.

I told my sister, “Well, now that you said it, it’s probably not going to happen.”

The train car we had walked into was standing room only at that point, so my sister and I stood by the filled seats.  It was then that I noticed a familiar face, seated right between where my sister and I were standing.

“Sarah?”

She looked up from her phone and though we hadn’t seen each other in five years, neither of us had changed much.  It was definitely Sarah.

Was this serendipity?  Maybe.

Was it my strange New York Vortex?  Probably.

Monday

This part of the story extends beyond New York City limits, but I was still in New York City when it happened.

Although I was on vacation, I needed to complete a class observation for my teaching course.  As my doctorate program works with both face-to-face and online instruction, I was able to ask my friend Virginia who teaches in Virginia if I could observe her online course.  Unfortunately for my vacation, the class met on Mondays and didn’t observe Presidents Day.  But the day had been busy with dim sum and ice cream in Chinatown and wandering around The Strand – one of my favorite bookstores – so it was actually nice to just settle down in Columbia’s International Affairs Building to do an online class observation.

At this point, after everything that had happened the last few days, I thought that if anything I would find out I had a friend at Columbia that I didn’t know about – that perhaps I might see this person walk into the International Affairs Building while I was sitting on the main floor.

This did not happen.

This is what happened: I logged into Virginia’s class as a “guest” – not wanting to be too distracting to the class, but of course she introduced me anyway.  After a few brief questions about my background, one of her students wrote “I love your poems.”

It turns out that one of Virginia’s students was a friend of Private Danny Chen and she had read my An Invisible Handshake poem that I had written after reading about his story in New York Magazine, shared to me by a co-worker.  This poem is incredibly special to me because of the sad situation that inspired it, but also after I had shared the poem on my tumblr, one of Pvt. Chen’s cousin had contacted me directly stating how much she appreciated the poem.  So hearing similar sentiments echoed again from a friend of his speaks a lot to me as a writer and a human being given the topic of my poem.

I can’t even really begin to express how this moment alone is astounding and crazy and touching, let alone adding it into the sequence of events of my New York vacation.  And the numbers I have on hand only add to how odd this is.  I don’t know exactly how many people have read this poem, but according to my site statistics, less than 100 people have visited the specific page where this poem was written.  Even if that number gets doubled for anyone who might have reblogged the poem on tumblr or seen it in passing, the fact that one student – in a class of almost 30 people, taught by a friend of mine in another state – knew this poem is mind boggling….

…and it’s also special.  So I will leave it at that.

Tuesday

Perhaps all of this vortex is related to my lost sense of time given time zone shifts and lack of sleep during travels.  I woke at 5:30 am to take the Subway and then AirTrain to a 9:00am flight at JFK.  By the time I got on this airplane, I was pretty exhausted from the specific adventure of getting to the airport and from my crazy whirlwind trip.  Needless to say I fell asleep for the first hour of my flight – I hardly remembering our take off into the air.

I woke up having to decide between homework and a book – having packed my heavier books (I went a little crazy at The Strand) in my overhead bin carryon, I had kept a lighter paperback in my purse to read.  The book was called On Love by Alain de Botton.  Though an international bestseller first published in 1996 and again in 2003, I hadn’t heard of it until I found it on a table at The Strand.  The beginning looked promising enough and I loved how the reviews focused on Botton’s great sentences (Literature Nerd Note: Sometimes there’s nothing that can compare to a great sentence.).

But by the time I got to Page 15, I realized that my “not knowing” the book wasn’t entirely true.  In the evening as I was packing, hours after I had already purchased this book, someone I followed on tumblr had posted a quote from Page 15 of this very book.  I remember this quote not because of the author (which was mentioned) or the title of the book (which wasn’t mentioned) but because I didn’t necessarily agree with it:

Every fall into love involves [to adapt Oscar Wilde] the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping that we will not find in the other what we know is in ourselves – all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise and brute stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one, and decide that everything that lies within it will somehow be free of our faults and hence lovable. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through union with the beloved, hope somehow to maintain [against evidence of all self-knowledge] a precarious faith in the species.
-Alain de Botton (via kateopolis)

Perhaps it’s ironic that I close with a quote that I don’t agree with (primarily because I think our flaws should be embraced because they make us who we are).  But in talking about a vortex where all these crazy events happened, I think this story requires lending oneself to “hope over self-knowledge,” not for the sake of falling in love with a person, but falling in love with the possibilities of life.

Maybe there wasn’t a vortex and the weekend was just filled with coincidences.  Honestly, I don’t know.  I just know that life seems to always ask me to lend myself to magic – and I’d rather believe in a little magic than none at all.

-cct

Seven Star Cavern Wishing Well - Old Chinatown Central Plaza

This past weekend life carried me to Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown Central Plaza. While there on an errand, I threw a coin into its Seven Star Cavern Wishing Well. By “well” I don’t mean your standard hole in the ground encircled by bricks, but you probably figured that out with the phrase “Seven Star Cavern”. This is more of a replica of the Seven Star Caves of China, painted green, dotted with Buddha statues and little metal “wells” complete with signage. These signs call out to the things we often wish for – “Love” (naturally all the way at the top, no incognito throwing there), “Prosperity”, “Peace”, “Wealth”, “Good Luck”, and even one for “Vacation”.

There is also one for “Happiness”.

Happiness - Seven Star Cavern Wishing Well

This one isn’t in the picture I took above; it’s near the bottom area under the broken sign for “Wealth” (symbolic of the bad economy?). I aimed my coin for “Happiness” – since it seemed a little closer at hand and I was just talking to someone about the meaning of happiness just the other day. It might not be readily apparent, but “Happiness” has two little “wells” – one very apparent underneath the sign and a smaller one next to it on the right. When I threw a penny in, it ricocheted off either the larger well or the “Happiness” sign and into the smaller one.

My immediate thought, “What does that mean?” Followed by being kind of amazed – I hadn’t even noticed that smaller container and what were the odds of my coin landing in there?

Then the obvious questions: Did it mean happiness? Did it mean almost happiness? The events of the weekend made me think that it’s both these things.

Immediately after this, I purchased a Jasmine milk tea with mini boba and had returned by the fountain to drink it and eat my lunch. I hadn’t been entirely careful when puncturing a hole into the plastic sealed cup and, with the drink perched on the grates of a bench, it fell to the ground. With a plastic cup and a plastic sealed lid, I immediately grabbed it – hoping it was just a minor spill. However, the cup had split open on the side and everything else with it. In my immediacy to grab the cup, my phone also fell into the mess as well. My drink gone, my phone sticky but intact, I sat and ate my container of chicken chow mein under the red paper lanterns, contemplating if the puddle of Jasmine milk tea and mini boba was the picture of almost happiness.

If it was, it wasn’t pretty…

But this seemed like too much of a philosophical question to tackle, especially over spilled milk tea. I roamed back to the same tea shop for another purchase – wondering if I should brace myself for an embarrassing telling of my klutziness if the salesclerk should remember me.  Although I think I noticed a slight glimmer of curious recognition in his eyes, I think I was rescued by the place’s popularity and the ordinariness that comes with looking like just another Asian-American girl in Chinatown.

I walked the few blocks of Chinatown enjoying an intact drink and taking photos, wandering through nearby Olvera Street where I picked up a mini decorative guitar – something I had always meant to buy for its iconic nature as an Olvera Street sales item, for the fact that I play guitar, and…okay, they’re just cute.

Aztec Dancer at Olvera Street

As I left the shops and restaurants of Olvera Street, I began to hear the sound of drumming at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Plaza. I heard a women nearby tell her friend that it was Aztec dancers, so naturally I scurried forward for a good view. Seated cross-legged on cement, I was in front of the crowd, camera in hand – the show ahead of me.

Bright feathers. Elegantly long headdresses. Shiny colorful outfits.
Drums. Drums. Drums.
Dance. Dance. Dance.

Meanwhile, the sun peeked in and out of light gray clouds. Even under this gray, the day was bright, but when the sun shone through – there was a kind of magic that blended with the dancing. I wasn’t knowledgeable about the history of Aztecs beyond the gentle impression of facts from TV and California and World history schoolbooks. I couldn’t tell you about the costumes, the dances, or the drums. I couldn’t name names or much less pronounce them. But dancing and drums and the reflection of a people’s history carry with it a relationship to the sky and the sun and the earth. It’s a special something that often gets lost underneath our existence in sound-controlled environments, office cubicle spaces, and clock-constrained schedules. At least, that’s how it felt in those moments watching the sky shift with the movement of people and seeing the sun act as the world’s largest spotlight, casting shadows of the dancers on the cement in front of me.

I left the sound of drumming and the motions of dance to go to where I originally intended – the Chinese American Museum. Though I wanted to see their current exhibition on Chinese American architects, I had never been there before and decided to wander it all. It’s not a large museum, but the richness of a museum – like a good book – is never about its size. It’s about how you fill that space. The Chinese American Museum takes you back in time and pushes you forward through the up’s and down’s of a people who helped build this country even if, at times, this country kept barriers in front of them.

Perhaps the journey of Chinese-Americans touches too close to home for me – despite being the daughter of more recent Vietnamese immigrants, I am Asian-American of (at least some) Chinese ancestry. I’m not connected to those roots closely – I don’t speak the language and my knowledge of Chinese culture is intermingled with Vietnamese practices – but it’s part of who I am and being no stranger to the prejudices of being a minority in America, I can feel my thin thread connected to a heavier spool of experiences and actions and heartache that yearned for something better.

But the Chinese-American Museum timeline lets you choose how long you want to linger across time, urging you to move forward to the successes that stem from them, to those that persevere – the war heroes who fought in spite of it all, the acknowledgments that arrived with positions in public office, the (few) faces of celebrity fame. My journey there closed with their current exhibition of Chinese-Americans who shaped the Los Angeles landscape and architecture.

I think we often forget that there are faces behind buildings and a part of me feels that maybe there’s beauty in that amnesia. But in this instance, at this museum having ran through the timeline of where Chinese-Americans had to begin, I was glad to learn the names and faces tied to the complexities of structures, glad to see them as places that rise above a past that could easily hold us all back.

New View of Los Angeles - Midway Point at the Chinatown Firecracker 10K

The day landed me in unexpected places, even in the one place I had intended to go. The next day would echo the same as I ran the Chinatown Firecracker 10K. I had signed up for the race twice before and had to bow out due to one reason or another. This third time signing up, I was determined to give it a full go – and I did…and it was wonderful. But it was more than starting and crossing a long awaited finish line. I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life and though I had to run (okay – walk…) some hills to get there, it was nice to see views I had never seen, to run around Dodger Stadium where I had only gone to baseball games, to gather with thousands of people I might never know but who experienced the same spaces with me.

Almost happiness IS happiness, but it’s the kind that you get without looking. It’s the happiness that you achieve after a certain string of events, some by chance – like a coin ricocheting off a sign and into an unseen wishing well – and others by attempting a goal but achieving far more than that.  It’s happiness in unexpected and unseen places.

In a conversation with my friend before all this – that gave me part cause to throw a coin toward happiness – I described that “being happy is a limited effect and all we’re really seeking are the things that will cause it.” While I still believe this is true, I also think that those two wells in front of “Happiness” tell me something: that there is happiness that you can seek, but all around you is the possibility that happiness can also find you in the process.

-cct