Isn't it? Innit? – On grieving and strikes

I’ll give it to you straight folks. I’ve officially been rejected from undergraduate literary journals 3 times. Being rejected is very not sexy. I cried the first time. The second time was not as dramatic. Still, every new time it happens it gets even less sexy. This is my coping mechanism: tacky humour.

I don’t really know where the line is anymore between ‘persistent’ and ‘relentless’. Where do you go from ‘OK! Let me pick myself up from this failure and try again!’ to ‘OK! Maybe I should take a break to figure out what I’m doing wrong!’? I get that you should do both, but I always feel pressed for time somehow. The rejections haven’t really repelled me from writing and trying again, but I think this little voice in my head that is obsessed with how people see me is worried I’m beginning to look desperate, and ‘relentless’. I guess there’s this fear I have that I’ll have nothing accomplished in my 20s. Most of my favourite authors were either editors of campus magazines (we don’t have one, or one in English more specifically) or prolific publishers in their youth; if I can’t be like them, I’ll go nowhere. Or so the thought process goes. I understand that it’s irrational to think that you’ll have it all set when you’re—what?—21 and still dumb about many things, but it’s hard telling the irrational part of yourself that you’re fretting over nothing. Some people go loco over love. I go loco over whether or not I’ll ever publish anything.

I recently finished Lily King’s Writers & Lovers and while the ending of the book is way too clean, I found a lot of solace relating to the main character perpetually struggling with her creative work and constantly getting rejected. She obviously gets the happy ending and I’d love a happy ending for myself too, but I have to remind myself that I have time. Casey was 31. I am 21. I don’t hate what I do yet. I don’t think I’ll stop any time soon. Eh. I’m just trying to figure out how to get things to work. It’s okay! And I also keep telling myself that part of my goal with sending stuff to journals was to learn to deal with rejection better. This was part of the process and it’s okay to acknowledge that rejections sucks poo! Plus! My more personal goal for this exchange was to finish the zeroth draft of a novel (my more pragmatic goal: pass my classes). I’m going nowhere with that yet but I have 4 months to get it together!

I got on the bus during Valentine’s Day to head to a halal supermarket that was a little farther from campus and town. I wasn’t really feeling the Valentine’s loneliness this time around. I think it was because my perception of the date on which it fell was completely whacked out with having most of my friends in a different timezone. I hadn’t even noticed it was Valentine’s Day until people started posting about it. Like, 8 hours earlier too. I think it’s also because York isn’t very ‘city’ and therefore not very loud about the consumerism around Valentine’s Day. Hong Kong would probably go a little crazy with the possible products. I was supposed to get myself steak but realised they were all overpriced as hell. I realised later this was because they were being sold in sets of two. Because it was Valentine’s Day. Aw phoo!

On the bus, as one normally would, I was staring out the window and listening to music. It was rainy and I guess that made the mood a lot more solemn. I can’t tell if it was the houses, the gloominess, or the fact that English was the only language I could hear around me and I will never get used to that honestly, but all of a sudden I really felt my distance from Hong Kong. I don’t know how else to describe it other than feeling like I’ve dissociated from my body for a bit and was watching myself from afar. I was still staring out the window, but I suddenly noticed how different from Hong Kong everything was. I felt like a kid who was suddenly transplanted from Hong Kong to York at random. I legitimately felt myself panicking and thinking to myself, ‘Why are you not in Hong Kong? Where am I? Why does nothing look familiar? Why do the street signs look like this? What is happening?’. The anxiety subsided after a bit and I went back to just staring and zoning out, but it was really weird. Maybe I was just cold? And my heart was pumping extra to keep myself warm? I don’t know. I didn’t do biology in secondary school. I guess it adds context to know this is the longest I’ve been away from family and the first time any of us have left Asia.

I can’t tell if it’s my proper longing for a place coming in a little too late. I have a habit of grieving well past the time that seems appropriate. I would lose something or someone and go, ‘yes, this is fine’. But then, I’d go through the 5 stages of grief a month after. Or it could just be my denial lasting a very long time and manifesting in general numbness to the situation. When my grandmother passed last year, whom I was fairly close to, my parents asked why I hadn’t cried. I cried about it around 3 weeks later but they weren’t there to see that. It was when I ate something really good and the reality of the situation started settling in. I was in a funk for a week after that. So maybe that was what was happening. I was finally grieving Hong Kong and my severance from her, like a child who realised she did want her neglectful mother to love her after all.

I didn’t get steak in the end because I didn’t think the meat had marbling that was good enough. I really wanted steak though. Should steak be shared? I went home and it was rainy. My fingers were very cold.

During the same week as Valentine’s day, professors from universities across the UK were going on strikes. I think the strike was especially prominent amongst Russell Group universities, which York is part of, though I could be wrong. This was a very ‘woah’ moment for me because the idea of getting stuck in a strike as a university student seemed like a very distant thing and, maybe it was my subconscious classism showing, ‘third-world’ thing to happen. I had only read of such occurrences in postcolonial coming-of-age novels and heard of offhand experiences from my dad, who completed his tertiary education in Indonesia.

It had always seemed like such a debilitating thing, ruining undergrad experiences. Of course, the strikes I never experienced lasted a lot longer than the one I’m currently experiencing. I don’t think this one will last long enough for me to have to switch universities and go back home, but it’s still interesting to be living through. My own thoughts on it are somewhat mixed. One part of me is upset this had to happen while I was here seeing that I had to pay a hell of an amount to come here and the guilt of that still occasionally overwhelms me. Another part of me more sympathetic to worker’s rights totally understands where they are coming from. I can’t really do much other than feel bummed about it. I’m lucky enough to have professors who were kind and helpful about it though.

When I asked around about what would cause the strike, seeing that I was still naive about it all, I was surprised that most students were aware that it was because of low pay and/or pay cuts. Maybe it’s because I lived in Hong Kong, and either professors are paid much better here or circumstances don’t allow for collective worker action for me to realise a darker underbelly, but I had always assumed professors were paid bank. In hindsight, my mother has siblings who are professors and they live fairly humbly, so I really should have been wiser. I had been reading here and there about how the job market in academia is fairly saturated nowadays but had never really felt the ramifications outside of ‘oh, university is so competitive now aiya!’. It’s interesting to live through things rather than just read about them.

What I wasn’t surprised to hear, even if it did disappoint me, was that it was humanities professors that tended to face the brunt of the pay cuts. I was here as an English student, so I was especially affected. My flatmates who were doing STEM subjects were less so. As much as I do understand that STEM subjects do seem to bring in more value for the pragmatic industries, it is hard to hear that the humanities is quantifiably perceived to be worth less.

This, again, had me seriously asking what it means to be an English major. Less so in the sense that I feel like I have so little to say in the field, but more so in the sense that I’m wondering why I’m doing what it is that I’m doing. I entered university and the first thing I was sure was going to happen was my majoring (or second majoring in this case, I guess) in literature. That was the goal. Part of it was, looking back now, definitely arrested teenage angst playing out in my early adulthood. An answer to my anger at the world and people around for not letting me do what I want. The other part was most definitely a passion for literature and discussing it. But you grow up and you mature a bit more and you start thinking about things other than yourself and I wonder if I could’ve done other things that other people would’ve deemed more helpful. Perhaps this questioning period is enhanced by the nearness to graduating and the world just becoming a gradually scarier place. Quite literally, what is it that my little books can do?

I’m trying to properly figure that one out too.

Either ways, on happier news! A friend and I went to Edinburgh during the week of the strikes to make the most of my time here. I may have not had class, but I was not going to be wasting my time meandering in my room! As nice as it is!

Edinburgh was an absolute delight. But I think, and I may be the odd one out here, that the view on the train heading there was even more stunning. We were lucky the weather decided to be kind to us then because the forecast said it would be raining. It didn’t, but not long after the trip was Storm Eunice so it was probably the calm before that.

I distinctly remember passing a part where the train was close to the sea and we were overlooking the ocean. I hadn’t realised the ocean was that big. Like that big. There was nothing on the ocean. It was just big and blue. I realised then and there that I had never seen an empty ocean. I had lived in areas near the sea my entire life, but they had always had boats on it. I’m doing a miserable job at describing what I saw, I’m aware. I’m trying to get better at that. The area was apparently called Berwick-upon-Tweed which, like many parts of the UK, is excessively named (Why is it named that? Why so long? One of the places I really want to visit is called Hole of Horcum. Let that sink in a bit. Say it aloud if you fancy.) but when I say I will be doing everything in my power to make sure I retire at the age of 45 and live there with my cats, sheep and secret lover, I mean it.

While we were initially on the train, we had come across parts of the countryside. At some point, I was seeing some white splotches here and there. I was like, ‘aha! They are not moving so they must be rocks, yes! The Isles are a rocky place!’. Upon further and closer inspection, it turns out they were sheep. They were very big sheep. They were not-moving sheep. Harhar!

I hadn’t realised that keeping left was the standard here. I’m very used to keeping right. Like in Hong Kong and Indonesia. Kind of wack! Really not helping the occasionally misleading East-West dichotomy in present discourse.

Aight! This is too long! So I’ll cut to the pictures and my teeny descriptions for them.

Part One