6/8/25
The light hangs in the sky for a long time here. It’s 9:20pm, barely dark, and the sky is still glowing pale blue. I’ve been here for about 24 hours now. Feels longer. This morning, I woke up, looked in the mirror, and felt older than usual.
I called home and Aya looked blankly at the phone like, “What is this?” Evan said she went out to the living room early in the morning to look for me and I wasn’t there, but she went back to sleep and was okay. I wonder if the separation is traumatizing for her, if she’s upset with me or just confused.
I hear a train outside, clicking along the track long after the whistle has faded into the distance.
ICE raids increasing in LA and now Trump has sent out the National Guard.
The question is not how to hold joy at the same time as grief. The question is, how to nurture both joy and active resistance. Both are essential.
This far from Aya, I can’t sense how she’s doing. Our connection is not that mystical. Here, I feel, in the material sense, simply, without her. This far away, I can think, What if Aya were a dream? This lively, full-fledged person who shapes my days, who touches my heart with everything she does. My C-section scar has written her existence on my body. Her birth, I should say. She is real and here I am, without her.
6/9/25
Emotional day — protests continue in LA. Evan says that Aya sometimes says, “Mama fly plane.”
Currently at Treetop Coffee — happy to see the visibly queer barista with long earrings and Asian people at the tables. I forgot how common it is for places to be politically mixed. I’m not talking about “agreeing to disagree” — I mean having to live in resistance all the time and somehow make it sustainable, the courage of visibility. For me as a visitor, I have to remember not to generalize about the south.
Anyway, the neighborhood I’m in right now (Sequoyah Hills) is very pretty. The residential areas are lush green with brick houses and rolling hills, reminding me surprisingly of the Pacific Northwest.
Feeling a lot of tenderness for my dad, being here, imagining him growing up in the American countryside. The drive along the highway made me think of him. The tall restaurant signs sticking up alongside the road, Cracker Barrel imposing on the heavens.
And I thought of my mom in Trader Joe’s yesterday, seeing just two Asian families. Sometimes when I read books about immigrant families in white towns, they have this airless feeling I don’t remember from my childhood. But at Trader Joe’s yesterday, surrounded by patriotic shirts and hats, women in feminine cotton dresses that have a different effect here than they do at home, as if a Fourth or July parade is about to start, families with many children, little blonde girls idly staring me down, the atmosphere did feel airless. I had the immediate urge to eat Asian food, even though I’d arrived only one day before and had already planned to make miso shiru. I put my pasta and crushed tomatoes back on the shelves and chose sesame noodles instead. I wonder if my mom felt so airless for seven years in Illinois and four in Texas.
And did my dad, or both of them, feel the optimism of the open road and all these glowing green broad-leafed trees?
I wonder if this country is beyond hope.
I imagine a lineage of resisters, artists, people loving their communities fiercely, and feel in a way honored to join them.
I want Aya to, as one of our parenting teachers puts it, “buy into” the idea of being alive on this planet even while I want this planet to be better for her.
The water on this stretch of the Tennessee River along Sequoyah Park is still, until moments after a speedboat passes. It takes longer than I expect for the wake to kick up and come toward the shoreline like a wave.
6/11/25
Came to Haw Ridge Park. The feeling of walking long enough for my mind to drift, then come home again.
Thought about today: how the work [an essay, poem, etc.] has its own logic, can’t impose my own fixed idea the whole time. I have to set the work in motion, but then it becomes its own thing, helps me. Later I can edit consciously.
Thinking about how essays need their own constraints, like personal style — “where your taste intersects with the constraints of your life.”
6/12/25
Mom is staying at my apartment now with Evan and Aya, and she just texted a photo of Aya wedged into the space between the hamper and the wall next to the bedroom door, crying because Evan was in the shower.
Not only can I not feel Aya’s presence from afar, but I’ve also gotten used to solitude again. Sometimes I imagine, she must be at school now, or she must still be sleeping. But I haven’t been worried. I miss her and also feel content on my own right now, which is kind of sad but also freeing.
Music playing at Potchke Deli: “The revolution will not be televised, brother.”
My friend Sophie texting about the situation in LA: “i haven’t hit the streets yet but will soon.”
“you should enjoy your residency tho! there will be more to do when you get back 🖤”
After Potchke, went to Cruze Farms, where I ate chocolate and sweet cream soft serve and watched a video of Senator Alex Padilla being pushed to the ground and handcuffed during a Homeland Security press conference.
Drove home past the University of Tennessee along the Tennessee River — beautiful, startling to see water so close to the level of the road.
Then, rainstorm. Felt my little Hyundai rental car shudder for a moment as water scraped its undercarriage.
6/13/25
Sitting on the edge of my bed in my farm clothes (denim shorts from Lucky Pig Vintage in Atwater Village and Elysian Park shirt from a friend’s giveaway). Israel bombed Iran. ICE abducting people from taco trucks, elementary school graduations. Would __ be the kind of place that will be targeted? (__ shared that __ are undocumented.)
Out of sync, seeing Pacific time on my computer and Eastern on my phone.
Being here, I realize that I normally carry some anxiety all the time about earthquakes. Here, instead, I’ve felt it driving in heavy rain. In this part of the country, rain and wind come on so quickly. The dark clouds are the warning, but the acceleration from calm to storm feels instant. We can’t opt out of danger on this earth.
Last night at dusk I saw fireflies flicker in the yard. On my drive here from the airport, the sight of them excited me so much I missed my turn multiple times. My housemate had told me he’d never seen them in real life before, so I went to get him from the library. For a couple minutes, we stood on the porch and watched them appear and disappear against the darkening green of the holler.
Journaling prompt:
How are you? What do you need today?
One thing I loved this week:
“Legacies” by Nikki Giovanni, who was born in Knoxville. Looking for one of her books at Addison’s, I found a first-edition copy of My House, and this poem, the first one in the collection, convinced me I had to read the whole thing.