Feb 14
Across the Bay in San Francisco, teachers mounted one of the biggest strikes in recent history, demanding higher pay and better healthcare. They won a 2% increase.
The disillusionments came in waves. Across the country, a nation turned its back on people who do the dirty, difficult, backbreaking labor. The ones who harvest our fancy organic produce. The ones who deliver McDonald's to our doorstep at 2am. These same people now woke up wondering if their children will be taken from them tomorrow.
But then one of the biggest Latino artists takes the stage at the most watched sports event in America—art as a form of remembrance and protest. I'm suddenly reminded of who are actually making culture in this country.
"Every generation must have felt the same," my husband said. He's probably right.
...
I saved this newspaper clipping about my grandpa. It's an interview from when he was in his 70s.
He told the story of how he got married at 16 and ran away against his family's will to join the army. He became a medic at 18. For seven years he was on the frontlines of the Chinese Civil War, saving people from gruesome wounds caused by powerful explosions. During those seven years he never went back home. Only my grandma visited. He missed his mom's funeral and his first son's birth.
I go back to that article every once in a while. Partly it's curiosity. I wonder what it means to witness so much death during the most formative years of someone's life. I have to read between the lines of how he made sense of it all. I didn't have the maturity to ask him those questions when he was alive.
But I also go back out of surprise. My grandpa barely mentioned any of it to me. He was probably the most positive presence in my childhood. He cared what I thought. But he also cared about other people—his children, his family, his community, his old friends from the army. Only later did I realize how much he shaped me and how much of who I am comes from him.
It's a strange balance. You can't be ignorant to what's happening. But you also can't let suffering swallow and consume all of you.
...
I read something recently that stuck with me: "The world doesn't start beyond the walls of your home, you are in it always... Understand yourself and use that strength when understanding others."
So I look inwards. What has touched me recently:
This snippet from an A24 podcast where Paul Thomas Anderson and the Safdies spent 15 minutes talking about their shared cinematographer, Darius Khondji. Three of the best directors of our generation talking about how Darius is a master of his craft, how he works almost like he's painting with lights. And also how he is this humble, curious human with the most childlike openness to everything around him.
We were gifted a book about Four Horseman, a restaurant in Brooklyn. Reading the preface somehow brought me to tears. It's about a group of strangers came together having this somewhat naive dream of creating a new kind of unpretentious restaurant in the neighborhood. How much care they put into every single detail, the acoustics, the toilet, the water, and most importantly the workers. How taking care of each other allowed them to survive through mistakes and failures.
And then there's this: we gifted our neighbors the wines Fred made for the first time this year. People loved the wines, but also because of it we got invited to dinner at one of our neighbor's houses. We ordered pizza, we chatted, and we finally got to know each other after living on the same street for over a year. It's simple, nothing fancy, just shooting the shit. And I somehow never felt a deeper sense of belonging to a community in the past 14 years in this country than at that exact moment. I'm grateful.
The act of caring always moves and humbles me. I try to care in my own small and naive ways. Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's what I have.
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