Henry Abbott

Currently I’m sitting in bed on the bottom floor of my aunt’s apartment in Portland, OR (not the other Portland, the one in Maine where I go to school). It’s almost a hundred degrees outside. I angle the shades to let the soft afternoon light in, and I’m really hoping the neighbors don’t walk by …

I just spent an hour reading through my old middle school and ninth-grade writing. And I’m a bit confused, because I don’t think my writing has improved at all since then. Maybe my analytical skills for sure. But my storytelling abilities? My self-reflection? Where did that girl go? It’s pretty clear that most of the things I wrote about had to do with starting middle school because honestly … that was a lot. But now? If someone gave me a writing prompt centered on personal narrative, would I have anything to say? About a month ago someone asked me to share a story from my life. I kept avoiding it by talking about all the birds I’d seen in the last week: a turkey in a tree on the way back from Simpson’s Point, a really red robin behind Pickard. And why were there no seagulls here? Not a single pigeon on campus? I had just biked by myself to Simpson’s on the hottest morning of reading period and accidentally spent an hour crying on the shady banks of the southern side while staring at the tiny bay. The lighting, the trees, the way the rocks ran in straight lines right into the Atlantic, all so different from home. (And there were no seagulls.)

All my writing now is chopped up, with horrid sentence structure, bullet points, halfway thoughts sitting in various folders in my notes app. I remember when I used to write five-page, detailed rundowns of the day in my butterfly journal every summer. I avoided my feelings even back then, which annoyed my dad because he said I was just writing liú shuǐ zhàng, all actions and facts and none of my own flavor and feelings.

I am also thinking that I am being overly dramatic. I am currently reading “Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong, and I am both extremely annoyed and intrigued by what she says. She’s talking about female Asian memoirs while writing her own and adding to the canon of the very thing she analyzes. Talk about meta. And I reread Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” before that (still confused on how that is my comfort book even though it makes me sad and mad every time), and I read the copy of Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” that I found at the Bluestockings Collective where Rania, Khuê Anh and Finn and I spent most of an afternoon and evening in in New York, which I don’t have on me right now because I left it with Brian at school. And I think I should take a break from Asian female memoirs for a bit, because I am getting annoyed by all my thoughts. So next I’m finishing “Kindred”, interspersed with “Severance” (is it a light read? Probably not) and “Citizen,” and something about what sucks in America’s healthcare and “Golden Gates” to prepare for my Alternative Spring Break trip. Let’s see if I actually read them this summer.

Clearly, I am still struggling to identify and name feelings. I don’t like having to do that. I wish I could just let the feels rush over me like water over pebbles in the creeks (which are all drying up again, by the way). Letting life move through me without really registering any of it. But feelings come and go like water, no? Since last fall, I’ve been calling it underthinking. I tell people: I swear I do have thoughts. They’re just floating around like clouds, and I have to catch them, condense them, distill them into words. Also, I haven’t had a severe laughing attack since I was with my sisters.

P.S. Now it’s almost three years later and I’m sitting in the Ladd basement, rereading this while procrastinating my history paper because my friend and my classmate texted me last night (separately) that they were looking for Orient submissions. I ruminated on everything I want to say about politics and home and friendship and gave up because that meant more thinking and sharing my feelings. My paper and this submission are due on the same day, so I’m sending this in—a testament to my wonderful friends who are still with me four years later, to the last summer when I simply dreamed and breathed and read, to the fact that I never managed to take an English class at Bowdoin and just spent a year writing applications and personal narratives so these notes app entries are all I have to show for myself.

Luna Jiang-Qin is a member of the Class of 2025.