Single happiness

Substack anniversary = also my 38th birthday anniversary ;-)

Mar 02, 2024

One year ago I launched this Substack with my annual birthday calligraphy meditation. Here’s another, to commemorate my 39th. For the non-Chinese speakers, this poem is about the Chinese obsession with double happiness, to the extent that we invented a new symbol for it. It’s about the cruelty of both superstition and language, and their implicit condemnation of ‘single’ happiness. (Ideally read on desktop so it retains the correct line breaks.)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Single happiness

囍 / double happiness, 喜 and 喜
the word 'happiness' twice
conjoined as lovers. Co-dependent fuckers
wrought into railings and marital bed frames
immalleable as iron,
immalleable from irony. 

Double happiness
glazed on a mooncake,
sour aftertaste to something sweet.
Double happiness
staring me down from mother's teapot
if I pour a solo cuppa.
Double happiness
of double yolks, forever yoked 
in cloying, turgid lotus paste.

How do you even pronounce 囍?
In Chinese language, where each character is 
mo-
no-
sy-
lla-
bic
why do we permit such polysyllabic anomaly?
People can't even agree
whether you pronounce 囍 as:
shuāngxǐ? - as in 雙喜?
Or just xǐ? Surely it should be xǐxǐ?

(happiness happiness... kinda stupid stupid
if you ask me)

Double happiness won't leave me alone,
always creeping into line of sight; 
no it's not double vision.
(no it's not double vision) (was that an echo?)
No it's not an echo.

Why does no one talk of single happiness?
喜 - ideogram of a drum and a mouth.
Jubilant! Loud! Aloof, and proud!

"SORRY BUT YOUR APPLICATION HAS BEEN
REJECTED MA'AM. EDICT FROM NOAH MA'AM.
THE REQUIREMENTS CLEARLY STATE THAT
YOU MUST ENTER 2 x 2 MA'AM."

ONE is the most malevolent number
and thus eleven/eleven marks an
inauspicious date, which society annoints
as SINGLES' DAY
(srsly could you rub it in a bit more? 
couldn't it be national dictator's day?)
but 11.11 is mainly an example
of the capitalist co-optation of self care.
"I can buy myself flowers," Miley declares.

In inventing 囍, we the Chinese
double bind ourselves to hyperbole
and now poor 喜 is eclipsed in the shadow
of its bombastic doppel-doppelganger.

(what is it with the chinese and their superstitions?)
             (- because 好事成雙: good things come in pairs)
(oh hey ghosts of ancestors past, i didn't see you there
idk tho, tell that to fred and rosemary west)
             (- hush, rebellious progenitor
             - now tell me why you aren't married yet?)

My father's funeral:
a procession of white envelopes
tucked with odd-suffixed condolence cash
$101 - $501 - $1001
And the red packets I stuffed, handing back
a bonbon and one Hong Kong dollar
to sweeten the day's sorrow
and the dollar to be spent or tossed
lest bad luck followed you home

獨身 / dú shēn - 'single'
Except 獨 is a word for the old and childless,
subhumanised by the dog radical 犭.

未婚 / wèi hūn - 'single'
Except it means I'm not yet (未) married (婚).
未, a tree with two unfurled branches,
a word pregnant with expectation and
with expectations of pregnancy.
婚, a female-coded word, 
the woman radical 女 next to dusk 昏, 
because brides were once welcomed
at sundown for wedding rites.
(hah! back when unbroken gloamings
signalled the celestial hymen)

To be single,
always missing a chopstick.
To be single,
listening to the sound of one hand clapping.

I don't desire the two-ness of things,
nor do I miss the half-ness of beds.
I'm learning to starfish, to spread my legs 
but not for some body or some thing.
Dining and reclining on alternate sides
of a table or sofa, not to preempt
any uneven grooves - so spare your contempt -
but solely because I choose to.

A 39 year old 剩女 / shèng nǚ 
is what you'd call me - 'leftover
woman'. Nah, fuck that.
Plate me on your finest bone china.
Tupperware does nothing for my skin tone.
I am the main course,
and don't you forget it.
Singly, happily, left alone.

單喜