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.)
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
This past year I published 21 Substack posts. Revisit some popular and personal highlights:
As a queer Southeast Asian woman of Han Chinese descent, I’ve often wondered how many traditions I should appropriate for my own eventual nuptials or whether I should just f it and sign at city hall. 🫠🥲
🧡🧡🧡