Before the longest night of the year, remember how short your time on earth is. Retread footsteps to the family home. Masks may be removed. 37 going on 13, return to mother's embrace. Don't fight with feelings. Look for compassion. Same anecdotes are on repeat; do nothing, let them speak. Unroll your eyes. Pause. Listen deeply. What is she really trying to tell you? Eat 湯圓, it brings the family together. Swallow the platitudes, symbol > object (when it suits) Catholics have transubstantiation and we have sticky rice. Take time out in your childhood bedroom. Try on old clothes, get lost in old mixtapes. The longest night shall pass. Well, that's something to look forward to. Look deep in her eyes, know she will pass. Well, that's something too.
That was a poem I wrote exactly one year ago on the winter solstice of 2022. It’s not cheating to recycle old material, since today I wanted to write about cyclicity and spiritual migration.
Just as wild birds start to feel the urge to migrate south as the days get shorter, I too have headed south [of the river]. One year on from writing that poem, I have once again retreated to the family home. Only this time, I’ve moved back in during an unexpected life transition. Everything in the poem still rings true — bar my current age, of course. Though who can disagree that we will always revert to going on 13 around our parents?
The 湯圓 I mention (tong1 jyun4 in Cantonese, tāng yuán in Mandarin) are glutinous rice balls filled with different regional fillings, such as black sesame or red bean paste, served in a dessert soup. As a homonym for togetherness and unity, 湯圓 are often wheeled out for the tail end of a menu during significant occasions in Chinese and Sinospheric cultures. They are favoured particularly during 冬至, Winter Solstice Festival, when the rice balls’ sticky, chewy texture and hot, syrupy broth provide comfort against the harshness of winter.
Much symbolic gravity is given to 圓 / jyun / yuán in Chinese tradition — it can mean both roundness and completeness — and within that, there’s an implication of perfection. I enjoy the concept of roundness insomuch as it is anti-linear; in a previous essay on knives (which will be published in a forthcoming book) I mused on how curvature, associated with femininity and organicism, can be an antidote to the erect angularity of masculinity.
But this year, as I bite into 湯圓 with my family, I am thinking about 圓-ness as a form of cyclicity, which picks up where my rough fumblings left off in this earlier Substack post on how to rework our relationship to time. I find myself chewing on how life’s journey is simply a migratory pattern of concentric circles, one in which we are constantly closing the loop on our different senses of selves — selves in their multiplicity that span across non-linear time. For example…
There is my circadian loop of consciousness: from waking to sleep.
There are the daily micro-loops that provide a mundane sense of purpose. Washing the dishes, making the bed.
There is an annual loop of anxiety that birthdays gift me, though with it comes the immense gratitude for the gift of vitality.
There is the nuclear loop that is my mother, my brother and I: we push and pull and stress test each other but we are a Möbius strip of paradoxical love.
There are the reverse migratory geographical loops that I regularly make: visiting ancestral homelands like Hong Kong and Malaysia where childhood memories roam free and cannot be taken home like a tourist talisman. I wrote about how this ritual of ‘returning’ profoundly replenishes diaspora kids and their sense of identity in Return. I can only describe it as a constant contextualisation and re-contextualisation of the self; the more you understand where and who you come from, the firmer your roots reach into the soil.
There is a serendipitous fifty year loop that I have just closed: moving to a new home down the road from where my parents met and married and had me. Last week, I crawled under the foundations of my mother’s house and dragged out all their boxed up wedding gifts — a full Chinese crockery set emblazened with 囍 (double happiness); an unopened National rice cooker. Fumes of bittersweet irony filled the low basement in the realisation that I, in my new 喜 status, would finally make good use them.
There is a spiritual loop that I am yet to complete. I can comprehend it but I don’t quite know how to feel it yet. It is a connectedness to my ancestors and progenitors and all things in nature across every plane of place and time, and an awakening to being part of something greater than myself. Perhaps it’s not a loop for me to make; perhaps it just requires me to surrender to being looped in.
So, we find ourselves retreading these concentric circles on a winter solstice night, leaving footsteps in the snow. Should we glance up momentarily, fresh snowfall obscures our tracks.
We go again.