Women have been my teachers for so many years of my life. Women, of course, spend lots of time – often, most of their time – with other women, just as men do with other men. Today, I’d like to talk about women’s support and guidance of each other rather than celebrate the work and influence of male mentors, as I often have in the past – perhaps pandering to the other gender for diplomatic balance.
I begin my personal herstory with the realization that I’ve always been drawn into close friendship with women of an unconventional or even hidden form of intelligence. First there was Gillian Klos, a descendant of English and Poles whom I decided to console with my stuffed tiger doll when I saw her sitting alone, frowning deeply as she sat on the bus going home from our first day of kindergarten. Wildly temperamental, with a father who played rock music in their basement among other diversions, Gillian may have repaid me by bullying me into English comprehension, and thus assimilation to central Jersey’s America, more quickly than friends or neighbors typically do with the average ethnic kid. While I loved the diversity of artistic ornaments and curios at her house just a five-minute walk away from ours – including canvases on which her mother painted – I would never really understand Gillian. I remember paying tribute to her obsession with Wil Wheaton in my thirteen-year-old diary after Stand By Me came out, and beginning to understand her better after finding out that she’d won a top award in her class for Art in middle school. We’d long “split up” by that time, though, as Kristin Weber had saved me from Gillian’s overweening ardor in the third grade. Kristin, whose hazel eyes I peered up toward – at a distance seemingly twice my height – when we bumped into each other at the sink in the ladies’ room, and who seemed to recognize me, too, from a past life. Drawing from the Chinese zodiac, my sister and I would give Kristin the moniker Tiger Eyes, and ourselves the names Tiger Tail and Mouse Ears. Kristin had a heart big enough to support every person in the class, a sense of humor solid enough to bring out my own, and a physical stature that could protect me from bullies. She was the first person I loved outside of my family and considered my best friend. Her mom would take my sister and the two of us to a charity event where we would dress up like clowns and paint our faces to cheer up the disabled: my first experience of the sublime.
There were lots of girls near our age in Birchwood Estates in the early nineteen-eighties. Krista Stroever, the twiggy German descendant with the Jenga-shaped swingset and giant, intricately-furnished dollhouses (tiny teacups atop tiny dining tables!), whom I’d sit next to as we shared one copy of Anne of Green Gables, always checking with each other before we turned the page. Stacy Leake, the spunky Italian-American who always called dibs on kickball captain, was the first to have a Commodore 64 at home, and also initiated games of Spud. Missy Broxton, the tall, rosy-cheeked girl who appeared in our fashion show video at seven after we raided my mom’s walk-in closet, yet who sometimes walked around shirtless as a boy. Gillian and I would later conduct seances at her house in attempts to make contact with the afterlife. (Did that Kermit doll just move?) Other friends lived farther off in Edison: Chrissy Hardy, the Hungarian descendant who shared my shorter height and rounded cheeks, and came to our side of town to draw on my bedroom walls with crayons, a pastime my dad had initiated. Lori Krempa, Italian and Polish American, was my main partner in nerddom, good citizenship, and French. She also inducted me into Billy Joel.
In fifth grade, halfway through the eighties, newer immigrants began to fill the empty, newly-constructed houses on our street, with their endless wood ceiling beams and shiny new windows. Alexa Gonzales, whose parents came from Cuba, and who would win Most Beautiful at her Catholic School, helped the rest of us learn to slow-dance at a very clean-cut party at her house. Seventh grade boys’ hands would rest at seventh and eighth grade girls’ waists, while the girls’ outstretched arms would land atop the boys’ shoulders. Alexa would later study counseling at UPenn. Tejal Mody, a Jersey-City transplant whose parents came from India, shared delicious, buttery naan bread from a generally austere house as we competed over grades, and would end up studying business at Wharton and Harvard. Janice Marron, my next best friend after Kristin, was the Filipina-American next door who kicked higher and farther than all our brothers at kickball games, while also beating the usual suspects at spelling bee (she won on the “d-a-r” rather than “d-e-r” ending of the word “calendar”). In eighth grade, she’d play Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam from her cassette deck and teach us girls to box-step to the formidable bass of “The Promise.” Later on, she staged a mini-social revolution, getting the richer and more popular caucasian kids from the other side of town curious enough about her underground filipino parties to want to join in. Janice’s first love and life partner, whom she met in high school after I moved, ended up at Princeton. Another girl who moved to the other side of Birchwood Estates in seventh grade, Chandra Choe, became my very first friend of East Asian ethnicity; down-to-earth, tiny-boned, and with an early fashion sense of acid-washed jeans and banana clips, she charmed all of us immediately. And after I moved towns the following year, we would be reunited on the paradisical Cornell campus with its waterfalls and gorges of four-hundred-million-year old shale.
At home, despite my Taiwanese immigrant mother’s lack of personal devotion to or deep understanding of western classical music (she and my father typically blasted Teresa Teng, Paul Anka, or Taiwanese versions of Japanese classics in the car on the way to Chinatown in Manhattan), it was primarily her passion that helped my love of music to develop. She was the one who’d started a fight with me in her secret stentorian voice before my first violin solo of La Cinquantaine, all fancy trills and grace notes, in third grade. She’d walked out on me to punish me, leaving me to enter a crowded auditorium alone, then pretended to return to the parking lot. As soon I began to play for the crowd, she’d snuck back in and sat quietly in the last row. Throughout the years, my mother has often exploited her anger – an anger which I attribute to her having been conceived exactly one month after the 228 massacre of Taiwanese-Chinese in Taiwan – to upset the kids in my family enough to birth art in us. While this later became a bone of contention between us, I can’t deny that it kept me playing various kinds of music for a substantial amount of time in my life.
This brings me to a most relevant point which people refuse to talk about today, instead preferring to privilege discussions of “sexuality.” I have always had a greater fear of women than men, both inside and outside of the house. I say this with a smile and a laugh; the deepest scars have long faded. Nevertheless, that fear translates into my being more careful and more strategic when I talk to and interact with women than with men, however dominant men happen to be in society. I’ve had several serious boyfriends – encountered at ten-year intervals throughout the decades of my life – with whom I could not have shared more trust, affection and mutual growth; but my comparatively less fearful response to them has never made it easier for me to sacrifice my dreams or ambitions – in short, what feels like my life – to follow, serve or obey them. The monogamous relationship I’ve been in for the past sixteen years has somehow survived this problem, or at least, it has persisted. But I digress.
My fear – and ultimately, admiration – of women, probably relates to how deeply saddened I became at thirteen when I was first introduced to larger pools of classical-musician-fish who seemed more talented, and were certainly more skilled and had had better lessons from a younger age. (Though I’m sure that befriending two of these new violin-mates, Melissa Chinchar and Doris Zahner from John Adams Middle School, ultimately had a good influence on me!). It also relates to how ecstatic I became within a year of that disillusionment, when our brilliant Jewish, Polish-descended choir teacher, Ms. Kijowsky, along with another teacher named Mr. Semenza, led a team of girls – carefully chosen from both sides of the tracks – to put together a musical theatre skit for the Odyssey of the Mind (until that year called the Olympics of the Mind, then changed so as not to insult the athletes). For the first time given an opportunity to work with the taller, more popular girls at school (the same girls whom Janice would influence towards filipino parties later that year), I arranged a violin accompaniment and performed live with them. I was the shortest of all seven girls on the team, and had bad skin, and rarely ever opened my mouth to speak, but managed to helm a lot of the artistic embellishments by myself. Not just the live soundtrack, which I arranged without guidance from our coaches, but also the calligraphy and drawings of characters for the medieval scroll of a program that best-suited The Emperor’s New Clothes. Our dynamic, outgoing female cast would regale crowds and judges with their bold and quirky cross-dressing humor. When we beat three regions and finally won the state, a flood of tears fell from all of our eyes simultaneously. We were headed for the world finals and University of Maryland, as well as a trip to Washington DC. As the shyest of the group, I often wondered if this experience was the most memorable for me. Two team members I’m still connected to on Facebook are Karen Dong and Becky Clauser.
I ponder – as I often do – how I learned about contemporary music most of all from female friends. British New Wave from Lisa Anderson, a tall blonde Texan who moved to Ridgewood, my second hometown, at the same time as me between eighth and ninth grades. She lent me dozens of New Order, Depeche Mode and Cure cassette albums to dub over my dad’s old medical tapes. American and European alternative rock was bestowed by April Marzoli (my next best friend, who moved to Ridgewood junior year, and who gave me her J. Crew surplus when my parents refused to spend on clothing, later founding a successful accessory company called Zoli), as well as by Maria Vonderhaar (our kind and sophisticated Manhattan co-transplant). Both were petite rebels who shaved their heads more prettily than anyone could imagine. With Pamela Coumans, another of our group who became a NYC-based interior designer, these girls possessed photographic memories for dozens of emerging bands, songs, and lyrics of whom the mainstream would often not have an inkling for three years (including Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins). They put their minds passionately toward the “cool” at a time when I, still tied to nerddom, would never have been able to access or find it on my own. Michelle Tabi, too, lent us her athletic streetsmarts when she took us on the train to Manhattan, drove with as much agility as any boy could, and opened our eyes to massive underground filipino parties that blasted latino music in Jersey City.
When I first entered ninth grade, my mother had found her way toward the Bergen Youth Orchestra, despite obstacles like a tiny Taiwanese-American population, limited English ability, and extreme shyness – so that I could experience Carnegie Hall. I recognize that for some, this is a small thing. I’d made a comedian of myself in orchestras from thirteen, after being devastated by those violinists in various towns who’d already had more professional training or careers. My equally self-deprecating, but tall and beautiful South Korean adoptee of a stand partner at BYO and I even joked, the day of our performance, that they’d placed us over the trap door on the Carnegie Hall stage. (Indeed, there was a suspiciously outlined square of floor underneath us.) But somehow we were able to contribute to the Mahler and Shostakovich pieces, and I’ve always felt blessed to have been granted such a majestic experience at a still-formative age.
Despite my new high school’s notoriety for its high quality education, our orchestra wasn’t as competitive as the ones in my previous town, so by the end of junior year, I somehow climbed to next-in-line for concertmistress. As a matter of both skill and seniority, I’d reached the higher chair of the second stand in the first violin section (the first was occupied by two girls who were about to graduate), but felt that Meredith, who was a year younger and my stand partner, was not only more serious about violin, but more promising in her skills. I didn’t have a private teacher who could convince me that I could master solos for all the concert pieces I felt sure I’d mess up on. Instead, I quit orchestra at the beginning of senior year and moved to guitar. Jane Visek, a descendant of Czech immigrants, was the close friend who held my hand into our first acoustic guitar lessons. She looked like Strawberry Shortcake and was the type to make her family and good relations with schoolmates a first priority. I have a funny memory of a time when we were practicing violin together, and she shocked me by managing to play one short but tough musical phrase more quickly than I did without having to practice it, despite that she was in the second violin section. These kinds of experiences always make me wonder how people’s minds really work, and why. In the meantime, our other best friend, Heather Friedman, the orchestra harpist, was driven to become a doctor after we’d been AP Bio lab partners, and it was my dad who’d been the doctor. (Indeed, I could more accurately identify parts of a sheep heart on an exam, while she could more confidently dissect one in lab.) Cantonese-American Grace Loo, yet another good friend of Heather’s and mine, joined me in attending Cornell Summer College between junior and senior year – nothing short of a heavenly memory – where we bonded for the first time with other Asian Americans from all over the US. She later went on to UC Berkeley.
In recent years, being in France while connecting with virtuoso Hilary Hahn on Twitter opened my eyes to an understanding of music that I never knew existed, never knew that I could gain in my life. To me, this felt like a true miracle, just as Hilary’s music feels like a miracle every time I hear it. I finally began to understand that every time I’d observed the impossible speed and agility of professional violinists, and found my palms sweaty – how others respond when watching their favorite sporting events – that I wasn’t crazy. I did identify with it because some part of me knew I could get closer. By turns of fate, I’d never spent enough time in any musical environment that could lead me to the kind of faith – guided by some fundamental scientific principles – that would have provoked me to let my fingers fly faster or with more strength and deliberation. Instead, for many years, I was so much more influenced by contemporary popular music that I developed a real thirst, a veritable passion, for reproducing these sounds through simple guitar chords and with my voice.
Returning to the general impact of women on other women – and home life – my sister Sandra has always been my first and truest partner in creativity. She and I were always improvising comedic harmonized duets at home and in the car together, including on the first road trip we ever took together, alone, from New Jersey to New Orleans. We were the types to sing Dana Carvey’s “Choppin’ Broc-coli” tune from SNL at the top of our lungs, very often, and to improvise humor that was similar. (Sandra is the only person whom I have ever trusted enough to be able to improvise comedy with on that level, with the exception of my brother, who tended, nevertheless, to spend a lot of time alone playing video games, which is why he now programs for Firaxis). Recently, I thought of a Sesame Street style Taiwanese-teaching song crossed with American rodeo-shouting-litany we made up by repeating a chorus of “de jia,” and “de hi-bing-hya” – which mean “here” and “over there” in Taiwanese. It’s a little hard to explain how funny this was, considering that Taiwanese isn’t a language that’s ever made it onto Google Translate. (And that my own cousins were denied entry into the United Nations on a tour several years ago, despite Taiwan’s being the democratic exemplar of all Chinese peoples, and a base for thousands of US troops, for a few decades). In earlier childhood, we were always memorizing the lyrics to soundtracks from musical movies and singing them, whether “Popeye” at six and seven, “Annie” at eight and nine, or “The Sound of Music” at any age. There is no doubt that my sister – with whom I tag-teamed in creativity throughout the decades (I drew and won the first design award, while she sang and won the first choir award; later, I sang, and she drew, both more seriously) – is my artistic mainstay. By undergrad, she switched from engineering to fine arts and immediately developed what I considered to be pure visual brilliance. (I like to believe that I developed a detectable amount of brilliance by the same age; I’ve gotten enough kudos from elite writers and organizations throughout the country to believe this could be true.)
In recent years, I have gotten to know other women in my family better: my aunt Bi-Jeng, whose silent and powerful insights make a very useful contrast to the dramatic antics of my mother (her older sister), and whose confidence in remaining single, as well as her understanding that learning comes through involvement rather than talk, have saved my life at moments. My oldest maternal aunt, who hosted my first stay in Hong Kong during a monumentally important time – the handover of Hong Kong back to China after a hundred fifty-six years of British rule. Also in attendance was her daughter Eugenia, who later offered mutual support on a trip to Delaware for a Taiwanese-American conference. My cousin Amanda, whose down-to-earth sense of humor mixed with good taste mingles with my memory of hearing “Claire de Lune” through roaring, drumming typhoons while resting on a tatami mat in Taipei later the same summer, in 1997. Her mother introduced me to my first job as a teacher for a summer English class at Danshui Elementary school, where I learned that children see me as one of them. My cousin Jasper, who wrote a poetic eulogy to our grandmother after her death in 2012 that made me realize not only how well she and her brother had gotten to know Amah, having grown up in her house in southern Taiwan, but that all three of our writing capacities and talents had indeed been inherited from our award-winning and anthologized poet grandfather. This fortifies greatly in light of how little weight the rest of the world seems to give credit to, or concretize, “writing” in the modern age. Their mother, too, spent so much of her life supporting our grandmother; and she helped keep all of us cheerful and fed as we worked on our film, while our uncle was designated to share some important locations with us, including a neighboring mayor’s (his friend’s) home, vast views of the nearby river, and a purple mountain pineapple grove. Our oldest uncle’s wife supported us when she greeted us the day Da Jiu took us biking to secure the beautiful prime location for our film, a palm tree fringed, garden-filled yard of a friend of theirs, as well as a variety of elaborate temples – more elaborate than exist in mainland China today – and other relics of buildings in which my grandfather’s poetry and name are inscribed or import some history. I’m not sure which of these two uncles shared the old red-bricked architectural relic near the expansive banana farm, but those locations were equally beautiful and memorable. More recently, on Facebook, I have gotten to know one of my oldest maternal uncle’s daughters, Ruo Xuan, a thoughtful teacher, as well as a lady whose part-time modeling in youth could vie with any I’ve encountered in the entertainment industry here or abroad. The maternal grandmother shared by this entire bunch was truly a soulmate of mine, even if I only got to spend about four months of my life with her, which is tragic, but seemed inevitable; I always felt that if my personality resembled anyone’s in the family, it was hers, with her staunchly persistent, no-nonsense way of guiding and leading the younger family members – mixed with sweetness and a sense of humor. My mother has also suggested that I remind her of her mother.
On my father’s side, I had a chance to get to know, if unfortunately more briefly, all three of my oldest uncle’s daughters – Rui Jian, Rui Rong, and Rui Ling – who supported me on trips to Linbian and Taipei in 1997, and on our film project in 2007. (Rui Jian would call up to us from outside the window with breakfast baozi in hand, and hold our hands as we walked through Pingtong together; I still wear the spare pair of jeans and deep blue velvet heels she gave me). I got to know my oldest aunt, the owner of a vast and scenic shrimp farming pool, who treated my dozens of crew members to hotpot on a restaurant located in the large town park that she owned. Her daughter A Mei, who runs a business office in Kaohsiung, introduced us to the main child actress of our film, and took us touring to a small neighboring island by boat, where we saw an incredible diversity of salted cuttlefish. Our second oldest uncle’s welcomed us to her house for lunch while her husband would occasionally bike around to find us as we searched for props and locations, sometimes stopping to chat with us about family history. The family of our wonderful youngest cousin – the daughter of my father’s youngest brother and his wife – introduced us to her cousin Chang Xiu Yu (half Vietnamese ethnically), to become the oft-commented-upon gifted main actor in Moon Lady. My father’s twin brother’s wife, who happens to be half-Japanese, and the mother of my two male Canadian cousins, helped support us greatly by lending us their spacious house in Pingtong, where our principal crew members stayed. The wonderful wife of our oldest uncle greeted us very maternally when we arrived in Linbian to film at their house; she never stopped feeding us fresh shrimp and rice, and from time to time, she’d give me subtle advice about leading more assertively, or about marriage. Finally, my father’s younger sister supported us by asking her husband to help us with building maintenance when we first arrived in Pingtong, where they also lived. Then we finally had a chance to talk with her and her daughter Mei Jing, a national award-winning pianist in her youth in Taiwan, who had always been inspiring for us to hear about in the States. In the US, meeting my aunt, the wife of my father’s third oldest brother, as well as my uncle, have also emboldened me in ways I never expected, especially knowing that they raised their daughter to be a Harvard-graduated doctor.
To jump back and forth in time, in undergrad at Cornell, I was blessed to receive the support of so many incredible women with whom I was joined at the hip for about a year at a time each. In chronological order, these include Stephanie Sanok, my first roommate, who kindly initiated me into the beauty of Long Island vineyards and homemade bread and butter pickles; Janice Lee, a math genius whom I’d met at Cornell summer college, who transferred back from Cooper Union first year. She recently served as the lead astronomer at a major world observatory. Jen Richmond, who introduced me to the savors of fresh sage and saffron, and frequented with me the practice sessions of our brilliant rock band friends The Sutras (one member of which was bestie Jarrett Mason, whose scholarship house boasted its own chef). Jen is now an environmental science and engineering professor at North Carolina State. Heidi Shin, the granddaughter of a national award-winning former Minister of Agriculture in Korea, who first showed me the enduring classic “A Room with a View,” and thus educated me in film; Patricia Yoon, a practicing psychologist with a post-doctoral from Columbia, who influenced me to direct scripts for the first time after helping stage manage my first play; Susie Lee, a graduate student of Asian American Studies without whose courage we might never have gotten the play into gear in the first place, nor the fancy first Asian American Artist’s Symposium Frank Fukuchi and I ended up organizing at the IM Pei designed Herbert F. Johnson museum. Emily Quan, the lead actress of my play and a very good friend whom I often spent time with later in NYC before she became a speech therapist and got married; Barbara Yien, the star of the poetry ‘zine I helmed during my stint as the Asian American Playhouse Writing Workshop Leader, who later studied poetry with Mary Ruefle at Vermont College and published in numerous literary magazines; Regan Brooks, the daughter of two professional models-turned-IBM staff who lived in a beautiful home with ladders leading to unwalled loft bedrooms à la “Little House of the Prairie.” Regan gained a Master’s in botany and later founded Alaska Story Works. Bo Lee, a lively and highly efficient architect and interior designer who often entertained us at the number one architecture department in the country, probably my favorite interior space at Cornell; Ai Le, a diversely talented and wise engineer and designer once known to date a six-foot-seven blonde man when she was about four foot eleven; Jacqui Pessah, a hilarious, brilliant singer who surrounded me with a house full of marvelous a cappella chanteuses for an entire semester; and Fon-Lin Nyeu, a med-student-turned-acupuncturist-with-her-own-practice who played guitar with me and was the only roommate ever to have inspired me to suggest swimming at 6am before work (at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, on Union Square). Margaret Bae and Helen Kim were both witty, outspoken friends with whom we shared much laughter, who both became successful lawyers. Nayoung Ma, like Ai, had been valedictorian of her high school; she always gave people sincere feedback, came to my house once to hang out with our music friend Chuck, and later started a successful bakery in San Fran. Eumi Ahn, another good friend with a Master’s in Urban Planning from Columbia, and one of the usual actresses for my early short films, recently decided of her own avail to pursue acting, something I’d guessed she’d have a genuine interest in. Vina Lam was a classmate I didn’t get to know until she visited me in Beijing and I visited her in Hong Kong; the daughter of a doctor of Bruce Lee, she once gave me the soundest relationship advice when none of my old friends seemed willing to admit to it. Other women emerged through the same network later in NYC: Alison Chin, once a lawyer at Paramount, who shared a prudent hope for financial stability alongside a passion for the arts, and a need for freedom beyond just having a family. Rowena Chien, with whom I began to view more Shakespeare while working on my first short adaptation, became the still photographer on my project, and as far as I know, is still an avid photographer. At Shakespeare in the Park, we met Wanda Salas, a professional NYC tour guide and Shakespeare fanatic from a Dominican-transplant medical family, who became a very close support as well as my first Assistant Director. I later introduced Wanda to a good friend I made while doing my supplementary writing tutor time as an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts: Maria Marquez, an artist who spoke elegantly in both Spanish and English, who later welcomed me to her politically engaged circle in Mexico City.
Just before leaving for China in my mid-twenties, I had a short stint in social work when a temp agency appointed me to Population Council in NYC, on a job relating to improving the situation of newborn girl babies in rural China, as well as women’s reproductive health and rights. I met a special group of women that ended up including Anna Gu, a very passionate and funny lady who later married my brother. Anna’s father and my boss at Population Council was the Chinese correspondent for Judith Bruce, a woman famed for her work in women’s rights in developing countries; Judith was also friends with Jane Fonda. Other women involved in this work were Diana Szatkowsky, who assisted Dr. Gu in NYC, and Laura Ghiron, who accompanied the Chinese pilot leaders of the social experiment they were working on along with the rest of us on a trip to Baltimore and DC.
In China, I met Dr. Li, Anna’s mother, who with her husband had both been graduates of Beijing University, the Harvard of China. She helped me in a very sincere and patient way to research my housing situation when I first arrived at Beijing Language and Culture University. Other women from whom I received substantial mutual support in China included Yu Hua, one of Dr. Gu’s assistants, who was hysterically funny (“I call this photograph ‘my husband and a woman,’” she would joke in Chinese about her wedding photo, in which she’d worn a ton more makeup than usual), and helped me get an excellent apartment near school for a mere 150 US a month. Guo Xin Hua, who came from an important family of municipal administration in Beijing, took me on a very memorable trip to Southern China, including Nanjing, with a large group by train. There, we had the most delicious Chinese breakfast I’ve ever had, complete with salty duck egg and fresher and more authentic shau mai than I knew existed. Yu Hua also had a good friend from Xian, Liying, to whom I taught English for a time, which led to her taking me to the ancient-walled Silk Road capital, where I tried the delicious Middle-Eastern infused food for the first time. I remember our talking about her having had a serious boyfriend who was younger than her by six years, and my discovering later that this had once been a cultural trend, where women thought that “molding” their younger husband’s characters made for better marriages. Eventually she was able to immigrate to Canada, as she’d hoped.
Later on, more women in China helped me, like Lucy Chen, a fellow journalist at the Time Out Beijing predecessor with whom I co-wrote an article on Latin dance teachers at the Brazilian embassy when she became an editor at Madame Figaro China. Because of Lucy, a major rock star named Dou Wei (previously married to Wang Fei, who was called the Madonna of China), attended one of my concerts at the prestigious rock/jazz performance venue CD Cafe in Beijing, and I also had a chance to meet the founder of the first independent rock label in China, Shen Lin Hui. I also got to visit Beijing’s first school of rock and jazz. Other friends in China included my first roommate and best friend, Hyosuk, a staunch South Korean feminist whom I later met up with in London for punting at Cambridge; Xuanmei, my maternal South Korean second roommate who prodded me to date an eventual love-of-my-life even after I tried to get them to date, instead; Kim, a bossy, but kind, mixed British-Chinese woman who worked for a multinational corporation and guarded her freedom with a vengeance; and Sunny, the Taiwanese granddaughter of a Nationalist general who had married an Italian, talked endlessly about the beauty of Italy and worked as the creative director of our magazine. The magazine office where we worked was itself headed by Hong Huang, one of the most famous female entrepreneurs in China and ex-wife of the great director Chen Kai Ge, as well as Shen Qing, the sister of Shen Tong, one of the two leaders of the Tiananmen Square Movement. With the help of our magazine, I was able to write about subjects as diverse and amusing as Chinese indie films, local “movie bars,” obscure travel destinations nearby, and acupuncture. Zhou Xun, a mega-star of Chinese movies, later helped heal my heart when a mutual collaborator and Warner Producer got us working on a song together by remote, helping to communicate to me the feelings she needed to express at that time in her life, which were about purity. Friendships that began in China and extended to visits in America included that with Qiu Ya and Marketus Presswood (a Chinese history scholar), a very special couple who made the world feel more united to me.
I continued working on freelance journalism back in NYC when my friend Rain Noe teamed up with Jiae Kim and her husband John to create Theme Magazine, which I think the four of us found more globally relevant and aesthetically fulfilling than the previous NYC Asian American magazines had been. With Jiae and John’s help, I wrote more articles on topics like the Beijing rock musicians I’d met in China, and Korean dramas, for which Jiae and John provided the box sets of DVD’s. It was enormously helpful for me to be given these opportunities in order to advance my writing skills and confidence.
Simultaneously, at my first graduate program, interactions began with yet another group of female geniuses with whom I was joined-at-the-hip for long stretches: Maryam Keshavarz, my partner on countless directing exercises, who most recently debuted her delightful transnational indie “The Persian Version” in London (happily, on my birthday); the lovely Eunah Lee, my most prominent NYU collaborator, the cinematographer on my thesis film, which was selected to open for Indiewire’s first-listed film of best features at Slamdance 2009; my thesis star Ten Huang, the previous winner of a Taiwanese “Emmy,” who won me over with her striking beauty and social awareness (and who took me thermal skinny-dipping for the first time in my life); Kim Spurlock, a talented director and mom-of-the-class for whom I acted in a film that won the Vietnamese International Film Festival, and whose other projects have gained support from Sundance and Venice; Angela Cheng, now a creative director at Ted Talks, and co-writer of “Lucky Grandma,” which won a million-dollar grant from Robert Deniro; Sasie Sealy, a Yale graduate and my second-year producing partner at NYU, who co-wrote and directed “Lucky Grandma,” and for whom Siggi of Siggi’s Yogurt and I produced her first Tribeca-winning short in 2004; Leah Meyerhoff, a sensitive soul and generous artist whose first feature was “Unicorns,” the debut of Natalia Dyer; Dara Bratt, a warm friend to all, who has shown her skillful work at Cannes; Marquette Jones, a UC Berkeley-trained lawyer-filmmaker powerhouse with whom I filmed her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and who very sadly left us two years ago; Rania Ajami, the Princeton alum who made a documentary about Khaddafi’s female bodyguards and introduced me to the brilliant Living Theatre founder Judith Molina; Hind Shoufani, a talented poet and filmmaker and daughter of a PLO leader who has shared with us her intense experience with Palestinian culture and struggle; and Tai Burkholder, an incredibly spirited and efficient producer. Dagmar Tatarcyk was another maternal support to all and now lives with her co-alum husband and family in London. Stewart Thorndike, who’d made an appearance as an actress in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and showed her work at South by Southwest, became a good friend and mutual support as we continued to advance our work. Carol Liu was a Stanford graduate who became an important partner-in-crime as we developed scripts together and even met up – along with Christine Choy – in China. She introduced me to Jinying Li, a Beijing University graduate, former Variety China writer and current Brown professor who got us a first 100k grant from a successful female producer named Xu Wen, for the script I decided instead to postpone, and which I have been developing on and off for a decade. Wei-Chen Chang became a line producer on my thesis film, Moon Lady. Sari Dalena opened my eyes to quality living as a filmmaker when she shot her first feature piecemeal and also cooked us an excellent filipino meal. Pamelyn Chee, an actress I met on a very capable Columbia director’s (Kit Hui’s) film, was someone I eventually introduced to star in Angela Cheng’s Wasserman-winning second-year film. Then after Pam was cast in Wayne Wang’s “Princess of Nebraska” (2007) as a co-star, she invited me to direct her in a skit for a series at the Spoon Theatre, which was a lot of fun. Olga Miasnikova is another gifted lady I spent time with, specifically on my adaptation of Rivka Galchen’s “Region of Unlikeness.” She’s a production designer who has contributed substantially to MGMT’s videos, and who gave me many important insights (one of them, coincidentally, about violin). We also went location-hopping to many magical places in Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of the best locations I managed to secure for a reasonable amount, with the generosity of Sharron Cannon, was the Lenox Lounge, where the great Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and John Coltrane once performed. Another great location was my friend Tess Giuliani’s yard, around the corner from my house. A close relation of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s by marriage and mother-in-law of “caterer-to-the-stars” Mary Giuliani, I’d first met Tess when walking through our neighborhood on a rainy day with an umbrella, and bent down to look at a profusion of wild mushrooms in front of her house. She’d opened her door to ask me, “Do you like the mushrooms?” and then invited me in to chat. (This event that took on even more meaning recently when I studied “Mushrooms in the City” by Italo Calvino with a student). It turned out Tess was a very talented and free-spirited interior designer. We quickly became friends and had many a meaningful chat at her house. She also supported me a lot on my film and involved me in a rodeo-style charity ball that she helped organize in our town. Rivka Borek, with whom I felt a soul-mate connection before casting her as the lead in “Region of Unlikeness,” had grown up in London, Hong Kong, and NYC (and spoke in American and British accents varyingly), and gave me newfound awarenesses that ultimately made me feel more comfortable in the world. She later did an MFA at ACT and was chosen to play Ophelia in their rendition of Hamlet. Anya Talis, whom I met somehow in connection with my film “Moon Lady” before it won the San Diego Asian Film Festival (I’d given my awarded flight and hotel room to my sister) ended up becoming my second Assistant Director on my short adaptation in 2011, as well playing a small role at our favorite filming spot, the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Samantha Fisherman, my high school AP English classmate, a Yale and UPenn graduate and lawyer, gave me support regarding contracts for my adaptation, and allowed me to reconnect with Ridgewood High School in a way I’d somehow missed out on, as a late transplant to our town. Our AP English teacher Gail Jordan had also been my most deeply impactful teacher in high school, as she’d taught us Dostoevsky and Camus, both of whose texts recently entered the discussions of work I produced for my French Literature applications and at the Sorbonne. Finally, Leah Meyerhoff introduced me to the friend with whom I have spent most of my social time for the twenty years since film school ended: Nathan “Mimsy” Marcus, another “secret” genius and Brown alumnus with whom I initially bonded over Ingmar Bergman.
Rivka Galchen (now a New Yorker staff writer) and her agent at WME, Alicia Gordon, with whom I interacted for a year, both taught me tremendous lessons from a distance. From Alicia’s forwarded emails, I learned that warmth and affection need not be inappropriate at work, and are even necessary; from Rivka, I learned that I needed to return to my studies of literature and philosophy, as well as how to write for longer periods of time without getting bored or impatient (via her explanation, in an article published after we completed my adaptation, of why we aren’t supposed to know or understand everything we are about to write). Kelly Lerner, my casting agent in LA, was one of those psychic ladies whose casting picks led me to some magical coincidences in my own selections: two final girls out of hundreds ended up being roommates, and two final male actors ended up having gone to Yale Drama at the same time. Because of Kelly, I ended up doing my script reading at the apartment of another idol since childhood, Cyndi Lauper.
From 2012, while and after I connected with Stephen Colbert’s team online, I gained yet more distant interaction with established female authors: Amy Tan and Judy Blume, who had always been two of my original idols from youth, and later, Gish Jen, from whom I’d received the inspiration to “romanize” my Chinese name to sue-lynn zan, after discovering her book about Chinese Americans growing up among Jews in our area. I later gained remote support from Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Yoko Ono, St. Vincent, Amanda Palmer and many other established musicians as I occasionally uploaded my own recordings to my blog correspondence. All of this interaction became important to my understanding of the music world in the United States. Many other major celebrities on Twitter, like Kim Kardashian and Arianna Huffington and Julie Chen, helped challenge my ideas about body types and so I could better accept myself. Needless to say, the political careers of women like Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made a huge difference to the confidence of women, gradually, for the past twenty years.
It was also encouraging, later, to see two women with whom I had exchanged mutual support at Cornell and in our NYC social community, achieve great success with their first books: Nicola Yoon (NY Times #1 Bestseller) and Lisa Ko (National Book Award Finalist). The childhood friend with whom I’d read Anne of Green Gables together, Krista Stroever, went on to attend Princeton and became a romance book editor for HarperCollins. Teresa Park, the literary agent who discovered Nicholas Sparks, was an important influence at my first college internship between junior and senior years at Cornell, as a Korean-American with some European upbringing who’d studied law at Harvard and quit her job as a lawyer to become a book agent. Two years later, a British woman on Tina Brown’s staff who interviewed me at the New Yorker magazine after college (1997) gave me an unexpected amount of encouragement and inspiration by telling me she liked my writing, as well as by debating my thoughts about authors and asking me how many countries I’d travelled to. Lynn Buckley, now an Art Director at Viking/Penguin, was a sweet friend whom I found exciting to talk to at the entry-level job I got at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, along with Kelly, who worked in Sales. Joy Isenberg and Sheryl of Client Services were important leaders of our department and strong female role models. Natasha Wimmer, a Harvard graduate who was then editing Jamaica Kincaid, now a major Spanish translator for authors like Robert Bolano, warmly joined a party at my apartment in NoLiTa.
Further into the future, the female professors at NYU’s MFA Film program were remarkable: Chris Choy, the chair of our program and a major Asian American figure whose Oscar-nominated documentary we’d studied at Cornell (“I got Ang Lee his first job, and now he’s huge and I’m still nobody,” she joked when introducing him to a packed NYU auditorium); Sandi Sissel, who had just gotten off “Master and Commander,” and is considered one of the most important female directors of photography in the US; Kristi Zea, a true powerhouse, having designed classics like “Silence of the Lambs,” while she also produced “As Good as it Gets”; Gail Segal, passionate in film aesthetics, and a poet; Roz Lichter, who represented countless favorite indie productions as an entertainment lawyer; Karen Ludwig, who had acted alongside Meryl Streep on Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”; Jennifer Ruff, an editor whose self-avowed devotion to film-as-art was refreshing. Finally, Yvette Biro ended up being my closest film mentor by our thesis years; she was the professor emeritus who, I’m proud to say, won the Fipresci Screenwriting Award at Cannes during that period of time for a film she collaborated on with the rising Kornel Mondruczso of her native Hungary, who became a sensation in indie film. She also taught me two most important lessons: that I was “freer than I knew,” and that “we are tightrope walkers for good.” After NYU, our previous chair, John Tintori, introduced me to Marta Renzi, a choreographer whose sister was Maggie Renzi, the partner of John Sayles. I was invited to stay at the house where they’d grown up as we worked on a project in Massachusetts with dancer Marta Miller, who happened to be my neighbor in Wyckoff, and whose son Ezra Miller has since become a popular actor. This was also a very edifying and warming experience. The reason I was introduced to Marta Renzi in the first place was probably because my first and second-year films had both featured some form of dance, though not in conventional ways, and this leads me to remembering the strong skills of actresses Amanda Jones, Kishiko Hasegawa, and later, Fiona Lee, popular model Jihae Kim, and a very charming filipina dancer named Melissa Guerrero who was introduced to me by my old friend Olase Freeman, himself a professional dancer. Kathleen Kwan, an old Cornell Asian American Playhouse collaborator and actress was later put back in contact with me by Emily Quan, my original Cornell actress; she acted in a 35mm exercise that I worked on with Maryam Keshavarz and a talented production designer named Renée Chao who was the first that ever made me think about how to translate Taiwanese aesthetics into something more westernized. We did this for Sandi Sissel’s class.
In 2013, I met and spent time with more gifted women who were my co-professors at the School of Visual Arts, most especially the wonderful Katherine Garrison, who did her MA at UC Berkeley and worked with students who had serious learning disorders, and the warm Kyoko Miyabe, who did her PHD at Cambridge and specializes in painting and literature, and is now Co-Chair of Humanities and Sciences. Maryhelen Hendricks, the Chair of Humanities and Sciences who first hired me – thanks to the introduction of NYU co-alum and Stanford graduate Janice Ahn – was truly a lifesaver. I will be forever grateful that she let me teach college writing without even having had an MA in literature. While she had always been happy to keep me on with just my English BA and film MFA, I was ultimately thrilled that the experience made me want to pursue graduate literature studies and writing. This led my writing and teaching in the directions they were truly meant to go; and that does not in any way preclude a continuation of film work.
In 2015, I found an additional part-time job with Tzu Chi as one of about two dozen English translators who worked for an important Buddhist leader named Master Zheng Yan. Master Zheng Yan, named one of the hundred most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine in 2011, is a Taiwanese monk who, through her aim to alleviate suffering throughout the world – particularly when problems like natural disasters strike – has somehow amassed a following that has led to the opening of 500 offices worldwide. Two of the most memorable lectures that I translated during that time involved the metaphor of the “full moon” for what we experience when we are with real friends, and the idea that every child receives far more than they ever dreamt to ask for, simply because the combination of forces of all individuals and things in the universe creates things that we cannot even imagine by ourselves. Yet another most fundamental idea that impacted me there was the fact that we should not attempt to “create” too much karma because if we do, we won’t be able to complete what we started, nor handle the effects of what we started. This is another reason I’m writing this blog at the present: I believe that by now, I have initiated just enough work to be able handle completing in my lifetime, and I’m trying to get a clear assessment of what has happened thus far, and with whom.
I will only go briefly into the female professors at Columbia and the Sorbonne because I’ve mentioned them all most recently on Twitter or in my blog: Julie Peters, a previous Harvard and Princeton professor who was both kind and deeply insightful enough to incorporate the films of both my NYU mentor, Boris Frumin, and my old friend Daniel Wu into our Shakespeare adaptation coursework, a therapeutic act that astounds me every time I think about it; Branka Arsic, whose class on Emily Dickinson was probably the best and most thorough being conducted in the US, and whose “Bird Relics” made a sample for my student’s writing tasks when I was an adjunct professor, before I arrived at Columbia; Sarah Cole, a Modernist who is now Dean of Humanities, who’d begun at Columbia when Edward Said was still present and her co-worker mentor; Jennifer Wenzel, a grandly impressionable speaker and writer who has made waves in the field of Environmental Literature; and Kathy Eden, a genius who can readily go from Classics to Kant, who both cracked me up with her double entendres, and cracked open my newly-growing fascination with Greek. Socially, I found a great deal of support in my friend Chris Klippenstein, who has taught classes at Columbia as a PHD student and is now teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Another close friend, with whom I experienced the warmth and authenticity of my first Sorbonne-educated Algerian- French professor, Imen Amiri (who generously helped me with a recommendation later), was Anna Troy. Anna and I were frankly different from other students in that we had spent some years of our lives playing music in between our schooling – but we had a ton of fun in French class as well. Another helpful French instructor at Columbia was Katherine Raichlen, in whose class the entire community was so supportive that I began to try harder to really speak French for the first time rather than just do well on the tests. All of this reminds me, too, to credit my Cornell literature professors: Molly Hite was of great impact, not only because she taught enduring favorites by EM Forster, Joyce and Woolf – as well as articles on gender, race, and war – but because she was the first teacher I ever had who brought my grade down solely for my silence, thus causing me to take a leap in public speaking by senior year. Shelley Wong was also important as the Asian American Literature professor who first shared Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Huang, Christine Choy, and more.
Post-Columbia, rather than stay in one place as an adjunct professor or anything similar, I decided to try online tutoring so that I could travel while working. This enabled me to prepare a new set of graduate applications while completely supporting myself through travels in London, Athens and Paris – while gaining an essential amount of insight about the historical and cultural foundation of what I was studying and teaching that could not have been gleaned otherwise. Without the help of Sarah Zhang at Cambridge Network (who brought my English literary and Chinese language skills together for the first time), and now Lynn Lin, who has taken her place; Jessica Bush at Tutor Doctor – the daughter of a personal assistant to Frank Lloyd Wright – who possesses great sensitivity to her tutors and clients; Michelle and Jeremy Fine at ConnectPrep (who got me my first Greenwich, Connecticut clients, which later led me to introduce the area to my parents); and perhaps most of all, Irene Kim and her entire church community in Bergen County, who brought me stable private clients who all trust each other; without all these people’s help, the travelling-while-working could never have happened. (It’s not a joke, folks. Teaching at SVA made me face this: what right did I have to talk about German Expressionism without having spent time in Germany? Did I really understand Flannery O’Connor if I hadn’t spent more time in the South? I began my ultra low-budget traveling during the SVA years for precisely this reason. If we are in the business of accumulating knowledge, anyone who thinks this is irrelevant is – I’m sorry to say – living in an age of education that is essentially inadequate, and destined to keep changing quickly with our advances in technology.) I also need to thank both my “possible professional track writer students” Olivia Lee and Eileen Yoo for helping me improve my own creative writing through our mutual examination of their ways of working, and their strengths and weaknesses, as well as Emma Wood at Stone Soup, a Harvard and University of Iowa MFA grad who has rewarded the strength of my students’ fiction several times with publication. And I’d like to thank Johanna Lee, newly-tagged with me on Facebook, for being one of my most well-rounded students, as she helps reaffirm that people truly can be skilled in many things at once, from art to science to sports.
At the Sorbonne, my young graduate classmates Éléonora Lethielleux, born in France, and Ema Luncian, from Romania, were my closest supports; they provided keen, needed insights and made my time in France warm and comfortable. The vast knowledge and kindness of so many brilliant professors were key to all of our experiences: Anne Carlier, whose gigantic understanding of linguistics transformed my understanding of literature into something as scientific as I’d always needed it to be; Christelle Reggiani, whose intense discussions of Georges Perec brought poetry out of my analysis; Sandrine Aragon, coincidentally the sister of an NYU classmate, who helped restore the rhythm and faith to my fiction-writing; Chryssanthi Avlami, the Greek-French professor who started us off with the dazzling, impossible Hannah Arendt and made us feel connected in more ways than one; Françoise Simonet-Tenant, whose exquisite way of speaking is well-complemented by her obvious feminism and her capacity to share the profound respect French have for written culture; Sophie Basch, whose sense of humor, down-to-earthedness and honesty pair well with her fine knowledge of Proust; Alice Cosme, whose incredible memory mixed with her poise and delightful cadence make her a very effective Greek professor; and finally, Sophie Vanden Abeele-Marchal, in whom I recognized a familiar need to express herself, at all times, as her most human self, even while many cannot muster the energy to do so in a daily job.
Added to this particular group of women in Paris are my friend Bastet, a Polish architect and designer based in Paris who works on buildings in areas as diverse as Morocco and London; and Yoonsun Choi, a humorously expressive woman well-versed in law, and my South Korean partner-in-crime as women of a certain age studying Proust, but enjoying it oh-so-much!! Paris also brings to mind the incredible ballet teachers I had there at Paris Marais Dance Center, as well as for more than ten years now in NYC. The women include Kathryn Sullivan (Columbia/Barnard NYC), the first teacher to make me start thinking about the words behind the positions, and to understand the relationship of the entire body to the fingertips; Nathalie Bochenek (Paris Marais), who possesses a capacity for combining wisdom and humor with choreographed movement in a way that seems to have disappeared in the States; Heather Hawk (Steps in NYC), who before dancing with American Ballet Theatre trained with Maria Tallchief, Balanchine’s third wife and at one point the face of American ballet. Heather’s complex footwork has helped me build my dancing brain. Allegra Kent (Columbia/Barnard NYC), another prominent muse of Balanchine’s, whose grace and magnanimity in teaching at eighty compelled me to get our class to buy her and our pianist roses at the end of our class. Mayumi Omagari, who demonstrates for us in Finis Jhung’s class (originally at Alvin Ailey NYC, now independent), was incredibly helpful to me when I first started, partly because her whimsical personality is very similar to my mom’s!, while her precision in movement helps me get a routine correct. For this discussion, I will break ranks with gender for a moment – because unlike with so many male mentors in other fields mentioned in my previous blogs and articles, I haven’t had enough opportunity to talk about any of my ballet teachers. Finis Jhung is the incredibly rare Asian American artist important for both Americans and other Asian Americans to know about, taking into account the calibur of his work in a most classically difficult field. Not only did he travel around the world as a professional dancer, but he worked with major artists like Gwen Verdon, Isabella Boylston, and the cast and crew of Roger and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. Finis’s understanding of the statistical difficulties for Asian Americans, combined with his professional skill level, made it possible for me to try ballet in the first place, and to actually stick with it for long enough to begin to understand it. Later, Ghislain de Compreignac at Paris Marais was incredibly effective for his meditative and mentally unifying way of talking to each student one-on-one. He slowed down the process of grasping a single correct movement in a way that seemed frankly impossible in NYC – something as simple as keeping the foot in contact with the ground at all times in its sweeping motions so as allow the body to maintain constant balance and control – to the point where at last I began to feel, more intuitively, the aesthetic and the logic of ballet.
Returning to women, and also to music, the understanding Hilary Hahn gave me, in combination with my reading more thoroughly about classical music history via Proust studies in Paris, changed all the previous fundamental premises I had, which had led me merely to make a comedian of myself in whatever I felt I couldn’t do. (And this is not at all to say that I don’t still value comedy; on the contrary, it’s getting better at things that makes one the more convincing comedian!) These new awarenesses altered not only the way I see and approach and listen to the violin, but to all kinds of instrumentation and genres of music — it’s changed my understanding of music history, and indeed, of human history… not only the way I practice Mozart and Bach on violin, but how I practiced singing Tracy Chapman to prepare for karaoke the night before I began this blog (“Fast Car” is surprisingly difficult to sing and requires a lot of objectivity).
There you have it. Women are great; women take each other seriously, spend time helping each other, and often, just as the maternal stereotype suggests, without any ulterior motive other than a sense of mutual support, balance, and joy. I can say without hesitation that every single woman I have named here (and I may add more as more memories come back, but I felt I had to post this by New Year’s Day, 2025) is markedly intelligent, independent, and insightful, to say the least. While I understand that my life may seem too generally episodic for some (keep in mind my first dream at seven was to be an author), I need to make you understand that throughout these many years of life, I have spent my time, most of all, with women; that many women do; and that many remain somewhat invisible despite their very positive and collective accumulation of effects on our society.
***Important historical reminders that may help us understand how much we all impact each other: Corazon Aquino became the first female president in Asia from 1986-1992 (the events I describe with friends in middle school occurred in 1986-1988). The Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall occurred in 1989, of course.
Ridgewood, NJ
