[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Ander, for that intro.
I knew I brought out my finest tunic for a reason tonight.
Thank you, Paco and Tyler too, and everyone at the Poetry
Center for putting this event on and giving me an excuse,
not that I needed one to come back
to a place I remember fondly and also just really love.
I'm going to read an essay from my book
that I began when I was an MFA student here.
I mean, frankly, all of these essays,
I began when I was an MFA student here.
And the piece is about the beginning of a relationship that
also started here in Tucson.
And my way into the piece, because I was like 24,
trying to write about feeling like I was in love, maybe
for the first time in my life, was I over
intellectualized it and started writing about these photographs
and critiquing and looking at these photographs of lovers
marks and public declarations of love that I saw around Tucson
and around other spaces I was moving through.
And Ander created a really incredible broadside
from some of those photographs.
So this is called Love on the Rocks.
There is a tree on campus where all the lovers go.
They deface this tree, carve their names into the wood,
and kill the tree slowly for love.
One day, I dreamed that we were there.
And that you were, as you always are, laid back,
sylvan, a little stingy with your words,
while I stood beside you, hot with shanghuo,
Hua that inner heat my grandmother blames
for my acne and my temper.
In the dream, we did not know what to do with the tree,
like we lacked the proper tools or sentiment for each other
to act.
When I awoke, sticky and unresolved,
it was already evening.
And I was due to meet you at Casa Video, the rental palace we
go to every Friday to drink craft cider and browse.
In the movie whose treatment I've been writing in my head,
an Asian man is riding the elevator up
to your Tucson apartment, the one
with the North facing views of the train tracks and Mount
Lemmon.
He's been thinking lately about one of his first days
in this city, how his key had refused
to turn in the lock of a borrowed apartment.
On that day, he'd sat down on the bristly welcome mat,
watching an unknown neighbor do laps in the pool.
Maybe love is always having that someone on the inside
ready to let you in, or maybe it's
the door frame that swells in the summer heat,
catching a deadbolt fast.
The man walked down to the pool and bought a cold Fanta
from the vending machine.
He put the can to the keyhole and waited for something
to happen.
A contraction in the frame, an answer to his open sesame.
For years, I've kept a folder on my computer called Love
on the Rocks.
Inside are photographs I take of lovers' marks.
The carved or painted dedications to love one
can find anywhere there are lovers.
Most of the marks in my collection
are small, containing nothing more
than a phrase or a set of initials, two letters connected
by a plus sign or an ampersand.
Some lovers enclose their first names in entirety,
though rarely their surnames.
Many even date the mark as if signing a contract.
As linguistic acts devoted to love, the marks in my collection
remind me of Roland Barthes writing on the amorous figure.
Barthes' book, A Lover's Discourse:
Fragments, is organized into 80 such figures,
each a different way to express how we love.
In his preface, Barthe describes these figures as gymnastic acts.
They are renditions of a lover's impassioned discourse,
not attempts at defining love's essence.
Barthes' book isn't a dictionary, it's a script.
During my early 20s, I moved around a lot.
In Oslo, I found the marks jotted in Sharpie
on the spine of a park bench right next to the Akerselva.
In Osh, I found them branded like permanent hickeys,
into the rocks of a sacred mountain.
In Nepal, the marks marshaled on a gazebo outside of Nagarkot.
And in Hawaii, they scarred the banyan trees in Ala Moana park.
On Borneo one rainy season, I hiked
for hours on flooded trails to find a boulder marked
by some long departed couple.
L plus E that sigal calculated on an abacus slick with green.
The marks were a useful metaphor for the kind of love life
I was learning to lead.
They, too, looked like isolated incidents.
But unlike my hookups, the marks had
endured, outlasting their moment of inception
by more than a few days.
I won't pretend a switch flipped the night that we met.
Gay, monogamous love settling like a spotlight over us.
Sitting outside the bar, we talked electoral politics
and sipped our vodka sodas.
I remember noting the slim fall of your shadow,
the nautical tattoos half covered by your sleeve.
He isn't really my type, I would say to my friends
later, a dodge as much as a dismissal.
Most of my early experiences with sex and love
happened while I was living out of a suitcase.
The men I connected with on Grindr
didn't beat around the bush.
After a flurry of pictorial exchanges
to verify mutual interest, they would ask
if I wanted to host or travel.
My answer was always the latter.
Over the years, I've sometimes felt
like a seedy sex tourist compiling
a Rolodex of quick fucks.
I worry that I am treating each lover too much like a prop,
and not the complicated amorous figure they surely must be.
In more charitable moods, I try and think
of each hookup as a fact finding mission.
I learned from a police officer in Jinghong,
for instance, about the platonic love
he felt for his best friend, a graphic designer,
he planned on marrying as his beard.
And I learned from a restaurateur in Mostar
about all the queer Bosnians who regularly took jobs
on international cruise liners to make money and get laid.
In Copenhagen, a Russian photographer I met at a bar
taught me which of my facial angles best caught the light.
Then he laid me down and fucked my face.
What about you, then?
The you who was unfailingly polite and secularly Jewish
and almost exactly my height.
The you who grew up in Arizona.
The you who sat by rectangles of turquoise water
each summer in high school, a lifeguard
employed by the city of Phoenix.
The you with your cactus stud earring,
and your beat up Tacoma.
I'm trying to fit brackets on you,
as I have all the others to render
you a charming bit of terror.
But when we met, I was also residing
inside these same brackets.
Your place in the world was more to me than just a pit stop.
I couldn't easily skirt it, nor you.
Once while on a date with another guy I was seeing,
I ran into you on the street.
You called out to me and we joined you.
And after around of very casual seeming introductions,
spent the next hour hanging out with you and the other guy.
Telling myself, this was definitely normal
because it wasn't like either of you
wanted to claim me as more than a friend.
I never found the idea of being more than a friend to you
unpalatable.
Far from it.
But the idea of a real relationship
seemed unpractical, to say the least.
My plan had always been to move back
to China after my graduate program ended.
A plan I shared with you on our first date.
Because of this, it seemed almost
irresponsible to spend our weekends cuddled up
on your couch watching movies.
Millennium Mambo and Three Times by Hou Hsiao-Hsien,
Summer Palace by Lou Ye, Tsai Ming-liang's The River,
and every movie ever made by Jia Zhangke and Wong Kar-wai.
Screening these films was a crash course for both of us
in contemporary Asian cinema, but also
perhaps a way of showing you where I was going
and inviting you to come with me when I left.
The truth is, I've always felt like a novitiate when
it comes to matters of the heart, a Phaedrus.
I'm always looking for my Socrates.
My uncertainty stems in part from how difficult
it has been for Asian men in America,
whether straight, gay or neither,
to see themselves as romantic protagonists.
This is not to say we all feel unlovable, sexually deprived,
ugly, or repugnant, though an online contingent
of us very vocally does.
It's to say that when we are loved or desired,
when someone fucks us and wants to keep doing it repeatedly
like a tick, when we're held up as a paragon of anything other
than braininess and hard work, when
we play on stage or in life.
People hemorrhaging emotions and not just zen koans.
People who are open holes rather than obdurate sphincters who
have enterprising genitalia instead of Ken Watanabe-esque
blanks, and who definitely aren't here
to dispense wisdom or consult on web design or large racially
cocked.
Isn't it crazy how Asian girls only date white guys
complaints from the sidelines?
When any of this happens, it seems like a mistake.
And inside our cold, cold hearts and our insensate fleshpot
bodies, we suddenly don't know how to feel anymore.
When I first met you, I was surprised to learn
that none of your previous partners had been Asian.
Your interest in me did not follow a predilection.
I know that love in its unalloyed form, true love,
that good shit, the shit honored by every lover's mark I
photograph, is supposed to supersede
all such quibbles about age, race,
and other demographic factors.
One of love's promissory conditions,
after all, is that it shall take the generalized like one feels
for certain people and hone that feeling down
to something individuated, a bell
that tolls only for the one I love, the singular,
implausible you.
And yet the anxieties I feel about my qualifications
and deficits as a lover or loved object remain.
I cannot help but still see us as others might,
as one of those Asian male, white guy pairings,
ubiquitous today on the streets of Cambridge or Brooklyn.
How can I critique exoticism when my own colored body seems
exotic to me, when I trade on its currency of difference,
and am, in general, pleased with the returns?
At the end of each encounter, there
is always a moment of retraction,
of staring down what Barthes calls
the long tunnel that follows each love affair's instigating
moment.
My limbs untangle from his, I wash up in the bathroom,
get dressed, smile, because I've seen this scene of language
before.
I don't think sleeping around is the only or even the best
way to figure out what love is or can be.
My encounters have, if anything, taught
me more about what love isn't than what it is.
Each hook up, a teaser trailer for some unfeasible future.
It wasn't love, but an exercise in self-sabotage,
when I got on the back of a partnered man's bike in Shanghai
one summer.
It wasn't love, but a resurgent kleptomania,
when I left another man's apartment in Milan
with a photograph swiped from his bookshelf.
It wasn't love, but a reckless kind of loneliness,
when I let a man twice my age pick me up beside a Montanan
lake, get me high and fix me a Boston market TV
dinner in his camper.
It certainly wasn't love when this man came shuddering over
my pliant, vacated shape, how the pot and booze made
me feel like I was slipping away through the air,
my borders fuzzy and indistinct.
Later, I would grope my way, as if blindfolded,
through the dark insides of this man's life.
I would find the door, the fence and the grass,
the road outside leading somewhere new.
It wasn't love the night we met, but it didn't
preclude the option either.
Like two obliging weather systems,
we developed in line with the forecast.
Hipster bar, cheap drinks, the quiet walk
in midnight back to my place.
After you left, I sat on my stoop,
trying to remember exactly the way you had descended my body,
how I had ascended yours in response.
We had exited the scene, but left the door open.
You would come back often, standing at my cusp,
asking in your own words, to enter.
Part of my trouble with love is how stubbornly I
cling to my own subjectivity, to the knowledge
that these vignettes, these marks, are mine alone
to inhabit and record.
The stranger who is my lover retains
the status of a character in each encounter.
I can sympathize with him, care for him, maybe even love him.
But he need never follow me out the door,
back into the clutches of all that is quotidian and daily.
On the other hand, the time I've spent with you is nothing,
if not a series of moments interpretable from both sides.
I remember an early date when you came over
so we could watch Wong Kar-wai's queer classic Happy Together
from 1997.
Lying on the carpet of my unfurnished apartment,
we watched the film's central lovers, two Chinese men
caught in a co-dependent, toxic relationship, danced
the tango in their dilapidated Argentine kitchen.
That image is the film's crucial amorous figure.
Leslie Cheung, finally, closing his eyes
sated as Tony Leung holds him close.
You were so quiet through that almost brutally romantic moment
that I wished to compare notes, to be consenting adults
in the way one of my college professors
used to talk about consent.
One day, after another long exegesis on Plato,
she looked up from her slides and told the class, sotto voce,
that consent comes from the Latin, "consentir,"
or together feel.
And so to consent to a person is to agree to feel together
with them, to be as porous to that person and their feelings
as one person can be.
I remember thinking this was the most romantic etymology I'd ever
heard.
And I also remember years later, looking at you in my apartment
and asking you what you thought of that scene.
Returning to the photos in my folio,
I noticed that the lovers' marks recur in places
where two entities meet in some kind of discord or harmony.
Romantic vandals leave their marks
at the Grand Canyon, where red Earth cleaves into blue sky.
And at Niagara Falls, where Canada abuts America.
The lovers go to Stanley Market in Hong Kong
to sprinkle their names on the tide line,
and they haunt the grounds at Dunkirk or Manassas,
where opposed forces once met and mutually
assured destruction.
I don't know yet whether our doubleness needs such memorial.
If I should be taking my pen knife
and paints to the backlot of that rental palace off Speedway,
where every Friday we used to meet.
For so long I have thought about love
as a feeling that lives and dies in the moment.
I have thought about love primarily through the words
of philosophers like Barthes, rather than poets
like Audre Lorde.
Lorde, who writes, breathlessly describing a lover's touch,
I am come home.
What I have avoided thinking about too deeply
is the hope, deliciously irrational,
that we will not disappear into or away from each other,
that we will keep our separateness,
but stay somehow a unit moving through the world
in each other's company, each other's co-feeling.
I do not balk at the cliché this figure enacts.
Love as two people's shared journey a long march
through city and fen.
It makes me think of a time many years ago in Manchuria,
when I watched a group of lovers cast red paper
lanterns over a frozen river.
There was a bridge in that city covered
in thousands of lovers' marks.
I spent hours picking over the bridge as carefully as I could,
wanting to record each and every one.
Standing at the bridge's center that night,
I looked over the railing and saw a flock of lanterns detach
from the river's Southern bank.
The lanterns floated on onshore winds to the river's other side,
where they fell into the snowdrifts as trash.
Chinese love is so often typecast
as the honoring of a pledge or the fulfillment of a child's
filial duties.
The lanterns over that Chinese river
said love differently, though.
That love's vigor was uncontrolled,
the result of an inexpert heave made in the night.
That love traveled, shaking on queer winds,
flickering, but holding.
We are flickering still.
We are holding.
It was you who finally asked me to make it official.
We were standing on a rooftop, splitting
a cigarette and a beer.
You told me you knew that the timing wasn't great,
what with my move fast approaching,
but that many relationships start out premised
on planned obsolescence.
And some of those relationships don't stick to their plan.
Maybe you could visit me in China,
and we could take it from there.
I said, yes, I would like that.
At the end of Happy Together, the two men
are no longer in love.
Or maybe they are in love, but their feeling
is no longer supportable.
Tony goes home to Hong Kong, leaving Leslie behind
in Buenos Aires, curlicues of cigarette
smoke adorning his lips.
Why are the movies you show me always so sad?
You once asked me.
I don't know, but I haven't ruled out our happier
ending just yet.
Ultimately, the marks I collect are
made by lovers for their lovers, not for me.
This voyeur come from the future.
Whatever is transmitted by each mark
is publicly available, but privately held.
A message meant for one person alone.
It was I who first said the words to you
during that long summer when I was no longer living in Tucson,
but hadn't yet moved to the East.
I drove across the country to see them
because it seemed like the most romantic possible way.
As the states between us past--
Missouri, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah,
I vacillated about how exactly to say it.
All I could think about was that moment in many Wong Kar-wai
films, when a person in love will whisper something
into a mud filled hole in a wall, a knot in a tree,
or a friend's tape recorder.
What words the lovers speak in these scenes are never divulged,
and, indeed, do not matter.
The point is that the lovers are speaking
and that we are seeing, without comprehension,
the act of expression as it takes shape.
Once, after many days alone with myself,
I came to a town near what geographers call the Eurasian
pole of inaccessibility, otherwise
known as the most inland point on Earth.
There were no tourists in this town, just goatherds
and truck drivers and people like me
who came for the pleasure of passing through.
I didn't know where exactly in the desert the pole was located.
But like any hopeless romantic, I
longed to get as close to the inaccessible as I could.
After an hour or so of walking, I came to a rocky tor
jutting up from the desert and decided to climb it
before turning around.
I expected to stand at the top, contemplating my solitude
while looking out over the vast and tawny desert.
Instead, I saw smokestacks and train cars
and the ragged edges of the town I had just left.
I could also see, between tor and town,
a giant bilingual lover's mark that some couple had left there,
and all of life's heat and isolation.
A sign meant for you and for me, but mostly for them.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]