Chance Meetings Defined by Random Chaos or Fate?

“I like chance meetings — life is full of them. Everyday, without realizing it, I pass people whom I should know. At this moment, in this cafe, we’re sitting next to strangers. Everyone will get up, leave, and go on their own way. And they’ll never meet again. And if they do, they won't realize that it's not for the first time.”
- Krzysztof Kieślowski (Director of Film Trilogy "Red", "White, "Blue")

To be familiar with Krzysztof Kieślowski's films is to recognize that this quote befits his approach toward filmmaking and story developments. A minor character in the backdrop of one film becomes the primary protagonists of the sequel.

I find this quote fascinating as I have wondered this as well. I wonder what our lives look like if we could zoom out and see the complex matrix of our interactions with others, the points when we intersect at junctures of street corners, classrooms and theatres. As strangers who think we have never met, we discover we shared the same space years ago at the same time. When we look at each other...perhaps we look familiar. Maybe we have been familiar. I recall being in high school (perhaps the summer of junior year?) and a classmate named Taylor made a rather perplexing comment as we waited for a bus. Someone made a comment that my hair had reddish highlights or silver highlights. Taylor, solemnly observed me and said I had silvery-shiny highlights. He then said he knew me pretty well or something like that. At that point, I said to him that I recall seeing him in our junior high school biology class where he sat at the first row closest to the door entrance, his red and black checkered jacket covering his head. He slept (or pretended to sleep) through all the lectures. I never spoke to him then I think but he was one of the amusing characters in that classroom aside from two girls who came in dressed as if they were pregnant, their backs arched over presumably by the weight of their poofy pillows tied to their bellies or more likely, by the weight of their imagination of a pregnancy. Taylor said quietly and dismissively of that fond bio classroom memory, "I know you much more than that." Hmmmm. Well, maybe in a past life.

I think of random coincidences... maybe they were fated and deliberate rather than the debris of chaos, part of a matrix of a determined future unbeknownst to us. Recently, I joined Facebook.com site and was surprised and bittersweetly delighted to see an email from the younger sister of my late best friend and former bf Ben Walter who happened to have searched for my name on Facebook that very day I signed up. I had wanted to look up Angharad's contact info through a friend of hers since her contact info was not on her site. What a strange and beautiful coincidence that she should have happened to think of searching for my name that very day I signed up.

I wonder about deja vu... is it possible that some people seem familiar to us because they are characters in our lives each time? Perhaps, those who experience deja vu more often re-experience their lives over and over, seeing the same characters again each time. However, for others who are living their lives currently for the first time, perhaps, they don't experience deja vu or a strange sense of familiarity with their existing lives. If we suppose this is true, why then are some of us destined to repeat the same struggles of our previous lives, treading through the same muddy paths, destined to make the same mistakes? Is there a lesson we're supposed to learn but keep missing each time? I like to imagine that perhaps at the moments of our deaths, we are offered two options... a new beginning or a chance to return to our past lives if that would be the only way to see our loved ones again. What if it took thousands of years to be reborn as ourselves or billions of years for the universe to return to this state where we could relive our lives? What if there are some of us who are aware of this cycle somehow in our subconscious and the deep-seated loneliness we may feel stems from the bittersweet recognition that our time is but one quick instance in the billions of years it will take to return and see the ones we love again? Would it not be bittersweet and lovely then to see the face of our loved ones and to re-experience perfect moments with them only to know that it would take millions of years to return to that same moment? What if I've been a lonely nebula floating in the ocean of time, in the womb of the universe waiting to be reborn but alone all this time...

If we could zoom out to witness and map the paths and crossings of our lives like spectators observing our context to our contemporaries, what would the map of our lives look like? Do our paths and interconnections repeat every hundred of years in the paths of our ancestors? Presumably, the world we live in is experienced as smaller to us even as our life footprints span a greater distance. We can travel to further places than our ancestors did in a lifetime. However, could our travels mirror the movements and distances of our ancestors in their clans at their micro-level? I often contemplated when I was in college whether human interactions mirror molecular interactions. Could friendships, relationships, and larger group networks be described in terms such as covalent bonding, ionic bonding, etc?


- Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative

Deconstructing the Film "Day of Fire": Deconstructing Lives, Deconstructing Relationships, Deconstructing Life Meaning

On Saturday, I checked out the Boston Film Festival (session 14 showing) at the Boston Loews Theatre. There were four film shorts that comprised the session 14 grouping of films:

• Bombay Skies (21 min)
  
• Club Soda (23 min)
  
• Backyard Suicide (14 min)
  
• Day of Fire (94 min)

I was a bit surprised at how polished they were compared to other indie films I think I recall seeing at other Boston or Somerville movie theatres. I found them of Kendall Square indie film quality even at their current state.

Among the four films I watched, the one that impressed me the most was the film “Day on Fire" directed and written by Jay Anania. The poetic and slow-moving feel of the film with its philosophical metaphors, an artistic fixation with thoughtful, beautiful faces that speak volumes when silent, discoveries of lives intertwined and re-examined at the end remind me of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s films. Kieślowski once said that he casted actresses (e.g. Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, and Irene Jacobs) and actors who had thoughtful faces that seemed to say so much even when silent. It was a study of the relationship between several individuals living in NYC — a Palestinian woman Nadzia who is obsessed with learning about all the nitty-gritty, gory details of how a victim experiences a suicide bomb (you find out she lost her parents to a bomb I think), a blond model that befriends the Palestinian, and a lonely middle-aged guy who seems alienated and odd, trying to make an awkward connection with others in the city. There several other secondary characters that you find are all interconnected somehow. At the hospital, Nadzia tape-records a medical physician describing the clinical, dry details of the physical impact and experience of a bombing and while you listen to this endless, grotesque description of bodies torn apart, the camera lingers on beauty during a model’s photo shoot which presents an interesting paradox running in parallel.

The story begins with physicians making an arrangement to transplant the eyes of a donor killed in a recent accident to another victim who has her cornea sliced out by a psychopath. The film seems focused on the intriguing eyes of all the actors even a filthy beggar who interacts with some characters on the streets. Although his face is covered with the dust and grime of the streets, his bright blue eyes are beautiful and pure as they were when he was a child, and perhaps unchanged by time as he peers out at the world. The film probably could have been edited down a bit more but I think it could have been drawn-out and long intentionally since the tape-recording of the bombing was supposed to be described in meticulous detail. The slow deconstruction of a bodies torn by a bomb parallels the slow deconstruction of the relationships of the characters that reveal their universal connection.



- Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative

In Search of the Everlasting Perennial?

A small, round glass bowl of orchids
Rests on my square, kitchen table
Delicate, pale pinks crown this simple glass —
Yet their petals are firm, crisp, and young
The unbroken idealist.
The light of a cloudy Sunday afternoon
Illuminates the ribboned lines that spill from dotted centers
The drizzle-beaded bay window
Framed by a pseudo-tropical view of a lush ivy and spider plants adorn the fringes of my window view
Overlooking
Outside, a garden of winter weeds
A square patch of brown, barren earth lie unpopulated with greens
The lawn stoicly waits for a sullen summer.
Oh, spring orchids, so perfectly formed and hopeful
Today.
But what of tomorrow?
I've seen your brothers and sisters wilted and browned,
Your mothers and fathers stooped by age and cynicism
Once beautiful like you are today
Bittersweetly, I look upon your frail beauty and resolute pride
and recognize your fragility
But what of the child
Who sees her first orchid?
Or her first flower?
Was love purely hopeful and non-melancholic once?
Were we too young to remember what it felt like then?
And now too old to forget the loss, we pine for memories
we never lived and never knew?
Should we aspire for a childlike naivete unspoiled by regrets and
long-lived experience?
Or walk a tight-rope life, tottering between tentative hopes and
absolute losses, burdened by the knowledge of life's transience?
Can there be a flower that never dies?
Or must we make do with the perennials that expire
And are reborn anew —
But not the same?
Oh, the sun has broken through the grey clouds!
Can the disappointed hope once again be renewed?


by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative
May 20, 2007

An homage to "u"

A poem I wrote last summer 2006 when I took a typography design (the study of letterforms and the role of typefaces in communication and information hierarchy development) class at MassArt. This is an homage to typography in memory of my dear best friend Ben Walter (munch 2):

"An Homage to U"

Sorrow sleeps in the nooks of the serifs
Hollow loneliness echoes long around the counters
I'm a letter in black sheep —
in a word out of context
Grouped in with other letters;
A phrase seeking meaning
A floating non-sentence in a nonsensical world.
I kearn myselfcloser to my neighbors only to find them —
Shifting     away, forming new interletter spaces;
Gaps   of   misunderstandings
Someone removes a letter — u —
Beside me, close to me...now gone.
Lonely. I'm aware we're now a mispelled word.
Perhaps, I need a new arrangement... maybe meet new neighbors.
It's all been a scramble of mispelled letters since you've been gone.
Hoping this will all make sense someday.


by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative
Summer 2006

Another Winter Sinks In — Reflections on A Year After Ben

Today is officially the anniversary of my dear best friend Munch2's (Ben Walter) death. Well, perhaps it was yesterday, December 20th since today was yesterday in Shanghai, China where he passed on. The present is already the past elsewhere. I never thought about how the day of a person's death is not a universal day in the universal moment experienced by all on this planet. For example, Martin Luther King's death date varies across the globe although the actual time is a universal moment.

I thought often as the days rolled closer to today or yesterday, what I could have done to prevent this tragic direction. Could I have been nicer to him during our college years? Could that have changed the course of our future? Our fate? Throughout this year, I kept thinking that on that particular day, munch2 would still have been alive. However as of yesterday or today, time has folded into himself... an entire year will emerge soon that starts the years where I cannot reflect on how just a mere year ago, he would have been alive.

I learned during this one year the human capactiy to float above the darkness. As humans, we always seek to find a plateau in our suffering. Like ocean waves, the water falls yet rises again in constant flow. However, I also recognize that there are some losses that define a person and this one touched the most beautiful places of my heart. As humans who have truly loved someone or something, we carry these wounds, these scars that leave us different, indifferent, tougher, softer and more sympathetic to the suffering of other that reveal a heart that can feel for others. Munch2's passing and the death of several others around this time has led me to reflect that what makes us human is universal.

Munch2 could have done so much for the world... I can only do my best to make his legacy and beauty live on elsewhere.
This year, I offered gifts from Oxfam Unwrapped in memory of my dear munch2: 12 textbooks for children and training for teachers in a poor region of the world. Hopefully the love I felt in my most profound friendship can blossom somewhere else and that his life is recycled elsewhere in the hopes of others renewed.

Much love to you, dear Brains... always.

- siming
www.jsiming.com
December 21, 2006

Tips for Giving to Non-Profits and Charities

Apparently many people tend to make charitable donations around the holidays so I thought I’d share my advice in case you're looking into charities to support.

I strongly recommend doing the following:

• Check out Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org), a 501C non-profit organization works to guide intelligent giving. According to their site, they say, “They help charitable givers make intelligent giving decisions by providing information on over five thousand charities and by evaluating the financial health of each of these charities. They ensure our evaluations are widely used by making them easy to understand and available to the public free of charge. By guiding intelligent giving, they aim to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace, in which givers and the charities they support work in tandem to overcome our nation's most persistent challenges.”
  
  
• Read Charity Navigator advice on smart giving: ”Top 10 Best Practices of Savvy Donors:“
  

... The site suggest several tips that I would like to summarize and emphasize in particular that I find to really important points in particular:

1. Identify and Prioritize Your Values. Support non-profits that have targeted outcome goals
   and are not too general with their objectives.
   “Smart givers generally don't give reactively in a knee-jerk reaction. They don't respond to the first organization that appeals for help. They take the time to identify which causes are most important to them and their families. And they are specific about the change they want to affect. For example, they don't just support generic cancer charities, but instead have targeted outcome goals for their giving, such as providing mammograms to at-risk women in their community.”
   
   Basically, really think about what your values are before you feel guilty and just give money to whomever sends us pleas for help. Personally, I get tons and tons of mail from all these non-profits who get my info from similar non-profits to whom I donated money previously. FYI — Non-profits often share your contact info with other non-profts that share similar focus so think about where you’re donating money b/c you’ll soon be hearing from other similar organizations. I have been guilty of repeatedly giving money to organizations that send me info rather than really researching the organizations that interest me. I recommend that you first take time to evaluate what issues matter the most to you and then research through charitynavigator.org for the non-profit that does the best job at what you care about. For example, say you care about environmental-related causes, but you will find that various non-profits take on a different angle or focus. In my experience, there are firms that focus on protecting wildlife or endangered animals affected by global warming, others that focus on preserving natural resources and national parks, and then others that focus on the effects of environmental damage on people. When I thought it through, I realized I cared more about environmental dangers that more directly affect human lives foremost. Also, there are non-profits that focus on short-term emergency care and then there are non-profits that focus on longer-term strategic planning i.e. Do you want to feed someone a fish (or veggie if you’re vegan) today when they are hungry and desperate, or do you want to help teach them to fish so they can eat later everyday?
   
   
2. Concentrate all Your Giving on Only a Few Non-Profits.
   Donate and work on very few organizations rather than give to a bunch of them at a fraction of what you could give to just one or two organizations that really meet your passionate concerns (see above). Personally, I've been overly diversifying my own contributions to a various non-profits since I have felt guilty about not giving money to non-profits who would have "wasted" their money writing to me and sending me all their endless free address labels if I didn't reward their efforts.
   
   
3. Donate to a Charity in Honor of Someone You Care
   Another point (not mentioned to on the Charity Navigator site) — you can always donate in honor or in memory of someone as a gift for people who already have everything material they feel they need. You can also donate in memory of someone to honor their memory so they continue to “live” on in your good deeds done in their name and send a note to someone alive who would feel happy to hear that you care.
   
   ***I noticed this rather fun “gift” idea on Oxfam (they get 3/4 stars on Charity Navigator for excellence):
   www.oxfamamericaunwrapped.com
   (Gifts that help others around the world. Their site states, “Need an unusual gift? How about a camel or a water pump? What about a coffee mill or an emergency toilet? This holiday season, give a gift that helps people in need.” They allow you to send a card to someone you care about this donation in their honor.)
   

Happy Holiday and giving! :)

- Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative

Holiday Arts & Crafts Shopping, and Grand Opening of the Boston ICA!

Support indigenous international arts and culture or works by local artists. Check out these links to learn more about these great places to buy unique, holiday gifts that support the arts. Visit the new Institute of Contemporary Art at their grand opening on Sunday, December 10, 2006.

1. Cultural Survival Bazaar holiday sale of indigenous art
   Saturday & Sunday, 11 am – 7 pm
   Hynes Convention Center — 900 Boylston Street
   
   - Support hand-crafted, fair-trade work from around the world when you buy your holiday gifts here or purchase art for your own home.
   - I believe that all the vendors pledge 40% of their proceeds toward the cultural survival group’s mission to promote indigenous folks’ rights and fair-trade.
   - For more details: http://www.cs.org/events/bazaar/index.cfm
   
   **** Their collection will be even bigger than the one in Harvard Square. I bought a bunch of stuff last week in the Harvard Square one
   
   
2. South End Holiday Market
   (SOWA) of local New England artists
   Saturday, 10 am – 8 pm, Sunday, 10 am – 6 pm
   Cathedral High School Gym — 74 Union Park Street, Boston
   
   - over 75 artistans’ stuff for some creative inspiration – Their stuff looks pretty hip and funky
   - For more details on the participating artists:
   http://www.sowaholidaymarket.com/participatingartists.htm
   
   
   
3. Mass Art Student & Alumni Artwork For Sale
   Monday – Saturday (Dec. 4 – 9), 10 am – 7pm
   MassArt Tower Lobby — 621 Huntington Ave, Boston (E line)
   
   - Featuring original works of glass, ceramics, painting, jewelry, photography, sculptures, fibers, and more. Sales benefit artists and support student scholarships.
   - For more info: www.MassArt.edu
   
   
   
4. ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) GRAND Opening Reception
   SUNDAY (Dec 10), 9 am - 9pm
   Introducing the brand new ICA on fan pier!
   http://www.icaboston.org/about/news/grand-opening/
   
   - The ICA officially opens with a free, 12-hour community open house. Come tour our new exhibitions, grab a free family guide, and enjoy a variety of events including performances by Snappy Dance Theater, Alloy Orchestra, the Either/Orchestra, a live DJ, and much more, plus face painting, balloon sculptors, and animated films by New England filmmakers. 
   
   

Tips for Holiday Shopping with Ethical Considerations in Mind

As the holiday season descends (or rather POUNCES) on us, I found a few cool sites online to check out that you might find helpful as you think about where to shop for gifts for others that reflect ethical considerations. For example, you could buy green/recycled products made into cool stuff, fair traded goods, organic, vegan, handmade products, etc.

• Ten Thousand Villages (”Fairly Traded Handicrafts from Around the World”)
  http://www.tenthousandvillages.com
  (I’ve seen their stuff in Cambridge area and I support their fairly-traded, BEAUTIFUL handicrafts from around the world theme and I thought I’d add it in. They even have gift registries so if you wanted to have a wedding gift registry, consider this place. Personally, I love beautiful, ethnic stuff. They make for great gifts for those with exotic or artsy tastes.)
  
  
• Greater Good (”Show Where it Matters”) affiliated with Oxfam and found through a link on Oxfam site
  http://www.greatergood.com
  (They have some really FABULOUS, beautiful ethnic stuff priced pretty reasonably as well as mainstream popular vendors. You can also give unusual gifts like $40 to pay a teacher's salary in Afghanistan or $90 for business grants for rural African women. Certain products that you purchased will then translate to a percentage of profit going to a cause of your choice posted on the site.)
  
  
• Oxfam Unwrapped
  http://www.oxfamamericaunwrapped.com
  (Gifts that help others around the world. Need an unusual gift? How about a camel or a water pump? What about a coffee mill or an emergency toilet? This holiday season, give a gift that helps people in need.)
  

These sites below were mentioned on the MSNBC "Today" show and listed on its site:

• Viva Terra (”Eco Living with Style”)
  http://www.vivaterra.com
  (I think they are one of the more tasteful and interesting sites listed here with some really nice products that you guys might want to give to folks. I like their dining and kitchenware particularly as well as their home decor items in particular. This site is geared toward women site visitors or gifts for women.)
  
  
• Hip & Zen (”Modern Lifestyle Products that Nurture the Body and Soul”)
  http://hipandzen.com
  (If you’re seeking some nice clothes and accessories for women and some items for men, babies from many brand collections, this is the place since they have a larger collection for women than most of the other sites on this list. They have limited collection of home decor items though. A great feature of their site is that it indicates whether a particular product is fairly traded, recycled, vegan, handmade, natural, organic, etc. They offer some urban punky cool stuff like laptop bag from recycled movie posters.)
  
  
• Branch (”Sustainable Design for Living”)
  http://www.branchhome.com
  (looks like a pretty nice site with some good options)
  
  
• Our Green House
  http://www.ourgreenhouse.com
  (eco-friendly baby products and stuff for an eco-friendly home if you have a kid or want to give gifts to someone with children or for baby showers)
  
  
• GreenKarat (”Ecologically Responsible Jewelry”)
  http://www.greenkarat.com
  (some nice jewelry designs that you can buy for yourself or for others. They can customize a jewelry design to your specs I think)
  
  
• Earth Friendly Finds
  http://earthfriendlyfinds.com
  
  
• Green Feet (”The Planet’s Homestore”)
  http://www.greenfeet.com
  
  
• 2kh.com
  http://2kh.com
  

(Of course, another cool idea is to also shop from local artists to support grassroots artists which I like to do as well :))
** I don’t get paid for any endorsements above so these are impartial suggestions based on things I thought people might find useful along with my commentary on these sites after reviewing them a little.. :P

- Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative

Election 2006 - Deval Patrick: First African-American Elected as Governor of Massachusetts

Yesterday was a spectacular day for Massachusetts — we made history with our election of Deval Patrick, the first African-American Governor of Massachusetts. Woohoo! I'm impressed with his open-minded, bipartisan approach toward reaching to both sides of the political aisles and other minority groups. I'm glad to hear that he advocates working with businesses as well to solve problems and work toward common goals, and is interested in growing new industries particularly biotech and green technologies. I credit Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate (in the primaries) Chris Gabrielli for getting the message about investing in innovation and green businesses through his ads. I think that Grace Ross of the Green-Rainbow Party made excellent points and is a very bright candidate — i think she really helped make the message much clearer on how Republicans advocate lowering income taxes but at the expense of increasing other types of taxes like property taxes and other fees.

Democrats also gained majority control of the House of Reps and took back most of the seats in Senate.

Six Months Past and Counting

I loved to look into your childlike eyes
Large, dark, sympathetic pools
Sinking into their silent caramel brown depths, I felt
An everlasting liquid longing
A heart-churning, desperate, unrequited
love like a misty, jade-green summer pining for its lost spring
With the delicate, pink blossoms long gone, spring seems like a dusty dream
My love, I cannot resist
Your unfathomable, enchanting gaze
my heart sunk
to the bottom of our endless loneliness
I drowned in the ocean of your melancholy
I tasted the salt of unseen, unbled tears
I gazed into my mortality, your mortality
Transfixed, I glimpsed your eternity in my emptiness
Baby, perhaps I knew even then...
Our moments together would be a mere --
instant in my new decades alone.
I long to look into your childlike eyes
again...


by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
June 26, 2006 (Monday)
In loving memory of my dear best friend Munch (ben walter)

Evolving Recollections... Can a contemporary evolving love outlive the temporal context?

I was recently reflecting on love evolving with time as our recollections of our past relationships evolve over the years...
As I contemplated on the sad reality that my dear best friend Munch2 (ben walter) died tragically at the young age of 27 in December, I realized that although I am still his contemporary as of now and think of him as my contemporary, what happens when I'm 60 someday, will I still think of him as my peer, my contemporary?

Can a contemporary love retain its temporal contexts if people step outside their relationship to time? If parents lose a child, I think their relationship to their child is still relatively the same in their evolving memories especially as we consider that parents often think of their grown children as being perpetually much younger even if the parents should be their 80s and the children in their 60s. However, what can we say of a friendship defined by a contemporary generational context? If someone dies as a grown adult defined by a stable concept of self-- if such a thing exists-- perhaps the contemporal relationship can exist between the dead and the living assuming that the other living individual's identity is also at a constant, stable state. However, in my opinion, Munch2 was still at the brink of true adulthood... a peaceful plateau of self-actualization and I can say at this point, I am at a similar stage. We were ephemeral contemporaries in our self-actualization and our generational experiences although I think that in true love, there exists a knowledge and recognition of the eternal core of one another's unalterable personalities, motivational drivers, and potential. If I feel that I can predict the achievements he would have obtained later in life and the evolution of his thinking given his extraordinarily gifted talents, interests, personality and temporal contexts, can my love and memories evolve to contain him in my temporal contexts?

Can I contemporize a temporal, ephemeral relationship where one individual continues to grow but the other is at a static stage? Or would there be a day when I'm in my 80s, that I would think of him as a grandmother fondly looking back at him suspended in time as a young adult forever young and beautiful, a rosebud frozen by a premature winter? Or will I look back and see him as I once did when I was in my 20s because our relationship is a temporal experience? When I'm with my family, I often find myself slipping back into the shell of my former self... my relationship contexts mostly remain the same. Of course, there are major events in life like going away to college and living away from home afterwards that have altered my relationship and some perceptions. Given that we can often slip back to our former relationships within old, non-relevant contexts, perhaps, it's possible that I will never think of him from a grandmother perspective on a much younger individual but rather as my contemporary as we once were in our shared temporal existence. Since munch2 was a couple years younger, I will always think of him as younger and his death doesn't change that. I occasionally wondered after my paternal grandfather passed away how his wife, my grandmother thought of her then older husband? My paternal grandfather was just a few years older than my grandmother but he died ten years ago when he was in his late 70s...now my grandmother is in her mid 80s, does she think of her husband as "older" than she still or younger now?

Poem: Pepperminted winter mist lingers

peppermint oil frosted winters
bottled in purple tinted glass
acid burnt suede after midnight
sculptures of metal sprawled out
rolling mercury across the floor
we fumbled for a mercurial moment
sunday afternoons by a bench
at the charles river watching the sunset
counting hours silently before a
dreaded working monday begins
embracing each other tightly
we were an island together
stranded in a strange universe
your face, a picture of innocence
pale below a stoic cap of copper brilliance
a porcelain child i wanted to protect
eyes wide as a baby stare up into white space
heavy with loneliness and pain
teetering between empty giddy giggles
and silence and eyes shut
your eyes were always blank those days
a wall i could not touch, enter
i was lost in your suffering
tiptoeing on a dorm's rooftop
we watched the 4th of july fireworks
a Chinese-born American, a Brit
sharing an American experience
gulping down little bottles of booze
with two other friends
summers simmered forever
a delicate blend of melancholy beauty
laugher echoed across the years
wish i could go back
and save you
love burns like acid
nothing but fuzzy memories
textures of dreams left
writing to your screen name
a face grey and unlit now
i pretend you'll write back
a knock on IM after midnight
you're halfway across the world
a day away in time
you should be up now
i could almost think
it's you
no--
but you're gone.

by Janet Si-Ming Lee, March 23, 2006

The March of Spring, a winter season has passed...

Yesterday was the first day of spring. An entire winter season has passed since Munch2's passing on the first day of winter December 21st. Time marches quickly... March will soon slip into April. The days are not quite distinctly warmer -- it has been a warmer winter to begin with. The sky is still gray.

The Chinese have memorial days on the two equinoxes of the year where they visit the cemetery to pay their respects to their loved ones and have a picnic above their graves. My family held theirs on Sunday at the Forrest Hill Cemetery where my paternal grandfather Yung Chak Lee is located. It's nice that asians keep the dead in their lives, their ancestors in their minds. Typically we bring lots of Chinese dimsum and pastries, pork with crispy skins and sit and eat there. There are often many Chinese families there in the spring and fall as well visiting the grave sites of their loved ones. It's funny that even in the afterlife, there are still ethnic communities clustered together... a little Chinatown community for the dead.

It would be strange and sad to visit Munch2's grave in England some day... just a name on a stone and know that somewhere below, he sleeps forever under winter snows and all the seasons of the years. I haven't seen him since 2001 when he graduated... five years ago. I had hoped i would see him alive again. I think of a quote that I read somewhere as a child... "If we knew when and where would be the last time we would see a loved one again, our partings would be more dear" or something like that. The last time I remember saying goodbye to Munch2, we were on Main Street near Kendall Square MIT area. We held hands and I cried thinking when would be the last time I would see him again. I held his hands in my hands wet with tears for as long as I could while thinking of that quote. He seemed rather antsy, eager to start the next stage of his life that left this Cambridge behind. I watched him for as long as I could still see him... his bright copper hair fading into a dot around the bend and underneath the aisle of trees. Maybe there was another goodbye afterwards where I last touched him but this goodbye I remember best. I thought then maybe I'll see again in five years? Who knows? I didn't know for sure that moment would be the last time.

The crocuses should be out soon... I'll have to keep my eyes open for the signs of spring...