Blog Post

March Updates

which is really to say, some new things i've discovered about myself

March 15, 2026

The reason I really enjoy my fellowship has more to do than just the mere fact that it aligns with my values and allows me to be authentic, but more so how it allows me to be authentic: I am allowed to be intellectual. I am supervised by a music historian who became a music director and I am encouraged to listen to recordings and pick out fun facts about them and to sound like I know what I'm talking about. The full-time position still hasn't been filled yet so I've been hosting three hours a day. Two of those three hours are live, which means that I'm exposed to a variety of music by a variety of composers, some of whom I have never heard of before this fellowship, and have recently taken an interest in (Miklos Rozsa).

Which brings me to a discovery as of late: the reason I have been in so much anguish is both because I was desperate for employment, but also unable to commit! Talk about commitment issues to a discipline. It's obviously different from that of a human relationship, but I've been cognizant that because of my fear of abandoning one interest (i.e. music and/or film) for a period of time, I can't get myself to commit to either.

Add to that my new-found hesitation to corporate jobs (actually, it's not that newfound). But after giving myself permission not to pursue corporate film jobs because, as it turns out, I get easily bored in money-driven roles that don't necessitate the intellectual thought or curiosity I have come to enjoy. In any case, I'd much rather make films independently, where I have full artistic agency over the final product. As one of my friends says, "tech is kinda dumb." I'm finding that entertainment might be kinda dumb, too. (Especially after reading End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood by Patty Lin.)

I spoke with the director of new media at the school I work at and he enlightened me with a key finding: committing is not pigeon-holing. I've been so scared of following a generic path that I don't seem to realize that I'm doing a million things right now: even while I have a fellowship where I host music on public radio during the day, I spend my nights continuing to work and write and make podcasts with cool semi-famous people.

And the fact that the number one thing I need to do in this weird liminal decade of my life is to gain experience -- as much of it as I can. I don't have a so-called "career capital" to direct a feature film right now, let alone realize the pipe dream of selling a pilot (especially now that I'm increasingly averse of corporate influences on creative labor). I think I will apply to PhD programs for musicology. It's a field I feel drawn to and proud of represent, even if I still at times fall into a type of despair in which I feel like I'm failing to realize an immigrant fantasy of 6 figures and wealth. I'm happy right now without wealth; I'm only scared of job insecurity and not being able to make ends meet. I am scared that I won't be okay.

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Some other discoveries:

I'm 22 and only now do I realize that there actually is a million more things that have plagued me and my childhood that haven't affected others in the same way. It's not the fact that my upbringing has been evidently and undeniably traumatic (which in some rare, regrettable cases, it has), but that much of these things are simply not intense or definitive enough to be considered a type of institutionally recognized trauma or hardship. "Stuck in liminality," as it might be called.

  1. What generation am I really? In the most technical of senses, I was born here in the U.S. and never had to naturalize, so I'm second generation. But my parents have spent merely one more year in the U.S. than I had; I am not the type of second generation daughter to have access to parents who fully understood me in English or have any type of substantial experience in this anomaly of a country. My mom would always tout that she has more "experience" in the age sense, which applies to certain universal issues like daily habits or respecting ones elders, but certainly not in terms of sending one's daughter to an immigrant-run tutoring center to improve her grade from a 92% to a 98%. Not to mention, I lived in China and went to pre-school there from 6 months to 4 years old before returning to the U.S.; I hardly have any memory of being in the U.S. before the back and forth. What does that make me?
  2. My parents, and therefore I (before this job), have never gotten health insurance from an employer. My father runs a small business -- which should already be grounds for a "see? She definitely does come from a disadvantaged background!" But my dad's business is not a mom and pop shop on the street somewhere; it's in the corner of a warehouse district two cities south of my hometown, a corner that often sees robberies and theft with air that smells of fried chicken from the factory across the street. That small business raised me and my sister. My family had to pay for health insurance out of pocket.
  3. Speaking of small business, I could never really write a coherent narrative about helping out the family business besides doing "marketing" (which is really just me BS'ing the shit out of their social media page) during the pandemic. Not necessarily because I couldn't help, but because I didn't want to or wasn't allowed to. Poor little girl who barely weighs 110 lbs (even now) can't run a forklift to carry bikes from one end of the warehouse to another!
  4. One of my friends once said that everyone is a nepo baby of something. This particular friend happens to come from a family of scientists well established in their fields, who work at household name companies and academic institutions. When I told him that my family merely runs a bike shop, he said, "you're a nepo baby of bikes. That's pretty cool." How do I explain that his status as a nepo baby of science is not equivalent to my status as a nepo baby of bikes?
  5. My parents are only ever friends with other immigrant families. Never Americans. Cue the Chinese immigrant diaspora echo chamber of "send your kids to SAT tutoring" or "Li's Ballet" or "get fingerprinted so they can use biometrics to determine your scholastic aptitude!"
  6. I have been physically and verbally abused. In sixth grade, I told my friend that I was scared my mom would hit me if I failed an exam. She replied, "She's not allowed to do that! Child abuse is illegal!"
  7. Per the last point, I'm still healing from those scars.

If I was raised to be cognizant of all the ways I've been disadvantaged, my story would have much more easily taken shape as a girl who has had to struggle all her life. I would have been, in a sense, a first generation Chinese American daughter whose family had to run a small business to survive, who experienced abuse she never deserved, and was subjected to the misunderstandings of an immigrant-centric system that stunted her growth throughout her teenage years.