Cynthia Li for Volume 7 Launch Party

Speaker: Cynthia Li, @dainty.foibles

Cynthia Li: Hi, everybody. My name is Cynthia Li. I'm based out of Michigan and I do a little bit of everything. I'm not an artist or writer in my day job, but I do quite a bit of art in my downtime to help me process my complicated feelings about complex topics. That includes a lot of poetry. I also write songs. I perform with my band, Talented Asian Girlfriend. You can look us up on Instagram or bandcamp. Please give us a follow if you like us. Today though I'll actually be sharing a personal essay, The Words that Come After, not the whole thing though. The whole thing I think takes maybe 10 minutes to read out loud and I only have five minutes on the recording. So we're gonna try an excerpt and see how it goes. Wish me luck. Here is the words that come after.

Cynthia Li: My daughter wants to know if I'm ok. I am not ok. I am crying in the dining room of a restaurant in Foshan at lunch with my parents, my sister and my child. I am turning 34 this year, but I may as well be 14 at my parents' dinner table, forced to stay and listen to my parents interrogate me. My mother, whom I have not seen in person in over three years, not since she left for China just before the pandemic, reaches over and touches my head. I wonder if she is brave or stupid. Which one am I when I reach out to touch an anxious cat who bites? "It's just that we're your parents," she says, "Parents should be close to their children." I nod. "When we ask for specifics of your life, we're not trying to attack you. We just want to know what you're doing, how to support you." I don't say anything. "You don't tell us anything. It's like you don't trust us." I keep my face impassive. "I don't," I say. I don't see my mother's face. I don't look at their faces anymore. Too often they're confused or angry or disappointed and I don't have the patience or the time to process other people's pain in my existence anymore. But maybe she looks sad. "I don't understand what we did wrong," she says, "why do you treat us like strangers?" I try to swallow my emotions, to lift my chin above the flood of resentment and pain that bubbles up in me. It feels like losing a tug of war. My heels are dug deep in the sand, but I am mercilessly pulled out toward the sea. I try to speak and lava, hot and molten, falls out. My mother speaks to us almost exclusively in Cantonese these days, but I answer in English because I don't have the words, was never taught the words, to express my pain in ways that felt sufficient to me otherwise. "You never believe me when I tell you things," I say. And even English words are difficult. What I actually want to do, what my voice wants to do, is roar like a wounded bear. "Do you know how heartbreaking that is? I tell you about myself but you don't believe me. So I don't tell you anymore." And then my throat closes up and my eyes fill with tears and I furiously search my bag for a pack of tissues. My seven year old daughter who has been lost for most of this conversation looks up in confusion. She understands functionally no Cantonese. This is the first sentence of this fight that has meant anything to her and she doesn't know why I'm crying. She never sees me cry. I do it when she is at her dad's or after she's gone to bed. "Like what? Give some examples," my mother insists. She always does this. She always demands an entire poster presentation to support the claim that she has done anything less than perfect. But I am done talking. The only person in the world who understands and respects that there are times when I can't talk because I'm too dysregulated, too overwhelmed, is on the other side of the world with our two cats. She went to bed an hour ago. We're getting married within the year and she isn't here with me right now because my parents have failed to accept the reality of my life. When I was 15, I tried to tell my parents that I was pansexual and my dad said, "If you were gay, you wouldn't be my daughter anymore." We were at the community pool. His voice echoed amid the splashing of other swimmers while I packed up our damp towels. And I never brought it up again. When I was younger, I showed everything I wrote to my parents and they told me, "There's no reason for you to write such depressing things. You're so young and you have a good life." They only approved of it if it was something "positive". They specifically requested glowing write ups about family trips we took together. The last piece of writing I ever showed them was a poem called "Parents" that I performed at a school poetry slam. It was specifically about how nothing I wrote was good enough for them. They liked it because one, it was about them and two, it won the competition. They never asked about the pair of Chucks that I won as the grand prize. I gave them to the girl I had a crush on. As it happens with a lot of queer folks, the friend group that I had in high school just got queerer as we all grew up. I had to relay these updates to my parents when my friends came up in conversation. "Oh, they go by Apollo now and they use they/them pronouns." My dad would routinely scoff at these announcements as "identity politics" and then later demand via text whether or not my partner had had brain scans to "prove" she was trans. I would hide in the bathroom and cry, wishing that I could tell my own parents that I was non-binary, but knowing that it would just be inviting trouble.

Cynthia Li: So this essay, The Words that Come After, I wrote, basically the night after this fight happened after my daughter had gone to bed and I actually had time to, you know, think about it and be like, I, there's just too many feelings inside my head, I have to put them down on paper or like, I guess in this case, my phone, it does happen to me sometimes when I'm just way too upset that I need to write it down, I can't say it out loud. My verbal skills just sort of fail me. I can't speak but I can write and so I wrote out, you know, all these feelings and as you can see, it's never just the one thing that happens, right? It's the one thing that happens, that's the tip of the iceberg and underneath it's the history between you and a family that tells you that you're incorrect in some way that there is something wrong with you that you are not acceptable as you are. Not just that, but also that you know, when you report on yourself that the reports are wrong, that you cannot trust your own perception of your own experiences in your own life. And that to me is just so hard to process, even as an adult, especially as an adult. I think when I was a kid I had this fantasy that, you know, oh, when I grow up I'll have it all figured out, you know, like I'll have a good relationship with my parents. And they'll finally understand me and all that and I don't know, a lot of work goes into it obviously. It's very difficult and at least part of it is me processing my side of it. You know, I can make requests but if they're not answered on the other side, you know, I can't control that. I can only control, know what's going on, over here what's going on with me. And that's sort of, you know, why I wrote this. Initially it was just a therapeutic exercise for myself and it was much messier in its first iteration. And then when I decided that I wanted to submit it to Canto Cutie. I organized it a little bit more polished it up a little bit more. Try to make it, make sense to someone who wasn't just me looking over, like, basically a very messy diary entry.

Cynthia Li: This is actually my first published work outside of, you know, any sort of school publications ever. So that's a very big deal for me. I want to say thank you to Canto Cutie for this awesome opportunity. As for why I chose to publish my work in Canto Cutie, I first came across Canto Cutie. I think on Instagram and I just thought it was so cool that there was a Zine for people who shared like this very like near and dear trait. You know, just the the Cantonese speaking diaspora is to me, it's a weirdly a new concept when I was growing up, I was just sort of under the impression that, you know, Cantonese speakers outside of of China. and Hong Kong they were difficult to come by, you know, or, or, you know, they're all out in California or they're like over in Vancouver. Like I said, I'm from Michigan and where I was growing up, it didn't seem like that many other Canto speakers were around or like if they did speak it like they weren't speaking it to me and it was always like a really nice surprise. Any time I ran across another person who spoke Cantonese, it felt like hearing if I felt like meeting family I never knew about. That's just a really special feeling. So I thought it was really cool that there is a Zine for folks like us. Then when I saw the all call go out for volume seven, I was like, well, you know, I guess I write stuff sometimes and, you know, I hadn't really been trying to publish anything at the time. And I was like, well, you know, maybe I could submit and just, you know, see what happens and see if, you know, is my writing even like fit to print basically. And when I actually had to think a different essay planned out before, which was sort of similar in scope about being, you know, queer and trans and then also coming from a Chinese American family. But it had sort of my draft is sort of stalled and then, you know, I was traveling to China with my kid and I was like, you know, I probably don't have time to even finish this draft and submit and all that. And then this fight happened, I was like, bitch, we're writing this, you know, we're putting this down on paper, we're gonna make it, you know, a legible piece of writing and we're gonna submit it and you know, we'll see what happens. But no, I'm not keeping this to myself anymore.

Cynthia Li: So you can give me a follow on my personal Instagram. I am at dainty.foibles on Instagram. That's dainty period foibles. You can also follow my band, Talented Asian Girlfriend, all one word on Instagram as well and Talented Asian Girlfriend is also on Bandcamp. I believe this is all coming out in December. So hopefully, by the time you're hearing this, our first single will also come out, Pillowcase, which is a song I wrote while trying to process all the feelings that come with getting divorced. Honestly, a lot of divorce songs coming out of my band at present, but hopefully in the next year, there will be more of the new stuff that we're working on. So stuff about queer identities, family trauma, you know, all all good things. Give us a follow on Instagram and Bandcamp. I hope to hear from you. Thank you.