Love, Mentiras, and ‘Human Development’
The segues are not good. 3 things on my mind.
I’m someone who has talked a lot of shit about love. But in the last year, I have come to accept the need — my need? a societal/cultural need? for it. I’ve been very conscious of the way I reject love and being accepting of it could change not just my perspective but my quality of life. So for the last few months, I’ve been studying love at a slow pace [and by a slow pace I mean reading a book and sitting with it for 3 months ’cause damn]. I’m not even interested in pursuing it, you know? Watch that bite me in the ass. I’ve just been so opposed to it that I’m just like what’s it all about.
In all about love: new visions bell hooks highlights the need for a definition of love. Love has as many definitions as there are people in this world. Look at at these fourth grader definitions of love. It’s pink, it’s feelings, it’s caring. But what does it really mean to love and to be loved? Hooks’ definition of love comes from M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled:
Love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth…Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
Love is a choice and a combination of care, trust, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, and respect. I think I grew up with this idea that love is innate that you just love your family, friends, and partners as they showed up. But, that was never true, it’s always been a choice to love, to care, and to surrender to people in your life. Media makes love seem so passive, like one day I’ll be sitting as I do, and the person destined for me will materialize right before my eyes and it will be love and that’s it. But that’s not it. It’s work literally, and I hate work.
I’m stunted, obvi, but throughout this, I’ve realized how patriarchal and misogynist I could be. Patriarchal indoctrination, or pick me syndrome, was really about survival for me. If could escape the male gaze, if I could be as emotionally vacant as them maybe they would see me as one of them and I could escape the violence. By refusing to dig deeper into me and my friendships I was denying everyone, including myself, of loving and fulfilling friendships. I thought I had unlocked the secret to survival under a patriarchal society…wrong. It’s hard to accept that I actively rejected my femininity and my sexuality over my fear of men taking that as an invitation to take advantage of me. Maybe if we lived in a loving society, where there is no domination, violence, or abuse we could feel safe existing in public as we are.
And that’s the thing about love, it’s powerful, revolutionary, and transformative. How could we justify war if everyone adopted a love ethic? How could we continue to deny the climate crisis? How could we turn refugees away? How could we drive past houseless neighbors? How could we refuse to get vaccinated?
Love is as love does.
I for real thought I could get away with pretending love didn’t exist. I feel like I sound... whatever, that’s so embarrassing…anyway…I’ve been consumed by Caramelo’s epigraph which reads, “cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira.” It is the title of a Cuban-American anthropologists’ work on her subject, a Mexican woman. It’s fitting to the book in the sense that Lala is telling the story of her Awful Grandmother. As someone who enjoys telling stories, I often wonder when a story becomes a lie. Even just listening to my family talk about things that have happened throughout the day they become exaggerated tales of the reality of the moment.
My dad one day delivered a bedroom set to this woman’s house, and he was going to have to go back the next day because one of the nightstands was damaged. The woman had purchased a few more things lamps, a sofa table, a rug, and my dad said I have no idea where she’s going to fit it all. Her home is already packed with things. Her living room set is spilling into the kitchen. In my mind, I pictured a hoarder-type situation. Boxes of stuff stacked up towards the ceiling, sticky carpet, tight walk space. The next day, when I went with him to deliver I saw a regular-ass home. Adequately furnished. I was a little disappointed in the state of the house because it was not what my father said it was. I mean, I guess she could’ve done without the chair in the living room, but it was not claustrophobic in the way my dad made it seem.
Maybe my dad saw her home in that way. Maybe it was frustrating having to maneuver bedroom pieces from the living room to the kitchen and upstairs to the bedroom without damaging anything already in place. Maybe finding something to laugh about, to exaggerate makes having lived the frustration easier. So what if her living room set wasn’t spilling into her kitchen; the absurdism made me laugh.
It’s like the family we delivered to with 6 boys who live in the basement of a duplex. The duplex is underneath Delta’s flight path and I wondered how that must feel — to climb out of your home and emerge with the roaring of an airplane. Maybe they don’t think about it now. But maybe as the boys grow older and move out, their mother will remember those days and she’ll tell the story to her grandkids this way: we lived so close to the airport in those days, that we could wave to the passengers and they’d wave back.
Maybe to tell a story is to be lying.
What if we called writers what they really are, liars!
I recently read Anthony Veasna So’s debut posthumous collection of stories Afterparties. Every main character is a Khmer-American, and every story is full of atmosphere, humor, longing, and endings that are poetic, resonant, and…fleeting.
The story I keep re-reading is ‘Human Development’. It’s about a character named Anthony who is a few years post-grad living in San Francisco working at a School teaching his students how to be good, socially conscious people. He goes on to meet Ben, also a Khmer-American, who is creating a safe-space app. They date until they no longer are. To fully grasp the story, I may have to read Moby Dick, yeah, but even without it, I was moved to tears.
I thought I was going to have a lot to say about this piece, mainly because of how many times it crosses my mind. But, I think in the end what stuck out is being excited. The fact that you can be someone like Antony, someone carrying the “aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism,” and still find something to be excited about. That even after allllllllllll that, you can stand in your body, as a survivor and find joy.
