Writing Your Life

"Past Lives is a love story, but it’s really not about romance."

Apr 01, 2024

Happy Monday! Yesterday I celebrated Easter by going on a long run to the top of East Rock. I called my friend Saya and my parents on the way up/down.

This week’s ADHOC categories are A Perfect List, Dessert Making, Hot People Eat Vegetables, Optimistic Science, and Celine Song. This letter is very much about the ways we craft narratives out of our lives—to find perfection in the mundane, to land an internship, to sit at a bar with your husband and childhood sweetheart and make a movie out of it.

Read to the end for Lauren and Diza’s beautiful words <3

A: A Perfect List

One time I met someone who told me about his list of perfect things. I can only remember that he has the Rotten Tomatoes Parents’ Guide on his, to avoid the blood and gore of horror movies. I’m still putting mine together. Maybe I’ll send a completed one in the future, but here’s the start. This is also me prodding you to make your own. It’s a fun exercise. And comment some Perfect Things on this post!!!

🍎𝓐𝓻𝓭𝓮𝓷'𝓼 𝓟𝓮𝓻𝓯𝓮𝓬𝓽 𝓣𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼🍎

Phone calls in the car (I did this often on my long drives from Oceanside to LA)
Washing sweat out of my hair
Milk bread
Crisp fruit (apples, nectarines, Asian pears, grapes)
Waking up full of energy
The first nice day of Spring
Long dinners where you lose track of time
Taylor Swift’s All Too Well performance at the 2014 Grammy’s

To be continued…

D: Dessert Making

On Saturday, Phaedra and I hosted (with help from Andres) a mini pavlova pop-up for our baking business PLAY.

The dessert is actually from Australia/New Zealand, named after the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. It’s very simple, but the outside gets all crispy and crackly, and the inside stays soft and marshmallow-y. Ours had a meringue base, vanilla custard, whipped cream, berries, mango, and mint. The weather was warm and sunny and everyone ate their pavlovas outside with plastic spoons. A success!

H: Hot People Eat Vegetables

In my Social Perception class, we learned that attractiveness might be related to your vegetable intake?! Fruits and vegetables are sources of highly-colored carotenoids, which contribute to increased skin yellowness/redness and decreased skin lightness. Faces with this pigmentation profile are rated as healthier, clearer, and more attractive.

I spent a lot of the last two weeks tanning. But in this study, they find that carotenoid coloration is consistently preferred to melanin coloration, especially in women. So maybe the beauty hack is eating more greens and spending less time in the sun—all the benefits with none of the skin damage.

O: Optimistic Science

I found myself on this Twitter thread of a guy explaining that he switched from studying Economics to English in college because it’s the only discipline “where theory touches ground.” Higher-level economics incorporated more and more calculus without justifying underlying assumptions, while English courses were consistently rooted in the text.

Then I read the essay he linked by Christopher Nealon that bashes economists for trying to craft a literary tale out of the field’s history. Sylvia Nasar’s Grand Pursuit: A History of Economic Genius unfolds a 20th century coming-of-age epic, cherry-picking the “scientific” moves that eradicated poverty (for the US, Europe, and Japan) and (momentarily) increased standards of living after World War II. Nealon digs into her shallow analysis that attempts to turn economists into storybook heroes, romanticizing the ideas that birthed modern capitalism and conveniently omitting the 2008 housing market crisis.

The essay made me think about career advice I’ve gotten many times: make sure you have a good story. Your educational, extracurricular and (limited) professional experiences must make you an ideal candidate based not only on your skills, but the persuasiveness of the narrative you shape out of them.

Ex. You led your high school basketball team to victory (teamwork), you’re in charge of your fraternity’s finances (accounting), and you tutor little kids (mentorship). All of this has led you to this Zoom interview with an investment banker, the only natural climax to your story whose resolution consists of a job offer, a self-congratulatory LinkedIn post, and an omakase dinner.

As hard as I’ve tried to bend my academic and professional careers into a cohesive narrative, it always feels a bit forced, because the real world is disjointed and random and not every choice is connected to a larger plan. I came into Yale as a prospective English major and I still think those classes have been some of the most rigorous, complex, and rewarding ones I’ve taken. I can see why other disciplines want to mimic the literary devices and plot-lines that make us fall in love with books. I just don’t know if it works for the Marshall Plan, or a finance internship. The stories feel disingenuous, like those kids who only joined clubs they knew would help them get into college.

C: Celine Song

Celine Song, the director of Past Lives, came to speak at Yale this Tuesday. She was the keynote speaker for the Pan Asian American History Month celebrations. I saw her movie this summer in Oceanside, and I thought it was tragic because the three main characters cause each other so much pain without intending to. Even the two men who love Nora are restrained and respectful when they meet, which makes it worse. I was surprised that Celine thinks the movie has a happy ending, and that each person gets what they were looking for (closure, acceptance, affirmation). She said that the only villains in Past Lives are space and time, separating people and setting their once malleable lives into permanence. I thought the ending was very sad.

I also asked my friends for their thoughts.

Lauren (who texted me to watch the movie in July):

“Celine Song was forty-five minutes late ("traffic on I-95") and breezed into SSS 114 in a sweatshirt, jeans, and baseball cap. Everyone in the crowd (Asians, people who saw the movie, Asians who saw the movie) immediately forgot the grumbling about her lateness and sat rapt as Celine spoke from the podium with no notes or slides.

Some things she talked about:

Immigrating to America from Korea at thirteen
ESL and being a writer in her second language
Parasite opening doors for foreign-language and bilingual films in Hollywood
Casting an earnest and un-hateable white guy who is husband to a Korean woman to play the role of earnest and un-hateable white husband to a Korean woman
Hollywood (a notably messed-up industry) as less messed-up than the theater world she was part of previously
Sitting at a New York bar with her husband and visiting childhood sweetheart, translating between her past (Korean) and present (English) life and waking up the next morning inspired to start writing the Past Lives screenplay

I left Celine Song’s talk moved and inspired. She seemed kind and introspective and incredibly dedicated to her art. It was so special to hear the thought process and deliberate intention behind every scene of one of my favorite movies. Past Lives speaks powerfully to immigrants and writers and anyone who sees their life as delineated by some feature of time or space. Everyone should watch it (and bring tissues).”

Diza’s Interlude: of Bilingualism, Ghosts, and Manifestation:

“In May of 2023, Mark Chung and I came up with the AACC PAAHM theme as I drove us up a forested Pali highway to Byodo-In Buddhist Temple. In June, I watched Past Lives alone in Kahala Mall on a Tuesday afternoon, behind a group of strongly opinionated Asian American moms who seemed to think that Greta Lee was "not very pretty.” In November, I submitted Celine Song’s name to the long list of PAAHM keynote speakers. And in March, on Tuesday of last week, Celine Song stood on stage at SSS 114 and told us how she immediately resonated with our theme of Nostalgia and Moving Forward.

All that to say — I believe in manifestation, or otherwise finding ways to write your own life before it happens. This entire cyclical process was a labor of love and stubbornness for me (in true Taurus fashion). Getting to see Celine, HUG Celine, and asking her anything I wanted — I knew I had an obligation to ask hard-hitting, searing, provocative questions, but in the end, I think I just took the opportunity to talk to her about things only I ever would want to hear about… First being sharing a word, my 인연 (in-yun) equivalent, that I’ll share with you all today:

sayang (Indonesian)

Noun. Love, sweetheart, darling

Verb. To love, to cherish

Interjection: Too bad… or What a waste!

It is a sense of loving and loss in simultaneity — my mom used to call it “sayang” when I would save my favorite part of a meal for last, and then get full before I could eat it. We have other words for love, of course, (HINative user anthonygotama says, “cinta is for loving someone, but sayang used for loving from their deepest heart”), but something about sayang is tragically fond. I’ve never seen anything capture that sense of affection and grief in one medium before Past Lives. It’s a love story, but it’s really not about romance. It’s about having love for your dreams (Nora’s future Tony award), for practicality (her marriage with Arthur), and for your past self (the child who was not an immigrant, who Haesung once knew). At least... I think.

When I asked her about ghosts, my phone (unknown to me) blew up with a dozen texts. To be fair, I asked about the soundtrack (which we both agreed was underrated), specifically a track on it called “Staring at A Ghost” — which accompanies the moment in Central Park where Nora and Haesung see each other in the flesh for the first time as adults. And THEN I asked if Past Lives was, in any way, a ghost story. Queue the iMessages: “UR ASS AND GHOSTS” “No way you asked if past lives was a ghost story lmao” “love stories as ghost stories… gagged”

But she got it! The film is called Past Lives, after all... Celine described the experience of long-awaited reunion, of seeing Haesung the man after knowing Haesung the boy, as a supernatural encounter, and the meeting of Arthur and Haesung as time-travel — sci-fi, even — where past meets future face-to-face. As I turn toward my own thesis in film production, I am desperately trying to stick to my roots as a genre writer, while trapped in the potential of making a regular old drama. But I now have a lot of hope for capturing the heightened within the mundane. Like Celine said to all of us on Tuesday, part of making stories about longing is helping audiences admit how special and temporary regular life is. So hopefully we can all start thinking of reunions as haunted houses, and first meetings as portals to the future.”

Have a wonderful week!!!