Happy Birthday Audre Lorde & Toni Morrison + saying NO to fear
Hi everyone!
BERLIN,
Sunday, 02-16-20
— With so much change coming up, I thought I would introduce all my future newsletters with my current location, from wherever I am writing this. Some of you might have remembered, but I am heading to Hanoi, VN for a study abroad semester soon and am starting to get excited about it, especially after speaking to some of my cousins this past week (yes! in Vietnamese language). I am looking forward to re-connect with them after 12+ years. Thus, next month's newsletter should be coming from the East.
So... it's been almost three weeks without crutches and I already did the biggest mistake the first weekend. When my doctor prescribed me to ease back into movement i.e. walking and taking stairs, of course I had to go for a 1:45hr walk. Nevertheless, I quickly learned my lesson and restrained myself from lots of walking and running until this past Saturday. After falling sick again for a few days this week, I was just too eager to opt outside for my first jog in 3 months. Although everything felt completely uncomfortable, my knees, hips and ankles, I was so relieved and happy to get out of my head and feel into my body. My lungs, my belly and my heart.
There is nothing quite like running and if you have a healthy body, gift yourself the joy of movement and solitude.
Monday, 02-17-20 CET 15:22
— I only learned about the cancellation of the Tokyo Marathon (one of the six world marathon majors) about an hour ago when my friend Kalli from NYC texted me that now, only elite and wheelchair elite athletes will be able to race (due to the corona virus). Up until this point, I was sure it would be held nevertheless and I trusted my friends would have a grand time there. It was only yesterday, around the same exact time that I made the final decision for myself to not go to Tokyo anymore. While I had to let go of the idea of racing the marathon a couple weeks back, I still intended to go visit, cheer and potentially host a womxn's only event. Yet, post #crutchlife I felt overwhelmed trying to catch up with all the tasks that have built up, my studies, my work and the (running) commitments made here in Berlin. As if it wasn't enough, I was coping with a flu last week and felt highly conscious about how to manage my energy going forward. I needed to make a final call and after turning inwards, I decided to just take it one task at a time and focus on my study abroad semester instead.
Now, I feel sad for all the friends who trained throughout the winter, who had prepared for such a major event, and had just planned their trip around this marathon. It's freaking wild... how life turns around and how we have to adapt to changes on the go. I remember sitting in front of my doctor and being utterly heart broken not being able to run Tokyo due to my stress fracture and on top of that, not being able to defer to next year. Fast forward, here we are and it's not even happening at all... for around 38,000 runners from all over the world. This Parasite movie quote seems quite fitting: "You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned. ... With no plan, nothing goes wrong."
So, here we go, taking life day by day, staying present and continuing to spend this Monday afternoon writing away:
Photograph from the documentary Toni Morrison - The Pieces I Am
Black History Month every day
"Black history is American history," as we all know... therefore it's probably trivial that I am mentioning it here, but to all my white and non-Black POC friends, (especially here in Germany) this February and beyond, I hope you're taking the time to listen to, read, study and educate yourself on and invest in Black people and their businesses, especially to those of womxn and folks with disabilities. All of us have the responsibility to participate in and create the future we want to live in. Ask yourself: how can you help change existing systems and structures long term? While we all build new ones? The concept of building as we fight, I first read about it in this blog post by activist and scholar adrienne maree brown.
I remember when I first learned about the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party by a friend and while I just sat in her house, listening to her family story and more, I was baffled that none of this was included in the curriculum of my undergrad's American and English Studies at university. Neither did we read any writings by Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Angela Davis or Toni Morrison. She also explained to me then, that none of this was being taught *well* in U.S. schools. She asked me how Germany's school system was structured. What we learned about the Nazi regime and whether or not we discussed "reparations." It was then, when I also asked myself: who gets to decide what is being taught in schools? And from whose perspective is "history" being told? As mentioned in this video briefly, whether Black activists support Black History Month or not, I agree with Angela Davis as she says that it should be less seen as Black History Month but more so as a reflection of the struggle for freedom.
My time in New York was incredibly defining, as it gave me the opportunity to learn and be part of U.S. life there. I could better understand through friends, what it meant for them to be Black in America. To be Black in the world. I didn't want to be ignorant, instead stay open and truly listen and I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by a very special group of highly active people, who welcomed me into their realities.
Today, as I am spending life time in Berlin, I see that Germany still has a long way to go regarding conversations on race and diversity. The book White Fragility (which I also haven't read yet) comes to mind as I think of the ways I speak to white people here. From my experience thus far, I haven't been feeling free to speak about these matters with a lot of white Germans... It seems as if the people here are not ready to admit it to themselves yet. In their eyes, anti-Black racism and racism is not a systemic problem. In the media, they speak about "Fremdenfeindlichkeit" (engl.: hostility to foreigners) instead of racist attacks. Thus, for the ones doing the work, educating and writing, we find ourselves utilising the English language to describe concepts such as othering, tokenism and white saviour complex. The Afro-German journalist Alice Hasters recently published a book on her experiences growing up here including letters to her white father and white partner (in German language). My friend Mia Harrison, who relocated from the Pacific North West to Germany only a few months before me, also wrote a piece on defining her Blackness in Berlin, and how she actively sought out Black spaces and communities for her to not only survive but also to thrive.
Therefore, it is even more important and more urgent for us non-Black people to partake in the building and fighting here. It is important to show face and solidarity at events and gatherings. It is important to reach out to one another and hold space. To educate ourselves, to read, to create long-lasting sustainable change. To invest real money and energy and time into Black businesses, foundations and founders. To help challenge and ask questions. To step up and step out, but also to step aside. Plus, I've been thinking about this recently, too to make use of the German language more and more, reading and writing to push for change in this country here. Starting where we are and making active choices every day (e.g. I wrote one of my first pieces summarising this East German Plus event during the celebrations of 30 years of the Fall of the Berlin Wall on Heimatkunde here in German, and translated it here in English - feedback is more than welcome!).
And if you're in this part of the world, make sure to follow and support these: the Center for Intersectional Justice, a project by scholars Emilia Zenzile Roig and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the organisation Each One Teach One, as they are hosting a bunch of Black History Month events + screenings in Berlin and are about to conduct a national study on Afro-Germans (recently watched Toni Morrison's documentary which is highly recommended) and Adefra, a space for queer feminist Black womxn in Germany. In addition, when you come visit, check out Audre Lorde's favorite places here and I can recommend this conversation between her and James Baldwin, originally published in ESSENCE 1984.
Photograph from the BLM protest Berlin, July 2019.
On Fear
Tuesday, 02-18-20 CET 12:10
Putting this newsletter together is low-key spanning over a couple of days and I am trying to be okay with it. Balancing personal life, work life, study life and running life. Making sure I don't overdo it again.
This morning, I had my very first therapy session at university (probably can't say it enough, but bless this education + health care system, therapy is free here! BTW: if you consider returning back to school or wanna send your kids, yes, maybe consider coming here for all of that), and I told this doctor that recently, I have been experiencing a little bit more fear. Really just fear of the unknown and the fear of the future. Mostly, they were fuelled by uncertainties, loss of control, my parents and the media. With the rise of the coronavirus, the panic and my parents wanting me not to go to Vietnam at all anymore, including the tensions and the anti-Asian racism, the last few weeks felt unsettling. I just got back to walking again, but couldn't fully enjoy my new freedom. Returning to gratitude each morning helped tremendously though (more to this later!). I was ruminating over my plans to go to Vietnam and wondered about my trip to Tokyo as well.
The doctor asked me, so how did you cope with that energy? "Well," I said "by turning off the media, not talking to my parents for a couple of days and really listening into myself." My gut feeling told me that anything could happen anywhere in the world, whether I was going to be in Berlin, or even in New York or Hanoi. Sure, I might have less of a chance to get infected in this part of the world, but after being re-assured by a couple of friends, I realised for myself: I just don't want to feed into that fear within. You can call it fear, or darkness, but if you imagine having two buckets inside of you, one that is filled with fear, and one that is filled with light and hope, I choose to say no to fear. Or better: I choose to not continue feeding into it. Why nourish that part of myself, if I know life just feels so much better, easier and lighter when I feed into the bucket of hope. Isn't that also what keeps us keeping on after all?
Also, I am not trying to ignore that fear or eliminate it, but there is a way to live with it on the daily and keep it to a minimum. I wouldn't want fear to cloud my decisions. This past week, I was also interviewed for a small blog and the question came: "If you could travel anywhere tomorrow, where would you go?," to which I replied: Vietnam. I am speaking about this topic of fear and mentioning it here, because if you're also going through a tough time or a time of uncertainty and don't know how to move forward, 1) know that you're not alone and 2) I hope you can find some stillness and presence to listen inside and then make an active decision for yourself which bucket you want to fill to move on. While I understand that outside circumstances are uncontrollable and unpredictable and very much uncertain, we can find contentment knowing that life is change, and life is uncontrollable. The question I keep asking myself is: how do I show up / react / cope with it?
Now, this topic makes me even more curious and I want to read Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals.
Preparing for Vietnam
Pictured here is my younger cousin Tuan in Hanoi and I two weeks ago, face-timing each other. I had called him to help me with some of my preparations for my study abroad semester there. Okay, he also helped me translate something from English into Vietnamese and forced me to read the whole thing, haha, it turned into an hour language class for me and I enjoyed it dearly ;)
It feels surreal, three weeks before heading out, but I am reminding myself, that it has been one of my biggest dreams to spend more than a 4-6 week vacation there, that I am about to go there all by myself, without my family and my parents and that this is something I had planned and hoped for when I decided to leave my job and New York. Also, I am doing this as an adult. It will only be my 3rd time, 12+ years after my last visit as a child. For someone who has spent every single cent since I was 17 to visit the U.S. and then to return there and build a life there, this, heading East to the mother land, feels like [I want to say, in German: ins kalte Wasser springen which would translate into: to jump into the cold water which I am unsure of whether or not it exists, so I looked it up and it comes to:] jumping in at the deep end. I am excited and scared, it's for sure a good scared though!, and I am really looking forward to the personal growth ahead of me. To prepare, I've been consuming more by Vietnamese people like Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous or Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, which reminds me I have yet to share my 2019 book list :-P
Another personal project I somewhat started in the past years is interviewing my parents and recording their stories. About their upbringing, their past, their move from the Czech Republic and their escape to Germany. Even the stories about their marriage and their divorce. Time is incredibly precious and for some reason, I thought: if I don't record their stories now, if I don't talk to them about it or if I don't ask and at least try, I will never know My story. Let's see where this will lead towards.
November 2016 New York, Photograph by Sean Lee
100 days of meditation
Friends, I don't know if you set resolutions or goals or lists, but I am that type of person. Inspired by Black queer artist and media worker Alexandra Bell, I started a list of things I'd like to do at each age of mine, renewing it throughout the year and putting most of the goals down on my birthday instead of new years. Looking at the future ahead, I like the idea of manifesting things, writing it down black on white and speaking dreams and goals out loud, speaking things into existence: for example at 35, I would like to do XYZ, and this or that at 36 etc. I keep it mostly private on my notes in my phone, looking at it only once in a while, as a reminder to keep me on track, not too obsessing about them, but a couple weeks ago sports journalist Lindsay Gibbs called her community of readership from Power Plays together to share Women's Sports resolutions and I shared this publicly:
As you can see my list is pretty personal and includes athletic as well as artistic goals. One of them was to accomplish 100 days of meditation throughout our filled lives here, and I would say I feel more at ease overall.
A mother / friend / yoga teacher said to me during the 6 weeks on crutches: "Now that you're injured, you have all the time in the world to meditate, do it and make use of it." And she was so right, at times, when I felt like falling and couldn't head out to run, I called onto meditation, even practicing it several times a day. It has been my constant and I turn to it more and more. I've been using the meditation app Calm and while it somewhat felt like a chore in the beginning, having to meditate every morning, I knew too that I can only achieve the real and long-term benefits by doing it; I surrendered to the journey of it. It was this morning again, when this therapist said to me that it's amazing that I can utilise meditation to bring me calmness and I truly hope this is something that you can find for yourself as well.
In the meantime, I hope as I am surpassing 103 days today, that I can deepen this spiritual journey and maybe sometime in the future, visit a retreat or two and continue making this practice available to more marginalised communities. I recall this article that I read by strategist and founder Keith Yamashita, who turned his life around after experiencing a stroke at 51: "The sentence that came before was: 'I want to change the world, and to show my loyalty to the mission; I’ll exhaust myself.' The sentence that I am trying to write now, after my stroke is: 'I want to nourish myself so that I can nourish the world.'"
““If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ”
The 2019 book list has to come as a separate post, maybe next week, until then, take care of yourself first and foremost, "keep things as light or as heavy as you wish", know that your survival, your being is already enough and that it is totally okay to rest, take breaks and work on your own timeline.
Make sleep a priority and keep up the good work <3
xx,
Huyen