Turning Inward
“Human lives were short and fragile. Time and illnesses consumed us, like flames burning away these pieces of wood. But it didn’t matter how long or short we lived. It mattered more how much light we were able to shed on those we loved and how many people we touched with our compassion.”
– Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, The Mountains Sing
Good afternoon loved ones,
I started this newsletter in November 2017 to better share the blog posts I was creating over on my personal magazine. Inspired by my co-creator, writer-sister, running friend Michelle and her Hot Knees letter, the act of drafting up a monthly letter to you provided me with a consistent writing practice. It allowed me to not only share my thoughts, interviews with friends, the books I was reading, the topics I was interested in, the races I was training for to personal podcasts and everything in between on a monthly basis, but also to have a closer connection with you. [Thank you to everyone who have been following along. Big thank you especially to Emily, Mekdes, Faith, Ben and so many more of you for reading attentively and responding always]. Sadly, the last letter I sent was in June of last year and the one before that was in April.
Indeed there was just too much going on between work, studying, activism and volunteering. Friends and family. 2020 was a lot, for all of us and I still struggle to find the right words. And maybe there aren't any *right* words. We move on. And we keep it afloat. We find joy, again and we stay resilient, despite the chaos and the uncertainty, the loss and the grief. We take our time to process, we turn inward. We cherish what's there. What 2020 taught me was to be more compassionate. To care for the community even more. Thus, I chose the quote above from The Mountains Sing which seemed fitting to me.
Although I didn't intend to make any recap of 2020, I do want to share the small joys we experienced [given the circumstances] the second half of last year, picking it up with July: I didn't take any vacation days all of last year, but in July, I did re-locate my laptop to an hour outside of Berlin, to a youth accommodation on the countryside in Brandenburg for a week or so. It was spare, but I loved the scenery: we swam during lunch time and ran in the forest every morning. I felt blessed.
In August, I visited my family and it was the only time during the pandemic I was able to see my folx. It was short yet necessary to check in with them. To see about their health. Two of my family members have been unemployed throughout the last months, thus I've been working more to support. Admitting the relationships to my divorced parents and my younger brother are challenging, I am grateful we have one another. It was also in August, where my brother and I hung out for two to three hours over ice cream and coffee where he opened up to me, sharing his own lived experiences throughout his last turbulent years [being forced to move out of my parents and finding his own footing]. Today, we try to have weekly phone calls and even if, they can be emotionally taxing, I feel good about actively trying to build healthy ways of communicating with each of them.
In September, we together with my running team WAYV and friends held our first anti-racism run on Berlin Marathon weekend and were able to raise funds to local youth organisations Gladt EV and Sankofa Kita. With the wonderful support of: BIWOC*Rising, BlackBrownBerlin, IchbinkeinVirus.org, BAFNET – Berlin Asian Film Network, SANKOFA Kita, Speak Up Initiative, ISI eV – Initiative Selbstständige Immigrantinnen, LabelNoir, House of Saint Laurent Europe, DAMN* – deutsche AsiatInnen make noise, GLADT eV, Schwarze Filmschaffende, Korientation, EOTO – Each One Teach One, Isusu Ffeena, Ohana VietPoke Bowls, HeyDay Flowers and Seitenwechsel.
In October, I enjoyed some last warm days outside running with the team on the track or in the park fundraising for KOP-Berlin [an organisation fighting against racist police violence here in Berlin]. Some of our WAYV members were also photographed and interviewed for High Snobiety.
In November, I celebrated my 28th birthday by baking my own cake and going for a long walk. Coincidentally, this Sisterhood campaign by Nike was released.
In December, Germany went back into a lockdown, thus only the most essential stores are open. I've been keeping it lowkey, finishing up projects and working on my master thesis which is around Solange's concert in Hamburg in September 2019. I also just donated all my km's run this December to EtharRelief, an organisation supporting the ones affected most by the Tigray Genocide. If you're looking for a trustworthy news outlet, subscribe to Sham Jaff's What Happened Last Week here [an easy, critical, no BS, email magazine on world news curated by political scientist and journalist Sham]. The last few days of the year, I also very much enjoyed creating my yearly vision board. Find some inspiration by watching Issa Rae's board and story here.
As I mentioned earlier, 2020 was also the year where I worked more. Not necessarily more like in my NYC days, but I became an *official* freelancer. With all the paperwork you need to file over here, 2020 also marks the year when I registered myself as a freelance writer, speaker and workshop organiser, and yup... also as a model. I know, it's weird, but in Germany, it is required for you to register for different *professions* thus it does feel good to get these things into place. Most of my October weekends I spent scrambling through my taxes and organising. Most of November I worked on an anti racism project for the federal governement [more to that later!] and December also represented a time of transition. Long story short, it feels good to be independent, to create my own schedule and to work on projects I care about.
On top of these official professional changes, it is also my last semester of grad' school, and as I don't see [a much needed] vacation in sight, I do want to make the future about resting and slowing down. Something I told myself on my birthday, because I do truly believe that rest is resistance, too, that rest will bring joy, and inner happiness, that rest will allow me to nourish the things and endeavours I really want to do. Which brings me to drawing and painting, a childhood dream I returned to in the last weeks. When everything felt like work, I picked up my pen and started drawing, I felt refuge in it. Maybe a topic, I want to dive in more for next month. As of now, goodbye 2020, here's to co-imagining and co-creating more just futures! I am sending you lots of love and lots of healing energy your way!
To create less pressure on writing these newsletters, I also want to experiment with different letters, thus, some days / months, I might send you a poem, a book recommendation, or a recipe, or just a few words from my days here, and I hope you'll join me for those as well.
xx,
Huyền
P.S.: If you'd like, you can add a dollar or two to my future publishing goals, thank you!
Some of the words I've written in 2020:
Apart from my "Insta essays" and my blog posts, I wrote about the NYC Marathon 2019 and its running culture in Läuft Magazine [a German running magazine], having interviewed some of my friends from the city. It was published in print in January, 2020.
I summarised an event for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kulturprojekte Berlin, in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, who organised the reading and panel discussion, "Ostdeutsch-Plus - Die DDR Migrationsgesellschaft seit dem Fall der Mauer” (engl: “Eastgerman-Plus - The DDR immigrant community since the fall of the Berlin Wall”) into an essay and it was published online here. Thank you again Nhi and Biggi for this!
We [my colleague Vicky and I] wrote about our project IchbinkeinVirus.org on anti-Asian racism and structural racism on the Goethe China Institute blog here.
I shared my personal story on how it is to grow up in Germany, being Vietnamese German on diaCritics.
My artist and film making friends Thuy Trang Nguyen, Minh Duc Pham, Dieu Hao Do and I sat down and asked ourselves: Where do our borders lie? How and why are we forced or confronted with crossing and redefining borders? Why is border-crossing so indispensable with regard to marginalised realities? We transcribed it and it was published in German language in this academic book by VLAB here. Currently working on an English translation, so stay tuned!
I wrote an essay and unpacked the science fiction of my childhood to find new ways of community building in the first issue TOGETHER by the Black owned Daddy Magazine. It was published in print in December.