Life

This is a 38mm long, 10 weeks 4 days (8 weeks 4 days after conception) little embryo, temporally living in my belly.

The gender of the embryo is not yet defined, its sex organ not yet formed. So I call this little thing "it".

My belly is still flat, no weight gain yet. If three weeks later, the decision be made to kill this little thing, because it doesn't have a penis, nobody should be able to notice.

When we were in the hospital, watching the ultrasound image, it was jumping around, stretching arms and legs, flipping over, kicking. And we saw that, it was smiling the whole time, with its thick lips fully resemble its father's.

It is a life. Grows by second.

Two weeks ago we saw its heart beat for the first time, 150 times a minute. It didn't have a little bit human shape by then, looked like a frozen turkey in the supermarket, it didn't move at all.

Only two weeks after, we saw the fully functioning arms and legs, we saw its smile on the face.

Maybe it already started dreaming, and wondering where it is living right now. Soon it will have the urge to know the world, to know everything, to explore.

We didn't care to ask the doctor if she could tell the gender of the little thing.

Because it is our baby, the gift from gods, the reminder of our love. That, is all it matters.

It is a life. Grows by second.

#save female fetuses

#stop female foeticide

Related post: Gender

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Reimagining India

The subcontinent was home to some of the most sophisticated early human civilizations. Critics of India's modern infrastructure would do well to recall that inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro and Rakhigarhi built the world's first-known urban sanitation systems five thousand years ago and may have been the first to use wheeled transport. For centuries after Alexander's departure, India was governed by powerful Hindu dynasties who patronized the arts and took keen interest in religion, philosophy and practical science. Megasthenes, the first western historian to venture beyond the Punjab into the Gangetic plain, described a land so verdant and fertile that "famine has never visited India and there has never been a general scarcity in the supply of nourishing food." Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who claimed to have visited several ports in India during his 1292 voyage from China to Persia, declared Malabar (now Kerala) on India's southwest coast to be the "richest and most splendid province in the world".

....in Akbar's court in Fatehpur Sikri, notes British historian Alex von Tunzelmann, Akbar lived in "unmatched opulence... in rooms done out with marble, sandalwood and mother-of-pearl, cooled by the gentle fanning of peacock feathers." By comparison, Elizebeth was a "weak and feeble woman" who ruled over a "grubby, unsophisticated, cold, dismal little kingdom."

--Reimagining India, by Mckinsey & Company 2013

December

We will walk around holy fire for seven circuits,
make seven oaths in front of Hindu gods.

I will mark your forehead and hairline with red sindoor,
plant a baby in your body.

Finally I am locking you down.
You are mine and only mine. 

Random thoughts

I am still not quite in my place, intense working schedule before the big Indian wedding vocation, plus a restless mind.

When people ask me what do you think about India, my answer now is, "it's complicated". I am struggling in a complicated relationship with India. I've seen it, I've seen the best, I've seen the worst.

Every time when I picture it as my going-to-be future destination, my mind goes blank for a few seconds.

If it's only about me, all I can have is excitement. But as a single child, I will have to think about my parents, I still couldn't tell them the truth of our future plan. Luckily India and China is geographically much closer than America and China. We will find out a way, like we always do.

I don't know where I belong, I don't have roots. So wherever I go, I make a little home, and try to enjoy the moment.

It's very ironic, the building where my wedding is going to be hosted, I experienced minor sexual harassment there. "Sexual Harassment", it is not a phrase which could bother me anymore, but it followed me for more than ten years, from a child to a girl.

Whenever I walked in a dark street, saw a men ten meters away heading my direction, I couldn't help trembling. I was not raped, not even stripped naked, but the month-long damage took me years to repair, with no one to tell.

Stuck in a narrow tunnel, dark and cold, suffocated, I crawl and crawl, there was no ending, couldn't feel the light, I woke up in fear and tears.

At least when I was screaming, my mom and dad were there to take me to their room. So I never actually tried to kill myself, just some thoughts sometimes.

For the past one month or so, I haven't expressed myself in Chinese, no tweet, no blog, I do not wish to. You can say it was due to the massive attack a month and half ago, or maybe I am just tired of it, after all these years. Debates always turn vulgarly abusive, general opinion always lead to personal attack.

They hate me, wish to shut me up, only because I marry an Indian and in love with freedom and equal rights. Why can't we discuss about it with mutual respect? Tolerance is something the country took away from us.

As an evacuee from authoritarian regime, I am still on my first few years to build up constructive thinking, from zero ground. If my knowledge and capability of independent thinking reflects a 14 year old kid who grows up in a free country, most of them are less than 10, not all, but mostly.

Internet gives them a mask, they find the "weak" ones for their emotional outlet, only because they are weak.

And I say it, I proudly say it, my mind is only equivalent to a 14 year old child. So what? I will keep exploring and developing, I have no rush to grow old. If my immaturity wins from time to time, only because I am true to myself. As long as I am not ashamed of myself, nobody is on any "high ground" to judge me. And I will never be ashamed of myself. I never regret on anything I do.

This is also something I grew out from my sexual harassment experience.

In a way I am grateful to my haters, unless a person faces such harsh situation, nobody knows where is his/her limit, how much he/she can take.

They fed me, made me stronger.

I guess my battle continues, no matter it is in India, in China, in here, or in myself.

India is a beautiful place, unimaginably rich, rich with culture, rich with spirituality, rich with love. This is also the reason why wealthy America can't make Raj stay.

Love is all we want, love is all we need. Love is home. 

Mad Girl's Love Song

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963) 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.) 

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, 

And arbitrary blackness gallops in: 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed 

And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.) 

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: 

Exit seraphim and Satan's men: 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 

I fancied you'd return the way you said, 

But I grow old and I forget your name. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.) 

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; 

At least when spring comes they roar back again. 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Wonder

I was not aware that I would be confused for so long. As of this very moment, life seems lost its taste to me.

Where am I? What am I doing? What do I want?

I am that kind of a girl who gets whatever she wants, a good family, capable daddy, top universities, traveling around the world, a line of people to love and spoil me.

All these years passed, now I am going to be 29, I find myself asking this question more urgently and desperately: what's the meaning of my life, my existence?

I still couldn't give an answer.

I try to find out what is faith and belief, I read Gita, I read what is the selfless duty. All this abstract ideas are understandable also appealing to me, but my life is right now in a warm and colorful bubble, Berkeley is an unimaginable dream place.

I fear I might have lost my ground.

People seek courage from my stories: never hesitate to fall in love, fight against family and society for their prejudice, ditch the major after 6 years of study and keep chasing for dreams.

But when the time I start to feel everything is coming as I ever wished for, I feel lost again, even more lost than before.

In my eyes, most people are asleep, some trapped in the basic human needs, some a level or two upper, same struggle, different kind. But then, what is my position to judge? I still feel ashamed to look back the time when I was utterly brain-washed by communism propaganda. Now which level I've woken up to and trapped in at the same time?

Raj spotted me right across the hall, this pretty little girl with an angel smile. He has never let me gone out of his sight ever since. He always knows what he wants, and determined to get it. He has big dreams, to change the society, change the world.

Does it make my life's purpose then?

I've always been the crazy one, the madness, the misfit, the unbelievable. I do not wish to set up examples, but I wish to express myself by exploring new things. I wish to find myself.

Ironically, that's when I see her lost, from time to time.

I thought happiness is elimination of sadness. Now I know confusion, emptiness and uncertainty can co-exist with the maximum amount of fulfillment one can imagine.

I am not crying anymore, but I couldn't forget. I touched my own face, the glamorous red lips. "I am your stranger, jump!"

I should thank Raj who is always there for me, who gives me freedom and takes adventure together with me. But I know it's also my own soul, the soul of a rootless gypsy, unrestrained like horse, free like bird.

If we are just souls who dwell in the bodies, when the body moves, it's our souls which meet and share a moment, a moment could be traced back to previous lives.

As in Buddhism teaching, "500 times of glancing back in the past lives, only to trade an acquainted smile in the present life", I cherish each every person I meet.

Even when I am aimlessly wondering the street, repeatedly asking the unanswerable question "what's the meaning of life", as long as you need me, I will be there, to hold your hands, to tell you, everything will be ok.