A scan of a photo I took in August 2015, with a Polaroid camera, using film made by the Impossible Project. It shows a section of a tree that was cut down.
A time named “just the next day” and the next, and next. Until the years pass, and we forget. What day was it then? A time and place known to me and others through news. The horror of it. The images, the language used—frozen in time. That day when time stopped and we, along with its suspension, became lost to all things that were familiar, the comfort of notions. The myth of safety, when there had been none.
I was thirty, in the last year of my PhD; there was so much I did not want to know yet. My father had died in his sleep in March 1989. My recurring nightmares stopped the moment he died. The terror of being on a bed, pressed down from above, unable to breathe. A shaft opened up below me, and I was pulled deeper into that darkness.
Deeper into shadow, into encounters with truths.
That was half a lifetime ago when my nightmares stopped. Three months before they attacked the demonstrators in that public square, that place named as a gateway to heavenly peace. The sacrilege of language through violence.
Was it just a dream? A hallucination? Or do nightmares cross from reality into dream? One man who harmed me; as compared to a mass of perpetrators motivated by a singular desire to terrorise and squash a group of protestors. Vastly different scenarios, yet they are superimposed in my psyche—as powers intent on killing the spirit of rebellion; intent on erasing that which is different and vulnerable.
My nightmares no longer plague me. But others live with the nightmares of what had occurred on June 5th, 1989. Their nightmares crossed from reality into dream. And back, into reality. A blurring of boundaries between waking and dreaming.
June 5th, 2023. Just another day? Each day contains infinite vibrations of difference—how many live, suffer, love, hate and die, unbeknownst to me. I cannot possibly hold or imagine such enormity. Except to admit my helplessness. Another day, not just. The marking of a collective wounding thirty-four years later. Another day, where there is uncertainty, but also possibility.
How to cite: Kwa, Lydia. “Just Another Day: Lydia Kwa.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/14/next-day.
Lydia Kwa has published two books of poetry and four novels. Her fourth novel Oracle Bone was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017 as the first novel in the chuanqi 傳奇 duology. A new version of The Walking Boy was released in Spring 2019 (Arsenal Pulp Press). Her next novel, A Dream Wants Waking, will be published by Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn, in Fall 2023. A book of poetry, from time to new, will be published by Gordon Hill Press in Fall 2024. She lives and works on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, known by its colonial name, Vancouver. [All contributions by Lydia Kwa.]
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