Category: 2023 Entries
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY I left my apartment at the worst possible time. There was a moment when I almost took the bus, only I glanced at my phone, knew I had time to walk, and did. But I…
![[JUST ANOTHER DAY] Laura Wang](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/just-another-day_cha.png?w=1024)
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Today is Mother’s Day here, so, a few hours out of the Sisyphus paper-grading: up at 10:30 am, which means six hours of sleep, then a while to get ready, eat a little, go drive…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Performance Art in a “City Without Protest” Hongkongers have long visually resisted the domination of the Chinese communist Leviathan and its collaborators in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) regime. From supporting the democracy…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY I got up early, dressed quickly, had some coffee and a bowl of yogurt with blueberries and raspberries, and got in the elevator at 8:30 am, along with the security man who was finishing his…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Your father and aunt were writing to prisoners today. Neat letters with kind words. My page stayed blank, and I felt selfish. I couldn’t write, not even to you. I went to the place where…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Walked my dog in the evening and ran into a gaggle of policemen downstairs handling a domestic dispute. Headed home and read some poems to avoid scanning the news lest I see familiar faces being…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY I get up eventually. I’m happy. It is an incredibly bright day. I read. I think about Jack Spicer’s Martian in his brilliant lectures in The House that Jack Built (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), edited by…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Good Enough “… I’ve lost count of the years …” This day a year ago, during the launch of her published play Wild Boar, Candace Chong said this in passing. It hit me very hard,…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Everyday Soundtrack It’s six weeks now since I moved to this other part of town. Into an apartment near the train station. With a kitchen window view to the incoming and outgoing trains. To the passengers, walking…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY The June sun warms my skin. It feels like summer. I have come to the public pool to swim laps. It is nearly deserted, except for the lifeguard. The water feels cold at first, but…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY We went to Garryvoe beach today during a rare Irish heat wave in early June. The sea water was quite warm but a cold breeze cut through us from the sea despite the brilliance of…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY I take the old ferry across the harbour for the first time in five years; I think of water. They’re talking about stopping the ferry service even though it has brought locals from peninsula to…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY On Sundays my son works backstage doing tech for a church in Wan Chai. The dress code for the production team is all black, allowing them to disappear into the shadows. The goal is to…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY A Lazy Sunday in Abu Dhabi June 4th 2023 was a largely unremarkable day. A lazy Sunday in balmy Abu Dhabi—where I unexpectedly find myself, having left Sri Lanka when I least expected to do so.…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Never Forget, an Echo will Then Arise In 1993, Charles S. Maier asked, “Are we suffering from too much memory?” “The fault is not with memory,” he argued, “but with our current balance of past…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY In Kuala Lumpur space is on steroids. Swelling, bulging, limitless. Perhaps that’s exactly the reaction you’d expect from someone from an island city-state, where land is so limited that we constantly renegotiate our boundaries with…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY It happened when I was prepping for a roundtable on Hong Kong I am taking part in tomorrow, deliberately timed to be a day after this, just another day. My soundtrack for work was the…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Today is a clean slate. It began with stretches and back exercises, because at some point one’s biology tips towards sleeplessness and aches. I had breakfast in a wood-panelled dining room that I will probably…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY There is never just another day in our lives. The moon will glow strawberry bright on June 4th, on an Earth where only a few humans have tasted strawberries. Skeletal thousands die today and every…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY It is 4:20 am here in Vancouver, on the unceded and traditional territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, as I begin to write. The day has awakened me. The memory of what happened, thirty-four years…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY My day starts with glitter. I rub some lip balm between my fingertips to soften it, then apply it to my temples and cheekbones. Looking in the mirror, I tilt my head sideways, then sprinkle…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY I woke up early today, when the fog was just beginning to burn off. A little after seven, I helped my daughter pack up her car and waved goodbye from the sidewalk as she drove…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Every year, I like to try to run a race on or close to my birthday. This year, my birthday falls on a Monday, so I picked the Ironman 70.3 Virginia’s Blue Ridge, which was…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY The MTR is crowded with faces we can see and faces we cannot. The air conditioners blast Arctic air as we head towards the department store, looking for the new swimsuit that my teenage daughter…
-
📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY Hope A few days ago, I got together with a close friend with whom I often end up commiserating about the world’s injustices. We ate sticky cinnamon buns in the hot Texas heat as our…
Cha 