2001-06-08 - 5:54 p.m. - trivialis10

There's too much I don't understand about scaling walls.

I'm Chinese by blood, a United States citizen, and have parents who are bound to Taiwan by their past - one was born there, the other found it a refuge from the Communists in 1949. Very often the worlds collide.

There's a line drawn in my life, a big wall: on one side is my Chinese side, the other my "American" side. The two don't mix, or at least I'd like to think they don't. They do mix despite everything I do to prevent it. I can't fight it, why not embrace it? I want my life packaged into neat little bits: the ultimate expression of mastery over the self. If I can fit myself into neat little categories, then I can turn my attention to the world:

Itself another distinction that fascinates me, the boundary between myself and the world, or, in special cases, between me as a performer and the people of the audience as they listen.

Shuttling back and forth, audience-performer, Chinese-English, I lose sight of the boundary between the two, lose awareness that slowly the line is broadening, coming alive, making more gray area as it spreads outward, feeding on itself in order to extend itself, until I'm not quite sure where what belongs at all. Does the audience look at me and see that I got very little sleep last night, that I have a fever, that I'm shaking from fright and exhaustion? I doubt it. Does the audience feel what I'm feeling about the music? For a moment, I can hope so. How much do I want to draw with me across the border?

I'm a creature of the border, crossing through it so many times- no matter that what "it" separates is different every time- that I've stopped being able to describe any of the borderlands. I hate the border, I love it, I live there, and I'm not coming out. The borders are artificial but never mind that, I've incorporated them into myself, and now they're in me... and I'm organic. So what does that make the border?

And where in the borderlands should I settle when war threatens?

The rambling entry has nothing to do with the Ampersand project topic of "views of the border" dated June 2001.