Hitomi Kelsey Ko
Word Count: 1132
Third-Person portrait of Kelsey Ko
The kid in the picture is me when I was writing the very beginnings of my personal projects, Nueva Cambria, and Rifts. She’s in her early 20s and getting through the second semester of her Junior year in Parsons. She sits in a medium-sized room, big enough to fit a queen size bed in the left corner, where a large parallel window to the left spans its whole length. Between the right of her bed and the built-in closet, coated a metallic grey, is enough room for the pullout twin mattress. At the foot of her bed is a widescreen TV built into the wall, hovering above a built-in desk, flanked by floor-to-ceiling cupboards, all painted in white. Long grey tiles make up the floor. The room overall looks modern, if not stark or barren. Her mother says it’s for simplicity and easier cleanup.
Hong Kong, 2021: the beginning of phase 4 or 5 – she’s lost track at this point – of the Coronavirus pandemic when people have been allowed to wander the streets again. She lives in a tall grey apartment building neighboured by a couple other buildings just like it, huddled in a small complex, neighboured by a few other complexes like itself – all at different heights along one mountain. That mountain is situated by the sea, along the Southern outskirts of Hong Kong island. It’s quiet, especially compared to the bustling city of skyscrapers and honking vehicles. You could tell it’s a wealthier neighbourhood, because the views are nice and you don’t feel like you’re suffocating just to see the world from above, and because white expats can be seen strolling in and out of there.
Her room has been mostly cleaned up but it’s still a rough process – her belongings are strewn across the room, including a neon sports bra, running gear, an empty Evian bottle, and charger cables. Her desk is so cluttered that she works on the bed instead. The space is dimly lit by a strip of cyan LEDs hooked along the edges of her ceiling, bluish light filling the room. A fragrant jar candle flickers gently to her left by the window. The pleated blinds block out the stark white fog outside, but a few slivers of muffled sunlight leak through the gaps. Weak fairy lights zigzag under the colourful LED strips, but for the most part the wall was still pretty empty except for a couple of postcards.
She finally started her willing journey of self-discovery at the age of 21, so she’s made the choice to start redecorating her room. She planned on filling the space with video game posters, playing cards, and maybe a couple of mahjong tiles. She discovered that morning that her LEDs were faulty so she’d have to get more, along with a mirror, some glittery lamps, and neon tape to make her furniture glow under the blue light. She’s posed as if she’s been working for hours, slumped in bed against the wall, blankets to warm her feet as she types away on her laptop, but really she’s only halfway into a writing assignment that she’s set a 2 hour timer for because she can’t organize to save her life.
After graduating from Parsons, I moved out to live in east side Manhattan. I was aware that I’m fortunate enough to come from a family that can afford to buy property if I wanted to, but I didn’t. I rented out an apartment where I come back home everyday from working two jobs. I could’ve found work that paid enough so I don’t have to go back and forth, but I need an excuse to go different places. Where most parents would have been upset with me for not settling down because I wanted to explore, fly out to a new country every two years, my mother was happy and supportive – happy her daughter lives comfortably and stably. Life isn’t perfect, but it’s enough for her daughter, and that was enough for her. My grandmother messages me frequently, as she always has. She subtly hints that she wished I’d come to live with her by the sunny California beachside, but again, my family, unlike most in Asia, is mostly respectful.
Being a writer is among many things I do for fun. But for now, it’s more just an outlet for me, and complimentary to my drawings. I didn’t have many friends back home in Hong Kong who shared my passion for the arts but being in New York, I could find and talk to people more up to my speed. I sign up for workshops and occasionally attend clubs and meetups where other illustrators/story-writers like myself can compare ideas, worlds full of character, history, lore and magic of their own, yet to be manifested in the physical realm. People like that only ever existed on the internet back when I lived in Hong Kong. If there was one thing that’s always been abundant in the Land of Opportunity, it was people who connect with me. I’m not part of anything worldwide, nothing big like Disney, but wherever I go and wherever I make myself home, it’s always cozy and people talk to each other.
A lot of the time though, I still feel like I write things because my imagination is my only superpower. My imagination is the ultimate weapon I carry, that gives me power of any kind. Because without that, I’d be a pretty album cover, but all I’d hold inside would be shitty and forgettable music. I still feel empty without something that makes people stop and turn their heads. No matter how much I help people around me and how glad they say they are to have met me, not because of my imagination but because they like me for who I am, I grew up with it hammered into my head that I’m merely one out of 8 billion people, and if I didn’t do my part I’d fizzle out of relevance.
Every night before I sleep I envision my end goal, as I’m domed in the safety of my blanket. I’m at a table. I’m in a nice dress – not too flashy but pretty enough to be at a fancy restaurant with my mother, opposite me. We’re having dinner in a dimly lit restaurant, sitting at a candlelit table with an orange glow – one just like the restaurant where we had our first mother-daughter date night. I’m in a brown dress, and my mother in her usual desaturated tones, because overly vibrant colours meant a lack of class. I’m financially stable, I have a job that I love, and I know my mother is safe, healthy and living comfortably. For the first time, I’m the one treating my mother to dinner.
PROCESS LOG
- Good job, Kelsey
2. Writing this felt overwhelming – I don’t usually think about the future as I get very anxious when I do. My confidence in my ability to self-sustain as an adult has always been very low because I don’t believe in myself – I’ve always believed in my work to be interesting, more than I believe myself to make it in life, and realizing that as I wrote this was infuriating as well as daunting.
3. I was surprised I was able to imagine a stable future in the first place because honestly I don’t have a lot of faith in myself. More than write, I think i’d like to think more about my future, in a positive light. I’d like to be able to envision the adult world in more clarity so it won’t be so scary.
4. Does reading Uzra’s essay about fiction and magic reinforce Morrison’s message for you? Explain why or why not by quoting a passage from Uzra and unpacking how it relates to or contradicts what Morrison is saying about writing.
Morrison’s speech was dense – almost indecipherable at times. I feel like there are many messages that can be taken out of it – but so far the ones that made the most sense to me was the ambiguity of language and its’ capacity to be manipulated to justify violence,
“There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.”
as well as the violence that comes with the choice not to use language, to not inform people
“How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past? You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? “
I think the best way I explore this in my writing is by looking at communication between my characters and compare the way they interact, the degrees of intimacy there is in each relationship, as well as the manner in which they talk. Some of my characters are more straightforward than others, for one, and some more elusive, which is indicative of their character, their past, and their intentions.
I had trouble relating Urza’s article and Morrison’s speech, actually. i think because Morrison’s speech is so dense and indecipherable for me that my interpretations are very limited, and so Urza seems to be talking about something completely different from me. I appreciated his text in its own way though, with two of my favorite quotes being:
“You can chart most magic effects in exactly the same way, with one notable exception: there’s no resolution after the climax. The climax is the endpoint of a magic trick.”
and
“Many magicians have become too comfortable inhabiting the same two emotions for an entire show: humor and astonishment.”
The first quote showed me a similarity between magic and fiction/writing that I would’ve never thought of – magic is an act, the way stories are an act, with a beginning middle and end. Urza taught me that magic, visuals, need to have context for the ‘trick’, the performance, to be fully appreciated and understood. The same way writing needs context.
The second quote made me realize why i’d lost interest in magic tricks when it was something I was actually really interested in it in my youth. As a consumer/viewer most of the time it doesn’t occur to me what emotions I’m experiencing – they all blend together. It’s a lot easier to distinguish however when I have something more relatable, like fiction, whether it’s written out on a page or played out on TV, where I know how to react to recognizable day-to-day situations.
5. it was honestly a very bumpy ride this time – i have a lot more trouble writing about myself than about a fictional character. I think my honesty flows really well though – i write very well when i have clear images in my head, and they’re a lot easier to manipulate because i can just write whatever i want when handling fictional characters. but when writing non fiction i’m writing based on reality so problems arise when i focus on accuracy. i found it very challenging to picture a future of my life past graduation – i’d always had a rough image but to actually entertain it made me realize how scared i was. i’m scared of failing and disappointing myself. i’m scared of work and being self-sustaining, living with no training wheels. i’m still very immature like that, i’ve learned.
