I'm not quite sure what to make of 2013. In many ways, it was wonderful; in some ways, it was the complete opposite. It was a year of gains and losses, of rising progress and crashing hopes.

I've never been one for lengthy lists of resolutions, but if I resolve to do at least one thing in the new year, it's this:

I could bore you with a lede about how social media has made it easier to be mean to one another on the internet, but instead I'll jump straight to the point, because the point is there's no way to lead into this tweet I received on Friday:

It's been two years, but there's something that still bothers me: one night in 2011, before a midnight showing of this horrible movie I was dragged into seeing, the conversation somehow turned to ethnicity and how much I had in common with another girl in our group of moviegoers--a  girl of Vietnamese descent.

"Well, you're both pretty whitewashed," the guy I arrived with, who knew us both, said.

I sat up a little straighter and prepared to bite back, refusing to accept this label from someone who, while I was close to at the time, seemed wholly unaware how offensive that statement was. But before I could say anything, the other girl laughed and said, "Yeah, I totally am!"

What even makes a person "whitewashed"? Is it the food he or she chooses? The music, the films, the clothes that he or she prefers? Or the language he or she speaks most often at home?

Does it make that person more American? What does that--"being American"--even mean anyways? And what does that mean for me, the daughter of an immigrant family who was born and raised in California?

"I have always viewed Miss America as the girl next door, and the girl next door is evolving as the diversity in America evolves." That was Miss New York Nina Davuluri's answer to a question she received on Sunday night at the annual Miss America pageant about Julie Chen's plastic surgery to make her look less Asian. Davuluri, whose pageant platform was "celebrating diversity through cultural competency," walked away with the crown at the end of the night--becoming the first Indian-American woman to be named Miss America, and the second Asian American in pageant history to win.

First, a disclaimer: the majority of my knowledge surrounding pageants comes from Miss Congeniality. "It's not a beauty pageant, it's a scholarship competition!" And, to be fair, Miss America is in large part a scholarship competition: in fact, it's the single largest scholarship competition in this country, according to this discussion on Sunday's Melissa Harris-Perry before the competition aired. (I highly recommend watching that video segment and the segment that followed it, as it dives into the deeper discussion of the relevancy of the Miss America pageant--a topic that is very interesting and complex, but one I won't be focusing on here in this post.)

Second: if you thought Davuluri's achievement wouldn't go without racist remarks from the internet peanut gallery, you were right. "Miss New York is an Indian.. With all do respect this is America," one person tweeted. Others called her an Arab and a terrorist, and said her win was offensive so close to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Posts that featured these negative remarks were shared thousands of times within hours of the pageant's conclusion. And while the sharing of these negative remarks was criticized itself, I think it's important that we recognize the racism that still runs through our society in this day and age, and understand that it goes beyond those who use a social network and choose to express their discriminatory thoughts in such a casual manner. Alyssa Rosenberg over at ThinkProgress put it best: "What’s interesting about the reaction to Davuluri’s crowning isn’t that teenagers say stupid things, but that people are uncomfortable with a woman of color being held up as an ideal of All-American beauty and femininity."

You can watch the full video by clicking the image, or this link. I would've embedded the video, but it autoplayed on the page, and I hate that...

On Wednesday, TV personality Julie Chen revealed she underwent plastic surgery nearly 20 years ago after being told she could never make it in journalism because of her "Asian eyes."

"I asked my news director over the holidays, 'If anchors want to take vacations, could I fill in?' And he said, 'You will never be on this anchor desk, because you're Chinese,'" Chen said about her time at a local Ohio station. "He said, 'Let's face it, Julie, how relatable are you to our community? How big of an Asian community do we have in Dayton? On top of that, because of your heritage, because of your Asian eyes, sometimes I've noticed that when you're on camera, when you're interviewing someone, you look disinterested and bored because your eyes are so heavy, they are so small.'"

Chen attempted to find another job shortly after that with the help of a new agent--but the agent she approached agreed with her news director. "He said, 'I cannot represent you unless you get plastic surgery to make your eyes look bigger.'"

The issue divided Chen's family, she said, but she went forward with the surgery. "After I had done it, the ball did roll for me," she admitted. After her surgery and after leaving Ohio, Chen landed CBS anchor gigs and an eventual job hosting Big Brother, and also ended up marrying the head of the network.

I will admit that when I first saw the headline Thursday morning, I didn't think much of it (other than to shake my fist at the racist news director and agent who advised Chen.). Yes, it was terrible, but was it that surprising this was a thing that actually happened? Of course not. The concept of this kind of surgery is not new, particularly to those in the Asian community. I remember playing with makeup when I was younger with my non-Asian friends, and wondering why I couldn't use eyeshadow the way our Seventeen and Teen People magazines suggested. I felt frustrated backstage in makeup rooms before musicals and shows because the women applying makeup would have lengthy conversations in front of me about what to do about my eyes (not to mention that alopecia had taken my eyebrows early on as well).


But I was surprised at the reactions I browsed through on Twitter and in the comments sections on various articles. There was a genuine shock that a Chinese woman would have surgery to make herself look less Chinese. Some people were angry that she gave in to the pressure and changed who she was in order to further her career, but I don't think that's necessarily fair: Chen's choice was a personal decision she made about her own body. Women (and men) of all color make decisions about their own bodies every day that are theirs to make. Perhaps if Chen's decision was a result of the growing pressure on personalities to look a certain way, then we can have a different conversation about the standards of beauty set in Hollywood and the media.

But Chen's decision was a result of racism, a statement she took for truth, and it resulted in her conscious choice to try to distance herself from a visible marker of her heritage. And it worked: she was rewarded for it. And that's unfortunate, because it doesn't celebrate the diversity that makes up America; it punishes those who look different.

"Did I give in to 'the man'?" Chen wondered aloud to her co-hosts. I think the frank answer to that is: yes, at the time you did. But she felt it was necessary to be successful in her chosen profession, and she turned out to be right about that. At the time in the mid-90s, there were very few Asian journalists on network TV. (Hell, in 2013, there are still few.) Chen may have "given in" to the pressure to change her appearance in order to gain any sort of recognition from her peers that she could be a major player in the media, but I absolutely disagree with any suggestion that she was wrong to do it. And she's speaking out about it now, which is so necessary because it's opening up a conversation that I don't think many Americans knew was being had.

When Chen started talking about how she would watch back the tapes of her interviews and focus on her eyes, I began to instantly relate: I did that with photographs often, and would notice snapshots where I would look bored or disinterested, though it had nothing to do with my mood. My smiles looked fake because my eyes weren't expressive, and I used to obsess over it. In fact, I still do obsess.

So I changed myself too, after struggling to find a photo to put on a campaign poster for a 7th grade school election--not with plastic surgery, but I forced myself to engage in active listening, even in my day-to-day casual conversations with friends or with family. Whether I was genuinely interested or not, I learned to nod with the rhythm of the other person's speech, and when to interject with words or sounds that indicated I was indeed listening and interested. I made myself make eye contact, and found the right moments to repeat back key words or phrases. (You can imagine how much this, plus the countless number of interviews I watched Barbara Walters conduct on 20/20 before bed each Friday night, helped as I developed my journalism skills later in life.)

My mother's oldest sister used to use the "Scotch tape" method to create that double eyelid illusion, and while I never did it (okay--I tried it once, and nearly blinded myself), I met more than a dozen people in an Asian American Psychology class in college who admitted they've used it before too. It was a painful solidarity to feel, but it validated the anger I knew I rightly felt when, as an 18 year old, a stranger balked at the idea I could ever be a journalist--because I "don't look like the people you see on NBC or something."

One girl who sat next to me in the psych class admitted she'd gone the Scotch tape route, but "only for big events, like prom and class photos."

"Wasn't it uncomfortable?" I asked her. She just shrugged, as if to repeat that old adage: beauty is pain.

The view from a rooftop bar--another reason to love NY.

Today was one of those days I hated New York City. I was 10 seconds late for every train I needed to catch; I wore the wrong outfit for the gross, muggy weather; some guy threw his dying cigarette onto my foot on the sidewalk; I felt useless at work; every subway car seemed to smell like urine--and the air conditioning was broken in those cars too.

I kept thinking about what everyone told me my whole life on the west coast: "New York City is the greatest city in the country." The greatest in the world, some would argue. There are certainly reminders of that every block you step in Manhattan. I still remember the January afternoon I got off the bus from DC, with my two suitcases and no place to live--but when I stepped off that bus, I saw a poster in Port Authority that told me to leave my troubles at the door, because I was in New York, baby.

Since moving here, it's felt like a non-stop rollercoaster of ups and downs. Did living in the 'greatest city' mean struggling to stand on the sidewalk somedays? New York City, with its fast pace and loud noises--it never stops.

But as I rode the subway home today, I looked around at the group of commuters packed into the 1 train with me--they looked annoyed and tired, and many sighed that familiar sigh that really says, "I just want to be home." It made me realize something about that struggle I, and others, complain about: it bonds the people of this city together--the unpredictable subways, the inconsistent weather, the trash, the pressure, the stress of it all. We hate it; yet, it's what makes New York unique. It's really all those qualities that we can point to and say, "Our city is great"--the key word being our--"because of these things we never seem to get used to." And it's great because we still live here, no matter how many subway trains we miss and how many still-lit cigarettes get thrown at our feet. We choose to live here, because you never know what it'll throw at you next.

On this eve of the 12th anniversary of 9/11, I can't help but think about how strong that bond must've been in 2001 in this city when the towers came down. Two years ago, I wrote in D.C. about my memories of that morning and how it felt to be so far from something that felt so personal. Last year, I saw the lights for the first time that marked where the towers once stood.

I didn't understand for the longest time what made New York great, but I think I get it now: greatness has nothing to do with perfection. There are problems in this city that've yet to be confronted and issues that need to be fixed, but I truly believe that there are people working to keep this city moving forward.

You can't be a survivor until you've battled something, and won. What makes New York City great is that it keeps battling. It keeps standing tall. Even at times of suffering, when it takes a punch and can't stay up, it finds a way to come together and lift the fallen. It's not perfect, but it's certainly great.

I adore Audrey Hepburn, but I can't stand to watch Breakfast at Tiffany's. What would be an otherwise lovely film is tainted by Mickey Rooney's portrayal as Hepburn's Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi--now one of the most commonly-discussed examples of 'yellowface.'

But although Rooney's character has been denounced by critics since the film's premiere in 1961, it hasn't stopped yellowface from appearing in popular culture--only this time, there doesn't seem to be many people denouncing it. While it is quite the achievement for Linda Hunt to be the first to win the 1983 Oscar for portraying a character of the opposite gender, the man she portrayed was a Chinese-Australian photographer.

In the 2007 comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Rob Schneider played an Asian minister, complete with slanted eyes, a wider nose, and darker skin. Schneider is a quarter Filipino, but apparently that didn't make him "Asian" enough for the role. And, most recently, Cloud Atlas casted non-Asian actors to play Korean characters--including Jim Sturgess, who previously starred in the 2008 film 21, the story of six MIT students who learned how to count cards and cheat the Vegas casino system. 21 was based on the true story of Asian-American students, but you wouldn't have gotten that based on the film.

(Update: My friend Laura makes a great point in the comments section about Cloud Atlas and essentially calls me out for not having seen the film. I stand corrected!)

2007: Rob Schneider in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry"

So, perhaps all of this just further proves that there needs to be more Asians in the mainstream in order to debunk the apparent myth that there are no talented Asians who deserve the spotlight in films, television, music, etc. It's disheartening when it has become the norm to simply accept that we will never be leading men and ladies.

Take, for instance, this recent interview with Olivia Munn, who flat out says she will never be Wonder Woman because she is Chinese: "That's probably not what they would do. I don't know a lot of Asian-American women who are getting great opportunities yet, and the other actresses (vying for the role) are probably really famous and Hollywood tends to go for the girls who are already in the big movies."

It's frustrating, yet true: Asian-American women are not seen as leading ladies because there aren't many leading ladies who are in fact Asian-American. So then, how do you get to be a leading lady? Good question. (And for all of you who are going to throw Memoirs of a Geisha at me, consider the fact that the leading lady in the film is a Chinese actress playing a Japanese character while speaking English.)

We continue to see a lack of representation in the mainstream media--this extends from entertainment to journalism--and, more unfortunately, a subconscious anti-Asian sentiment that runs beneath the conversation: "Saturday Night Live covered it best last week during the show's cold opening during a mock game recap in which three anchors made plenty of jokes about Asian Americans, but when one anchor tries to make a joke about African Americans, he's immediately stopped."

This is a conversation that extends beyond eliminating yellowface as a practice in Hollywood in the 21st century, but until we can all agree that that's offensive and should be stopped, perhaps the conversation needed to break barriers is a long way away.

I've come to expect that the pain associated with a forced goodbye is an inevitable emotion. There is no easy way to part with someone who once occupied a space in your heart, and there is no easy way to remove every trace of that person without feeling like you're losing a part of yourself.

At the age of 24 now, I can only think of one person for whom I fought against my every natural instinct to walk away from--a boy I loved for more years than I should have, until telling myself not too long ago that love never happens so easily that you should assume the other person is fighting to stay with you too.

If you know me, you'll know my affection for Joan Didion, and you can already guess that I'm about to quote her. Didion has a lot to say about enduring heartbreak and suffering from heartbreak and recovering from heartbreak, and there is one line in particular in "Goodbye To All That" that I never really noticed before in my dozens of times of reading it until recently: "All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring."


I didn't move across the country and from city to city just to get over a boy, but that reason certainly crossed my mind. The first month I spent on the east coast two summers ago was lonely and filled with dread and regret as I wondered how many moments he and I would be missing out on apart. More than spending the previous year in a passive tug-of-war of emotion, he was someone who changed my life when I needed a reason to believe in living again.

"I speak Mandarin, you know."

I looked up from the text message I'd been writing, unsure of how to respond. I hadn't been expecting a stranger I'd gotten into an elevator with to say that, especially as his first words to me.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, thinking I misheard him.

"I know Chinese," he said. "Ni hao."

He looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to respond back or smile or applaud--I don't know. I just stared. "I don't know Mandarin," I responded. The tone of my voice was dry and unemotional, and I wanted to be sure nothing of our interaction could be confused for any sort of delight. I was not delighted.

We unfortunately got off on the same floor, so he continued the conversation:

HIM: "So what kind of Asian are you?"
ME: "I'm Chinese, but I speak Cantonese."
HIM: "Oh. I don't know Cantonese. [pause] You should learn Mandarin. I can teach you--want to go out?"
One hundred points to Gryffindor if you guessed the answer to that question.

Angry Little Girls by Lela Lee

Three tips for those wishing to speak to an Asian female you do not know:

1. Don't greet her with "ni hao." It isn't cute, it isn't clever, it doesn't show her how worldly and suave you are. It makes you kind of a jerk: you're assuming, first, that she is Chinese--and no, not all Asians look alike. Second, you are acknowledging that you see her ethnicity before you see her as a human being. (It's the same as going up to a redhead and saying, "Top o' the mornin' to ya!" in a terrible Irish accent that you've learned to mimic from a Lucky Charms commercial.) It is a form of fetishizing her, treating her as an object you've defined before actually getting to know her as a person.

2. Don't suggest she learn a language she isn't familiar with. I suppose this goes for anybody who is talking to any stranger. There are plenty of Asian Americans who grew up only speaking English in their homes, and they don't need to explain to you--a stranger they've just met--why they don't speak an Asian dialect. Do I ask every Caucasian person why they don't speak Latin? Telling an Asian person to learn a dialect she doesn't know can be seen as patronizing. You do not need to instruct someone you've just met to go learn something.

(Side note: Once, I had someone get belligerent with me because I couldn't translate something in Korean for him. "Why didn't your parents teach you Korean?!" he yelled. Because my parents are Chinese, sir.)

3. Don't ever (ever, ever, ever) ask, "What kind of Asian are you?" Think about that question for a moment: by asking "what" in the context of "what are you," you're turning a "who" into a thing. "What kind of Asian" implies that the person you're interrogating is part of a grab bag of ethnicities. If you absolutely must ask a stranger about her ethnicity, why not just ask that? "Excuse me, what is your ethnic background?"

Bonus tip: cut the "Where are you from? No, no--where are you really from?" questions from your mental phrasebook. When you ask somebody that, you're that person into an "other." You've judged, by the way the person looks, that she must not be from this country. But there are plenty of Asians born in America, and when you ask, "Where are you from?" and we reply, "California" or "Connecticut" or "Ohio," don't push us to validate your assumption that we aren't American.

This 1886 propaganda poster shows Uncle Sam booting a Chinese man back to China. The poster claims, "The Chinese Must Go!" and is meant to assure Americans that washing machines would easily replace Chinese laundry washers.

In the summer of 2000 during the Sydney Olympics, I remember sitting in my living room with my mother and asking her why the phrase "Chinaman" was bad. We'd been watching a men's diving match, and I had meant to ask Mom about one of the athletes from China, but instead of asking about "that one Chinese man," I accidentally said, "that one China man."

"Don't say that," my mom responded quickly.

"Why?"

She explained it was an offensive term, used once-upon-a-time as an insult to Chinese immigrants. We talked a little about how Americans treated Chinese immigrants in the past, and about how she and my dad both experienced racism as children when they came to America in the '60s.

Up until that point, I was aware of the concept of racism, but at 11 years old, I hadn't been entirely aware of its reality. But as I got older, I began looking back at and learning more about the environment I grew up in and what being the daughter of an immigrant family really meant.

Why didn't Asians stand up and protest too? I remember thinking after a lesson in the Civil Rights Movement in junior high. I was starting to get angry about racism and injustice, but in the early stages of my teenage years, I had no way to really express what I felt. My friends in school didn't share the questions I had, and most just didn't want to talk about it.

"You were born in America, so why does it matter?" somebody asked.

It mattered. But I stayed quiet. And then in college I learned what "model minority" meant, and I didn't want to stay quiet anymore for the reason that Asian Americans were, and still are, expected to stay quiet--to be a good worker, to keep our heads down.

I often wonder if that's why some feel it is okay to make remarks at or about Asian Americans--because rather than lash out or speak up, the belief is that we'll look the other way and just keep our anger to ourselves. I've been stopped multiple times by strangers on the subway, in elevators, on the street, in stores--all so they can ask me what my ethnicity is, what "kind" of Asian I am, or if I speak Mandarin (or Korean or Japanese or, occasionally, English)--that's all they want to know: if I speak the language. They never need help translating or anything like that; they just want to know if I can speak it. A man once literally grabbed my arm as I was walking up the stairs from the subway to ask me if I spoke Mandarin. When I pulled away and said I had to go, he called me a "rude chink."

Another time in the grocery store, a man called me a "Jap" and ranted at me about how "my people" ruined everything. He followed me around the store and screamed at me about how I should "go back home" because I didn't belong, and threatened to "finish the war" right then in the produce section.

He was most likely crazy, as I had noticed him earlier talking to himself in one of the aisles. I left and didn't look back--but what bothered me the most was not that this man had threatened me like that. What bothered me was that nobody in the store full of people said or did anything. They all looked, some whispered. Nobody intercepted.

When I started writing this blog post, I wanted to talk about several things: the fake Asiana pilot names, the completely racially insensitive song "Asian Girlz," the community of people angry that a business owner changed his restaurant's name in order to remove the word "chink"... and I realized there were just too many things I wanted to say about all of it.

But now is absolutely the time to not stay quiet.

My grandparents - most likely in Hong Kong, post-war.

I used to watch my grandma work on her garden through the living room window of her Sacramento home. The backyard was more than just a place to grow food; it was a place we explored and pretended was another world. The grass was our soccer field, the clothesline was a jungle, and the sprinklers were what we imagined running through a waterfall must feel like. In the mornings, it was a tai chi space; in the afternoon, it was a playground.

As I grew a bit older, I was envious of my classmates and friends who lived near parks and whose parents allowed them to go to sleep-away camps and join sports teams. Their worlds seemed to have no limits to where they could go and where they could play, and yet I could only call the rectangular space in a Sacramento suburb my park, my world.

But I think I get it now.

Na and I spent a large part of our childhood calling our grandparents' home our own home, so it goes without saying that the story behind that front door is as important as the one housed in my parents' two-story home. To get to the home my parents built and nurtured, you have to understand where each of them came from: from different homes in different places, all traced back to a country halfway around the world. Both sets of my grandparents found love during war, and escaped into Hong Kong when the Communists came. Their worlds changed dramatically, and even more so when they came to the U.S. at a time when a quota stopped many Asians from doing so. I get it now why they stuck to their kin, afraid of being the obvious foreigners.

Mei gok - "golden land." A land of opportunity. My grandparents didn't do it for themselves; they did it for their children and their grandchildren, and the generations to come. It never occurred to me as a child that the stories of war and torture and escape weren't just inside the pages of an unwritten book. These were the realities of real peoples' lives, my families' lives. The wealthy landowner who was tortured and killed and his wife who committed suicide were my great-grandparents. The diligent engineer who abandoned proof of his educated status to avoid being taken, the young girl who hid her younger family members during war...the soldier and the nurse who stood by the Nationalists until they lost...those were my grandparents.

I get it now why they held us so close when we were young, and spend their days and nights worrying about us now that we're older. I think there's still a lot of pain for what they lost back home as children and young adults. I think they want to make sure that despite all the people they couldn't quite save, they could at least save us from whatever might hurt us.

They came to America with broken hearts, and so I get why they pushed us so hard: to make sure we we were strong enough one day to push on despite our own heartbreaks and struggles.

I don't think my grandparents know how much their grandchildren know about their lives back in China. I remember the look in yeh yeh's eyes when he saw the book of old photographs we'd put together for him from old photo albums we found in their spare bedroom. It must've been 60 or 70 years since he saw many of those faces in person, and the stoic army man I remember growing up with disappeared for just a moment. I wished I could unlock his heart for a second and know everything he was feeling, but I know I'll never know. I can only hope I understand the strength he and my family mustered up to keep going despite all that had happened.

After spending a short week in Beijing and seeing thousands of faces that reminded me of my grandparents, I was overwhelmed just thinking about the sacrifices so many of our elders made for us. And as a child, I know I never appreciated it, and the funny thing is they never forced me to appreciate them for what they did. They stayed quiet so much of the time about the things they saw, the emotions they felt, the anguish of losing everything they knew. When we fought and cried and pouted over what we thought were robbed childhoods, they knew better. I know better now. I get it.

The D had just pulled up to the station when Zoe fell. I heard her cry out before I saw her at the foot of the stairs. Her maroon hat was on the ground, and her gray hair was a tangled mess. The Fairway groceries in her hand landed beside her, and she was grabbing her ankle in pain. Around her, people rushed up and down the stairs--the Dance of the Commuters, some have called it before. But I broke choreography and turned away from the train.

When I dropped to my knees to help her sit up, I noticed Zoe's face was obscured mostly by a large pair of sunglasses. She told me she had just come from the hospital where she had her eyes dilated because of an infection. She said she knew she should have taken a taxi, but she thought she could do it on her own. "I don't want to go back to the hospital," she said. "I'd be so embarrassed."

I asked her a few basic details, and sent a young man in a tie up the stairs to retrieve the station manager. A minute later, an MTA employee arrived with a chair. She settled into it and her breathing returned to normal. Zoe then looked behind me at the second express train that had arrived and pulled away. "You missed your train again. I'm so sorry." I shrugged and told her there were plenty of trains.

It turns out that Zoe lives a block away from me. She repeated that she knew she should have waited to get groceries and go about her life, but she was impatient and wanted to be at home. I imagined my own grandparents, and could see them doing the same in all their stubborn glory. In fact, six years ago, hadn't that been what happened to Grandpa? A stroke at a bus stop, and I could only pray that there were people who would stop to care for a stranger.

Zoe asked me what I was doing in New York, and I told her I'd come from California and worked at MSNBC. "Stop," she said, her jeweled fingers reaching for my hand. "That was my career."

She told me about her years as a news producer at NBC, and the few years she also spent as a production manager for Saturday Night Live. Her eyes lit up behind her sunglasses as she talked about "the old 30 Rock" and how much she had loved her career and her coworkers. "Oh, but you wouldn't know anyone I knew," she said. "I don't even know who's there anymore."

The station manager reappeared with emergency responders at the ready just as another train arrived. Zoe insisted I catch it. I gave her my number and email address, and asked her to let me know later if she was okay. She thanked me and I got off the floor to rejoin the dance.

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history." -Phil Graham, publisher, The Washington Post (from the Newseum in Washington, D.C.)

I first noticed the books in the fall of 2009, half hidden behind the orphaned couch and obscured behind trinkets and gag books received via mail. I'd been working at the New University for eight months, and until that point, I'd never bothered to look too closely until, one Friday while I waited for dummies, I finally did.

When I asked the then-Layout Editor what they were, she said they were old copies of the newspaper, but that we didn't really look at them unless we had a layout question and needed to consult the previous year's issues. I remember the then-Editor-in-Chief chiming in to suggest we move them into storage because the layout of the newsroom was awkward and we could use the extra space.

But we left them, and I didn't think twice until five months later when someone tossed me a pen and it dropped behind the couch. When I reached for the pen, I saw the bottom shelves of books that dated back to 1967, when the New U used to be The Spectrum, and then at one point also The Anthill and The Tongue. Over the next week, I stopped into the newsroom between classes to look through the older archives, marveling at the stories of a campus and city that no longer exists in the same way. Even the national news coverage was unique because it told a story from the UCI perspective. After all, what good is a newspaper if it isn't going to give you your community's take?

As I leafed through the pages, I noticed an evolution that was documented with care and concern for a campus that rose up in the middle of nowhere, and a city that would close in on it within a decade of its inception. It was in those pages that I learned how different UCI once was, with a chancellor who led the campus' first walkout protest and a radical student body that sent a delegation to Berkeley's People's Park protest that ended up being arrested and bailed out by the university itself. Those stories led me to my own year-long research into the failure of the Master Plan, along with the rise and fall of student activism at UCI, but it also led me to realize what was missing from the New University in the 21st century, and it motivated me to apply for Managing Editor to try and bring the vision of the old New U back.

I wanted the editors and writers and photographers to be inspired by the rich history of UCI, to understand that the story of the campus before the Irvine Company painted everything beige, and to know that there was still so much more to be told. I didn't want people to just clock in and clock out; I wanted them to be passionate about the community they reported on. I wanted them to feel the weight of what it meant to contribute to this documentation of history that nobody else was really documenting anymore.

I'm proud of what we accomplished by the end of the 2011 school year and, returning to campus yesterday, I'm even more proud of what's been accomplished since. There was nothing but praise and admiration for the current staff, and although I've been removed from campus happenings for two years now, I can see it is well-deserved based on a single whirlwind visit. I know that voting is over to try and save the New U, and results will be out in just a few hours, but I hope everyone who's worked so hard is proud of themselves for all they've contributed to the paper's success. The New U may not have always printed what people wanted to hear, but it's always printed the story that needed to be told. I hope 50 years from now, there'll still be proof of that.

Don't stop reading because I'm beginning with a Sex and the City quote, but...

Carrie: Will we still be friends when we're this old?
Miranda: Sure.
Carrie: What do you mean "sure"? l could barely get us together for the weekend and we're all mobile!...How are we gonna make it to 70 if you've already zoned me out?
Miranda: l'm listening. Talk fast.
Carrie: Friendships don't magically last 40 years. You have to invest in them. lt's like savings. You don't expect to wake up when you're old and find a big bucket of money. My point is, we need an emotional retirement plan. This is important, making time for each other and taking trips like this. As we can see, at the end of the line, it's gonna be us ladies riding a bus.
Near the end of the night, my coworkers and I were discussing--among many topics--the real, true importance of having friends to vent to when things in life are rough. I was surprised to hear them state a concept I had tried to articulate before, but to no success: "I don't need someone to fix my problems or tell me exactly what to do. I just need someone to be there."

That concept of "being there," of "showing up" when the time calls for it. I always thought it was intuitive--a friend needs you, so you're there. That's what I was always taught, but maybe there was a part missing: don't get taken advantage of either. I learned this from my mom, but sadly the hard way. My mother, the most caring and wonderful person I know, always showed up when people needed her. She made sure she was always there. She's reliable, dependable, and she always tries to do her best because she loves people--that's just who she is.

And she would never tell me this (because I think it hurt her a lot), but my dad told me that somebody whom she loved made a comment about the fact that she never got a four-year college degree. The context is a long story, but the basic fact is that somebody my mom was trying to help was frustrated about something, and basically called her stupid in front of a lot of people.

Which infuriates me, but that's another story for another time. The point is: despite all that, I think that my mom would still show up for those people, no matter how hurt she is, because she's never been the kind of person to make her life about herself; she's spent her life nurturing and loving people, and doing her best to lift them higher when they fall.

I've been wrestling with this idea lately, though, because in all of my attempts to show up for others, I hadn't really sat back and wondered if those same people would show up for me. Over the last few months, I'm afraid I've gotten my answer, and so I'm learning to set the boundaries I guess is necessary to make sure I don't end up spent.

But I think, at the end of the day, I am my mother's daughter: I would still show up for the people I care about. I don't like cutting people out of my life, and so I almost never do it. Maybe that makes me weak, but if I could spend my days nurturing and loving people, and doing my best to lift them higher when they fall...well, I think it would be worth it.

There is still sand in the navy blue
flats I wore to Long Island the day the three of us went to brunch and ended up on the beach.

"I don't know if you know this," I said, "but I'm a Californian who doesn't like the beach."

That's not entirely true--some of my best memories come from evenings on piers, and watching the waves from the sand. The beach is unavoidable when you spend four years in Orange County. What I hated were crowded beaches in the daytime and sunburnt bros and the sand that followed you home and appeared for months in clothing you never even took to the beach in the first place.

But hopping on that train last October and heading out to a beach, the first I'd been to since moving to the East Coast, was refreshing, rejuvenating. It wasn't just the fresh air and the empty sidewalks; it was being with two amazing people while close to the ocean again, and laughing over torn cardigans and spilt ketchup.

That was only six months ago. It feels like it's been years. I don't remember much about the city or the streets there, and I can barely recognize the friends I fell asleep next to so comfortable on the train.

This French novelist once said, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." I used to scoff at that notion because if things were always changing, how could I hold onto the love and the dreams and the optimism? You feel certain things when you're 16, 18, 21, 22 in new and different ways. I couldn't imagine being who I am today with the same thoughts and feelings of a 16 year old.

But what I think that saying really means is that there are memories you hold inside of you that don't ever change, and that sometimes it's the insecurities you may have felt as a 10 year old on the playground or the mistrust you've held in your heart since you were 18 that remain so deeply engraved on the cover of your life. There's a part of you that is built on all of the things you've never forgotten--whether they be good memories or bad ones--and even as you grow up and learn more and become somebody new with each passing year, you can't ever really distance yourself from memories and from the past. Maybe sometimes that's a good thing, maybe sometimes it isn't.

The person I am today is built on the foundation of every experience I've ever had. Those beach-filled memories of bonfires and boardwalks and little bottles of alcohol tucked into a crevice between us in the sand don't just disappear. No, perhaps they became painful to see all around, and it was best to leave it behind, to move forward onto new memories and a new chapter, but it doesn't mean they're gone.

I've been in New York for over a year now, but it feels like less because I didn't really start that new chapter until it was almost too late. I guess I didn't expect those old memories to follow me 3,000 miles east, and I think that's why I'm not done with New York yet, even though the chance to leave it could be just a phone call away. Perhaps I don't love things now the way I did six months ago, but I know I loved them once. That didn't disappear. I still have the sand to prove it.

After Joan Didion's husband died, she knew she wanted an autopsy. Not just wanted one--she actively wanted one:

"If whoever it was at New York Hospital who asked me to authorize an autopsy experienced such anxiety I could have spared him or her. I actively wanted an autopsy. I actively wanted an autopsy even though I had seen some, in the course of doing research. I knew exactly what occurs, the chest opens like a chicken in a butcher's case, the face peeled down, the scale in which the organs are weighed. I had seen homicide detectives avert their eyes from an autopsy in progress. I still wanted one. I needed to know how and why and when it had happened." 

-The Year of Magical Thinking

I won't pretend that being 24 makes me older or wiser in any way. I remember, as a child, thinking that each birthday meant some big change: I would suddenly gain some knowledge I didn't have before right at the stroke of midnight, and it would be what separated me from the age I had been to the age I had become.

Of course that isn't true, and so now having been 24 for just a blink of an eye, I can tell you what I've really learned over the course of the last year or two:

I've learned how to have faith in the midst of a crisis, and how to find joy despite the heaviness that may sit on your shoulders. I've learned how to step back and see the bigger picture, and how to hold my head high and move forward. I've learned about the people in your life who truly matter, and have learned to understand the importance of forgiveness and unconditional love. I've learned that life can be the fullest at the quietest moments, and that you should never take the small things like a handshake or a laugh for granted.

Rather than come up with resolutions or a list of things I want to accomplish between now and 2014, I think my goal will be to just keep going. That notion seems so simple and so obvious, but for those who know me, you know what a struggle that itself has been.

So...onward!

We sat through the credits, and when the lights came up in the small theater, we exited and sat in the parking lot for a moment or two longer. Before we knew it, hours had passed. Our conversation had eclipsed the length of the movie, and all we could talk about was the pain of what we’d been entangled in: love.

We drove back to my place, and along the way he settled upon a song—this song. “This is what I’m thinking of,” he said. It was random, out-of-the-blue, but so appropriate for the tragedy we’d just witness on screen.

Here was Blue Valentine—a film that attached inevitable heartbreak along with every romantic story—and here he was: a boy who would tell me he loved me, only to push me away every other week. Perhaps heartbreak would be inevitable for us, but I didn’t want to believe it was the canopy above every relationship.

Yet he always told me he believed in me, that I’d “make it,” that I’d soar. He said he didn’t want to hold me back, but I never saw him as a disappointment—not at the time, anyways.

“I won’t believe in love until I have proof that everyone doesn’t end up miserable,” he had said before turning off the car in the lot outside my building.

I told him I wished he believed me—that I loved him, and I wouldn’t turn my back on him. But when he dropped me off at the end of the night, I didn’t hug him goodbye.