Being a girlie on the internet

Holy shit it’s 2024 !!!!! I tried to get this out before new years, but decided to rest instead — I hope you were also rested <3

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In July I got on all the social media (ones I haven’t been on before): Twit…X, TikTok, Substack, SoundCloud. I’m doing an experiment called being unironically online. The goal is to self-publish randomly and chaotically until someone notices me or my art and decides to write about me with poise. The result would be either fame or embarrassment. The process mostly involves turning my practices into internet contents, and framing my identity crisis as an internet performance.

There’s something that feels inherently feminine in making work about putting oneself online. From artists and writers Molly Soda, Miranda July, Internet Princess, Mackenzie Thomas, and Maya Man whose contents I frequently enjoy, to the overwhelming girl blog / dinner / math trends that feel either too meta or slightly questionable on the grand scheme of cyber-feminism, it seems like the strength and vulnerability of displaying femininity (and being ✨unapologetically #girl✨) is weaving the web around us last year.

Being online is about being relatable but still unique somehow. In the cracks of consuming and creating in the cyberspace I’m experiencing oscillating struggles relating to my femininity, entangled with a deep uneasiness existing on (western) social media, having a hard time relating to either (mostly) white girl bloggers or Asian (American) girl writers.

Growing up in a non-western culture while consuming so much American media you’d really think you know this foreign country so well, until you’re actually here turning your entire life around. And 9 years later you still hold a specific fear that you’re not “American enough” to be on Twitter or even engage in most online discourses. Is this even relatable at all?

Growing up in an environment that lacked critical theory I learned that feminist wisdom was amongst the wise white women. I related to Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and later to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Greta Gerwig’s Jo March, Sally Rooney’s complicated female characters… I held tightly onto my upper-middle class white women heroes because I didn’t know any better (and didn’t know Audre Lorde), but also because of the general relatability of womanhood presented by them, through cultural discourses, to me.

But then I learned there were also Cathy Park Hong, Rina Sawayama, Celest Ng, Ocean Vuong, Michelle Zauner Crying in H Mart — femme and queer Asians discussing heritage and displacement with brutal honesty. Their stories, and the dialogs around them, immediately resonated better. I experience the same fear and anger towards anti-Asian hate crimes, face the same objectification, struggle with the same internalized racism, feel the same weight and complexity and pride over Crazy Rich Asians, Beef, Everything Everywhere All at Once represented in media. But it’s different. It’s not the same at all.

“Home” isn’t a nostalgic landscape.

Language isn’t the bridge of lineage and acceptance.

Immigration isn’t a complex story of generational trauma.

My broken passport and its 539463254 pages of VISA stamps weigh me down every single day.

I published a comic recently that tried to explain what my diaspora meant for me in light of a massive movement back home, and the way it influenced how I — we — engaged with Chinese politics overseas. It took me a whole year to put how I felt into words. I didn’t know how. It was not an Asian American experience, and not at all a Chinese experience either. I felt paralyzed, empowered, relieved, misunderstood, for being away in a place that I in fact call home, crying about the other place that I call home. I typed these words into my phone winter of 2023, and I’m still seeking the same answer now:

Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to weave an immigration story intertwined with queerness and femme-ness and learning to radicalize that is so fundamentally unrelatable to the general public, and if I can’t fight it I’d just have to swallow it.

Sometimes I yearn for a look into the future, where this diaspora has already become a language of its own, a narrative well-paved for me, presented and packaged beautifully and served in plates as art or memes. .

Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve felt a little more coherent if I simply be an internet artist so that I could just embody it all, floating in the cyberspace the way I float as a cultural refugee.

And I’ll eat my girl dinner there.

More about this soon.

On to happy things! Here’re some updates since you last heard from me:

⊹ In October: I released my first track! It’s available on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere you might get music. PLAY !!! was made with my amazing friend Bradley CD in between lots of gaming and eating junk food at neighborhood arcade-diner Action Burger, where I was crowned best Duck Hunt player of all times. We tried a thing where we combined my livecoding with Brad’s playing real bass. There’re glitches, randomized beep boops, humming, a little screaming, a little singing, and a lot of dnb. Give it a listen!

⊹ In November: I released my second track! It was such an honor to work on Intercell [the Live Code Edits], a remix EP for DJ_DAVE amongst 4 other extremely talented livecode artists. The entire EP is so good. I coded my track in strudel, a javascript version of Tidal Cycles (the language I usually code music in) and one of the most exciting projects I’ve discovered in the past year. I also made a visualizer with raw, unprocessed music here.

⊹ In December: Did a performance with my friend Casta on visuals, at a livecode.NYC and creativecodeart joint event. Casta took the visuals from my code editor and conducted some beautiful sorcery. This was probably one of my favorite sets I’ve ever played, including a Charli XCX detonate remix into an unhinged Chinese morning assembly track (will be on soundcloud soon!), and also playing the DJ_DAVE Bitrot remix live <3

Also December:

⊹ Directed a 9-people livecode jam in collaboration with Wave Farm, and beamed our sound all the way to Chile! Then I gave a talk about it.

⊹ Gave another talk about livecoding and comedy in the same conference.

⊹ Co-taught a Coding Music with Strudel workshop with Dan! Full workshop video is here.

⊹ Spent NYE with Livecode family. Played a b2b DJ set with Char (will be on soundcloud soon!). Watched a gloomy sunrise. Entering 2024 with gentleness to myself, my friends, and boundless community love.

Thanks for reading this far, I hope you have a beautiful year ahead of you. There’re so much more to look forward to this year, and strangely, I’m not scared. I’ve spent the past 3 New Year’s in my apartment, mostly alone — being with people felt good. I’m very grateful for the company.

Ok bye!

Oh wait, I have the same handle (v10101a) on all aforementioned platforms if you’d like to follow my social media arc (likely unrewarding). Ok bye for reals (⁎⁍̴̛ᴗ⁍̴̛⁎) ✧