WEBSITE!!!

www.jessxchen.com 

That is all. Finally after two years a website has been born. the birthing process wasn’t very fun. 2 straight days of wrestling with layouts and typography. thanks cargo collective.

Whose poems I first fell in love with

thepianofarm:

  

e.e. cummings
…who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man

Happy Birthday.

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A play celebrating China’s 50 minority cultures directed by Zhang Yimou at Yulong Snow Mountain in Yunnan, China

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Guangzhou Opera House

designed by Zaha Hadid

beijing train stations and blood red skies. 

Beijing or something like capital of china. 

The Website of Professor Wang YaPing that I made. Very inspiring, take a look! →

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two different kinds of sunsets in Yunnan China

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so i really feel like this yak sometimes. all costumed up, head to toe, with balls of red yarn, out of place in this society. the people here listen to me, and ask me how old I am, “nineteen” I say to them. “really?” they reply wide-eyed, you seem much younger than that. Yes, perhaps because my chinese has now fallen down to the ability of a third graders. I try to talk film theory and conceptual artistry while tripping and sputtering on chopped up vocabulary. even at my aunts and uncles i feel out of place. i am the unusual limb that juts out of our family tree, with a strange bird of paradise perched on it. heart filled with such heavy unfamiliarity that the limb might break at any moment. when it does, it will land on a the tree’s roots — too twisted with ancient cultural history to even try to untangle.

these confusing days will soon come to an end. the yak will shed its layers of clownlike costuming, and find it’s way back home to a place where she will no longer be questioned. but, then what? what of the questions of cultural ancestry and birth-defining past that will torture one forever. what of parents raised during the cultural revolution, too scarred by an entire country’s phantom pain to even want to look behind. i strive to understand, but cannot untangle myself from the roots I have plummeted into.

findling

sometimes, i honestly feel like a completely emotionless person. sometimes i walk through ancient, beautifully preserved art exhibits, with only a massive amount of fog in head. i come home after a long day of thinking too much, and doing nothing exactly important in Beijing, China, and feel like I have landed in nowhere land.

when it gets like this, the only thing that can knock the real human emotion back into me is a really, really well-made film. The genius kind of film, the cinematic dream that hits you in all the right places and strangles you philiosophically, artistically, and psychologically, until you are tuned to the key of your own personal reality. and that is truth.

wherever that is, let me find it soon. 

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today was meh. nothing to write about. goodnight everybody who reads this.

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marketplace, nanchang china

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this city is an adolescent girl, sweating with nervous jitters, throwing down her tears on a weekly basis. Her body is damp, she was always too short for her age, so now she is traversing through valleys of growing pains, trying to catch up with the other cities — her eyes rage with a roaring kind of rain. Her body’s buildings are acne scars that she scratched too hard. so in her doleful shyness, she holds the thunderclouds close to her skin so she has a place to hide at night. But when the lightning strikes her skin and the thunder echoes across her ribcage, they play like xylophones, so her sleeping civilians become insomniacs. 

but by morning she is happy again, but her streets are still swollen with heavy summer rain.

Nanchang, China, you were once my parent’s best friend. You were the girl that people didn’t know was actually beautiful until they grew up. Some kind of below-surface beauty that always cries herself to sleep.