Oceans

Yesterday, I attended the International Writers Workshop symposium, "Learning from the Ocean" held on campus. There were many varied viewpoints and it raised some interesting questions on mythology and the sea, the boundaries of water, biodiversity, coastal communities, uncertainty, movement, and even Victoria Harbor. A journalism major asked the international writers what they felt when they first saw Victoria Harbor. What I first felt: technicolor water. I felt as if I was in television. There was also this sense of being cradled - not only in the sense of the harbor being so close to land, but also because modernity seems "safe". With the ocean, there is always this feeling of uncertainty, of excitement mixed with fear. What goes beyond what we can see - this we do not know. That's what I love about the ocean: the unpredictability, the "not knowing". For my senior project, I wrote a story about a couple who has their honeymoon on the Jersey shore, in the middle of November, in the middle of an abandoned beach town. I tried to pinpoint their anxiety, their murky relationship, but am finally realizing why this story never quite worked: I had no idea what to do. The story dragged on, never ending (at least not in the "ah, I'm fulfilled" way), mirroring the force that put them there in the first place: the ocean.

At the panel, I also thought a lot about Melville and Moby Dick. How those connected to the ocean never quite leave it. When I visited his home at Arrowhead last year, my professor pointed out the back porch where Melville would pace back and forth, as if on a boat, looking out at sea. I imagined the entire field covered in white snow and the storminess of the house, and how it must have felt to be at sea, even on land.

And then, after I got back home from the panel, I had this terrible feeling of uncertainty and fear. About where my life will take me and if I'll ever quite make it as a writer. Do I apply to graduate school now? How many rejection letters does it take it get published (there is no math in uncertainty)? What am I doing here in Hong Kong? Why do I feel like I'm fumbling all of a sudden?