"I guess Yokohama is the city of rejection"

In my last letter, I wrote about Girl Power and its capitalistic manifestations through bougie yoga studios and rah-rah female-forward coworking spaces, a post I think I wrote too hastily and with too much lenience towards the economy of the privileged without challenging the systems of oppression that simultaneously distract women with consumerism while keeping us from attaining full person-hood: That is, full autonomy over our bodies, access to executive power, and social justice for Black and Indigenous women. I ended it with a pretty generic closer: "This is what Girl Power looks like." But if I had taken the time to complete that thought, I would have come to the conclusion that Girl Power, at least as many of us encountered it in the '90s, was itself a pseudo-social movement fed to a generation of 10-year-olds with any amount of disposable income through branded lollipops, stickers, collector's cards, T-shirts, with vague promises that our belief that Girls could be good and inspiring, and at ease with one another, would be fulfilled once we put down the money and joined the club.

But, naturally, I didn't finish the thought. Instead, I hit "Send now" and patted myself on the back, and went straight back to what I was doing, which was comparing online reviews of facial foaming cleansers.

A few days later, I read the excellent essay by Amil Niazi, Am I Allowed to Want Less. She weighs the current work culture, specific to millennial women, in the context of crushing job prospects and student debt and the increasingly inaccessible expectations what it meant to be a woman in the workforce. She writes:

"Particularly as young women we didn’t ever ask ourselves if we could “have it all” because we knew there was no all, we just wanted a piece of something. Choice was replaced by desire, the yearning for self-actualization through material and career success. To have more you had to want more but nothing was out of reach if you just worked hard enough."

At a certain point, she writes, the dream of "having it all" in the face of the 2008 financial crisis turned into a gig economy, and then the rhetoric around work and empowerment turned into seizing the opportunity to "lean in" and "hustle" and become your own "#girlboss". That, too, fell apart amidst increasing globalism and wealth inequality. So now, what writers write about is "Millennial burnout".

Eventually, work pressure and life pressure in her life begins to constrict: Four months after the birth of her child, she leaves mat leave early to chase what seems like a dream job opportunity. But panic sets in about this decision.

I was under water with worry, so I rushed back to work with the hope that my ambition would float me back to the surface. When it didn’t, I became unmoored. I felt like my identity had become about the acquisition of success (the big job, the baby, the house) rather than the enjoyment of my life.

I, too, am at an impasse my work identity, and therefore my life identity. I had wanted to be a journalist since I was 10 and took all the necessary steps to get there: I went to Journalism school, side-hustled while I slung cappuccinos, wrote content, moved across the world so I could actually get a job in the field, moved back, and rose through the ranks of a monthly magazine to become an editor. And then I quit.

And suddenly, people are advising me about content marketing, and I'm applying for literary writing grants, and I sit down to research potential feature articles I could pitch but I get this churn of dread in my stomach. Suddenly a lot of the stuff I'm filling my time with, like Cantonese language practice and writing this TinyLetter, which isn't really work, begins to feel like work because they are active choices that I'm making to develop an identity and a way of being and thinking that is independent of the work identity that has ruled over me for my entire adult life. But why is it that when I talk about it or think about it, it feels like these are activities that diminish my value?

There's a scene from the Japanese reality show Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City that has haunted me since it aired three years ago. The show is loosely about three boys and three girls living in a beautiful house and their naturally occurring relationships. It removes the high-octane, alcohol-fueled drama of American reality dating shows and replaces it with gentle interactions and heartfelt conversations that at least attempt at mature conflict resolution. In the scene, two characters, Hikaru and Masaki, are on a date in Yokohama after weeks of tension. When they had first met, there was instant attraction, but as the relationship progressed, Hikaru, an 18-year-old model, had started acting evasively, and avoided asking her out on subsequent dates. During this outing, which was initiated by Masaki, a 25-year-old part-time convenience store clerk and "entertainer" (she's a singer and dancer in the Ebisu Muscats, 33-person girl group dressed in sexy maid costumes that performs in nightclubs comprising mostly middle-aged men waving glow sticks), he rejects her after she tearfully confesses to him how much she likes him.

"I was attracted to you at first, so I invited you out on my bike," says Hikaru as they stand together, fireworks shooting into the sky behind them. "As I got to know you, there were good things, but I saw the bad, too. I feel like you don't know yourself. You're insecure. And it's those core elements to you that I really don't like."

In an earlier translation, his rejection is actually articulated as, "You have no core".

This exchange devastated me for many reasons. For one thing, I've heard the exact same critique from a boy I had a crush on when I was 19 or 20. I was complaining about lack of job prospects and not really having any specific topic of specialization, and he said: I think you lack a certain core to you. I was instantly destroyed. At the time, it was a confirmation that everything that I had worried about myself was not just true, but also apparent to the people around me: That I was a fundamentally vapid girl with no ambition, only potential.

Terrace House has always been primarily about seeing which couples end up together; it has secondarily been about catapulting early-career professionals into positions of higher visibility. People enter the show as citizens and they exit as gold-tier influencers. On Boys and Girls in the City, there was a hat designer who launched her own label, an architect who went on to form his own furniture design agency, and a high school student who successfully parlayed her title as "Japan's Cutest High School Student" into a modeling career, and they all took turns piling on Arman, an "aspiring fireman" who had just arrived from Hawaii, for not being proactive enough in his own career. Earlier in the season, before Misaki or Hikaru arrived, the cast mates threw a birthday party for Tap, a professional dancer, and he spent much of the dinner grilling another cast mate on her lack of a concrete vision for the cafe she dreamed of opening until she cried. Another Terrace House member, a student on a baseball scholarship, was accused of being lazy and of gaining weight after getting benched by his team. In many of these instances, career apathy is met with annoyance: The men are perceived as lazy, and their alcohol consumption is put into question; the women are perceived as flaky, or indecisive.

Notably, Misaki was the only person who didn't catch any flack or praise for her career goals, even though she was at home just as much as Arman was. But she was not strictly unemployed, and she was in pursuit of a higher artistic goal, even if that artistic goal was weird and creepy. In the end, her semi-tenuous record of employment and zany demeanor was simply construed as unstable, aka, "She has no core".

For years after my own "core" conversation, the words continued to sink in throughout the following years. After I graduated, I dated guys who had louder opinions, more impressive jobs, and stronger convictions than me and they all seemed to know where they were going. All I wanted to do was be a journalist; I didn't know or care what kind, or what I wanted to write about. It was hard enough, I reasoned, to even get a job; a specialization would be asking too much. But then, I worried my interests were too broad, that my ambitions were too vague, and that maybe I didn't have the discipline to really go for what I wanted, but then, what is it that I wanted, other than the opportunity to write for a living? So maybe it was true that I lacked a core.

Now, these days when I think about it, it's so much more convoluted. Sometimes, I feel like not only do I not have a core, but that society is also losing its core; distracted and directionless. Devastating natural disasters are gone with the next news cycle. Opinions are recited off the internet and shouted out loudly and anonymously. Values are expressed in a curated accumulation of consumer goods. There's an eternal barrage of important new shows, new movies, new seminal albums, new exhibitions coming out and each one represents its own zeitgeist.

And consequently, someone like me, a privileged Millennial woman, is not just expected to work ourselves to the point of exhaustion, but also expected to be a political activist, an art appreciator, a vegetarian, an owner of property or at least an aspiring owner of property, an experienced traveler with several "travel hacks" up her sleeve, a mother; if not a mother, than a doting daughter; a wife, but if not a wife, a very chill and devoted girlfriend; decent at cooking a handful of healthy and delicious comfort meals, quick to supply a list of rock solid restaurant recommendations for any occasion, knowledgeable about organic wines, popular on Instagram and/or Twitter, fit, subtly fashion-forward and able to sink into mindfulness meditation at the whiff of a smoking nub of Paolo Santo. If I am not these things, I worry that I'm being lazy. If I am all these things, then I feel unoriginal.

"I am large," wrote Walt Whitman, "I contain multitudes."

But how many of those multitudes were imposed on him by the expectations of a frenetic society? I'll end this letter by asking you, dear reader: How do you feel about your work identity in relation to the self? Have you ever felt like you've struggled to find your core? I'd love to hear from you.

Things I read/loved/ate/learned this week:
- The Jungle Prince of Delhi, worth reading every word.
- Inspired by our friends Deva and Jenna in Hong Kong, a Kimchi Mac and Cheese that is just as cozy when it's 29 degrees outside and humid as it is when it's -6 outside and blizzarding
- The suburban wholesomeness that is this Adam Sandler profile
- If you read one thing about the situation about Hong Kong this week, make it this: A contemplation about freedom and patriotism between a daughter and a mother.

If you think someone in your life would enjoy receiving this in their inbox, please do forward this along. If you're just meeting me here, thanks for reading! You can find out more about me on my personal website here and on my Instagram here.