More than half of my life has been lived in translation. I moved to America when I was eighteen, and although my mother tongue is Spanish, I am so fluent in English that I talk like a native speaker. When you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss. The transference of what I want to say pours from one container into an incompatible receptacle. Inevitably, something is lost. I am used to thinking of something in Spanish, for example, which then comes out strangely in English, or cannot be said in English at all, not in the same way. I am used to being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.
Why do you hate the waiting room?
Because of the way it looks? What’s it like? Do you remember? If pressed, could you rattle off, say, your five favorite waiting rooms with a list of their primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary features? Then, would it be possible for you to throw in the dates and times you visited them? You think there aren’t detectives who can check up on these things? You think they haven’t already checked up and we’re now interested in seeing if you decide to lie? But, seriously, does a waiting room ever stick with you? If you left this waiting room right now, walked around the block, and returned, would you be able to state with certainty that it was the same waiting room? If it were different, would you notice? If it were the same, is there a chance you might think it was different? Have you, in the end, either consciously or unconsciously, accepted the fact that there’s a template in your mind labeled Waiting Room, and that’s all you’ve got no matter how disparate the places might actually be? Does it bother you that somehow a number of your experiences have taken place in an unidentifiable void? Or, without thinking about it, do you just sit there, surrounded by who knows what, and, innocuous activities notwithstanding, do you just sit there and wait?
There are multiple histories about how the Chinese zodiac system came to be. The 12 Earthly Branches ordering system — which encompasses understandings of time and astrology — is prevalent in several Asian cultures, and is based on a 12-year cycle that just about lines up with the orbit of Jupiter. The most prevalent accompanying myth describes a race in which animals competed to be the first to reach the Jade Emperor; the Emperor would name one year for each animal in the order they completed the race. Variations of the myth unfurl different ways in which the animals ended up in their final order, with the narratives corresponding to the accompanying “personality traits” of each animal.
But no one seems to know where the zodiac placemat came from, or which illustrated version might be the first. The original artist’s name was either never on or was erased from the current versions of the designs. “I’m not sure who originally created these placemats,” says Kian Lam Kho, a food writer, cookbook author, and co-curator of “Chow: Making the Chinese American Restaurant,” an exhibit currently on display at the Museum of Food and Drink in New York City. “But the Chinese zodiac has been a common cultural symbol among non-Chinese in the U.S. for many years.”
I had only a vague idea of what to expect when I boarded the Celebrity Summit in April for a weeklong excursion to the Caribbean. Olivia, a groundbreaking women’s record label turned lesbian travel company, named for the hero of a Dorothy Bussy novel, has catered specifically to lesbian vacationers since its maiden voyage in 1990. When I reached out to Olivia, the company offered me a press ticket for one of their Celebrity-partnered cruises so that I could get a sense of how it’s become one of the most successful lesbian companies of all time. I generally expected to meet some nice older ladies with interesting life stories, to explore the tensions of intergenerational lesbian culture and the fraught future of lesbian spaces, to laze about on a beach in the Virgin Islands and get to say I was swimming and sunbathing “for work.”
What I didn’t expect was everything else that would happen to me — and is still happening to me — thanks to this one little week in my otherwise pleasantly uneventful life.
My entire wardrobe was Canal
Street original, knockoff chic,
adolescent sleek in my double XL