finnair blueberry juice: a rambling ode



Plane ride aside, my laptop has mostly been dead weight this trip. The 20W European charger Allen got at a mall after we both neglected to bring adapters charges only at a trickle, far slower than power is actually consumed by usage. In the shaking aft of a cruise-like ferry to Tallinn, I write this update on my ever-reliable reMarkable while eating a surprisingly good 3€ pastry.

The events of the last week: after five days of quarantine I very luckily tested out on Tuesday morning. Sienna did lots of editing so it was an easy TSL week; I took on a big financial data project since tuition increases had just been announced. Thursday night I opted to sleep relatively early even with an unfinished paper due the next morning. Friday morning I bashed out a thousand or so words in two hours, didn't re-read more than a few sentences of it, and hit submit.

Friday 2:30 PM Xuehuai and I took a $100 Uber to LAX. A group of students rushed past us in the security line, attempting to make a flight set to depart in 20 minutes. We met Allen at the gate reading case law on birthright citizenship. I planned to sleep on the flight but struggled to and ended up reading Crying in H-Mart, getting to the second-to-last chapter before my laptop died. It was a humble and rich and powerful book -- several times in the cramped cabin I wanted to reach for someone to hug or cry a little on. Instead I had Finnair's famous blueberry juice.

We took the train into the city, then transferred to a tram, then struggled to find our Airbnb, ducking into an S-Market to get out of the cold and the icy, gravely roads. Eventually we realized that we misread the address.

The next day: a long walk, market square, a Shanghai-like mall, a busy cafe, Allen going shopping, the design museum, Xuehuai's family friend's dad buying us dinner. Monday: Suomenlinna, 3D printing at Oodi, live American country music at Juttutupa, falling asleep in my clothes again. Getting up at midnight, then 4 AM, then 7 AM to catch the ferry-cruise to Estonia. Only on Monday, seeing Stockmann, the parliament building and Oodi at the same time, did I realize how small Helsinki is. Xuehuai points out that the amount of things is nevertheless high: malls, restaurants, museums and cafes abound. The public transit is amazing. The vibes are good.

Tallinn: old town, The Times We Had, R-Kiosk, a closed vegan restaurant, an amazing one right back in old town square, struggling to buy tram tickets, pre- and post-Soviet occupation art. Rovaniemi: campfires, clouds, skiing, regret. A last day in Helsinki: splitting up, Pasila, Sinsay, Kamppi, Xuehuai's pilot friend, smuggling alcohol, getting good sleep on the flight.

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Listening to Sibelius in Oodi after discovering his Reverie in a sheet music book in this very library two days ago: a new desire to pick up piano, a realization that there is so much more to piano than I previously grasped: something so far from Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt that I'm familiar with, even Debussy that Mr. Porter introduced me to, that I've somehow never even thought to explore.

Oh, how narrow-minded of me to center my study of piano on myself, my lack of commitment or discipline or technical ability! What joy there is left to partake in, what other languages to learn, people to meet, foreign yet familiar cold to feel stinging, trams to ride trundling through twisting streets, spires from another half-millenia still saluting the sky…

I think about that LA Times panelist telling freshmen to study abroad, that it was the best, most important thing they ever did. I think about how when steam engines were all the rage psychologists described cognitive functions with valves and balances, and now it's with networks and algorithms. I think about how the Suomenlinna museum mentioned Germany instead of Nazy Germany, how the Tallinn art museum had all their signs in Russian and German as well as Estonian and English.

Maybe to grow up is to trade the comfort of unconditional belonging for the view of a world too big for unconditional belonging but only by being so big enough for all the other wonderful lifegiving things, to lose conviction in all you believed so surely to be true in order to discover a kaleidoscopic trove of truths you had never previously conceived possible.

Re-reading old blog posts I feel for a moment that I'm on a ferry, a plane, a liminal space where anticipation of reality supercedes actual reality. But I must anchor myself back to Oodi, back to the present, to the city I should be exploring instead of writing about.

On the plane back to LA Xuehuai tells me that visiting Finland cured her homesickness, that homesickeness is more about being tired of the place you're in and longing for anywhere new rather than home specifically. She asks if I feel homesick in Claremont or the other times I've lived away from New York. I tell her that I didn't because I don't feel strongly attached to any place I can call home: I've spent about equal time in upstate New York, New York City, and Andover so far, plus Salt Lake City and San Francisco last year, retaining only relatively isolated connections from each of these places (am I really a New Yorker if I only spent middle school there? an Andover kid if I have almost nobody from my grade to talk to after graduating?). But the trip to Finland -- maybe Allen's celebration of coca-cola as a patriotic American symbol -- made me realize that there was a place and a community I felt strongly about and would long for if away from for a long time: America. America and its language, my language, its arrogance, my arrogance, its Asian American community, my community.