Ingrid ZH | Fangruo’s Cereal — Writing, Food, Travel & Coaching

Every year in May, I write a letter to my past self. This is the sixth year. Six letters are recorded on my Chinese blog. Starting this year, I’ll be keeping them on my English blog as well.

Dear 27-year-old Ingrid,

Hello.

I feel like I have so much to say, and yet the moment I typed your name, I hesitated. By now, your book should be out. I believe you are a wonderful writer. I think writing is one of the greatest professions in the world — we simply live, and living becomes part of the work. This year I have no questions for you. I only want to send you my wishes from across the time. This morning I spent hours looking at wedding cakes, and now a starfruit jelly cake has taken up residence in my mind. I want to wish your life the same: luminous, sweet, soft, and full of give. Like a starfruit jelly cake.

I went to Newfoundland. I saw icebergs. The world is nothing more than this, and yet it is so much more.

Yesterday I was listening to a book called My Name Is Red. I’ll be going back to China in August, and before that, we’ll make a brief stop in Turkey. I’ve been preparing for those few hours by brushing up on some Turkish literature. A podcast about the book mentioned a detail that has stayed with me.

It’s a story about miniature painters. The painters in the book hold blindness in the highest regard. For a miniaturist to reach old age without losing his sight is considered a source of great shame. One blind painter says that a blind painter simply goes on painting from memory. As I wrote that sentence, I closed my eyes. Maybe I’m not writing at all. Maybe I’m only reciting what memory already knows.

Whose memory?

I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about Borges, living in darkness, and how he wrote. He dictated; his assistant — who later became his wife — put everything down. Having a keyboard is a fine thing. These days the World Cup is on, and I noticed this year there’s a feature designed for visually impaired fans: a small device, roughly the size of a keyboard, that vibrates. You hold it in your hands, and through it you can feel what’s happening in the match. One fan said, with great excitement, that he could tell exactly what the people around him were cheering for.

Memory fades. Images resurface.

I’ve been sorting through the books at home these past few days. I came across some encyclopedias I bought at a secondhand bookshop three years ago. The first time I ever saw that kind of encyclopedia was at a friend’s place. I was staying there alone, and I remember spending a lot of that summer reading through it — looking up what a fjord was, or what plate tectonics meant. Last month, while traveling, I paid close attention to my own breathing. I noticed that whenever I came across something I didn’t know well, or had forgotten, I held my breath — the way I used to as a child, faced with an exam question I couldn’t answer. Holding my breath was how I punished myself for not knowing. But reading an encyclopedia, I can be most forgiving of myself. Or, to put it another way: I can give myself the fullest permission to forget, to start over, to learn like a child.

I no longer try to hold on to things. I am a pebble on the shore, waiting for knowledge to wash over me again and again. And what stays, stays — the way a blind miniaturist never loses his memory of a Mongolian horse.

Last year’s me believed that right now, I would be doing what I love most.

Not a hundred percent, but much more than last year. This past year I’ve spent no small amount of time on things I’m good at but don’t love. I am a greedy butterfly, drifting lazily from flower to flower, unable to choose.

I still wish you this: keep doing what you love most.

Come to think of it, there’s no other secret. Only to keep doing what you love.

Ingrid