Seeking Synchronicity
Plus, the *best* eats in Portland and Seattle, why we love the Olympics and a hot take on Alice Munro.
Two bodies walk to the edge. They brace for a moment before leaping into the still pool of blue below. As they rapidly descend through the air, they contort their bodies into identical shapes, hitting each pose simultaneously, so precisely I feel like I’m watching a series of still images flash before my eyes. The goal, the announcer says, is for them to mirror each other, right down to the millisecond. How can two separate bodies—each with their own complex system of unique cells and completely different heartbeats—be expected to move in complete synchronicity? How do two people become one?
When I’m feeling out of sync, I seek nature. So on my day off work, I head to Washington Park in Portland to be in the forest. As I’m walking on the sidewalk, a car is exiting a grocery store parking lot. I assume he will stop. He assumes there is no one walking on the sidewalk. Two separate moving bodies converge. We become one as I feel the force of his moving vehicle against my arm, then my hip, and then my thigh. He stops. My feet come back to the Earth. We look at each other in disbelief and continue on our separate paths.
A few days later, I’m hiking in a forest near Seattle. I keep coming to a fork in the road and choosing the wrong path. What begins as a clearly marked trail gradually fades until I realize I’m not on a path at all and fully just wandering in the bush. I backtrack and try to find the most well-trodden path, but it doesn’t seem to exist. I climb steep forested hills only to have to turn around and go back downhill. The shade of the canopy makes the ground muddy so I slide and fall. I get back up and keep searching for the trail. Eventually I give up and exit the park onto a smoothly paved residential street with white picket fences overlooking the sparkling ocean in the distance. I wind through the neighbourhood until I arrive at the crowded beach. I walk along the manicured boardwalk. It’s easy but boring.
That night, I’m in a restorative sound bath at a yoga studio near my hotel. In the near-complete darkness of the studio, the two gongs at the front of the room look identical. But they sound completely different. The heavy baseline of one reverberates through my body, like an earthquake breaking open my foundation and unearthing what’s buried within. The other reverberates at a higher pitch, creating a thin, whirring sound, like fighter jets flying above in the sky. Both are activating, both make me anxious. Their dissonant sounds bring me to tears, tears not of joy but of fear. The two contrasting sounds compete and never seem to find harmony. They are out of sync.
Everything I say is misunderstood. I can’t tell at what point the communication is breaking. Is it in the space between my brain and the words I spell out with my fingers? Or is it in the space between the person’s eyes reading the words and the brain that turns them into meaning? I keep trying and failing. It’s only a failure because I care.
A small circle of light appears in the dark night. It grows wider until it blinds my entire field of vision. I get on the train. When it pulls up to my station at the precise hour and minute it says it would, I realize what a miracle this is. How do they calculate what time the train will arrive at each station? I have never, in my entire life, witnessed this train be even just a minute early or late. How is this possible when there are so many variables that could affect the train’s travel? Perhaps it’s because it’s a single train, on a single track. The subway, car traffic, pedestrians—it’s only when you begin interacting with other beings, travelling at their own speeds on their own paths, that you risk collision.
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Staying on your own course separate from the rest is safer, more predictable. Opening up to the traffic and running your track parallel with others is hard. But the greatest challenge of all, one very few successfully achieve, is merging into one; finding complete synchronicity. I’m still not convinced it’s natural for humans to do so. But when done correctly, it looks beautiful.
Best,
Anna
Reading 📖
🏊♀️ The Olympic sport flipping, twisting and pushing for respect.
🇺🇸 Snoop Dogg and American attitude at the Olympics.
🤳 The grand unified theory of aesthetic vlogging.
💼 The rise of anti-corporate influencers.
🧀 What cheese and queerness have in common.
🥬 Lessons from the kimchi masters of South Korea.
🍲 “The best restaurants are the ones that mean the most to us, and they won’t be spoon-fed to us in our daily media diets. They’re the ones we arrive at, physically and emotionally, on our own,” writes Priyanka Mattoo.
Watching 📺
Today’s essay was inspired by an hour in which I became totally entranced by the synchronized diving on my hotel television. It kept coming down to the Canadians vs. the North Koreans—I felt like I was watching the two competing parts of my identity dual it out on the screen. In the end, North Korea beat out the Canadians, winning them their first diving medal ever. I’m not a big sports person but I’ve always found the Olympics totally mesmerizing. I remember when I was a little girl I used to pretend ice skate around my bedroom, imagining myself like the figure skaters I found so graceful on my television.
I didn’t realize how I’d unintentionally stopped watching over the years until I suddenly had access to cable every night in my hotel room. After coincidentally catching another dance-like sport, gymnastics, and becoming totally enthralled, I got in the habit of having it on in the background each night. In a recent episode of Vibe Check, Saeed Jones offers an explanation to why I find watching the Olympics so addictive—it taps into our sense of awe, “That sense of scale where you realize we are connected to something wondrous beyond us; it’s important for us to stay in touch with it. When we’re distanced from [awe], it can lead to things like depression and anxiety.”
The unbelievable capabilities of the human body are breathtaking, and the narrative arch of each athlete—the unbelievable hurdles they’ve overcome, how they perform under pressure—makes for captivating entertainment. This has been the case since 776 BC, when the ancient Olympic Games began. What is different about the Olympics today is the role technology plays in how we watch the games and perceive the athletes. Streaming has democratized access—contributing to a more communal global experience; this sense that we are living through these moments together—while social media platforms give us a window into the lives of the athletes like never before.
Then there’s the science behind the sports themselves—we’ve never been better able to understand the precise mechanics of how the body performs in each sport as we are now. I personally don’t like this, it feels like it contributes to optimization culture that treats the body like a machine.
Still, I’ve been finding joy and awe in watching the Olympics. Here are my top three performances:
Runner-Up: Simone Biles suffering a calf injury early on in the qualifiers and still taking home three gold.
Her comeback this year proves quitting is not quitting, it’s knowing what’s best for your body and mental health.
3. Korean Canadian Phil Wizard bringing home the first gold medal in men’s breakdancing.
Everything about this didn’t feel like the Olympics (even the judges didn’t fit the script), and I absolutely loved it. I wish more of the games had this kind of energy.
2. American gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik stoically refusing to express any emotion leading up to his performance.
Sitting on the sidelines with his glasses as his teammates got fired up, he looked like a serial killer. But then he took off those glasses, got on that pommel horse and won bronze. The unleashing of all his pent up emotion was worth the wait.
1. China’s artistic swimming (aka synchronized swimming) performance left me completely speechless.
These athletes are dancers and swimmers, but they are also performers, making artistic swimming arguably the most under-appreciated Olympic sport of all.
Listening 🎧
I’m not an avid fan of Alice Munro so the news that she stood by her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, despite knowing he sexually abused her daughter Andrea Skinner, has not greatly affected me. But it does have me thinking about the blurred line between a writer’s work and their personal life. For avid readers of Munro’s work, the news of her wrongdoings feels like a betrayal, as much of her work grapples with what it means to be a women overcoming tragedy. In this episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large, they question why Munro couldn’t implement in her real life the wisdom she divulged to readers through her stories.
To me, it’s not that surprising. From the reader’s perspective, it can look like the author is speaking from a place of wisdom and authority. But as a writer who has written a lot about my personal life online, I know that’s not always the case. Writing, for me, is an act of processing. Sometimes I draw conclusions on the page before I—or perhaps in order to—draw conclusions in real life.
As Jiayang Fan—a New Yorker writer whose personal essays about her relationship to her mom I deeply relate to—says of her own writing,
“What is on the page is an attempt at honest grappling with what I’m trying to work out within myself, I hope we can give that same respect to Munro’s work no matter what you think of her as a person.”
So, will Alice Munro be cancelled? The ambiguity around the answer raises another question: have we moved on from cancel culture? We don’t seem to outright cancel artists when we find out they’ve done unforgivable things as quickly as we used to. The other day, my friend and I had The O.C. on in the background and I was disappointed with a homophobic scene I’d completely forgotten about. Did we turn it off? No. Will I stop watching The O.C.? No. Same goes for Sex and the City—I can recognize it hasn’t aged well and yet I don’t feel guilty when I feel comforted every time I watch it. We seem to have loosened the all-or-nothing mindset and made space for nuance.
The Alice Munro scandal reveals the shortcomings of idolizing a person for their work. People wouldn’t feel so betrayed by their artistic hero if they simply connected to their art. It’s because people form parasocial relationships to—and build entire fandoms worshipping—the artist. The high brow nature of the literary genre, as compared to say, comedy or hip-hop, imbues the author with an extra layer of moral superiority, but they are just as much flawed humans as the rest of us (and I’d argue it’s what makes us connect to their work). We can’t forget that.
Snacking 🍌
I ate more ice cream in a few days than I’ve eaten all year during my week in Portland with Salt & Straw. I’m not a huge fan of the savoury dessert trend but of the 16 flavours I tried in their test kitchen, my fave was the cinnamon honey fried chicken (more cinnamon than chicken). I also had one of the best bites I’ve ever had in my life in their factory—ice cream immediately after it’s churned, when it’s still soft right before it’s hardened into the pint.
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The last time I visited Portland was right after my mom died. Back then, I remember most of the standout eats were found in dive bars. This time, I couldn’t believe how much the city’s food scene has grown. We tasted the Chinese dishes Korean American chef Kyo Koo grew up eating in Portland at his restaurant Warsugai, and “first-Generation American” (a twist on words that made me realize how we only categorize ethnic foods as first-Gen) at Xiao Ye. We were lucky enough to snag reservations at chef Gregory Gordet’s Kann (every bite was revelatory), and experience the 16-course tasting menu at ōkta. I also got the chance to visit Oregon’s underrated wine country and forage for barnacles and mussels on the coast.
But my favourite meal in the Pacific NW was not at a Michelin-starred restaurant or made by a Top Chef alum, it was at Revel in Seattle. As someone who gets insecure going for Korean food because I can’t speak the language, I appreciate that Korean-born chef Rachel Yang has made the menu approachable. Dishes like the ‘kimchi pancake’ and ‘rice cakes’ are clear references to pajeon and tteokboki, respectively. But they’re made distinctly American with the addition of creations like ‘kimcheese’ (think kimchi mayo). The flowering cauliflower was served over a dollop of jalapeno ranch balanced with a swirl of peanut chili crisp oil. But the standout dish was perhaps the least Korean on the menu—halibut cooked in banana leaf. With a rich coconut curry, it transported me to Thailand, and the morning glory that accompanied it was better than the morning glory I had at Morning Glory restaurant in Vietnam earlier this year.