hello from queer stories, hello to queer futures

by Yu-Chen Lai

Yu-Chen shares the works he created with friends during queer qandī fest, including a creative narrative piece and a hand-drawn postcard.

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Hello friends.

September has been full of birthdays for my close ones, and in this month of joy and celebration I also turned 24. While reflecting on what feels different this year about myself, I find that one difference I am grateful for was sort of amplified by the queer qandī festival, when Aude led us on a workshop in crafting queer narratives. I give in to my (immensely millennial) compulsion to worry over past experiences in the gay dating world, acknowledging the feelings like I missed out on high school romances or that I am otherwise ill-versed in the hookup culture that seems hyper-visible for cis gay men in the US and Taiwan.

I am also prompted to think about the future (not to turn this into a quarter-life crisis). Another workshop at the queer qandī fest was led by Bella and Hanna from the daikon* zine, which invited us to think about queer futures and queer utopias, as well as how to implement them. We made postcards and compiled a zine to visualize and materialize what we wish to see in the world.

I put below both the narrative piece and the utopia postcard, to capture a sense of the productive energy generated in the room when a group of QTIPOC put their heads down together. (Scroll to end for whales and rainbows!)

When I listen to podcasts about queer loves and about unrequited adorations, I see him in the elevator coming down to greet me in Paris, and I think this time I want to be the one doing the work: I want to want with this boy who seems lost but inviting, happy but not quite in love, and so they say it is dangerous and alarming, our minds, laborious, in fact too productive at seeing a lover who is not present. They say it is not fair to be in love with someone who is not there nor there for it, though he feels nonetheless real because he must be real, his skin shies and his laugh warms, quiets, and I think he does not know, see, feel, share the same world I think I was in, painting a relationship for myself that is mine and mine alone, for this time I do not feel trapped and I think he does not have hands too slick on my chest, whispers too heavy in my ears, ex-lovers too present in the room, I enjoy myself around him but I don’t think he feels the same, at least not in the way of loving an imagination in the mind, loving a past future in the middle of nowhere, loving a self so capable of love full of sincerity, so real perhaps because he still makes me afraid somehow, familiar in the uncertainty and confusion somehow, comforting because I intimately know how to love a man who doesn’t love me back, again and again and perhaps this time he still does not love me but perhaps neither do I, really.

When the seatbelt at the backseat of this car isn’t very tight and I try to adjust it I am on the plane away from Taipei City, this time the relationship ending as abruptly as it has begun, old patterns of curated connections and careful words that still failed, slow embraces that still fell, useless, and this time for the hundredth time I hear him recording his songs inside his studio to someone before me and then another after me and I am still, stuck, in my plane seat leaving his city, I am still stuck with my seat belt that is as binding as it is temporary, I am still not moving but being moved across heights and sheets and oceans, and I think I am shaking but the man sitting next to me is not, I am crying but my father seeing me off that morning is not, and I have many questions but I think my nose and mouth cannot breathe through the liquid to ask them, who do I ask? Where did I go? Do I hold onto so much only because I have nowhere to put them down? A devastation with nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, nowhere to jump, to hang, to cut, to drown and then the taxi driver stops the meter and I just get out of the car.

I guess Mandarin speakers call relationships a segment of feelings, but I feel it also means having a part, a paragraph, a passage of emotions that carries me from one place to another, reassembled, rephrased, replaced. I think about how diaspora means having a place and time you can never return to, and I think I am also displaced in this way although I do not know if I truly have a claim to where or why. I think there is also a body belonging to that time and place that I cannot become although I think it should be mine, complete and whole with his own set of words, motions, fury, a different body that should have been me, a shape and sound which, had I inhabited it, would perhaps have allowed me to function differently and I could work through the world more easily, readily, steadily. Parcels of feelings and memories that are now too big or too small, too old and too far from where I am, and still I do not know if they are moving me or I them, though I know they stop me from thinking about how to proceed, stop me from looking away, stops me from thinking whether this will end where, who, when.

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Things I move toward

When asked about what I envision in queer utopias, I think decolonization cannot be left behind. I still think about the people on the islands of Taiwan, how Taiwan was first described by navigators as 鯤島, a whale-like island, and I wonder to where we are going now and from where we have come. My friends celebrate Taiwan for being the first country in Asia to implement marriage equality by law, but I hope we also do not forget the colonial legacies of the Japanese Empire and Chinese Nationalists that we did not, indeed cannot leave behind, but must live with, contend with everyday and carry forward with us. We do not arrive at utopia until justice is brought to the land and the water and the mountains of these islands, until indigenous peoples take back the power and resources to properly serve their communities, until new immigrants from other parts of the Asia Pacific are enfranchised, welcome and at home. Somehow, a utopic future, like Taiwan, must be able to be all these things for different people, all at the same time.

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