> on nesting
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: homemaking.
Hello friend,
We live across from an incense shop. Often, when I leave the house, I’ll find a mat of incense sticks drying in the sunlight. My roommate bought some the first week because our first floor bathroom stank, even after we doused the floor in bleach. We didn’t have any incense holders, so he stuck one stick diagonally into a kitchen sponge.
There are over two hundred temples in Lukang and shops for religious items must be everywhere, selling joss paper and various varieties of incense. I think of the sponge on our living room table, all bright yellow, green-bottomed. The incense was made for spiritual purposes, not as an air freshener. It’s similar to how I feel when I read travel blogs written by White Americans telling me where I should travel in Taiwan—a self-consciousness about how I position myself as an outsider in Taiwan.
Somewhere in my parent’s garage is a ten-year-old bag of incense, tied up in a shopping bag. When we open the bag, yellow powder spills everywhere, like pollen, onto our fingers. As far as I know, we use it only once a year, when we visit my grandmother’s grave in Ohio. Usually, we go around Memorial Day, so I won’t make it this year. I think about this when I visit temples in Lukang, watching people light exactly three sticks of incense, bow exactly three times. I never know what to think when I’m at my grandmother’s grave. How to pray. What to say to her.
In the 8th grade class this week, the students talked about how to visit temples. I caught only snippets—burn money, light incense, bow here, go upstairs, bow there. When my roommates and I visited the Mazu temple at midnight on the ninth day of the lunar new year, I felt intrusive, watching people walk around the temple with their incense, their bags of joss paper, their platters of fruit and whole ducks and other offerings. I wanted to know what it meant, and I felt that the knowing would make me feel like I had some stake in belonging there.
I’ve had this newsletter from a friend of a friend sitting in my inbox since Valentine's Day. In the letter, Faith and Rena write:
I’ve been thinking about love as a resting place, something away from all the effort we think we need to put into life and the roles we make ourselves play and the noise of it all. Love is certainly a verb, and it is a feeling, and I think it is also a truth, or maybe the feeling of remembering a truth. Love is what brings you back to yourself, makes you forget all about what you’ve been pretending to be all day.
When I think about love as a resting place I think of home, the idea of a home. For me and so many of my friends, home has become less of a real place and more incorporeal, an abstraction that results from moving so much. I got so used to packing everything up from school in the spring and then hauling it back again in the fall, switching apartments every year, etc. that I didn’t even notice that there may have been a loss, a loss of the safety/comfort that comes from knowing that you’ll return to the same physical space every day for years and years. Or maybe it’s that I spent so much time trying to get away from home that I didn’t even realize when its physicality had dissipated.
When my partner talks about homeownership, I get a little freaked out. Maybe it’s the fear of realizing your friends are old enough and make enough money to get mortgages, to participate in landownership (“property” being the basis of American racism and oppression since the country’s beginning).
The latest video Micarah Tewers posted on YouTube is about her buying a home. Her channel is technically about sewing but it’s also a glimpse into her life, living out her mid-twenties with her dad in her childhood Ohio home. Some of my friends also watch Micarah’s videos, and when we talk about her, we always circle back to how modest she is, how she hasn’t lost herself and moved to a hype house in LA or whatever it is influencers do when they start making more than enough money. When she said she bought a house, it surprised me for the same reasons as when my partner starts talking about buying a house. Does the impulse of homemaking (not the abstraction of “home,” but a physical home) require ownership?
I watched Nomadland a couple weeks ago and the moment I return to most is when Swankie talks about kayaking:
Come around the bend, was a cliff and find hundreds and hundreds of swallow nests on the wall of the cliff and the swallows flying all around, reflecting in the water so it looks like I’m flying with the swallows and they’re under me and over me and all around me. And the little babies are hatching out, and egg shells are falling out of the nest, landing on the water and floating on the water, these little white shells. It was like—it was just so awesome. I felt like I’d done enough. My life was complete. If I died right then in that moment, I’d be perfectly fine.
I cried at this part, more so than when they actually show footage of the nests. Homemaking in Nomadland requires ownership of a different sort. Fern can’t have a house, so she makes a home with other belongings. The plates. The swaps for an extra can opener. The freebies. The kind of home in Nomadland still requires an attachment to physical stuff, it’s just that the stuff is different.
In a VS episode about nesting, Danez Smith talks about how they bring an assortment of objects with them when they travel:
I started bringing this little pack of things that reminded me of home and people I love…It just had little mementos and stuff like that. And every place I went, I would just unravel it, and then I’d have an automatic altar.
I guess I’m kind of homesick, but it’s more like a homesickness for the future, like I don’t know where to anchor yet. Or like, I kind of sort of have a general idea of where I’ll anchor for the next few years, but don’t know what that will look like yet. And there is this fear about homemaking, too: What happens if I lose my home? Can I still build an altar?
Cheers,
Tiffany