1. An Incomplete List of La Weather Eternal Sunshine, June Gloom, Infernal Heat, Demon Winds #2
At that point, my entire existence meant making all the right choices to put me in all the right rooms—one of which was William de Witt’s.
Usually when people asked me why I wanted to be an actress I’d give them a very sly smile, saying real artists don’t decide they want to be artists, they simply can’t help it; art comes for them with a knife.
This was the tacit truth, that anyone who was a real artist (the distinction being, loosely, that a Pink’s hot dog wasn’t real food but a hot dog cut up into Filipino spaghetti absolutely was) didn’t choose this lifestyle from a place of rational clarity but from a fit of divine inspiration.
Like tongues of fire, or God telling Noah to build an ark.
An objectively insane thing to do if you don’t already know a flood is coming—buoyed only by the knowledge, crystalline and absolute, that this was not only right, but foretold.
I tried explaining it this way, Catholically, to my mother, who wanted to know why she’d bothered working so hard to make a life for us if I only wanted to throw it away, forever starving for jobs, eternally shouldering rejection.
My mother is a very smart woman—there’s a sturdiness to her, a resiliency like ancient ruins.
Determination to survive. She just isn’t the kind of woman to entertain a destiny.
Or maybe her destiny is more polite, and doesn’t whisper to her at night.
To my mother, the ideal life meant safety, which implied a practical career, the kind with consistent paychecks, and benefits.
The freedom to sleep well knowing that the rent would be paid and that any unforeseen acts of God might annoy us but not destroy us.
Because I was good at my craft, I did grasp her point in a way that she never really grasped mine.
But I did not, as she wanted me to, revel in containment.
My grandmother understood this because my grandmother was the one who believed in the ineffable, in the elements of nature and balance.
Something that was kind of like God but also more like cosmic irony, which was probably what made her feel so at home in LA.
My grandma was the one with the initial thirst for entrepreneurship.
She’d bought the courtyard apartment complex we lived in back when apartment complexes cost about the same as a sack of potatoes, and she had also opened the store that my mom was now trying desperately to cobble into a brand.
Despite my grandma’s natural inclination for investment, Mom was the savvy one.
She spotted trends, charting them like stars.
She wisely did not believe in them but still trusted their trajectories, their implications, like cracking the spine on the zeitgeist and interpreting the entirety of the work, not just the current page.
My mother was the one who first noticed the uptick in new construction around our neighborhood; the hipster coffee brands with sans serif fonts that heralded development, and with it affluent white people, who would soon be on their way.
She was also, ironically, the one who started the palm readings at the store, the tarot consultations, the gradual transformation of a Filipino dry goods shop with its Virgin Mary candles and neighborhood gossip and apothecary cabinet full of dried herbs for lactation and balms for sore muscles into an offbeat destination for the West Coast woo-woo occult.
The spiritualists who were really orientalists, who wanted crystals and sage and balance and the aesthetic of authenticity, but packaged neatly, in English, and poised to post. Mom, who wasn’t not an artist despite being fervently a capitalist, painted the fairy houses and affirmation cards, fitting our old-world superstitions to the tune of the modern ennui.
I say “our,” but of course I wasn’t involved in that, or why would I have chosen to be an actor?
If I were really part of “our” then I would have simply done what my mother asked, like accountancy or law school, things I possibly had the brains for but not the patience, because I didn’t froth at the mouth for the economy the way I did for the freefall of art.
I wanted to be alive the way the stage made me feel alive, the way I came alive for the camera.
I wanted the kind of life that didn’t simply blur the days.
So yes, art came for me in the night, and it came for me again in the morning.
It made me do things I wouldn’t have had the endurance for otherwise—long runs in blistering heat, diet after diet, money that went toward facials and blowouts instead of birthday presents and family vacations, late nights followed by early mornings, huge gaps of daylight to be filled with audition calls that didn’t always come.
A normal person doesn’t choose that. It’s an infection, a fucking disease.
If I didn’t attend to it, if I didn’t feed it—the craving—then I’d waste away and die.
But try explaining that to someone who’s lived through martial law.
Impossible. So, most of the time I didn’t.
I bartended and taught yoga classes and produced a variety of content with whatever trend was hot that day and I worked at the store when I could, depending on what left me free for the mythology of callbacks, like midday fucks with a half-invested lover.
Trusting blindly that the thing for which I lived and breathed would reward me in the end.
My precious artifacts at the time: my phone (of course), my car, the perfect cropped tee from Target that I kept in my trunk, one in almost every color that suited my soft winter palette (the quintessential biracial experience: too white on the outside to be Filipina, too Filipina on the inside to be white), because the hem skimmed my waist at just the right spot.
Feminine enough, but not trying too hard.
Sexy, but understated. (This was what the casting director had liked about me before the casting director, too, lost her job.) Folded neatly in the trunk: the perfect pair of vintage 501s, which I’d struggled through countless thrift stores just to find.
I always knew I had to change something about myself if they felt too tight in the thighs one day.
I monitored my body like a fucking zoologist, my metric being that one pair of jeans.
I wore them to Hollywood parties, to auditions, to catering shifts, behind the bar, under an apron, to dinners with friends where I said I wasn’t hungry because I’d already eaten at home.
(You can see why I took a liking to Emmanuelle’s daily smoothies.) I wore them nearly every day at the de Witt house, and I can still catch that old hint of smoke whenever I slide them off.
The point is that certain things were true about my life in a way that’s unignorable—without them, there’s no story.
Of those truths, the most important one was this: I was young enough to believe every romance was inherently Bluebeardian.
Locked doors, deadly secrets. A deep, insidious longing for someone to be a little bit mean to me, which subconsciously I deserved.
I wasn’t the type to give up ambition for love, so I had never considered how I might behave under conditions of abject lunacy.
In retrospect, if a man says run, you should listen.
I didn’t, of course. But that’s what I’m trying to tell you—there really wasn’t a version of me who could.