Quartets

Four for fortitude.

Four years into this strange decade of elastic time. Going on our fourth year of life in Japan. The American presidency is neatly partitioned into four revolutions around the sun. We officially moved just days after the last election, and somehow the quagmire of another campaign news cycle is already upon us—with higher stakes than ever before, and yet greater antipathy, heavier dread.

Four years felt like a lifetime in high school and college. They were such intensely formative eras, so fragile and free, at once. The first four years of “adulthood” after that were extraordinarily tough, but also exhilarating, groping in the darkness for purpose or direction, love or understanding.

I was four years old when I was flung out of China and onto this other path, snaking westward, doubling back, that has led me to where I am today. Closer to my origins than I have ever been, and simultaneously many more layers removed.

The view from Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei.

Now I’m staring down the barrel of four full decades of life (well, two more birthdays to go, but still) and realizing how fleeting and fickle these four-year chunks are. A flash in the pan. There’s nothing frivolous about this measure of time, and yet it can seem so flimsy or insubstantial: just another sand castle to be swept away by the tides of history.

Chinese people are superstitious about the number four because the word for it is homonymous with the word for death. An identical taboo stands in Japan for the very same reason.

Four, a foregone conclusion. A foray, a frenzy. Four horsemen heralding the apocalypse.

The teasing sun, one afternoon near Korakuen.

I spent the first four days (and then some) of 2024 immersed in an intensive spell of work: preparing for my dissertation defense while completing a close-to-final-final round of edits on my novel. It was a thoroughly exhausting period, but in a good way. These tasks with concrete deadlines signaled that these two endeavors—the doctorate, the novel—are coming to a conclusion. Major life projects for which I staked out mental space, among other resources, over the course of four years, give or take, are reaching a culmination.

Once these are done cooking, who knows what will happen. Discouragement and rejection are rife in academia and publishing alike. My dogged pursuit of whatever goals I have in these domains is one part delusion, one part stubbornness. But I’m glad to have made progress.

The year of the dragon looms. The last dragon year of 2012 also felt like a fateful, freighted time: worlds ending, new bloom, settling into my late twenties, desperate for a shakeup and getting more than I could have asked for.

Shinobazu Pond in winter.

Hoping to find some balance in this year of travel and transition ahead. And trying to meditate on the evenness and equilibrium of four: four cardinal directions. Four suits of playing cards. Four-character idioms. Four inner planets.

A group of four is the perfect party size for dim sum, if you ask me. It’s also an ideal dynamic for dinner dates and road trips. A four-hour flight? Easy peasy. Weird, interesting things happen at four in the morning. When I played violin growing up, I remember playing in quartets being one of the more consistently enjoyable experiences. That we could synchronize our rhythms and harmonize in such a way was thrilling, nearly magical.

Four for foresight and forbearance. Four for fortitude. “To feel at home across four seas”—the aspirational cosmopolitanism of 四海为家. To find rootedness and belonging no matter where in the world you go.