Saturday, August 24, 2019

Jordan/Yuan-wei: Half a World Away

Been a while since I checked in, but I guess that happens to everyone - at a certain point, you are Jordan Lee Yuan-wei, recent college graduate with a job in the visual effects industry, and the fact that you used to be Jordan Chang, male and five years older, is less important on a daily basis.  Especially with my parents doing their best to act like I was born this way.  It was weird to get earrings for Christmas from my mom, but I'm not complaining.  Even though becoming a girl hasn't made me really into jewelry, that's her accepting a lot.

Of course, I don't may have one mother now, and Yang Chen-ai has been anxious in recent weeks.

I know that not many Americans have been following the news out of Hong Kong (this country has its own issues to fill all your worrying about the world going to hell needs), but it's something I get asked about a fair amount because I'm from there as far as anybody who doesn't know about the Inn is concerned.  What's going on scares the shit out of me, to be honest, because there's not a lot of scenarios that don't have Lee Yuan-wei going back there for more than a visit at some point, and I'm scared that it's never going to be close to the place I know again.

On the one hand I don't know if Chen-ai really cares about that.  Maybe she does; even evil people can love their home, though I think she's mercenary enough to put up with anything so long as the business continued to bring money in.  On the other, well, she had had her husband killed with the intention of setting me or whoever else wound living Yuan-wei's life up for the fall, so who knows what else she's afraid of happening to her should China take more direct control over Hong Kong and start looking into things that had previously been ignored.  It's enough to spook her, enough to get in contact with Bingbing and hint that if she would like to go back to her real life, that could be arranged, if Chen-ai were to become her.

I'm almost angry that she said no, for a bunch of really fucking stupid reasons.

I suppose all of you that read this blog because you, not having been to the Inn, see it as a weird or kinky fantasy saw this coming, because it's the most dramatic way to fuck with me, but it turns out that the person who has been living the life of Chen Bingbing for the past couple years is, you guessed it, my ex-boyfriend Jacky.  The one I broke up with because Chen-ai promised to ruin our lives if I didn't.  Who then, apparently thinking that I wasn't upset enough by the whole state of affairs, proceeded to fuck and then get involved with my brother without telling either of us what was going on.

The whole finding out deal was weird - I guess Jacky found out that Chen-ai was sleeping with whoever was living his life (he was working as her personal assistant), figured that meant he was never going back, so came clean to Max.  They didn't immediately break up, but he told me, and...  Well, the whole thing felt gross, and for a while my brother and I weren't talking, but eventually he met another girl and decided he didn't want to be in a relationship that wasn't just about the two people involved.  Jacky/Bingbing graduated from college this May and went back home to HK, and we'd kind of figured that was it.  I wanted that to be it.

I asked him what he wanted, and while he said that he had come to accept the idea of being Bingbing for the foreseeable future, it wasn't like he'd put down roots, and I can testify that the call of "how things should be" is damn strong, even when everybody thinks they're probably better off.  So who am I to tell him that there's probably some major league catch?

It's got me stupidly distracted, though, to the point where people are noticing at work.  I can tell them that I'm worries about folks back "home", but the truth is, they really don't give a shit; they just can't have our team missing deadline on animating a swarm of monsters.  so there's been a lot of overtime and I probably haven't been doing my best work.

And I don't get it.  I've always had it in the back of my mind that Chen-ai might decide to leave her old life behind and become a generation younger, I always thought it would be to become Yuan-wei.  It's just so much fucking simpler!  Has she stayed liking me enough to not want to mess with my life, or does she see some other way to mess with me?

Who the fuck knows?  This shit doesn't matter as much as the rest of what's going on in Hong Kong, and I wish it wasn't my first concern about the whole thing.

-Jordo

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