Next week I start back at UBC again. My classes in the summer will be online, and I’ve loaded up on the number of credits, figuring that restrictions on travel are likely to persist here for some time. Spring has come and moved to what feels like early summer. The leaves are on the trees, even on the old Crimean linden outside our balcony, which is covered in moss, and seems always a little later to bud, a little sparser when in leaf, than all the other trees in the street. The cherry and plum blossoms are now gone and, in Stanley Park, the first goslings are appearing, huddling together in little yellow rafts of life on Lost Lagoon. In B.C. COVID-19 seems contained in the wider community, but clusters in institutions: to nursing homes we have now added meat packing and poultry processing plants, those other places where unseen and underpaid labour is performed. And in Singapore, of course, the explosion of COVID-19 infections in migrant workers’ dormitories contrasts with diminishing “community” infections. 

Locked down over the last month, I’ve had time for reflection. All my grades are in for the courses I took on my first year in the MEd, and there’s a strange comfort in looking at them, and realizing that I’ve done well. Although I tell myself that I don’t value grades. Really. And yet the habit of benchmarking myself academically against others goes a long way back, to childhood, and the desire to store up personal capital to escape into a new and different life. My UBC transcript, funnily enough, goes back to when I first started my PhD in 1989. I can see all the graduate classes I took in English, and all those Mandarin Chinese classes I audited before I went to Taiwan. Grades have certainly inflated over the years. And now, partially to guard against this, or at least make readers of the transcripts aware, there’s a new column, the average grade for the class. Even now, with nothing at stake at all, I surprise myself in feeling pleased when I surpass it.

 I’ve also been realizing that some of my expectations of the program are perhaps unreasonable. I want much more attention given to skills. And yet I’d also like much more attention given to the wider context, both in terms of politics and the social, and in terms of intellectual engagements with basic questions, especially those around counselling as a culturally embedded practice. What I’ve found is that we often get caught in a kind of soggy middle ground, in which the results of post-positivist research are glibly applied to practice. We move too fast to ask too many questions, and we take things on trust. Yet there’s no easy way out of this, beyond maintaining some kind of dialogue between practice, theory, and context: any attempt to stress one of these elements means that I sacrifice the other two. What I’m hoping, then, this summer, is simply to tick off a number of courses from requirements, so that I have a lighter load, and thus more time to explore, next academic year, when something like normal university teaching will resume. In this exploration, I’ll face my usual dilemma—whether to follow my instincts, further into the self, or to push myself to do what comes less naturally to me, to reach out to others and to community.

In the brief interlude in my studies, I’ve gone back to work on scholarly papers: one in proof stages, one that has been accepted but needs revision, and a final one that I’m sending out to a journal, in a revised form, for the first time. One of the things my qualitative research class I took in the last semester made me realise is that it’s not as easy as I’d initially thought to move across disciplines in the research I do. I have highly developed close reading skills that I can apply to a variety of non-literary texts, but I’m used to working very much on my own with the text in front of me. I’ve now been exposed to possibilities that bring in a community: PhotoVoice, arts-based research, interviewing, and participant observation – yet learning skills for each would take time, and practice. In my current research, squeezed as it is into a month, I’ve fallen back onto skills I already have, putting off these thoughts for the future, and wondering which, if any of them, I might return to. As I’ve written in this blog before, growing older has made me more keenly aware of choices: I cannot do everything, and in order to do some things well I need to give up others. And yet I found so often, with all topics, there’s always something interesting by the wayside, a trail of breadcrumbs that leads you off over a hill, and before you know it, brings you into a beautiful and unfamiliar forest. At some point you stop and think, do I really want to go back?

I’ve also had the time to read, eclectically. First, a few books remaining from the Vancouver Public Library, before it shut down. Notable among them was Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter, the only one of her novels that I haven’t read. There’s something very beautiful about the way in which she represents the internal dialogues of characters.  Then hard copy books from Massy Books: short story collections by Richard Van Camp – Moccasin Square Gardens (very good, somehow more reflective than an earlier collection I read) and Deborah Willis – The Dark and Other Love Stories (well written but for me a little predictable, not so much in the plot, but in the way they are emotionally structured according, seemingly, to formulae, but then one stunning story, “Last One to Leave,” that goes down and down and down, through affective floor after floor). Yan Lianke’s darkly disturbing The Day the Sun Died. Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Talents, both grueling and prescient, a novel in which the future is informed by and releases the spectres of the past. Frank McCourt’s two alternately harrowing and very funny memoirs of a Limerick childhood, and then making his way as a young man in New York, Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis. Finally, when I’d developed momentum, Hilary Mantel’s last volume in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy,The Mirror and the Light, over 800 pages of it. I have to fight myself when reading it. The plot draws you onward, ever faster, towards the inevitability of Cromwell’s execution, while the language asks you to slow down, to lose yourself in its richness. And then I realise that I could happily lose myself forever in books for a whole summer, if it wasn’t for the insistent ache of those classes that start next week, almost like something caught in your teeth, that you can never not be aware of, that you return to, to worry at, again and again.