It is 5:25am and I am sitting on a rough-textured sofa
reading Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. Sumire has disappeared without a trace
and K (the narrator) is currently reading the thoughts she had written down on
her Powerbook prior to her disappearance. Nevertheless to say, I am reading
this through K’s eyes, understanding her thoughts from K’s point of view.
As I read through every line and sentence of Sumire’s
thoughts, I stopped at a quote Sumire had taken to heart, “Did you ever see
anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?” From the literal perspective, it is
true. Unless the bullet had miraculously taken a sharp turn outward from its
course, there is no chance of avoiding bloodshed once the bullet has made
contact with the body. In other words, contact = bloodshed.
Sumire then compares it with her past writing experience,
how everything she has written has been “a dream, a sightless foetus called understanding, floating in the
universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension” (149). I couldn’t help
but compare it to my previous adolescent years of confusion. I was the typical
adolescent teenager. I went through numerous existential crises. I pounded
myself with questions such as, “Who am I really? What do I want to be in the
future?” My poor adolescent soul must have been suffering a lot back then for
who would ever want to think about this when I was already undergoing physical
changes?
But that question, to this day, still remains unanswered. I
thought I had it answered; I wanted to be an engineer who would change the
world with one single creation. It was the typical dream for every aspiring
individual in a top college. We all had one thing in common: we wanted to make
an impact in society. We wanted to make a change to the world.
Yet, how important was that? Looking back, I see my younger
teenage self trapped in that same fluid of incomprehension that Sumire so
clearly described. I was a fool so to speak. I did not know anything about the
real world and just dreamed to be a high and mighty individual. Now that I am in college, I can see how naïve
I was back then. Life isn’t as simple as a piece of toast; it’s so much more
complicated.
Last semester, I took a Women and Gender Studies class, a
decision that left my friends and family confused. They asked me why out of all
the available classes would I choose to take a Women and Gender Studies class.
My mom especially thought it was a useless class as it wouldn’t help career
wise.
Nevertheless, it was the most eye-opening class I had ever taken in
my life. Though I expected to be taught about the importance of feminism or
something equivalent, my professor gave me much more. I became aware of the
problematic messages that society placed on gender. Though it was a bit on the
feminism side, I became aware of why it was problematic. To sum it up, women
are valued just for the sexual organ. We are the ones responsible for producing
the later generation. We are significant for maintaining the human race.
What is so problematic about this is that it’s the sole
aspect of our femininity that we are valued for. Women have so much potential
and so much to contribute to the community. It saddens me to see women being
objectified instead of being emphasized as a whole. But who could blame society
for that? It’s just the traditional viewpoints that are influencing how society
views women. As conservatism holds a strong presence in society, it is no shock
that this perspective holds a strong role even in modern-day.
Yet on the other facet, there are women who want to be viewed
as dominant. One of the major events that took place on campus last semester
was the class government election. I remember scrolling through the candidates’
faces, examining their facial features and the multifarious aspects of each
campaign. Each person or team had one thing in common: they all wanted to make
a difference to our class. And that’s true; who wants to have a person or team
as a leader who thinks there is nothing that needs to be changed about our
current situation? We can never be satisfied with what we have and we always
want for more.
But there is a line between making a difference and wanting
to make that difference. As I read, I couldn’t help wondering if these
candidates really wanted to be the people that they wrote themselves out to be.
I didn’t personally know any of them so there was no way I knew for certain. It
wasn’t, however, hard to think that they were doing this as an aspect they
could put on their resumes so companies could think better of them.
After reading Sumire’s thoughts, I like to think that we, as college students,
are all trapped in that bubble of incomprehension. It dawns me to think of an
individual who really knows what they want to be in the future. How could you
ever be so certain of who you want to be? I myself know I like the mathematical
sciences but I love to write essays (like what I am doing now at 5am) and I
love to learn about the liberal arts. I cannot, however, go to either; I want
to find the midpoint between the two extremes. I’m just not there yet.
My main objective in life is then to find that gun and shoot
open that fluid of incomprehension that I am still trapped within. And that gun
is located in the midpoint.
