Venus is a student at Hong Kong University and was introduced to me by our common friend Shyla. First Venus started helping me with my research and generally showed enthusiasm for my projects and personality. Now we have evolved and can chat with each other in the dark morning hours or late at night, and sometimes even in the French language. We use each other as willing subjects and objects of our research. Venus wrote a paper about me for one of her classes. Now I am writing about Venus in my new book about pornography and Internet culture.
(photo by Atomzi)
And several weeks ago, Venus invited people to write all over her school uniform in a performance art piece which took place during the opening of the exhibition ExtraordinaryDresscode:::The Rest of Us. She was wearing a traditional Chinese school uniform (Cheongsam style) and acted like a bored schoolgirl waiting to be distracted. She walked around in the gallery and convinced people to write messages on her uniform. We had thought out this concept together and went shopping for the uniform. It was challenging for us to deal with the personnel inside the school uniform store, as they could sense that I was not a real mom and they were afraid we would use the uniform to “party.” We were surrounded by hundreds of real moms who would swiftly give their instructions about their specific schools, sizes, and cuts (each school has a different uniform), then the moms would collect their kids’ uniforms and then get the hell out of there. I wanted to get a uniform for Venus as well and finally we convinced the personnel to sell us the blue cheongsam-style school uniform that Venus used to wear in high school.
The last time we met again was during my interview of Venus for my new book, where we chatted again for several hours until the digital tape recorder ran out of memory. We went out to eat pizza and Venus suddenly tackled the the topic of age gap–concrete stories about her love for the much younger and the much older. And some level-headed analysis about these these concrete instances of a somewhat lopsided desire. And then we agreed there was something amazing about it all as she ran off to catch her yoga class.
(photo by katrien)