Although I had no preconceived notions about the results before the research, I was still surprised by how much these two most popular nightmares aligned with reality. The two keywords, family and exams, are almost a stereotype for East Asians, but from the long or short descriptions of the dreams, I could see the impact of these two themes on the interviewed East Asians: parental constraints, advice, obstacles to communication; the depressing atmosphere that pervades the classroom, the sense of self that is hidden in the group, the uncertainty and fear of the future, these long and slow effects are like tiny, accumulating wounds. They have even become old wounds, inadvertently triggered by what is happening in the present life.
These two topics are so emotionally charged, so much like a cup of overnight tea with a myriad of flavors, that defining and judging them has become an extraordinarily difficult task. This has become a key word in my research, production and writing: Fuzzy.
This kind of fuzziness appears frequently and abundantly in the interviews I conduct: during the dreamers' narrations, they appear to be extraordinarily fluent, and the dreams seem to be vividly familiar to them; but when we talk about what's behind the dreams, most of them fall into a pensive mood. After a few moments, a vague answer is provided. "I don't know, maybe?" "Maybe it's because of me, or maybe it's because of my dad" "It's kind of hard to say, but I always thought it didn't have anything to do with the fact that I'm always late."
The family and the examination, which are in a sense interconnected, become a bit sticky in the mouths of the interviewees: the rule of "talking about things" no longer applies here. Just as dylan couldn't explain why the expected "joy" of his father's death turned into two lines of tears when he woke up.
You see, I have tried to find "certain facts" in my dreams, but in these dreams I see "facts with blurred boundaries": are families in East Asia horrible? No, because most of the interviewees still have good memories of their families in their minds; is the East Asian school system completely stifling? No: some respondents still think that middle and high school are the times they miss the most. Is the East Asian family something to run away from? No. One interviewee never had a friendly relationship with her mother, but she still longs for her mother to love her in a normal way, and on her cell phone, her mother's note is still the affectionate "my mom".
As the research and production progressed, I gradually realized that the world is full of certainties and unknowns, and I happened to choose to walk into a zone in the middle of the two, a fuzzy one, difficult to come to a definitive conclusion, and full of complex emotions over years or decades. It's as if the place is surrouded in pre-dawn mists and morning dew, never bluntly spread out in the sunlight: this coincides with the dream itself, which belongs only to the sleep of a weak self-consciousness, and seems to be hardly noticeable.
Thus, all of the above is what I want to present to you. In the face of this complex collection of dreams, perhaps I can't offer a definitive conclusion: what is the East Asian family like? What is the East Asian school system like? What are East Asian people like? But by reading these words, perhaps you, I, others, we will all get a glimpse of a part of the East Asian people through the small window of dreams, the complexity of a person or a group of people that emerges from these fuzziness.