on Gilmore Girls
I started watching Gilmore Girls for the second time, episode 1 season 1, I couldn't find nor am I in the mood looking for an alternative to fill in the gap. What is so special about Gilmore Girls that every time when I watched it, be it in the background, or with full attention, the warmth just filled up in me. The mother-daughter intimate relationship, growing up and always coming back to the little Stars Hollow town, dining and chilling at the same place, and always walking on the same street, the feeling of settled, homey, comfort makes you want to smile and I had to say I saw myself in both the daughter and the mother.
Stars Hollow, the little and tight-knit fictional town in Connecticut, with probably less than a 1000 residents, where everyone knows each other, seeing each other grow up and grow old, everyone's daughter is everyone's daughter. That just resonates with my life so much. I grew up in a small village town with about 1 thousand regular residents living in it, and half of them carried the same last name as I do (Hu), each new cry of a new born, each newly knot-tied couple is a whole town's celebration. Almost everyone has their houses built by themselves, no high floors, with max-5 floor low-rise houses. The river flows through the village and that's what I jogged along since growing up. They know where I went for primary school, middle to high school and my college, where I worked, where I lived and they care about my relationship status more than I do (not a fun thing when your life becomes the whole town's chitchat topic). Life is simple, repeated, and peaceful.
That kind of intimate mother and daughter relationship, the way they grow up together, experiencing different stages of life, the loves, the heartbreaks, the fights, the mistakes, the regrets...that kind of intimacy and closeness is something I always long for. I started boarding school since the age of 12 (middle school), and my life before undergraduate was mostly about competing for a higher rank in grades, caring about appearance and outfit is being irresponsible for your future, is what I learnt as the first principle when growing up, I don’t have a childhood friend like Lane, no one is beside me all the time except myself, having an early boyfriend during your puberty is something one should be ashamed of, especially the kind that drags your grades down. Sometimes, as I look back, there’s always some sense of tragedy in the early years of my life, that lost freedom, that lost care-free childhood, that lost pursuit of creativity, everything is about competence and competition, I felt very sad about the younger self and whoever is experiencing that same pathway in life.
On journalism, surprisingly similar in career ambitions with Rory, I always strived to be a journalist since growing up and applied to journalism schools for my master’s though none of them really worked out. The excitement and nervousness I had when seeing my first by-line printed out on a Shanghai-based English newspaper, and my street interviews series released on multiple channels...I gave up my pursuit of journalism when I failed to be admitted to any of the top journalism schools, and pivoted to the technology sector, which turned out really well too. In another world, if that journalist ship sailed off successfully, I wonder who and how I would be.
There can’t be more differences between my life vs Gilmore Girls’, but also can’t be more similar. It’s so easy to project myself onto them, and make wishes that in another world, I will find great joy in a life like that.