Cong Yu
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On Driving
Driving is my church basement romance. I did not fall in love with driving for the reasons most people do - Neither speed nor the adolescent promise of freedom. My relationship with driving arrived much later, shaped by a long sequence of liminal states between countries, visas, relationships, and versions of myself. In all of those in-betweens, I was always waiting for the knife hanging above to drop. Driving was the first thing that wasn’t.My twenties unfolded across unstable ground. I built a life between negotiations and disgraceful bargainings. Liminality became my native terrain which sounds poetic until you’ve lived inside it long enough to know it mostly feels like waiting with nowhere to put your hands. When I started doing solo trips with long distances on roads that weren’t quite roads — something shifted. The liminality is still there in the long dark nights but I was moving through it instead of suspended in it.
Manual driving, especially, demanded a kind of presence I rarely gave myself. To shift gears is to stay inside the machine. To read the terrain is to return to instinct. For someone who lives mostly in her head: thinking ahead, rehearsing outcomes, anticipating, driving pulled me back into my body in a way that felt almost medicinal or religious.
I had an argument with someone I cared deeply on Christmas Day, then I find myself crying in the bush seven hours from my own ground in Sydney. The emotional blow was sharp and specific: a rupture at the exact threshold of intimacy, when the door had been open just long enough for me to step toward it.
I got in the car and drove. Seven hours, two toilet stops, one tank of petrol, and somewhere in between, I stopped being stranded in someone else’s emotional landscape and returned to my own.
I got in the car to save myself. But what I understood later — much later, the way certain things only become clear in the rearview — was that by saving myself, I had also saved something else. That drive meant the relationship wasn’t defined by his worst moment. The beauty of what we had didn’t get shattered on Christmas Day. It survived, not because I forgave him in the car, but because driving gave me back my dignity. And because I held onto my dignity, the love and sacred yet fragile romance didn’t have to be collateral damage.
This is what off-roading has taught me too: the terrain reveals everything. You can’t fake traction. You can’t perform your way through uncertain ground — you have to actually read it, feel it, respond to it in real time. My life has never been a highway. It has been a dirt track, a desert road, a stretch of unmarked coastline. Driving taught me that this is not a problem to be solved but a landscape to be navigated. There’s a difference.
What remains constant is this: driving is how I return to myself. Not escape, return. The road gives shape to the parts of my life that feel formless. At times, in the space between destinations, I discover that the movement itself was the answer I was looking for.
I love driving.
To G
My dear little sister, my Gemini gang, you don’t know how grateful I am for having you this precious being in my life.
I think of your face in the dark - we look so similar but different - as that racist lady at Le Bon Marché noticed, you are more of “darker” Cantonese/south East Asian, while my features and bones appear to be more of classic East Asian woman, a typical look of the lower Yangtze River delta my ethnic origin. My second language is your mother tongue, but we know we belong the same destiny of being an immigrant woman. We know it’s not easy to live a life in a learnt language
We know it’s not easy to be a girl living a life
I wish you happy, I wish you healthy and well, I wish you achieve everything you want.
Amour,
Sister, 姐姐, Jie Jie
* G is a
Living in a Foreign Language
Living in a language when you know you will never have the full context is like standing in Dee Why Lagoon alone in the dark. The sand underneath your gumboots is moving, but you know you are safe—or at least your reckless courage tells you that you are safe and sound—alongside the baby king prawns swimming in the water, and the Milky Way moving above you.