A man in the weight room does not move in synchrony with others. Quite the opposite — he is each in his own world, headphones over his ears like some bellicose gladiator ready to fight until his knees give out. In place of some prancing beast he has the cable machine, its handle stiff and smooth like the tusks of a wild boar. He lunges at these tusks, back locking into position. The eighty-pound weight elevates, hovering by his waist before it plunges to earth with a precipitous clang. After this first tug the gladiator leaps into rhythm, movements widening into distinct extension and retraction of the three-headed muscles at the back of his arms. Again and again he levitates the weight stack, snorting like a wild hog. But a man in the weight room does not hear himself. The only thing he hears is Skrillex screaming in his ears like it’s the end of the world, and so he goes in again for One! Last! Push! After an eternity, the tug of war ends: the man lets go of the boar tusks, which turns into a lifeless hunk of metal once released from his virile grip.
My friends and I used to make fun of men in the weight room, how overconfident they must be to spend hours huffing and puffing to the contour of their own muscles. But as I ventured into the grubby basement and became more comfortable with my own set of dumbbells, realization dawned: when one’s body is deep in motion, one’s sense of vision, while trained on the mirror in front of the weight bench, isn’t perceiving itself. Or rather, one becomes immured in self-consciousness for the first few moments (my biceps are underdeveloped, would my face look weird when I’m picking up these dumbbells, and how for Chrissake is the guy next to me lifting three times heavier!!!), which quickly gives way to an instinctual, rhythmic reaching for and quailing from pain. Trying to not be crushed by the weight, the mind stops running circles around whether the way the body moves, or exists in this world, is enough. Pushing past the point of comfort rips apart muscle myofibrils, and this plasmic ripping clears the mind. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become, Milan Kundera writes. But in lifting one feels not only weight but, simultaneously, lightness — the magnificent lightness of realizing that one’s body is not a finite lump but a living dart — stronger, faster, more able with time, toughened up compared to the last lift. The weightlifter’s vision both tunnels in and expands — beyond the mirror, beyond the present, beyond himself as separate from the cable machine that his fingers are touching — until some trigger goes off: the end of a song, a magic number in his head. This alarm reminds him that his existence does not extend to infinity, but remains confined within some corporal, expandable but as yet demarcated boundaries of a body. Nonetheless, it is he who pushed it to this brink, imposing motion upon the otherwise stagnant objects that are body and cable machine. Victorious, he comes back to earth.
A man is moaning in the Museum of Communism. In my fifteenth hour in Prague, nothing surprises me anymore. The Flixbus arrived at dawn to this city I had dreamt of seeing since I was thirteen years old, devouring The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the brutalist classroom of my Communist school. Oh how the Soviet oak desk, with its conveniently tilted top, provided cover for my deviant activities of the mind! I still remember reading about the Prague Spring and the Russian tanks, how they bulldozed this city five days after New Year’s 1967 to purge all those who had dared to clamor for freedom. And Tereza — Kundera’s caricature of woman as weighted, finally written in motion as she braved the streets by herself to take pictures of the atrocities. As my Party cadre droned on with his slogans, empty-eyed, I imagined Tereza’s fingers on the camera as she peered through the viewfinder. For one brief, glorious instant, this woman would find the courage to impose her shutter’s movement onto the world — snip! snap! — before she went back to her husband to be undressed and weighed down. At thirteen I could see their naked bodies, his on top of hers, pressing down to the rumbles of bulldozing tanks and Kundera’s lyrical prose. Meanwhile, Uncle Hồ gazed on from his perch on top of the blackboard.
The Flixbus pulled into Florenc station. My friend and I collected the two duffel bags that contained all our possessions that week, jittery with anticipation and preemptive regret that we were only able to spend one day in Czechia, the archetypal American on spring break. On the streets of this Bohemian city, aluminum and concrete dance like silk. After tasting green poison from raw fire in an absinthe cellar, we stumbled into daylight squinting at our hands. I couldn’t convince my friend that Vaclav Havel and the Czech KGB were worth squeezing into the precious hours before dark, so at 3 p.m. I find myself alone before a green police uniform. The suit is from 1951, paired in display next to a helmet stamped at the helm with a double-tailed lion rampant wrapped in rye. Funny how Soviet imaginaries converge across different continents. If I did not train my eyes on the Bohemian lion I could swear the insignia was my home country’s hammer-and-sickle on the same bed of cereal and blood.
My soliloquy is punctured by what initially sounds like heavy breathing. I tilt my head towards the sound and realize it is coming from the adjacent room. The breathing is so faint that I think I must have misheard, but as I try to refocus on the captions behind the green uniform it waxes into a series of distinctly male, guttural groans. The room takes on a newly intimate character, but somehow no one around me is noticing anything strange. They all seem local, reading the Czech side of the displays instead of the English one, and I wonder if there is some context clue I am missing out on. Why am I listening to a man moaning at the museum — surely on some loudspeaker, yet so close by at times as if right inside my ears?
Soon, the man in the next room is no longer just moaning: he is wailing and cursing under his breath while struggling against some invisible restraint, the sonic reflections of his movements sharp and caustic. Some clanging of metal. A yelp of pain. I can hear him just before turning the corner, and imagine that a video would soon materialize to justify the awkward auditory experience. I think about my last museum visit — the Hollywood Museum in LA — where I unwittingly stepped into a hall filled with screens of Pedro Almodóvar’s brilliantly chromatic women stabbing various men with kitchen knives. But that would be too easy. In Prague, in the Museum of Communism, what I get upon turning the corner: a heavyset desk, two straight back chairs, and a gooseneck lamp.
A bell rings as I step into the room, marking the end of one torture session. The sharp yells subdue into ragged breathing; the man on the loudspeaker has been looped back to the beginning of his audiotape existence. For him, pain never ends; it simply stretches to infinity and back again, forcing the most animal sounds out of his vocal tract as his limbs contort in unnatural angles, his eyes glaze over and his skin pricks open. Unable to control the movement of his muscles, I wonder if he feels the same sense of lightness as the man in the weight room. Can movement under duress still clear the mind? Or is it too weighted by the recognition of its own powerlessness, reflected in the sardonic smile of its torturer? My first thought: what a privilege it is to choose pain! To reach for and retreat from pain in the lurid brightness of the gym basement — instead of submitting to it ad infinitum in the dark damp cellar of some Commissar, brandishing his whip as he straps one’s legs to the chair! But on second thought: does submission to pain mean absence of choice?
After all, based on the museum caption that reported 205,486 imprisoned political dissidents, this man must have chosen resistance with the full knowledge that the torture chamber was a possible, even probable, consequence. We often speak of dissidents’ courage to stand up in spite of pain. But maybe, they are simply more in touch with the truth that it is oftentimes pain that gives movement meaning — meaning sorely lacking from the daily humdrum of writers and scientists made to cut up identical leather soles in the Svit. I imagine him as one of them, the man on the audiotape, feeling his fingers go numb from the endless furling and unfurling of knuckles over skiving machine. In the absence of all other choices, there is always the option to stop. When he did this, or whatever brave stupid thing he did that put him in the crosshairs of the Czech KGB, was this man praying he would continue moving through the world unscathed as before? Or was he running headlong for the torture chamber, a human dart quivering to snap and draw blood?
***
A man is moaning and moving towards me. Gentle curls fall to one side of his forehead, which I, from a great distance of roughly three feet under him, cannot quite reach to brush behind his ear. His chest is peppered with veiny muscles, but what titillates me more is the defined silhouette of his thighs and buttocks, tough and well-proportioned like the bent-over thinking Rodin. Funny, how the brain latches onto different details from my encounters with various men and women — without which the little romps we engage in, marked by generally similar trappings of flesh piece held, lips touched, and names called — would meld into one lugubrious mass. I can never quite predict which slight bend of the head or glint in the eye would draw out my impulse to move the other’s body with my own. In this case, it is something about the drawl in his voice as he moans and throws his head back, my kneeling Rodin, that compels me to move sideways and flip him onto the bed.
As with lifting, sex starts with an all-encompassing self-consciousness (my thighs are too big, my skin is not soft enough, he probably thinks I am a slut for sleeping with him on the first date) that gives way to an instinctual, rhythmic reaching for and quailing from desire. When I write about these encounters, sheepishly aware that Society — maybe even my closest friends — might be pathologizing my desires, I attempt to psychoanalyze myself. But in the absence of any Freudian motifs, the best diagnosis I can give is this: in sex, I am chasing that moment when my body, reeling from the most unabashed form of objectification that highlights its material impermanence, abruptly throws itself into motion — aiming at others like a dart. Between the first caress and the strike of midnight, between our young supple skin and the final softening of our bones, there is only movement.
In this life, I do not know if I have the mettle in me to do the brave stupid thing of prostrating myself on the streets for ideals I hold dear, rushing towards vague hints of detainment and torture. I do not even know if I have the mettle to resist, to refuse cooperating. Am I more Havel or Husák? At thirteen, I thought the answer was clear; now, I am no longer so sure. But in this moment, as a declaration to no one but perhaps the other on the bed, at least I have the mettle to move towards them.
***
I was sitting shotgun in a Ford SUV contemplating ways to break the window. The man I was dating at the time was at the wheel, his deep-set eyes trained steadily ahead. Behind him, the highways rolled by endlessly, clean and desiccated. Together we sped through the heartland of Americana in one afternoon, the xanthus desert of Mission Viejo opening up and closing in around us with evenly spaced clumps of slender, criss-crossed palm trees. Belted into my seat, I had to trick my brain into believing that my body was in motion (look! seventy miles per hour! according to his speedometer!), for I would never be able to master the American sweetheart act of sitting still inside a vehicle for more than an hour without wanting to kick my legs. How eerie, the way we were being delivered by this hunk of metal straight from the gates of San Diego airport to his parental home: sprawling, suburban, flat-roofed.
I had spent the past few months picturing the moment I would meet the woman who birthed the man I was dating, a woman who, like me, had come to this country from faraway lands. But here the similarities between us stopped. She did not move to this place but rather, followed, at least in his retelling: accompanying her betrothed, hands on her belly, curled up in the tiny seat of an airplane headed for a country she had never been to. I tried to imagine her being content in the middle of this strange desert, nursing the fetus growing larger inside her — this lanky, dark-eyed, sharp-chinned fetus who would one day only refer to her when speaking of the home-cooked food we always had and those silly rose bushes in the backyard, I never know why she cared so much for them. As soon as he could, her baby drove far away from this ranchland. Yet the mother remained, her movement confined by fathomless miles of identical rambler houses, schoolyards, and lowland basin extending in all directions.
The Ford SUV made a sharp turn into a gated community. I turned away from the window —
“Babe, did you know that getting pregnant is equal to 170 micromorts?” The statistic had been on my mind since I found it on r/childfree, building my arsenal of arguments. We would pull into the driveway any time now, and I was grasping at straws. “I would be as likely to die from it as I would from base jumping, which is like, the most dangerous sport ever!”
“So what I’m hearing is you’re never going base jumping with me,” he chuckled. “Was going to suggest Angel Falls as our next Thanksgiving destination.”
For a moment his eyes remained on the steering wheel, and from his side profile I could not tell if the chuckle was an invitation to refute him or drop the discussion. But he finally turned to face me as someone’s toddler dashed in front of the car chasing after a basketball, forcing him to brake.
“Anyways, it’s not like she’ll ask you about kids until at least three years from now.”
Three years? I put my hands on the window again. That is less than the amount of time separating my current life and the bustling city of my youth, eight thousand miles away. I closed my eyes and imagined myself straddling a motorbike, the only vehicle I can man: wind in my hair, the odor of sweat in my lungs. Looming over this city of sunshine and fast bikes, however, was the threat of surveillance by some Politburo pusheen bot. In coffeeshops, people smoked and gestured in innuendos. So at thirteen, I thought that leaving would mean freedom. Yet somehow I managed to land here, next to this American — grasping for numbers and words to explain that no, it is not death I am fearing. It is not even the pain of tearing skin or breaking cervix; mostly, it is the act of lying still, waiting for things unseen to happen to and within my body. A foreign being, parasitic, emptying out my insides in ways that I cannot witness, restrain, or even egg on if I wish. How ironic — the way something as boundlessly kinetic as the motion of lips and limbs could result, for the woman, in weighing down: for the first nine months, when every action is constrained by a dumbbell-sized protrusion that cannot be lifted up or put down; then the rest of her life, in which she may never be free to move for herself again. And worst of all, the fact that all of this is in service of repetition — the act of reproducing another me, another you, another bald bawling baby no different from the bald bawling babies that emerged from the legions of splayed-out wombs that came before me. The moment a man forced me to confront my uterus’s unoriginality overwhelmed me.
This moment stretched on for two years. But why? I stayed because during these two years my life otherwise moved fast — new jobs, new horizons, new nightmares of imminent expulsion — so I saw him as an anchoring presence. Part of me also hoped that the earnest and inventive way we moved towards each other every other night meant that he would apply the same energy to all our shared projects. This was self-delusion. I see now that though he claimed not to understand, the man I was dating must have intuited the claustrophobia with which I clawed at his wrist every time we saw a married couple, with dog and child, strutting unthinkingly down the pavement. I know, or imagine, that he thought about ending things many, many times if not for god damn the sex is good. It is good because I fling my body towards and past him, because I refuse to superimpose his desires onto the contours of my movement through the world — also precisely why we would never work. In the end, the only uncreative words he could muster to describe the situation were: your weird feelings about being a woman. Hurled across the tiniest table in the afternoon buzz of a suburban Tatte, right before he spilt his coffee. I am tired of dealing with your weird feelings about being a woman.
So alright then, my weird feelings about being a woman. And do you, sir, not sometimes feel weird about being a man? Does anyone never feel weird about being anything, other than the wax wings of Icarus moving across an ever expanding sky?
***
Twice in her life, my grandmother had the chance to move. The first woman to top Sài Gòn College of Medicine’s entrance exam, she was offered a scholarship to continue her studies in Québec, then a few years later, through her work on infectious diseases, received an invitation to do research in Algeria. Twice, she packed up all her belongings ready to leave. Twice, a man threatened to blockade the runway with his body if she ever got onto the plane (If I try to picture this scene literally, I’m not sure how it would have worked; maybe the Tân Sơn Nhứt runway was particularly narrow? But take it at its face value, for comedic effect). My love, I will kill myself if you leave me — the sentence that strikes woman mute with fear yet is supposed to melt her heart.
That man is, I sometimes regret to say, my grandfather. I know my mother regrets to say it. My grandmother stayed, gave birth to three children, and watched most of what she had earned during her short career as a university lecturer get loaded onto nondescript trucks, the day the Communist army went marching upon Sài Gòn. Instead of the sharp pain of excision, she chose the es muss sein of duties, the ignominy of a city stretched out before its liberators, and the jealousy of a man who knew that his only weapon was to fall on his knees or raise his fist. At seventy, she lives mostly in still lifes, cataract eyes dripping with irony as her hands brush the black-and-white cobwebbed photos: from her high school days, upturned face hidden behind wide sunglasses; her university lab, back bent in concentration as she wields her microscope against some hapless organism; her wedding, done up in gossamer lace and thick kohl, a sacrificial princess about to meet her fate.
I cannot recall when I first learned about grandmother’s depression or the outlines of her early life. By the time I was thirteen, I had gained the habit of looking past her when I looked at her: peeling back the veil of fifty doldrum years to catch a glimpse of the twenty-year-old woman. There she was standing before the precipice of a great decision, ever so close to leaping and running.
And so, at the first chance I had to leap and run — perhaps all that reading of Kundera twisted my prose in ways that tantalized the Yankee literati — I ran. I ran and kept on running. Away from gender roles and an autocratic government, I first told myself, although even at thirteen I knew this wasn’t entirely true. The drama of dysentery-laced labor camps, while ever present in bedtime stories, had long retreated into my family’s past. By the time I was born, my country was former-Comecon in aesthetics only; explicit torture and political persecution had become unfashionable — many thanks to global trade! No, more than the threat of violence, it was the insistence on sameness and a predetermined fate that compelled me to gaze across the sea.
Perhaps my restive brain has always been unable to tune out any quotidian directive — seeing hackneyed motifs everywhere, adding question marks next to binary groupings, insisting on motion as means of creating space for a third category to emerge, dancing forward. Sometimes, running down the library steps towards an impromptu taproom rendezvous, I think myself happy now. Far from family and Uncle Hồ, released from nightmares of gestational micromorts, claiming lightness for myself as any man would. What can limit my movement in the world?
Once upon a time, under the kitsch of Communism, my neighbors and I were all the same: I was Comrade N bowing before a portrait, my little red scarf noose-tied around my neck. I have shed off the little red scarf and picked up a leather collar. But the trouble is, under the kitsch of Americana, we are all different: I am now an Asian Woman. I reckon you are a White Man. More precisely — I am a bisexual foreign-born southeast Asian woman in beaded leather collar and fishnet stockings, my ankles laced with mosquito bites. You are a blonde white man standing six-feet tall in neon purple harness and a latex suit. We keep on differencing and take cover behind these differences like armor. Come time, we think they tell us who we are.
***
Many years ago, in high school, I could be jolted out of slumber by nightmares in which my lover was kissing another who looked just like me: ebony hair, golden skin, willowy neck, et cetera et cetera. There were two of me glaring from his bed, one oneiric snapshot pregnant with meaning.
But today, in this place where bodies meet, there are two dozens of me and three dozens of you. Our bodies have lost all meaning. There are sixty outstretched necks and a hundred twenty half-closed eyelids. We are all children of Lenin and lambs of God. Riding on syncopated drum beats, we are nothing but the frenzy of percussion before the next drop. Do not bother wondering if this is lightness or weight, a blessing or a tragedy. Stop thinking. Strip. Move.
2025