Ashley Yang-Thompson

Summer 2021

What are you doing?

Edward Miguel Supranowicz

Crocodile Tears

Will Powers

Inside the Mexican restaurant, a blonde Polish waiter withdrew the contents of his pockets onto the marble counter, and these included a yellow lighter, loose change, a leather keychain with its flimsy metal token inscribed “mammoth cave, kentucky,” and, at last, an iPhone charger, frayed at the end with its internal wires exposed. He inspected it for a second, frowning. This was Avenue A and it was nighttime. Sitting out on the patio facing Tompkins Square Park was the lone customer, a boy named Alonso.

Alonso thought that this Mexican restaurant patio could very well be his day’s final stop. If true, it would terminate a series, all those stops, situations, and stations that had constituted his day, beads on a string pulled into the future: first the hairdresser’s bedroom where he’d woken up and had sex with the hairdresser, then Lexington Ave where he and the hairdresser had walked and eaten a bagel together and where he’d caught the Q train, then the fry cook’s living room where he’d watched reality tv with the fry cook before the fry cook left for work, then the fry cook’s fire escape from which he’d watched the very same fry cook rush towards the train station in a light drizzle, where he’d watched his own feet dangle high above the street and watched the gleaming, brand-new cars shoot beneath the dirty soles of his sneakers and felt that this really was the atmosphere in Manhattan, everything and everyone trying to look new, shiny, and clean as they flitted about beneath a dirty, stinking shoe. A few more stops and he’d ended up here, on this patio, Avenue A, and it was close to one in the morning, the street empty, and the tall blonde waiter came up behind him, a shadow moving against the white wall, asking if he wanted anything, and he said, no, he was okay, but then said, wait, I’ll get an empanada, another pork one, and the waiter asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said, no, that’s okay, and then the waiter, with an air of bashfulness, asked him if he possibly had an iPhone charger handy, and he said he was sorry but he didn’t, and then the waiter told him that he wouldn’t normally have asked a customer for a charger, but that these were special circumstances since his sister, who had just emigrated from Poland, was in the hospital in Queens with appendicitis and that his phone had died just as he was getting an update on her condition from their cousin. Alonso, upset by this, didn’t have anything better to do so he offered to go over to the 7-Eleven and buy the waiter a charger if the waiter could give him some cash to do so. Then the waiter handed him a twenty and Alonso walked through the barren street to the 7-Eleven. Its clean neon sign was visible from far away.

When he got to the store there were just a couple of construction workers inside and he surveyed the shelves for chargers. The man behind the counter was half-asleep, lulled by talk radio. Suddenly the door opened and five figures entered, each of them wearing a small blue sailor’s hat made of folded construction paper or card stock. One was very tall and husky, a man in a white button-down and black sweatpants who walked right over to the back fridge with a strange, luxuriant, swaying gait, took out three one-liter bottles of Sprite, and then walked straight back to the counter, the rest of the group standing around silently in the front of the store. One of them was a girl Alonso’s age with curly black hair and a Glen Campbell t-shirt. Her eyes met his for a moment, but then he aimed them back down to the store’s dirty black rug. The group left just as quickly as they’d come, and Alonso didn’t want to linger so he bought the charger and a granola bar with the twenty-dollar bill that the waiter had given him and he went out the door and trailed the group at a safe distance.

They stopped at the marble pavilion in the park, which was a Roman-style monument with a drinking fountain inside, and on the top was a bronze statue of a toga-wearing goddess (Hebe, with a goblet in her hand) and the word “TEMPERANCE” inscribed into the marble along the rim of the roof below her. Ten blue-hats were mulling around near the pavilion, and the tall man was sitting near the middle with one leg inside the pavilion and the other leg languidly resting two steps lower, and in this way he leaned his back against a column and unpacked the plastic bag full of Sprite bottles and rested them one-by-one on the ground. Off to the side of the group were two hatless onlookers, a young woman in a pantsuit and an old, fat man with a yellowing beard and extremely round, small-lensed glasses that made him look like a character in a Victorian novel. Alonso, not yet bored, stood next to these two and waited with his arms crossed. It wasn’t long before another blue-hat arrived, his arrival slowed by a large, unshapely black object that he pushed, or wheeled, in front of him, up to the pavilion and then, with some difficulty and care, up the two marble steps, and there in the dark of the pavilion center beside the fountain, he unzipped it from top-to-bottom and it was revealed to be a harp, gold and white with flashes of red on certain strings, and the man also produced a small, flat piece of black plastic from the inside of the harp case, and this turned out to be a foldable stool. At this point, the other blue-hats arranged themselves into a little formation or audience facing the pavilion and its harp.

The tall man began to speak in a high-pitched, neurotic voice, welcoming everyone to the gathering, informing them that it was, of course, the monthly assembly of the Metropolitan Society for Dream Inquest, and that every part of the assembly would follow the visions and prophecies of the society’s two founders, Cutty and Winnie Fisher, who recorded free jazz music and published instructional dream manuals from their apartment in Red Hook between the years 1961 and 1978. The society, he said, holds as its central tenet the notion that dreams persist after the death of the dreamer. He elaborated no further and there was a lengthy silence. Then he explained that on this night the goal of the assembly was an “audition,” and that candidates would each play a piece on Winnie Fisher’s chromatic harp. Whoever demonstrated the requisite “level” would become the society’s official harpist and receive an annual stipend in return for a small number of appearances. The society’s previous harpist, he said, had moved to the Maldives.

First up, he said, was Craig Günther, who played first seat in the New York Harp Ensemble. The old man with the round glasses and the yellow beard stepped forward out of the place where he had been standing next to Alonso and walked over to the harp. His facial features disappeared in the darkness of the pavilion. He took three deep breaths and then launched into something like Bach, his body moving fluidly with the song, back-and-forth, and his fingers, seen at certain angles on the transparent strings (refracting the light of the park’s streetlamps behind), walked or jumped or danced along like water insects. Sometimes, one or both of his hands would drop from the instrument during a rest and float back up again. When he’d finished, there was scattered clapping. He stood up and took his spot back in the line-up next to Alonso. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

Next was the young woman in the pantsuit, who was introduced by the tall man as Natasha Thornwood of Harlem’s Absence Chamber Group (ACG), and she took her place on the stool and put her hair back with a green scrunchie and then began to play. The notes were sparse at first, plucky and close together in the middle-range of the instrument, and when she played them she seemed to pull with all her might, her elbows darting outwards with vigor. Gradually the song, significantly more experimental than Günther’s, perhaps even improvised, built outwards in both directions, up and down on the strings, until the notes were streaming across the full range in reams, teetering on the edge of dissonance, veering into blues. Finally, her hands landed on the highest and lowest extremes of the instrument, creating an ambience that sounded like a thin, silver net over a vast chasm. She bowed and there was a storm of clapping.

At this point, Alonso had already considered leaving. Or should he move to the side? Would they consider him another candidate? As the clapping died down he looked at the harp sitting there in the cold darkness of the pavilion. There was something unusual about seeing such an object in Tompkins, which was otherwise a kind of armpit of the city, a nexus of Manhattan’s lost or aspiring-lost. The harp was so large, dwarfing the fountain, filling the pavilion with a certain grace or fullness that it had never seen before. It was an alien grace, parabolic in shape and ancient, imperial in color. How many had played it? Heard it? And yet, it was there, right in front of all of them, ready to be touched once again. The tall man began to speak again, but Alonso, his eyes transfixed on the object, heard only a kind of rhetorical sound, the sound of ceremony itself, the movement from one communicative event to the next, and he raised his voice and said, I am here to play too, interrupting the man, but the man was obliging, and he asked the boy for his name, and asked the boy if he had anything to share about his background with the instrument, and the boy said his name and then said no, not really, and then the man said okay, but he said it strangely, as if something were wrong, and then the boy interrupted the silence and said, I do have something to share. My mother is a harpist, he said. I was raised by a harpist.

He walked over to the pavilion now, but before touching the harp he went over to the fountain and had a drink. Then he moved the black bench off to the side and cradled the harp standing up, the instrument coming to his mid-chest, and he touched the strings silently, feeling their texture and tension, and then he played a single note, the lowest note on the instrument, a red string with a plump, round sound. After some silence he played this note again, and played it over and over, his mind completely set on the sound of this note while his other hand began to mindlessly search the upper regions of the instrument, the shortest and highest notes, across which he dragged his fingernail producing a dry sound. And then he began to moan and laugh, all the while playing the single lowest note again and again with his one hand, and then he began to tap on the wood of the instrument with his other hand, striking it in irregular ways, rapping on it, oscillating between delicacy and aggression. And then, all of the sudden, he stopped, set the instrument down, and then tried to bow but was overcome with laughter and found it difficult to finish the bow, so he simply took his hands and put them on his shaved head and looked out at the crowd with a smile.

The tall man walked to the back of the crowd of blue-hats and bent over to speak briefly with another man who was seated in a wheelchair. He walked back towards the pavilion with his easy, lurching walk and said that although he and the other board-members of the society were surprised by the unforeseen progression of the night, the notion of the unforeseen had been a fundamental interest of Winnie Fisher and her husband, and that, for this reason, they had decided to offer the position to Alonso, who had demonstrated his level to be far more than adequate.

The boy had already turned away. He was looking at the fountain and then out into the park where there wasn’t a single blue-hat, where there was only the empty night, full of space. In an instant he reached back and pushed the instrument with his sticky palm, felt it swing outwards, out towards the blue-hats, and he launched away into a sprint, barely hearing the crash of wood and fiber against marble and concrete, the single twisted shriek of the harp’s defunction, barely hearing the voices and shouts over the wind in his ears and the beating of his heart.

Without looking back once, he darted out of the park, across the street, and into the restaurant. The blonde waiter looked up, surprised. The boy pulled the coiled charger out of his pocket. Do you have somewhere I can sleep? said the boy. What? said the waiter. I need somewhere to sleep. The waiter fumbled with the new charger, uncoiling it. There’s a small futon in the back, he said. But you’ll have to get out by six. That’s fine, said the boy. Show me.

Fiction

The Harp

Peter DeCamp Haines

Imaginary Friend

Sandro Giordano Remmidemmi

My Lovely Boy

Double Healthy Burger 

Vicki Xu

In the days after high school graduation, having ridded my schedule of high school effects, I found myself in possession of a remarkable amount of free time. Three months’ worth, to be exact. The last time I had this much free time was probably elementary school graduation, and I had spent most of my high school years yearning for this kind of idleness.

This is great for personal growth, I kept saying to myself. You finally have time to slow down and think instead of rushing to the next thing all the time. This is great. Enjoy life.

I was very rusty at enjoying life. I had spent middle school and high school rotating through a number of bodily, social, and academic neuroses. As far as I could recall, when I last unabashedly, unreservedly, un-self-consciously enjoyed life, no-financial-social-or-existential-strings-attached enjoyed life, I was probably ten or eleven.

To occupy myself now, I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia. When I was a little kid, I imagined my own article on the site all the time: my name in Georgia heading font, a picture of myself, and detailed sections that amounted to a full, rich life. Surfing biographies, I felt like I was trying on costumes.

But mostly I tried to avoid hearing myself think. The world was unfurling and asking, “what now,” in the same way my mother would ask “what major” or my grandma would ask “what if you get a PhD,” neither question I was particularly keen to answer. A line from the novel 

 by Olga Grushin played over and over in my head: “Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you.” So what I really wanted now was to dig my heels in and stop time. Unfortunately, I was finding that while 

 presently had the leeway to slow down instead of rushing to the next thing, time never did. 

Three months seemed too little and not enough to prepare for a four-year catapult into what I knew as a murky cycle of waking up, brushing teeth, doing things, eating, doing things, eating, doing things, going to bed, waking up, and so on. I was full of waiting.

In July, I took a trip with my mother to China. It was her parting gift to me as well as an attempt to mend our relationship, which had grown strained over high school. The plan was to hit Hong Kong, visit my mother’s college buddy in Guangzhou, Guangdong, spend a couple days in a Sanya, Hainan resort, and then go back up to Beijing to link with my extended family.

I had been listening to a lot of music. For one reason or another I never really listened to anything for fun in high school. (A small exception occurred in junior year: I cross-enrolled at a local community college for a music history class on Western pop in the latter half of the 20th century and went through a brief glam rock phase.) As if to make up for lost time, I was pounding through genres.

From now on, there’s no looking back, full steam ahead on a one way track…

I’m not a very proficient Spotify user — I usually file songs into playlists labeled with the season and year, hoping to capture some essence of the times to revisit. By the time we arrived in Hong Kong, my summer 2019 playlist was swollen.

Out on the Verge on the rest of our lives tonight, top of the world and we’re dressed to the nines tonight…

Hong Kong was a blur. My mother was strung tight. We arrived in the midst of the city’s free speech movement that year, and we spoke Mandarin, not Cantonese. “We really don’t fit in here,” she muttered to me more than once, which must’ve been a blow to her since here we finally resembled everyone else. I was accustomed to not fitting in in the United States or Asia and had no problem navigating using English.

Afternoons were hot and sticky. Having grown used to dry Bay Area summers, we took shelter in the hotel room. While my mom napped, I sat next to her in bed and rediscovered a lot of stuff:

You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies…

But time gets bolder, children get older, and I’m getting older too

Today is the start of the rest of our lives, I can see it in your eyes…

, but Christy Carlson Romano’s “Could It Be” was the backdrop recording to fan edits of shows I did watch. It hit me, as I watched the lyrics scroll across the screen, that the first time I’d heard the song was a decade ago.

For most of my life up until then, ten years ago pointed to a time when I wasn’t quite culturally sentient. But now ten years ago meant 2009. I was eight. It was a strange feeling. Ten years would turn to twenty, and twenty to thirty, and thirty to… I was joining the ranks of adults.

Once my mother had discovered a hunk of months-old bread in the back of a pantry, and you could imagine the shape it was in, a spongy body decked out in fine white lace. I imagined the lace stretching before me now. The mycelium at my feet would extend outward into a cloudy distance, and at the end of each hypha would be a different self that grew off the choices I made. I was right now a wisp of a being, not yet fully formed.

At some point it had occurred to me that to move forward happily, maybe I should first try to replicate that old happiness, of being ten or eleven and always the most important person in the world. Back when I was an even wispier being and felt so much more solid. As I was adding fifth-grade staples (Owl City, Ke$ha, Dixie Chicks) to my playlist, my mother woke up.

“Having fun?” she mumbled. She had been making an effort recently to talk about our feelings.

“Good that you’re having fun,” she said. “You should have all the fun while you still can. Before you get to my age, ha.”

That’s encouraging, I thought. “OK,” I said.

My mother’s buddy had become a hotel manager in Guangzhou, which meant we got a room at a vastly discounted price and were treated to excursions to landmarks around Guangdong and in the neighboring province, Guangxi. The last time I slept in the same bed as my mother, I was six.

In the hot, heavy Guangzhou summer we took air-conditioned rides to museums and restaurants. The Nanyue emperor’s partially excavated tomb, the sleek asymmetric Guangzhou opera house. We hiked the park next to our hotel and took shelter under a pagoda during sudden torrential rains, and my mother and I peeled and fed each other mangosteens without meeting each other’s eyes. China’s transformation-in-progress was palpable: we walked through narrow, cloying-smelling streets surveilled by CCTV cameras overhead, and shared the road with rickshaws when we rode in cars. We drank egg milk pudding in tiny dessert shops adjacent to stores selling counterfeit designer clothing.

I watched my mother unravel in the sweltering air. Reserved and compact did not fit in the effusive Guangzhou, and she loosened considerably. She giggled when the chauffeur called her a pretty lady, and cracked jokes with fellow restaurant patrons, glowing with mirth. This was the most emoting I’d seen her do in a long time, but I hadn’t observed her as a person for years.

“She’s very quiet,” one of my mother’s buddy’s friends remarked about me.

As the crowning bit of his generosity, my mother’s buddy took us to a hot springs hotel. We arrived in the early evening and were treated to a meal with a couple of my mother’s buddy’s business associates. He was networking and hosting us at the same time. Waitresses brought out platters of yellow-skinned duck and sesame buns, food I didn’t know the names for, and they sat beside us and toasted us with whiskey, and pointed out each dish’s specialty and coaxed us to eat.

“You know your mother was the top of our class in chemistry?” my mother’s buddy asked.

“Yeah,” I said, glad I finally knew something.

The men took over as the dinner wore on. They chattered and laughed uproariously, teased the waitresses, shoveled food into their mouths and pronounced it delicious. Occasionally the conversation spun to me or my mother, where they invited us to toasts, but mostly they talked politics and business. Trump was a firebrand, but at least he inspired patriotism in youth. Couldn’t Xi do the same? China was old that way, poor for too long, the kids growing up learning other countries were better.

I did not know Chinese businessmen had such specific opinions on Trump. I don’t think my mother knew either. The tightness came back to her, and we sat stiffly next to each other. I am not sure if my mother was quiet because she had been gone from China for almost twenty years and had not followed the news, or because she was surrounded by unfamiliar men, or because she was surrounded by men. I didn’t trust myself to say the right words so I smiled and nodded along. I wished my mother would say something because I couldn’t. I hoped she wouldn’t say anything because she was my mother. I stared at her. She stared at her food, lips pursed, separating duck meat from bone in little birdlike pecks with her chopsticks.

She is so obvious, I thought. If she could be more poised — or maybe if I could be more poised, or worldly, for the both of us — wait, do I look like that when I’m self-conscious?

Dinner was a cacophony of sound, but our room, located in the middle of a grove of trees, was serene and beautiful. I shoved the chewing and laughing and smoking from earlier out of my mind. After we unpacked, I spun around slowly to memorize the lay of the beds, desks, lamps. By the time I opened the glass door to the fenced-in outdoors extension with the stone tub, my mother was already halfway in.

“It’s hot,” she said with a grimace.

The sun had almost completely set by now, and the sky was purple-gray. Steam curled around my mother’s face and body.

I stepped out of my slippers onto the porch boards, then took off my robe. The night was mild and comfortable; I didn’t even shiver. I placed my foot on the raised stone edge of the hot tub.

My mother chuckled. “I wasn’t lying, right? I think I’ll just do this.” She rose out of the water. Dripping, she crouched on the edge of the tub and scooped up a handful of water, tongue between her teeth, and poured it over her legs.

“But that’s not a soak,” I said. My legs were in now. They were pleasantly numb. Only the line where the water met air was slightly uncomfortable: cool and hot at once, as if my body couldn’t decide which.

She laughed self-consciously. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m doing this right.”

I averted my eyes. Her laugh had broken the naturalness of the moment — too aware, too nervous. I slid deeper in, feeling the line of water rise up to my ribs. I watched the outlines of my thighs waver from above and admired how firm and smooth they looked, even through a watery prism.

It started to rain. Pockmarks interrupted the water’s surface, and as the steam around us thinned out, the trees in the distance grew obscure. Mist, I thought, and raised my face. Little pinpricks of coolness landed on my cheeks. I could just slightly make out the dusting of stars on the warm, dark, open sky.

I closed my eyes to the sound of sloshing water. Behind my eyelids was the image of my mom, naked — how long has it been since I saw my mother naked? — and squatting beside the pool, her pale, plump limbs like hams. She was tall, but she was getting older.

“I’m going to leave,” my mother whispered. “Take a shower, then sleep. You can stay.”

My eyelids were sticky. I nodded — did I nod? — and kept my eyes closed. I was floating in the sky, tiny among the stars. I heard the soft sloshing as she rose out of the water, the receding pat of her wet footsteps on the wooden flooring, and the sliding sound of the door as she quietly went back inside.

I do not know how long I stayed in that tub. I was warm, light, weightless, numb. Just at one point my eyes slid open as easily as they’d slid closed, and the water was much cooler than it had been earlier, and I knew it was time to go.

When I finally rose, my muscles quivered. I felt like a newborn foal. I dragged my legs heavily through the water and clambered back onto the deck. The rain had stopped, but the night was cooler too. I shivered. I was slick, but also a little sticky, perhaps from the minerals in the water. I removed my robe from the hook on the fence and wrapped it back around me.

Inside, I saw my mother emerge from the bathroom, her hair stringy from a shower. She moved slowly, dreamlike. In two days, as she’d said to me earlier, we would head back to the hotel.

The last few times I’ve been to China I’ve been too young to truly cherish it, I thought. I’m old enough now. But in years I’ll remember merely images, not videos, and not necessarily the sequence that it happened either, and I don’t even know if the sounds will stick. Probably not, we forget sounds faster than we forget pictures. How is she alive? How is my mother alive, like this? Do things stay special as you get older? I thought the shine wears off. These are happy experiences, but these days will never come again.

The trees overhead rustled softly. The light from the moon dimmed. I stood on the warm porch boards, soaking in the sight of the dark stone tub at my feet, the soft yellow glow of our room beyond the sliding doors, my faint reflection fogged onto the glass. Inside, my mother’s solid fleshy body undressed to sleep.

Yiyi was the child of one of my mom’s college roommates. I had only a faint recollection of meeting her ten years earlier, when I was seven. She had been wearing a chartreuse-yellow dress with some kind of red pattern. She was grown now, half a head taller than me, still fond of ankle-length dresses and wide-brimmed hats that prevented tanning. When we walked out of the airport terminal in Sanya, it was her waving hi that I saw first.

“I’ve always wanted a little sister,” she said. She was three months older than me.

When we headed up to Beijing, Yiyi learned that I was fond of museums, and she suggested the Forbidden City to visit. We went on an overcast day. Yiyi led me by the elbow through courtyards and gardens she’d walked through on school trips as a kid, narrating the placards out loud because I couldn’t read them fast enough myself.

We stopped at a small well. “This,” she said, “an imperial concubine drowned in during the Qing Dynasty. They say she committed suicide but it’s probably more likely the dowager empress had her drowned.”

“That’s awful,” I said. I wondered if she considered this a possible fate when she became a concubine. I wondered if she chose to become one. At least she has a placard, I thought. Most concubines get nothing. I was thinking of the concubines who had been buried alive with the Nanyue emperor back in Guangzhou.

“Yeeeeaaaaaaah,” Yiyi said. “Court politics get nasty. Moving on.”

We moved through displays of imperial jewelry and of gifts from other empires over the centuries. These emperors, who were so obsessed with immortality and longevity — some of their names I was just learning now. As we waited in line for a Zheng He exhibit, I Googled “qing dynasty concubine well” on data (which I found could bypass Chinese Internet restrictions) and found her on Wikipedia — Consort Zhen, a woman with an oval face, doe eyes, and puckered lips. Wrong place at the wrong time, I thought.

The sky was still overcast at noon, and the diffused sunlight made everyone’s features soft and shadowy. We found the cafeteria and squeezed in on a bench. At Yiyi’s insistence, I was treated to a bowl of noodles. As we ate, I watched the passersby: mothers with fanny packs slathering sunscreen on their children, strings of elementary school students wearing matching yellow shirts, a cluster of French tourists shielding their faces with brochures as they looked about the broad walkway.

“Do you come here often?” I asked Yiyi.

She gave me a look. “Usually not if you’re a local. It’s always so crowded.”

“Oh!” She patted me. “It’s not an inconvenience. You’re a guest, and you haven’t been before. Of course you have to see it if you come all the way here.”

Being at the Forbidden City was an interesting feeling, those centuries of history under my feet. I hadn’t considered myself American in America, because I was Chinese, but I felt very American in China, both because I wasn’t quite fluent and because “old” in America was 200 to 300 years. Not this. Most of the structures had been built over, but the essence remained, the imposing sense of an empire that had once been great and will reclaim its greatness in the coming years. Fortunes, I thought, change quickly.

The world gets so big. I was scared that without an anchor I would get lost in it somehow, swept away by the tides of history, which I saw as a big, twisting, circular rope braided from tiny channels through which each person could shoot, channels whose shapes were dictated by the choices people made. Buffeted by the world’s impulses, I would float down narrower and narrower straits until I’d lost sight of the bigger picture. But as long as I stayed at the base of the mycelium, straddling all my different options, I had the full view of the lives I could live.

There was an innocence to not knowing. New experiences inevitably color older ones. The shine wears off and a path just becomes life. But suspended in this in-between, I could be everything at once. I did not have to worry about dissatisfaction, or discontent, or all the rest of life’s petty worries because none of it had happened yet. An artist, painter, scientist, translator, doctor, professional globe-trotter. It was never enough, and it was spilling over.

This is the problem, I thought. You want to live and you are so afraid of life. You want and you want and you can never choose, but you have to.

After the visit, before heading up to Yiyi’s apartment, we stopped by the grocery store on the building’s first level to pick up some fruit for her mother. As Yiyi knocked on the watermelons for quality, I stood hefting the mangoes. These were fresher than I’d seen in any Safeway or Trader Joe’s, or maybe it was just the atmosphere of the whole store that was like a fruit stand melded into a building: crates of papayas and oranges spilling out onto the sidewalk outside, tall stalks of sugarcane framing the doorway. The mangoes were so heavy and ripe.

“Do you want one?” Yiyi asked, looking at me.

I thought she meant the watermelon before I realized she was pointing to the mangoes in my hands. “Oh,” I said. “Oh no no, you don’t need to.” She had already spent so much on me.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I like mangoes. I want some too.” She took the ones I had been holding. “Good choice,” she said. “These will be sweet.”

She brought the mangoes and a watermelon to the cashier.

In the apartment, Yiyi’s mother cut up the mangoes and watermelons for us, and Yiyi chattered away about our day while I ate. Like me with my mother, Yiyi did not physically resemble hers, but unlike me and my mother, they seemed to carry out complex conversations just fine.

“She’s always wanted a little sister,” said Yiyi’s mother. “But by the time China’s one-child policy lifted it was too late to have another one. You know the one-child policy?”

At night, we clambered into the same bed. As she pulled the covers over us, Yiyi asked, “Are you excited for college?”

I never was able to come up with a satisfying answer to this question. “Excited, but a little scared.”

“It’ll be a lot of fun. Your first time making your own decisions. I’m excited for you.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Yiyi was so different from me; I wondered how I would’ve turned out if I’d grown up with her.

“Okay, I have a lot planned for you tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

“Good night.” She turned off the light and flipped around.

I laid in bed for a while longer, staring at the dark ceiling. It always takes me a while to fall asleep in new places. This apartment building was on the outer parts of Beijing, but you could still hear the sounds of the city through the walls, the beeping and the honking and the shouting.

This is it, I thought. This is it, now. Alright.

In just a month I would be in a Lyft, heavy suitcases in the trunk, watching Cambridge pass me by.

Today is the start of the rest of your life, I thought. I can see it in your eyes. God, shut up. Atta girl. You got this. Alright.

For now I was lying in bed in my family friend’s apartment in Beijing, right above a grocery store that sold fresh-wrapped sugarcane and watermelons with thin rinds, the surrogate little sister to a girl who had always wanted one. Next to me Yiyi’s chest rose and fell. She never felt more solid, or more present, than in that moment. At the end of forty seconds, the beat of her breaths had become one with my own.

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Self-Porkrat

Dragon Looking Back 

Kelsey Chen

 —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Living 

Recently Footprint has been showing more and more error messages in response to my motions. I started to notice this about three months ago—an error is typically a very unusual thing, but during the week of May 2nd alone, I logged three non-negligible recalibrations in my Footpath. Before this May, I averaged around one recalibration a year since I turned eighteen; even during developmental years, annual recalibrations never exceeded 6-8 in total, which is already on the high end.

In the past month, I have logged twenty-two recalibrations. This is far out of the norm, according to my GP. She referred me to a technician, who was just as puzzled, because there was apparently nothing wrong with my Footprint. All systems were up to date, she said, and the hardware was fine too. The technician referred me to a psychiatrist, who cleared me from the only real syndrome that excessive Footprint error is an indicator for—schizophrenia. I was then referred back to a second technician, who promptly referred me to yet another psychiatrist. I didn’t bother to schedule an appointment.

But I think I figured out why I’ve been getting so many errors.

This past year, my information feed has been overloaded with constant notifications and news reports on violent crimes committed against people whose phenotypic characteristics mark them to be socially classified as “Asian”—therefore, diseased, foreign, dirty. The violence is gratuitous, horrific, and directed at the most vulnerable members of the demographic body. It’s completely devastating and still somehow feels abstract, even as my own body is implicated in this same calculus of violence. It’s completely devastating, how same we are, even in our incommensurably different lifelines—how same we are in our bodies, our classification, our disciplining within and by this city.

For nearly half a year, I hunched over in a perpetual flinch. In that time, I learned the exact air density in a space where there is an expectation of violence, which is to say that all public space suddenly became viscous: not like honey, more like tar. I wondered for long periods of time about the sculptural formation of a human skull—if it takes around eight decades for a human skull to be made, what is made in its place when the body does not live for the necessary time of its sculptural incubation? I thought it might resemble a turtle shell—architecturally deformed, functioning neither as trap nor armor, but somehow both at once.

I am certain, had I gathered the courage to see a doctor in those early months, that I would have been diagnosed with a slew of neuroses. But even then, as deeply as I had sunk into depression, Footprint was logging an average recalibration to motion ratio.

And then, in April, Yao Pin An was brutalized. 

 A 61-year-old man who had immigrated from China only two years ago to this city, Yao Pin An was collecting cans on the streets, having recently lost his apartment to a fire and his job to the unforgiving motion of business cycles. He was assaulted while picking up bottles to pay his rent, his head repeatedly stomped into the curb at 3rd Ave & East 125 St. In the news report, his wife of 31 years, Baozhu Chen, said, “My husband is a hard-working man. He picks up bottles to help pay the rent and the bills. 

. He did not do anything wrong. He is a very kind person. He is quiet. He doesn’t cause trouble to make people mad.” 

 He suffered a cerebral contusion and multiple facial fractures. I do not know where he is now. The last time I remember a news update, Yao Pin An was in critical condition in a medically induced coma. The half-life of information is so tragically short now—even news on life, on death, and on catastrophic human violence begins to decay within a week.

I could not move my body for twenty-three minutes after viewing the news report. I was paralyzed, thinking about (1) How exactly the contours of a human skull might change in form when crushed between a concrete curb and a human sole. (2) How much Yao Pin An resembled my father. (3) How, 

, (4) How much sadness was contained in Baozhu Chen’s quiet insistence that 

. (5) How dare this country call itself Beautiful in its own naming in our language. 

 (6) And how there must be something wrong with the Footprint data, which the press released in an oddly intrusive reporting decision. There were 0 recalibrations and 0 deviations in the six months before Yao Pin An was assaulted.

Everyone knows how Footprint works in the abstract, but no one knows how Footprint works in actuality. Its precise mechanism is entirely opaque, which is remarkable in this moment of explosive information circulation. Everything about Footprint seems vaguely out of grasp. No one knows anyone that works for Footprint, but everyone knows someone who knows someone who is Footprint-affiliated.

It isn’t just because I’m a ceramicist, rather than a systems engineer, a physicist, or an information scientist. Even those in the relevant fields seem to have no concrete sense of the actual workings of Footprint. What I do know, or what I think I know, is that Footprint works by mapping motion, in the most expansive definition of the word. It tracks all of your motion, and all of the motion that is you.

My mother used to tell me stories about the magic of the ancients—how, in classical times, those trained in divination would use a turtle shell and bone fragments carved with trigrams to look to the 

 for directional directives on living. Face this way when you sleep. Face this way when you work. Be careful when you walk in this direction. 

 would guide you in your motions; align you directionally towards a virtuous, auspicious life. It’s funny that more of my knowledge of feng shui comes from my white colleagues than from my mom. They think they know a lot about how to save yourself with magical realignments; I don’t think I know very much about anything, especially about 

. But from what little I have gathered in my crude impression of what the 

 is, Footprint strikes me as its post-modern, substantially more brutal iteration.

And, unlike feng shui, it’s not magic. Footprint could not be further from magic, even though there’s something phantasmic about how cleanly it’s disappeared its own innards; any trace of its mechanics. There are no bones and shells; just a sleek watch-surface that offers a set of optimized potential motions at any given moment. It doesn’t just tell time; it tells you all your possible timelines. And it doesn’t just map motion; it maps all possible motion—not just what has already been enacted, but also what is to come. I won’t pretend to know how it works. But I think there’s probably some kind of quantum logic involved.

Sometime in the days of college, I stumbled across a theoretical physics class. I remember myself wedged between the hard green plastic of my seat and the splintered wood of the desk in the dizzying humidity of early fall, listening to the professor speak about wave-particle duality. I was lost in the math, but I still remember with remarkable clarity how he explained that a particle’s location consists of probabilities. At any given moment, he explained, it is 

; it is that likely the particle will be 

. This set of probabilities, in turn, can be described with a mathematical function—a wave function. Until the moment of measurement (which, in physics, means an encounter with a possible observer), the particle is somehow splintered, at once located at all points on the wave. When you look at it, its infinite possibilities collapse into a single location. Infinity becomes singularity; you gaze upon it and suddenly it gets fixed. Which is the same as saying that with one look you can stop the entire world; with one look, with one motion, you cohere infinite possible iterations of what you encounter into one. I remember thinking, 

. How beautiful to think of space as filled by infinite possibilities, so that we are constantly walking through echoes of what could have been. I remember thinking 

what a beautiful way to think about existence

, to understand that to be is to cohere yourself in every moment. I remember thinking, 

. In each miniscule gesture, I am somehow being reconstituted by an infinity of possible Is. How gorgeous, that in every step I am writing myself into being.

This is how Footprint works, I think, in a very provisional, crude sense—which is the only sense in which I understand it. Footprint traces the infinite possible motions of “you” in the next instant and calculates the likelihood of you carrying out each action, given the constitution of “you” in all your past and present motions. Within these possibilities it selects a curated few and presents them to you as your Footpath, displayed on your screen alongside each of their probabilities, which have been determined by computing indices such as past motions, biological composition, and experiential making. Many times, the Footpath is how you would have moved anyway. The curation of your Footpath happens through optimization—somehow, “they” decide which of your possible actions would be best for you and for the entire world. No one knows how the optimization algorithm works or who writes it. No one knows who “they” is, only that they are constantly making “you.”

Described this way, Footprint seems overwhelming in its complexity. But it’s really a smooth, liquid motion. In each moment, Footprint presents you with your Footpath. Your watch screen continuously repopulates with a set of optimal movements. You learn to read the screen quickly. You make small movements easily, without looking. It’s likely, anyways, that an inconsequential movement is within your Footpath. A breath, a slight lean of your body, an adjustment of the angle at which your elbow rests on the table. For bigger movements you glance first. Then you act. A step in this direction, a turn of your head, a decision about which job offer to accept. I always feel a little bit behind, like I’m constantly catching up to the temporal location of my own body. But even this constant, slight lag is smooth: a continuous motion with no beginning and no end.

No one is obligated to take Footprint’s suggestions. A Footpath is a gift—an offering. A general trajectory that has been determined to be optimal not just for you, but everyone in the world. Every being reverberates; every motion ripples throughout everything that exists and everything that will ever exist. This is one reason that most people never think to deviate from the Footpath. It is beyond you. The consequences, in fact, are cosmic. But mostly people follow the Footpath because it is good. When you are young, you learn quickly that Footprint is really good at what it does. Deviations always result in injury. You trip. You get a small scrape or a bruise. Sometimes, you die. Sometimes, your cat dies.

Footprint is the blueprint of this city—and of every city. It has many versions around the world: Wu Gui (“Turtle”) in China, Link in the Middle East and North Africa, and Deca in Cuba. But they are all Footprint. The program optimizes human motion. It tracks motion—the motion of every single being in the world. Its calculus is organized by zoning, by local aggregation. Each city is insular, a system of motion that is at once open and closed. In his PhD dissertation, Takashi Murakami made a map of the art world as a multiverse: many disciplinary lineages, many spheres of cultural production, many philosophical impulses, and many different inheritances of technique—countless systems of artmaking, constantly colliding. They coexist and intertwine, yet they have their own gravitational pull—have their own boundaries, no matter how unstable.

Human cities are the same way. Each individual motion ripples unpredictably through the fabric of our world, but it does so unevenly. There is a kind of pull towards large collections of human motion, so that cities begin to cohere not just in topography, but also in cause-and-effect. Footprint pays a privileged attention to your immediate locality—that is to say, your city. Because they are whirlpools of human motion and emotion, even the momentum of “you” gets caught. Human cities and Murakami’s art worlds are the same thing: constellations of people and concepts ordered by aesthetic principles. How to live is an aesthetic question, and Footprint is humanity’s final answer. Somehow, in the messy web of constantly colliding human orbits, in the crossing and enfolding paths of everyone in this city and in this world, there is an optimum. You can see how this might have enormous implications for governance, city planning, and the practice of everyday life. This is why Footprint has become so universally integrated into all of our lives. It is an ethical administrator of futures. There must have been so much casual disaster before Footprint. I cannot even imagine what it would be like.

There really is something indisputably beautiful about Footprint—about how coherent, how synchronized our collective existence has become. Footprint has made one giant, harmonized map out of every possible human future. Spatial design has always been about making futures—Cellini thought of 

 (design) “as a tool for ordering human endeavors toward virtue. Man cannot act virtuously without disegno.” 

 Footprint is a kind of designed spatial ordering, but not meant as Cellini had hoped, as a mode of ethical self-transformation. You no longer invent “yourself.” Ours is a new age of cartography where the map makes you.

Footprint accounts for all possible instantiations of “you,” including the sub-optimal. Sometimes, people move in a direction outside of what has been offered by Footpath. This is a deviation. It can occur intentionally or by accident. Deviations are within Footprint’s comprehension. A deviation does not trigger an error message. But people rarely decide to deviate. No one wants the cat to die.

Recalibration is more difficult to explain. It is a motion so substantially outside of Footprint’s calculus that you receive an error message—a small red notification on the right side of your watch screen. I’m not sure even the people behind the empty-centered infrastructure of Footprint, the engineers writing ghost code in their ghost chairs, know exactly what triggers a Footpath recalibration. Even specialists, like my technician, whose services are wildly overpriced on account of the many certifications and degrees she’s racked up, could not explain what a recalibration is. Unlike a deviation, a recalibration happens when something gets messed up—even when you undergo a motion that has been offered by Footprint as your optimal Footpath. Somehow, somewhere in your motion, Footprint’s projected trajectories for the “you” that comes into being as you move get reconfigured in a way that is unexplainable. It means, ostensibly, that you have constructed a possible future that was impossible. So the system recalibrates.

I once had a conversation with a chemist about Epicurus’s theory of the swerve. Swerves, he said, are unexplained moments of randomness within largely orderly systems. 

 I remember him showing me a mathematical function, speaking quickly in his excitement. He was telling me how even the most recent research could not explain why a smooth function like this might suddenly have a jump like that. I remember that while he gestured at the function, I was having the greatly unscientific thought that maybe math was a kind of poetry; that maybe the function chose to jump, because it, like Pascal, was terrified by “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” 

 I couldn’t tell you why we were talking about Epicurus, much less why I would ever be speaking to a chemist. I think we were standing under green-gray tinged scaffolding. I think there was rain, and I think it was quite humid. But I’m not sure about any of these impressions; everyone that’s lived here for a while tends to locate lost memories under a non-specific piece of scaffolding. There’s something about this place that’s a bit loose and hazy. Things are not good at happening in specific places—events, like people, often get lost in space.

I remember the chemist describing how contemplating the 

 was an exercise which had much to reveal about the infinite unpredictability of the world, and of us, even within the statistical likelihoods created by universal laws. I didn’t know that chemists could be so elegant in their words; I didn’t know that functions could stutter so much in smooth motion. I guess even a mathematical function can’t resist the staccato inertia of the whole world hurtling through time. Andrew Hui has written in 

 that “it is the halting, broken fragment…that is the only viable form of expression…not so much a distillation of doctrine as an expression of the impossibility of any formal systems.” 

 What if the universe only speaks in fragments? What have we done to ourselves, to reconstitute humanity in a formal system of constant, unending motion? I truly could not tell you what a recalibration is. But I imagine it to be a swerve, of sorts, in all my possible futures. If even the best mathematician cannot predict the swerve of a function, how could Footprint’s algorithm ever account for the swerve of a person?

These are the reasons I was rendered immobile when I saw Yao Pin An’s released Footprint data. 0 deviations and 0 recalibrations in the past six months meant that he had followed, exactly, his Footpath. 

He is innocent. He did not do anything wrong. He is a very kind person.

 In what kind of world is the optimal trajectory of Yao Pin An’s life one which ends with his skull crushed against the pavement? How was it decided that the structural deformation of Yao Pin An’s skull against the concrete curb was necessary for the architecture of this city? If Yao Pin An’s brutalization took place along his Footpath, how many of the previous string of murdered and assaulted Asian people had also been optimized?

I could not move for twenty-three minutes, fixed to my bed. According to my biomarkers, this was the longest time I have ever been still, even in my sleep. Me, fixed in my bed in all my abstract grief for something that had been lost since the birth of human civilization; Baozhu Chen, fixed on the screen in the heartbreak of having lost her husband.

1 Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Living,” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 101.
2 All names have been changed in the piecing together of this legend, but all details, including Baozhu Chen’s words, have not been altered.
3 Tina Moore, Georgett Roberts and Dean Balsamini, “Wife of Asian man stomped on NYC street pleads for just tice,” New York Post, April 24, 2021, Wife of Asian man stomped on NYC street pleads for justice (nypost.com)
4 United States of America translates to 美国 in Chinese, literally meaning “beautiful country.”
5 Susana Berger, “The Visible Order of Student Lecture Notebooks” in “The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment,” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 119.
6 From a conversation between the author and Professor Logan McCarty.
7 Andrew Hui, “A theory of the aphorism: from Confucius to Twitter,” Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 10.
8 Andrew Hui, “A theory of the aphorism: from Confucius to Twitter,” Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 10.

Master You said: When practicing the ritual, what matters most is harmony. This is what made the beauty of the way of the ancient kings; it inspired their every move, great or small. Yet they know where to stop: harmony cannot be sought for its own sake, it must always be subordinated to the ritual, otherwise it would not do.

When my mother wanted me to clean my room, she would recite this one Chinese proverb: 

If the old doesn’t leave, the new cannot come

. It was a lesson on many things, especially on letting go—on making room for the uncertainty of the unknown. But contained within those words is also the understanding that there must always be something lost when there is something gained. For so long, I didn’t stop to think about what might have been lost in the grand spatial-temporal mapping of human futures.

That night, I was so ashamed that I thought I would simply die, right then. There was grief and a deep shame at my own inurement towards the obvious necessary violence of optimization. I was so shocked by my own shock at what was so exceedingly obvious that I began vomiting violently.

It was so easy to miss the brutality of Footprint. The way Footprint makes “you” and “I” who we are, reconstitutes us in our planned collective motions, seems so benign, 

 where control is not centralized in a person, but dispersed—collectively configured. Each one of us is optimized for everyone else and for ourselves. We had given up the arduous task of self-transformation through the disciplining of our bodily comportment to 

 who knew how to do it better. It doesn’t matter, really, whether this way of thinking about Footprint was right or wrong. Whether the systems of Footprint disaggregated power—whether it truly was a decentralized, collectively choreographed motion towards 

—or collected it into the spectral hands of the invisible they; whether they were really us or not; none of this mattered because there is nothing to be done. The required subject is absent. The center, even if it exists, cannot be located or held responsible. All of us are held by the inertia of this deep structure.

The night the news of Yao Pin An aired, I walked all the way from my closet-sized apartment in Brooklyn to 3rd Ave & East 125 St, pitching through the dark in unclean motions. Imagine the desperation, the vicious anger, the grief of someone who is trapped in something unescapable, who has no choice but to subject themselves to something to which they had always and would always be subjected. I was overcome, violently, with an urge to do everything wrong—to deviate in all of my motions as a giant fuck you to 

. But I could not. Everything I do is beyond myself. There will be consequences for someone else.

I remember once reading an anthropological text on the wisdom of the Apache. The anthropologist wrote:

The past is a well-worn ‘path’ or ‘trail’ (‘intin)…the past has disappeared—and…must be constructed—which is to say, imagined—with the aid of historical materials, sometimes called ‘footprints’ or ‘trails’ (biké’goz’áá) that survived into the present. 

The Apache imagined that we would grow in wisdom by looking for footprints—directives for path-building found in the stories told by memories, places, and moments past. Footprint eliminates the need to look for footprints. No one is involved in the construction of their own paths. No one is involved in their own making.

How will you walk along this trail of wisdom? Well, you will go to many places. You must look at them closely. You must remember all of them…You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. 

I was thinking about how people go places but do not look, or remember, or learn any names; Footprint eliminates this need. I was thinking about the rhetoric of walking, how the sounds of all our motions have cohered into one single harmony. I was thinking about Yao Pin An and his broken skull.

I was thinking about this when I arrived at 3rd Ave & East 125 St.

 was the annexation of all of our selves and all of our possible selves.

I was thinking that somehow, at this moment that is by all “objective measures” the height of human development, we are coming upon the end of the world.

9 Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Living,” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 106.
10 Keith Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache,” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, p. 31.
11 Ibid, 129.

In the transforming process of the universe, the past has just gone and the future continues to come. They continue without a moment of rest

 —Chu His, Lun Yu Chi-Chu Ch. 5, comment on Analects 9:16

From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way.

 —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 

That night, I started to write things down—and Footprint started to recalibrate at an abnormal pace.

Standing there at the corner of 3rd Ave & East 125 St, a day after Yao Pin An’s head was bashed into that spot, I thought about Baozhu Chen and Yao Pin An. I thought about my father. I remember feeling ashamed of the abstraction of my own sorrow. Yao Pin An is in a coma. Baozhu Chen must live. And I am just… here. What was the reason for my arrival in this place?

I don’t know what I expected to see—maybe I thought that a catastrophic event would have changed the terrain of the place, just a little. But there was nothing. No yellow tape, no markings, no trace of where Yao Pin An was crash-landed into the earth. Just a non-descript street corner, the faded yellow paint peeling like tree bark from the curb, the impact of a human skull lost among decades of scrapes and weathering. A bit of grass and a lone, scrawny dandelion broke through the earth where curb met street.

Standing there, watching the dandelion waver in the thick air, I reached in my pocket and wrapped my fingers around the cheap ballpoint pen inside. I popped off the cap and drew a line on my left hand. It felt right, so I kept going. I drew the line all the way from the tip of my left index finger to my elbow. Above the line, I wrote “R.I.P” and below the line I wrote all the names I could remember of everyone who has died in the past year. Yao Pin An is not on the list. If he is dead, I don’t know this. I didn’t put him on the list.

None of these motions were deviations. But the second I lifted the pen from my arm in the gesture of writing, Footprint recalibrated.

One month later, the ink from that night long gone from my arm, finally beginning to relearn the motions of casual happiness again, I stood by a magnolia tree. I watched it blooming in the warm light of the coastal spring, and suddenly, I knew that its name was 

. I marked it down on my hand so as not to forget, using the same pen, stashed still in my jacket pocket. When I lifted my pen, Footprint recalibrated again.

Summer 2021

Summer 2021 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Fiction • Summer 2021

The Harp

Fiction • Summer 2021

Footprint (A Makeshift Legend)

Fiction • Summer 2021

The Leaving

Fiction • Summer 2021

Jumbo Mumbo

Features • Summer 2021

The Rest of Our Lives Tonight

Art • Summer 2021

What are you doing?

Art • Summer 2021

Crocodile Tears

Art • Summer 2021

Imaginary Friend

Art • Summer 2021

My Lovely Boy

Art • Summer 2021

Double Healthy Burger

Art • Summer 2021

Self-Porkrat

Art • Summer 2021

Dragon Looking Back