Probably Benign
Writing can be a lonely pursuit. I am that person who frequently and longingly looks at MFA websites and programs, wanting, I think, not only the structure and schedule of education but a cohort, a group of people who will write blurbs for my nonexistent book and remember when I defended fan fiction in class. Then the anxiety of inevitable debt then forces me to close all the tabs, the pictures of workshop tables and notepads and literary luminaries (Zadie Smith! Ocean Vuong!) vanishing from my horizon.
This piece is a little about that loneliness, but funnily enough it was created out of an opposite environment: I wrote it during a wonderful four-week, online Catapult fiction seminar with Alexandra Chang, which I took earlier this year. I dearly miss those classes, the watery 8am mornings, Alexandra’s precise and generative discussions, talking about everything with other writers who also, miraculously, managed to squeeze in a precious hour and a half each week.
Some house notes: since my last newsletter, I’ve published a review of That We May Live, an anthology of translated speculative fiction by Hong Kong and mainland Chinese writers; and this tiny Artforum piece on mutual aid and interdependence at Tai Kwun’s recent exhibition. I have a few things in the works which I’m excited/nervous about, but can’t share until they’re finalized.
As always, thank you for reading!
***
Probably Benign
IMAGE: Lala Rukh, “River in an Ocean: 6,” 1993.
All along the fencing of the small garden near our flat are mounds of soil, pressed neatly into the shapes of the upturned pots that once held them. Scattered on the bed are whole mandarin oranges, some toothpaste-white with mold.
My dog and I visit that garden every morning and night. I notice the plants. Mainly because they change so often, and I always wonder why. Sometimes we see the district gardeners hauling rows of displaced foliage on their carts, tearing off the stalks and stems of perfectly decent flowers. My dog always takes his time sniffing here, until one of us becomes anxious about being outside or the police car coming around the bend and we hurry on.
*
One night after the lunar new year I wake up abruptly from a nap on the couch and say “It feels like . . .”
My husband asks, “what?”
I’m fully awake now and embarrassed. “It just felt like we were preparing for someone to visit us.”
I hear the phantom knock of the door, my chest battering from the stress of having to disinfect surfaces, tuck the computer cords in, put out the guest soap, refill the seeds. But it’s midnight and just me and my husband and our tiny sleeping dog and the nature documentary we were watching. Somewhere between the vampire bats and wood frogs I had drifted off to sleep.
“Huh,” my husband says.
“Do you smell smoke?” I ask.
*
We go high up in the mountains. Where there are less people, less chances of catching the virus. A mother and two toddlers are looking at a pool—well, really, a puddle of stagnant water.
“What’s that!” The boy asks. He’s wearing a little blue Doraemon hat.
“It’s baby shrimp, but they’re all dead!” His sister says, excitedly. They start singing as we walk past.
One, two, three, four five, once I caught a fish alive . . .
The mountain twists and converges on fog and they disappear.
Six, seven, eight nine ten, then I let it go again . . .
“You know that song?” My husband asks, hearing me sing.
“I guess I do,” I say.
*
I notice the cruise ship when I open the blinds to let some cool air in. “Look,” I call to my husband. “That’s the ship with all the people quarantined on it.”
I keep a close eye on the view from our window. Every morning I look out and see the vessel in the same position. It’s too far away for me to see anyone on it, but I know they are there. Can they even leave their rooms? Are they all playing cards or mah-jong?
*
Most days, I can’t really get out of bed.
*
I wail and dither at my keyboard. Useless. Why don’t you try drinking while you write, at least half a dozen people have suggested to me. It sounds so easy, like a good squat when you take a shit to uncurl the kink in your puborectalis muscle.
But doesn’t that take the fun out of drinking, I say.
Everything everything everything is contaminated these days.
*
“You still walk your dog?” an acquaintance asks. I can’t tell if he’s horrified or if in awe.
“Early,” I reply, defensive. “When there’s no one around.”
*
I want to tell this acquaintance: I can’t and won’t ever give up on my dog. Okay? Even if I’ve given up on everything else. Including myself.
*
Friday. I’m smeared with so much goo and gel after the ultrasound, it takes me a full five minutes to wipe all of it off with these stiff squares of paper towel. I’m thirty years old but the doctor said it’s never too early to check. I told him my grandmother died of breast cancer. Actually, that’s not true. She had breast cancer three times and then she died of complications from the poisonous gangrene in her leg. The day after I got married.
*
The doctor’s office calls again. The nurse asks when I can come by to pay off the outstanding balance for my ultrasound.
“Maybe this afternoon,” I say, although I have no intention of moving from the indented space on the sofa or drawing open my blinds. If I look left toward the back of my flat, away from the windows, the light inside looks almost like sunlight, something I haven’t felt in two weeks.
“Ok, sure,” the nurse says patiently. She is so, so kind.
*
Do you know who is unkind? The neighbor upstairs who cracked a hole in our ceiling when they were drilling their floors, and who refuses to pay for damages. It’s been over a year. Every month or so one of us will make the elephantine effort to write yet another polite yet firm email stating our side of the argument. The hole is still there although it’s partially stuffed with concrete. Sometimes I imagine them spying on us, writing down every time I even dare to laugh. “See,” they might say. “You’re still having a good time.”
*
Someone also recently reached out to tell me in that they’re following what I’m writing, and instead of saying anything nice, they said I must stop. I almost laughed because, why? I can barely write at all.
*
They say that the virus can’t get in through your skin, but all I feel are my pores opening wider and wider to absorb all this shit.
*
My husband and I fight every time we need to go out now. I don’t like it but I can’t stop it from happening.
“What are you stressing about?”
“The plan is all wrong,” I say. “You don’t get it. Everything has a price.”
I don’t tell him: if we take public transportation, we’re exposing ourselves to disease, germs, grime, racism, state violence, guilt, panic attacks. But if we take a taxi, we have less money to spend on food. Plus the taxi driver could be an asshole, like the one who refused to take us through the older cheaper tunnel, just so he could rip us off an extra 200 Hong Kong dollars. Or the one who cursed at everyone as he tried to ram his car through a protest that had spilled onto the streets.
I sit stewing in my anxiety, this weight of whatever this year has done to me.
“It’s almost 8pm,” he says quietly, looking at the clock.
*
I wake up and say: “You don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“The sushi line is going to be longer for them and they won’t like it.”
“Are you asleep?”
Sometimes in the morning when I check my phone, in the cold dark light of the room, I find an email from my husband with no subject line, no punctuation, just lines of my sleep talk. I laugh so hard sometimes I end up crying on my pillow.
*
I’ve started to say good morning and good night to the people stuck on the ship. When I eat lunch at our dining room table, I stare directly across at the cell windows all lined up across the length of the whale-like vessel. I find the model of the World Dream cruise ship online and look up the floorplan. There is a swimming pool on its roof. Each room has a tiny balcony with two deck chairs. There seems to be an abundance of cold crab claws on ice. If you pay enough, you can also hire a private butler.
“Do you think that if we put up a banner, they would see it?” I ask my husband.
*
The last time we were cooped up we hadn’t been dating two months and we were still living in New York. There was a storm all over the city and it snowed so much that the bicycle that was permanently parked outside my apartment building vanished. You could just about see the bell.
*
I grab coffee on Zoom with a friend, who asks about my writing. They finished their manuscript months ago.
“It’s so hard to find an agent these days,” they say. “I spent so much time on this book, you know? I can’t give up now.”
So much coming in, not much going out.
*
My mother, who received her PhD in feng shui by way of Whatsapp and WeChat, calls and insists that I must buy an onion and plant it in the soil of a green shrub that she has delivered to my flat.
“Don’t ever move it. Keep me updated on its progress,” she says.
The onion grows. I snip off the tender stems and sauté them with eggs. I expect them to taste mild, but they’re pungent and sour, like raw garlic. I pick them out of my pretty-looking dish.
I forget to water it for a while. One day I notice the onion skin looking a tired, drooping into the soil. I peel it and it comes away in my hand like silvered foil. There’s nothing there, just millions of tiny dark flies.
My mother calls and asks how the onion is doing. “It disappeared,” I say.
“You see, it soaked up all the bad stuff coming through your door,” she says happily. “There must have been so much wai ye.” She says bad like: spoiled, rotten, malfunctioning.
“Okay,” I reply. I don’t even tell her about the flies. My brother says I’m being kind, letting her believe that she’s protecting me. But the truth is I’m just too tired to argue.
*
Everyone riding the train now seems to have developed some sort of nervous tic. The man sitting next to me compulsively taps his wrist between straightening up his tie and folding his hair over and over with his thin, cigarette-like fingers, which are iodide-brown at the tips. He’s so close that I feel the slight pocket of wind he creates when he flips his toupée. A woman on the other end of the carriage starts praying after she accidentally brushes a pole with her left hand.
Me: I sit very still. When the train pulls to a stop at each station, I gather up my muscles and concentrate so hard on not moving that I effectively evaporate behind my mask, become a statue, cold, lifeless, impermeable like waterproof marble.
*
The ultrasound x-ray comes back in little grids, like a comic strip. The images look like mini seascapes, black as night, the whiteish permutations like the beginning of a wave. I am reminded of an Indian artist’s works I once saw in a gallery, in which she drew with a silver marker wriggles on photographs of a dark river. Grainy. I am reminded of Hito Steyerl: “the poor image is a copy in motion.” The lump is a clog of uncolor.
The report reads: “probably benign.”
*
I am reminded of Julia Kristeva: “Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”
*
The banner for the cruise ship. My husband says it might not work, but we could try. The stationary store only sells A3 sheets of paper so I have to buy dozens of them and staple them all together. The paper and metal scrape and cut my fingers.
Together we hang it from our window. “Okay,” my husband says. “Someone might see it if they used their phone and zoomed in. What should it say?”
“How is everyone doing?” seems too friendly, lacks urgency, “hang in there” a bit saccharine. “You are not alone” is my preferred message, it seems comforting, but my husband said it could be perceived as threatening. “And how do you know everyone’s first language is English?”
In the end we write nothing, and just leave the banner flapping in the wind, patches of pristine, clean, disinfected white that said everything that they might want to hear, or nothing at all.