An Invisible Wrong

By: | April 2, 2021

There’s something wrong with men. I am one, I feel it. Something is broken. The last two mass shootings — two massage spas and a grocery store — might be old news by the time you read this, but it feels like an open wound.

How are you doing? 

We say we’re becoming numb and I don’t believe it. I have never hurt so much in my life. No matter how loud you turn up the radio or how many devices you bury your head in, it still hurts. 

Does it need to be said that the shooters were male? They almost always are. If we’ve got one thing going for us, it’s consistency. I don’t want to determine here on this page why men indiscriminately kill, but I want to recognize that this is a thing being done by men. Women have their own brand of rage I’ve found, but that is not my business to solve. It does not leave so many bodies on the ground. Women are murderers, there’s no doubt. I taught a writing workshop several years ago in a women’s prison in Anchorage, Alaska, and sat in a circle of women, some of whom had killed. Good writers, I have to say, enthusiastic about the craft. They had their demons, and maybe they weren’t so different from any of ours, but I’m not talking about theirs. I imagine they had reason to kill. I didn’t ask. 

I didn’t grow up fighting, but I grew up male. My dad was a brawler. We were playing pool and a guy stacked quarters on our table. My dad didn’t like his look and swiped his coins to the floor, saying, “Go play with yourself.” As in, don’t interrupt me and my son, but in a less polite way. I talked the guy down. I’m better at that than fighting, maybe it’s growing up with a single mother.

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Voice Mails from the Great Beyond

By: | March 29, 2021

On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.

I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.

I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.

I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone. 

When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter. 

Photo: Pxhere

Redux: A Photo By Any Other Name

By: | March 26, 2021

This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity.

Ever since reading the comment thread for Ginny’s Lie to Me piece, I have been searching myself for the truth behind the convenient story that I am vehemently opposed to, and vigilantly on guard against, any kind of untruth in journalism.

Festivities have begun in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Shackleton/Scott expeditions to the South Pole. I know someone who’s going to be re-enacting the Shackleton expedition, tall ship and all, so I headed down to the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace to see the exhibit of photography from those trips.

Among many artfully arranged photos of penguins and icebergs, loving portraits of sled dogs and triumphant group shots of the team, there hung two photos that were different.

Elephant Island was the site of a gruelling test of survival, with fourteen men sleeping under two overturned boats, waiting for rescue by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Among them was photographer Frank Hurley.

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Relearning

By: | March 24, 2021
A screenshot of a Duolingo screen to translate the sentence "There are 1,500 cat photos on my cell phone"

The fall of 5th grade, my parents gave me two options: I could either enroll in Chinese school, or join the youth orchestra. I loved playing cello so I opted for the latter, but as an adult, I wonder if I made the right choice. While I have some basic Chinese conversational skills, I didn’t learn to read or write until college, where I spent three years in a class full of kids like me who grew up speaking the language but had limited reading and writing skills. At one point, I learned up to 2,000 characters, but after years without practice, I’m illiterate again.

I’ve had no shortage of excuses for not practicing my Chinese. First, it was school. Then I got into running and climbing and I told myself I had time for other activities. Finally, over the pandemic, those excuses mostly fell away, and I’ve realized my resistance to learn was rooted in shame, embarrassment, and fear of failure. Am I a “bad” Chinese American for not learning this earlier? What does it say about me that I can’t even write to my grandpa in his native language?

I resolved to get over it, and accept that I’d be starting from almost scratch. I checked out children’s books from the local library: one was about a little boy who found a spider, and the other, about a class who discovered their teacher is also a rapper. I could just barely make out the contours of the story without help from the English translation. My mother was delighted to hear that I’m trying to learn again, and mailed me a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales — the same volume she’d recently sent to my cousin’s toddler.

I’ve also been obsessively completing Duolingo lessons. Today makes the 117th day of my streak and I am already worrying about what will happen to my stats once the weather is warm enough to go backpacking, where I’ll be without wifi. I notice the reading has come easier; while practicing writing characters, certain words or strokes came back to me easily, like a long-lost friend.

Sometimes, the app feeds me a sentence to translate that stirs up some unexpected emotion. In a lesson on travel, there was the sentence, “Be careful, it’s not safe there at night,” and I felt like my mom was in the room with me. And “I will try harder to learn Chinese” made me feel like an irritable teen again. I AM trying, Duolingo! Look at my streak!

But then there are the sentences that make me wonder: Duolingo, are you ok? In what world are these the sentences I’ll need to learn? If I were a creative writing instructor, some of these might make interesting prompts or character details. Here are some of my favorites:

  • He is handsome, but he is not a good person.
  • How can we be better than other people?
  • There are 1,500 cat photos on my cell phone.
  • There are too many people here.
  • He had three bottles of Baijiu, and now he is sleeping.
  • None of us like him, so luckily, he didn’t come.
  • I have a smart little bird. It likes to dance.

I’ll leave you with the question that almost sent me into an existential tailspin the other day:

Are you happy?

Quick, Call This Number Right Now

By: | March 22, 2021

Have you ever dialed a phone number to get the weather forecast?

This is one of those questions and answers that dates you, like describing your favorite TV show in adolescence, or the brand of shoes that were extra cool in 10th grade. 

Dialing a number: There’s the first anachronism in that example. I don’t remember the last time I dialed a rotary phone, like literally turned a dial seven times to reach seven different numbers in sequence. But I am both old enough to have done this in my life, and old enough to have been sufficiently old at the time to form a memory of having done so. 

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Amphorae

By: | March 19, 2021
Ancient Roman glass (1st-6th century CE) at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento From the collection of Marcy Friedman. Photo by Emily Underwood.

A little over a year ago I made an unplanned trip to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I had driven to the city to run errands but then decided to go look at art instead, a moment of pre-pandemic spontaneity that felt indulgent then, and now, I imagine, would feel like intense catharsis. It was a rainy Sunday; I remember stepping over crushed magnolia blossoms on the wet pavement. I paid my admission and declined the headset tour, bought a cup of coffee in the museum cafe and drank it in the light-filled glass atrium, a relatively recent expansion of the oldest public art museum west of the Mississippi River.

I enjoyed all of the exhibits, more or less, but one installation made such an impression on me that I still think about it: A collection of 1st-6th century Roman glass jars, flasks, juglets and perfume bottles called amphoriskos. The placard by the case was succinct, noting only a few physical details like “turquoise twin handles, spiral and zig-zag trailing,” and “globular sprinkler with pinecone.” It didn’t say anything about how the glass was made, where it was found, or how the donor, a local painter, acquired it. I left the museum without asking, not realizing it would be the last time I’d visit.

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One year of this

By: | March 17, 2021
Pretty flowers on an apricot tree

Here’s something I’ve learned about myself in the pandemic: I open produce bags by licking my fingers. My entire life, after touching the car keys or the inside of the metro, and my shoe, and the cart, and anything else that is around, and before touching my fruits and vegetables, I have been sticking my fingers in my mouth.

Now I know, if I don’t have access to my mouth, I’m just going to stand there muttering to myself and rubbing the end of the bag and poking at it and generally feeling like an incompetent human.

Before, infectious disease was not something I spent a lot of time thinking about.

Now, infectious disease is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.

I used to think very little about introducing novelty into my life. Now, I will purposefully buy a new brand of soap, just to try something different. I’ve been walking down the alleys in my neighborhood to see the back sides of houses. Earlier this year, I tried Fig Newtons for the first time since childhood. (Have you tried them lately? They are so odd. How can a cookie be both mushy and gritty?)

One day a few weeks ago I sat on the opposite end of the couch from usual. It was thrilling.

Sunday I got my first shot of the Pfizer. This feels like another turning point, when after a year of relative isolation I can start to consider a world where I can go places and be indoors with strangers. Novelty will be easier to come by.

But I’m not sure I’m ready to give up my life at home, where all it takes to get a new perspective is a lemon-verbena-scented bar of soap.