November 30, 2020 First Person The Cold Blood of Iceland By Roni Horn The American artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975, when she was nineteen. Since that initial journey, she has returned to the island nation, both in person and through art, time and again; she has described Iceland as “a force, a force that had taken possession of me.” Island Zombie: Iceland Writings, which will be published this week by Princeton University Press, collects vignettes and photographs from Horn’s ongoing fascination with the country. An excerpt appears below. Photo: Michal Klajban. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. MAKING BEING HERE ENOUGH I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to do anything but be here. Doing something will take me away from being here. I want to make being here enough. Maybe it’s already enough. I won’t have to invent enough. I’ll be here and I won’t do anything and this place will be here, and I won’t do anything to it. And maybe because I’m here and because the me in what’s here makes what’s here different, maybe that will be enough, maybe that will be what I’m after. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’ll be able to perceive the difference. How will I perceive it? I need to find a way to make myself absolutely not here but still be able to be here to know the difference. I need to experience the difference between being here and not changing here, and being here and changing here. I set up camp early for the night. It’s a beautiful, unlikely evening after a long rainy day. I put my tent down in an El Greco landscape: the velvet greens, the mottled purples, the rocky stubble. But El Greco changes here, he makes being here not enough. I am here and I can’t be here without El Greco. I just can’t leave here alone. Read More
November 25, 2020 First Person The Libraries of My Life By Jorge Carrión The Chemists’ Club library in New York, New York, ca. 1920. Photo courtesy of Science History Institute. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I was thirteen and wanted to work. Someone told me that you could get paid to referee basketball games and where to go to find out about such weekend employment. I needed income to bolster my collections of stamps and Sherlock Holmes novels. I vaguely remember going to an office full of adolescents queueing in front of a young man who looked every inch an administrator. When my turn came, he asked me if I had any experience and I lied. I left that place with details of a game that would be played two days later, and the promise of 700 pesetas in cash. Nowadays, if a thirteen-year-old wants to research something he’s ignorant about, he’ll go to YouTube. That same afternoon I bought a whistle in a sports shop and went to the library. I wasn’t at all enlightened by the two books I found about the rules of basketball, one of which had illustrations, despite my notes and little diagrams, and my Friday afternoon study sessions; but I was very lucky, and on Saturday morning the local coach explained from the sidelines the rudiments of a sport that, up to that point, I had practiced with very little knowledge of its theory. My practical training came from the street and the school playground. My other knowledge, the abstract kind, stood on the shelves of the Biblioteca Popular de la Caixa Laietana, the only library I had access to at the time in Mataró, the small city where I was brought up. I must have started going to its reading rooms at the start of primary school, in sixth or seventh grade. That’s when I began to read systematically. I had the entire collection of The Happy Hollisters at home, and Tintin, The Extraordinary Adventures of Massagran, Asterix and Obelix, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators at the library. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie were devoured in both places. When my father began to work for the Readers’ Circle in the afternoons, the first thing I did was buy the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels I hadn’t yet read. That’s probably when my desire to own books began. Read More
November 2, 2020 First Person The Messiness of the Suburban Narrative By Simon Han There are sexier identities than “writer of the suburbs.” Such spaces still call to mind images of picket fences, cul-de-sacs, and gated neighborhoods, uniformly and exclusively white. When someone asks me where I’m from—that familiar fraught question—I still catch myself saying that I grew up in Dallas, or at times the mythically vague “Texas.” Plano, Texas, where I spent a decade of my adolescence, now boasts a quarter million residents, a quarter of whom were born in a different country. It’s the home of Pizza Hut, Frito-Lay, the bankrupt J. C. Penney, a host of global tech companies, and a recently relocated Toyota North America. And yet, there’s a cultural specificity to Plano. Its Costco sells edible bird’s nest, a Chinese delicacy that none of my family in China has had a chance to taste. To call Plano a suburb may be a stretch when it’s bigger than cities like Orlando, Newark, and Madison. But beyond the swirl of language and music and food, a suburban state of mind persists. One can feel it acutely this year, as white-collar immigrants stay home and earn their usual salary while working-class immigrants mow the lawns, take away the trash, and maintain the roads. It’s there in the undercurrent of casual remarks: how the police are probably too scared to do their jobs now, how there’s been a horrific murder in a neighborhood like ours, how it could happen even here. Near my parents’ house in a suburb bordering Plano, a Muslim family sits in their driveway on lawn chairs, watching their kids scooter past a house with multiple Trump/Pence signs and a cute Pomeranian that won’t stop barking. Finally, the owner comes outside and snaps at the dog to be nice. * Suburban niceness was a product of people moving to live with the kinds of people they preferred to be nice to. In the thirties, New Deal programs helped middle-class white Americans enter the suburban housing market, while nonwhite, non-Christian, and poor people were largely denied access. Rather than curb neighborhood segregation, the federal government skewed property values by rating white suburbs at much higher grades than Black neighborhoods. Through the civil rights era to present day, suburban strategies of exclusion have endured, often taking different forms: land-use controls against affordable housing, resistance to school integration, and a lack of public transportation and social services to accommodate the growing number of low-income residents being pushed out of cities. There’s a new wrinkle to the old narrative: since at least 2000, more than half of immigrants to the nation’s largest metro areas have settled in the suburbs. Among these immigrants are those who are university educated and upwardly mobile, beneficiaries of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Asian Americans, the fastest-growing racial and ethnic minority group in the suburbs, are the majority ethnicity in seven “ethnoburbs” in the Bay Area. In Plano, they make up 23 percent of the overall population. Lily Bao and Maria Tu, two first-generation immigrants from China and Taiwan, respectively, became the first Plano residents to break the “bamboo ceiling” when they were elected to the city council in 2019. Asian Americans have reshaped the place where I grew up, but remnants of the original Levittown mindset live on in Bao’s and Tu’s platforms, namely in their resistance to apartments and high-density housing as a way to “keep Plano suburban” (Bao’s campaign slogan, with strong echoes of Trump’s current one). And yet, there’s something about Bao’s conservatism that updates the old suburban talking points and separates her message from the polite company chatter of, say, Cheever’s Shady Hill characters. Perhaps it’s the way she leans into diversity—albeit a more exclusive definition of “diversity.” In an interview for Plano Magazine, Bao touts the benefits of welcoming highly educated and skilled workers, immigrants who love their country, drive their kids to excel in school, and receive acceptance in return. It’s a coded description, reminiscent of an observation that sociologist Noriko Matsumoto noted in the suburban New Jersey Asian American subjects in her Beyond the City and the Bridge: a “resurgence of ethnic pride” tied not only to “the growing numerical presence of Asians” but also their “visible socioeconomic success.” “We [Asians] as ‘model minorities’ work hard and pay taxes,” Bao states, “but seldom have our voices heard.” Her call for greater Asian American representation in politics echoes those made in other areas of American life, particularly in entertainment. These calls are often raised and supported by people like me, progressives who grew up in America under vastly different circumstances than their parents, with the same justification as Bao’s: Look at how much money Crazy Rich Asians made. Asians are good business. We’ve paid our dues, and it’s time we get a seat at the table. * As a fiction writer, I’ve thought a lot about how Western conventions of narrative lean on differentiation and change. How does the protagonist change? How does the protagonist stand out from the rest of the characters? These are questions we learn to ask in high school English classes and creative writing workshops, ones that readers expect to be resolved. As we turn the pages, we trust characters will advance through emotional and physical terrain to end in a different place from where they began. But as the suburban story has evolved, with new faces and entry points, so has its relationship to the narrative of change. Many newcomers to the suburbs are not only surviving but excelling. They are reshaping the story in their own image, but they are also living with the knowledge that such a story is precarious. Perhaps to preserve the new suburbs in which they finally feel at home, they also latch onto aspects of the old narrative, resisting the principles that gave them space to enter the suburban story in the first place. I was wrestling with how a storytelling arc built on principles of change would play out with a Chinese immigrant family living in the suburbs. I wrote a novel centered on a family living in Plano in the early aughts, strangers not only to the American suburbs but to one another. A family that, in their previous life, had suffered as a consequence of standing out. More change was the last thing on their minds; they’d moved to the suburbs to avoid the very development that readers crave. Even as the cracks in their “model home” begin to show, and their status as “model minorities” collapses under pressure, the family refuses to reinvent themselves in a way that would satisfy my hopes for them. I wondered then how to sit with that tension, with characters who did not offer me any shortcuts to sympathy. These days I find myself imagining the family beyond the page. What if they were here with us, in 2020? Maybe the parents have weathered the financial crisis, found an Asian church, made a few white friends. Maybe they dream in English. They’ve lived in the States (and Texas) longer than they lived in China. On WeChat, many of their friends who stayed in China have become increasingly nationalistic, defending the government crackdown on the Hong Kong protests and the internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. The parents in my novel remember what they lost after war and through the Cultural Revolution: homes and possessions and loved ones, yes, but also the memories they never got to have. Everything they’ve endured in Plano, including the current pandemic, feels like a small price to pay for finding their rightful home. Now I imagine them watching the video of George Floyd’s murder. I imagine them reading their children’s social media posts about anti-Blackness in Asian American communities. I imagine those children coming back from the big cities where they live in order to work remotely from their childhood homes. One day, the parents bring up the story of Black Lives Matter protestors crowding a white woman eating outside a D.C. restaurant. They say how much this reminds them of the struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution, when crowds publicly humiliated individuals. The children roll their eyes. “It’s not the same,” the children say. “That’s such an oversimplification. That’s what they want you to think.” The “they,” the parents assume, are the white people on TV telling them that the radical left are going to take over the suburbs. The parents see Trump tweeting to the “Suburban Housewives of America” that “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.” They see Patricia McCloskey, who along with her husband pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protestors outside their St. Louis suburban mansion. They hear her warning viewers that “what you saw happen to us, could happen to any of you, watching from your quiet neighborhoods.” “Your American Dream.” “Your quiet neighborhoods.” The mother in my novel is an electrical engineer and the family’s breadwinner—worlds away from Trump’s “housewife”—but she is also an Asian American. She is adept at projecting herself onto the we and us and you that was never intended to include her. The father, a failed artist and small businessman, his photography studio now shuttered after the rise of smartphones, follows her lead. It has taken him a long time to feel that these suburbs could be his, and the thought of losing that, too, even if it is in the service of the greater good, fills him with dread. He is tired of the unknown. When I started my novel in 2014, I didn’t consider whether my characters would vote for people and policies that I find abhorrent. To worry about such things felt outside the novel, a distraction from the writing of fiction, not to mention incompatible with a kind of “immigrant character arc” in which the change that the characters undergo tends to trend upward—if not socioeconomically, then morally. If the characters do not gain acceptance, they will at least learn a valuable lesson, something that nudges them closer to becoming the woke minority that a white liberal reader will willingly align themselves with. * In 2017, it seemed all of America—Trump included—was expressing horror at United’s forceful removal of one of their passengers, a Vietnamese American refugee who practiced medicine in the small-town suburb of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. David Dao was randomly selected to give up his seat on an overbooked airplane, and when he refused, security guards gave him a concussion, broke his nose and teeth, and dragged his unconscious body down the aisle. While watching the video, I thought the words that Patricia McCloskey, of all people, would later echo: “What you saw happen to us, could happen to any of you.” But then the stories came out about Dao’s past. More than a decade earlier, he had been convicted of trafficking prescription drugs in exchange for sex. He’d lost his medical license, which had only been provisionally reinstated in 2015. He’d faced many complaints of anger issues. For a while, I didn’t bother to read these reports, chalking it up to rumors and smearing. Dao’s background didn’t change the fact that what happened to him on the United flight was an injustice. But as Cathy Park Hong notes in Minor Feelings, to understand the complexity of Dao is to understand that he is not “some industrious automaton.” He did not fit an arc that I myself felt grafted onto: sacrifice + perseverance + hard work = acceptance. He did not become that friendly suburban doctor, quick to pick up the phone, ready to please you, make you feel better. His story did not seem to belong to suburbia at all. To be clear, I’m not equating David Dao’s actions with my fictional characters possibly voting for Trump. I’m less interested in a character’s turn toward Trumpism than in my inability to imagine where exactly that turn would take them. Vietnamese Americans like Dao, many of them refugees and staunchly anti-Communist, are more likely to be Republican than Democrat. Chinese Americans include big pockets of right-wing voters, especially among a new wave of wealthy immigrants who move directly to the suburbs and couldn’t care less about the old methods of work-hard-speak-English-earn-their-love assimilation. Asian Americans, on the whole, are less likely to belong to either political party. One reason for this, Hua Hsu argues in The New Yorker, may be how “they often seem too socially and linguistically fractured to effectively target.” Asian Americans are also the most economically divided group in the United States, and they’re experiencing huge spikes in unemployment during the pandemic, a shift that has gone underreported (as has the story of poverty in the suburbs in general, rising at a higher rate than in cities). When we look closer, the story of how we survive, find acceptance, and thrive is messy, even in the suburbs. For progressive Americans, there’s a temptation to read the headlines (even Republican Asian Americans prefer Biden!) and breathe a sigh of relief, as if all these people turning against Trump means that we’ll be okay. But there was never an easy we in this story of us. * The story of the suburbs is also a story of America. As Jason Diamond states in The Sprawl, “We don’t realize how suburban we’ve become, whether we live in a suburb or not.” It was only after I left Plano that I could look on it with fondness. I would remember how my dad would drive us past all those Taco Buenos, and never fail to creatively butcher the pronunciation of “bueno” to make me laugh. There was a comfort to that memory, how copies of a place could bring back a singular story from the edge of my mind. I grew up among chain restaurants and sprinkler-fed lawns, highways stacked on top of highways and churches as big as shopping malls. I also grew up among faces that looked like mine, with languages that sounded like home, a home nevertheless built to be exclusive and far from the “integrated” spaces that Biden claims the suburbs he was raised in were. Now, after more than a decade, I’m living in the ’burbs of Dallas again. It’s different from what I remember, but it’s still a home, and like all homes, it’s hard to know what to make of it now. If we are to understand where we are going as a country, not just in November but beyond it, we ought to see the suburbs as they are. Because this feeling I get here is a contradiction, too: that there could be so many of us, yet there could be no we at all. Simon Han is the author of Nights When Nothing Happened, forthcoming from Riverhead Books.
October 14, 2020 First Person Slow Violence By Lynn Steger Strong The US Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC. The day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings two years ago, I was applying thinly sliced yellow-dyed marshmallows in the shape of daisies onto cupcakes for my daughter’s sixth birthday party. I’d been watching Christine Blasey Ford speak—I’d moved from the couch to the floor—but I’d turned the TV off around the time that Lindsey Graham appeared to start crying. I went running. I was angry. Worse than angry: I had that feeling that I’ve felt so often the past four years—but also, my whole life—that what was happening was deeply wrong, and that was why it was happening, and that was just the way things were. Running, I tripped on something and I fell, hands and elbows first, on the hard dirt. I got a nasty gash on my left arm. I smashed the lower half of my phone. I got up, though, and kept running. My elbow stung, burned, but I didn’t stop to look at it. I felt the warmth of blood, a few drips on my fingers. It was only later, back at our apartment, that I saw how wide and deep and bloody the cut was. I showered quickly, and poured half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my arm. I put on the short-sleeved shirt I think of as my mom shirt. It was humid, mid-September, but I put on a cardigan to cover up the blood. I put the cupcakes into a cupcake carrier. I put the cupcake carrier into our old stroller and walked them to my daughter’s school. I listened to the hearings as I walked. I was shaking by the time I got to our daughter’s first-grade room. The party was for all the kids with September birthdays and another mom read a book to all the kids. I sat quietly in the back. When it was my daughter’s turn to walk six times around the sun, I stood up. I had begun to sweat and I pulled the sleeve of my cardigan up over my elbow. I saw another mom blanch at the site of my cut, avert her eyes, and I pulled the sleeve back down. We clapped and sang as my six-year-old danced around in circles. My daughter wanted me to bring her home with me but I left her there. I sat on someone else’s stoop close to the school until it was time to pick her and her sister up. Rattled is what I felt, rickety. Standing there, clapping, trying to smile. A low roiling under everything. The burn, but also the shame, the mess and gore, but also the absurd stupidity of that cut stuck now to the cardigan’s thin wool. I was glad about the gash, though. I did not want to show it to those other mothers I did not know, but I talked about it to friends. It felt like proof that something happened that day, a concrete marker for what has felt true in my body for so long. Read More
October 5, 2020 First Person The Eleventh Word By Lulu Miller The sky was a slate of electric indigo. We were sitting in the bath, my year-and-a-half-old son and I. My wife popped her head in the door. He looked at her, giving her a smile I will never get, and then pointed to the painting of a magenta fish on the wall. “Sheesh,” he said. “Fish?” She said. “Sheesh!” He said. It was, perhaps, his eleventh word. He had dog and ball and duck and bubble and mama and (mysteriously in our lesbian household) dada and nana (for banana) and vroom vroom (for cars) and hah-hah (for hot) and (the root of so many of our evils) what’s dat? What’s dat? What’s dat? And then, there it was: fish. It should have been a tragic moment for me. I, of all people, should have sensed the danger in it. I had just spent the last ten years of my life working on a book called Why Fish Don’t Exist, arguing that the word “fish” is symptomatic of our human inability to see the world as expansively as it is. In short, scientists recently discovered that many of the creatures we typically think of as “fish” are in fact more closely related to us than to each other. And when you accept this fact you will see that the category of “fish” is a bum category—an act of gerrymandering we perform over nature to make it line up with our intuition. But it’s a lie, this category of “fish,” a mistake, a meaningless group that hides incredible nuance and complexity. And “fish” is just one glaring example of this thing we do all the time—group things together that do not belong under one label in the name of maintaining our convenience, comfort, power. My book, in large part, is a plea to approach the world with more doubt—more doubt in our categories, more doubt in our words, more curiosity about the organisms pinned beneath our language. The reward, as I promise in the book, is a more expansive world, “a wilder place,” where nothing is what it seems, where “each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.” And so, as the word “fish” rolled off my son’s tongue for the very first time, I should have felt that hot burst of fricative air as a puncturing of his innocence—sheeesh. His fall from grace in real time, his ejection from a Garden of Eden I had just spent a decade trying to hack a path back into. I should have squeezed my palm to his lips and pressed hard so no more words could spill out. Instead, I tested him. I pulled up a photograph of a goldfish on my phone. “Sheesh.” A salmon. “Sheesh.” A mottled blue coelacanth, fleshy and finned. “Sheesh.” “Yes!” I squealed in the highest octave I could reach, cementing the mistake with my glee. * Over the next few weeks, he revealed to me that fish were everywhere in the city of Chicago. Fish along the mosaicked wall of the pedestrian underpass to Lake Shore Drive, now barricaded with yellow tape to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Fish inside the library books we could no longer return. Fish in the windows of the shuttered nursery school on Clark. Sheesh, sheesh, sheesh, he would point his little scepter-finger, stunning the former confusion into mastery. In his care, a snake was also a fish; a turtle, a fish; and one morning as we opened the window to let an April breeze roll through the apartment, the potted banana palm became a fish, her fins suddenly paddling the air. As our world was closing in, his seemed to be exploding. The word “fish” turned out to be a sacred key, one that granted him access to the entire animal kingdom. Suddenly, no creature was unknown to him. If a dog walked by, it was “dog.” If a bunny hopped by, it was also “dog.” The cows, bears, zebras, kangaroos, giraffes, and elephants stuffed inside our children’s books—all “dog” to him. As for birds—the robin roosting on our porch rafter, the cardinal in the bush, the pigeons flying with a new woodblock elegance across the quieted sky—all “duck.” Everything else was “fish.” It was Aristotle’s same system of classifying animals into three groups—land, sea, or air. One morning, he called an ant a dog. His chest began to puff just a little bit. Mine did, too. I did not yet sense the threat. In late April, we learned of one of the few nature preserves still recklessly open and we plunged in. We walked through archways of naked underbrush, brambles holding in their buds, carpets of moss stealing the show. “Dirt,” our son said. “Yeah! Dirt!” We said, pointing to the infinitely complex swirl of mineral, mycological, entomological, and electrical matter beneath our feet. That very same day came “wawa,” for the small creek at the end of the hike and, later, for rain and baths and thirst. Next was “stick.” “Yellow” bloomed for one day, then left us. The tiny black dogs that crawled along the cracks in our porch became “bug,” then “ant.” We cheered with every word—two women waiting upon the doorstep, giddy to welcome him into our world of language. And then, five weeks after he first said the word “fish,” it happened. We shouldn’t have gone to see my in-laws. But … they’re young. Not even sixty. They don’t play tennis, but they could. We wore our masks and sat at the other end of a long rectangular table. They served mushroom risotto, cooked in an instant pot. Mango and strawberry and yogurt in tiny crystal glasses, because why not. We put our son to bed in their guest room. Around 10 P.M., we were all still up, still chatting, when our son started screaming. Not crying. Screaming. It was a sound we’d never heard. My wife went up, but after a few minutes, the volume had not lowered. I leaped up the carpeted stairs, worried he was sick, worried he had a fever, worried he had—but my wife shook her head, puzzled, “He isn’t hot,” she whispered. I tried to take him into my arms, sure I could settle him, but he recoiled. He looked up at me with no recognition. We tried everything. Rocking him, showing him a book, the one with the penguins who like each other so much. We tried warmed milk. Nothing. Finally my wife took him over to a framed photograph of Coptic tapestries. Various trees birthing goat-like creatures with curling horns, and snail-like creatures with spiraling shells, and maybe snakes and definitely vines all coiling into one another in such a hallucinatory way that it would have caused me to have a psychotic break if I’d been as disoriented as my son. My wife got him up close to the glass and started whispering the names of what she thought she saw. “Goat,” she said, tapping the glass. “Flower. Snail. Duck.” Thud. Thud. Thud. And slowly, through shaking inhalations, he settled enough for us to pack him up and drive home. * Once upon a time there was a German psychologist whose name I am forgetting—which will, itself, become relevant in just a moment—who argued that when you don’t name a thing it stays more active in your mind. Specifically, he found that you have better recall for the details of an unsolved task, an unfinished puzzle, an unnamed psychological phenomenon, than a solved or labeled thing. “Loose ends prevail” could have been the name of his law, but it was—I’m checking my notes—the Zeigarnik effect. The man’s name was Zeigarnik and she was a woman not a man and she was Russian, not German. But still. It has stayed with me, this idea with a hard-to-remember name about how unnamed ideas are easier to remember. This rabid little law that suggests that unlabeled things gnaw and tug at you with more vigor, their parts and powers somehow more alive when they are left to roam wild, outside of the confines of our words. With the name comes a kind of dormancy. The name, in this metaphor, is a trap. It’s the lid on the jar that extinguishes the firefly. * The next morning, our son was fine. My wife and I weren’t. “What was that?” We said to each other, shaking our heads over coffee prep and neglected dishes, glancing back at him, merry in his high chair. My wife went into work that morning at the hospital where she is a psychologist to kids who have come into contact with Chaos’s whims—amputations and paralyses and premature birth. She took her supervisor aside and asked if she had any thoughts on a night terror like the one we’d seen. Her supervisor told her not to worry, said it was a common occurrence around eighteen months, a by-product of all the neurological growth that happens around that time. I pictured a lightning bolt discharging from the growing ion storm of his mind. I had done my own half-hearted investigating. Some fruitless googling and a serendipitous phone call with a colleague who mentioned that his toddler had had her first night terror the very same night. We joked that there must have been something in the air. “That’s reassuring!” I heard myself saying, un-reassured. * I left them for five days. My book tour had been canceled. I needed nature. I needed something. I drove to West Virginia. I hiked on a ridge trail and saw a lady’s slipper orchid, whose name I only learned weeks after I saw her. This, well, vagina on a pedestal that lives on mountaintops. She was covered in dewdrops, she had pastel veins. I thought I was hallucinating. I missed my wife. I listened to Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity on tape while I hiked. He told me that the root of all our problems is the desire to hold onto anything. Life is inherently flowing and our grasp to possess it makes us sick. I nodded and tried desperately to capture each beautiful thing I saw: I took a picture of the mist, of a toad, of a cairn; I took a time-lapse of a sunset, an audio recording of a grouse bleating for her chicks, six photos of the lady’s slipper orchid; I ripped up a tiny bouquet of meadow flowers—purple, yellow, and white—and stuffed them in an envelope to mail home. I returned home to new words: apple and help. To the killing of George Floyd. To a city-wide curfew. I awoke one night to my wife saying, “Lulu. Out. Now.” She beelined down the hall to get our son. Our bathroom window was sunset-orange with fire outside. “This is a communication,” I thought as I wondered what to take. I chose our laptops. And the scrapbook I have been making of my son’s life—his inky footprints, his finger paintings, his words. The garage one plot over from us was razed. It was declared arson. No one was hurt. My son’s eyes gleamed at the fire trucks, five of them, the best night of his life. I thought about everything he didn’t yet know. I wondered how on earth we could raise him to be a good white man, to not think of himself as sitting on top of the hierarchy society continues to maintain for him. In June, he began saying the word “up.” He began rejecting his beloved blueberries, throwing them on the floor. And I would—what would I do?—pick them up. In July, we visited our sperm donor, a close friend who we’ve decided to call “uncle.” Our son’s face is his face but he has no word for him yet. His new word that month was “bus.” In August, a tornado pushed through Chicago. Flying saucers of roots rose from the cement as the tree trunks fell. I sat in the bath with my son. The thunder was so loud it shook the car alarms awake. My son looked at me with “WTF?” eyes. I said, “Thunder.” “Hummer!” He said. And, I said, “Yeah. Hummer.” In September, the wind rolled through, bearing cicadas and a chill. He turned two. His hot grew its t, his banana its b. He spoke his name out loud for the very first time. And no and corona. And now it is October. The mysterious white creature I hung from the porch, my son quickly learned to call “ske-le-tah.” He calls the giant orange orb sitting below it “apple” and tries, in vain, to bite into it. Over the ridge of this month lies a greater unknown than we’ve seen in a while. How will the votes get counted, will the votes get counted, and if the president loses, will he stay? Will he even be there to refuse to step down? Will the social order hold, and wouldn’t that actually be the worse fate of all—if it did? Will there even be a month called November? I am alone again. My wife and son are both asleep. I slip out onto the balcony. I can’t see the stars between the breaks in the clouds but I trust that they are there, because I have been told they are there. In honor of a more expansive world, in paving the path to progress through doubt, I let myself consider, for a moment, that there are no stars. I try to slip the word “star” off the stars, or to unscrew it, leaving just the sockets somewhere above me. I try to take down the word “above,” and consider that the stars might be below, or inside me. I roll my eyes at myself, while trying not to all the same. Suddenly, the words of this essay melt into paint. Or maybe to felt. To wooden waves of green and blue. The colors are muted but deep. The fish curl into the stars, which curl into the wind, which forms a kind of tornado, at the center of which, you can see, is the soul, engulfing the earth, re-engulfing the soul. There is the sound of laughter. Which is rendered as a tiny bouquet of droplets off the tip of Antarctica. The word “Antarctica” is crossed out. The word “Antarctica” was never there. Ice melts from the brass pole around which the globe spins, then freezes. Then sublimates. I would like to stay here. In the wordless place. After all these years looking closely at words, I have come to mistrust them. So often they are used as the sober blades to scale selves away from the group—its protection, its warmth, its assurances of justice. But something desperate in me still wants to hurl a handful of them out into the air, still believing that they could catch and tame a terrible thing. “With a rising sense of mastery comes the fear of the unknown” is the pompous phrase I want to toss out into the night. That night, back in April, when my son screamed out in terror, one might theorize that the reason for his fear was that he had awoken to an unfamiliar room, my in-laws’ guest room, and had become disoriented and afraid. And yet, prior to lockdown, we had dragged that child all over the place. In his short life, he’d lived in three different homes, two different states. He’d awoken to countless unfamiliar rooms, inside friend’s homes and hotels (remember those?) and cars and bars and tents, and never before had it frightened him. So what was different about that night? It was the first time he had awoken to an unfamiliar setting after the advent of words. For 569 days before that, he had lain with the unknown each night and it had never bothered or frightened him. Instead he had curled into her, this hulking, formless shoal of uncertainty and confusion, because it was all he knew. It was only with the advent of words, with the illusion that he could name the whole world, every last corner of it labeled and known, that the unknown became an enemy, became a threat. She’s flexing her wings this year, the unknown; she’s showboating around. She’s waving from the horizon in a coat of flames, she’s lingering on metal surfaces. There’s the same amount of her there always is, of course, but she’s making herself felt. Her presence can be seen in the whittling down of our teeth, the spikes in suicides, the surge in demand for therapists. Uncertainty, it has been shown, is more painful than certain physical pain. For some reason, the neurologists say, we are wired to fear the unknown. There is a thumbnail-size soldier in the brain, they explain, who they’ve named the Locus Coeruleus, who is charged with tracking uncertainty. He’s useful for a bit, they say; when faced with uncertainty, he puts the brain into a fluid state so it can better run through strategies to keep you safe. But when the uncertainty won’t let up, that fluid state starts to wear on the body; such extended vigilance leads to exhaustion, to a measurable increase in stress. “The strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” declared H. P. Lovecraft, nearly a century earlier. But what if they’re all wrong? What if we are not, in fact, fated to fear the unknown? What if that fear only starts with the advent of words, with the false belief that a named thing is a known thing? Perhaps it is our words that transform the hulking unknown from friend to foe. It is a tidy theory. It allows me to explain away the fear that something’s wrong with my child, that his anguish is unsolvable, unknowable. If I can name it, I can swat that haunting look in his eyes—when he no longer knew who I was—away forever. * With fish came every last creature on earth. The ducks are still ducks, but now owls are hoo-hoos. Both curbs and boulders are stone. He’s got fern and mushroom and umbrella and bus-truck. His chalk is cock, and the neighbors can’t stop laughing. The porpoises of the sea have all sprouted ruffled collars. “Doll-fish,” he says, animating the world with his wrongness, shaking them all temporarily awake. A few weeks ago, I sat in the park, under a heavy beam of wood that could kill me in an instant. But I trusted it wouldn’t, because I had named that thing branch. In that same park, I watched a man, face twisted, run hard in my direction. But I trusted he would not kill me, was not running from a thing that might kill me, because I named him jogger. In that same park, dozens of ten-ton death machines whizzed by. I named them truck. I named the flat ribbon of asphalt road, and in road I trusted. With each word comes a false set of assurances. That now you know how it will behave. “We have [the coronavirus] totally under control,” said the president the day after the first case was discovered in the U.S. My friends, who are nurses, and married to each other, once told me a story about a woman who lay down in a hammock and felt the cinder block into which the hammock hook had been drilled slip out from its wall and land on her face and kill her. With fish came the entire animal kingdom. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there are a few left. He’s still got no word for cicada. He’s never named a firefly. That night in the bath, so many moons ago—the same moon ago—the light gave off its last sparks of day, and he spoke his eleventh word. I heard it only as a mother. I clapped at all the finned creatures he had just caught in one syllable. I believed that he was drawing closer, each word a stepping stone thrown to walk him nearer, nearer to me. And yet the truth I knew even then, maybe, is that each word was another brick in the wall being erected between us. An experience named instead of shared. I pulled the plug and watched as he watched, delighted, the water drain away. By the time it was gone, it was night. I wish, now, that I had lingered just a little longer, in the warmth of the water, in the waning days of wordlessness, when confusion was still everywhere, when confusion was still nothing to fear. Lulu Miller is the co-host of Radiolab, the co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia, and author of the book, Why Fish Don’t Exist. Her writing has appearing in The New Yorker, VQR, Orion, Catapult, and beyond.
September 30, 2020 First Person The Alien Gaze By C Pam Zhang The last time I watched the stars, I was sheathed in the silence of Joshua Tree, California, that southern desert whose titular trees raise their spiny tentacles to the sky. It was a moonscape, beguilingly strange, the Joshuas huge as gentle aliens. This was in July. I’d left—fled—my home in San Francisco for the same reason generations of restless Californians have made pilgrimage to the desert: escape, disconnection from daily life. All around were lone tents and isolated houses, meditators and sound bathers and people floating up to the sky as acid dissolved under their tongues. As a debut author with a book younger than California’s shelter-in-place orders, I’d spent the past few months rubbed raw by attention, uncannily watched. I looked up and thought the usual stargaze thoughts: how large the universe, how small our worldly concerns. I thought about extraterrestrial sightings in Joshua Tree and the annual “Woodstock of UFOs” conference. I thought, as I often do, of alien life—not the scary body snatchers variety, but the reassuring fantasy that even if we fuck up this world, at least there are others out there, doing it right. I didn’t know that this was one of the last nights I’d see the stars in California. Two days later, a brush fire crackled through the dry scrub of San Bernardino National Forest, forty miles east of our rented house near Joshua Tree. This was the Apple Fire (33,324 acres, 95% contained), innocuously named. The same sky that had so perfectly framed the stars became a screen on which a horror movie played out on a massive scale, doom rolling in on thick gray clouds. The air was shot through with that particular sick, yellow light of fire country. We drove back north, cutting our trip short. Less than a week later I woke again, this time in my San Francisco apartment, to the same yellow light creeping over my feet. This was the CZU Lightning Fire (86,509 acres, 100% contained) that crunched through redwoods in Big Basin, seventy miles south. The country’s oldest national park erupted into flame. It was a different fire and yet, it seemed, the same. A month later we moved north, slipping out from under the choking press of smoke. One night of reprieve on the border of California and Oregon, the sky clear and star-spangled—and then, a week later, the fires (Pearl Hill Fire, Evan Canyons Fire, Cold Creek, Sumner, Fish, too many to list, 790,000 acres, seemingly uncontainable) reached our new northern home. Read More