Caravaggio, Narcissus, ca. 1595, oil on canvas, 43″ x 36″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I saw Edward Hopper’s Pennsylvania Coal Town for the first time in a gallery on Madison Avenue in 1994. I was a freshman in college; I had come into New York on the train for the day, alone. It was February. I had never been in a New York art gallery before, but I had seen reproductions of Nighthawks, and I wanted to know more. The room where the paintings were displayed was not large—the size of an ordinary living room. Apart from the gallery attendant behind her desk, I was the only one there.

I loved all the paintings, but when I stopped in front of Pennsylvania Coal Town, it seemed to me, in that moment, that I was looking at a perfect work of art. The man, who has been stooped over, raking leaves, raises his head to look in the direction of the setting sun. The curvature of his back is a little exaggerated, giving him a feeling of intense, though perhaps accidental, humility. He’s raised his head almost in surprise, without expectation, but his gaze is fixed on whatever lies on the other side of the house: on the source of light, of course. You’re not supposed to think about what exactly he’s seeing; his head, his chin, is lifted, looking toward the horizon. The little alley, the side yard between these no-nonsense, matter-of-fact clapboard coal-town houses, is flooded with light. It’s an image of transfiguration. The accidental quotidian life, illuminated from another angle.

In those days I was thinking almost nonstop about transfiguration by light: or, to use a more familiar term to writers, epiphany. I was thinking about it but not quite getting it to happen. I wanted my stories to have endings like Joyce’s “The Dead,” or Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” or Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother”:

The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

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Original illustration © Jia Sung

“Don’t eat pigs,” she said. “So I can kiss you, if we meet again.” That was how she said it, in Mandarin. Pigs, not pork. The line went dead. I was out of calling-card credits again.

We’d met a year earlier, in 2002, at the Shanghai Municipal Physical Sports School. She was fourteen, I was fifteen. She played soccer, I played softball. She was a Uighur Muslim who’d never heard of metropolitan Singapore, I was a Straits Chinese atheist who didn’t know pastoral Xinjiang existed.

A soccer coach, trawling rural northwestern China for athletic girls from underprivileged backgrounds, lied to their parents: If your daughter trains hard, she might be selected for the 2008 Beijing Olympics! In truth, the girls were only ever intended as a minority Xinjiang team for his majority Han Chinese girls to spar against in Shanghai. My Singaporean all-girls softball team was visiting their facility for a training trip. We were from a tiny Southeast Asian city-state that desalinated its seawater and had the highest number of millionaires per capita.

Mandarin was the only common tongue we had between us, but unlike for the Han Chinese, it was the first language for neither of us. We spoke slangy Singlish; the Uighurs spoke Turkic Uighur. When the Uighur girls began singing a traditional folk song to a clapped beat, it was clearly a cultural performance rather than a social invitation, but I took my chances. I’d never once used Mandarin this way as I walked up to the girl with the palest, longest, thinnest fingers I’d ever seen and said, “Want to dance?”

She laughed shyly, pushing me toward their captain.

Nuoerguli, the captain, was seventeen. She played goalie. Her short hair was curly on top, like Justin Timberlake’s. Their coach gave them mandatory crew cuts when they arrived, for hygiene, and confiscated their passports, for safekeeping. The girl watched me dance with her captain, hiding her smile in the upturned neck of her zippered windbreaker.

I asked Nuoerguli about her.

Her jersey number was 12. She played forward. Her name was Maidina. Read More

Cute baby boy playing with mobile phone in the park, digital technologies in the hands of a child. Portrait of toddler with smartphone

A baby’s first word seems as if it ought to be universally fascinating. Laden with the promise of a new life, a first word is a new person’s first expression of self, even if it’s just to label the dog, ask for food, or say hi. First words are more than cute; they’re existentially profound. They represent the threshold where noise becomes signal, the moment that interiority breaks its confines to greet the outside world.

And yet, for much of history, infant language wasn’t regarded as worthy of attention, and in many contemporary cultures it still isn’t. All babies, across time and space, transition from babbling to language at about twelve months of age, in spoken languages as well as signed ones, but not all parents and caregivers pay attention to that transition. That supposedly irresistible thing we call a “baby’s first word” is a romanticized milestone, shaped by social and economic circumstances, and it is surprisingly recent. The natural state of first words is to be disregarded, misheard, or entirely overlooked. Doting over them isn’t perverse—it’s just a modern, underappreciated luxury.

I was inspired to attempt a cultural history of “first words” by Germanist Karl Guthke, who wrote a definitive book about last words in the early nineties. He saw them as artifacts of each era’s conception of death. “There are styles of dying,” he noted, “so are there corresponding styles and fashions of last words?” In an aside, he dismissed first words, arguing they couldn’t tell us much about individual lives. They belong, he wrote, “with anecdotes of childhood, whose biographical value is inversely proportionate to their charm.” He had been musing on 1988 U.S. presidential candidate Michael Dukakis whose reputation as a cold fish technocrat seemed to have been predicted by his alleged first words, in Greek: monos mou, or “all by myself.” Read More

© Riko Best – stock.adobe.com

When I was twenty, a man broke into my bedroom in the middle of the night. He’d busted the dead bolt of the house, where I was alone inside. Asleep. The doorknob clicked; I stirred. A yellow glow pooled into the dark of my room. By the light of the hallway, this stranger saw me in my underwear. They were leopard print. He was the first man to see me that way. All I could see of him was a silhouette.

His shadow: hazy, rough. It sighed. Said, “Oh.”

He shut the door, and then I heard nothing. It was 2001. I had no phone, no computer, no fire escape. Petrified, I waited the four hours until dawn to open the door and found that he had gone. All he left behind was a broken dead bolt and a trail of muddy footprints turned red by North Carolina clay.

By midmorning, a police officer arrived and asked me to describe the man. Tall, short. Fat, thin. Old, young. I told him I couldn’t see more than a shadow. My glasses were out of reach. The light had stunned me.

Surely, the officer said, I could remember something—I could, perhaps, draw his silhouette.

“You don’t understand,” I answered. “He saw me, but I couldn’t see him.”

This, more than anything else, is what still haunts me: All I have are questions about that night. He has all the clarity. Read More