The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  Wendy set up the table while I finished cooking. It was one of my most sumptuous spreads. There were five dishes, fish done two ways, and a soup. All the colors satisfied, every plate still hot. Old Ping opened twelve bottles of beer and clinked them against the plates. Now we could eat.

  “A toast,” Old Ping said, “for little Wendy giving us the honor of her presence. We owe it all to you for this nice meal we are having.”

  “Don’t pay attention to your Uncle Ping, he has no education like you,” said Charles.

  Old Ping pointed a chopstick at Wendy. “Be nice to your old dad, don’t neglect him.”

  “Chi Chi! Eat eat!” I said, digging into the brisket.

  The table was quiet with eating, until Ping started talking again: “Say, Wendy Wendy Wendy, when are you going to get married?”

  “Ah, don’t bother the girl, Ping, she’s going to get a PhD, isn’t she?” Charles asked me.

  “You know!” Old Ping cut in, “They have a saying in China, there are three genders: men, women, and women with PhDs.”

  “Well, this isn’t China, last time I checked,” she replied.

  “Don’t take too long is my advice,” said Old Ping. “Make sure you find a boyfriend before your PhD scares all the boys away!”

  I jumped in, “She doesn’t have to worry about that. She can always live here with her old dad. I’ll pay the bills.”

  Then, what the heck, they decided to give the wine a shot. Charles asked her, “Wendy, you really think this tastes good? I’m not going to lie. I’m ignorant.”

  “It’s from a family vineyard in Italy,” I said, but not wanting to make my friends feel out of place, I added with a laugh, “Not that I could taste the difference.”

  “It’s a little too sweet,” Old Ping said as he wobbled toward my refrigerator and cracked a few ice cubes from the ice tray with his hands. He sauntered back to the table with a fist full of ice cubes and I reached out my glass.

  I drank a big gulp and made a satisfied sigh.

  It happened sometime after that. Charles had made us all take some shots of baijiu, and we were laughing when I noticed Wendy had stopped eating. She pushed her bowl away from her and was blinking at the ceiling light.

  “Try the fish,” I said to her.

  Her eyes glistened. “Dad, why am I here?” she said, getting up from the table. “I flew back just to spend time with you, but it’s like you have no interest in me. It’s like I’m . . .”

  “Oh, so if you’re going to have to spend time with me, it should be all about you.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “I should be honored that you came back.”

  “Jessica’s dad said her first verb was ‘scurry!’ What was my first verb?” she asked me.

  “How am I supposed to remember a stupid word from twenty years ago?” I laughed. I should have just made something up on the spot, like “eat!”

  “Come on, come on,” Charles said. He pressed his lips together and rubbed his hands together. He had his own grown daughter that he was afraid of.

  Knocking against the table, she struggled to put on her jacket. “Hey, you can’t be mad at your dad,” I said. “I raised you, you can’t just throw a tantrum over nothing,” I said, and somehow I accidentally ripped a few hairs from her head in trying to stop her from getting up and putting on her jacket.

  She yanked away from me and went into the kitchen. I got up and the ground moved below me.

  “Think of all the stuff I bought you. Think of all the sacrifices I’ve made for you. Now you come here with a bottle of wine and ask me questions? Make demands on me?” I said, yelling now, “Do you know how much of my money it cost to raise a little bratty girl like you all these years?”

  She stopped by the kitchen door and looked at me. “You calculated the exact amount of money it cost to raise me?”

  Old Ping cleared his throat. “Hey, Ma, stop it now.”

  “Yeah, it’s 150,000 US dollars, not including all your tuition,” I said to her, the blood rushing to my head as if I was hung upside down. “How about I act like Jessica’s American dad, and ask you to pay me back?

  “How about you pay me my money back?” I asked, “Why don’t you think about that?”

  She left. Charles and Old Ping left soon after that too, leaving the table a mess of bottles and bones. An hour passed before I realized she was not going to take responsibility for her disrespectful behavior and return to apologize. Fine, have it her way. If she was going to be an ungrateful little brat, then that’s her code of operation. I don’t get it. My mind works best in bytes, in data, in things permanently and irrevocably true. I’m not even going to pretend that I understand women at all.

  It’s possible that I might have said some things in bad taste. I might have drunk a little too much as well. Thus, I had a problem on my hands.

  I am aware there are limits to the capabilities of the human mind. That’s why solving complicated algorithms is difficult; it requires a person to keep track of so many interrelated concepts. The solution couldn’t possibly be figured out that very night. The last of the wine tasted bitter in my mouth, but I drank it anyway. Birds went up into their nests and I went to bed.

  Wendy didn’t call that night. She is still young, self-important, and takes her hurt feelings seriously. Even though she knows, at least should know, that I’d simply lost my temper. But even though I am asleep in bed, things will start happening. That’s the phenomenon of problem solving; the mysterious wells of inspiration will often follow a period of incubation. Often the most difficult problems are solved only after one has formally given up on them.

  So while I sleep, my mind will be incubating. The subconscious part of my brain will continue working on a problem previously met without success. Even after I wake up, work my mindless eight-hour shift in the assembly line of a computer repair shop, then watch basketball with Charles and Ping, I’ll be trying subconsciously to get to the mysterious inspiration to solve my yet unfathomable problem. Once I do, the solution will be forced into my conscious mind.

  Everything makes logical sense in computer science. Machines know not to get sentimental; they can rise above and work in symbols and codes. The world of imagination, uncertainty, and doubt can be managed through entities, HEX notations, and sooner or later, everything becomes representational and quite manageable. You don’t need to worry about the specifics, once you figure out the abstract.

  My favorite is the Nondeterministic Polynomial, which is simply a case in which someone or something, a magic bird perhaps, shows up out of nowhere and simply gives you the “answer” to a difficult problem. The answer is “yes.” The only thing you need to do is to check if the answer is correct, that the circumstances of the problem actually exist, and to be able to do so in a reasonable amount of time.

  At one point in the past, I thought I had all the answers already. It happened before moving to America, before the marriage, before the daughter, before I’d even attended college. It was the summer I hitched a train to Guangzhou, then bought the cheapest ticket to Hainan. I was eighteen years old with a shaved head and twenty yuan in my pocket, but I just wanted to see the ocean, to float above the water and see the sand below. I still remember the water reflecting a million perfectly placed petals, lifted up to meet the moon. Those birds that lined the trees like big white fruit, who transformed back into birds when I approached them and then flew away to become clouds. Those clouds reaching down to meet the sea, like a lock of wet hair on a girl’s neck.

  It was then I realized that the reflection on the sand looked like the electricity in a light bulb, like the mysterious maps of marble. I thought I knew the answer to a question I hadn’t even asked, that there was some order in this universe.

  Life happened so quickly. My hair thinned and I developed a paunch. The years melted and quietly pooled at my feet. Before I was at all prepared, I was married to an ambitious woman, with a precocious daughter, giving up my professorship a
nd moving to New Jersey to become another immigrant American living an ordinary immigrant life.

  Now that I think about it, those years were like watching a sunrise. It was not at all like the pleasant vision I had in mind. It was too much to handle, the great sun peering out from the distance: warm and comforting for a moment, and then brilliant, too brilliant to bear. The soft halo of light quickly became a flare and it stung. And yet, by the time I learned to turn away, most of my life was over.

  Some nights I wake up in a panic and wonder: Why did everything that I worked for turn into things I despised? How did I become an old man? How did I end up with no one?

  Algorithm discovery is the most challenging part of algorithmic problem solving. The phases themselves are unambiguous, but it is determining them that is the art. To actually solve a problem, I must first take the initiative.

  Phase 1: Define and understand the problem

  Phase 2: Develop a plan for problem solving

  Phase 3: Execute the developed plan

  Phase 4: Evaluate the solution for accuracy, and for its potential as a tool for solving other problems

  Phase 1: Define the Problem: The daughter herself

  I always knew this daughter was going to be trouble. The first inkling of it was sparked when I used to take her on my bike around my old campus. Because we didn’t have any children’s seats, I sat her on the pole directly behind the handlebars of my bike. The first thing I told her was to never, ever, get her feet close to the wheels. They would get caught and the wheel would cut her feet badly. I told her the only thing to do was concentrate on keeping her feet as far from the wheel as possible.

  So the first thing she did was get her feet caught in the wheel. Cold sweat beaded on my face when I bandaged her bloodied little feet, but she barely cried. It was as if she was testing me, as if she had gone against my warning just to be sure I was telling the truth.

  Phase 2: No . . . let’s go back.

  Phase 1: Understand the Problem: Immigration

  Maybe it began soon after Wendy was born, after my wife and I boarded a plane from Beijing to JFK. Probably right after I took my first bite of ham and peanut butter sandwich and liked it. The problem might have arisen following decades of listening to the same Chinese songs, driving to Queens to be surrounded by other transplanted Chinese people, craving the same food we left behind. Perhaps it was sparked during the last twenty years of watching television, how I could never understand enough of the dialogue to chuckle along with the laugh track.

  Phase 2: Could it have begun because TV wasn’t funny? No, let’s try again

  Phase 1: Understand the Problem: Unfair and unexpected reversal of roles

  When I pictured myself being a father, I’d always assumed I’d take the lead in the relationship. I’d teach her how to read, how to ride a bike, how not to talk to strangers, and all that, but a lot of these opportunities at fatherhood have been robbed from me. It was she who taught me how to read English, when she was eleven. When she was twelve, she helped me pass my citizenship exam by making up acronyms. When she was sixteen, I taught her how to drive, but it was my daughter who helped me renew my license. I never got to console her over some little punk kid breaking her heart, but she held my hand when I cried, after her mother left me.

  Is that all there is? It can’t be. Cannot proceed to Phase 2.

  I must admit, there are some ultimate limitations of algorithms. A difference does exist between problems whose answers can be obtained algorithmically and problems whose answers lie beyond the capabilities of algorithmic systems.

  A problem solved algorithmically would be my temperamental attitude. I have since stymied the urge to physically threaten teenage boys being assholes in public, and I no longer pay for car damage due to routine road rage. It was logical reasoning.

  However, there is ultimately a line to be drawn between processes that culminate in an answer and those that merely proceed forever without a result, which in this case might be:

  The problem of wine

  The problem of daughters

  But this can’t be the end, not for Wendy and me. We used to have a good relationship, a great relationship, with some all-involving grace that didn’t need problem solving. When I watched her ride away on her first bicycle, her ponytail flapping back and forth like a bird’s wing; or as I listened to her sing in the school choir, my heart skipped when she spotted me in the crowd and waved. That’s my girl! I made her! Like when I visited her third grade open house and she showed me that in her bio, she had written “hiking with father” under hobbies, and “father” under heroes. That’s got to be worth something.

  There has to be a solution and I won’t give up until I find it.

  And so, a portion of my unconscious mind will go on translating ideas from abstraction to pseudocode and laying it out systematically in algorithmic notations. It will be an ever-slowing process. Once I wake up, life will bring about more arguments and disappointments; small trespasses in a long life.

  My relationship with my daughter might never fully recover from this night. We might miss a lot of holiday cooking together, and my hair will thin even more and she will grow just a little taller. Maybe out of the blue, some years from now, she will introduce me to a boyfriend, a strange-looking but polite boy. It might take even more years, but maybe she will come home and apologize and wash my dirty pillowcases and overeat in order to please me. I wouldn’t be able to know how unhappy I had been until she returned.

  She cannot abandon me. She loves me and thus will be able to anticipate my indignation and put my hurt feelings before her own. Those are some of the concessions made. There will be others. These sequences of instructions are programmed within her; that is her heritage.

  Ah, but the solution, and there is one, will come to me years later. Perhaps when I am on a fishing boat in Baja, or in the middle of my honeymoon with my second wife, or in the hospital room at the birth of my new baby daughter, Lana. When it comes to me, and it will, I will remember this:

  One afternoon, not long after we immigrated, when my daughter was still outgrowing her baby teeth, I came home from work early and found her walking alone around the dim apartment. Holding a hand mirror, face up at her waist, she walked from room to room while peering down into the reflection.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I am walking on the ceiling,” she replied.

  I was about to tell her to stop fooling around, to do her homework, but instead I paused and allowed myself to go with her imagination. I tried to picture what she might have seen up there. What magical inexplicable things could have been walking on the ceiling with my lovely fat-faced daughter, who spoke no English, sensitive and shy, and so often alone.

  ENDNOTES (JOHN CLEGG AND ROBERT LUCAS)

  Brown vs. Ferguson

  FROM Endnotes #4

  Endnotes is a journal/book series published by a discussion group based in Germany, the U.K., and the US. Each edition of the journal emerges from conversation and debate among Endnotes members. What follows is an excerpt from Endnotes #4, which attempts to provide a historical account of the Black Lives Matter movement. Its principal authors were John Clegg and Robert Lucas.

  Ferguson is a picture of pleasant suburbia, a town of tree-lined streets and well-kept homes, many of them built for the middle class at mid-century. But Ferguson is in north St. Louis County, and the area is suffering from one of the region’s weakest real estate markets.

  —St. Louis Post Dispatch, 18 August 2013

  IN 1970 a sociologist from Galveston, Texas, Sidney M. Willhelm, published a book with the incendiary title Who Needs the Negro?* In it he pointed out a bitter irony: just when the Civil Rights Movement was promising to liberate black people from discrimination in the workplace, automation was killing the very jobs from which they had previously been excluded. Willhelm painted a dystopian future that has proved eerily prophetic. He warned that African Americans were in danger of sharing the fate o
f American Indians: heavily segregated, condemned to perpetually high levels of poverty and dwindling birth rates—an “obsolescent“ population doomed to demographic decline. At the time, in the heady days of Civil Rights success, Willhelm was dismissed as a kook. Today his book is remembered only within some obscure black nationalist circles.*

  In retrospect most of Willhelm’s predictions bore out, but even his bleak vision failed to anticipate the true scale of the catastrophe in store for black America. He wrote that “the real frustration of the ‘total society' comes from the difficulty of discarding 20,000,000 people made superfluous through automation,” for “there is no possibility of resubjugating the Negro or of jailing 20,000,000 Americans of varying shades of’black.’” Nowhere in his dystopian imagination could Willhelm envisage an increase in the prison population of the scale that actually occurred in the two decades after his book was published. Yet this was the eventual solution to the problem that Willhelm perceived: the correlation between the loss of manufacturing jobs for African American men and the rise in their incarceration is unmistakable.

  Today in the U.S. one in ten black men between the ages of 18 and 35 are behind bars, far more than anything witnessed in any other time or place. The absolute number has fallen in recent years, but the cumulative impact is terrifying. Amongst all black men born since the late 1970s, one in four have spent time in prison by their mid-30s. For those who didn’t complete high school, incarceration has become the norm: 70% have passed through the system.† They are typically caged in rural prisons far from friends and family, many are exploited by both the prison and its gangs, and tens of thousands are currently in solitary confinement.