by Tao Lin
“Snap,” said Li. “And then you need to write a little more.”
“Snap at…something?” said Li’s mom.
“Need to write, like, ‘in a bitelike manner,’ ” said Li.
“Hoh,” Li’s mom understood and laughed a little.
“Need to write more to make it accurate,” said Li.
Li’s dad said it’d be good if his employee sold ten lasers by June. Li walked ahead and listened to his parents amicably discuss business. His dad was going to China soon, possibly to bribe their government into letting him sell his lasers there. Li’s mom, to Li’s surprise, had seemed supportive, telling Li that bribery was necessary in China.
After his parents and Dudu went inside, Li walked around thinking about his nonfiction book. His editor had emailed him edits the previous day, encouraging him to write more about himself and to delete the last three chapters.
In the distance, two garbage trucks syncopatedly and repeatedly broadcast an electronic, stiff-sounding version of the first eight bars of “Für Elise.”
“I recorded parents confessing,” Li emailed himself, walking on the dark road. “I forgave happily.”
“Don’t walk into water like Binky,” he thought. In Florida, a very old, deaf-blind Binky had fallen into the swimming pool, making a surprisingly loud splash.
Li stood flapping in moonlight, thinking that his mom’s forehead scar was like a burned-off eyebrow to an invisible eye, then watched TV with his parents, laughing when people got electrocuted by eels in a Survivor-like show.
Novels crystallized dreams into prose, made them shareable through matter, he thought in bed. Like dreams, they could be disruptive and unhelpful, fomenting fear and bitterness and confusion, or calming and uplifting, connecting disparate elements from history and memory into holistic stories with natural resonance.
Statins and Coffee
Two days later, clearing the table after dinner, Li found a pink fragment of round tablet. He felt disturbed, challenged, and calmingly self-conscious. On PillIdentifier.com, he learned the fragment was a brand of statin called Crestor.
He dreaded discussing statins with his parents again. He was only mildly stoned. He was out of LSD and had reduced his daily cannabis to half a capsule per day to ration his supply. He only had twenty-seven capsules left for sixty-three days, which somewhat worried him.
After washing dishes and taking out the trash, he emailed his dad, “The drug you take, statin, causes many problems and may be why your eye twitches,” with a link to an article on nerve damage.
It was 8:32 p.m. He’d agreed to wake his dad, who was napping, at nine. He went in his mom’s office (she was looking at stock prices), said he’d found a statin on the newspaper, and asked where the newspaper came from.
“Auntie’s,” said Li’s mom.
“Does Auntie use statins?” said Li.
“She used to, but hasn’t for a long time.”
Li realized he knew that. “I think Dad’s doctor pressured him into taking statins again,” he said, unsure if it was the second, third, or fourth relapse.
“I don’t think so,” said Li’s mom. “I haven’t gotten any statins.” She did all the doctor-related things that didn’t require Li’s dad’s presence.
“Can I send you the email I sent Dad?”
“Of course,” said Li’s mom.
At nine, Li woke his dad, who said to wake him in ten minutes. Li went to his room, returned to his dad, and said he was going to focus on writing, so wasn’t going to wake him—he could set an alarm, like other people—and so wanted to ask him something first: “Are you using statins?”
“No,” said Li’s dad, and began to criticize the drug.
“Why did I find a piece of statin on the table?”
“It must have come from elsewhere,” said Li’s dad.
It was possible, Li knew, that it was an errant fragment, left over from decades of use, or unwittingly transported from Auntie’s or elsewhere—statins, like heavy metals, pesticides, cations, amphetamines, and benzodiazepines, seemed ubiquitous in society.
“Tell him about the nerve damage,” said Li’s mom, cleaning a toilet.
Statin users were fourteen times more likely to develop nerve problems, including muscle twitching, Danish scientists had found.
“Then how does one lower one’s cholesterol?” said Li’s dad.
Li reminded his dad that it was a lie that low cholesterol was good. Studies had shown that the lower one’s cholesterol, the higher the risk of death.
Li’s dad criticized his doctor and said it was all about money. Li said statins were a thirty-six-billion-dollar industry. Li’s mom said Li should write a book on statins.
Li said people already had, and he could just promote their books. If he wrote a whole book on statins or certain other topics, billions to trillions of dollars of aversion could flow toward him, leading potentially to injury or death.
Biking an hour later, Li considered how civilly the re-return of statins had gone. His left eye quivered in a distinct but minor way that was probably unnoticeable to others, reminding him it did that sometimes—a private sign of emergent damage.
* * *
—
After a movie the next day, on the brief walk home from the train station, Li’s mom said she was going to buy toilet paper. “The store is there,” she said, pointing. “Li, you can go there in the future if you notice we’re out of toilet paper.”
“Should we help you carry it?” said Li’s dad.
“No,” said Li’s mom. “I’ll carry one in each hand.”
Li and his dad walked toward home.
At the gate, they realized they didn’t have keys.
“When Mom asked if you had a key, why didn’t you say anything?” said Li’s dad.
“I didn’t hear her,” said Li, who’d been distracted by his own paranoid suspicion that his mom had passive-aggressively wanted him, not her, to go buy toilet paper.
They turned around and walked toward Li’s mom.
“If Mom bought coffee, don’t say anything,” said Li’s dad.
Li had 90 percent believed his mom had stopped buying store coffee. It had toxic forms of sugar and milk, detrimental to blood sugar, as they’d discussed many times.
She was across the street, buying coffee.
“Let’s walk back, then,” said Li, turning around.
“Just pretend we didn’t see her,” said Li’s dad, laughing a little.
“Why doesn’t she drink what we have at home? It’s the best quality.”
“She wants hot coffee,” said Li’s dad.
“We can heat it,” said Li.
“She wants store coffee. When she said she was buying toilet paper, I knew she was buying coffee. Just pretend we didn’t see her. You can’t control us too much.”
“When your and Mom’s brains are bù xíng le, it will be my problem.”
“We’ll hire people to care for us,” said Li’s dad.
“No you won’t,” said Li. “It will be me. I already said that.”
“When our brains break, we’ll have no worries.”
“You’ll only have worries,” said Li. “You and people around you.”
“We’ll be pushed around in wheelchairs. We won’t have to walk.”
“Mom is addicted to buying coffee from stores,” said Li. “I used to be addicted too.”
“My legs go soft when I don’t buy red bean soup,” said Li’s dad. “Mom needs store coffee or else her legs will go soft.”
“I know,” said Li. “Everyone needs things.”
“When you’re old, you’ll be even more yāoguì than me,” said Li’s dad. “Yāoguì,” literally “starving ghost,” was a Taiwanese term for people with insatiable appetites.
“I was li
ke you in the past,” said Li.
“In the past, you were like me?”
“Of course. I ate a lot of candy as a child.”
They sat across the street from their building. Li said he’d posted a video online of his dad cutting his feet skin with big scissors. Li’s dad seemed delighted. He said he’d make a video explaining himself for Li to post. Li said it was better unexplained.
Li’s mom appeared in the distance with one bag of toilet paper.
“There she is,” said Li. “How did she drink it so fast?”
Li’s dad repeated that they should pretend they hadn’t seen her buy coffee. Li felt heartened and impressed that his dad was sympathetically mediating.
* * *
—
An hour later, on a pre-dinner walk, Li’s mom said Dudu was like Li—she liked nature, exploration, and novelty—which led to discussion about moving out of Taipei.
Li’s dad said Li’s mom couldn’t leave Taipei—unlike him, who wanted to live in Taichung, a smaller city—because she needed coffee, Auntie, and friends.
“What friends?” she said. She had a college friend in Chicago and a friend at Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan, but no friends, except for family, in Taipei.
“You need coffee, Auntie, and friends,” repeated Li’s dad.
Li felt disappointed that his dad seemed to be trying to provoke him into mentioning the coffee. The change seemed unstable in a way that Li felt he knew well.
But then Li’s dad’s attitude seemed to fade. Setting down Dudu, he walked ahead and began to eat single-wrapped candy that he got as free samples from various places and seemed to always have in his pockets. He was going to China in the morning.
* * *
—
That night, Li finished transcribing his voice memo of the walk when Dudu went catatonic for six minutes, then browsed his notes. He was amassing too many notes—thirty-five thousand words so far that visit, plus thirty-six recordings totaling around fifty hours. He heard his mom outside his room.
“What did you say?” he asked her in the hall.
“Heheh—I was talking to Du. I said, ‘Mi Mi is going to exercise.’ ” She laughed. “I am Mi Mi. Mi Mi.”
Friendship
The next day, Dudu seemed unfazed by Li’s dad’s absence. She startled Li and Li’s mom at the elevator by putting her front paws on Li’s leg, as he’d tried for years to entice her to do by excitedly patting his thighs while saying her name.
That night, Dudu lay surreally with Li as he read in his room, where she’d previously gone only when Li had sufficiently desirable food, like pork or beef. Li’s mom entered, and Dudu hid behind Li, who handed her to his mom, who carried her away to brush her teeth and clean her face.
In the morning, Dudu sentried a Li-containing bathroom. Li felt moved by his new friendship in a shriveled way due to what seemed like an unrelated situation: he’d begun to feel depressed for vague reasons, causing tension with his mom that was extra frustrating because they were, he sensed they both thought, supposed to be enjoying their rare time alone together.
“I need friends,” thought Li, lying on his back in his room with Dudu on his chest in Sphinx position. He had friends, but he rarely communicated with them. He was a loner. A loner who felt lonely. Loneliness was unhealthy, he knew. Talking only to his parents in a stunted vernacular seemed adverse to mental health.
“Thought ‘I need friends’ while feeling unhappy,” he emailed himself, and, gaining some distance, felt a little better. He stared at Dudu’s thin black lips. Her mouth looked like how his might’ve looked without orthodontics: ghastly, comical. Her fangish bottom teeth jutted away from her face, pointing at nothing.
At dinner, Li’s mom said she’d called Fat Uncle, who lived in south Taiwan, that day because he’d lamented weeks earlier to Auntie that she, Li’s mom, hadn’t called him in a long time. On the phone, Li’s mom had said they’d talked on Line, a messaging app that was popular in East Asia, and he’d said Line wasn’t the same as voice, then had complained about their eighty-one-year-old sister, their eldest sibling, not attending sǎo mù—an annual event in which people visited their parents’ graves—in recent years.
“When did she last go?” said Li, who’d never gone to sǎo mù, literally “sweep grave,” because he’d never been to Taiwan in spring. As a child, he and his parents had visited Taiwan almost every summer.
“Before the car crash,” said Li’s mom about an accident in which her sister’s right crus had been torn off. “Five years ago.”
“That long ago?” said Li.
Li’s mom said women normally weren’t allowed to attend sǎo mù because people absorbed energy from their ancestors during it, and men hadn’t wanted to share, but Fat Uncle had said that in their family women could and should attend.
Li’s view of Fat Uncle changed a little. The few times he’d told his mom that male dominance was an aberrational declension, he’d felt shy and unconvincing, even though she seemed to believe him. He considered saying it again. “Goddess,” “partnership,” and other relevant words felt weird to say in English, and he didn’t know them in Mandarin.
“Everyone listens to Fat Uncle,” said Li’s mom.
“Is he older than Thin Uncle?”
“Three years younger,” said Li’s mom.
“Then why does everyone listen to him?”
“Because his temper is not good. You’re like him.”
Li felt closer to Fat Uncle again. He began to emit monosyllabic responses to his mom’s questions and comments, sounding distracted and far away.
He’d read in The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture, a Chinese anthology inspired by Riane Eisler’s suggestion in The Chalice and the Blade that non-Western cultures also research their full histories, that Chinese civilization also began with millennia of Goddess-worshipping partnership societies. The Zhaobaogou, Yangshao, Hongshan, and other cultures had sculpted nude and pregnant female figurines that resembled those from the same period in the West, including in Old Europe.
The Hongshan, which archaeologist Guo Dashun called “the dawn of Chinese civilization,” existed from 6,700 to 4,900 years ago in an Arizona-sized area west of North Korea. They lived in river valleys, grew millet, raised pigs, carved jade, and built ceremonial complexes, one of which, excavated in 1983, had a pyramidal artificial hill, a ten-acre walled platform, and what Chinese archaeologists called the “Goddess Temple,” a semi-subterranean structure containing fragments of female figurines up to three times life size, including a life-size, jade-eyed head.
The first Chinese dynasty, the Xia, began around 4,100 years ago. They initiated the male hereditary principle, in which the ruler’s eldest son became the next ruler, and replaced “All things belong to the public” with “All things belong to the ruling family,” but were still influenced by their partnership ancestors. The Xia government and people, according to ancient texts, favored the color black, the most modest, inclusive color; promoted compassion and benevolence; and seemed to have practiced an early form of Daoism, which valued nature and viewed a mysterious force called Dao as the mother of the world.
After the Xia Dynasty, things deteriorated further. In the Shang Dynasty, from 3,600 to 3,050 years ago, female infanticide, the drowning of baby girls, began. To “make people forget goddesses and the partnership between the sexes,” wrote Min Jiayin in The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture, “a religious myth of a god in the form of a male” was promoted in the West while “a philosophy of exalting yang and degrading yin” spread in China. In the Zhou Dynasty, from 3,050 to 2,250 years ago, the government instituted the Rites, a set of rules that said women belonged to men and were banned from politics.
There was a partnership revival in the Tang Dynasty, from 1,400 to 1,100 years ago—Wu Zetian, the only Chinese female emperor, reigned for fifteen
years, and emperor Li Shimin promoted Daoism—but in the Song Dynasty, which began 1,000 years ago, Zetian was viewed as “evil” and foot-binding became customary, and in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, from 650 to 100 years ago, women weren’t allowed to leave home, husbands striking wives was “generally accepted” as “required for good housekeeping,” and, for a time, “literary works with love as the theme” were banned.
The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, affirmed that there should be equality in law, marriage, wages, education, property inheritance, and social issues, but male domination continued through habit and momentum, with, among other imbalances, males doing little to no household chores and only 12 percent of the National People’s Congress being women in 1954, up to 24 percent by 2017.
News was reporting on a politician who’d accepted a corporate bribe. A segment began on the toxicity of oil sticks—fried dough that people ate for breakfast.
“In China, they add detergent to oil sticks,” said Li’s mom.
“Not everywhere in China,” said Li.
“Some places in China,” said Li’s mom.
* * *
—
After dinner and chores, Li carried Dudu into his room and lay thinking for an hour, falling asleep sometimes, then left his room, Dudu in tow, surprising his mom in the hall.
“Du wants to see you,” said Li.
“Come,” said Li’s mom.
Dudu walked to Li.
“Eh?” he said, self-conscious that he was smiling more than he had in two or three days, during which he’d smiled at his mom only once or twice, weakly.
“Why did you change?” said Li’s mom to Dudu, sounding tired and unenthusiastic. “Huh? She only wants to be with you.”
“No,” said Li. “She wants…”
“Right?” said Li’s mom.
“Ng,” said Li inaudibly, distracted by thoughts on how they were supposed to be learning from and enjoying Dudu’s change together, how he’d ruined it with his glumness and surliness, which had given his mom a perpetual slight frown.