"Severance"

[fiefoe]

Ling Ma's descriptions of Candice's immigrant parents ring true, but I'm not sure how that fits with the other part of the novel, the zombie apocapolyse part. 

• Google would not last long. Neither would the internet. Or any of the infrastructure, but in the beginning of the Beginning let us brag, if only to ourselves in the absence of others. Because who was there to envy us, to be proud of us? Our Googlings darkened, turned inward. We Googled maslow’s pyramid to see how many of the need levels we could already fulfill. The first two.
• Our self-appointed leader was Bob, a short, stout man who had worked in information technology. He was slightly older than us, though by how much it seemed rude to ask. He was Goth when he felt like it. He knew about being alone.
• What is the internet but collective memory? Anything that had been done before we could do better. The Heimlich maneuver. Breech births. The fox-trot. Glycerin bombs. Bespoke candle making. Lurking in our limited gene pools may swim metastatic brain tumors and every type of depression and recessed cystic fibrosis, but also high IQs and proficiencies with Romance languages. We could move on from this. We could be better. <> Anything was better than what we felt. We had shame, so much shame at being the few survivors.
• * I was thinking about how New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.
• disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices.
• * Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right. Or something like that, the usual ways of justifying your life, of passing time. With the money I made, I bought Shiseido facial exfoliants, Blue Bottle coffee, Uniqlo cashmere.
• Some R&B track with jumpy bass tremored the ceiling. It was that time of night again, when the neighbor upstairs brooded to sad songs with good beats... Even the better, more artfully composed images were just Eggleston knockoffs, Stephen Shore derivatives. For these and other reasons, I hardly updated the blog anymore. I hardly took pictures anymore.
• As our business relies on overseas suppliers, especially those in southern China, we are taking precautionary measures with this announcement of Shen Fever.
• carried themselves like a rarefied breed, peacocking through the hallways in Fracas-scented flocks. They worked exclusively on the most detail-intensive, design-savvy projects—coffee-table books and color-sensitive exhibition catalogs. Their clients were galleries, museum presses, and, most important, the big glossy art publishers. Phaidon, Rizzoli, and Taschen.
• * No one can work in Bibles that long without coming to a certain respect for the object itself. It is a temperamental, difficult animal, its fragile pages prone to ripping, its book block prone to warping, especially in the humidity of South Asian monsoon season. Of any book, the Bible embodies the purest form of product packaging, the same content repackaged a million times over, in new combinations ad infinitum. Every season, I was trotted out to publisher clients to expound on the latest trends in synthetic leathers, the newest developments in foil embossing and gilding. I have overseen production on so many Bibles that I can’t look at one without disassembling it down to its varied, assorted offal: paper stock, ribbon marker, endsheets, mull lining, and cover.
• * With vampire narrative, the danger lies in the villain’s intentions, his underlying character. There are good vampires, there are bad vampires. Think of Interview with the Vampire. Or even Twilight. These are character narratives. <> Now, on the other hand, he continued, let’s think about the zombie narrative. It’s not about a specific villain. One zombie can be easily killed, but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat. This narrative, then, is not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force: the force of the mob, of mob mentality. Perhaps it’s better known these days as the hive mind. You can’t see it. You can’t forecast it. It strikes at any time, whenever, wherever, like a natural disaster, a hurricane, an earthquake.
• Bob gave me a look. Candace. When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction.
• * When he wasn’t digging wells or developing crop rotation systems in outlying South American villages, he was reading postcolonial theory in chambray shirts, sheltered by the cool, gentle shade of indigenous palms. Across weak, spotty reception, we held obligatory sessions of phone sex, more for the novelty of the thing than the thing itself. (You’re a fox. I’m a hen. Chicken coop. Go.) He broke up with me via email after the calling card minutes ran out.
• I shaved my legs. I shaved my armpits. To shave my pussy, I lowered myself into the tub, crouching like a sumo wrestler pre-bout. Like a champion sumo wrestler. I placed a hand mirror at the bottom of the basin; I liked to be thorough.
• I often ended up in Chinatown around lunch. Specifically, the Fujianese side, separated by the Bowery from the tourist-pandering Cantonese part. This part was cheaper, more run-down, less conscious of the Western gaze. You could get a plate of dumplings for two dollars, spiked with black vinegar and julienned ginger on a flimsy, buckling Styrofoam plate.
• * Looking at the office workers suspended high above us, I sensed for the first time my father’s desire to leave China and to live in a foreign country. It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.
• Once we were all seated, we beheld the magnum opus at the center of the table: the shark fin soup was arranged in a crystal punch bowl with a ladle, prom-style. Actually, two punch bowls, one for the original soup, and another for the mysterious vegan version that Jane had made.
• party: When other people are happy, I don’t have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.
• watching some Italian movie on a laptop with a group of people, the loud exclamatory Italian phrases like typewriter keys clacking.
• * With the both of us lying low, he started kissing me. It was like tumbling down a dizzying Escher staircase of beer-tasting embraces and caresses... I opened up his closet and looked at his wood hangers and shoe trees. He got off on my curiosity. When I kissed him, it was like I was kissing all his things, all the signifiers and trappings of adulthood or success coming at me in a rush. Fucking was just seeing that to its end, a white yacht docking.
• Stalking, Bob liked to say, is an aesthetic experience. It has its rituals and customs. There is prestalking. There is poststalking. Every stalk is different. There are live stalks. There are dead stalks. It isn’t just breaking and entering. It isn’t just looting. It is envisioning the future. It is building the Facility and all of the things that we want to have with us.
• Every morning and evening, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, going through this process. It wasn’t always the same. Sometimes she’d wash her face in circular clockwise motions, other times counterclockwise. Then there were times when she’d finish with an extra, unsanctioned step: Fujianese face oil, patted onto her face.
• During freshman year of college, she would call to stress the accumulative benefits of a proper facial regimen, her Mandarin always sounding like a reprimand... In your twenties, a skincare regimen is more for preventative measures. Even if you don’t see its effects, the aging process will be worse if you don’t do this, she said.
• This publisher specifically wanted a pleated feature to recall—I can’t remember the designer’s name. He’s well-known for pleats? <> Issey Miyake, I supplied.
• * And, of course, your precious Bibles, he added, the snideness of his tone barely perceptible, but the subtext of which could only mean: We manufacture the emblematic text to propagate your country’s Christian Euro-American ideologies, and for this, for this important task, you and your clients negotiate aggressively over pennies per unit cost, demand that we deliver early with every printing, and undercut the value of our labor year after year.
• He explained that only certain printers in China were granted a license to print Bibles, and even then there were rules.
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar: The worm is very greedy, Balthasar said darkly. He eats all the food and doesn’t share. What lesson does that teach children? To eat with no—he paused, searching for the word—no conscience?
• I had been six when I left China, and my Mandarin vocabulary was regressive, simplistic. I used idioms that only small children would use; my language was frozen in time. I could carry on a casual conversation for ten minutes. Any longer, and I was like a shallow-water dog paddler flailing in deeper ocean waters.
• Ah, your Chinese is very good! he delightedly exclaimed. Which was an inverted form of what Chinese immigrants would say to me: Your English is very good!
• * I looked at Balthasar uneasily. There was a hierarchy of provinces, and each province carried a stereotype, like the cultural biases associated with different New York neighborhoods. He was probably unimpressed.
• this person for whom his voice unfurls slow, drowsy murmurings, like a comb through wet hair.
• The Lexus is to Chinese communism what the Lincoln Town Car is to American democracy, he would say. Both look nice, but not too nice.
• * because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it’s unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same. <> When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B.
• Blythe liked to say the only things you can really do in Hong Kong are shop and eat. It is a city that distills life down to its bare essentials.
• You could buy the actual bag, a prototype of the actual bag from the factory that produced it, or an imitation. And if an imitation, what kind of imitation? An expensive, detailed, hand-worked imitation, a cheap imitation made of polyurethane, or something in between? Nowhere else was there such an elaborate gradient between the real and the fake. Nowhere else did the boundaries of real and fake seem so porous.
• Once broken down into ashes, she had explained, the money would transfer into the possession of our ancestral spirits. They would use it to buy things or to bargain with others or to bribe afterlife officials for favors. The afterlife, with its bureaucratic echelons and hierarchies, functioned similarly to the government. Nothing turned your way unless you took matters into your own hands.
• She’d always wanted a Burberry trench, so I burned her one of those too. I burned her a Coach satchel. She loved Coach; she liked most classic American brands, their clean lines. I burned her some Ralph Lauren slacks. As the pièce de résistance, I burned her some Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. Clinique anything, I burned.
• Genevieve had made her dulce de leche as a special treat. She had been boiling cans of condensed milk in a Dutch oven, because if you boiled this stuff long enough, it turned into a nutty brown, tooth-numbingly sweet caramel taffy. We dipped saltine crackers into it. Around the fire, our tipsy thoughts cast large shadows.
• The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.
• I never totally forget the past because I’m seeing it on my Facebook wall every day. You can never reinvent yourself because your social media identity is set.
• Ashley’s eyes were now closed, as if she were in a deep slumber. She lay absolutely still, a sleeping beauty, the soft, submissive center of some fairy tale, a piece of linty candy left on the floor in her princess dress.
• An entire office building sat vacant, leased out as a supporting platform for billboards. It was a dream space, a collision of brand worlds, floating in a vacuum. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, with that hypnotic red Coca-Cola sign winking at us, I knew that I was going to be with Jonathan.
• If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you.
• There’s the Alternative Bible, featuring a blank cover and packaged with Sharpie markers, for the alt-Christian teens to decorate however they want. Then, in the center booth, there’s the showstopper, the Bible Handbag, a portable Bible enveloped in the customized front compartment of a Coach-like satchel, for the housewives to show off at study groups and prayer circles.
• He shook his head. Are you sure you don’t want a Xanax? You’re shaking.
  I can’t take one because I don’t know how it’ll affect the baby.
• Or, at least, I couldn’t work in Bibles forever. I’d go crazy. I couldn’t keep having nightmares of thin Bible paper ripping on web presses, I couldn’t keep explaining to clients the working conditions of Chinese laborers, things that I didn’t understand myself, I couldn’t keep converting yuan to dollars, the exchange rates wildly fluctuating, flailing like a drowning swimmer.
• Things were different in Art. The clients weren’t so fixated on the bottom line. They wanted the product to be beautiful. They cared about the printing, color reproduction, the durability of a good sewn binding, and they were willing to pay more for it, alter their publication schedule for it. They donated to nonprofits that advocated against low-wage factories in South Asian countries, even as they made use of them, a move that showed a sophisticated grasp of global economics.
• The single heroine, usually white, romantic in her solitude. In those movies, there is almost always this power-walk shot, in which she is shown striding down some Manhattan street, possibly leaving work during rush hour at dusk, the traffic blaring all around and the buildings rising around her. The city was empowering. Even if a woman doesn’t have anything, the movies seemed to say, at least there is the city. The city was posited as the ultimate consolation.
• It was summer when they arrived at Salt Lake Valley. The beauty of the land, surrounded by vast mountains and pines and lakes, entranced Brigham Young. The canyon rocks, large and cathedral-like, were patterned with streams of white where water once coursed. In early settler photographs of the West, all streams of water—rivers, brooks, waterfalls—looked like milk. Between the motion of the water and the long exposure times of early cameras, the land once looked as if it were lactating.
• * Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.
• 89: Though her husband had kept his opinions to himself, one night he had spoken passionately about democracy. Every system has its problems, he argued. But any government that granted its people freedom of speech, freedom of protest, showed respect for its citizens. It was the most idealistic she had ever seen him.
• * Her homesickness eased in department stores, supermarkets, wholesale clubs, superstores, places of unparalleled abundance. The solution was shopping, Zhigang observed. He was not trying to be reductive.
• It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say. <> Her prayers began as requests, sometimes bargains. She prayed to be swiftly reunited with her daughter.
• She thought that maybe that serenity was inherited from my father, but it was actually, I wanted to say, a quality owed entirely to her. It had to do with the way she managed our days, so steady and constant and regulated. I have looked for that constancy everywhere. <> Then she was gone, moved to America, and I was transported to live in another part of Fuzhou, with my grandmother and grandfather
• On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You’re not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn’t recognize me. That’s what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn’t know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you? <> But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable.
• She grabbed my arm and led me down the hallway of our tiny apartment, and into the bathroom. In the bathroom, she ordered me to kneel, fully clothed, at the head of the bathtub, the drain between my knees. She said that such a self-nullifying act of pretending to be homeless could only be punished by another self-nullifying act. I would have to be nullified twice over.
• Both of my parents talked to themselves in English routinely, reenacting conversations with American acquaintances, colleagues, the car wash attendant, the grocery cashier, while they mindlessly washed the dishes or vacuumed or washed their faces in the bathroom. They were performing their Americanness, perfecting it to a gleaming hard veneer to shield over their Chinese inner selves.
• But when we moved here to Salt Lake, he added, your mom and I went to that buffet restaurant, Chuck-A-Rama. I had never had fried chicken before. And I thought, this is better. Fried chicken is better. <> My father rarely spoke of the past, and perhaps it was only after having officialized his severance from China that he felt free to speak openly of his life there.
• Whenever I couldn’t sleep, I would torture myself by creating a completely hypothetical Bible production scenario to troubleshoot. I would calculate the cost of using Swiss Bible paper in place of the Chinese paper that the client insisted we buy, should the latter prove too flimsy to prevent ink from bleeding to the other side, the Psalms obscuring the Proverbs, Matthew contradicting Mark, Peter preempting John. I would estimate the time this theoretical setback would delay the production schedule, then the shipment schedule.
• Nan Goldin: When they laughed, they threw their heads back to reveal crooked, yellowed teeth. The city back then was almost bankrupt. Day and night seemed indistinguishable, the dividing line between them membranic. The party spectacles gave way to hospital scenes gave way to funeral tableaux. The AIDS epidemic seemed to strike overnight.
• a copy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency under my mattress. So many of the people depicted seemed freakish or other in some way; they didn’t fit in. But that didn’t matter, the photographs seemed to say. What mattered was, they styled and remade themselves in the way they wanted to be seen. They inhabited themselves fully. They made me want to move to New York. Then I’d really be somewhere, I had thought, inhabiting myself.
• Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.
• The reigning theory, first disseminated by a prominent doctor in the Huffington Post, was that the new strain of fungal spores had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals.
• They were mostly European visitors, from lesser-known countries such as Malta and Estonia, who were taking advantage of the drastically reduced hotel rates, reduced everything rates.
• * But Occupy Wall Street lost its glow pretty quickly. At first a media darling, it became a hot-button debate issue in editorials and cable news shows. In light of the rapid dissemination of Shen Fever, the movement was deemed decadent and out of touch. The images of young, healthy protesters chanting, not wearing their masks so their voices could be heard more loudly, only seemed to enrage the public.
• I stood over the sink and eased the thing into my mouth. It was too big. His teeth were not my teeth. I looked at myself, my freakish, grotesque self, a mouthful of metal and plastic jutting out, and knew that I was alone. <> I spit the retainer out. I washed it, filled the mug with fresh mouthwash, and placed it back in the medicine cabinet. I thought, absurdly, that I’d keep his retainer fresh, for when he returned.
• He compliments you when he wants to control you. He doesn’t see you. It doesn’t mean he’s not a person. It doesn’t mean he’s not vulnerable. In certain moments, he’s just vulnerable enough that you feel sympathy for him. You make excuses for him, often to yourself. You think that if you just work with him a little, then eventually things will get better. Even if he makes you pray, or breaks your iPhone, or makes you shoot at fevered. You think things will be different, more comfortable once you arrive at the Facility. But he doesn’t work that way. Or you wouldn’t have ended up locked up in a cell.
• I opened Outlook, which showed no new emails. I typed up an email to Michael Reitman and Carole, with the subject line elevator malfunction, that detailed my morning’s travails and the steps I took to implement a solution. I wrote that I would let them know of any updates. It was satisfying to finally execute a task, but the satisfaction was fleeting.
• vegetation was already taking over; the most prodigious were the fernlike ghetto palms,... They are deciduous suckering plants that originated in China, were cultivated in European gardens during the chinoiserie trend before gardeners became wise to their foul-smelling odors, and were introduced to America in the late 1700s. They have lived on this land almost since the formation of this country.
• I looked at the photo on my phone. It was a former carriage horse, with its blinders still on, and a harness decorated with bells, jingling with every trot. Once enlisted to give tourists carriage rides around Central Park, it was now free. I wanted to show someone, for someone to marvel at this with me, but there was no one left in the office.
• There was a haunted look about all of these places. Ambling through midtown, I thought of the Robert Polidori photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a ghost town that formerly housed the nuclear-plant workers. Or the Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre images of Detroit, the images of abandoned auto plants and once-grand theaters. And the Seph Lawless images of the vacant, decrepit shopping malls that closed after the 2008 crash.
• Visitors trickled in to NY Ghost. Overwhelmingly, they were from Kihnu, Iceland, Bornholm, and other cold-climate islands I had never heard of, where the fever had not reached. They requested photos and updates of their favorite places. It was as if they still couldn’t believe New York was breaking down, and needed confirmation. Everywhere else could fall apart, but not New York. Its glossy, reflective surfaces and moneyed environments seemed invincible. Even after 9/11, even after the attempted bombings, even after the blackouts and the hurricanes and the rising waters due to global warming. <> I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself. But toward the end, in those weeks of walking and taking pictures, I came to know and love the thing itself.
• * The subsequent post was a thirty-second video of the saleslady folding T-shirts. I tried to show it from a distance; I didn’t want the video to be too graphic. Half her jaw was missing. But the way she folded each garment, with an economy of movement, never breaking pace, generated a sense of calm and ease.
• I took a three-hole punch from the copy room and heaved it repeatedly at the glass, which slowly splintered, cracking open as it fissured. When it finally came down, I took all the food items, a fox stealing hen eggs. I rifled through abandoned desks and found chocolate bars, microwavable Kraft mac and cheese,
• Above me, cut into the ceiling, was a skylight. In all the years I’d worked there, I’d never noticed it, and now that the city no longer lit up as brilliantly with electricity, I could see the stars. They were so bright and clear that the sight of them felt astringent against my tired eyes.
• For a long time, I just lie there. My heart beats so hard I feel it in my fingertips.
• * I’ve just never heard you use the term plausible deniability in real life before.
  May you live long enough to see how little your children think of you.
  I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just strange now, how you speak perfect English.
  Well, I can’t communicate with you in your terrible Chinese, she deadpans. Anyway. She gets up. Be careful.
  As she is about to leave, she turns back. If you do manage to escape, then it will be a long time before I see you.
• Trying to talk myself out of my job felt like trying to justify an extravagant purchase I couldn’t actually afford.
• * Even if it is a secondhand familiarity, it is a familiarity all the same. As if all of the stories Jonathan told of his years in Chicago, while we lay drowsing in bed, had seeped into my own memories. Right before sleep when the brain is at its most porous and absorbs everything and weeps chemicals indiscriminately, I must have been deep in his reminiscing, his intricate, lacelike memories inlaid in me. I have been here in another lifetime.
• The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.
• To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?