In Which We Profit Entirely By Conjecture

Wormholes

by CATHALEEN CHEN

I believe in quantum physics, kind of. I don’t study it and I certainly can’t prove it, but like Christians in a casino or a child in a buffet line, I muse its most attractive theories.

Wormholes, for instance, are tunnels of negative space energy that link sets of any two points in the universe. The conjecture of Stephen Hawking and a handful of science fiction writers, wormholes can be visualized as a funnel between a two-dimensional surface that folds over a third dimension, allowing the two ends of the funnel to be however infinitely apart, yet connected. Black holes, the nihilist version of wormholes, have funnels with only one end that eventually tapers into nothingness.

Admittedly, I had to Google “wormhole” for its technical definition. I used to snooze through physics class except for when my teacher, a young, lanky Christian, born and raised in western Pennsylvania, would use words like “spacetime” and “exotic matter” to describe phenomena that he attributed to God.

Maybe it was Mr. Gardner’s sermon-like cadence or maybe I so desperately want to grasp onto some sort of cosmic enlightenment, but the notion of wormholes and dark matter stuck with me. At first they were just nice ideas to cogitate, theories with which to coyly embellish a conversation and to speak of with a tinge of irony. But certain things in life have a way of popping up and then disappearing, and as I encounter more and more strange, arbitrary happenings, I’m now willing to accept the mysteries of life as mysteries of the cosmos.

by vija celmins

Now consider this: I am a 20-year-old Chinese immigrant, a soon-to-be first generation American citizen and the daughter of a scientist. Having spent the first eight years of my life in Communist China — i.e., modern China — I didn’t have a conventional childhood.

In the first grade, my classmates and I were indoctrinated as junior comrades of the Party. We were sanctioned to wear red ribbons around our necks, which I thought at the time was to commemorate Mao Zedong’s favorite color.  In the second grade, I participated in a school-wide campaign against superstition and religion. The principal recited Marx over the intercom.

In the third grade, I found myself scrutinized by inquisitive faces, some with yellow hair and blue eyes, like the Chinese imitation Barbies I used to own. This was in Morgantown, West Virginia, where I spent my next five years learning about the English language, Harry Potter, chicken nuggets, the Beatles and eventually, about god.

I guess God could’ve been an easy fix for the perpetual cultural quandaries that ensued in my adolescence. If Chinese counterfeit Barbies had yellow hair and blue eyes, why didn’t I? And how could I have let my parents eat spaghetti with chopsticks in front of my friends?

by vija celmins

But I was the daughter of a scientist, a communist expatriate scientist for that matter. I was never sold on god. I had science and Marx, and I’d rather not elucidate upon the latter, though it’s probably in my blood.

Out of my white, baptized group of friends, I think I was the first to board the bandwagon of existential doubt (I was later reaffirmed by my uncanny keenness for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). They’ve caught on by now, of course. We are twenty-somethings, after all. But all of this — the communists, the angst, the James Joyce — leads me back to the notion of wormholes, black holes and dark matter.

Let’s, for a moment, forget about the grandiosity of existence. Forget about life and death and the meaning of it all. Let’s look at the little luxury of poetry and of language, a practical and tangible thing. For all intents and purposes, let’s consider it matter, because it exists in ink on paper and thus, it exists in some sort of fathomable sphere. Different languages, then, are the different states of matter and each meaning is like an element on the periodic table — it can differ in form but never in essence.

But that’s not how language works. Human communication does not follow the conservation of mass and energy. Take the Chinese word, 亲人, or “tsing ren.” The most direct translation in English would be “relative” or “kin.” But that’s far off from the literal meaning of the Chinese word, which in essence, means someone who is close to the heart. The essence of the word, therefore, disappears through translation — the same way matter disappears into the singularity of a black hole.

Likewise, emotions can be contextualized as matter or energy. Anger, apathy and happiness — among the infinite palette of human emotions — can be traced to a specific part of the insular cortex, i.e. the left side of the brain, induced by a specific sequence of nerves and receptors. Feelings, at the very least, are energies we utilize. But when a certain mental sensation is channeled into something else — say, a jog around the neighborhood, an act of revenge, a personal essay — its existence transcends the human body and recalibrates on another medium, separate yet connected to its origin in the mind.

by vija celmins

On the other hand, emotional energy without an outlet eventually dissipates and ceases to exist entirely.  In certain cases, caffeine might be a good remedy. But some, if not most, feelings fade, and nothing can change that. Not even caffeine can make love forever. Shakespeare knew that, though I didn’t believe him until I was 16 and on the receiving end of lost affections, adrift in the relentless gravitational pull of a black hole. I was the end of the funnel.

When we lose something in life, we’re told to let go. In order to grieve, we must eventually accept the dearth of a being that used to be. We quote Vonnegut and buy posters that say “live and let love” to hang on bare walls. We put up and put out. It goes against the circle of life, in which everything is supposed to be connected. And then at some point down the road, we must accept that Mufasa was wrong and that not everything exists in the paradigm of a beginning, middle and an end that leads to new beginnings.

It seems to me that the universe is full of contractions — of conservative Christian physics teachers, of irreconcilable languages and of parents who eat Italian pasta with chopsticks. I hear the universe is also constantly expanding, perpetually mobile, like a haphazard middle school dance with which the only way to keep up is to accept the fact that it’s supposed to be awkward and random and at times, tender. This, I believe.

A few months ago, I was reading 1984 on my commute to work. It was a typical rush hour El ride until I noticed that the lady standing over me was also reading 1984. It would’ve been a regular, serendipitous coincidence if it weren’t for the fact that she was holding the very same Signet Classic paperback edition, published 1950. Mine was a literary artifact that I borrowed from my roommate, who received it as a birthday present from his sister in 2004. To put this in context, there are more than 450 English editions of Orwell’s masterpiece, nearly 800,000 El passengers each weekday and approximately 145 different El stops in Chicago.  I’m not really sure what it meant or if it means anything at all. But in that moment, I was reminded of a particular day in AP Physics. I had woken up just in time before the class was dismissed to see Mr. Gardner drawing a worm poking out of a black circle on the white board.

“There are things in physics I can’t really explain,” he said, dotting two little eyes on the worm. And then the bell rang.

Cathaleen Chen is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her twitter here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Chopin.

"The Old and the Young" - Midlake (mp3)

"This Weight" - Midlake (mp3)

In Which We Manage To Make It Work

End of the Trip

by JOANNA SWAN

The dwarfing stones caused the city to be even more gigantic for him than it already was. The manmade horizon, the brutal cut in the body of the giant city — it felt as though they were entering the shadow world of hell, when all the boy was seeing was the railroad's answer to the populist crusade to hoist the tracks above the grade crossings so as to end the crashes and the pedestrian carnage.

- Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Davis, California: a veritable Cow-Town where the U.C. Davis Aggies rule the playing field, displaced snowy owls and rabbits foment rage, passionate debate, and press at city council discussions, and Baggins End exists. Davis, California, where greenbelt lanes snake and bike cop citations are a very real threat. Tiny little Davis, my childhood home, where Mom's piano studio was always 98% Asian (to my great delight when Chinese New Year brought moon cakes and recitals brought homemade refreshments and charming extended family).

Yearly hongbao, bi-annual chicken foot-y outings to the New China Buffet, shopping at the S.F. Supermarket in Sacramanto, and a plethora of Guangdong take-out notwithstanding, my small-town schooling could never prepare me for the Mainland itself. From childhood home to college life in Walla Walla, Washington, I traded a small-town high school for a degree in a city known for its sweet onions and Seattle expats, and thus was most green (in the wet-behind-the-ears sense, and also in the where-is-the-azure-sky-and-recycling-program sense, too) upon arrival in Beijing.

Peering out of the Beijing taxi window at endless monstrosities of human engineering, I relished the romantic evocations of Scarlett Johansson's Tokyo scenes in Lost in Translation — and felt very small. This wasn't my first experience with Roth's "man-made sublime that divides and dwarfs," but it was the first time I'd been besieged on all sides by Joy City Malls and Easy Life Malls and Paradise Malls and unfinished subway lines and other things that make David Sedaris' snarky turn snarly.

"Plan of the City of Peking," British LithographIn one of the cafes where coffee is not served to businessmen in a corporate casual atmosphere, I was approached by a small man from a table of The Cools: a Chinese girl with platinum white hair, several subscribers to the black monotone dressing doctrine, and a bald Spaniard who kept giving my boyfriend flirty eyes over his latte. Said small man introduced himself as Juan and asked in adorably broken English if I'd like to model some t-shirts as a "foreigner friend." For want of a more compelling professional life, I consented to do a few jobs for VANCL, a Beijing-based online company that seems to hire hoards of waiguo and nationals alike whose thighs are uniformly much less thunder-y than mine.

This baffling shirt may or may not be an inside joke of the Chinese youth. Either way, it regularly serves as a reminder of why my boyfriend is extra-cool.

VANCL paid better than my teaching job — 600 RMB per 2-or-3-hour job — and visions of free t-shirts with cutesy graphics danced in my head, reminding me that I had yet to purchase a shirt from Threadless.

The first shoot took place at what had been some sort of factory or government compound: firebrick warehouses and snaking alleys now peppered with hints of film and fashion industry gentrification: shiny luxury vehicles, decay-chic rusted doors, an eerie veil of anonymity. The shoot itself was fun, if not a ringer for Bob Harris' "Suntory Time" translation troubles. I was instructed by photographer Han, a most genial young fellow involved with directing and shooting films (many were, he admitted ruefully, "boring propaganda"), to look happy, drunk (I think?) and also that very distinct misty/innocent/pensive pose that's spotted in manga and certain Asian fashion circles — eyes demurely downward or at a thoughtful 45-degree upwards tilt, chin coquettishly jutting, hands behind back, or finger at lips, feet together, or slightly pigeon-toed.

During most shoots, a young man would crouch below me, aiming a hairdryer directly at my head. Half the photos capture my futile attempts to extricate flyaways from my over-glossed lips.

What ultimately inspired the photographers would always be my hair. I'd come with it tied up in a bun, hoping to keep my tresses locked away from the snarls, split ends, and the leonine mane it revels in when freed from ponytail prison; everyone always wanted it down, though — I was to shake, twirl, fluff, flip, twist, braid. I ended up under a curling iron more than once and 45 minutes later the proud stylist would present his creation: Sandra Dee meets Amy Winehouse with bubblegum lipstick.

If I look happy, it's because I thought they weren't going to curl my hair.

I made friends with a girl who'd seen my photos on VANCL, a friend of Juan's. Her job confounded me until I realized that rather than sell clothes, she contracted out photography jobs for companies — they chose the model and backgrounds, she styled and produced the photoshoots. Once, I modeled 60 down coats in June for a big website. It was cool, I got free Victory Vitamin Water.

Sweating under my pancake makeup. Fashion. It's Height.

I took the 991 bus to her studio to model various outfits, and the bus trip alone cost me three hours of my life roundtrip. I'd sit with my magazines and iPod, watching the bus TV and trying to spot horse-drawn buggies on the road and marveling at the tinted, removed insulation of the Audi dashboards and BMW backseats idling at red lights below me. Such insulation was never afforded a bus passenger, leastwise a laowai.

Once, the blue-uniformed ticket collector helped me with some directions and then asked me about my other, less compelling job: how much did lessons cost for each student? (I told her — 100 RMB to me, 300 RMB to boss-lady.) She had a bit of cilantro in her teeth, perhaps from a recent Beijing Breakfast stop, and gestured at my Lapham's Quarterly every time she mentioned teaching or English. On TV there was a video of Michael Jackson performing the Sawing A Woman in Half magic trick while singing "Smooth Criminal." There were also many yelling ads.

Raised voices being frequent and tolerated in most areas except perhaps temples, shrines, and the respectable sit-down restaurant known as Pizza Hut, the promotions heralded the imminent glee of summertime, liberation at hand. Everyone yelled in these ads: old ladies exclaimed about online shopping deals, a young woman called "wu ba dian commmm!!" (online classified ads) to the world through her cupped hands, two young lovers yelled coyly about chocolate popsicles, an actress and popular microblogger rode a CGI donkey and hollered about something that sounded like "ganji-laaaaaa!" All the while, we scuttled past the blue and white corrugated walls of Yah Gee Modular Housing or JH Prefab Housing, the two choices migrant workers seemed to have regarding city lodging.

On the return trip from my last modeling job, I fell asleep and woke up sweaty as from a fever dream, wondering if my stop had already passed. Wrong as always in my evaluation of China's great breadth, I inconspicuously peeled away my false eyelashes, stained my last Kleenex with melted mauve and dripping beige foundation, and settled down to the last hour of the myriad strange smells of public transportation, aircon drips, and a stomach aching for an icy pop to usher in the oppressive Beijing summer.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Beijing. She last wrote in these pages about living in China. She blogs here and tumbls here. 

Photographs by the author and Galen Phillips.

"Love Handles" - Akon (mp3)

"Lock Down" - Ya Boy ft. Akon (mp3)

"Freaky" - Mook, Jadakiss and Shella ft. Akon (mp3)

In Which We Pass The Bottles Back And Forth

Coming Up For Air

by LUCY MORRIS

In my room here in Beijing, my child-sized desk sits opposite a window that looks out on decrepit socialist-style apartment buildings and great capitalist skyscrapers. I came here in the great tradition of escape. I write from here, a glass of Mandarin orange juice beside me, because I thought that I could not write any closer, because that had always been the plan after a tumultuous year and a half of post-grad life: to parcel up the concerns and heartbreaks – the break-ups and broken leases, protracted job searches and abrupt job desertions – into a big red suitcase, dump them in a black duffel bag, strap them like a passport holder to my chest, and only then unpack, only then rehash in the comfort of my best friend’s apartment here, with dumplings steaming away on our two-burner stove in the kitchen.

Catherine lives in Wudaokou, a student neighborhood, sort of like a Communist built Madison, WI. It contains both of what people call the MIT of China and the Harvard of China. I have stayed in this area once before, three years back, when my brother was studying in the foreign language program of the Harvard; now, he lives and works as an editor a couple more grown-up neighborhoods over, and Catherine bikes to the MIT-type campus every morning before I wake up. We joke that I am her housewife even though she is better at both cooking and cleaning than I am. In reality, I rarely venture beyond the neighborhood alone because I haven’t yet learned my way around and feel embarrassed about not knowing more Chinese.

The city is whiter – as in more Caucasian – than I remember it being. The air seems denser with khaki hued pollution, although supposedly air quality has been improving, and the humidity is so negligible that the clothes we hang on lines to dry are quickly ready to wear. More wireless networks appear when I try to connect, but my e-mail is still inaccessible without a VPN, as are the triple procrastination threats of Facebook, YouTube and often gmail, with all its capacities for video chatting with friends back in the States. We have not yet succeeded in setting up our own wireless; instead, we share a single ethernet cord on the premise that limiting our internet usage will make us more productive at what we call our “work work.” For Catherine, that is her research job (re-search, she pronounces it, emphasis on the second syllable, like we are professionals, or British), and for me, it is Russian business translation for a company back in New York. It is not lost on me that I came across the world to work in two languages still not (in the case of English) and no longer (in the case of Russian) really spoken here. But that is the point, I guess: to say things in writing that could not be understood aloud.

For a while before I came here, I was dating a man who was half Chinese and who would lecture me on my white privilege while professing that he was terrified of China, for reasons that ranged from the hazily racist to the half-heartedly political. “Stick to the Cantonese Diaspora and Hong Kong,” he instructed. Alex had never been to China, and in fact his ancestors left in the nineteenth century for Japan, where he had spent some time. I asked him if he liked Japan; I have never been and might consider it now that I’m on this continent. “It’s fine,” he said. “But ask me if I like the Japanese.” I did, and he does not.

Before I left, Alex and I would go out to eat at the only good Chinese restaurant in Milwaukee, where we were both camped out for varying stays – mine two months, his ten years – on tenuous loan from our real homes and lives in New York. Most of my fall clothes were in storage so I wore a Quiksilver hoodie everywhere that he had gotten for free on a rap tour he was managing.

Alex was eighteen years my senior and about my height. I had often summed up romantic entanglements of mine with the phrase, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” but with him it did not even seem like a good idea at the beginning. He had a daughter not significantly younger than me, and during our second meal at Fortune, he showed me the booth where he usually sat with her. On our next trip, the first where they gave us the for-Chinese-only menu, we were seated in that same booth. I thought about switching, but did not want to create an issue if he didn’t see one. “What if we are just working out our own issues on each other?” I asked him once. “What if we are?” he said. “I guess I don’t see what’s wrong with that exactly.”

I passed this onto Catherine, then busy settling in and finding us a home in China, and she was of a different mind. “Buy your ticket,” she advised. "Be careful with love declarations. And don't get in too deep."

Alex and I spent autumn afternoons after late nights and even later wake-ups eating fatty-tasting faro in red bean sauce and double-fried Cantonese-style Chow Mein, piles of shocking green Szechuan string beans and deep bowls of soft tofu. We ate so fervently we barely spoke to each other, not until the post-meal tea and oranges, and then we took the leftovers home to eat after bar-time. I was occasionally so drunk I had to lean on his shoulder to stand, but still somehow adroit enough to eat with chopsticks, albeit the stupid American child way, thumb sticking up and the tips of the chopsticks crossed, not held gracefully near the top like everyone does here.

And this was not the first time I had chosen Chinese food over meaningful discussion. During our second year of college, Catherine and I had discovered that we could lug pounds and pounds of frozen Chinatown goods – scallion pancakes, red bean or meat bao, dumplings – back to our dorm kitchens outside of the city. With wrists weak from typing and mouths sore from explicating, we dug into our dough products like it was the only assignment we truly cared about. We didn’t talk about our futures, internships and jobs and apartments for the summer ahead, or the relationship psychodramas we were playing out together but separately, with different men. She delicately flipped the green-flecked flour pancakes in a roommate’s cast iron pan and then onto a shared plate, and we ate, and we were quiet for once.

A year after that, I was studying in Russia, and it was over winter break that I took the train from Siberia to Beijing to see my brother. My host mother had packed me off with a giant Macy’s-sized shopping bag of food, bland cheeses and black breads, pickled beets, expensive grapefruits imported from the very country I was headed to, homemade pirozhki and plastic pouches of instant mushroom soup. After 65 hours of train travel, I arrived in China with the bag still half-full. I handed it off to my brother; I was done with Russian food, the beiges and yellows and starches of it all. I had lost 15 pounds in four months, and all I wanted to eat was greens. So we did: garlicky sautéed greens like our mom used to make, steamed greens, leafy greens dunked in hot pot and allowed to fan out in the broth, lacy raw greens edging plates of stinky tofu. We ate Uighur food and Korean food and on New Year’s Eve we had Thai food, none of which could be found in my provincial Russian city.

The night before I left we had an expensive and indulgent Indian meal, in a kind of remembrance or honor of the Indian Sunday brunches our family ate weekly back in America. Neither of us were sure when we would be home next, let alone at the same time. In the end, it would not be for more than two years.

Here, I am living and loving less hungrily this time around. I write e-mails to Alex, and he responds promptly but also stoically. I compose laborious questions about current events like it will evince whatever it is I want to hear from him.

He writes how odd it is to him that my class of young Americans is migrating to one of the more oppressed countries in the world in search of some vague sense of post-grad freedom. He is not wrong about this: I am here “doing me” in a culture where “doing you” is not encouraged. But in the mornings when I am alone with this ambivalent knowledge, I still get up and pour a glass of a lassi-like yogurt drink from a jug that looks like dishwasher detergent, purchased at the combination supermarket-department store a block away from our apartment. I dismantle a pomelo with more care and patience than I make love, easing off the thick skin, gently plying apart long pieces and peeling back the membranes to get right to the flesh of the fruit. I wash yesterday’s wok before Catherine comes home for lunch, yielding bags of fresh noodles (2 kuai) and eggs or tomatoes purchased at the makeshift stand just outside our door. She sautés everything in sunflower oil, crushes Szechuan peppercorns in her hands and dusts them over the wok, and we douse our bowls of food in sesame oil and soy sauce, passing the bottles back and forth with greasy, ravenous hands. We don’t have a dining or living room, so we sit on her bed and plan our afternoons.

The Western bakery goods at the cafes here where we spend those hours are better than in New York. The pies at The Bridge on Chengfu Lu are fresher, the crusts flakier and fillings richer, than the ones at Think Coffee on Mercer Street, where Catherine and I spent a lot of our job searching or telecommuting afternoons a year ago. I think I could stay here for a while, maybe get really good at something. I tell myself that if I write 2,000 words a day, I’ll have a novel in a month. Or I could start a Chinese-Russian tea export business, like Alex once suggested. I could study for the LSATS, retake the practice tests at the back of the prep guide I brought until my score is pretty good. But in truth, our talks about the future are only hypothetical: travel plans and visa renewal plans and, very distantly, grad school plans. We could take the bus to Mongolia in December, or the train to visit my friends in Russia and then onto Germany. Maybe we’ll go to Thailand for spring break.

For now we’re planted here in Beijing. The food is excellent, and it is cheap. The giggles I share with Catherine are free, $12 cheaper than the movies I’d make Alex take me to when I needed laughs back home, sometimes so badly it felt like its own kind of hunger. It’s true that hot pot, eaten athletically and excitedly on the third story of a building not far from here, steams up my glasses, but so does kissing someone on one of those frozen winter afternoons that seem, although they are probably not, unique to the Midwest.

Lucy Morris is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a translator and writer living in Beijing. She tumbls here.

"Agents of Love" - Wolf Parade (mp3)

"In the Direction of the Moon" - Wolf Parade (mp3)

"Semi-Precious Stone" - Wolf Parade (mp3)