Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  But whatever now is, there is a sense of permanence. Him, there. Us, here. None of us have visited since he’s gone. I planned to at one point, even got my ten-year China visa. But then work happened, or something else. I couldn’t take vacation time, I didn’t feel like I had the money for the trip, I missed a good deal on flights. Now just isn’t the right time. But he is always asking and his list of requests grows.

  He left on Christmas last year, in the dark morning, in a shuttle headed for SFO, for a plane to Macau. My parents’ interactions had appeared to be okay to decent that month, but we all knew that between them, things moved cyclically and no state lasted long. One night while out with J, I got a call from my dad telling me to come home right away. Book him a one-way ticket to China—this was the last straw, the straw that broke the camel’s back, he wasn’t taking anybody’s shit anymore, she was the lit fuse and he was the exploding dynamite, she says they’re divorced and wants nothing to do with him, so be it, let’s see how she likes it, this was final, it was his way or the highway—look into Shanghai, Zhuhai, Macau, Beijing, Hong Kong, and find the cheapest ticket for the soonest possible date. He hung up. I called back and made my pleas—it had been a while since he’d gone to China, how would he find a place to live, what would he do there, how would we get in touch, shouldn’t we slow down a little—to which he said, I’ve survived this long, haven’t I? Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself. Just do as I say, now. And again he hung up. So I went home and did as I was told.

  They did not speak a word to one another in the days leading up to his departure, but on the day of, she came with us to stand outside the house to send him off. Another, the most recent, goodbye.

  J has pointed out that I’m the only adult person he knows who continues to call their parents Mommy and Daddy.

  But so does my sister. (Although my brother switched to “Mom” and “Dad” at some point.) Perhaps it means something deeper—a stubbornness or unwillingness to change, a desire to cling to childhood. Or it is, more simply, what we’re used to, and doesn’t mean much at all.

  My mom says she’s making all of our favorites for Christmas dinner. Chicken in tomato sauce for Didi. Lion’s head for Mei Mei. Shanghai-style braised pork belly for me. And lots of veggies—bok choy, Chinese broccoli, tomato and egg stir-fry, mushrooms with fried tofu.

  “What about for you, Mommy?”

  “Me? I’m just happy all my kids are home for me to spoil. Now come over here and help me clean and chop.”

  At home, our San Francisco home, J does the cooking. He gets back from work before me and by the time I’m home, the food is ready, or close to. He makes carnitas. He makes braised beef and onions. He makes stir-fried basil eggplant and tofu. He makes chana masala. He makes potatoes au gratin with leeks and Gruyère. He bakes shortbread cookies with little dot illustrations, indented with chopsticks: a dog, a baseball, a scorpion, smiley faces, our initials in a heart. When he has time, he pickles various vegetables and attempts to grind his own mustard.

  I do have one consistent kitchen chore, which he can’t seem to get right: I measure the rice and water for the rice cooker by the finger method I learned from my mom. After rinsing the rice, stick your index finger in until it hits the bottom of the pot. Take note of where the top of the rice meets your finger. Add water. Stick your index finger so the tip now touches the top of the rice. You want the top of the water to meet the same spot on your finger as the top of the rice previously did. Basically, equal layers of rice and water. It sounds complicated, but it is easy. It also yields consistently balanced and uniform rice.

  J walks the block over to our house. He comes in with a bag of Verve coffee from Santa Cruz, where he and his family—mom, dad, and younger brother—rented a beach house for the holidays, as they do each year. And each year they invite me. I went once and experienced so much guilt and disconnect over what felt like choosing them over my own family that I have never gone again.

  “For me?” my mom says as she takes the coffee. “Sorry, I don’t have anything for you.”

  “Oh, no, that’s fine,” he says. “It’s my pleasure.”

  “See, he gives me something for Christmas. So good,” my mom yells to my sister, who is on the couch looking at her phone, and whose boyfriend has not given our mom anything for Christmas.

  “Geez, if you really needed a present just tell me and I’ll tell him to get you something next time.”

  “I don’t need! You need to train him better, like your sister.”

  “Jing Jing’s the bossy one. She probably bosses him around all the time.”

  “Yeah, ha ha, she does,” says J.

  “What? No, I don’t! Tell them I don’t.”

  “Oh right. No, she doesn’t.”

  We all laugh.

  “Wow, I feel bad for you, man,” says my brother. “My sister’s pretty crazy.”

  “Well, what about you? Did you get your girlfriend’s mom anything?”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “I thought you did,” my mom says. “The one lives upstairs from you?”

  “We’re just talking and hanging out.”

  “Didi is, like, super casual about women. They’re, like, just talking.”

  “Ah, how my son end up like this? So bad!”

  “Yeah, you have two sisters who are telling you what to do and you’re probably just a typical college bro,” I say. “Don’t mistreat women!”

  “Oh my god, all I said was that she’s not my girlfriend. Ling Ling’s the one who has the bad boyfriend who doesn’t give presents. If I had a girlfriend, I would obviously give her mom a present.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Don’t bring it back to me!”

  “Okay, we’re going out. We’re leaving now!”

  “Bye, have fun!”

  One of the reasons I love J is because he can handle, even likes, my family.

  At some point between year two and year three of our relationship, he started calling me Jing Jing.

  “Jing Jing,” he’d go, teasing. My name was all wrong in his mouth: the emphasis in the wrong spot, the J soft and mushy instead of pointed and sharp, as it should be.

  “Don’t call me that,” I’d say.

  “It’s just for my family,” I’d say.

  “You’re saying it wrong.”

  “It’s Jing Jing. You’re saying ‘Jing Jing.’ Do you hear the difference?”

  No, he could not and he still can’t.

  It’s year five and now he calls me by this name most of the time. I’ve gotten used to the way he pronounces it. I think of it as the version of me that is particular to him. And he says we are family, too.

  We go to Mishka’s, a local coffee shop, where my sister used to work. The barista taking our order remembers me and gives us a discount. We’ve already run into three people we know from high school. Davis is small and slightly suffocating like that. It was not somewhere I wanted to stay, or live in again. But UC Davis is still an option, since it is, technically, our home. We are here to submit the last of his applications. We divide the list up and load the documents into their designated portals, until finally we are done. It’s done. We’ll end up in one of those places.

  Our friend Becca walks in as we are congratulating ourselves and clinking our coffee mugs.

  “You guys are sickeningly cute,” she says. “It’s too much. Planning your future life together. I need a boyfriend! Help me find a boyfriend, please.”

  The next twenty minutes are spent under the seduction of Tinder swipes. We get excited every time we see somebody we know—since the app is based on location, a few guys from high school have shown up. Their chosen photos speak to how much or how little they’ve changed: band nerd shirtless and ripped on the beach; soccer jock still doing his soccer jock; our mutual friend drinking beer, a photo from the other night’s hangout. Pass, pass, pass, Becca says.

  “Do you really want to be with a Davis kid?” I ask. “Why do Dav
is kids always glom together? What is it about them?”

  “You realize that’s what we are, right?” says J, a Davis kid, meaning he was born here and spent his whole life up until college here.

  “No,” I say. “I am categorically not a Davis kid, so no.”

  “Didn’t you come in elementary school?” says Becca, also a Davis kid.

  “The middle of sixth grade!”

  “You hate being associated with Davis, even though it’s where you’re from,” says J.

  “No, I’m not from here!” I say, in part proving his point.

  “Whatever, you’re two Davis kids who’ve been together forever. Wait, is that who I think it is?” Becca shows us a cute punk kid turned clean-cut hipster, standing in front of a brick wall with his hands in his skinny-jean pockets.

  “I had the biggest crush on him sophomore year,” says Becca. She swipes right. It’s a match! “Technology is the fucking best.”

  Open-plan offices are conceptually cool, but they do not work cool. Everyone is visible to everyone. Just another way to breed competition, plus worry, disturbance, and procrastination. If you don’t wear noise-canceling headphones, then you are bombarded with office noises: the typing, the chewing, the groaning, the mumbling, the complaining, the tapping, the squeaking, the bickering . . . Then, too, there’s the ever-present anxiety about somebody flying over to talk, and if they approach from behind, it’s unexpected and frightening, and if they approach from ahead, you have to watch them coming across the space as your anxiety and anticipation build. What do they want? And what is the best position in which to talk—do you stand up once they’ve arrived? Do they squat as you sit? Do you stare up at them from your chair? And how best to end the conversation—do you say see you later, though you can technically see them at all times across the open expanse? Do you say goodbye? Do they walk away with no formalities? Do they make a grand exit?

  To avoid answering such questions, there is the work chatroom: Parley. Even though we are all physically in the same room, it’s quieter, easier, and more efficient to communicate through the screen, through Parley.

  When I first got my work computer, I’d misread it as Parsley. (Which I still consider a better software company name.) Then, I thought it was Parlay, as in, to take one thing and transform it into something better. It didn’t take long, however, to realize it was “par-lee.” Did you see what so-and-so said in Parley? Get on Parley, we need to talk. The business people are going crazy on Parley right now. Why isn’t anybody responding to my question in Parley? The original definition is: a discussion between opposing sides, or enemies, over the terms of a truce. This offers a decent analogy for office communication.

  Especially true of our publication, which is divided down the middle between web and print. We are all on the same floor, but web people sit in a room on one side and print people, plus management, sit on the other side. Doors, the restrooms, and a long hallway divide the two sides. The Berlin Hall, everyone calls it.

  J dislikes that I have Parley notifications on at all times. It is constantly buzzing, during dinner, during TV time, and especially these days, as our group prepares for the yearly Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas. The problem is my guilt. It never seems as though I’m doing enough, and if I do more, respond faster, I think, maybe somebody important will notice, and I will be lifted out of this wait.

  Nobody likes to go. All of us complain during the weeks ahead. CES is four long days of Las Vegas product porn. We are bombarded with pointless gadget after pointless gadget in the crowded convention center, we wait in lines to get into rooms with who knows what kind of announcements, we take countless meetings with overeager PR people, we type up stories on dirty carpeted floors, we go to pseudo-parties at night, we test our luck in casinos, we drink too much, and we get very little sleep. As Jasmine says, “It’s a nightmare hellscape, but at least we’re in it together.”

  Yet beneath our snark is desire. We want to find the next piece of technology that will make us better, give us purpose, fill our voids. We are looking for what we can show the world and say, here, this is the future, and the future is bright.

  The senior gadgets editor, Corey, and I meet up to attend a few meetings together. Afterward, he tells me he’s sick of the booth babes and the way women are being used to sell products at the convention. He says I must feel grossed out. He points out that during our meetings, the men rarely look at me as they talk, even after he explicitly tells them that I am the reporter. Have I noticed? No, and I think he might be wrong. I distinctly remember making prolonged eye contact with a young male product manager showing us the company’s new flippy laptop-tablet hybrids. But maybe Corey is right and the executives mostly address Corey. Maybe I don’t notice because I spend my time taking notes and examining the product that I am supposed to write in detail about, while Corey sits there drinking coffee and eating the free snacks and making jokes. Now I wonder why he even accompanies me to these meetings in the first place.

  Jasmine and I, plus another reporter named Elizabeth, decide to go to a tech party. And though they are not ever quite what we want from a party, we are lured to them by their offers of free food, free drinks, free swag.

  From the pedestrian walkway over the strip, Las Vegas looks how it always looks, neon in the night, vibrant and lively and loud. But the scenery is in contrast to every person we pass—men, men, almost entirely men—who look, well, like they’re here for a tech convention. Dressed for the office, practical shoes, with lanyards around their necks. Then coming toward us from the opposite direction is a group of thirtysomething-looking ones, rowdy and swaggering, an aged fraternity party. One jumps in front of me and makes fingering gestures at my crotch. He scampers off grunting. “Don’t go near him!” another one yells. “He’s got diseases!”

  The horde whoops and laughs.

  I turn.

  I see their grotesque backs.

  “Fuck you!” Jasmine yells.

  I start yelling, too. Fucking assholes! A few turn around and see me flipping them off.

  Jasmine jogs after them and throws something at one of their heads, a full water bottle. I run after her. The bottle misses and thuds on the pavement, a dull sound. The dicks look back at us and laugh some more.

  Elizabeth has not moved from the spot of the encounter. When we walk back to her, she can’t stop saying, Wow. Wow. Wow.

  “Fucking impotent jerks,” Jasmine says. “A curse of ten thousand years of sexlessness on all the fuckers.”

  “You’re so brave,” says Elizabeth. “I don’t even know what I’d do if it was me. Do you think they were here for CES? I doubt anybody here for CES would do that.”

  Jasmine and I look at each other, like, is she serious? Then Jasmine conveys to me, with a flutter of her eyelids, what do you expect, she’s not like us. Yes, sometimes we are this good at understanding one another. When our similarities align in a sort of power.

  Another tech company party, another white man. This one introduces himself as vice president of something or another, and asks if Jasmine and I are sisters. He asks if we’d like to see his room, and when Jasmine points at me and says, “She’s taken,” he pivots and asks if Jasmine alone would like to see his room, and when I point out his wedding ring, he says he and his wife are separated, that she’s not in Vegas anyway. He says that clichéd line we all know, one not worth repeating. This is when Jasmine and I decide to stop going to these fake parties, to stop doing anything besides pure work for the remainder of the trip.

  Now, Corey again, in the publication’s rented office—if it can be called that; it is more of an enclosure, a shed, placed along one of the convention center’s pavilions. He is talking to me about his longest, most serious relationship while we eat a quick lunch. He and his girlfriend had met online. She moved in with him, scolded him for using his iPad in the bathroom, took his dogs on walks, and then broke up with him a year later. It’s so hard, he says, when you put so much effort into a relationsh
ip, into this other person, and they end it like that. He snaps his fingers. Feels like such a waste of time, he says. J and I have been together for five years. I don’t call him my boyfriend anymore because it sounds too trite—now I just call him J. I don’t really know what to say to Corey. He seems to want relationship advice, or maybe a sympathetic ear. So I nod. I want him to know I’m listening—I will get this raise, somehow, eventually—and I say, That really sucks, Corey, I hope you find somebody, I really believe you will. I remark that there are plenty of single people in San Francisco. He shakes his head and looks down at his salad. Corey is always trying to lose weight. Well, yeah, he says, just not age-appropriate ones. But maybe in Vegas? he says, more hopeful. Whether he means being age appropriate is less of an issue in Vegas, or there are more people his age in town, I don’t bother asking. I don’t want to know. He is fifty-four.

  The convention center is a sensory deluge, and in it I have found nothing to give me hope, and still I post. I post about an app-controlled massage pillow, an app-controlled oven, an app-controlled blood pressure monitor, an app-controlled fork . . . I write about a gross number of smart and 4K TVs. (But, but, look how beautiful the images are up close!) In a room lined with televisions the size of my refrigerator, I run into Tim. We don’t notice each other until we are in each other’s faces, attempting to move through the stream of other bodies.

  “How’re you holding up?” Tim says.

  “Fine,” I say. “You?”

  “So sleep deprived and hungover,” he says. “Wild night with the new EIC.”

  “Wait, he’s here?”

  But then the bodies surge and Tim is pushed along in the opposite direction, waving goodbye.

  I run a hot bath and order a load of room service: chicken fettuccine alfredo, four-cheese quesadilla, chocolate cake, coffee, and tea. When the food arrives, I push the cart next to the bathtub, climb in, and eat while submerged in the steaming water. Yes, I could live this part forever, enjoying life on the company dime.