Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  “Nothing, blah. Just work drama.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Do you want to tell me again?”

  “No. Not really. I was just venting.”

  The next day, I ask Kevin if the managing editor responded to his email. He says no, but he believes it still made a difference, even if small.

  Tim says it’s terrible, a real bad look, but then also, why didn’t Mo say something during the meeting, instead of live-tweeting it?

  I had the same thought. But for reasons, I think, different from Tim’s, so I don’t say anything. It only occurred to me later, after reading Mo’s original, now-deleted tweets. In one, he wrote: a white boss says this word and not one person in the room even blinks. because hey it’s just a word? i can’t even.

  It bothered me that he had implied none of us had cared. And seeing him, in that moment, on his phone, he’d looked to me like he wasn’t paying attention. Why was he framing it as though he was better than everyone else? Why was he presenting himself in this way online, when in person, in that moment, he’d said, like us, nothing at all?

  We convene in corners and nooks. We whisper. We go for walks around the building to speak more freely. Jasmine and I head to the vintage clothing store two blocks from the office. As we push through hangers of overpriced blouses, a cloud of indignation thickens around us.

  “It’s total bullshit,” she says. “Same shit all the time, all the places. White man does something shitty and racist, and who apologizes publicly? The person of color. I can’t believe Mo fell for that.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I mention my concern over Mo’s one particular tweet.

  “I mean, he’s not talking about you. He’s talking about the whites. They didn’t blink.”

  “But he implied us, too.”

  “Don’t take it so personally. What I’m pissed about is that he fucking deleted it all and apologized. I mean, now he’s made it worse for sure. Caving to them.”

  “But he kind of had to, right? He’s the social media editor, so he represents the public voice of the site.”

  “This site should be publicly against racism!”

  “I know, I know. I’m sure they made him do it, though.”

  “Made him?”

  “Like, maybe he thought he’d lose his job if he didn’t apologize.”

  “The other guy should have lost his job. You think that’s the first time he’s done something like that? No fucking way. I heard him use the n-word on multiple occasions to describe people who take public transit! He was complaining about people who drive to work. He goes, ‘People who use public transit are the n-words of commuting.’ What in the fuck? I drive to work. You know why I have to drive to work? Because I live all the way in Oakland and have to go all over the place to take photos for this damn job. And my car’s a piece of shit I can’t fix because I’m broke. He has no fucking idea about anything, living in his nice-ass Noe Valley house, acting like he has some marginalized experience because he takes the BART? Puh-lease. And do you know how many times he’s said something to me thinking I was you?”

  “Wait, really? How many? When? What does he say? What do you do?”

  “At least two or three times. He goes, ‘Nice article today!’ I just look back at him, like, you idiot.”

  “You’re joking,” I say. “So he thinks I’m being rude to him.”

  “Who cares, he sucks.”

  “Jasmine,” I say, “I know that, but—”

  “Oh my god, stop worrying,” she says, and laughs viciously. “I tell him I’m a photographer. And he always tries to backtrack like he meant, nice photos for the article!”

  “Oh.” I stare back at the clothes on the rack. “Okay.”

  “You worry so fucking much about what they think of you,” she says, “when they’re not even worth it. And they don’t give a fuck about you.”

  Her words sting, but they also feel true. “Yeah, you’re right,” I say.

  “We should just kill all men and all whites, then take over this place.”

  I wonder if she means this place, as in the publication, or this place, as in the country or the world. Before I can ask, she holds up a dark purple piece with a black collar and says, “Do you think this is too sheer for the office?”

  “No,” I respond. “With an undershirt, it would be perfectly professional.”

  The school in Nashville is the only one that exclaims Partners more than welcome! in their email invitation. On the way there we have a layover in LA. I see a famous actress in front of me in the Starbucks line. I text J, who is waiting at the terminal. He doesn’t know who I’m talking about, so there is nobody to corroborate my excitement. Then, when we get on the plane, I see the woman again, sitting next to her less-famous actor boyfriend in first class. We are on a plane with a university baseball team and end up seated in the middle of many rows of them. “Did you see Reese Witherspoon is on the plane?” they say to one another.

  “It’s not Reese Witherspoon,” I tell them. “It’s ——.”

  “Ohhhh. That’s cool, too!” the one next to me says, then puts on his headphones and promptly falls asleep.

  It is somewhat comforting to encounter these young “all-American” men, in their baseball uniforms, mistaking one famous white woman for another.

  Imagine: August 17, 1982. My mother arriving at the Nashville International Airport, technically the second American city she’s seen. She had connected from Chicago, where she’d spent four hours walking up and down the various terminals, fascinated by the people, the language, the food. She’d ordered a Chicago-style hot dog. It looked like a too-large, overstuffed bao bun. Why pickle and tomato? She felt very American as she took her first bite; she liked the way it tasted—very salty, kick of acid, the pepper’s heat—even though the useless tomato slid out onto her lap. As she stepped into the arrivals area, scanning for her host family, she wondered briefly what she would eat in Nashville. More hot dogs? All she knew was that the people coming to get her were a husband and a wife and a daughter, and that they were American, which to her meant white. Smile a lot, her best friend had told her. Shake their hands firmly. Americans like that. Call them Mr. and Mrs. Erickson.

  She could tell them apart from the rest only because they held a sheet of paper with her name on it: Lei. All three were waving. The parents told her to call them Robert and Susan. The young daughter, Jeannie, wrapped her arms around Lei. We’re so happy you’re here. Lei mirrored their greetings. She was nineteen and eager to learn. They took her home, showed her the bedroom she’d have for herself—a room twice the size of the room she shared with her sister in her former home—and told her to make herself comfortable. The house sprawled on forever. The bathroom she would share with Jeannie, and only Jeannie, not the whole family, had pink tiles and smelled of something unfamiliar and sweet.

  Everybody behind a counter calls me “sweetie” or “darling” or “honey,” like we are intimates at home. And though it is harmless, even friendly, it gives me pause.

  On the bus, the Vanderbilt graduate student acting as tour guide points out the window at the giant houses with wraparound porches and tall pillars holding up wraparound balconies. They all have huge entrances that suggest somebody important walks in and out each day. We pass one flying a Confederate flag in the front lawn.

  “Oh, Tennessee was part of the Confederacy,” the graduate student says. “So we still get a bit of that here.”

  There are some laughs, some scoffs. I whisper to J, “A bit of racists? Is that like a pinch of salt?” He shrugs.

  Another guy on the tour, a few rows ahead of us, says, loud enough for all to hear, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The white tour guide mumbles and rubs his hands together. He points out the window at a coffee shop. “And this here is where the hipsters go,” he says. “Any of you from the coasts and big cities will love it. Why don’t we stop in!”

  “I wonder where my mom lived,” I say to J as we walk around the nearby Belm
ont campus.

  “Look at that,” he says, pointing to a Victorian garden with intricate white gazebos flanked by bronze deer.

  “This is insane. I can’t believe this is the first American city my mom saw.”

  “Doesn’t the campus look like it’s from a movie?” he says.

  “Yeah, one that takes place in the South, where guys wear cowboy boots and girls have debutante balls, and everybody goes to the honky-tonk on the weekends to dance.” Only a day earlier did I realize that “honky-tonk” was not the same as “honky” and that white people were not offended by the hyphenated word “honky-tonk,” that in fact, it seemed that white people quite enjoyed honky-tonks, as I stood there in that crowded, entirely white room pressed between J and the bar, staring up at a band in matching denim, flannel, and red neck bandannas, who sang energetic songs about being born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus and tailgating and loving you when you’re anywhere and that tomorrow’s the day we’re gonna fly, when I said to myself, Nope, this is not going to work for me.

  “How weird do you think it would be to come from the biggest city in China to this?”

  “It already feels weird coming from California.”

  I text my mom: Did you really like Nashville?

  She replies: Yes. Everyone was so nice.

  One’s early experiences in a new place are the most charged. They imprint the deepest and have the most influence over how one relates to that place. For example, San Francisco is my city of origin, it is the beginning of everything for me. It is where we lived as a family, where I learned to speak and think. I love the city, especially our neighborhood. My dad’s old mechanic shop was on 9th Avenue. Now it is owned by a dealership. Whenever I walk by, the chemical smells of motor oil and grease and solvents take me back to being a kid, reading magazines in the front office, eating Skittles from the candy machine, sweeping the dust from the shop’s floor for a dollar.

  That day I moved back after college, I walked alone down Irving Street, toward the Outer Sunset, toward the water of Ocean Beach. As the cross street numbers increased, so too did the number of Asian businesses and restaurants, especially the Chinese. There were Chinese groceries and Chinese travel agencies and Chinese housewares stores and Chinese banks and Chinese day care centers. The vast majority of the population walking the streets, coming in and out of stores, was Asian, and I was overwhelmed, my eyes watered as a well of feeling pushed its way up from the bottom of my stomach into my throat. I was so happy to have returned to where I felt I belonged.

  The same can be said of a relationship or a job. If the present (or envisioned, imagined, predicted future) appears low on fuel—as it does, for example, at my increasingly shitty job—memories of a vibrant past can act as reserve energy, propelling one forward on the same path. The beginning has that special power. But if weak, it can also eliminate any possibility of a future.

  Later that evening in the hotel room where the university has put us up, I tell J I do not want to live in Nashville for five years. He says he understands. He says the professors told him that they have a difficult time recruiting students from the coasts.

  “It’s why they invite partners. To convince us with their Southern hospitality,” he says.

  “It didn’t work,” I say.

  “I feel off from eating all this fried food anyway.”

  We spend the last day eating up more of it, walking to the various neighborhoods, and it is a nice trip, because we know we will not return.

  I read the bit I’ve written about my mom’s Nashville arrival to her. That isn’t real, she says. She does not like hot dogs. The daughter’s name was Jane, not Jeannie. The bathroom was big, but she doesn’t remember how it smelled.

  “But I like Chicago-style hot dogs,” I say. “And Jeannie sounds cuter, more Southern.”

  “So you are writing made-up stories now?” she asks. “What about journalism? The truth?”

  This is separate from that. Some made-up stories and some real, but they all come from the same person, and they will, I hope, all add up to some kind of truth.

  I request, receive, and read a copy of Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In and am now asking, in Parley, if any editors want to run a review. I’m inspired! I’m Leaning In!

  Sure thing, says one of the Business editors I’ve never worked with before. Can I turn it around by 3 P.M.?

  A rush job, but I agree, because I have asked for it, plus I thrive on deadlines. It’s one of my favorite feelings—the pressure of time creeping up on me, and pushing myself to meet it. The editor asks if it will be a positive or negative review. I reply, Mostly positive, but I’m aware of the criticism and will address those concerns. Interesting, he responds. Could be a good contrarian angle, then.

  What I liked from the book were the reminders to overcome internal barriers. To ask for more. I wanted to believe that the cause of asking, going for it, leaning in—whatever you wanted to name it—could lead to an effect of success.

  When I’m done, I tell the Business editor the draft is ready in the CMS. He says okay. The next morning the review is up on the site’s home page. The language and substance are shockingly altered. Where I hedged, he made firm statements. Where I made room for criticism, he shut it out. He did not ask if his edits were okay, he did not tell me when it would go up, and he gave it a cringe-worthy headline: “Why You Should ‘Lean In’ to Sheryl Sandberg’s New Book.”

  When I ask him in Parley about it, he writes: Your review was serviceable. But I felt it needed a strong, opinionated, and distinctive take to make it stand out, especially since so many others posted their reviews last week. I made edits accordingly.

  Clicks come to mind. As does the term “devil’s advocate.”

  Whatever belief I had in the power of Lean In™—at least for my given situation, because here I am qualifying my not-so-strong, not-opinionated-enough takes—is diminishing.

  Facebook. Work. Facebook. Work. Facebook. Work. Facebook. This is the typical routine. Sometimes a coffee, bagel, or tweet.

  Tim messages in Parley: So . . .

  I tense. I look over at him next to me. He points at his computer screen, so I look back to mine.

  Let’s go for a walk in 5? Get some coffee.

  We don’t take breaks together. We have other friends in the office for that, largely based on hierarchy and/or age. He and the senior writers and editors. Me and the staff writers and photographers. For five minutes, I sit beside him, anxiety bubbling. Outside, after checking behind and around us so many times that I lose patience and ask him to please hurry up, he tells me those rounds of layoffs everybody has been anticipating—they will start soon, as soon as the next day. Biggest news: The managing editor is out. Also most of the magazine’s Art department, and at least a handful in Web Editorial, possibly more, to “eliminate redundancy” and “bring in new blood.” The Berlin Hall will be no more. All of Editorial will move to one side as the website and print staffs merge under the new EIC.

  “You’re okay,” he says. “That’s why I’m telling you this. I don’t want you to worry when it happens. There are important people here who want you to stick around.” I ask if he’s one of those important people. “Let’s just say I’ve been asked for my opinion and I put in a good word for those I know do good work. I don’t do that for everyone.”

  When I ask him who else is getting let go, he says he’s not 100 percent sure; we’ll all know soon enough. He asks if there are any updates about my boyfriend’s graduate school prospects. I tell him we have options, but none are here or in NYC.

  “That’s unfortunate,” he says. “Are you sure you’re still moving with him?”

  “Yes, for the last time!”

  “Look,” Tim says. He taps erratically at the edge of his coffee cup. “The timing is really off. You’re going to end up asking for too much. You want to stay on remotely, right? That could happen. But that and a raise?”

  The sun is too bright. The cars are too loud. Th
e street is too crowded. Kevin walks out of the building just as we’re heading in. “Coffee! Just what I was thinking!” His face is all grin and radiating sickly cheerfulness.

  Tim looks at me and says, once Kevin is out of earshot, “For example, that guy.”

  Sheryl Sandberg writes an email thanking me for the kind review. It is surprising that she takes the time. Does she have ulterior motives, a grand PR plan, or is she genuinely this sweet?

  Again to the South Bay to visit a startup that’s raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter for an activity monitor that does not exist. Palo Alto is bright and beige, manicured lawns and wide clean streets of expensive cars and storefronts. Jasmine drives us to the startup headquarters, an apartment in a bright beige complex with perfectly clipped bushes and tall trees. A sign proclaims STANFORD WEST. It’s the kind of place that wants to remind you of other places, but then it’s hard to come up with where exactly you’ve seen it before. A mirror college town with money somewhere. A certain type of person finds it incredibly comforting. We deem it terribly depressing. The founder greets us at the door in leather flip-flops, too-long jeans, and two tight polo shirts, the white collars both popped. Inside, it smells of cologne and cheese. Beige curtains against beige walls, as though nothing matters beyond consistency.

  “It’s no Apple garage, but it’s what we’ve got,” the founder says.

  This is what the publication’s status in the land of tech journalism affords me: an exclusive interview and the first up-close, hands-on look at a sought-after device. The single prototype is ugly, but Jasmine manages to make decent photos using colorful processing chips and wires as props. During the interview, she tries to photograph the thing on my wrist, but it looks absurdly huge. We use the founder’s wrist, but she whispers to me that the man’s skin is too pale, reflecting too much light in contrast to the black activity monitor. She giggles indiscreetly. When I ask when he expects the working devices to be available, he says, “Soon. Things are coming up, but we’ll solve them. There will be more problems, guaranteed, but we’ll overcome them. That’s the fundamental code to a successful startup.”