Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  “Let me know if I can help in some other way, okay?” he says. “I want you to continue contributing. Whenever you want. Promise you’ll keep in touch.”

  The part about asking for a raise the final time, with Corey, that wasn’t exactly true. I was not stoic or firm. I cried, and not a few elegant tears. I shook, had a hard time breathing. I told him I’d been waiting so long, fucking six months and now they’d waited me out long enough that I was physically leaving and didn’t have leverage. He had his palms on his knees; he nodded down at them. He was ashamed, but of my outburst or its cause, I don’t know.

  Jasmine told me she’d heard what happened, which means, of course, Corey told people. They all think I’m weak now. All the effort to hold it inside, wasted. I don’t want to work with people who think I’m weak. Even Tim. We were being polite with one another, when both of us know that I’m going to ghost.

  At night, J falls promptly asleep, naked and sticky with sweat. I am awake, staring at the ceiling, telling myself, What’s done is done is done is done. But the wet heat is unbearable. I get up and go into the kitchen, turn on all the lights. I open the refrigerator and freezer doors, then lean into the cold. With my phone propped against a box of frozen corn dogs, I swipe through people’s former lives until I am shivering, until I have forgotten where I am.

  Day three and I have barely left the couple’s apartment. In bed, tunneled into my laptop when J returns.

  “Hello?” he calls from the front door. “How’s the work going?”

  “It’s boring as hell,” I call back.

  I get out of bed to greet him. I remember I have legs.

  He is carrying several full grocery bags into the kitchen. “How do you feel about burgers for dinner?”

  “Burgers are a thing I don’t yet feel bored with. You know what? Hell is, probably, at least, interesting. This work is as boring as the I-90 in the middle of the country.”

  “Sad,” he says as we put away the food he’s bought. “I thought that might happen.”

  “Why didn’t you save me from myself? Why didn’t you tell me not to do this?”

  “But you wanted to take it, so I thought you’d like it.”

  “What? You just said you thought I wouldn’t.”

  “I really have no idea what I was saying, I was just saying stuff like usual.”

  I laugh. He tells me about the places he’s seen in Ithaca, how beautiful it is now that it’s not frozen and covered in snow like it was during his interview, how the DMV is miraculous with no wait time, how he wishes I could go out with him. Soon, I say. Once I get the hang of this work, I’ll be able to step away.

  “And it’s not that bad, really. I just feel like a sellout. But at least I’m going to make money. How else am I supposed to survive?”

  “You can always ask me for money.” He wraps his arms around me from behind. “I’m getting my summer stipend soon, and it’s coming in a lump sum!”

  I swat him off. “It’s too hot for touching in this place. And no, I can take care of myself.”

  “We take care of each other,” he says, and smiles.

  We take an evening walk to one of the downtown waterfalls a few blocks away. Another defining feature of this place: all the water—the lake, the creeks, the gorges—and its proximity to everyday life. Here, it is raging, loud and white against dark rock cut jagged and deep from millennia. The sound of it is overpowering. The mist cools our faces.

  “This isn’t boring!” I yell over the water’s crash.

  What if I had my own channel? It could be called: “Some Snippets of Asian America” or “Pickings from a Particular Past” or more plainly, without alliteration, “What I Found in My Searches.” Maybe I should have listened to my dad long ago: the past offers answers for the present and future. That’s what I want from it. And to fend off this sense of restlessness, that’s what I will do. I will aggregate in parallel. An ambiguous, one-word title could be: “Distractions.”

  For example, here, from Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia:

  Just as white male desire for black women operated as an undercurrent to race relations during the pre–Civil War period, white male desire for Asian women helped change attitudes about interracial marriage. Of course, complexities and differences abound. In the case of white-black relations, attitudes slowly and unevenly changed in spite of the desire of many in power to maintain the status quo of sexual access and property accumulation. In the case of white-Asian relations, attitudes began to change because enough of those in power wanted to facilitate access. In her study of anti-miscegenation laws, Peggy Pascoe argues that legislation following World War II adapted to suit the desires of returning U.S. soldiers who wanted to marry women that they met while serving in Japan, Korea, and other Asian nations.

  And this, a pamphlet from the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in 1926, the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act:

  It is a well-known fact that the Chinese male population of this country far outnumbers the Chinese female population and that the Chinese male resident here, desiring to marry, must in most cases go to China to seek a wife of his own race, the number of Chinese female residents here being too restricted to supply the demand. Such being the conditions obtaining, under the law as it now stands, most of our Chinese-American citizens must of necessity remain unmarried or if electing to go to China, there to marry, must either give up their residence and virtually give up their citizenship here or live separate and apart from their wives, who are debarred from admission to the United States under section 13 of the immigration act of 1924.

  The only solution of the problem, the immigration act remaining unamended, would be the marriage of the Chinese-American citizen resident here to a woman not of his own race, and this is not only undesirable and inadvisable from the viewpoint of both white and Chinese, but contrary to the laws of persons of the Mongolian race being prohibited in the States of Arizona, California, Idaho, Missouri, Utah, Wyoming, Mississippi, Oregon, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia.

  The first night of chess, with the couple’s glass set, he won three games in a row, after which I gained a sense for the game, developed a strategy, and beat him. I continue to beat him and each round moves faster. On the fourth night he throws up his hands and quits. He says, “This isn’t fun anymore. You’re crushing me.”

  The face of a Chinaman is matter-of-fact and stolid. There is no flash of fancy nor gleam of imagination. But there is intelligence; curiosity and ingenuity are seen in every feature.

  —L. T. Townsend, The Chinese Problem, 1876

  In tech news: Apple executive testifies in court that the company did not collude with publishers in setting e-book prices; Google to use high-flying balloons to provide internet to remote areas; Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, says U.S. spied on Chinese civilians.

  Whenever the phone cuts out, which is often, I call my dad back. When I blame it on the calling card, he says, No, something must be going on. They’re probably listening. They’re monitoring us. When I ask who, he says, The Chinese government, the NSA, who knows who else. He’s a person of particular interest to them.

  In other news: Rupert Murdoch files for divorce from Wendi Deng. Plus, much more horrible events I am avoiding.

  A long time ago, my mom showed me an image of Wendi Deng with her two young daughters, a baby in her lap and a toddler by her side.

  “What took you so long?” she asked. She had been calling my name from upstairs, while I had been in my room typing aggressively into AIM chat boxes. I was fifteen. I was busy.

  “I was doing homework,” I said.

  She was lying in bed with the magazine and pointed at the woman on its cover. “This woman is very, very smart,” she said. “Do you know who she is?”

  “No.” I examined her wide mouth, her large white teeth. The daughters looked lighter, their hair a cardboard brown. “Some rich Chinese lady?”

  “Yes, she is very rich. She married a very rich man. Rupert Murdoch. Do you know
who that is?”

  “No.”

  “Would you do that? Would you marry a really rich white man?”

  “Hmm. Maybe, if I liked him.” I had a crush on a white boy who played bass in a band, and whom I was certain I would love forever as long as he continued to play in said band and invite me to his shows. But I was also still in love and AIM chatting with a Korean American boy from science camp, who at the summer’s-end talent show had sung and played church songs on his guitar. It seemed, above all else, that I needed to be with a musician.

  “She met him when she was a low-level employee,” said my mom. “And then she married him. What is that called? She was very ambitious. Very strong in will. Opportunistic. Some of these Chinese women are very opportunistic. They see what they can get and they do whatever to get it. Now you see she lives a really good life.”

  “With a really old, ugly man.” My mother had turned to a spread of Wendi and Rupert, side by side, him wrinkly and age-spotted, her lithe and radiating glamour.

  “He will die and she will have everything.”

  I hugged and kissed her. “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m so smart, I’m going to be the rich one,” I said.

  “Ha ha, yeah. That sounds good, too.”

  I felt no kinship with Wendi Deng. It was the first time I’d heard the adjective “opportunistic” used to describe a person. It seemed to have a slightly sour connotation, the way my mom said it, though the more familiar “opportunity” was a word enveloped in the good—seize the opportunity, make your own opportunities, a rare opportunity—having to do with fortune, luck, and winning. Yet being opportunistic, a not entirely positive trait, was paired with intelligence and could lead to a “really good life,” and though, even then, I knew it was not a path I would take, I knew, too, that it was not my place to judge what others were willing to do for such a life. There were women I admired and in whom I saw more of myself: during the Olympics, I liked to watch Michelle Kwan skate; at night, occasionally, it felt special to see Connie Chung anchoring the news. They were, however, all peripheral figures.

  Activist Grace Lee Boggs, in response to a question about how being born Chinese affected her outlook on life (from Hyphen magazine):

  I think being born a Chinese female helped a great deal to make me understand the profound changes necessary in the world. . . .

  Because I was born in the United States, there was more opportunity for women in the United States that was very different from China. And as a result, [my mother] felt very envious of me for the opportunities that I had and this created a lot of tension between us. I don’t know whether that exists for Chinese or the Asian families that are coming here to the United States today. So that being born Chinese was not so much a question of being discriminated against because I was Chinese, though there’s some of that, but a sense that I had a different outlook on life. I had the idea, for example, from my father that a crisis is not only a danger but also an opportunity and that there is a positive and negative in everything.

  Not only a danger but also an opportunity.

  I had a similar idea from my father, though I had not thought of it before as particularly Chinese.

  It is difficult to parse which parts of me come from my family, from being Chinese, from being Asian American, from being American, from being a woman, from being of a certain generation, and from, simply, being.

  It was the German Nietzsche who originally wrote, “Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”

  And then its variants made their way into the modern popular lexicon. But even he could not have been the first to have had that philosophy. It is as possible that the idea originated with the ancient Chinese.

  Some superstitions passed down from my parents:

  If your ears burn hot, then somebody is thinking of you.

  If you sneeze three times or more in a row, somebody is talking about you. The more sneezes, the more talk.

  Shake your legs while you sit and you shake all the money out of your life’s pockets.

  For each grain of rice you leave in your bowl, your future partner will have a freckle or mole on their face. (“But doesn’t that mean you both didn’t finish your rice, because you have so many? Why is it bad?” “Just finish your rice.”)

  Killing spiders is killing your ancestors.

  Don’t write in your own shadow. (Consequences unclear.)

  Behave. People are watching you. (Perhaps not a superstition so much as a warning.)

  Everybody here wants to give lengthy directions. Drive until you get to [street name], make a left, when you see [landmark] you’re about halfway there, then at [another landmark] make a right, which is at [another street name], keep going for a while until you see the house with [mildly distinguishing feature]. We’re the house a few doors down from that, at [number][street name], that has the [even less distinguishing feature].

  It’s okay, I try to interrupt. I can find it, I try again. It’s fine, no worries. Until I give up and, not listening, allow them to speak at me. When we get in the car, I enter the address into Google Maps and let it, instead, do the directing.

  “It’s because not everyone has a smartphone,” J explains.

  “In what time are we living?”

  We come up with the idea for a make-believe blog called That’s So Ithaca. So far, dentists’ offices in houses. How people talk about Wegmans, the grocery store on steroids, as though it is a theme park. A man in a tall hat and cape asking if we want to see some magic. A sedan entirely covered in green ITHACA IS GORGES and ITHACA, NY, 10 SQR. MILES SURROUNDED BY REALITY stickers.

  A week in, and it honestly feels like we’ve already seen it all—it’s that small.

  “It reminds me of Davis,” I say.

  “In a good way, right?”

  “I mean, it’s a little stifling and monotonous.”

  “But isn’t it also quaint and cozy? And there’s really good coffee.”

  He has been putting all of his coffee-making skills to use with local Gimme! beans—maybe even better, he claims, than his favorite beans in San Francisco. Maybe the best. He loves Ithaca already; he fits right in.

  On our walk to a nearby apartment, I read to J another one of my finds:

  “Did you know that interracial marriage was banned in California up until 1948? That’s a year before my dad was born. That’s not long ago! And in the western states it was more a fear of Asian men stealing white women. So this article from the New Republic says, ‘The weirdest aspect of the anti-miscegenation movement that Pascoe documents is the widespread belief that the child of a racially mixed marriage is inferior to the average person of either race. . . . Fear of the “half-breed” seems to have deep roots in human psychology, and to be connected with atavistic concerns with “impurity” and the “unnatural” that continue to resonate . . .’

  “Et cetera, et cetera . . .

  “‘It also helps to explain why the first successful post-Reconstruction challenge to the laws did not come until 1948, when the Supreme Court of California, in a case called Perez v. Sharp—a suit by a black man and Mexican American woman (classified as white) who had been refused a marriage license—invalidated the state’s anti-miscegenation law. By then the eugenics movement had faded, and the political grounds for the anti-miscegenation laws of the southern states did not exist in California, so the court could invalidate the law without worrying about too great a backlash.’”

  “Huh, interesting. Who’s Pascoe?”

  “A history professor at University of Oregon.”

  “Do you think our kids would have chicken legs like me or thick legs like you or something in between?”

  I punch him in the arm. “Be serious.”

  “No hitting,” he says. “But seriously. Eugenics, besides being creepy, doesn’t make biological sense. In mouse genetics when you cross two inbred lines, the babies have this thing called ‘hybrid vigor,’ where they’re healthier and stronger than either o
f the parents. In the old lab, we had these tiny, mean, athletic mice that would try to bite whenever I handled them. And then we had these big, fat mice that were really mellow and nice. When we mated the two, their offspring were these big, strong mice that were pretty nice.”

  “Okay. But you’re equating mice and people.”

  “Well, that is the basis of modern science. That mice are model humans.”

  There is a street festival outside. Booths and music. The smell of barbecue. A group of kids on scooters and bikes trails next to us. I smile at them. Some laugh and ride past. One little girl stops and asks if we want to have some food.

  “It’s okay, thanks, though,” I say. “We have to be somewhere soon.”

  “Where?” she asks.

  “There.” I point to a duplex down the street. “We might move into that building.”

  “Cool! Then we can be friends and play,” she says. She bikes away. I tell J that I feel good about living here.

  The man from the property management company walks up to us. “To be honest,” the guy says, quietly, on the stoop, “this is an iffy neighborhood. I know it’s tough to figure out neighborhoods when you’re coming from out of town.”

  “What do you mean?” says J.

  “Oh, just that I think you two would be better suited to living somewhere uphill, or on the other side of downtown, like Fall Creek. That’s where I live. We can just skip this unit.”

  I look over at J, who looks at me. We telepathically communicate.

  “No, that’s okay,” I say.

  “We’ll look at this one,” J says.

  “You sure? Okay then.” The guy, whose whiteness has now become blinding, crosses his arms. “I’ll wait out here.” Behind him, a banner hangs on the nearby park’s fence: CELEBRATE JUNETEENTH!

  We walk, quietly, through the unit. I try to like it, but it has been poorly maintained—the carpets look like they haven’t been replaced in decades and there are mold stains on the walls. Back outside, the white man says, “What did I tell you? I’ll send you our better listings,” and hands J his business card.