I Canceled America for 3 Weeks
A whirlwind of despondency and restriction leading to freedom
(Above) Beijing’s financial district
Hi internet friends,
The city (of New York) is alive! The soothing smashing drone of construction has become the new soundtrack to my morning yoga—never a better reminder that we’re all still kicking.
This week, paid subscribers received a reactionary annotation of Jiayang Fan’s “How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda” in The New Yorker. Subscribe now for the full experience—a behind the scenes look at the smorgasbordic writing process, aka surprise nuggets in your inbox, though I can’t predict if they will be luxe golden gems or McDonald’s chicken nugs. Bring your own dipping sauce.
What Happened When I Canceled America for 3 Weeks
Following the article (10/10 please read here!), I listened to Jiayang Fan’s interview on the Longform podcast, where she dishes on light fare like the fraught mother-daughter relationship, resolving splits of the self as an immigrant, how her individual story doesn’t affect US-China relations yet is certainly a product of it, exhorting emerging journalists to write into their self doubt, etc etc.
Almost as much as the words themselves, her speaking style stands out to me. She’s tentatively eloquent. It reminds me of the way I pray out loud in front of others or have heated discourse with my mother. She pauses frequently—not because she lacks important things to say, but because she doesn’t want to waste the words, or she’s waiting for the government to real time react-bleep out her last sentence.
Regardless, it makes an impression on interviewer Max Linsky:
I haven’t written much about China and the US and being Chinese American, probably because I feel like a fraud, even if I listen to Chinese culture critique podcasts or read the NYT in Chinese or exchange long Chinese email convos on sensitive subjects with my mom or listen to Chinese music or watch Chinese reality shows because it will never be enough for my mom, or it is too much for others. (I recognize that is a structurally ridiculous sentence to read and I will not apologize for it.)
Even though I live in New York City—Mecca of capital c Culture—I’ve been explaining my vantage point for years, no less than in Dallas or DC. Apparently and surprisingly, my voice is still unfamiliar, which I suppose could also be a good thing hence why you subscribed.
Over the years, my speaking/writing’s unconsciously gotten both more provocative and more intimate, because that’s the most surefire way I’ll be listened to. Or else, I’ll be mistaken as the approachable restaurant hostess or the unskilled junior subordinate. I have no choice but to write myself into my words, with my self inextricably implicated because I’ve never been afforded the privilege to “objectively” separate it.
Contrary to most Chinese Americans I know, I’m keen on going back to China, whether for another short work stint or a sabbatical. I know it’d strip and sharpen me in ways that America can’t.
(Above) Beijing’s financial district
I last worked in Beijing for a month long bank internship in college. I chose to not use a VPN as a personal experiment—meaning, I cut off all Google apps, Facebook, Instagram, American news/web sites, basically anything you’d pull up on a given day at any moment. With no expats or English speakers or friends in sight, I dove into wholly Chinese working and personal environments.
Pretty quickly, I got used to typing in baidu.com instead of google.com. I used WeChat to stay in touch with my family, my college roommate, and my one blessed friend Jiin who downloaded the app for me. Plus Skype to sporadically talk to my high school crush (honestly don’t remember how this happened?) and Spotify messaging (when that was a thing), until my computer restarted one day for an update and I couldn’t log back in because it was connected to my Facebook (not anymore!!).
Did I spiral into despondency? Yes. Did I feel more purposeless than a product marketing intern an ocean away at Facebook? Double that. Did I spend my nights reading a gritty 20th century English theologian authored book on spiritual disciplines and watching White Collar in 1080 HD on Chinese streaming sites with flawless 中文 subtitles?
That summer was the one I came to faith; it was then that Matt Bomer became my white savior.
Seeking refuge in beer gardens during sudden torrential downpours with 1 of your exactly 2 friends is also good relief from despondency
But things are different now, and I likely wouldn’t survive VPN-less unless I picked up coding, given Github is now the precarious final frontier of the free speech internet. As Yiling Liu reports for Wired,
The platform’s unique resilience can be explained through “the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism,” says Margaret Roberts, a professor studying Chinese censorship at UC San Diego. The theory, posited by internet thinker Ethan Zuckerman, states that if a website pairs sensitive politics with broadly appealing, popular entertainment—say, lolcat memes—the website will be more challenging to censor, because users want access to the Cute Cat. “But in the case of GitHub,” Roberts says, “the Cute Cat just happens to be the world’s open source code.”
Technically, how it works:
Chinese authorities cannot censor individual projects, because GitHub uses the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts all traffic. But they are also unwilling to ban GitHub entirely, because it is invaluable to the Chinese tech industry. The country’s developers are heavily dependent on the open source community; more than 690,000 Chinese users signed up for an account in 2017 alone. China is second only to the US in the number of open source projects on GitHub. Blocking the site would be too costly. An attempt to do so in 2013 was met with widespread outcry; tech industry leaders like Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google’s China operations, argued that the block would “derail the nation’s programmers” and lead to a “loss in competitiveness and insight.”
I couldn’t tell you why I want to spend time in China, now increasingly seen as the “other” in American dialogue. It’s not a natural instinct; ask any immigrant kid who loathed weekly Chinese school on Sunday afternoons growing up. Rather, it’s a desire birthed out of deep pain and loneliness and crisis of identity and purpose—in essence, the psycho-emotional reactions from when I shut America out for three weeks. It felt like descending down the circles of inferno. It burned like hell, but somehow instead of disintegrating into ashes, my skin grew more invulnerable, more protective of itself, from the exterior insecurities skimming off to reveal my pure, raw self.
Back to Jiayang:
For what is an immigrant but a mind mired in contradictions and doublings, stranded in unresolved splits of the self?
In her podcast interview, I loved the parts where she instinctually reacts to interviewer Max Linsky—who is as sweet and empathetic as ever—expressing his sympathy for what she’s been through: “I’m sorry to hear that…your mom is so lucky to have you as a daughter…”
…which she can’t handle hearing, immediately exclaiming at him to not “say shit like that.” Her automatic gag reaction to sympathy sounds jarring to the listener, which I can’t get enough of. Because it’s never been enough to be concurrently a good daughter, a good citizen, a good person, and we don’t want someone reminding us of how well we’re doing when we know it’s a lie.
My family had planned (a subsequently canceled trip) to return to China earlier this April, to see our aging grandparents and also for them to see their beloved grandkids. I have no idea what it’s going to be like the next time it’s safely feasible to go. I wonder if America will still be stuck on itself, spinning its wheels in the thick mud of our divisions, splattering our dirt everywhere yet remaining mired in.
As Ed Yong writes on American’s pandemic spiral for The Atlantic,
The U.S. might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is. Daily tragedy might become ambient noise. The desire for normality might render the unthinkable normal. Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, COVID-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.
With or without COVID, the signs are concerning. It’s a long flight to China, literally and figuratively. Throw in air turbulence, and it looks like the current US leadership would rather cancel the flight than weather the storm. But haven’t we learned by now? Cancel culture doesn’t work.
If you could use a reason to smile at someone else’s mistake, I recently had a very bumbling-fumbling experience while trying to reinstall a closet door before I moved out of my last apartment.
Both of my parents studied electrical engineering at China’s top aerospace engineering university, and then there’s me who screwed in all four closet door hinges either upside down or inside out, adding an extra hour to what should’ve been a less than an hour job.
My mother’s mantra echos back: maybe I’m not as good at things as I think.
Cheers,
Vicky
Links & colorful things
Faculty is a “modern grooming company for new masculinity.” Note their social media profiles: Instagram, TikTok, Spotify. (HYPEBEAST press here.)
On brands aka blands (Bloomberg) and premium mediocrity (Ribbonfarm)
The New York Times and Facebook are partnering to co-develop augmented reality (AR) filters and effects on Instagram that help users access and contextualize New York Times journalism (Axios).
Why it matters: “It's the first time that The Times has experimented with augmented reality technology at scale and off of its own website and apps. The partnership also represents an evolution in the relationship between publishers and tech companies.”
The Mandate Letter newsletter on “Why I Should’ve Taken My Wife’s Last Name” and the take (as well as the Swede’s general view) on matrimonial nomenclature as “the coolest name wins.”
My latest bop