Severance
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by Ling Ma
Read between February 4, 2021 - July 7, 2024
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After the End came the Beginning. And in the Beginning, there were eight of us, then nine—that was me—a number that would only decrease.
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Lurking in our limited gene pools may swim metastatic brain tumors and every type of depression and recessed cystic fibrosis, but also high IQs and proficiencies with Romance languages. We could move on from this. We could be better.
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New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.
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In a timorous voice, he said he could see clearly now, could see the future. The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers. The future is more newly arrived college grads and tourists in some fruitless search for authenticity. The future is more overpriced Pabsts at dive-bar ...more
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For a moment I wondered if I hadn’t just slept for months. Maybe I’d Rip-Van-Winkled my way out of a job. I would arrive to find someone else sitting in my office, my belongings in a box. I would return to my studio and find someone else living there. I would start over.
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I sensed for the first time my father’s desire to leave China and to live in a foreign country. It was the anonymity.
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He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.
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The air outside was cool and humid. Tiny pinpricks of rain dotted my arms.
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didn’t elaborate that they were both deceased, and that the family coffers or whatever would last me just long enough—maybe, say, for the next ten, fifteen years—for me to be comfortable with not working, long enough to be useless. The fruits of my immigrant father’s lifelong efforts would be gobbled up and squandered by me, his lazy, disaffected daughter.
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Unlike our space, the bathroom was also tidy, full of generic Duane Reade products lined up in his medicine cabinet, which I opened to look for prescription pill bottles. There weren’t any. I couldn’t see his private grievances.
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When other people are happy, I don’t have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.
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I missed you, he persisted. You have people, I repeated, not knowing what else to say. No, you’re not hearing me. You’re not hearing me even though you understand. I missed you. All summer, I kept thinking about you.
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When I kissed him, it was like I was kissing all his things, all the signifiers and trappings of adulthood or success coming at me in a rush. Fucking was just seeing that to its end, a white yacht docking.
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You could lose yourself this way, watching the most banal activities cycle through on an infinite loop. It is a fever of repetition, of routine. But surprisingly, the routines don’t necessarily repeat in the identical manner. If you paid a little attention, you would see variations. Like the order in which she set down the dishes. Or how sometimes she’d go around the table clockwise, other times counterclockwise. The variations were what got to me.
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It was like burrowing underground, and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working.
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because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories,
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Nowhere else was there such an elaborate gradient between the real and the fake. Nowhere else did the boundaries of real and fake seem so porous.
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Once broken down into ashes, she had explained, the money would transfer into the possession of our ancestral spirits. They would use it to buy things or to bargain with others or to bribe afterlife officials for favors. The afterlife, with its bureaucratic echelons and hierarchies, functioned similarly to the government. Nothing turned your way unless you took matters into your own hands.
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I watched the last luxury images burn and extinguish into ash, entering some other, metaphysical realm where my parents feasted. As the fire subsided and the embers dimmed, I imagined them combing through the mountain of items, dumbstruck by the dizzying abundance. I imagined that it would be more than they would ever need, more than they knew what to do with, even in eternity.
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Because being online is equivalent to living in the past. And, while we can agree that the internet has many uses, one of its significant side effects is that we all live too much in the past.
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This loss of the internet presents an opportunity. We are more free to live in the present, and more free to envision our future.
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The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.
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And there was that nagging sense that, though I was taking photos that were supposed to say something about these communities living in the aftermath of folded industries, I didn’t really know what it was like to live there. One night, at a bar in Youngstown, this grizzled old man came up, looked at me coldly, and said, Go back to where you came from. I had retorted, politely, Where’s that, sir? He’d responded, Korea, Vietnam. I don’t give a shit. You don’t belong here. You don’t know us.
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If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you. And if that’s the working world, then I don’t want to be a part of it.
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I didn’t know what to do, so I pushed it to the farthest corner of my mind. I went to sleep. Then I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.
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Memories beget memories. Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us?
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The feeling of walking into a mall before you’ve spent any money, the sense of promise that always diminishes gradually, as you go into the same stores, looking at the same merchandise.
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hands. It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control.
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Sitting by her bed in the last days of her life, I didn’t mention any of this. A part of me wanted to remonstrate with her, to list out all her infractions in a final accounting, but the last days are for relief, not for truth.
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I just want for you what your father wanted: to make use of yourself, she finally said. No matter what, we just want you to be of use.
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We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.
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I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.
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Before falling asleep, I felt the baby move for the first time.
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Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.
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No matter where you go, you can’t escape the realities of this world.
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The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.
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I have been an orphan for so long I am tired of it, walking and driving and searching for something that will never settle me. I want something different for Luna, the child of two rootless people. She will be born untethered from all family except me, without a hometown or a place of origin.
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To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?