Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life, Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,

Sharing and shouting isn’t the issue so much as the corruption of living in real time.

People experiencing everything at a remove through the eyes of a consumer (actual or potential), a future audience to judge.

“Do you have a lot of chef friends on Instagram?” “Yeah, a bunch.” “Wait, are they really your friends? Or just people you found on there? Like, do you really know and care about them?” “Oh, sure. They’re my good friends and I care a lot about them. They just don’t know I exist.”

There is something unnatural about standing for hours with nowhere to go, without moving any part of one’s body except one’s hands and fingers to type, while the rest of the room sits. It draws too much attention. It is performative.

I am the most attached to my family, its past and its potential and its ideal forms. I am the oldest. I hold on the most. I worry the most.

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself. —Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is,” wrote Laozi, way back when.

I’m tired of the road. I want the destination. I want to start this new life. None of this journey stuff, the experience, the unknown. I stare out the window, fall asleep, dream of nothing.

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.

Excerpt one: Pit minority races against one another to benefit white supremacy. The creation of the model minority. Excerpt two, eighteen years later: This model minority no longer benefits white supremacy. Therefore, no more allowed in this country.

There are typically two paths available to the child of an unhappy marriage: unknowingly repeat the same offenses as your parents or deliberately go far off in the other direction to prove you will not be them.

What greater loneliness and longing is there than living with someone you once knew so well, and who is now hardly around?

“You speak of the yellow peril, we speak of the white disaster,” said Yamei Kin to a New York audience in 1904.

I fantasize about running away. Booking a flight back to San Francisco. Getting up and walking out the door, taking the bus to New York City and staying there. Him doing something more terrible than this, him cheating on me or worse, so my departure can be justified and understandable to everyone outside of us.

Do not think that I overstress the horrors of race prejudice. One cannot be indifferent to the sufferings of one’s own people any more than one can ignore a severe personal injury. . . . But my wife, who had never yet personally experienced any instances of race prejudice, was amazed, insisting that I was foolish, that I magnified the dangers.

I stumbled on recklessly, mercilessly, intent on enlightenment. I have often asked myself, Was I cruel? Perhaps. Yet the greater cruelty, I was convinced, lay in leaving her in ignorance.

What would be the point of taking a test that tells me nothing beyond what I already know and, worse, says, Hey, you’re all the same anyway.

“The lotto man says it’s too bad you can’t understand or speak. But it’s okay. You can pick it up in a couple weeks. You’ll remember. Chinese is inside you.” “That’s what people keep saying, but where exactly is it?”

Without the black community we’d have no civil rights movement. Asians in America followed their lead. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We wouldn’t have what we have today without the black movements. We owe a lot to them. Remember that.”

Colonialism looking and tasting better than it should. And should I be enjoying it as much as I am?

It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside, their inner workings built both from memories and habits and histories made up from the exterior world, and from those known only between the two involved, that exist only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other. A relationship is particular in the way people are particular. Whatever lessons one can glean from other people’s relationships can only be taken in pieces, assembled into bare, minimal instructions.

I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand, despite how much I wanted to or tried, how my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past, they were not mine to determine, not mine to map out, no matter how much they shaped what I had become, however much we were connected, I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount, but what was truly mine was only a little, no, a minuscule speck of it all, and while this was a sort of devastation to me, one I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice, at least, to be on the way, in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I had left to go.