Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

How does one measure the space a person inhabits? How can one be sure of how much or how little one takes? And what is the best way to maneuver given one’s perceived size and status?

It’s year five and now he calls me by this name most of the time. I’ve gotten used to the way he pronounces it. I think of it as the version of me that is particular to him. And he says we are family, too.

Open-plan offices are conceptually cool, but they do not work cool. Everyone is visible to everyone. Just another way to breed competition, plus worry, disturbance, and procrastination.

“It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,”

As long as I’ve known them, my parents have bought lottery tickets. I don’t. Then, at least, I am completely certain I will not win. The certainty is more manageable for me than the cycle of hoping/not knowing and losing and hoping/not knowing and losing. The poor man’s tax, I’ve heard it called. Or worse, the stupid tax. But what the people who say that don’t understand is: when in all aspects of life the odds are entirely against you, it can be worth paying for even a tiny increase in hope.

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.

The beginning has that special power. But if weak, it can also eliminate any possibility of a future.

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

He looks at me like he doesn’t know me. I sense it, too, that I am channeling somebody else, that I am recycling or regurgitating somebody else’s words as my own—as my own pain—and directing it toward him, as representative of someone or something else. But is it not all connected?

He has a deluded sense of his audience’s relationship to his platform. Nobody loves Facebook like that. It’s more of a shameful and sickening addiction, like eating scoops of jam directly from the jar.

Have I made myself this accommodating? A harmless vessel for their confusion and rage? They must see me as soft and small and unthreatening, because I have never suggested otherwise.

According to some Chinese interpretations, this means misfortune will strike my family, or I will have a long and happy life, or I will soon acquire land.

Every day I play out the “if . . . then” game with myself. If I impress the editors, then I will get the raise. If I get a raise, then I will stay at this job. If I move to the middle of nowhere, then I will have no leverage. If I get my raise before I move, then they can’t take it back. If I stay at this job, then I might hate myself. If I leave this job, then I might also hate myself, plus no money. If I don’t move wherever J goes, then I am abandoning him. If I abandon him, then all I will have is this shit job. If all I have is this shit job and no raise, then I might as well follow him and have no job and no raise. If I move to the middle of nowhere with no job and no raise, then . . . what?

We watch from our window the people who come to take our stuff. In two hours it is all gone. And I feel a little sad to see it go, all the accumulated items that added up to make this place what it was, a home.

It feels like we are doing a sort of dance, the steps for which I cannot and do not want to master, so I end it by retreating to the conversations I know how to have, and am left with a nagging sense of having failed at something.

I’m sorry, I never saw you as Asian until just now! We all had a good laugh about it. I felt a kind of relief. I had passed, been accepted, blended in—at least with this one woman. It took a few minutes for the initial shame to kick in. Then years for it to curdle inside me, mixed with other instances like this, to really make me sick.

Who knows. I could change my mind. It is changing all the time.

Then there was the eerie feeling that came with seeing a mirror couple, the questioning of how they came to be, if their lives were parallel to ours, if their experiences were similar, and whether one of us could be swapped with the other without anyone noticing a difference.

This is one of his worst qualities, the way he chooses silence in certain conversations, so not only do I feel idiotic and crazed, like I’m talking to myself, I also have to do the work of speculating what he’s thinking.

Somebody once asked me to identify the emotions that most strongly affect my life and the actions I do or don’t take. I couldn’t name them at the time, but now I’ve thought more about the question. Here is the answer I’ve come up with: revenge and regret and fear and guilt.

We don’t only date white men and women. But we are only dating white men and women right now.

At first they were ghostly thoughts. Really, he wants me? How could this be? Why not her or her or her? Or is it because I’m—so ghostly was that thought it could not be completed. Those weren’t our problems. He wasn’t like that.

When we talked about race, we did so mostly from a distance or as a joke, like something that could not touch the depths of this combined entity that was “us.” But I know we do not and cannot exist outside of it. I know I am guilty of avoiding, or not completing, the conversations. That might still be our problem.

Why do I laugh, then? Out of discomfort. Better yet, defense. I add it to my short list of survival skills. If you make people believe you’re strong and comfortable enough to laugh in the face of danger, maybe then they won’t eat you alive.

Why is it bothering you now? One, you have the time. Two, traveling into unknown parts of the country is giving you raw skin and fresh eyes. Like a newborn with sensory overload, but what you’re overloading on is this sense of race, the colors that stand out against an increasingly white background. And all you can feel and see is this difference, wary and on edge of what could happen wherever you go. And here beside you is somebody who does not understand.

What you meant was: You don’t have a Chinese name for him to say or know. You are protecting a piece of yourself from people like him.

you feel both incredibly visible and sickeningly invisible at once, both so inside your own body and so outside of it, or maybe it’s all nothing, it’s all a coincidence, a slip of the mind, a confluence of small signs that don’t intentionally mean to add up to anything, certainly not this. Maybe it’s all in your own head.

Do I enjoy it? It is easy and mindless work. I’ll have a source of income as soon as we get to Ithaca. All of this gives me a sense of peace and direction. So sure! I really enjoy it. Sign me up.

The others I don’t know about. Some avoid speaking to or looking at me, but that’s okay, because I don’t want anybody here to pay much attention, to pick away at the pieces of me that are different.

How many improbable moves did it take for us to reach each other? How many miles? How many decisions made by those before us, to carry themselves from one place to another, from the familiar to the new?

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.

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.

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.

Please keep all of us safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy. It helped assuage that sense of chaos I had as a child. Now? Not so much, it appears.

ugh...i did not like this bit

This doesn’t mean anything, if you don’t look at it that way. What does this mean, then? This means nothing. What do they mean, then? What they mean is that you mean nothing.

He once told me he loved me because I was loyal. Loyal! Couldn’t that be translated into a form of narcissism? I love you because you love me.

Why are we with white men? Is it because we’ve been taught all of these years from all of this white American media that whiteness is the epitome of attractiveness? And even though we are aware of it, have we internalized it so deeply that it can’t be rooted out?

We laugh for a while. It is funny. It’s all too funny. We survive through the laughter.

Invisibility can be protective and advantageous—like the animals that camouflage themselves to hunt or hide.

Invisibility as harm, that of being overlooked and ignored. And now I’m thinking there is a third form of invisibility, of choice, of opting out, of going off into hiding, of separating off from the rest, so as not to exist.

One of those fights where you look at the other person, a person you’ve known so well for so long (or so you thought), and go, aloud and inside, Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? So much so that the contours of their face begin to shift, like there are shapes and lines you’ve never seen before, and the face becomes a landscape of the unfamiliar. One of those fights.

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.