Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

“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.

“It’s a new era in China,” my dad says on the phone. “New president. This guy cleaned house. He was doing that for months. Anyone corrupt, or anyone he didn’t like—out. He’s consolidating his power. Let’s see what he can do with it.”

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.

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

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.

or there’s all of this mashed into one place and this makes 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. Nothing exactly terrible happens, and you’re back on the road.

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.

She nods. I guess they just weren’t really Chinese parents, then, she says. I almost say to her, You mean, they weren’t your Chinese parents? They weren’t stereotypical Chinese parents?

Why does she need to reaffirm these markers of her experience, a valid and real experience I know to be true, as the only qualifiers—and why to me, who certainly knows exactly what she means?

My suffering is regular and small, and I want to suffer stoically and quietly, which perhaps then is the most Chinese quality about me.

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.