I saw my grandmother across the street when I was in line for a free ticket to a fancy talk by Annie Ernaux. I had never heard of Annie Ernaux before this afternoon, but I did always relish the exhilaration of standing in a queue—perhaps even slightly more, depending on the weather, than I enjoyed seeing my dear grandmother.
“My dear grandmother, have you eaten yet?” I roared, waving at her with my unconventionally long arm. To be more precise, my arm was gyrating rather than waving because I wasn’t coordinated enough to perform the common social graces. Thus, instead of a warm, courteous granddaughter, I looked rather like a windmill, the notion of which I revered without reservation because of my beloved hero Sancho Panza, until it occurred to me that wind turbines were far worthier of reverence in our modern society. Were I capable of generating electricity, the poor guy queueing in front of me—a five-foot-three, nine-fingered Ernaux aficionado (or, possibly, fellow queue connoisseur)—wouldn’t have had to anxiously ask around for a portable charger in vain because he needed to call Miguel.
What a coincidence that the one he needed to call bore the same name as the lad who had given birth to my hero—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a soldier, tax collector, and purchasing agent for the Navy (because he couldn’t make a living with his writing, says Wikipedia)—pondered I, who was at the same time busily pondering the aforestated coincidence, the exhilaration of standing in a queue, the conceit of being associated with a windmill, the shame of failing the great expectations of our modern society and of the one who wanted to call Miguel (“Miguel!” I heard someone screech), and the ineptitude of a modern day cell phone, because the simplest way to call Miguel was simply to call:
“Miguel!”
“Do not flee, coward and vile creature,” cried the poor guy, “for it’s just one knight calling you!”
Miguel did not respond, but a breeze happened to wheeze on by and my unconventionally long yet customarily courteous arm began to greet the breeze by rotating even faster, which the poor guy in front of me observed with the back of his bald head and said (simultaneously referencing my hero’s master and also addressing me, who despite her decidedly uncoordinated body and disproportionately long wingspan, possessed ten painfully normal fingers [boring in all aspects except for their length]): “Though ye flourish more arms than Briareus and more fingers than I, ye still must reckon with me.”
On the other side of the road, steps away from Miguel’s jittery acquaintance and a middle-aged long-limbed granddaughter who was savoring the positive liberty to stand in a queue and praying for the negative liberty from Miguel’s acquaintance’s jitters—O Isaiah Berlin how she loved to flaunt her flawless command of pompous political philosophy terms without knowing exactly what they entailed—standing on the other side of such ambition and finesse, grandmother seemed, by contrast, quite serene. She waited, waited, and waited for the very upright pedestrian light before her to begin flashing itself.
It seemed pretty futile, in the heat of the moment, to seek out the origin of the upcoming goo goo gah gah regarding a flash mob, a flash trial, or flash warfare, which meaninglessly and mercilessly give a bad name to our innocent friend flash, to pinpoint when and where and how it first reached me, through which organ, in what manner, all of which required a consecutive eloquence I didn’t possess (see, grandmother, my expertise lay in commanding rubble and ashes and fragments of grandeur, not in sticking them together and turning them into something concrete). But as soon as I told you the story about you, in which you waited, waited, and waited for an upright pedestrian light to begin flashing itself (but omitted the part where you found the lack of color in New York City’s pedestrian lights bizarre), as soon as I, the storyteller of a story not entirely mine, came in contact with the word flash, as soon as it stung my retinae, stroked my lips, long jumped into my prefrontal cortex, crawled into my mouth, slid down my ear canal (the exact sequence of these incidents being quite impossible to determine), my mouth and arm both froze in the air whereas my left brain immediately ordered my middle-aged mind to feel and act triggered because I had once been traumatized by a flasher; and because I had been traumatized and therefore possessed a trauma, I was authorized to slip the trauma into the narrative at any point and at any cost, including but not limited to interrupting my own storytelling, penetrating an innocent sentence with a puffed-up parenthesis, exhausting my countable readers (there were two of them, excluding myself), Reader One and Reader Two, tiring myself by first imagining what Reader One and Reader Two might say about my digression and then defending myself preemptively on the basis of their imagined response, and confusing my grandmother, who was standing on the other side of the road, watching her granddaughter’s futile dance, as if she had all the time in the world.
At first, I was surprised that grandmother wasn’t triggered at all, but then it occurred to my freshly moldered middle-aged mind (I just turned twenty twenty-two minus nineteen eighty-nine—thirty-three—this morning) that she wasn’t triggered because she wasn’t traumatized, despite the fact that there was a renowned flasher (oy, goosebumps!) in her childhood neighborhood. When I was young and ignorant and polite and never walked away from her, she’d peacefully recount their encounters to me and I’d wonder what those encounters truly entailed. Until I met a flasher of my very own three decades later. On a drizzly day. Inside a beautiful bus. En route to Prospect Park. Unlike grandmother’s flasher, who always wore a slick jacket and a shiny toupee, my flasher wasn’t too invested in his looks, was reading a book, and wore his mask upside down, revealing his lush nostrils. There was one lonely hair, away from all the other facial hairs that he may or may not—depending on his genes and habits—have had hidden under his plaid-patterned, eco-friendly cloth mask, dangling from his wrinkled pimpled right cheek (I didn’t know wrinkles and pimples could coexist until that day) as he sat there shaking. Then his book collapsed onto the floor… into a pile of hushed viscous sighs (I couldn’t help wondering if Reader One and Reader Two would be enamored of the lush texture and stark contrasts present in this meticulously-glued-and-layered metaphor)…
Grandmother, however, wasn’t too swayed by either my hushed viscous sighs or my storytelling, which was only fair, as both her eyes and ears had already waned. Therefore, very peacefully, she stood next to the upright pedestrian light, back hunched, cheeks hollowed, paying absolutely no attention to her hailing granddaughter across the street. You see, grandmother, as an insatiate attention seeker, as much as I valued attention, the mere sight of you pardoned me from my previous pondering—
Before I saw you, I was pretending to ponder a puly pivotal pestion (here you see how my addiction to alliteration had joined forces with my socialist throat, shaving every word before allotting identical caps to them).
The pivotal pestion: which was more detrimental to my mental health—the acute pain in my lower left shoulder blade, because I had vowed to live a creative life and had attempted to add some creativity to my lat pull routine the night before, or literature?
By literature I meant two moderately literary literary fiction pieces crafted by two moderately literate literary writers from my writing workshop cohort of three (self-organized, no instructor, because neither Reader One nor Reader Two believed in authority or authoritarianism and we took a vote and both of them voted no to the idea of hiring a mediocre novelist as our instructor and two outnumbered one (all hail supermajority!), one of whom (let’s call him Reader One) hit RETURN
with such affection
and
V
I
O
L
E
N
C
E
that I almost worried he hit his partner at home, but I was also kind of too cool and busy to worry about someone who wasn’t wise enough to recognize the risks of dating a moderately literate literary writer, RETURN, whom I had only met four times, RETURN, and chitchatted with twice, RETURN, about the weather and the difference between Sapporos and Asahis, RETURN, in a bar, RETURN, which smelled like cat and caps lock (grandmother whenever I can’t come up with a metaphor I throw in a random word in order to assert myself they say the only way to thrive is to assert yourself and make The Other do the work for you make The Other smell the smell of cat and caps lock). The other reader i.e. Reader Two was fiercely opposed to all sorts of syntactical adhesives and didn’t hit RETURN at all, to the point where I almost wanted to tell her that the key was invented for a reason.
But I was mature and educated and polite.
Hence, before spotting dear grandmother on this breezy autumn afternoon, in a queue that may or may not have led to Annie Ernaux, whom I had never heard of until I walked past the queue, I, holding onto my pain and my workshopmates’ manuscripts in the most mature, educated and polite way, was pondering a pestion.
Except I wasn’t pondering at all but was staring at a pair of thighs. You see, grandmother, my spot in this very finite line (because there were only a finite number of people in this city who trembled at the sound of Noble Nobel) was right next to a revolving door that didn’t revolve. So there I stood, on the cusp of this breezy autumn afternoon, clasping two stories in my unconventionally long arms, checking for traces of stewed beef cubes both in my front teeth and on my stockings (which were at least four feet apart because I was six foot five) in a fuzzy reflection in the unrevolving revolving door. Earlier that morning, before I found out about this amazing opportunity to stand and wait in a line, several stewed beef cubes had escaped from my chopsticks (it was in fact my mouth that had failed in its mission to harbor stewed beef cubes, but having stewed beef cubes falling out of my mouth wasn’t too tasteful a scene to be captured, and it was in fact a fork, not chopsticks, that I had held in my abnormally large hand, but even if I hadn’t used chopsticks to eat my beef, I might as well use them to write)—
And tainted my only pair of tailored pantyhose, which I had worn to celebrate my thirty-third birthday (believe it or not, pantyhose for six-foot-five women are extremely hard to find).
Thus there stood the birthday woman, somewhere in this very finite line, with the remnants of discounted beef on her left thigh and two moderately literary literary fiction pieces in her right hand, as she decided to greet her grandmother again despite the unbearable risk of screwing up that great question of life —after waving at someone from afar, do you maintain eye contact when she (or in other cases, he, they, it, Sancho Panza) walks over?
“Grandmother, have you eaten yet?” I roared again, this time without waving my unconventionally long arm. Last time I waved, I had, quite unfortunately, hit the guy lining up behind me right in the nose. Fortunately he had come with his friend, who evidently had an immense crush on him and who reiterated her faith in his future literary career once every six to seven minutes (alternating between “I think you are a better writer than Annie” and “Will you still remember me when you become a Nobel laureate”) and who had instantly seized the opportunity presented by his bleeding nose to wipe it clean with her affectionate upper lip. Seeing that the bloody nose was being tended to, I turned back, ten fingers sticking to the sides of my thighs, as if I were an austere tower safeguarding love.
Once again, grandmother didn’t react to my roar. She looked serene, but taller and sturdier than usual, so much so that I wondered if I had mistaken someone else for her, until I remembered that she didn’t speak English at all. There was no way for her to understand my greetings (O silly six-foot-five me)!
Nor did she know what a Noble Nobel was. She hadn’t gone to school. At the age when she should have been in school, she was in a meadow somewhere—what idyllic vibes!—running away from Japs (“Grandmother,” I interjected, “you shouldn’t use that term. It’s very offensive”), one of whom had pierced through her second uncle with a shiny bayonet. I dared not tell her that this was a fairly outdated trauma for her to linger on—it happened eighty years ago and this world doesn’t give a schmuck about what happened eighty years ago to you and your second uncle unless you aren’t you and are someone else. You are from that world. And this world may give a schmuck out of courtesy if you are caught in between this world and that world. You may even be celebrated in this world if you can state in a literary way that this world is better than that world. In poetry, pottery, performance art, whatever your medium. But since you didn’t go to school and don’t know anything about storytelling, grandmother, frankly, you don’t have a story.
Reader One:
Confusing fonts!
Confusing tenses!
Is this YOU your Grandmother the narrator’s Grandmother?
Might be a personal thing but I insist: Grandmother should be capitalized. But I love that ur writing a story abt Grandmothers.
Nowadays ppl only write about themselves. All that auto shit. I don’t approve.
I’m starting to miss my Gran Gran a bit, though she is a bitch. My partner thinks I’m being vulgar and that because I’m a dude I do not have the right to use the word “bitch”. But I think I’m doing women a favor by helping them reclaim it!
Curious to know what your stance is on this next time we grab a drink.
Reader Two:
I enjoyed your language play although some of it didn’t quite come through but this story might benefit from having some sort of plot and character growth? I want to know why the narrator loves standing in a line because without a sound explanation, the line itself would seem like a rather lazy authorial decision, but what you can do is to dig deep into the line, turn it into a trench, and before I get too carried away with my writing metaphors (<3), I can provide some ideas about why the narrator might like waiting in a line—for instance, is it because she didn’t grow up in a democracy, so she fetishizes being ordered to stand in a line? Or is it for the same reason that people stand in a line for restaurants and sample sales? Ground, ground, ground your reader, gently down the stream (of your consciousness). Merrily, merrily, merrily, and then I’ll be able to provide more concrete feedback.
I dared not tell grandmother that when stewed ground beef escaped from my mouth and fell onto my lap this morning I threw the pieces away. Grandmother wouldn’t have thrown beef or any food away on her thirty-third birthday because back then she had no beef or any other food to eat or to throw away. I also dared not tell grandmother that I was once so obsessed with a [Japanese] boy my sophomore year of college that I tried fermenting soybeans on my own and they smelled so bad that my suitemate reported me to the super but for some reason the super didn’t reply to her email so she started complaining about the super to me and we became best friends and she started to help me brainstorm how to captivate my [Japanese] boy and master the culinary art of homemade natto (she was so ardent in the pursuit of natto mastery that she spelled NATO wrong eleven times on her Intermediate International Relations take home midterm). After three months of joint endeavor, my [Japanese] boy told me that, contrary to popular belief, “not every Japanese person likes natto.” He, for one, liked chippusu (British french fries), dining hall dumplings, and Li Bai’s poems. Per his request, I read three of Li Bai’s poems in Mandarin to him although he didn’t know any Mandarin. My roommate was sure that he would kiss me three seconds before I finished reading them. It took him three years. One year after we graduated from college, he got married and finally started to have some interest in me. When his wife was away (grandmother I am really stuck right now should the wife be at the OB-GYN or her lover’s condo or a zoo) he invited me to sit on his tiny bed. I was having a hard time situating my dreadfully long arms and legs on such a tiny bed, and as such my ears could barely catch that he was talking about his mom.
Reader Two:
I feel that you have already exhausted the motif of the mama’s boy in your previous submissions—literature is all about breaking new ground, even if all boys have mommy issues. Not to be prescriptive, but you could perhaps add a stanza of Li Bi’s poem here (or is it Li Bo? Li By?). Or some visceral scenes. Like incest, or orgy, or if you’re in a more vanilla mood, maybe a polycule? Did I make myself clear? I was planning on apologizing for being prescriptive but my New Year’s Resolution is to be unapologetic. You should also be unapologetic, the first step being not to censor yourself—I would strongly encourage you to use the contemptuous term for Japanese people, whom I deeply respect especially because they were able to make Paprika! But [Japanese] is very hard for me to get a grip on. I’m not denying the risk of using racial slurs, because there is only a teeny tiny possibility that you might get canceled, but in my opinion writing is not only an art of dancing in shackles but also a sport of the fearless who dare to break these shackles. Meanwhile, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and we shall, together as a group of three, face the bleak prospect that there is only a teeny tiny possibility that this will ever get picked up by a publisher. Therefore, I would strongly encourage you to write as if there are no consequences or tomorrows because there literally aren’t any consequences or tomorrows…
Reader One:
I googled natto.
It seemed pretty
gross. Wink wink.
I think Californians know
How to make Japanese food.
While deciphering your difficult story
(my problem is that the difficulty is too artificial rather than organic)
I cud gobble 12 california sunrise rolls right here right now but my partner is a snob about inorganic avocados :/ (on top of being gluten free!)
We decided to grab mexican food instead, not trying to make your story about me but plz forgive me
If your manuscript smells like gluten free tofu tortas
The [Japanese] boy (“ditch the brackets & the a-n-e-s-e!”) talked about how much he loved his mom, his dad, his wife, their dog, his dad’s dead fish that died because his dad was simultaneously suffering from Parkinson’s disease and a midlife crisis. Parkinson’s made his dad pour too much fish food into the fish tank, whereas the midlife crisis made his dad question if there was any point in trying to do something about it. We discussed whether he should blame his dad for the death of his dad’s fish, if Parkinson was happy that the disease was named after him, and if the two of us stood a chance, etc., etc.
“No,” he said. “You are too tall for me.” And that were I six inches shorter, he might consider seeing me, very reluctantly, because I wasn’t his cup of tea.
“You don’t even drink tea,” I said. “Didn’t you say you were allergic to caffeine?”
He said he was allergic to arguing for the sake of arguing and had a brunch appointment with his wife tomorrow morning and needed to go to his tiny bed early. He tiptoed, kissed my chin gently, and politely asked me to leave.
That night, which was 3650 nights ago, I left his place with a burning desire to condense myself. On the train back home, my body failed to contain the burning desire to condense myself. I sprouted. I grew three inches taller. My woman bun finally got to caress the ceiling of the subway car like he had always wanted (in case you don’t know grandmother woman bun is a masculine word in many languages and masculine words seldom have opportunities to fraternize with or even get near ceilings).
Reader One:
This bit is trying too
Hard. you lose your cool when you try too
Hard. I’m also so tired of you showing off your comme ci comme sa french.
Put more Chinese characters in your stories (pun intended, wink wink)
They are very fresh and exotic for the open-minded ones amongst
us
Reader Two:
I simply don’t think a person can or should grow three inches in one day. This is absolutely not what I meant by character growth. If this is some magical realism buffoonery, I’ll need some world-building and rules and honestly speaking, I don’t think very highly of magical realism buffoonery. You’re either a realist writer (with a distorted view of reality obviously, like my man G.G. said, iykyk) or you aren’t one. Period.
No wonder grandmother didn’t recognize me! The last time she saw me I was only six foot two! (Now this doesn’t make sense at all!)
But I had to pretend that grandmother had recognized me and did speak English (you see grandmother quite ironically the only proper way to present misery or suffering is to bend it polish it glaze it dissolve it in your audience’s gastric juices) so that my story could go on. Pretend that she knew English, pretend that she cared about who won the Nobel Prize more than she cared about what was for dinner, pretend that grandmother had spoken to me in an impeccable Jersey accent despite the fact that I didn’t really know what a Jersey accent sounded like (I didn’t want you to get into trouble for what you might say and Jersey sounded so safe that if I had to pick a safe word I’d pick Newport) therefore grandmother said:
“You have gained so much weight since you came to the city. Cawfee. Your skirt looks like a tent. Cawfee. Shame on you. Cawfee.”
“Thank you for shaming me, grandmother,” I replied. “I finally have something substantial to chew on.”
So, feet rooted on the ground (for fear of losing my spot in the stagnant queue between Miguel’s acquaintance and the two literary lovebirds as well as losing Reader One and Reader Two), fingers stuck to the side of my thighs (for fear of hitting some bird in the nose again), I chewed on the letters in turns, the taste of which very much resembled artificial gummy amphibians with ample gelatin in them. S was sticky. H was bittersweet. A was acrid. M was merry in a superficial way (yes, grandmother, in our era even gummies need depth). E was elastic and eloquent at the same time, going on and on about how a modern feminist should discipline, improve and cultivate herself. They bounced around in my mouth (the mouth that failed to reap a kiss from that Jap boy [Hell yeah you did it!] whom I couldn’t tell you about because your second uncle was pierced through by a Jap bayonet [take it easy, tho]) for a while before reluctantly sliding down my unconventionally long esophagus and diving into my stomach, where a bunch of butterflies were anxiously awaiting their return. They were starving to death without these fictionalized angsts and agonies. Although I consumed a fair amount of mammals without mercy, I did care about the butterflies’ livelihoods and didn’t want them to die, but mainly I needed them to flap their wings—a mini sweatshop of words or tears, whichever came out first.
Delve into the sweatshop
Delve into the sweatshop
We’re intrigued
In lukewarm tears I showed my workshopmates’ stories to grandmother. “Look, my dear grandmother, look at what I’m suffering from.”
“You know, Cawfee, there once was a time when stamps were needed for everything,” grandmother said. “Maybe governments should also issue paragraph breaks, commas, and periods based on demand to prevent bad writing. There should also be a quota of sentimentality so that authors aren’t overly indulgent with themselves.”
After hearing what grandmother had to say about planned literature, in fear and frenzy, my workshopmates’ words, sentences and stories fled from the pages one after another (Miguel’s jittery acquaintance observed the grand flight with the back of his bald head and calmly uttered: “bof,” whereas the lovebirds behind me stopped their passionate pecking, watched the wonder with their amorous eyes, and mistook the flakes of phonemes for butterflies). A couple of phrases and metaphors lingered for compliments and consolation before they left for the clouds (a doomed quest because the affable autumn breeze was trying to ostracize every piece of cloud from the city because they didn’t fit the aesthetic of autumn skies). But I did not give the lingering ones that satisfaction. They left, ego shattered, leaving the emptied bodies of narratives and arcs on my unbearably giant palm, and ink-scented dander in the air.
“Grandmother,” I said, “my classmates think that my stories are too unnecessarily magical. Many people define good stories as a slice of life, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what slice means,” grandmother said. “There once was a form of torture that sliced people slice by slice into slices. But if your family had bribed the executioner maybe he’d stab you in the heart before dismembering you slowly. You know, less pain.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way,” I said. “It would then be quite cruel and selfish of realist writers to slice life without life’s consent or without giving its family a chance to sneak in a bribe. You see, I only tease and twist life, gently, gently, gently, in good faith.”
“Excoozie moi for interrupting,” Miguel’s jittery acquaintance interrupted. “I’m a scholar of the history of torture and in fact the Europeans were way better at torturing than you Easterners. O that delicate cross! O that graceful che-va-let! Excoozie moi for brushing up my worn out French because I want to poser yune guestion pour Madame Errrnow at the end of her talk, if Lady Fortuna would ever dawn upon us with a teekay. But I really think instead of slicing life, you should say: crucifying life or skinning life alive. Way more anpessif!” (Impressive??)
“I was almost interested for a second because I thought you two hooligans were talking about torturing humans. But who knew you two hooligans were just doing some sickening wordplay. What’s the point of personifying life?” (your Grandmother slayyyyys) I put words into grandmother’s hollowed mouth. When I was young and ignorant and polite and didn’t walk away from her when she brushed her artificial teeth, I observed air going in and out of her hollowed mouth and thought: she doesn’t need to do homework. What an easy life she has!
“What do I have, grandmother?” I responded. “I only have a flasher (eek!). I don’t have a second uncle who was pierced to death by a bayonet.”
“Granddaughter,” she said, “you see, I don’t have all the time in the world. And frankly, I’m once again losing interest. I didn’t go to school. Therefore, you parroting what people say in school means nothing to me. Also, you’re too freaking tall, it’s exhausting looking up at you while listening to you parrot.”
But I thought you were only in my head, grandmother.
Your head is too far from the ground, granddaughter, and this is even more exhausting, being pulled by gravity.
Just as I started to ponder whether I should free grandmother from the burden of gravity (or talk down to her on the subject of gravity by fleshing out, in a literary way, how whenever altitude increases, the gravitational acceleration decreases—the only perk of being six foot five is when your grandmother lives in your head, gravity harms her less Capitalize Grandmother! Cried Reader One) and let her go, keep her there, or let her go—amidst all this keyless jazz, Annie Ernaux cut through the queue. She passed by Miguel’s despondent acquaintance, who desponded no more, and me, who stood tall and empty like a lightless lighthouse while the no-longer-bleeding lovebirds behind me gasped and intertwined their sweaty fingers. Upon entering the building via the side door beside the revolving door that didn’t revolve for her (what a composed door), she coughed a quiet cough, onto which the entire queue hung in awe and wonder.