“Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.” — Batuman’s Selin, pre-“do it for the plot”
Over the past few weeks, mostly post-grad and partially unemployed, I’ve been trudging through two activities while back in China: scrolling through Tinder and rereading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. I was persuaded to finally start the novel when I attended Batuman’s reading at Stanford (where she started her PhD) a year ago. In person, she was beautiful, her speaking voice wondrous and drily witty, which was exactly the type of writer that I wanted to be.
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Rereading The Idiot, whose protagonist is a college freshman, as a graduated senior was like looking back on my past few years in college and high school. Like Selin, I too subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis1, have awful interactions with men, and was, and still am, always troubled with the constant and insurmountable gap between language and experience.
As far as I could remember, my first piece of writing was Alice in Wonderland fanfiction, more specifically, the live-action-2010-remake-of-Alice-in-Wonderland-with-Helena-Boham-Carter fanfiction. Shortly after, I wrote my second story centering a mysterious black cat, which seemed plagiarism of both the Chesire and of Poe.
In high school, I began writing seriously, by which I mean that I started to curate an internal and external identity based on what had once only been a peripheral hobby. For my college applications, my personal essay was on writing for connection. At our socially-distanced COVID graduation, I received the most likely to write a best-selling novel.
I’ve been trying not to, but rereading my old writing fills me with both disgust and horror. Does this signify low self-esteem? Would a man feel the same way about their past creations? Again and again, I diagnose myself. Only one piece of writing survives the pile of hatred. It’s not even a story, but a paragraph written in response to the prompt of “happiness” in my 11th grade AP Language and Composition class. Out of the strange and confused metaphor of scarecrows and paint, only the last line that I had spent hours agonizing over still feels true, after all these years.
I wasn’t particularly happy in high school, but after producing this short passage, felt that I had done something remarkable. There it was, this happiness had been transformed into a pleasing cadence, into visual signs that prompted sensory memory, into precise thought and ample meaning. I read this paragraph over and over, like self-absorbed Narcissus with his reflection, for these words were becoming a part of myself, until they started replacing the real memory.
What had originated as a simple in-class exercise now prompted me into a moment of existential linguistic crisis: The sound of the words describing how the dew soaking into my shoes superimposed over the visual & tactical sensation of the dew itself. The cadence of the last line, pleasant, perfect, had started to involuntarily bring tears to my eyes, which felt untrue, like I had lied about the experience and how I felt about it. I grew afraid. What if in a few years I only remember the writing and not the memory?
But back to the second activity. My first time opening Tinder in China, I was curious to see the differences in dating/hookup culture between the two places that I’ve lived in — the Bay area and Xi’an. I didn’t particularly want to go on any dates, because I’m lazy and introverted, and because of the one and a half hour subway commute to the city. But, like Selin, felt that in order to be a writer, I needed to pursue the most adventurous and interesting options offered in life, lest I be doomed to write about the same tired stories forever.
And so I matched with a couple of people, but only messaged this one guy for a few days. His responses made me uncomfortable. Beyond being explicit, he figured perfectly with my idea of a young Chinese misogynist and pick-me boy. But I didn’t stop messaging him. I couldn’t decide whether I would (not wanted, but would) actually go on a date in person until I realized I wouldn’t.
As these things went, a few days passed and the novelty wore off. I stopped responding, but I didn’t delete the app. He continued texting things like “I finished my final exams”, and “Looks like you’re ghosting me”, and his final texts a days later, “fuck you” and “bitch”, both in English, as if these phrases carried more weight than their Chinese equivalent.
I saw the messages in the dark, staring at them for a few seconds before unmatching and deleting the app. Then, I lay in bed, letting my brain work its anxious magic. I remembered the famous final sequence of “Cat Person”, then felt ashamed for even associating this situation with hers. I felt awful, and felt awful for feeling awful. But somewhere inside my head it was as if I had expected, even waited for these exact two phrases to be typed out from far away, on some random college guy’s phone, and delivered through for me to read at midnight.
Over the next two days, I was constantly on edge, feeling as if something horrible was going to happen. I texted two friends about it to dissuade some anxiety and it worked to some degree. I thought about all the horrible things that were yet to happen in my life. My only comfort: at least I could get a story out of it.
Recently, the purpose of writing has been constantly oscillating between the compulsion to put clarity to vague feelings and a consolatory gesture when faced with less than positive experiences. The language of capitalistic productivity fuels my bad days: What use are these emotions? Or rather, what use can I make of them?
Feeling as if I’ve wasted the month of July, I wrote a short story in one four-hour sitting. Here it was, the product of my unproductiveness. Now hopefully some magazine pays me for it.
I say I’m partially unemployed because I recently started a part-time job as a college essay editor. It pays well, and I’m very good at it. For my first assignment, I rewrote an entire essay for a kid that had turned in 250-words with the concluding sentence, “helping others make me feel good”. Using the nearly nonexistent information given to me about the kid, I invented a narrative of self-realization and a cheesy (but good) metaphor about drowning as a framework. A few days later, the agent said that the kid’s mother had been greatly touched.
There were so many ridiculous and ethically-ambiguous degrees to this situation that I most likely will write about it in the future. I imagine the mother reading the final lines of her kid’s/my essay with tears in her eyes. How could she not have known that he had felt this way throughout his life? I think about the kid reading the fake interiority I had created. Is this the work of fortune tellers? To tell a complete stranger what was wrong with their lives?
Looking through this essay, I’m not sure whether I have succeeded in creating a thorough narrative as I had anticipated: I had wasted time explaining my journey as a writer when it doesn’t directly round out the question of narrativization; I hadn’t explained the differences between Bay area dating app culture and China; I’m still unimaginably anxious about releasing my writing into the public domain, especially for my friends to read. But hopefully I’ll get better as time goes on.
I leave you with Mitski’s Genius interview for her song, “Nobody”. Here, she’s talking about traveling to Malaysia, and lying on the floor, repeatedly saying the famous chorus, Nobody Nobody Nobody.
i luv you let’s kill all the men then write stories abt it
"both in English, as if these phrases carried more weight than their Chinese equivalent" oh yeah this one hit