Dear America,

Confessional 12-Step Poem

I am considering lighthouses in a completely new light:

for instance, lighthouses really have their shit together.

One may appear here at any moment.

And while it’s true that I forget to go to the meetings,

still, I did sign up, which must be some mark of improvement?

I have been making this effort, placing myself in uncomfortable positions

only for their documented health benefits.

I believe there is a serving of fiber in my every selfless or measured thought.

I am now able to hold objects—

like lighthouses—at an objective angle and admire them for their spooky, impersonal truths.

I consider this my pledge to the greater good.

Despite past evidence and gratuitous use of the first person,

I do wish to improve.

Each day I start anew, launching myself against the great sea of . . . myself.

My dinghy is not in any way self-dramatizing.

There is a very real lighthouse in my future.

I will change what I cannot accept.

The low road

What can they do to you? Whatever they want. They can set you up, they can bust you, they can break your fingers, they can burn your brain with electricity, blur you with drugs till you can’t walk, can’t remember, they can take your child, wall up your lover. They can do anything you can’t stop them from doing. How can you stop them? Alone, you can fight, you can refuse, you can take what revenge you can but they roll over you.

But two people fighting  back to back can cut through  a mob, a snake-dancing file  can break a cordon, an army can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex. Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. With four you can play bridge and start  an organization. With six  you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds, and hold a fund-raising party. A dozen make a demonstration. A hundred fill a hall. A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; ten thousand, power and your own paper; a hundred thousand, your own media; ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time, it starts when you care to act, it starts when you do it again after they said no, it starts when you say We and know who you mean, and each  day you mean one more.

People can’t stop telling me I’ve lost weight. It’s September of last year. I’m in Beijing. I know it’s hot, but I can’t stop feeling cold, nodding in recognition of this observation, which is just east of a compliment: “Yes, I’ve lost weight. I’ve been very sad.”

The women (they’re mostly women) nod. Maybe they frown. Maybe they smile and try to make a joke out of it (”It’s hardest to lose weight in your face, but you did it,” one woman tells me brightly, “You look so pretty”). 

If I’m being honest, it’s a relief to be heartbroken in China. At least here people understand that sadness is bodily. It’s simply understood that what you cannot bear to feel or say will emerge in some other way. Two years before, my best friend in Beijing does not have postpartum depression; she has a terrible rash that spreads from her neck to her arms and prevents her from holding the baby without tremendous discomfort. For years, another friend nurses a persistent twitch; a consequence, she says, of her divorce. And me, I don’t get sad; I get thin. I don’t manage to look in the mirror every morning, but when I do, I know my friends are right. I can see my clavicle stretching out away from my hollowing chest, my chin revealing some other, previously unexcavated shape. 

I have been thin like this several other times. Once in Taiwan, after I was robbed for rent money the same month I had to front the cost of an international plane ticket for grad school interviews but still didn’t quit kickboxing. I agonized over each 30NT jianbing during the day; I traced the boney bumps running down the center of my chest in fascination at night. And once in 2011, when I realized I was just an angry aside in a faculty meeting from being kicked out of graduate school and losing my health insurance. I still remember staring at the food in the dining hall through the haze of my anxiety and realizing that no matter what I chose, I would have no appetite for it. 

The concept of appetite is a good one, I think. As I withdraw more and more from conflicts, from conversations, from the things that constitute my participation in a profession, I keep thinking, I just don’t have the appetite for this. Every morning, I force myself to eat a full bowl of oatmeal, and still my ribs continue to emerge from my side, one by one: tiny, unfillable caverns leading to the heart of me.

What can sadness do to a body? Here in the USA, I think we’re more used to thinking about the effects of stress, and of course, that makes sense: better to deal with the emotion that can be dealt with, whose excess can be blamed on poor management. When my gums start receding during the first year of graduate school, the dentist is quick to tell me it’s stress. When the corners of my mouth are infested with terrible sores after I move back from China for the first time, the irreverent nurse practitioner tells me I’m deficient in Vitamin B because I am eating poorly and also I am stressed. When I can barely sleep because of a deep aching in my wrists, the doctor says it might be carpal tunnel or it might be stress and hands me a brace (he’s wrong; it’s a strain from scanning books, and it leaves me as soon as I spend two days on a train away from a copy machine). 

A friend of mine who’s good with doctors tells me to be careful: all doctors have a default answer for every symptom, and they will rely on that until proven otherwise. I sit in office after office, and without making eye contact with me, the doctors all ask the same question: Are you stressed? There are so many true answers to this question. Usually I settle on this one, barked out between laughs: This is the least stressed I’ve been in four years.

So I’m not stressed, but I am sad. And what kind of malady is sadness? I don’t carry it the same way I carried stress--in my mouth, through my teeth, with my jaw clenched--but I carry it, anyway. Maybe you’re stressed and you just don’t know it, someone tells me before launching into a vague story about his own chest pains--nothing serious in the end, he assures me, just stress--and I can feel myself narrowing my eyes, becoming unkind. I don’t say the thing I want to say, which is, How manly of you. I don’t do the thing I want to do, which is punish them the way I’d like to punish myself for having to be vulnerable.

Stress is not mysterious to me. I know when I am stressed. My least favorite ex-boyfriend used to claim he could smell my stress after long days of work. I know what he meant. During a period of intense stress in 2015, I find myself hyperventilating first as a technique to calm myself down, and then, when it hits, as a joke. You grew up with stress, someone who should know tells me. And sure: I know how to make space for stress. I know when to start rinsing my mouth with Listerine. I know about the importance of nightly flossing for dental and mental health.

Sadness, on the other hand, is mysterious to me. It takes me by surprise. There’s a way in which there’s no floor to it. At my favorite bar in Koreatown, on the top of a skyscraper overlooking Times Square, I start bawling after a friend asks me an offhand question about the future. I cover my face, not to hide the tears, but to keep the whole city from quivering below me.  In the Oakland Kaiser Parking Lot, I think about an image from the memoir I was reading in the waiting room--of a woman, scrambling under her car in the rain, unable to find the key her former partner promised her would be there--and blubber uncontrollably as I wind the car slowly down the structure, floor by floor. I don’t stop till long after I’ve parked at the wrong destination and walked to the right one. Under the covers in my bright sublet, I feel a great ravine opening up down the front of my ribcage and close my eyes as I tumble down it. 

That night, my joints won’t stop aching, and I know: this is the sadness at work. In the bar, in the car, in my bed, I am falling. In the mornings after, my skin looks different. Tighter. And--if I’m being honest--bluer.

Stay with your anger, my therapist told me once, see if it turns into something else. I know she was being literal, but I can’t help but hope she means something figurative. I picture the scene from Amadeus where Mozart’s face falls after he apprehends his father’s double-sided black mask from the back (where it’s laughing) and then is apprehended by his father when he turns around to reveal the front (where it’s frowning). I love this scene for Mozart’s winning stupidity, for the way neither of his interpretations make any sense. After all, no genuine transformation has taken place. Both sides of his father’s mask are just that: masks. 

I do stay with my anger. It turns into sadness. For almost four months, I spend every day I don’t have to work lying in bed with a tiny calico cat on top of me. At the time, I don’t know what I am doing. A year later, it will be clear I am staying with the sadness so it can turn into something else. I am waiting to hit the floor. 

July of this year: I’ve stopped losing weight. Every week at the doctor’s office, I peek at the scale out of the corner of my eye and feel some small measure of relief: no change. The tests are over. The doctors still want to talk with me about my stress; I switch my pills instead. There’s no full-length mirror in my sublet, and I avoid looking at my reflection in the darkened windows of the vacant retail stores on Shattuck. What am I so afraid to see? Some reminder of my own despair that will send me, once again, into a free fall? Or, worse, no one I recognize--a gaunt stranger, her once-taut face dangling and loose, like some ill-fitting mask? 

What I say is, Well, I don’t miss him anymore? even though what I should say is, It’s none of your business. I say more--I talk about the life I thought I would live and had to mourn all by myself--but it feels bad. I’m right. It isn’t her business, which means I’m wrong to be here. Not that it’s her fault. She’s gentle. Soft. Quiet. She doesn’t blink when she’s listening. 

When I get home, I see someone’s shot 10 people outside a restaurant in Toronto. I google the street names. I can’t stop my heart from pounding, even though it’s stupid. Unnecessary? No: unearned. Please be far from us, I think, even though it’s none of my business. Even though even I don’t know what I could possibly mean by “us.”

Did I ever tell you about how I spent my first weekend back in New Jersey alone in a giant house, paralyzed with fear? Even though I’d decided to live in a house with four other women (and one bathroom!) on purpose, for some reason they all went out of town that weekend, leaving just me and the giant, fragile windows on the first floor. The first day, I sprint out the front door to my office, as though being caught seen leaving the house will be the thing that does me in. The second day, I spend the morning hiding under my blankets in my attic room. 

A day early, the house fills with the unmistakeable sound of someone entering, throwing down their weekend bag, and sobbing. The troubles of others! What a relief. I spend the next two months looking behind me in terror every time I walk the two blocks home from my office after dark, but I never have to be alone in that house at night ever again.

At some point in the summer of 2016, I decide: Fear is for other people. I’ve felt this way before. Before I know it, 14 months pass and I’m living two blocks away from the corner of Yonge and Dundas in an apartment building wedged between the bus station and a Canadian Tire. Both windows face the inside of the courtyard. I don’t leave the apartment every day. Instead, I watch the other balconies, make note of the other apartments with residents who don’t work. I decide the breastfeeding woman in the three bedroom corner suite accompanied by her mother must be Chinese. I think the older man in the one bedroom mirroring ours who eats lunch ever day in bright green shorts with his cat must be a gay freelancer. After too many people rotate through the apartment in the building across the courtyard with the attractive red couch, I conclude it must be an AirBnB. I think about trying to find the listing, but never do. 

I never see the people who own the black cat who watches the birds landing on the concrete outside the sliding glass door, patiently. I never see the residents of the top floor corner apartment who put a tree with white flowers in the very corner of their balcony. It leans out into the wind tunnel created by the narrow gap into the courtyard. Every day I watch as it bends, shudders, recovers. Someone must water it, but when? I never leave the apartment. I should have seen them. 

I spend a lot of August 2017 worrying about the tree. I should be worrying about myself.

When I say, Don’t speak poorly about your former partners to me, what I mean is, Don’t speak poorly about me to others. I mean that I am afraid. I say it more aggressively than I mean to. I say it so he can’t pretend not to know what I mean. I say it as though the person I meant to say it to were there.

On April 23, 2018 a man uses a rented van to plow into pedestrians in broad daylight on Yonge Street. Even after I see it’s the part of Yonge in North York, not the Yonge I knew--littered with gentle, contemptible Canadians pursuing their provincial idea of what a city is--my hands still feel sweaty. My face is still flushed. I don’t sleep for two nights, but I also don’t make the call. 

There’s a call I don’t make in 2011 after a different shooting. Of course I follow it closely. Of course it’s terrible. I tell all my friends about it. Isn’t it terrible? I ask, and keep rambling before they can stop to ask me, Sure, but why do you care? 

Why do I care? I am afraid of not being needed. I am afraid to be a person who wouldn’t think it was terrible. I am afraid there is no one else to care for. I am still a creature of fear at this point. I am afraid of all the wrong things.

Against all odds, everyone involved survives, even me.

I forget what I’ve told you about this. This is my line. I say it over and over again. While staring at my ice cubes, while stirring them around, while tipping them back toward my throat if I can get away with it. And I forget--have I told you yet that you can get away with an awful lot these days? I am afraid I am getting away with too much. You are healing, someone tells me, and maybe it’s true. In the mornings, I remember, shudder, recover. On my best days, I feel like a great tree, taking root and reaching up toward the sun. On my worst ones, I feel like I’m about to be torn to pieces.

Answers always come to me in dreams but never the ones I’m hoping for. For years, I spend the hours between 10PM and 2AM obnoxiously reminding people who would rather have been sleeping that Freud said there are no accidents in the unconscious. No accidents and, I would add, no true revelations, either. I think all the time about the passage in The Interpretation of Dreams where Freud explains condensation by talking about a centaur. To the patient, it appears as an element alien and external to them--they’ve never seen such a strange creature in real life!--but the canny analyst can recognize that, in fact, there’s nothing new here: just the body of a horse and a torso of a man, perhaps one the patient knows. Dreams, Freud writes, cannot be creative. There’s no escaping the rule: life first, dreams second. Even the most jarring elements of a dream are drawn from our real lives, are answers whose questions we have yet to find. 

In August 2017, I email my therapist. I need to talk, I write. I’m having violent, troubling dreams. I don’t know why I don’t say what they are in the email. I remember them even now. They are not, like some things, secret, even from myself.

On Skype, my therapist is patient, quiet. I know what the dreams mean, and so does she, and when I repeat her interpretation back to the man I’m living with, he rolls his eyes: “I could have told you that.” I am trying not to fight anymore, so I don’t ask the question he’s already answered: Then why didn’t you?

In the session, the dreams are a pretense. They answer a question I haven’t dared to ask myself: Can I stay here? The dream knows the answer, and so do I. Two weeks later, I leave the apartment where I’ve slept fitfully for almost two months. I never go back.

“In Zhengzhou, I know a lot of people who believe they have prophetic dreams.”

What month is it? June? I’m eating something disgusting. Deep dish pizza? Even though it only takes one bite for me to realize that something about it doesn’t agree with me, when my dining companion insists I take half the pie home, I do. For days, I feel sick and wonder why.

My dining companion says he’s had prophetic dreams too. Here’s one: In life, he’s out at a bar, where his shy friend does something uncharacteristic and hooks up with a girl. In a dream two nights later, he sees her walk into the record store where he and his shy friend both work. He tells his shy friend, who’s too shy to text the girl, about the dream, and they both laugh. Hours later, the girl walks in, like a prophecy fulfilled.

Or, not quite. What happens next, I want to know. Are they married now? Did they date for a long time? 

No, my dining companion laughs. In the end, his friend was too shy, and the girl ended up dating someone more aggressive. 

I’m disappointed. It’s true, the order is the revelation: dream first, life second. But still. What good is a prophetic dream if all it does is answer a question no one needed answered? Who wants a revelation for no reason?

Here’s another one: My friend in Zhengzhou is a small child. One night, she wakes in terror from a nightmare where her pet goldfish has died. In the morning, she runs into the living room, and lo: There’s the fish, swimming and healthy, in his tank. 

Minutes pass. At some point, one of her aunts emerges, red-eyed, and my friend knows: Her father is dead. 

Ever since then, she says, she’s hated sleep and dreams. When we’re together in Urumqi, I sleep in a bunk above the blue light of her phone, which she reads until dropping it to the side in exhaustion. In the mornings, she takes hours to get ready, stumbling from room to room and then back to bed. 

For most of the four years I’m in China, I don’t dream about anything. What answers can you offer yourself when all your questions are about the lives of others?

In July 2018, I have a dream about my boss, looming above me in wire-rimmed glasses and a bouffant I’ve borrowed for her from Peng Liyuan. Unlike my friend and dining companion with the prophetic dreams, I have the order right: life first, dream second. My dream is late. I don’t need to ask anyone what the dream means. 

The same is true of a dream I have on a weekend night between doctor’s appointments. In the dream, I am running to the bathroom. I get to the toilet, relax in relief, and then tighten as I realize I cannot stop. In horror, I watch as I shit my own guts out. 

I think about the dream later, in the doctor’s office, waiting to get the answers to questions I wish I didn’t have to ask. In the dream, my guts looked like ground beef arranged into the shape of a sphincter. The image is sad but also funny. Can the unconscious get any less creative than that? Maybe it’s a sign you’re lucky, I think, for something like this, better to dream it first, live it later. 

I don’t understand astrology, but somewhere I read There are five planets in retrograde and believe it. I think about making a joke about my guts, the ground beef, and Uranus. Instead, I laugh and lean back against the exam table. I vow not to eat hamburgers for the rest of the summer.

In August 2017, two nights before my flight to a different forever, the man I’m living with invites his parents to come over and spray WD-40 on the hinge on our bedroom door, which has been waking me up every morning with a loud squeak. Do you think you’ll sleep better, he asks, and I shrug. Why bother asking now? 

Before she leaves, his mother yells at me for wanting to go back to California, to the people who love me, and it occurs to me: those people aren’t here. Why didn’t you stand up for me, I ask even though the time for questions is long gone. 

These days, I see the people who love me often. I have a lot of dining companions. I end up in a lot of rooms where people talk softly about the lives they never wanted to have. Dreams first, life second. Instead of talking about dreams, they talk about housing: The business apartment they sold in midtown Manhattan so they could rent the business apartment here; the remodel they want to do that’s bringing up a lot of family things for them; the house they’re seeing above the tunnel later that day that maybe will be the one that lets them move out of their parent’s place; the house they stayed in for just a little while and only because their parents owned it that once flooded their neighbors’ entire yard; the big house, full of obligations and others’ belongings; the small house, with the open windows and the landscapers outside; the apartment with the 40% rent hike; the studio with the kitchenette and quiet; the tent cities, with their flags waving in the air. 

How do you feel about buying a house, someone asks me, and I quip, property is the only real thing, even though I don’t believe that anymore. What do I know about what’s real? Maybe the only real thing is WD-40 or the mottled periwinkle color of the last gown you’ll ever wear. That answer is a habit, like wanting to send a photo to a certain number, or checking my phone in the morning expecting to be able to relive the day of someone I loved. 

Since coming back to Beijing in September, I’ve turned the gas on the burner all the way down instead of turning it off three separate times. It’s a strange and dangerous mistake to make, a worse one to repeat. The reasons the mistake is dangerous are obvious: Turned down instead of up, the knob looks like it’s off, and a flame that low almost invariably goes out when the drafts in the apartment pick up. I don’t know if the stovetop turns the gas off automatically. I do know there isn’t an alarm. 

The reasons the mistake is strange are less clear. What I can say is that I can’t remember doing this once all last year. In fact, one of the first things I noticed when I moved into the apartment was that every time I cooked, the air became filled with the unmistakable smell of gas. Within a few days, the building maintenance men had gotten to know me as the American on crutches with ok Chinese who had insisted on replacing a perfectly good stovetop because she smelled gas no one else could smell. In the weeks that followed, my Chinese friends who came to my apartment would comment on how even though the apartment was very old and the bathroom was not that great, the stovetop was pretty good. “It’s new,” I’d say, proud to have advocated for myself, “It was leaking gas, so I made them replace it.” Sometimes, if I felt especially spirited that day, I’d add: “It’s the only thing in this apartment worth money!” 

It wasn’t true, but it was a good story, and I liked to tell it. Meanwhile, the man who later became my fiancé bought me a combination smoke and gas detector. It was a sweet and maybe useless gesture. I’ve burned a lot of things and left the stove top on three times already this year. It’s never gone off.

One of my first nights out in Zhengzhou, I heard a story about a woman on the 19th floor of a high-rise apartment building who’d committed suicide by leaving on the gas in her kitchen. It was early in the morning--between 6AM and 8AM--when something finally caused the gas in the kitchen to explode. No one besides the woman was seriously hurt (the woman died), but the explosion tore through the building’s main gas line, and inspectors quickly declared it unsafe for habitation.

I heard the story from an American woman who had been living just three floors below the woman on the 19th floor, and she understandably told the story from her perspective. That morning, she’d gone out to swim and come back to find the ground in front of her building covered in glass (from the windows, which had blown out). Here my memory becomes hazy; did she uncomprehendingly push through the fire department to get up into her apartment or did she somehow get to the scene before them? I can’t remember, but I do know what happened next: She entered her apartment, realized not the extent of the catastrophe but that there had been one, and gathered just enough things to survive before dashing off to her on-again-off-again boyfriend’s place. 

The explosion had led to a series of disasters for the young American. She hadn’t been able to return to the apartment to get her things because she was frightened of how unsafe it was, and she hadn’t wanted to continue paying rent for an apartment that was uninhabitable. Her landlord, in a fit of pique, left all of her belongings out in the hall and changed the locks. When the American finally returned, she found most of her most valuable things missing and herself with no recourse to reclaim them. Now she was leaving the country, and she wanted to sue her landlord for the value of the things that were missing and also her deposit. 

“Most of it is just stuff,” she said in a practiced, weary way. “But there was also jewelry and art.” She sighed. “The art is irreplaceable.” 

When I was leaving Zhengzhou, the women downstairs, who would eventually collaborate with each other to try to prevent me from getting a good deal on selling my furniture, asked me if I’d forgotten anything while packing. “I think I have everything,” I’d told them. They’d nodded, knowingly. “Just remember your jewelry,” they’d said, gesturing toward the plated gold necklace they were constantly insisting was evidence of my wealth. “Everything else is replaceable.” I never told them that the necklace was $35 and that it too was replaceable. Sometimes people need to tell themselves stories about you in order to live.

I’ve often wondered about the story of the woman on the 19th floor. How would we tell the story from her perspective? The American insisted that she committed suicide over a lover’s quarrel with either her boyfriend or her ex-husband, and that’s what the papers said too, but that doesn’t sound quite right to me. In Zhengzhou, every woman’s suicide ends up being about love, regardless of whether it is or not. 

For example: There was a suicide at a local mall in 2014 precipitated by a lover’s quarrel that everyone knew about. It’s strangely common for malls in China to be the sites of multiple suicides, and at one mall, a woman jumped from the eighth floor to her death during the mall’s opening week. Local Zhengzhou-ers gossiped that the mall had bad fengshui and was doomed to fail. Before it had been this mall, it had been another mall that had been forced to close after only four years, and before that it had been another merchant street that no one ever shopped at, and before that it had been a mass grave. “From the Cultural Revolution? From the Great Leap Forward? From World War II?” I would ask, taking notes furiously. 

There have been enough natural and manmade disasters in Zhengzhou that no one could tell me for sure which one had precipitated the mass grave, but they were sure it had been there and that there were ghosts. It was the ghosts who had made the girl jump. Onlookers had seen her fighting with her boyfriend and accusing him of not loving her when he refused to buy her something--a bag? Shoes? The tellings diverged on this point--and the girl, distraught, had thrown herself over the railing, falling down between the 16 sets of escalators and landing in a mess of blood on the immaculate white tiled floors.

“To kill herself over a bag!” one local scoffed, “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not worth it! Before I’d kill myself, I’d break up with the boyfriend, earn the money, and buy it myself. A bag is not worth dying for!” She paused for emphasis. “That’s why the ghosts must have made her do it.”

Phrased that way, it was hard to disagree. Sometimes we tell stories about dead people in order to live.

The night I met the American woman who lost her irreplaceable art after the woman on the 19th floor committed suicide, I also met the local who told me the first version of this story. She was working as a waitress at the bar where the American had come to meet the lawyer she hoped would help her sue her landlord (she’d lose the case). The American was trying to bake a pie in the bar’s oven, and even without a command of basic Mandarin had managed to communicate her disdain to the woman who would eventually become my best friend and favorite interlocutor, full of stories about ghosts under malls and in swimming pools. “I liked you because you were different from that other American,” she’d later tell me, “She was sad and tense, but you were happy and relaxed.” At the time, I’d tried to defend the other American. Now I don’t know if I’d make the effort. Much later, someone told me the American and the boyfriend she left Zhengzhou for broke up. I haven’t heard anything else about her though. 

One way to do fieldwork is to focus in on stories that seem valuable or confusing to you and repeat them to others. Valuable and confusing are for me the same thing; anything I don’t understand immediately is an opportunity to learn from others’ interpretations. That’s how I ended up repeating the story of the mall suicide to another local friend of mine who I knew to be particularly superstitious. He stopped me in the middle of the telling.

“Which mall are you talking about?”

I told him and tried to continue. “Can you believe it! She killed herself over a bag--”

“She didn’t kill herself over a bag.” He stopped me again. 

In my memory, he was driving me to dinner, but I might be wrong; always, we are either driving together or else eating things he doesn’t like, (”We are bad at picking restaurants together but good at drinking together,” he jokes, loving to remind me that we too met at a bar.) Maybe we were driving, but we may also have been eating mediocre Italian pasta or mediocre Korean fried chicken.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because I know that person,” he said sadly. “Her mother is my friend. She was there with her mother, not her boyfriend. She’d had depression for a long time. Those days, she’d been ok, so her mother left her by herself while she went to the bathroom. She was in her twenties. She wasn’t a child, it should have been fine. But in those few minutes when she was gone, her daughter jumped.”

The air left the car. Or the restaurant. Or maybe the dark, empty bar. I didn’t say anything. He went on to explain that the family was rich but the parents were divorced, and the mother felt particularly close to her daughter. She knew the depression was dangerous and real, and for years she had tried to do everything she could to cure it, getting her daughter doctors and drugs, anything that might help. That month, the daughter had seemed ok, which was why she’d agreed to go to the mall opening in the first place.

“Can you imagine,” he continued, “You leave your only child alone for a minute and then she’s gone forever.”

The month before I got engaged I started to have a recurring nightmare. Or not a nightmare, because I was always awake when it would come to me. It was more like an invasive thought. I’d be washing dishes and suddenly I’d feel a rush of adrenaline: my then-not-quite-fiancé was out there in the world somewhere. What if he were dead? The fear ramped up when I knew he was about to get on airplanes or go on long bike trips, but it was lurking even when I rationally knew he was fine, just sleeping away in his apartment in New Jersey while I puttered around my updated Chinese kitchen. Even though I was by that point--like now--too tired to keep a diary, I made a quick note to myself: Do not confuse fear of loss with love, and, There must be better ways to love than fear. 

What space can we make for those lost, for valuable lessons never internalized? When my cat came into my life, I woke up the first night in a cold sweat, convinced I’d rolled onto the tiny creature and smothered her with the weight of my dumb, unlearning body. That same week, a man delivered a pizza, and when the cat didn’t emerge for minutes after, I knew in my chest that she’d somehow scurried out the door and would be lost forever. Weeks later, I confessed to a friend that I irrationally worried about shutting the door on the cat each time I left the house, and when she teased that maybe we had, I stopped dead in my tracks ready to turn around and undo the unforgivable thing I’d done till she touched my arm and apologized: “I’m joking, of course, I’m joking.”

Now, months later, I talk about the cat as teaching me about my own capacity for love, and that’s true. By living with and caring for an animal that cannot reciprocate the kind of care I’m giving her, I’ve learned something strange and dangerous about how to love unconditionally, without expectations. Strange because why love an animal so much, and dangerous because it’s shown me just how conditional the love in the rest of my life is. I love the cat when she settles in my lap and meows in my face to stop me from sobbing and I love the cat when she sprints around the house while shitting. She is, I half-joke, the only thing keeping me here in Beijing, which feels less like home and more like a trap every month.

The cat has been alive now for exactly the same amount of months that I was engaged, which should be meaningful but isn’t. I haven’t grown out of the fear I felt when she first came into my life. Last night, I woke up gasping from a dream where she’d choked on her own vomit; instead I found that she’d overturned her food and water bowl and was happily tracking the contents of both all over the kitchen. Just a day before I’d cradled her with one arm while rinsing cat puke out of the e-collar she’s wearing while recovering from surgery with the other. The day before that, I’d cried quietly in the back of a cab for 30 minutes, convinced she was going to die from the spaying surgery I’d elected to give her and leave me with nothing. Here it is, the depth of my love, and it’s so big and yet so shallow: the certainty that I will lose myself if I lose this dumb sweet creature because I wanted her not to reproduce. 

Could my sense of self be that tenuous? After all, I’ve lost those things I dreaded losing before. Not the way I feared losing them (to car accidents, airplane crashes, or natural disasters), but it’s hard to see what difference that makes. I’m still the same person, aren’t I? Even if I do turn the burner down instead of off, I can still say that I’m not completely lost. Sometimes you have to tell yourself a story because you can still live.

Here’s another strange story: my friend who drove the car or ate the pasta or drank the beers also believed that the suicide had happened because of ghosts, specifically the ghosts from the mass grave that the mall was built on top of. Otherwise, he reasoned, it didn’t make sense. Sure, she had depression, but so did he. Why would she be fine one minute and throwing herself over the railing the next? It didn’t make sense. Lots of places in Zhengzhou had bad fengshui, he went on. The swimming pool in the office building across from the building where his failed coffee shop had been had a demon living below it. How else could I explain the cold he’d gotten after swimming there that had taken months to go away? From other vantage points in the city, fortune tellers could see the bad luck and bad energy lurking underneath Zhengzhou’s newest buildings and most developed boulevards. The city was like the movie Poltergeist, except at a much larger scale: Everywhere was an American Indian graveyard. 

Weeks after we had this conversation, news broke that construction crews had discovered an ancient Shang Dynasty tomb underneath the basketball courts at the city’s athletic facilities. The response was incredulous. “Discovered”? Everyone in Zhengzhou knew the real estate industry had sacrificed countless irreplaceable national treasures in its quest for new kinds of capital. I read the news and imagined my friend, sneaking a knowing look at me from the driver’s seat and saying, “See?” 

Sometimes only one version of the story can be told if everyone else is going to live. Is it dangerous to ask whether the woman on the 19th floor might have also died because of ghosts? Because of an accident? Because of any reason that isn’t her failure to keep a man? I’ve been thinking a lot recently of this story, “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box In Anger.” It’s very old, and almost too on the nose--you barely need me to tell it to you. All the tellings are the same. A woman chooses a man, and she is wrong to choose him. He betrays her out of fear and for money. Horrified to have committed her whole self to a man who could recognize neither her value nor the fact that she was going to be able to secretly fund them with priceless treasures for the rest of their lives together (hidden in the title jewel box), she commits suicide after dumping everything of value into the river that would have otherwise taken them to their happy life together.

When I first read the story, I remember not understanding the story’s climax at all. “Killing yourself over a man when you’re already rich,” I remember thinking, “It doesn’t make any sense! Why not just keep living and build a better life by yourself?” My teacher guessed that it was less about the man and more about her inability to live with herself; in a world where the only true choice a woman might be lucky enough to have is who she has as her partner, Du Tenth’s failure to love correctly might have been too much to bear. 

Or maybe not. There could be other things at play. The story doesn’t guess about the fengshui of the river port where Du Tenth met her early end, though she herself comes back as a ghost to terrorize the man who tried to buy her until he too commits suicide. She spares, however, the cowardly man who betrayed her, and there’s somehow nothing mysterious about that: an irresponsible man never having to bear the consequences for outliving the better woman he should have valued. It’s an old story. I’m surprised I even want to tell it anymore. 

When I tell the story of the woman on the 19th floor to people in Zhengzhou, the metaphor I think of is clucking. No one connects her to Du Tenth or to the depressed woman jumping into the space between the mall escalators because of ghosts. No one wants to talk to about the fengshui of the ordinary apartment building whose gas lines she destroyed. Instead, everyone is suddenly a mother hen, brooding over the irresponsibility of it all. “How selfish,” they cluck, their heads bobbing back and forth, “If she was married, maybe she had children! If she wasn’t married, maybe he did! Certainly there were children in the building.” At the beginning, it was hard for me to understand the connection between the woman dying in her enclosed, oxygen-free kitchen and these phantom children, but now I understand.  It is a story that makes it hard to live. The woman’s actions disrupted the necessary fiction of an actually isolated urban life and laid bare just how connected each family in each Chinese high-rise apartment building were to each other. Through the woman on the 19th floor, people became aware of a danger to their own children that they’d been able to repress before.

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter lost in hell. And found and rescued there. Love and blackmail are the gist of it. Ceres and Persephone the names. And the best thing about the legend is I can enter it anywhere.  And have. As a child in exile in a city of fogs and strange consonants, I read it first and at first I was an exiled child in the crackling dusk of the underworld, the stars blighted.  Later I walked out in a summer twilight searching for my daughter at bed-time. When she came running I was ready to make any bargain to keep her. I carried her back past whitebeams and wasps and honey-scented buddleias. But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.                    It is winter and the stars are hidden. I climb the stairs and stand where I can see my child asleep beside her teen magazines, her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit. The pomegranate!  How did I forget it? She could have come home and been safe and ended the story and all our heart-broken searching but she reached out a hand and plucked a pomegranate. She put out her hand and pulled down the French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry.  I could warn her.  There is still a chance. The rain is cold.  The road is flint-coloured. The suburb has cars and cable television. The veiled stars are above ground. It is another world.  But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time? If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The legend will be hers as well as mine.   She will enter it.  As I have. She will wake up.  She will hold the papery flushed skin in her hand. And to her lips.  I will say nothing.