In Keene’s Counternarratives, “the white girl” is used repeatedly to mark Eugénie, while “the blacks” are solely used in the grand historical narrative (“the blacks did triumph” p93), except for when near the end, Eugénie calls Carmel “you black witch”. The moments of calling Eugénie “white girl” stabs the narrative back into the contemporary USA for me. It’s a phrase circulated among my group of friends, each calling entail a bit of a callout, if not at the person, against the racialized institutions.

Perhaps because of the constant use of the white girl, despite the pseudoacademic air of much of the writing, it feels likes Carmel is somehow internally living in our bettered, more “enlightened” age. And hence, when at the very end of the story, where Carmel locks Eugénie in a burning house, in Eugénie’s desperate attempt to coerce and insult, she drops “you black witch”; the contrast painfully reminds us of the unquestioned sharpness with which race is used to mutilate.

“Then a police van crashed into four bicyclists late Friday night, generating new outrage against the Government. One cyclist was killed instantly, and two died in the hospital Saturday, while the fourth seemed less seriously hurt…”

Knife blades clink-clunk lyrically off the side as the knife man methodically push his bicycle through the serpentine hutong. The modesty of late spring lingers still in the June-day morning vapors, but he knows by noon his white headscarf would be soaked. He swings the spare towel over his shoulders and hollers again.

“mooooo jiannz leeeeeeeee,” she catches the last part of his tune through the window still covered in newspaper from the winter.

“Ahy!” She yells as her feet slip into the cotton shoes with thicker soles. Her new-fashioned son has snickered at her footwear habit many a times. New woman of the new Age embrace liberty, democracy, imported sneakers.

At the branch two houses down the clinking stops. “Hereeee!” The clink-clunk resumes.

He has already set up shop on the streetside when she marches out with their machete. Sugar cane season still an entire summer away, but she needed a reason to get some talk.

“Yo-hei! This big fellow! I’ve seen it since your father’s time. You still using it?”

She kicks the bike lightly and laughs through her nose. “You still riding this junk?”

He smiles, looking down to examine the blade as he shakes his head. “You don’t say, old dingus are actually work pretty well! Can’t find a knife like this now.”

“Yeah, Aiguo brought back this motor bike, fucking excited like he was having a seizure. Neighbors’ kids all came see it. Tututu, tututututu. Louder than mother-fucking firecrackers. Burns more gasoline than a tank! Now this big thing blocks half the street and attracts dust. So much dust!”

He giggled quietly as he begins his task. She grabs a sweeper, collecting loose yellow dirt into a pile. Yee yah from the knife and stone symphony rings on steadily, broken suddenly by baby screams.

“How did you get here? Don’t you live in Chaoyang?”

“Ah, few days back my nephew needed help with his butcher shop. Young men have all gone to the square. After busying for bigger half of the day I was just looking forward to go home for some mutton momo–Yo-hei!–before I made two steps I saw there’s a wall in the street. I got closer–what kind of wall that was?! Just people, standing, children stacking on top of one another. Army marching into the city! Heiyaya a field a green. All afternoon I thought someone was fixing their house, who would’ve thought it’s the boots.”

She continues to sweep the dust. Dried willow leaf waltzes down. She glides it into the pile.

“Where did they get that many soldiers from?”

He doesn’t answer, finishes grinding the machete.

“You don’t think they’re really going to fire?” She turns around to lean the sweeper against the wall. A group of kids run down the stairs from the house behind, kick over her pile of dust.

“Careful!” the knife-sharpener scolds lovingly.

“Do you kids have no eyes?” She joins.

“I’ve got eyes to see big tanks!” One of the kids shouts.

“Sha?”

“Erga says tanks are rolling in. Very big, big enough to hide people!”

“The turning tires can squash a person like I squash an ant!”

“Rumors were less meticulous about detail, and word spread early Saturday morning through the capital that four people had been killed by the police. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest, and immediately found themselves confronting more than 2,000 unarmed troops who were marching toward Tiananmen Square.”

Cui Guozheng, male, 1968-1989, born in Jilin, Manchurian, The Chinese People’s Liberation Army serving officer.

In the small hours of June 4^th, 1989, the army vehicle Cui Guozheng was operating arrives at the intersection between Chongwenmen Dajia and Xidajie. It was blocked by a group of angry citizens fortifying the street with bricks, fruit carts, motorbikes, and their staunch stance.

Cui and several cadets exited the army vehicle to negotiate with obstructers. Two older women kneeled as they demand the army turn around, on account of protecting their children. After escalating quarrels, Cui retrieved his standard deploy handgun and fired into the crowd. At least one man, one woman, and one child were shot.

The crowd began attacking Cui and others with bricks, stick, and fists. Cui originally attempted to shelter inside the vehicle, but tried to escape after the crowd broke the car windows. He was forced onto the tianqiao (“sky bridge”, overhead walkway) by a crowd led by three older women.

A woman about 40 years old poured gasoline upon Cui’s body and a man supplied the match.

“The troops retreated, but that confrontation seemed to set the tone for the massive demonstrations later Saturday and early today.”

Bolded text by Nicholas Kristof for NYTimes (https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/04/world/crackdown-beijing-troKops-attack-crush-beijing-protest-thousands-fight-back.html)

Notes:

The inspiration/source behind this story comes from my father. One day when we were on a bus, my usually silent father looked out the window agitatedly. He turns my shoulder and points to an overhead walkway–“that’s the bridge on which Beijing dama poured gasoline and burnt soldier on June 4th.”

dama literally means big ma, used to refer to all women around the age of menopause. I see it as the hybrid between the babushka and a South Asian aunty, with derogatory connotations of age, lack of feminity, but also a talent for gossip. This figure is pertinent to thinking feminism as they usually don’t identify as “feminists”, even often against the idea, but enact dignity, character, and pride that I think feminism works toward.

When writing this piece, my own language appalled me occasionally, especially when I tried to edit down the length. There seems to be an inherent arrogance that comes with hindsight. I couldn’t walk the edge between sarcasm and compassion very well like Keene, so I allowed myself more space to flesh out the figure. I also followed Keene’s line of letting the characters speak for themselves, even though I tried to fill the page with as much silence as possible. I don’t wish to construct a heroic figure, and it seems like silence is the most mundane but human aspect of life.

“Does Marx distinguish between productive and unproductive labor?”

I wish I could say the middle age, British, adjunct professor’s voice reverberate in the room, but too bad this cramped space was originally designed for music practice.

Silence reverberates in the room as everyone looks down at their thick block of Capital. Outside a tiny window, barren branches sway in lukewarm January wind, blocking my view of the adjacent building.

“Jonathan?” Now the self-identified Anarcho-Maoist softens his tone. Jonathan is a good kid, but even he averts the Englishman’s bespectacled glance–before uttering a few dry blinks and half an awkward smile. Meanwhile, Emily flips through the assigned chapter vehemently.

The (adjunct) professor teaching fellow reads out a page number, then a few lines of dense, terse writing.

“So, someone tell me if Marx thinks there are different kinds of labor?”

“Uh, there isn’t ?” Jonathon volunteers, still blinking.

“Damn, how much did you guys drink last weekend?”

Now laughter fills the holes in all five sound-absorbing walls to the brim. Bodies frozen in silence shake loose in giggles.

The teaching fellow resigns and begins a minilecture, chalk-on-blackboard style. It’s admirable he held on to the ideal of class discussion for more than a semester. After so many failed attempts.

//////

I pretend to do important business things while waiting for Eve to finish talking to him after class. She definitely has a crush on him.

You gotta admit, love is powerful. For someone who hasn’t done any reading since the last paper, Eve has a lot to ask. What do you think of this sentence? Is Marx still relevant? Oh also, what do you think about the Zizek-Peterson debate?

“I didn’t see it, what do you think?”

“Oh… they were both blabbering. It was really bad. Zizek makes no sense at all. It’s like he’s reading from a paper with random patterns. Peterson didn’t even know Hegel was. Maybe he was googling it on his laptop.”

“That sounds about right. Excellent critique.”

Writing Notes:

It was difficult to construct a narrative in which a meme is somehow actively involved. This made me reflect on how memes are usually circulated without comments beyond “haha” and subsequent emulation. However, I notice that a lot of our speech and personal opinions are shaped by this silent consumption. In the case of the recent WW3 meme wave, it seems memeing has substituted for opinion and response.

I added the I perspectives during editing, took it out, and put it back in. The piece reads somehow a lot more critical and harsh without a self-described narrator. When the “I” is added in, however, the narrator seems a bit sarcastic. My intention is not to condemn but to describe people and phenomena, but I enjoy the sarcasm so I kept it in there.

Two frames in Sabrina perplexes me. Overall, Drnaso’s delivery reads as attentively cautious–the constructed world extends and only extends to horizons required by the story. Yet the reporter and the pet shelter manager sitting at their desks are granted an abundance of details. Post-it notes of varying colors fill up pegboard behind them. Their little corners are clustered with indoor plants and idiosyncratic objects. For persons that can be easily written off as “a journalist” or “the manager”, who exist less like characters and more as conditions to the lives of protagonists, why provide such intimate portraits? Why do they summon moments of illustrative completeness, when Sabrina is often remembered against a backdrop of some solid color?

It would be dishonest to pick out these two frames alone. They jolted my eyes so I began to register that canned beans in the supermarket have more shading than most characters’ faces. Emails and news articles are transcribed/written in indexical entirety, even though the narrative integrity wavers (Calvin’s basement conversation with his colleague) and slurps into fractured flashes (Sandra remembering Sabrina as she falls asleep).

Like cici’s favorite book, which asks you to look at the picture closely and carefully, the fullness of the two woman’s office corners almost hits me like a sudden moment of clarity. Sometimes we remember viscerally the details for no reason. In this story so entrenched in the separated, personal glooms, these moments just present a view in of the world devoid of internal turbulence or fog. Perhaps it’s saying that we just “see” the world when we behold with more indifference.

I am reminded of Calvino’s interwinding strands of the abstract and the concrete. He urges us to at once paint the describable qualities and distill useful abstractions. We think of the people we love in the abstract.  The image their name evokes comes as a composite smile. Our fears haunt us in dreams of vague backgrounds. The abstract, simplified image can still bring visceral pain. Other times, the moments of “thick description” doesn’t quite match with “importance”. Perhaps what we notice isn’t quite understood, like when Teddy opens the book for a second time.

Revised

You almost always feel it before you see it. Sometimes it comes as a stringlike, pulling pain, snaking down your abdomen. Sometimes the soiled underwear dampens your inner thighs. On lucky days, you feel a rolling weight slide down a skin inside your skin.

You hesitate to call it blood because it carries unnamed tissues and formless things. Those gooey, semitransparent blobs of not-flesh and not-liquid, tangled with dark, cherry-colored spots. The dark spots stretch into a galaxy against the backdrop of vermillion smudge.

It cannot be blood because blood flows. You’ve seen blood climb up a needle, dripping out of a cut; but you’ve only seen this thing stuck on a tampon or a pad. On the heavy days, when your legs shudder from the icy toilet porcelain, your palm is warmed by moisture emanating from a weighty load. The entire cotton stick is soaked into a body-temperature, crimson popsicle. It fills the bathroom stall with a salty, rusting air. You wonder whether it is in the atmosphere now, and whether you carry that atmosphere around you. On other days it is more two dimensional. You discover a dry, long, maroon mark stretched against the white sanitary napkin. Blood crumbs adhere to the microscopic synthetic fibers.

Some days it doesn’t cross your mind. You sit through classes, oblivious to the red trail it leaves on the chair. Then when you are walking to lunch someone taps lightly on the shoulder. You turn around to eyes widened in politeness. They lightly whisper: “Hey, there’s something on your, umm, jeans.”

Rewritten

There are many kinds of periods.

There is the kind that fills up an entire extra-long, extra fluffy, extra expensive sanitary napkin and still spills over into the air.

There is the kind that comes in slow drips, bright red or maroon.

The worst kind is the ones that you don’t see. It drags down your insides, twists your abdomen like a laundry machine, but never shows itself. What is it afraid of? Why does it hide to torture you in the darkness of your body? A worthy enemy shows its face. The mask of no shape cannot be penetrated. 

When you were younger you had tried to understand it. As if staring at the gooey, jelly like things you could decipher what part of the body it is, whether it is a waste or a wound.

When you couldn’t figure it out, the tissues and blood stare back at you with a disgusting blank face. You toss it into the trash.

But now you’re old. Now you spend more time with its more invisible kind. You feel the back pain deeper inside your spine, and so you learn to pop ibuprofen with hot water. You learn to stretch and maybe jog and put it on the calendar. You are productive. You stop asking why or how or what. You just put it on your calendar. Another thing. Another event.

It’s been so long since you looked or thought about it. But when they say the word “feminism” you feel a sharp pain cut through your abdomen.

Notes:

During revision, it was challenging to hold back the urge to add in infinitely more details, metaphors, more ways to say the same thing. I had to go over the text a third time, after walking away a bit, to make sure the text still makes sense as a contained piece of writing. In other words, editing blended into writing; and it is difficult to read what one is writing.

Rewriting was completely different. I was a bit dreary of the object so I chose to write with a stronger voice of my own, and was less concerned about conveying its objective qualities. Rather, it is rewritten from an experiential perspective.