Ang Xu

Mama, on Monday night Pablo told me to write it all down but I dare not. Your daughter is a coward, couard, cauda, a tail, nuofu, 懦夫, a soft maleman, which sounds like mailman, Sam said, could it morph into mailman as well? Well Sam, said mama’s soft weak daughter with her fairly splintered English despite the fact that Mama had raised her to receive an unfairly expensive education, in English, from Harfard University, ideally, but Harfard said no, idly, which may or may not be the cause of splinters, thorns, and lumps in your daughter’s English,

“I’m afraid:

cant,”

                    said our soft maleman (the real deal) to Sam.

But before this splintering spinster delves into the etymology of soft malemen and drafts an appalling essay on the absence and/or/despite the abjectification of women in certain patriarchal languages (surprise! The equally expensive education your daughter received from a less ideal but equally idle institution had made her a feminist, a nominal one at least), mama, (don’t you worry, I won’t, my essay writing is quite appalling, like I never know how to mobilize punctuations,, like never,,, but don’t you worry,,,, I can’t be fainthearted and fatheaded at the same time can I), she’ll first hide her tail in between her soft malelegs and cowardly crawl into the crowd, gathered in front of cold curious eyes, instead of the tear gas, and an unnecessary assemblage of Cs

On Monday morning Rekha or somebody else asks me, her onions torched in sizzling seed oil, did your
mother want a boy more than a girl? Whilst scorched onions slowly chant their poignant elegy while
your nominally feminist daughter decks yet another sentence with holy adverbs and jolly adjective
while Christmas is sort of banned in your city (expand on how it is banned, Sam said, it’s sort of
banned, I said), I suddenly have an urge to tell Rekha what my name really means because I tend to
erroneously overestimate the significance of what my name really means in this world where people
actually fuck marry kill puke fight die (or f marry kill according to my fairly civil, sex-positive, middle
aged American artist friends—let’s play f marry kill, they say merrily, PBRs or picklebacks in their dainty
uncalloused artist hands, but only with friends and acquaintances and celebrities who are not here
right now, cuz we don’t wanna hurt ppl’s feelings, merrily they say). And that I really don’t care for
onions. But Rekha is too sweet. But on winter days Rekha has to stand the condensed odor of slow-
stewed meat in our miniature apartment every so often. Rekha is Hindu. Rekha is vegetarian. Rekha
isn’t aware of the fact that I have dragged her into this insignificant world of mine. I didn’t ask for her
consent, just like, I say this all the time during our cute gentle squabbles, how you’ve dragged me into
this, pluck and plant an unholy, unjolly adjective here, world without my consent. You, or I, or
somebody else shed tears more scorching than Rekha’s scorching onions.

During our good days I say, I will die for you Mama. You say I am a psycho. If this makes you happy, I
say, I will boil my children for you to eat. You say this doesn’t make you happy and that you don’t want
to eat my children and that you want there to be someone to see me off on my deathbed. Rekha the
roommate says she wants to marry for love

Mama, Pablo told me to write it all down but my pen and paper tremble whenever they sniff the fictionalized aromas of tear and gas (and Rekha’s onions), although on this particularly insignificant winter night (a cloudless, rainless, snowless, monsoonless Morningside Monday), she's actually sitting in front of a brand new laptop in a brightly lit reading room right under a chandelier that’s shaped like a bauhaus birthday cake and a flowerless funeral wreath at the same time, although it is quite clear, to you, not to the readers who might be picking their aquiline noses or picnicking on freshly wetted grass — it was definitely dew, they thought, despite the day was dry & a pug just passed by, that I’m making everything up because writing on a piece of paper sounds posher than numbly massaging the keyboard of a baby laptop which has yet to learn the art of making statements and or wearing statement stickers.

But mama, for an unarmed female maleman, a splintering spinster, the closest tsings to weapons, among her meager possessions, are rhetorical devices (caution: foreigned, forced, fobbed, noed by Harfard, awwed by middle aged American artist friends with dainty, calloused hands, understated by the stable baby laptop that excels at, instead of making statements, trapping unscreamed screams and unspat songs)

Simile: Rekha wants to marry for love, no arrange marriage for Rekha. When I talk to everyone but you, I put on chic disdain for marriage on my upper lip and chic words like construct and deconstruct on my lower lip (bulk purchased from Bibbidibobbidi College, where I obtained a piece of diploma papier in a pseudoscience called political science and a little red riding hoodie that had the initials of Bibbidibobbidi College Equestrian imprinted on its left chest despite I definitely did not know how to ride a horse, and from Bar East’s pedantic neighbor, where I obtained another diploma in another pseudoscience called art), like layers of lipstick that fail to cover my true colors, a deep dusty mauve because I have CHD, ADD, ADHD, THIS-D, THAT-D…

On the day Rekha and I met in the dusty slender hallway of our miniature apartment she asked me
what I did, a rider, I said. She seemed a bit despondent after finding out that I meant writer. What did
you study in grad school? She asked. CrativWriting, I said. She seemed a bit relieved after finding out
that I didn’t mean Crazy Writing. Nor did I seem crazy. Rekha was a sane scientist of some sort

… Your generation is no good at nothing except for inventing dese diseases, you say, when we were young no one depressed, no one gay, no one stares at their phone screen with dead goldfish eyes (“Mama, when you were young, smart phones weren’t invented yet,” I add), you’ve got a point, finally, but write a proper story with proper sentences, subject predicate object, subject cop predicative, don’t squander your commas, have you looked at your bank account, don’t squander time and don’t squander commas, your generation is no work all word play, get to work, finish a law abiding sentence, start an honorable story, use a period, for once.

I don’t have it, Mama, my period has been delayed for seven days

Mama, your daughter realized her period had been delayed for roughly seven days right before she entered the bar she would later be banned from (drink less, write more, said Ankle Sam, teacher Sam, righter Sam of the wrong grammar, wrong story, wrong motif, wrong direction, wrong stance, wrong premise, wrong ideology, righter of the wrong, Sam), Bar East, on the west side of the kernel of the western canon (how hard it is to use New York City, said Ankle, the unrelated brother to you who you’ve never met, mama), where the Monday night specials were brooding student artists who aspired to reconstruct the western canon and berry seeds that aspired to fill the gaps in between those artsy, uninsured, tobacco aromaed teeth—

“What a sentence!” I wondered, “what a beautiful clump of absolutely uninspiring insights and disconcerting descriptions.”

—you see the point is, Bar East, the bar which I’d be banned from 62 minutes later puts berry syrup and one to two berries into Warm Bombay Sapphire & Flat Tonic and names it the Kyoto Spring and triples the price of a regular Warm Bombay Sapphire & Flat Tonic—

“What’s the point,” I commented, “we get it, riders are cheap, riders are stupid, raspberry seeds stuck in riders’ teeth, what’s at stake? ”

“And doon’t be ashamed of your own profession,” I preached, “even if you aren’t a pro yet, a vague label like artists doesn’t grant you more wiggle room to wiggle away the shame you feel because you are a bad rider (or a bad wiggler)—doo badwritingshame yourself as much as you can, doo wiggle as much as you can, doon’t assume nosepickers and picnickers read because they are interested in the riderly life, doon’t suppose you’d have anything to lose cuz you doon’t, dance, doon’t assume safe period is safe, doo use protection, etc. etc.”

“And if I may inquire,” I inquired, ignoring time and tenses because the language your daughter speaks doesn’t even have tense, etc. etc., “is this the reason why your period has been delayed for roughly seven days, that you doon’t use protection during sex (good, you are at least getting laid while running away from the real story ((or to be more exact, while crawling on the periphery of a tsing that our nosepickers and picnickers can’t grasp at all)))?”

Like always, your daughter tries to

run away from: comments, preaching-s, inquiries, consequences, questions, rules,

By crawling on the periphery of sometsing (while having unprotected sex)

By going off on a tangent (while writing about having unprotected sex)

i.e.

Mama, Pablo told me to write it all down but your soft maleman can’t forget that she is a woman—according to her female middle aged American artist (“Rider!”) friends she writes like a man, reads like a man, men posture, men palette, men prose—according to men she’s rad! Please take this as a compliment, men say, you aren’t like a girl—according to nonbinary friends, who magnanimously forgive her for using the wrong pronouns—you are super cool and I forgive you for using the wrong pronouns, he or she says, I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry, your daughter gasps (and tries to perform Seppuku because East Asia all together makes only a small smudge through the binoculars positioned at the kernel of our western canon), how can I explain, that in Chinese, all third-person singular pronouns share the same sound—Chinese sounds cool, they say, and efficient—so that your daughter feels ashamed to cover up the linguistic fact that in Chinese it’s super easy for the he to devour the she even though they share the same sound:

Ta! As in ta-da, ta-boo, ta-sit, ta-citurn. A crisp cry of the esophagus. Ta!

“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” I interrupted, “where exactly is this going? I don’t think it’s very wise to cover up your tendency to derail by first saying you like to go off on a tangent and then going off on a tangent. So you are extra self-aware. So you are absolutely right about your insignificant wrong. Doesn’t change the fact that you need to start the story at some point. Also, I know exactly where this is going…”

“Let me venture a guess,” I ventured a guess, despite knowing exactly where this was going, “you wanna whine smart (play your multilingual card, mess around with he and she and slip in a Chinese character or two, 像这样, if you are actually smart, etc. etc.) about how hard it is to be a female malewriter, to read his words, to write his prose, to earn his praise, while trapped inside you female body praying for your period to come…”

You see, I do consider myself a feminist, head to my manicured, marroned toe, reading The Second Sex at beauty salons, caroling odes to the newest forms of contraception, while not taking any at all, while cursing everything else contemporary, especially literature, while dying my upper lip with a chic disdain for marriage, running away from my story with the manliest posture, a feminist who nevertheless cannot run away from her female malebody and male femalesoul and the female femalefright that her belly might harbor a baby after unprotected sex

“Alright, alright, ” I said, “let’s try to cast aside this sticky slooshy sentimentality. Baby, no baby, you still have to at least try to ride this story—”

“I don’t value prescriptions highly but here’s one, or three or five,” I prescribed, “first, you need to pick a setting. My fa-mer-s rider professor once said, to do some serious crazy writing about a crazy mind, you need to imprison the body first. Gimme-an-your nosepickers and picnickers one place, one location, one prison only—

“Right now, amidst the 2080 words we’ve either skimmed or scrapped so far, we have already either been led to or skipped four relatively uninteresting places: the unidentifiable place on page one, the miniature apartment that, unfortunately and unnecessarily, has something to do with onions, the library, which is undoubtedly unentertaining, and Bar East, which you haven’t even entered yet but merely have introduced its specials to us with a fairly bad attempt at mixing a handful of literary devices that you don’t quite understand. I’d say drop the library—we don’t need to know where a rider does zeir riding—and keep the apartment, especially if Rekha is a recurring character. Why else would you drag her into this insignificant world if you aren’t gonna trap her for good? As for Bar East—although you’ve already failed at forging suspense, not that your nosepickers and picnickers would care though, I still think it’s rather rude to not enter a bar when you’re this close to its entrance. At the same time, bars are better at harboring characters—I don’t think your Morningside miniature two bedroom apartment could hold more than two and I don’t care how considerate Rekha is, even if she often covers her diced onions with a lid…”

Repetition: Mama, Pablo told me to write it all down but David called, but David called. While David
from the other side of the ocean fed me his newest misery, Rekha diced her onions in our miniature
kitchen and covered the diced onions with a lid. I don’t want them to irritate your eyes, she said. How
kind of Rekha! Whereas Rekha the roommate kindly diced her onions and covered them up with a
copper lid, David’s newest misery (what is it, asked Sam; spell it out, asked Sam) dribbled down my
ears, my tone deaf ears that weren’t capable of capturing its melody and beats, so I paid back his
abstruse music with empty words:

If only I were in Beijing—If only I were in Beijing—

Then we took turns sighing:

Ah—Ahh—Ugh—Humph

Morningside air and Randomchinesecharacters air released from our weary throats (only because we
whine so much) , without engaging those unused vocal cords born and raised inept at making
statements, screaming screams, and spitting songs

“Now who the hell is David? You can’t just be introducing new characters, more exactly, dumping them on your nosepickers and picnickers despite your mutual contempt for each other, speaking of which, who the hell are you, what do we know about you? You are a self-proclaimed rider, so it seems, you are on a quest for period, you don’t have period, you don’t use period, you don’t use protection, and you might be pregnant, can’t tell if you are just producing comma splices for the sake of your quest, or if you’ve abandoned your period for the sake of knocking up a quest, these days we who trapped in riders’ riding quests are always on a quest, but who the hell are you, and who the hell is David…”

Mama, remember David, the guy you unconditionally root for because he was educated by Harfard
University despite the fact that I’ve told you a thousand times he’s got a small dick (don’t small-dick-
shame David, or anybody, it’s simply not polite, says daughter’s very polite Mama, do you know the
trick to maintain any relationship? That is, don’t compare and don’t venture, if you don’t venture, then
there’s nothing to compare. If you don’t get exposed to other dicks, you’ll never know how small his
dick really is. According to Albert, everything is relative so David’s dick is just relatively small ((I’m sure
this wasn’t what Albert meant)). According to me, and societal conventions, you should also write like
a lady. It’s simply not very civil to put the phallus onto the page ((but Mama, men bitch about
(((“language!”))) women’s bodies all the time and I’m just trying to get even; in fact, I’m doing the
entire human race the right tsing by diminishing the male ego by writing about a small dick)). If you
really want to be better than them, just take the higher road and not be like them ((Mama, do you
realize the only point of my Bibbidibobbidi education was for me to realize how deadly wrong you
are?)). Don’t hang death on your mouth, not auspicious, you say, and if only you got into Harfard, if
only you got into Harfard) 

“So we know David is someone in Beijing who went to Harfard, who has a small dick, which might or might not be true, who has no interiority, and no exteriority, except for a quick peek into his crotch, but who the fuck is Pablo (why did he order you to write it all down and why did you listen to him if you are a feminist, even just a nominal one)? And who the f is Sam (Sam is not only a teacher, a righter, a grandiose idea, but after all also an ankle therefore respectful language is strongly advised)?”

“Just enter the goddamn bar,” Ankle Sam says.