Because neither official nor personal narratives could be relied upon, many Chinese students and thinkers, myself included, found in literary criticism a mechanism for truth-telling by deduction: you can tell what has happened to us by what we are able to discern, and what we are willing to leave at the act of discernment. It did not seem like the truth would ever come to light. We felt that it would be overlooked or dismissed, like important legal evidence that happened to be formatted incorrectly.
âNan Z. Da, Disambiguation, a Tragedy
Nothing captures the dominant affect of being a Hong Konger living in the mainland as the phrase âlike important legal evidence that happened to be formatted incorrectly.â I lost my Hong Kong SAR passport at the Beijing South Railway station once, in 2019, and when I reported the incident to the station police, the officers on duty looked at each other like I was simply there to share a fun fact: Did you know they issue a separate passport in Hong Kong? ççćïŒ
The lost passport was one of the collected signs in a saga set off earlier in the year that ended in my occult theory based on nothing that Hong Kong is over for me, despite it all. I eventually got my passport back a year later (the saga) and have found no use for it since the pandemic. Within mainland China, the only piece of identification that matters for me is the Mainland Travel Permit. While carrying a mainland ID card lets you buy tickets and pass through airport and train gates electronically, the travel permit requires manual inspection. The technology in itself is not a hard rule: some machines are smarter than others and will scan my permit card, but there is no way to tell which ones. My hard rule, in turn, is to assume that they never work and always get in the manual inspection line. Whenever I (used to) gamble and the scanners donât work, they flash red and make an embarrassing sound that makes me anxious because I have now annoyed a whole line of people behind me. Some custom officer would then rush overâusually young, too skinny and tepid lookingâto inspect the ID that is causing the problem. They would turn the plastic card over and try scanning it themselves, first face down, and when that fails, the other side. The smaller the town Iâm in, the less likely they have had to deal with this, the more insistent they are to keep trying. It is insane to me that I have to explain to people in uniform how this works, or doesnât work. I would have to tell them in the most polite way possible, Iâm sorry, this needs to be manually inspected but not by you and not like this. Sometimes I show them how to position it on the special scanner.
Last December marked one year and eight months since I moved to Beijing. But if I add up the days, I wasnât actually in Beijing half the time, because I live very close to the airport express and that makes it very easy to just go, which is often how I get into trouble in the matter of life decisions. Just because you can doesnât mean that you should. Or just because you should, you can still do not. A lot of what I have done this year I compulsively want to put in quotes because more often than not it felt like they were things that I had to do regardless of how I felt about them. Sure, I "writeâ (not for anything approaching a living wage). Iâm a âjournalistâ (not in any higher calling, dedication-to-the-truth way). I âtranslateâ (not in any proud, career-orienting way). But all of these activities taken together constituted an existence that makes âmyselfâ easy to explain. I put âmyselfâ in quotes because without dwelling too much on whatâs passed, it was only recently when I was seriously confronted with a chance to consider a jobâor maybe more like an opportunity to change my lifeâthat I realized, conveniently, if it werenât for the trigger, I might never have to truly come to terms and process the trauma that was my first job. That at one point, the world was big enough and life was long enough that it was possible to go on without ever thinking about what happens when you had once worked really hard to get what you wanted only to realize when the time came it was that easy to throw away, so then, what was the point all along and where can you go from there. On the other hand, âhow rare, to undertake an act/ Thatâs truly free, and not just a response/ To a confused surge of drives and fearsâ (Anne Boyer, [Trying to see the proportional relation]).
There were so many times when I thought it wouldâve been so much easier if I could just write personal essays, instead of reading like five Journal of Peasant Studies articles just to vaccinate a passing point in a book review. Criticism is cool because instead of looking at me (or looking at each other), we can just look at this thing together. (Journalism is more like, I looked at this, now look.) Tiffany once said in a Q&A for her film Never Rest/Unrest (which I wrote about in the winter issue of Spike art magazine) that she wanted to make âan unfuckable textââa text stacked so thick with facts that you cannot argue with. Because of the ways events around the world and in our lives unfolded in the sequence that they did, at a dinner last September, some time after I came back from a few weeks in Hong Kong, I impulsively said out loud to some friends that Iâm gonna go to law school at some point. It was one of those that fated feeling moments again. It is possible that I have mistaken something for something else, but at the moment it felt like a logical conclusion to my part of the story. Like how moving to Beijing was just something I had to do.
Unrelated to âgoing into human rights lawâ as a possible intersection between âwhat feels useful to the worldâ and âwhat I can do,â over the past year of writing art and film and literary criticism, in the time of post-truth, the only way I could make sense of any impetus to write is more and more like building a court case. Not in terms of form, but it comes down to establishing context for a set of facts: what has to be true in order for X to be true. A similar impulse has led to the infection of a tic many reviews and criticism share nowadays: the cowardly sentence construction âifâŠ.thenâŠ.â But Iâm not interested in experimental thought exercises; criticism has to be more specific and can afford to be more concrete than that. In the Disambiguation essay, Nan Z. Da advocates for criticism as a way to assert your context that one day would give way to meaning (âtruth-telling by deductionâ)âan appeal to legibility even before close-reading: the ability to know when to close read. Personal essays, I think, no longer work as a critical mode because it too often jumps right into meaning, and, I am thinking, meaning is a privilege unafforded to the conditions of living under extreme political harm. What is the meaning of being sixteen and arrested for chanting slogans on a university campus, a charge that carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment? LOL.
Writing in English alone makes the whole project of representationâwhat the personal tends to seekâunfortunate. I think the recourse of the personal, when the personal is increasingly only allowed to survive on the page after endless qualifying, is not enough for a transnational narrative of the political now. I am, predictably to some, directing this frustration about a strain of platform-fetishized writing that seeks legitimization of cross-cultural privilege under diasporic consciousness, when such a claim to cosmopolitanism is ultimately fraudulent when it inevitably centers one, usually the more immediately truthful, interest over the other. To truly write from in betweenânot to be mistaken for writing from the marginsârequires a meta-personal that the empowered individual voice is actually morally ill-suited for, because attempts at defining a field of vision for the universal immediately fall apart, knowing the blindspots you know whichever way you turn. The leapfrog to what some might see as zealous over-intellectualization is in fact a visceral response to the constant demand of mental doubling and an ethical duty to maintain differences. I donât think itâs a coincidence or simply reactionary discourse that friends and others have independently come to similar conclusions at around the same time or having gone through similar thought processes.
At any rate, I want to be convinced otherwise. Show me if there is a way to live that doesnât begin with a 500-word summary of the news. At the beginning of 2020, in Chengdu one evening, after we went hiking, when I was slightly fucked up from vaping and drinking wine on an empty stomach, my friend Tom asked, what do you want? I was like, Iâm good scrolling on my phone. And he was like, what do you want? And I was like, I want to scroll on my phone. And he was like, no, what do you want in life? At the time, I was like, I⊠But now Iâm like, I would like to be proven wrong.
