BY Emily Yang ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
He saw the first one when he caught its corner behind a dust-bound volume of textbooks. A wrinkled page torn from a datum notebook, surface gridded tightly by faded cyan squares. When he unfolded it, he found an unmistakably boyish scrawl fluttering inside, printed in a paled blue ink. At the end of every other phrase, the oily ink bled into the paper like a tiny, bursting blueberry, a disquieting idiosyncrasy that Wei couldn’t quite pin down as intentional or not. The letter was signed with one Chinese character: 無, as in “none.” Too unusual an iteration of the syllable for a family name—probably a pseudonym, maybe a homonym for his real surname. The content was nothing out of the ordinary: a love letter addressed to Wei’s current lover, written by a former boyfriend of hers—perhaps from college, maybe even high school. She had told him about most of her ex-lovers, an assortment of sheepish Taiwanese boys she’d inadvertently charmed growing up, but he didn’t recall one whose surname was a “Wu.” Still, such a detail hardly mattered, he thought. Wei quickly put it behind him as he slipped the letter back in its hiding place, continuing his quest for her ragged, traditional Mandarin edition of Siddhartha that he’d wanted to borrow once more. It wasn’t until the next day that the clumsy lettering of this “Wu” resurfaced somewhat rudely. Ling had tugged on his red tie, pulling him in for a welcome-home kiss. When Wei tucked a few strands of hair behind her ears, a blotch of blue split on the side of her pale neck, an inch below her jawline. Startled, he pulled back. “What’s wrong?” Ling asked, frowning. Wei blinked a few times, and with every rapid blink the burst shrunk back down to the small mole on her neck. “Nothing,” he said. “Just thought I saw something.” +++ Ling: Sometimes I dream of an almanac that contains all the answers to your existence. A calendar that divulges every single detail I need in order to demystify you in my mind. It’s handmade, two days a page, jotted in my own handwriting across pages and pages of those datum notebooks that people use for math class. Every day I flip to the next page, and crucial facts about you emerge in deep red ink. At the beginning of these dreams, I rejoice. I feel myself becoming whole as I amass more and more fragments of who you are. The more words I collect, the more textures you take up, and the more you begin to take shape, like a slab of marble chiseled to life. And somewhere in this steady flow of words and images, your existence comes to fruition. I think to myself that if I go on like this, maybe one day you’ll become whole to me, too. Only then, I know, will I be able to touch you. But whenever I try to turn back the days, to seek out an older note I’ve long forgotten, everything disappears. It always begins where my fingertips first land on the page. It’s ruthless—as soon as I brush it, a nothingness contracts and expands until it blots out the words I’ve
13
LITERARY
placed carefully on your skin. This happens whenever I turn my back on the present. And I do just that, without fail, every time I dream of this almanac of ours, or mine. As this nothingness spreads, the blue notebook begins to fade away as well. When I reach out to stop it from disappearing, my fingers touch nothing. Yours, 無
Chinese characters for which the language was only one of many possible pronunciations. He wondered if Wu spoke Taiwanese fluently, or could only comprehend pinches of simple phrases like Ling. Maybe he couldn’t speak Taiwanese at all—he did remember her mentioning a Chinese ex or two. Again reaching no conclusions, he slipped the note back into the abyss between Multivariable Calculus and Differential Equations. +++
+++ A few days later, when Wei finished Siddhartha, he entered her study to return the book to its place. As always, it had moved him deeply, but over time it struck him as far too naïve. Somewhere within and across his words, Hesse suggested that all organic things had an essence, which neither preceded nor followed existence—it was existence, and in the fact of their existence-essence, all things, Dalai Lamas and rivers alike, were equal. Wei wasn’t the type to brood over these philosophical technicalities—he was a simple guy from Hsinchu County, really—so he didn’t question any of Hesse’s logic the first time around. By the third read, however, he knew that no society could function on this radically egalitarian notion. As idealistic as he was (he still thought Taiwan could one day attain independence from China), he acknowledged that it was only human to pigeonhole different existences in a way that privileged one or two over the rest. He mulled this over as he slid the paperback into its former place, moseying around his non-conclusions. Eyes flitting around the room for his next read, he caught a glimpse of the letter once more. Strangely, it was now jutting out from between the calculus textbooks. Wei was sure he had positioned the letter just as he had found it, lying in wait at the back of the shelf—but there it was, announcing itself from between two moldering college textbooks. He pulled the letter out and gave it a more thorough read. Upon closer inspection, he concluded, Wu’s writing was mediocre at best. Each ghostly burst of blue seemed compensatory, a Rorschach stammering an apology for the trite flourish just now penned and ostensibly read. He jumped from one thought onto the next without transitions, paying no mind to punctuation and spelling. To top it all off, the text was an incoherent amalgam of English, simplified and traditional Chinese, and even Japanese. In English, he alternated between the pseudo-poetic (“You make me feel a deep maroon”) and the cliché (“I’m so lucky to call you mine”). In Chinese, he simply recycled truisms that he’d spell wrong, either by accident or to deliver a bad pun. For the adage 愛不是佔有，而是欣賞 (“Love is not possession, but veneration”), he used the 心 that meant “heart” instead of the correct 欣, which signified happiness or liking. The one line of Japanese was simply an elementary 愛してる, scribbled in messy hiragana to close out the letter. Wei wondered what Wu would have written if Taiwanese had a corporeal form, one independent of
Wei and Ling had been seeing each other for the past two years, but he only wrote her a real, hard-copy letter once, after a somewhat dramatic argument on a spring evening. They had been discussing their romantic histories that night, circling around 信義 Plaza with cups of papaya milk in hand. “I was super hung up on Janice when I first met you,” he said as they plopped onto a marble bench in the clearing. “Janice, huh,” she said. “I used to have the biggest crush on Andy. On and off for maybe two years, a year before I met you.” “Andy Lau?” “No, not the singer, stupid. Andy Chiu.” “Wait, Andy Andy?” “Yeah. My Andy.” Tides of people rearranged themselves before him, shifting and slipping through the interstices of towering department store buildings. A nameless and shapeless feeling sifted through his chest, as did a stray stirring he couldn’t quite articulate into a thought. “Ling,” he said after a while. “If I didn’t exist—if there was no ‘Wei’ in your world, or any world, as stupid as that sounds—would you go for Andy, do you think?” Ling furrowed her brows. “I don’t know. Maybe?” For a long time, they sat on the bench without saying another word. Every now and then, a sound would wash over them, dipping toes into the capillaries of silence they’d gathered between them. But none reached either of them. “What’s up?” she finally asked, not bothering to hide the exasperation in her voice. Wei let it sit for a moment, unable to bring himself to speak. He felt like the male protagonist of a poorly written shoujo manga. “I thought you would say no,” he said. “I guess I wanted you to say no.” Ling looked at him, face streaked with confusion. “But that was just a hypothetical situation.” “I mean, you still talk to him almost every day,” he said. “Andy.” He stood up. “But it’s fine. I can take this.” “Take what?” She bolted upward to meet his line of vision, blinking fast. Fighting off tears, as she tended to do after any hint of disagreement. Probably hoping that Wei wouldn’t notice, but he did. “This. I mean, imagine if I said I’d probably go for Janice if you were gone. Someone I talk to all the time. I don’t know.” “What? That’s not what I said,” she said, voice rising. “You asked a question; I just answered. It’s an alternate universe, too. Like, that was my answer for an alternate fucking universe—” “I’ll take it, Ling. I’ll take it. You don’t have to explain yourself.”
27 MARCH 2020
