Severance摘录

Oh, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I said, locating one stack of board books. Yes, very popular, he affirmed. We do so many reprints. As we turned to leave, he asked: Why is it so popular in America?Pactice counting all the apples that the caterpillar eats.The worm is very greedy, Balthasar said darkly. He eats all the food and doesn’t share. What lesson does that teach children? To eat with no—he paused, searching for the word—no conscience?American kids are very fat, I joked, though I knew that was not what he really meant. What I knew about overseas labor came from a college Economics class. First, the U.S. manufacturing jobs went to Mexico, to the maquiladoras that staffed laborers willing to work for cheaper rates than Americans. Duty-free, tariff-free. This was the 1980s and 1990s. Later, a portion of those jobs went to suppliers in China, which offered cheaper labor rates, even cheap enough to offset the shipping costs that coincided with a rise in oil prices. And after this, in another few years, the jobs will go elsewhere, to India or some other country willing to offer even cheaper rates, to produce iPods, Happy Meal toys, skateboards, American flags, sneakers, air conditioners. TheAmerican businessmen will come to visit these countries and tour their factories, inspect their manufacturing processes, sample their cuisines, while staying at their nicest hotels built to cater to them.I was a part of this. Balthasar followed my gaze. That is where the workers live, he said. Except when they return to their hometowns for Chinese New Year. The printer shuts down for two weeks. Big holiday. He looked at me carefully, as if seeing me for the first time. Do you celebrate Chinese New Year?I’ll eat a moon cake, I said, purposely evasive. Does that count?He smiled the same enigmatic smile. Ah, moon cake. Can you speak Chinese? Balthasar asked.Yes, I can speak Mandarin, I replied stiffly, sticking to English. I had been six when I left China, and my Mandarin vocabulary was regressive, simplistic. I used idioms that only small children would use; my language was frozen in time. I could carry on a casual conversation for ten minutes. Any longer, and I was like a shallow-water dog paddler flailing in deeper ocean waters. It had worsened every year. I had only spoken Mandarin to communicate with my parents, and was out of practice.I added: But it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken Mandarin and I’m a bit rusty.He looked at me, as if trying to decide whether my response truly indicated the limits of my Chinese-speaking abilities or if I was simply conveying modesty, a very Chinese quality.Without warning, he switched to Mandarin. He asked if I liked Chinese food.I took the bait and responded in Mandarin. Yes, I quite rather like Chinese food, I said, proud to know so many qualifiers, the hallmark of a nuanced conversationalist. I like—here, I racked my brain. I was too embarrassed to say General Tso’s chicken, an American invention. But I didn’t know the names of other dishes, so I named something I never ate at all—Peking duck. I like Peking duck.Ah, your Chinese is very good! he delightedly exclaimed. Which was an inverted form of what Chinese immigrants would say to me: Your English is very good! He pressed on. Were you born in the United States?No, I said. I was born in China but—I scanned my mind for immigrate and came up short—I went to America when I was six.Oh, so young! Our exchange now took on an air of familiarity. Balthasar lowered his voice to confiding tones and told me about his daughter, how he was constantly pressing her to learn English. Because it’s good for business, you know? More opportunities. My mother doesn’t work. She stays at home. And your father? My father is a… doctor, I said, because I didn’t know the words for housing loans risk analyst. Then I added, unnecessarily, The brain. Ah, a brain surgeon, he said, then hesitated. Or do you mean psychiatrist? I selected the more Chinese-impressive title. A brain surgeon, I said. I understood the terms as he spoke them, but I couldn’t come up with the words on my own.He looked at me with what seemed like respect. While I hoped that we would stop conversing in Chinese and switch back to English, I sensed that something important rode on my ability to speak fluently in both languages, I wasn’t sure what. It was important that I gave the appearance of fluency.He asked where my family was from, what part of China.Fuzhou. That’s where I was born.Ah, Fujian province. He nodded knowingly.I looked at Balthasar uneasily. There was a hierarchy of provinces, and each province carried a stereotype, like the cultural biases associated with different New York neighborhoods. He was probably unimpressed. My knowledge of Fujian consisted of basic encyclopedic details: it is located directly across the strait from traitorous Taiwan; it has been historically separated from the rest of the mainland by a mountain range. With its seafaring traditions, most of the world’s Chinese immigrants consist of the Fujianese. They go to other countries and have children and claim citizenship, sending money back home to their families to build empty McMansions, occupied by grandparents. Fujianese was outlier Chinese.I switched back to English, changed the subject. How did you and Edgar get your names? I asked.They are not our real names, he said, following suit in English. They are just our business names, when we work with Western clients.How did you pick Balthasar? It’s unusual.It’s from Shakespeare. I choose from the best. He laughed. Then he asked, What is your Chinese name? 在莎士比亚的戏剧中，**Balthasar（巴萨扎）**是一个常见的名字，出现在多个不同的作品中，但他通常是一个次要角色。以下是几个主要的例子：

1. 《无事生非》（Much Ado About Nothing）

• 巴萨扎（Balthasar） 是剧中的一名音乐家和仆人，他为剧中一首著名的歌曲《Sigh No More, Ladies》演唱。这首歌的歌词暗示男人多变，而女人应该接受现实并保持愉快的心情。
• 尽管他的角色较小，但他的歌曲传达了戏剧主题之一——爱情和欺骗。

2. 《罗密欧与朱丽叶》（Romeo and Juliet）

• 巴萨扎（Balthasar） 是罗密欧的仆人，在剧中扮演了重要的角色。
• 当罗密欧被放逐到曼图亚后，巴萨扎带来了朱丽叶“死亡”的消息，导致罗密欧误以为朱丽叶真的死了，并最终促成了悲剧结局。
• 他的角色虽然不大，但在剧情发展中起到了关键作用。

3. 《威尼斯商人》（The Merchant of Venice）

• 在这部戏剧中，巴萨扎（Balthasar） 不是一个真正的人物，而是波西亚（Portia）女扮男装时使用的假名。
• 她假扮成一位博学的法官助理，利用法律知识在审判中为安东尼奥辩护，最终智取夏洛克（Shylock），避免了安东尼奥被割一磅肉的命运。

总结：

莎士比亚经常使用“Balthasar”这个名字，赋予不同角色不同的身份。他们通常是仆人、音乐家或者是假身份，虽非主角，但在戏剧情节的发展中扮演着重要的辅助角色。Balthasar responded calmly, something about how part of his job was to demonstrate the machinery for visiting businessmen, but as the irritated worker grew louder and more insistent, the two men engaged in an argument, speaking too quickly for me to get every word. Something I did hear: Balthasar told the worker he was making a fool of himself in front of the foreigner.I looked away. On the wall, someone had taped up a titillating photo of a woman, holding an ice cream cone and sucking her finger. It had been ripped from a magazine.The photo was of Claire Danes, and it had been ripped from a 1996 issue of Us magazine. I knew it right away, because, as a kid, I had been obsessed with the Baz Luhrmann production of Romeo and Juliet, and had read all the interviews with its stars, collected them in a folder. It was unbelievable to see it here, of all places. The fact of finding a childhood artifact in such a strange place on the other side of the world, years and years later, I couldn’t put this sensation into words.

Chengwen is from Fujian province too, Balthasar added. My family is from Fuzhou, I told him. Really? he asked, which in Mandarin sounds more like a request for veracity than a benign comment.Are you from Fuzhou too? I asked, trying to make polite conversation.Most of us are from villages, he answered. He named the Fujian village he was from, but I didn’t quite catch it.It’s a village very close to Fuzhou, Balthasar interjected, adding jovially, Maybe your families even know each other!Ridiculous as it sounded, I thought to ask Chengwen whether he knew my aunts or uncles. But I realized I didn’t actually know the full names of any of my relatives. I always called them by their designation in the family, the first uncle, the second aunt, my grandma. My mother had written their legal names on a list somewhere, though this was in a box in a storage facility in Salt Lake City. After tossing and turning, I gave up on sleeping and checked my work email. There was a new message sent by Balthasar from his Phoenix email earlier that day. The subject line was Your Name. I clicked on it, and the software asked me to download a Chinese translation program that would allow the characters to encrypt properly. I declined, because it was late and I didn’t have time to download a whole program. The email that opened showed gibberish in place of Chinese characters. And yet, when I scrolled down, I found a PDF attachment he had sent. It was a scan of a page from an unidentified book that featured a short poem. It was the English translation of “Thoughts in Night Quiet” by Li Bai. He must’ve been trying to send me both versions of the poem, in Chinese and English. I read it aloud to myself. Seeing moonlight here at my bedand thinking it’s frost on the ground,I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,then back, dreaming of my old home. During the first uncle’s bouts of depression, he stops eating, stops speaking, and spends his days online. When he does go out, late at night, creeping past wife and daughter asleep in other rooms, it is to frequent karaoke bars solo and sing Taiwanese pop songs whose lyrics, everyone is surprised to learn, he knows word for word by heart: I am a nightingale that croons for a love that doesn’t exist. / Into the mountains and valley swells my love flees. / Against the northern winds I chase, not far behind. / How ardent my love, how worthless my lover. / Fuck my bitchy bitch bitch. My grandma maintains that of all her daughters, only my mother has married wisely. Of the first and second uncles, she once said: One is weak in the mind, the other is weak in the body. She turned to me meaningfully: But not your father. He says, You’ve been gone for so many years, and now we’re supposed to invite you to our homes? More than a decade, the capitalist comes back and he’s welcomed like some prodigal son?My father stands there, as close as he can, daring his brother to come closer, his hands balling into fists at his sides. The low, mechanical hum of the ceiling fan descends over the room.Think of all your similarities! my grandma interjects. You’re brothers—think of everything you share!Despite their physical differences, there is one feature my father and his brother do share. It is the face, a face so eerily similar they could’ve been identical twins. They have the same furrowed brow, the same dimples below the mouth, and the same deep, sunken eyes. Beneath the stilled chandelier, as my uncle finally sits down to break into heavy, chafing sobs, I think: So that’s what my father looks like when he cries. When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeonseverything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized. Bing Bing, his face half-submerged in shadow, tells me, One day you’ll want to return permanently. That would be terrible, I say, laughing. I would be henpecked to death by all of my uncles. I begin imagining it:The first uncle would say, When are you getting married?The second uncle would say, What are you looking for in a man?The third uncle would say, Work on your appearance. He hesitates. Especially the chin and calves.The fourth uncle wouldn’t say anything; he would just think it.In my imagining, I return from New York. I do whatever my uncles say. I relearn Mandarin. I relearn Fujianese. I get married to another Fujianese. I live here, in beautiful, sunny, tropical Fuzhou, Fujian, fenced in by towering mountains and bounded by a boundless sea through which everyone leaves, where the palm trees sway and the nights run so late. I am so happy. And I remembered, in a sudden jolt of recall, that my mother had traveled to Hong Kong alone, one winter, when I was a teenager. The city was renowned among the Chinese-American communities for expert, cheap cosmetic procedures, and she was there to get the moles and beauty marks removed from her face. Her sisters used to call her a spotted leopard. When she returned, however, there were white spots on her face where the moles had been. She was still marked in the places she desired to be unmarked. I wandered around for a bit, trying to absorb the sights and stopping in at various stalls. One of the larger stalls smelled heavily of incense and featured what looked like shrines. It took me a second to identify what they were selling: accoutrements of mourning and/or ancestral worship. Spirit money, yellow bills imprinted with gold foil, was tied with red string and shrink-wrapped in thick stacks. When I lived in China, my grandmother used to burn it. Once broken down into ashes, she had explained, the money would transfer into the possession of our ancestral spirits. They would use it to buy things or to bargain with others or to bribe afterlife officials for favors. I watched the last luxury images burn and extinguish into ash, entering some other, metaphysical realm where my parents feasted. As the fire subsided and the embers dimmed, I imagined them combing through the mountain of items, dumbstruck by the dizzying abundance. I imagined that it would be more than they would ever need, more than they knew what to do with, even in eternity. I think the battery might be dead. Do you think I could find a charger? I asked Bob.It’s not supposed to work, Adam informed me. We broke it.Bob continued smiling at me. Like I said, Candace, this is just an object. It serves as a reminder of who you used to be, but accessing all your old data is not helpful to you in moving forward. It is a symbol of how far you have come. In response to his own question, he set down his beer, punched up his glasses, and sermonized:The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.I guess that’s true, Evan agreed. All those archives of news articles. Bob continued: Our eyes have become nearsighted with nostalgia, staring at our computer screen. Because being online is equivalent to living in the past. And, while we can agree that the internet has many uses, one of its significant side effects is that we all live too much in the past. But!—here, he looked around at all of us inclusively—there is a bright side. This loss of the internet presents an opportunity. We are more free to live in the present, and more free to envision our future. Flying maggots, larvae maggots, maggoty maggots, maggoted maggots, dancing their maggot mating dance all over his maggoted face. I staggered back, dropping the flashlight. Janelle grabbed my arm and dragged me into the kitchenette at the far end of the living room. It was hard to take deep breaths in the foul air, so I just stood, choking, over the counter, not wanting to touch anything, wanting to only keep my hands to myself, from now on and forever. Even Janelle, when she tried to help, yelling instructions to breathe, all I could think about was how disgusting she was, not her but her embodiment, her physicality; her breath, hysterically teeming with bacteria, spewing micromaggots toward me, the grit under her nails, the sweat that glistened on her arms and collarbone, that clung to her hair, ready to drip down all over me. I turned away, fighting nausea. There was not one clean thing, not one clean place. If there were no cells dying and procreating all over the place, in this room, in other rooms. If there were just not cells at all. If I could just find one clean thing here, one thing to please just anchor me. A cold, crisp, starched hospital sheet. A piece of ice lodged in my throat. Candace? Janelle was shaking me. Her breath was in my face, a hot subway grate of soured condensed milk. Are you okay? She rustled around in the cupboards for a glass. When she turned on the faucet, it rumbled like the sink was going to explode. The entire house groaned in solidarity. She drew me a glass, not listening to my pleas as the stream of rusty water cleared.We’re not supposed to be here. Let’s go. Let’s just go. Something feels wrong. I kept saying this, repeating the same sentences in different variations, just repeating, repeating.Calm down, Janelle said, rubbing my shoulder. We’ll get the weed, we’ll go.We shouldn’t be stalking our own homes.Ten minutes, Janelle said, handing me the glass of water. I shook my head, waving it away.It’s not that, I said. It’s something else, it feels wrong. It feels wrong that we’re stalking our former, old… I mean, would you go b Wait, I told him, and peeled them off cleanly, as he unzipped his jeans and took out his Schwarzenegger dick and plowed into me, harder and more aggressive than circumstances of introductory sex usually dictate, the raw mattress surface chafing our skin pink. The sex we were having was not romantic. It was matter-of-fact sex, sex that was trying to do something, to stake a claim, to mark territory. At floor height, I see people I recognize, but it takes a moment because they are all dressed in formal evening wear, their makeup done, their permed hair souffléd into intricate styles. My grandmother and my grandfather. The other grandmother and grandfather. My great-great-aunt, eyes blinded, world-weary. My mother’s two younger, slimmer sisters, mischievously confiding in each other. My four uncles, dressed in tuxedos, patting one another on the back and smoking so hard like it’s still the eighties. My father, sitting next to them, peeling an orange with his bare hands.Then I spot my mother. She’s the only one not in a dress, but a navy skirt suit she used to wear to church. She sees me at the same time that I see her. Coming over, she bends down and pulls me through the mouse door, my hips squeezing through with a pop. I stand up, dust myself off.Have you eaten yet? she asks.In this dream, I can’t speak. I try to open my lips, but I have none. I have no mouth, and even if I did, I have no language. I have deep emanations though, indigestive blubberings coming out of my stomach. My mother seems to understand.You’re hungry, she tells me. Sit down Don’t you think it’s strange Ashley became fevered in her childhood house? It’s like nostalgia has something to do with it.Shen Fever is caused by breathing in fungal spores. I’m pretty sure it’s not because of memories.I’m not saying it’s the cause. I’m saying, what if nostalgia triggers it?He shook his head. Are you sure you don’t want a Xanax? You’re shaking.I can’t take one because I don’t know how it’ll affect the baby.He paused. What are you talking about?I’m pregnant.Wait, what? Are you serious?I’ve been hiding it.Evan hesitated. If you don’t mind me asking, is it your boyfriend’s? John’s?Jonathan, I corrected. And yes. I ducked my head down and shut my eyes tightly. It took a moment before I felt something wet dripping all over my stomach, my crotch, my legs. I’ve been shot, I thought. I’m bleeding. Are you okay? Evan said.I’ve been shot, I said. I’m bleeding.I looked down. I had squeezed the water bottle so hard that it had exploded. The water was seeping all over my blanket, all over my shirt. The punctured plastic had gashed my finger.Here. He reached over, took the bottle out of my hands. You’re not bleeding. You’re going to be okay. You need to keep warm. You need to think about yourself now.I nodded. I felt cold all over. Things—the dashboard, the wrong time of day—in my vision were stuttering, as if trying to convey messages. This was because I was shaking. Can I have some water? I asked Evan. Senior Product Coordinator, Lane added. They’re posting it next week. Just thought you’d like to know.Blythe chimed in. It’s kind of like what you’re doing now, but in Art. And we know you want to get out of Bibles. She caught herself. I mean, who wouldn’t?Wow, I said, swallowing. Exciting.So you should put your name in, Blythe prodded.Lane smiled at me meaningfully. At least you get to work on challenging projects in Art. It’s not like Bibles, where you work on the exact same thing over and over again. Her phone pinged with a text. Delilah’s on her way, she announced.Suddenly, I understood why Blythe had invited me. They were trying me out, auditioning me, as a possible addition to their clique. I looked at myself. In my office outfit, I felt wilted in comparison to their glossy day-to-night sheath dresses.Yes. I took a sip from the wineglass. It tasted bloody. I wanted to tell them that they had made a mistake. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t want the same things that they wanted, and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths. All of these distinctions, of course, belied the fact that I very much wanted to work in Art. I wanted to be an Art Girl.Or, at least, I couldn’t work in Bibles forever. I’d go crazy. I couldn’t keep having nightmares of thin Bible paper ripping on web presses, I couldn’t keep explaining to clients the working conditions of Chinese laborers, things that I didn’t understand myself, I couldn’t keep converting yuan to dollars, the exchange rates wildly fluctuating, flailing like a drowning swimmer.Things were different in Art. The clients weren’t so fixated on the bottom line. They wanted the product to be beautiful. They cared about the printing, color reproduction, the durability of a good sewn binding, and they were willing to pay more for it, alter their publication schedule for it. They donated to nonprofits that advocated against low-wage factories in South Asian countries, even as they made use of them, a move that showed a sophisticated grasp of global economics. be underreported because there were many who lived alone. She laughed. I edged back toward the door, my body aflame with goose bumps. I opened it and stepped back out into the hallway. After the ambulance arrived, Lane tried to answer questions as Blythe and I stood by helplessly. How long has she been fevered? the paramedic asked.I don’t know, Lane responded. We were only neighbors.Did you notice any odd behavior? he pressed. Or anything off about her appearance that suggested diminishing cognizance? Like if she wore winter coats in the middle of summer, that kind of thing?If I detected anything earlier, I would have called.Do you know how we may reach her family or next of kin?Lane shook her head. Again, I didn’t know her that well. She kept to herself. The city was empowering. Even if a woman doesn’t have anything, the movies seemed to say, at least there is the city. The city was posited as the ultimate consolation.Tonight, Times Square seemed dim. The feeling of walking into a mall before you’ve spent any money, the sense of promise that always diminishes gradually, as you go into the same stores, looking at the same merchandise. He turned to me again. But I didn’t come here to talk about this. I came in here to present you with my dilemma. Which is this: I can’t have you leaving. I forced a laugh. I’m not going to leave, Bob. Where would I go, at this point?His expression was stark, severe. But you intend to leave. You told Evan. And now that you’re with child… He trailed off, before catching the thread again. The point is, right now I can’t trust you. And Candace, honestly, it’s for your own good that we keep you in here. It’s very dangerous out there.My breath caught. Keep me in here? I repeated.Starting tonight, he confirmed. And don’t worry about anything. We’ll take care of you, provide for you. You’ll carry your baby to term.How long do you plan on locking me in for? I asked, and as soon as I asked, I knew it was going to happen, I was going to get locked in. Asking acknowledged his authority to do this to me.Like I said, until you carry your baby to term. And starting tonight we’ll keep watch over you. So you’re saying that I don’t even have a choice, I said, trying to keep cool, to play along.Bob’s voice escalated, betrayed anger for the first time. Everyone has a choice, Candace. Ashley had a choice. Janelle had a choice. You all had a choice when you decided to go on your little road trip that night. And all those other nights when you guys did stalks without telling anyone. He took a breath. Look, you’ve shown that you had no problem breaking the rules of the group.It took me a moment to find my tack. Arguing only seemed to make him angrier. Better to appear meek and fearful, better to assure him of his power. I began this way: I’m sorry that—So starting tonight, he interrupted, you’ll stay here. For the duration of this confinement, you should work on showing me that you can follow the rules. Upon his first glimpse of the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young proclaimed: This is the place.When Zhigang Chen and his wife, Ruifang Yang, arrived in Salt Lake City, the mountains in the distance looked brown and ugly from the plane window. This was the winter of 1988. This must be the place, Zhigang said, before the plane dropped its wheels and skidded down on the cold asphalt.He had been granted the opportunity to study in America through a scholarship from the University of Utah, which had offered him full funding to pursue his PhD in Economics. He was the first graduate student from China to be admitted into the department. Due to the rarity of such an opportunity—the doors between China and the United States were tentatively opening through scholarly exchanges—the Chinese government picked up the cost of his airfare, and in the months leading up to the trip, the couple had scrimped to purchase a ticket for Ruifang too. The supermarket was called Smith’s.They didn’t know what to buy, so they bought a gallon of whole milk, plucked randomly from a variety of brands and types. In Fuzhou, milk was rare, reserved for children, so an entire gallon seemed incredibly decadent, incredibly American. When they returned to the basement apartment, they each drank a glass and fell asleep. If she were fluent, if she could’ve overcome her shyness, her hesitancy, she would have liked to convey how far she had come. How in Fuzhou, she had been a certified accountant, and she counted among her clients various city and regional government officials. That her job had been deemed important enough for her to remain in Fuzhou during the Cultural Revolution, while her sisters, along with other youths, had been banished to menial labor in the countryside for years.The Cultural Revolution had shut down all universities for several years. It was only when they reopened, accepting only a few students, that her husband gained admission. By then, he was already twenty-five and had worked as a foreman at an auto-parts factory. He had aspirations of becoming a literature professor, but he had the misfortune of scoring highest in math on the entrance exams—and was thus assigned Statistics as his major. In those years he had studied so hard that he had developed ulcers and lay in bed for days. After that period, he was plagued with afternoon migraines that, for the rest of his life, never completely abated. She began every morning with renewed vigor to hook hair, every strand bringing her closer to saving the airfare money to bring their child to America. But by the afternoon, her vision blurred and her fingers ached. The afternoons were when the depression would settle in, and with the depression, there was a sense of anger. If she wasn’t careful, she would begin tallying her grievances, and assigning blame: Her husband for bringing her here. Her sisters in Fuzhou for being secretly pleased at her misfortunes, despite the Clinique products she sent them. The dingy apartment that resisted her cleaning attempts; They were playing grainy footage of what appeared to be a night protest. The shaky handheld camera documented a chaotic swarm of civilians, military tanks, smoke. Gunfire rang out. The crowds chanted, Fascists, fascists! She understood, suddenly, that the protest was taking place in China.Where is this? she asked.Tiananmen Square, he answered.The footage switched from the protest to chaotic scenes in a hospital. An old woman held a bloody towel to her head as onlookers rushed her through hospital corridors. She could understand the cries of the civilians, but not the voice-over narration. A concerned-looking news anchor came on, speaking in English.What’s he saying? What’s happening?They’re saying that there was a big protest last night in Tiananmen Square, Zhigang said. There were up to a million people there at one point, a lot of students and older citizens.What were they protesting for? she prompted.He looked at her. Democracy. Finally he looked at her and repeated his words, loud enough that they echoed through the basement apartment, decorated by the owners with dusty bowls of cranberry-spice potpourri and Precious Moments figurines and paintings of autumnal New England landscapes and Utah Jazz sports memorabilia and Michael Crichton paperbacks and pastel seashell-shaped guest soaps and other tchotchkes that did not belong to them, that they did not know or understand within any cultural context and did not find beautiful.We are never going back, he said. And, in case she didn’t hear, he repeated it once more, louder this time: We are never going back. Her homesickness eased in department stores, supermarkets, wholesale clubs, superstores, places of unparalleled abundance. The solution was shopping, Zhigang observed. He was not trying to be reductive.For a whole week, they took baths every day. It was almost enough to forget how, in Fuzhou, most everyone lived without bathrooms. At night, you just wet a hand towel with hot water from the kettle and washed your delicate parts as you watched the evening news. The God we know is the God of second chances, the pastor said. But it is also a responsibility to accept and shoulder the second chance that God gives you. A second chance doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.He looked around at the congregation. Now we are all, in this congregation, first- and second-generation immigrants. Some of us have been in America longer than others, but we remember where we came from, and certainly we all miss the place where we came from. He paused. But you must understand in immigrating to a new country, this is a second chance. And it comes with difficulty. Being here is not always easy. Too often, it feels like we don’t belong. Too often, we may wonder whether we’re just wandering aimlessly by living here. But it is a second chance. You must have faith.The congregation stood up and applauded. congregation of CCCC consisted mostly of immigrants from southern China. They were doctors, real estate agents, restaurant owners. One member owned all the Taco Bell franchises in the greater Salt Lake area. Zhigang and Ruifang returned the following week, and the week after that. Among the other wives, Ruifang flourished. She joined the ladies’ committee and helped plan out every Sunday lunch. They organized Bible study groups on Friday nights. Whenever a Chinese holiday approached, the committee prepared big, extravagant celebrations, using the church space to worship and to celebrate at the same time. To teach their children how to read and write Mandarin, they created an after-church Chinese language program, taking up a Sunday collection to buy pinyin guidebooks and teaching materials. When her daughter arrived, Ruifang thought, she could join this school too. And then she wouldn’t lose the language.There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief. Suffice to say, Zhigang and Ruifang came to know the customs and traditions of Protestant Christianity. They learned biblical stories and verses. They learned the hymns by heart. But the thing that Ruifang found most comforting about this religion was prayer. She prayed, at first imitating others during group prayers, and then eventually on her own, alone in the basement apartment. It was during the afternoons, her vision blurry and fingers stiff and fatigued from hooking wigs, that she sat down at the kitchen table and clasped her hands. It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say. Her prayers began as requests, sometimes bargains. She prayed to be swiftly reunited with her daughter. She prayed that the phone bill, during one particularly rough month when she kept calling her sisters and her mother, wouldn’t be too high. She prayed that her husband might find gainful employment after graduating. She prayed for a grocery store that stocked Chinese items, like rice cooking wine and dried mini shrimp for seasoning. Lastly, she prayed that God would deem fit for her and her entire family to move back to Fuzhou. It was the one request that she always made, without fail, in her looping, repetitive afternoon prayers—no matter how improved her circumstances. Then she was gone, moved to America, and I was transported to live in another part of Fuzhou, with my grandmother and grandfather, who, despite their best intentions, alternately coddled and neglected me. We lived on the middle floor of a three-story concrete apartment building that, like most homes, had no plumbing. I was fed and cleaned and allowed to watch soap operas; for the rest of the time, I was left to my own devices. The days were devoid of order or meaning. I played ninja with a plastic sword on the concrete balcony, often the only place where I was allowed outside. When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You’re not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn’t recognize me. That’s what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn’t know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you?But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist. Whenever she’d get mad, she’d take her index finger out and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she’d say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car (Thank you! I yelled. Scissors! I screamed). She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends’ birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse. The first time I was forced to kneel was when I was seven, after she caught me playing Homeless instead of House. Playing Homeless was what it sounded like; I pretended that I was homeless. My parents had just bought a new refrigerator, and I salvaged the cardboard box it came in and filled it with stuffed animals. We pretended we lived in the box, on the street of some big, metropolitan city. We shook a tambourine and asked imaginary passersby for change.She grabbed my arm and led me down the hallway of our tiny apartment, and into the bathroom. In the bathroom, she ordered me to kneel, fully clothed, at the head of the bathtub, the drain between my knees. She said that such a self-nullifying act of pretending to be homeless could only be punished by another self-nullifying act. I would have to be nullified twice over. She set the timer on my father’s watch for fifteen minutes. She switched the lights off and left. I was alone. I turned to look at her. She had been crying.Turn around, she said. You have no business looking at me.When I averted my gaze, she continued. We didn’t come to America so you could be homeless. We came for better opportunities, more opportunities. For you, for your father.And for you, I said, trying to complete her thoughts.She shook her head. No, not for me. For you. We brought you here to study hard, grow up, get a job, she continued. So you have no business being homeless. Do you understand?I nodded.I can’t hear you.Hao.You’re not in Fuzhou. Say it in English, she said in Chinese.Yes, I said. I understand. Sitting by her bed in the last days of her life, I didn’t mention any of this. A part of me wanted to remonstrate with her, to list out all her infractions in a final accounting, but the last days are for relief, not for truth. Besides, even if I spoke the truth, would she understand it, as I pecked through sentences in my garbled Chinese? Sometimes she didn’t even know it was me, confusing me with her sisters, her mother, or a distant relative I’d never heard of. She referred to me by their Chinese names, it was all a scramble. They were performing their Americanness, perfecting it to a gleaming hard veneer to shield over their Chinese inner selves. Please and sank you. My father had worked hard his whole life, taking late hours at the office, coming home to cold leftovers in the fridge. He received promotion after promotion, in part because he went into the office on weekends too. His work ethic was like that of many other immigrants, eager to prove their usefulness to the country that had deigned to adopt them. He didn’t get to enjoy his life nearly enough. One exception that I remember: The afternoon my father and I passed our U.S. citizenship test together, he took us to the KFC across the street and ordered a deluxe combo of fried chicken with all the sides. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but because he never treated himself, I ate a few pieces alongside him, feigning a festive, abundant appetite. We sat in a booth next to the window, and it was there, with the view of trucks ambling down the freeway, that he seemed to lose himself in memory. He told me that when he was a kid, growing up in the Fujianese countryside, meat and eggs were so scarce that they were only consumed during Chinese New Year. He grew up with hisgrandparents, tenant farmers. During the New Year festivities, his grandmother would prepare two eggs per person, fried on both sides with soy sauce on top, with crispy edges. That was his favorite dish when he was a kid. It was hard to conceive of anything better. In the afternoons after school, he taught himself English using a translation of the French novel The Red and the Black. He looked up every single word in a Chinese–English dictionary.What’s the book about? I asked.It’s about a man from a poor background who wants to better his life.Does he make it?My father smiled. He does, but it comes at a cost. There’s no happy ending. Your father is an ambitious man. He wanted a better life for you, and it is only possible in America. You are the only child. You must do better or just as well as him.But what do you want me to do? I asked, afraid to admit how much I didn’t know.I just want for you what your father wanted: to make use of yourself, she finally said. No matter what, we just want you to be of use. He narrowed his eyes at me. You know this Shen Fever thing is only going to get worse, right? Some are saying more than a third of the population in China are fevered. It’s way worse than avian flu.I shook my head. If that were true, then we would’ve heard a lot more about this.The state media in China controls the optics of this, so we don’t know the real statistics. Maybe they don’t want to incite mass panic, but I’ll bet it’s also because they don’t want foreign investors to pull out of their economy. They need to save face. I moved my hand away and said: No matter where we move, it would be the same thing for me. I’d need to hold down a job. I’d need to make rent. I’d need health insurance.Jonathan gave me a hard look. Why do you want to work a job you don’t really even believe in? What’s the endgame of that? Your time is worth more than that.I returned his look. The way you choose to live is a luxury. It’s only possible for a while, when no one depends on you. But it’s not sustainable. I’m not like you, I said. What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used toadmire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.I didn’t say these things because we had fought about this before, or some variation of the same issue. I didn’t want to fight on our last night. I didn’t want to hurt him. Maybe he sensed what I was thinking, because he was silent for a minute. Zuccotti Park resembled a deserted refugee camp. It was left this way for several days before the diminished maintenance crews came to clean it up. In news photos taken before the cleanup, abandoned tents, tarps, and pieces of clothing littered the grounds. You could read their discarded protest signs: PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS. DEPRIVATIZE DEMOCRACY. WE ARE THE 99%. EAT THE RICH. I picked up the pen. I flipped to the last page, to the dotted line.Wait. Michael leaned over. He put his hand over the contract. I looked up at him, and for a disorienting moment I could see his brother’s face. He looked sorry for me, which I couldn’t take, the condescending expression so similar to Steven’s. I wondered if Michael knew his brother and I had been involved. Probably.You’re going to want to think about this, he said. Read it before you sign it.It’s okay, I said. Everyone who’s taking this work leave, they’re going back to their hometowns, they want to be with their families. But I don’t have any living family—in the U.S., I mean. So I would have stayed in New York anyway. I’ve lived here for five years—it’s home to me by this point. This arrangement—my eyes flicked to the contract in front of me—just makes my time more worthwhile.I surprised myself as I spoke; I was frighteningly lucid.Michael’s expression changed from condescension to a particular paternalistic concern that reminded me of Steven. A family man.Still, he said gently. Take your time.Sorry. I’ll look it over at my desk, I conceded, then changed the subject. How’s your brother doing? Whatever happens to me, I don’t want Luna to be in this environment. I don’t want her to grow up here, in a group controlled by someone like him. I don’t want her to be within his reach. Even if the threat isn’t immediate, when it becomes immediate it will be too late. Well, we insist. You’re with—you’re with child, he says, his voice stumbling at the word child, as if it were a foreign word.I look around at the table, the few people left assessing my state of compliance. Well, of course, I say, and fork two Spam slices onto my plate. But this choice is a mistake, I realize too late. Because meat is typically reserved for special occasions, and it is what everyone wants, and I’m eating it right in front of them. Well, good. Dear Balthasar,It’s great to hear from you as well. Let me just clarify: This estimate request is not a new job, but a reprint of a job that Phoenix has already done, the Daily Grace Bible. You should have all the files and plates on hand from the original printing. We only have to update the copyright page. As the initial printing was a great success, it makes sense that we work with you again.I want to emphasize the scale of this project, and the opportunity that you may be turning down on behalf of your company. You are right that these are trying times, to say the least, but we are still in business and looking forward to working together.Best,Candace I’ve made it this far, so I’ll probably keep going. I took another sip of champagne. I’d like to get paid.Blythe and Delilah exchanged glances.Does it even matter at this point? Blythe snapped, with a quick annoyance that made me feel oddly fond of her. It takes us two hours to get to work in the morning. The buses do absolutely nothing. Dear Candace,Thank you for your response. You are candid with me, so I will be candid with you. Seventy-one percent of our workforce has become fevered. As you know, there is no cure. We have had to close the residence buildings. Phoenix Sun and Moon Ltd. will cease all operations at the end of this week.As for myself, I will be taking leave from Phoenix starting tomorrow. I am sorry to say that my daughter is also fevered, and our family is spending her last days together. There is no need for condolences. Almost all of my colleagues here at Phoenix Sun and Moon Ltd. have experienced something similar.I am pleased that we have worked together. You are good at what you do. In these sad, uncertain times, however, it is important to be with people you love. I do not know the details Your group of friends, Janelle, Ashley, Evan, are all gone. What do you think that means for you? she repeats.But as long as I’m pregnant, Bob is invested in my well-being, I argue hollowly.My mother tsks. Listen to what you’re saying. As long as you’re pregnant. Let’s say you have the baby. Do you think you’ll even have the chance to escape after that?I look at her, keep listening.As long as you carry this baby, he’s interested in making sure nothing happens to you. But what comes after that? She looks at meempathetically. Do you hear what I’m saying?You’re saying that I should try to escape while I’m pregnant.You should escape now, she says. Why do you think I chose this place, of all places we could’ve settled?Because you co-own this place.True. But that’s not the whole story. This place—and here, he looks around in the dim nothingness—holds a great deal of sentimental value for me. I used to go to this mall when I was younger.It takes me a moment to understand what he is saying. So you grew up around here? In Needling?He nods. My parents would drop me off here, and I’d spend hours just walking around. I’ve probably spent more time here as a kid than anywhere else.What about the house you grew up in?My parents sold it after they divorced, and it was razed to build a retirement home. So there’s nothing left. But I never used to hang out much at home anyway. My parents fought a lot, and so I’d come here a lot. I’d just walk around. When I was hungry, I’d eat free samples in the food court. When I was bored of walking, I’d play games in the arcade. The employees knew me. They’d give me extra tokens. As I walked, ideas for the blog snowballed. I took pictures of the meadows where carriage horses congregated, eating grass. I took pictures of all the obvious landmarks, now indefinitely closed: MoMA, Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center.There was a haunted look about all of these places. Ambling through midtown, I thought of the Robert Polidori photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a ghost town that formerly housed the nuclear-plant workers. Or the Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre images of Detroit, the images of abandoned auto plants and once-grand theaters. And the Seph Lawless images of the vacant, decrepit shopping malls that closed after the 2008 crash.The main difference from those images of decrepit places was that New York hadn’t given up yet. It was deserted but not abandoned. The institutions here were still being maintained, as if someone expected everyone to come back eventually. They were guarded by security guards, uniformed in black muscle tees and pants, emblazoned with the Sentinel logo of a guard dog silhouette. Except for their discreetly holstered guns, they looked like waiters. Often the Sentinel guards were the only nonfevered people I would see for days on end; their presence was both eerie and comforting. By late October, all major media outlets, including the Times, had stopped publishing. Visitors trickled in to NY Ghost. Overwhelmingly, they were from Kihnu, Iceland, Bornholm, and other cold-climate islands I had never heard of, where the fever had not reached. They requested photos and updates of their favorite places. It was as if they still couldn’t believe New York was breaking down, and needed confirmation. Everywhere else could fall apart, but not New York. Its glossy, reflective surfaces and moneyed environments seemed invincible. The subsequent post was a thirty-second video of the saleslady folding T-shirts. I tried to show it from a distance; I didn’t want the video to be too graphic. Half her jaw was missing. But the way she folded each garment, with an economy of movement, never breaking pace, generated a sense of calm and ease.It became the most popular NY Ghost post, but also the most controversial. I felt conflicted about it. Some readers expressed their sorrow and concern for my safety. They wrote about their situations—how their countries had closed off most imports and banned most foreign travel, to alleviate the spread of fever. They expressed regret that they could not extend invites for me to stay with them.Others accused me of posting disaster porn. They questioned why I hadn’t left New York, why I was compelled to keep going with this.How do we know, one skeptical reader wrote, that you’re not fevered yourself? You should put on your blog something about how New York belongs to the immigrants, how it was once the first point of entry for foreigners. The history of it, you know?I was thinking about doing a post about Ellis Island, but none of the ferries run out there anymore. We drove around in silence for a while. As we arrived in midtown, he said, There’s something I like about being in midtown Manhattan. Sometimes I drive here just to remind myself.Remind yourself of…?That there’s still civilization. In midtown more than anywhere else, there’s infrastructure. You’ve got the Sentinel guards, guarding our prized institutions. There’s less crime in midtown. The electricity stillworks. You can still get Wi-Fi here. You can still get a cell phone signal. Being here gives me a sense of stability when I think everything is coming apart. Is that why you left, because your blog no longer had a readership? he asked, the mocking now unmistakable in his voice—and something else: a hard contempt, resentment.I left because I was pregnant, I reply, which is not exactly the truth, but bringing it back to the baby seems to quell Bob’s moodiness.You’re young, he repeated. You’re maybe under the impression that everyone gets to do what they want for a living.I just… I floundered, trying to find the right words. I just don’t want my life to narrow so quickly. This job is fine. I just don’t see myself here forever.He folded the resignation letter and put it back into its envelope. It’s your choice, but I want you to be sure. If you’re lucky enough to find something you’re good at, where people appreciate you, don’t thumb your nose at it. If it’s an issue of salary or benefits, I’m open to discussing. He handed the envelope back to me. Why don’t you take until Monday to decide. Take Friday off. Spend the weekend thinking. You should be sure.I am sure, I said hastily.Be very sure, he said. At the mouth was a billboard for New York Life, some insurance company, that greeted all traffic entering the city. It showed a picture of a grandfather hugging two grandsons, next to the slogan LIFE IS KNOWING WHAT YOU LIVE FOR. Could he be sleepwalking? Could I be that lucky?I turn around and watch him in disbelief. His body language does not seem to acknowledge my presence. I watch as he walks away, his motions smooth and unselfconscious, as he turns around to descend the escalator.The car keys, dangling from his belt loop by an aluminum carabiner buckle, catch the early-morning light coming in through the skylight. They glint, beckoning me.I exhale, a deep, shaky breath. I begin to follow. I trail behind Bob, descending the escalator swiftly to bridge the distance between us. I look behind on the chance that maybe Rachel has followed me, that she too is looking for an escape route. But no one comes. The doors remain closed.I pull out of the parking lot and I get the fuck out. The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.I have been an orphan for so long I am tired of it, walking and driving and searching for something that will never settle me. I want something different for Luna, the child of two rootless people. She will be born untethered from all family except me, without a hometown or a place of origin. I want us to stay in one place. Maybe Chicago, the city her father loved, in which he once lived, could be the place.