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MY GRANDMOTHER CAME BACK two years later. I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night — I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread. I started to fake illnesses so I could stay home with my 2-year-old brother. I followed him around everywhere, crawling when he crawled and walking on my knees when he learned to walk so that we were the same height.
relatable
My brother cried on the weekends when my grandmother went to work at a factory where she folded dumplings for five cents apiece. Most of the other workers could do only fifty an hour, and when the owner noticed my grandmother typically clocked in at a hundred and was teaching her trade secrets to the other ladies during their fifteen-minute lunch break, he instituted “quality control” rules, mandating a certain amount of flour on each dumpling and folds at the edge between 0.4 and 0.6 centimeters. My grandmother pointed out that he was arbitrarily docking pay for “unfit dumplings” without any real inspection, and all the dumplings she folded, including the unacceptable ones, were thrown into the same freezer bags, and that was exploitative. She persuaded the other workers to collectively demand back pay for all the rejected dumplings, and even organized a walkout one morning for higher wages. “Six cents a dumpling!” they chanted. The owner caved, and that day my grandmother came home pumping her fists like she was at a pep rally. Listening to her recount the day’s victory, even I had to admit that she’d done a great thing.
damn
All of her was laid bare now — I saw her. She was just an old woman, raised in the country without education, who’d been told as a girl that women had been put on this earth to give birth and rear children and not be a burden in any way but to live as servants lived, productively, without fatigue or requirements of their own, yet had been resourceful and clever enough to come up through the feminist movement that Mao had devised to get women out of the house and into fields and factories, who had been given more power than any of the women in her lineage, who alluded to all the people she “saved” but never the people she turned in during the Cultural Revolution, whose hearing loss fed her fears of becoming useless, and who to counter those fears adopted a confidence that was embarrassing to witness, an opinion of herself so excessively high that it bordered on delusional. She tried to make her children believe they would perish without her, and when they learned better she tried the same with her grandchildren. But we were learning better, too, and it would be years before we had our own children, and by then she would be dead. My grandmother’s unwillingness to be a victim was both pathetic and impressive, and she deserved compassion. But fuck, why did she have to be so greedy for it? It repulsed me that she wanted my brother and me to love her more than we loved our own parents, more than we loved each other, more even than we loved ourselves.
damn this is brutal (sad)
“Mother,” she said, as she jumped on the trampoline. “Mother, I didn’t want to leave you, but I had to go with Father into the mountains. Mother, you told me to take care of my brother and I let him fight and he lost his legs. Mother, I let you down. Mother, you said you wanted to die in my arms and instead I watched our house burn with you inside as I fled to the mountains. I told Father I wanted to get off the horse and die with you and he gripped me to his chest and would not let me get down. Mother, I would have died with you, but you told me to go. I should not have gone.”
I took a step toward her. Her eyes were open but they did not see me. In the dark, I thought I would always remember this night and be profoundly altered by having seen her this way. But it was like one of those dreams where you think to yourself while the dream is happening that you must remember the dream when you wake — that if you remember this dream, it will unlock secrets to your life that will otherwise be permanently closed — but when you wake up, the only thing you can remember is telling yourself to remember it. And after trying to conjure up details and images and coming up blank, you think, Oh well, it was probably stupid anyway, and you go on with your life, and you learn nothing, and you don’t change at all.
aaah this made ms cry
Unh unh unh, he wagged his finger at Julie as if they were in a sitcom. And maybe they were. After all, what was someone like her doing with him, listening in rapt attention to a middle-aged man with flaking skin on his forehead and cheeks, knowing that in fifteen minutes they would head to the bedroom, and she would have to suck his cock in that carefully calculated, enthusiastic way, bringing him to the edge several times until she ran out of to-do lists to compose in her head and had to entertain herself by sexually objectifying his despicability, which was actually easy for her; heterosexuality was inherently sickening and Julie had always dealt with the lack of power in her life by eroticizing it. If all orgasms were an act of conquer and surrender, and all life was subject to humiliation and disgust and violence, well then she might as well get off on it.
a little annoying but kinda funny i guess
This was all a lead-up to trying to get Julie to agree to spend time with John for free. If famous Hollywood actresses were paying to see him and willing to do just about anything to fuck him, then clearly he was a sought-after man. Only the most superficial dum-dum of dum-dums focused on the glut of his gut that hung over his belt like a fanny pack, and the receding hairline, and his sunken eyes and sloping forehead and yellowing brittle nails and overall repulsive personality! Couldn’t Julie see? He was a dreamboat on the q.t.! Only a fool would decline a “free” dinner at a Michelin three-star restaurant with him.
this is just purely annoying
He looked up at her with the reverence of a pilgrim. He especially liked being mothered by young girls. Bouncy flesh made him feel alive and their desire to take care of him made him feel capable of love. Capable of being loved or of loving someone? Julie wondered, even though, deep down, she didn’t trust herself to know the difference. Merv was turned on by the kind of love that Julie found immoral outside of a transaction because it was only unconditional in one direction—from a woman to a man. (That’s all marriage, Erin said when Julie started ranting about Merv’s lack of reciprocity. That’s like, being straight. That’s me with Steve. Except Steve loves me more than I love him. You should get someone like Steve—stable, dependable, and knows how to make you squirt!) Like all johns, on some level, it bothered Merv that he had to pay for it. Why didn’t Julie offer herself freely to him? After all, he was handsome, interesting, a Hollywood insider received with the cachet of an outsider. He had won several Oscars and still went to punk shows. In his twenties, he made movies she had loved as a teen. On their second meeting, she revealed to him that she only owned three VHS tapes growing up—one of them was Batman Returns, the other was on a list of “100 Worst Movies of All Time,” and the third was his second film, a philosophically complex art house–mainstream crossover film that blurred fiction and documentary in a recursive exploration of loneliness. She told him it set her imagination aflame, and he seemed genuinely pleased.
is this supposed to be like caveh or something lmao
I must have gotten it from Blockbuster? Or maybe the library had a clearing-out sale? She honestly couldn’t remember, but she did remember the afternoon when she came home from school and watched the movie, finished it, and immediately rewound to the beginning and watched again. From that point on, she watched it every day. It was always something new to her. There was always a new question. It had sparked in her a desire to make something that could make someone feel the way she felt every time she watched Merv’s movie—connected to the world and all of its mysteries. It was right then and there that she decided she wanted to be . . . an artist. What kind? She didn’t know. All she knew was she wanted to create, not just watch. She wanted to make things, not just be in them. She wanted to plumb the mysteries of the world and share what she didn’t yet know with other people who loved questions that led to more questions.
need to investigate this passage more to understand why i find it so annoying when theoretically it's right up my alley. is it the distance of the third person perspective?? it can't just be that
Julie could endure being treated like a stupid child, but what she couldn’t tolerate was when these men got it into their heads that they were actually lovable. If she couldn’t bring herself to love extraordinary men who actually contributed to cultural history, who turned their creepy sexual obsessions with women into art, then what made these losers think she could love them? They who contributed nothing and were part of a power structure that benefited the rich and stole from the people—the goddamn people!—by which she meant her parents and the families she grew up with, not these men who paid for every aspect of their personality, who couldn’t get off unless there was an element of coercion. Julie loathed the class of rich, untalented men who felt entitled to purchase anything at all, including human connection, but what could she do? She couldn’t open jars on her own. She looked like someone who made a certain kind of man feel strong and capable, which wasn’t much of a feat: you just had to be skinny in that way that didn’t look like it came from deprivation or too much time at the gym and have big doe eyes and long lashes, a tiny but full rosebud mouth, rosy cheeks, and soft skin—that was it! It was nothing that couldn’t be bought or passed down genetically (and all things passed down “genetically” had to do with intergenerational consolidation and hoarding of power, money, and resources anyway). The more difficult thing was when a woman successfully adjusted her personality over time to remain interesting and intriguing and nonthreatening without ever revealing needs of her own.
why is this so annoying???
The third time they met, she let him fuck her without a condom. Just pull out and don’t come inside me, okay? He came on her stomach and then told her all the things he couldn’t express the year before at a two-day ayahuasca ceremony in a hippie port town in the Olympic Peninsula. There had been so many middle-aged white people there, sobbing and speaking earnestly to an oily, lizardlike creature they had seen emerging out of their outstretched arms, but Merv couldn’t conjure up any kind of creature and could only sit there in an unnaturally stiff position, frozen with paranoia that maybe someone in the group recognized him and pitied him, for he was alone and hadn’t come with a partner or even a friend. Afterward, he decided to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife. They never got formally remarried, but they had a non-legally-binding commitment ceremony off the Amalfi Coast, and one month into being a changed man, he went back to his old standby, the online marketplace for “high-end escorts and modern-day courtesans.” He instantly went into a euphoric high followed by a flattening numbness—how many juicy tits and round bums could a guy see in a row? It all became as tasteless to him as caviar, literal caviar, he revealed to Julie. He yearned to taste something for the first time, to return to that childlike state of being guilelessly open to the world, before we armored ourselves against disappointment and danger. He wanted, essentially, to feel again.
it's all theoretically up my alley and yet just feels so tedious. it drags