The summer of 2005, I was twenty-four and running a punk bar in Wuhan, the biggest city in central China. During the school year, the place was packed with expats and local kids who came to see shows and mingle. There was something darkly utopian about it—moshing and chain-smoking mixed with the innocence of flirting and practicing languages. But by June all the revellers had left town. Most nights, I sat alone behind the bar until 4 a.m., drinking cocktails of my own invention from a limited supply of Western liquor.
Wuhan is notorious for hot, humid summers. Several nights a week, my neighborhood lost power. I had to drench my bedsheet in cold water, wrap it around myself, and lie down on the tile floor if I was going to sleep at all. I didn’t have an Internet hookup, and it was often impossible to reach anyone back in New York over the phone. I should probably mention that, in addition to cigarettes and alcohol, I was subsisting on a daily diet of one melon slice and four hours of exercise. This was all I knew how to do to try to make myself feel alive.
One morning, I walked around the corner to a dirt road lined with small shops, where you could find Popsicles, concrete mix, puppies, prostitutes, and the latest pirated DVDs. I went into an herbalist’s den, and asked for a tea “to wake me up.” The herbalist, an old man, got off his stool and peered into my eyes. He got closer to me than anyone had been in months. I wanted him to hold me, rock me gently in his arms, feed me tinctures that would soothe my nerves and crystallize my vision, tell me that I would soon be in the cool and easy swing of things. Instead, he sold me a prepackaged health tea and warned that I should quit drinking iced beverages. “Or else you’ll die,” he insisted.
“That’s O.K.,” I said, then paid and left.
I walked to an Internet café up the road. My anxiety at this time was both vague and maddening. It fed on itself, and spat out words for me to obsess over. That day, I sat down at a computer and Googled “death.” The first photos I saw were of mummified corpses—bodies shrunken, masklike faces gaping in silent horror. Then I found Victorian postmortem portraits—children propped up in chairs, perfect posture, only their dry eyes and lolling heads revealing the difference between strict obedience and extinction. Why preserve the dead, I wondered. What did these people know about life that I didn’t? Could I find it if I kept looking?
by Ottessa Moshfegh, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Rembrandt via Wikipedia
Wuhan is notorious for hot, humid summers. Several nights a week, my neighborhood lost power. I had to drench my bedsheet in cold water, wrap it around myself, and lie down on the tile floor if I was going to sleep at all. I didn’t have an Internet hookup, and it was often impossible to reach anyone back in New York over the phone. I should probably mention that, in addition to cigarettes and alcohol, I was subsisting on a daily diet of one melon slice and four hours of exercise. This was all I knew how to do to try to make myself feel alive.One morning, I walked around the corner to a dirt road lined with small shops, where you could find Popsicles, concrete mix, puppies, prostitutes, and the latest pirated DVDs. I went into an herbalist’s den, and asked for a tea “to wake me up.” The herbalist, an old man, got off his stool and peered into my eyes. He got closer to me than anyone had been in months. I wanted him to hold me, rock me gently in his arms, feed me tinctures that would soothe my nerves and crystallize my vision, tell me that I would soon be in the cool and easy swing of things. Instead, he sold me a prepackaged health tea and warned that I should quit drinking iced beverages. “Or else you’ll die,” he insisted.
“That’s O.K.,” I said, then paid and left.
I walked to an Internet café up the road. My anxiety at this time was both vague and maddening. It fed on itself, and spat out words for me to obsess over. That day, I sat down at a computer and Googled “death.” The first photos I saw were of mummified corpses—bodies shrunken, masklike faces gaping in silent horror. Then I found Victorian postmortem portraits—children propped up in chairs, perfect posture, only their dry eyes and lolling heads revealing the difference between strict obedience and extinction. Why preserve the dead, I wondered. What did these people know about life that I didn’t? Could I find it if I kept looking?
by Ottessa Moshfegh, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Rembrandt via Wikipedia
