Between frantic calls from aunts, my mother's suddenly soft tones, love from friends, I realize there's really no point in denying it, I am entirely not miserable, and any attempt at misery, cynicism, or sadness, is sheer self-pity and indulgence and bullshit writer crap. I am as normal and wholesome as it gets. Maybe I'd hoped moving to China, like moving to America once was, would be a cataclysmic rip in my life that might inspire momentum and tears. There were those, of course, moments when it felt like the floor was about to cave in, but let's be honest here: I have six aunts and every one of them is ready to drop their life, come to Beijing, and take care of me at anytime. How bad can this life be? Mao Mao says she is attracted to people like us, that there is a light that screamed we came from good, loving families, that we are ok, we aregood. Rong Rong says hardship is written all over Mao Mao's face. That beyond the beauty and brilliance is an indomitable sadness. I wonder if it's my own lack of tragedy that makes me love her too. It makes me want to look at her in the eye and say: hey, listen, one day the bubble will burst and I'm gonna crash hard, but I'll be ok because you're the toughest woman I know. Then she'd smile one interminable smile, the one where her eyes light up through painstaking makeup and say: baby, I know, and you'll be fine, I know.
But Mao Mao, if I look for destruction in all the wrong places, would you still be there in the end to salvage the pieces. Would you drag my fake poser poet body from the mob and slap me upside the head and go: baby, five glasses of wine is all the excitement you need in this life. Don't fight the good girl. Don't fight.
I need air. I wanna fight. I wanna drink. I wanna bleed. I wanna fall all over the place so I can finally wake up.