The Sunflower 向日葵

Two years ago today, I was at a cheap hotel in a little town southwest of Cleveland, Ohio. The night before I had (what they'd call) a "blast" at my first NBA finals --I actually made good friends with the guy sitting next to me who brought his father to the show ("you from China for grad school? you must be smart", "Man I'm just a stupid average American, I work at the car shop", "it's okay if you guys hate LeBron, we can still be civil during the game, eh?")--and 6am next morning I was sitting at the hotel lobby waiting for my lyft driver to pick me up to the Greyhound station in town.

2 things I've learned as soon as I arrived in the States are, A) people can get offended just by anything, and B) this is a nation knows little about grief. I mean, this country has too few wounds. I came from a nation who has been wounded significantly in almost every decade in the past century, and whose government, with multiple intentions, were determined to make these memories indelible in people's minds--especially in those of the children--to the degree where it is almost traumatizing. The mental images that I conjured up watching those documentaries and films as a child still haunts me today: the live burying, the forced incestuous rape, the killing for sports, the bayonet piercing raped bodies, the dead infants, etc. These are the nightmares that I had to wake up with for weeks, whose episodic return later in various forms seem to be only worse. I'm talking about the Nanking Massacre, of course. But there are even deeper wounds. We massacred against our past in the 60s and 70s, while others rebelled out of the surplus of production we rebelled out of the lack thereof; another time we massacred against our future in the late 80s, where those who should care took too little notice and those who should not, took too much. I guess the machinery of propaganda by the early 2000's administration did work-- whenever I look upon the peace and pristineness of my hometown, I feel much felicity. At the end of the day, these wounds dye my pupils with darker colors, so that the world before me is much more profound.

That morning, as I was swiping like crazy on my phone checking out the latest Reddit comments about how the Warriors gonna end the series with a 4-1 (where they blew a 3-1 lead, never forget, jklol), I heard an old lady gasping and mumbling at the front desk. The TV was broadcasting like mad about a shooting in an Orlando bar, which at the time didn't sound as bad as it was. You know the rest of the story. Twitter exploded, the entire nation mourned, everyone seemed to have something to say about it. And if you don't want to, you are always asked to. Our professor dedicated an entire session to talk about it, and you simply "have to" have something to say. It was a matter of grade point. People took to the streets, too. People of different colors, people with different sexual orientations and intentions, all came to join this ginormous parade for--God knows what it was for when the fiesta had been going on for over a week and you have met a ton of "friends" and by friends I mean potential sex partners.

And then was this sound. "POOF". This is no regular "poof", it was a sharp, abrupt, resounding and absolute "P-O-O-F". After this sound, everything died out, vanished, disappeared into the void. First it was the old lady's reaching out for his purse. "Oh dear lord..." I think that was what she was mumbling about as she groped for her cellphone in her purse. Seconds later she was talking to (most likely) her son about an incoming summer trip to Mexico. I was pondering on how much of an impression this alien message had left in her frontal cortex when her pinky silhouettes exited the front door: a lot, perhaps, or perhaps not enough, to endure the seepage of time. And then, you already know how fast hashtags dissipates-- three days later the entire twitter page was restored to its natural state of providing immediate sensorial gratifications and the mishap ayer seemed to be something utterly unthinkable. Professors went back to their baseline of the syllabus. Students and protestors went back to their posts with certain bruises in their hearts or on their necks. Only CNN still can't shut up about it, maybe because it was election season, and there's always more juice after the incident than during it.

So I guess a sense of Chinese exceptionalism did triumph towards the end, but it did not last long. For a good while it would seem that the incident was completely effaced from the entire nation's memory, and everything that has transpired was all but a long, strange dream. That changed when couple months later, on a unusually hot afternoon in southern Michigan, I went for lunch at a local Burger-Fi that I frequented. Amidst the infinite TV screens of Little League baseball and Summer League basketball, there was this music being played that was barely discernable, but it was almost unmistakably the soundtrack from the 2003 Charlize Theron movie Monster, a movie I just downloaded and watched last week from a Chinese website who posted its url under "June Classics". I cannot say if it has anything to do with the incident since the movie too is concerned with homosexuality, murder and Orlando. For a moment I had this impulse to ask the owner whom I know personally(a Black guy in his forties who would greet me with the catchphrase "what's shaking brotha" everytime) about the music since I never heard them played here before, but I refrained from it. There's no need to disturb the consciousness, to bring it before a court for a hearing ("Sir do you remember anything like that?" "Not to my recollection" "Sorry I cannot recall"), when you have the living proof right before your eyes (or ears) of the memory of the incident surviving in the collective unconscious of people. It didn't matter if the owner had chosen to play them intentionally or just by pure chance -- the point is that they were being played, at this juncture, a good while after all the limelights on the incident had gone.

Of course that is not the only residual memory of that wound, they were out there, everywhere, but more often then not too minute and too buried to be found. It was your pause before saying a name; it was your extra text message of "be safe"; it was your re-edited youtube comments that contains gay jokes; it was your whimsical decision to flatten the corrugated corners of your roommate's hexa-colored flag. It is beyond doubt that something has struck the nation's psyche, and something has become just a tiny bit different than before. Here I want to pause a moment to apologize to those victims and those who campaigned for their beliefs-- I don't think in any literary work can we be respectful enough to their loss and strife. Literature have the right to depict war, but those who were actually in it are ultimately the jury to decide if the art is respectful.

Later on I gradually came to realized that America does have wounds, she does grieve, just in different ways than China. Later that year I took courses which would take me up close to one of those various student movements and civil right movements in the 60s, and I was really amazed how they cried the same cry, marched the same march, and demanded the same demands as their peers in the other hemisphere once did. America has a special ceremonial habits and rites to remember wounds(again, caution against exceptionalism): these ritual is spontaneous and sporadic, sometimes impulsive, seemingly superfluous, and surprisingly sustaining. It is multifocal, rhizomatic, fragmented and unstable. But it is nevertheless efficient in its sedimentation of traumas, so that the nation can always move on. Unavoidably, it came with certain deficiencies, which could instantaneously turn into devastative forces: you'd know there's something horribly wrong when Anderson Cooper on his 360 show followed his sentence "today was a sad day" with "because President Trump didn't say blah blah blah to react to the incident" instead of "because of what happened in Charlottesville".

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is the deliberate increase or capping of death tolls; the artificial inscription of names and places and dates on people's minds; the ruthless condensation of colors and sound bytes into one month, one week and one day, so that they could be every month and every week and every day; it is the altar of all and nothing; it is the dynamics of the undynamic. The nation moves on, too, always, decisively and resolutely-- because that is the only way. Stability is not a choice but an imperative. At the end of the day, one simply cannot help but marvel at the magnificent constructs this stableness has created.

I apologize to history, I mean no offense. It's just-- sometimes we forget we were Sunflowers.

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

--Sunflower Sutra, by Allen Ginsberg

Summer 2016,

2017, 2018