WHAT WAS AMERICA LIKE IN 2019?
Yin: School shootings in another city on my first day in high school. Some black kids beating yellow kids in Philly on football court in news. Police dogs smelling cocaine in our backpacks before lunch break. Classrooms full of immigrant kids, French, Armenian, Kazakh, Spanish, all in one room. Cool skaters, punks, theatre kids. First wave of covid. A lot of distances. This year I was far away from the person in front of me. The year when Asians were forbidden to get sick. The year when if your eyes were considered “Chinese” enough, or your face shape was “Chinese” enough, or skin color or accent, you’d eventually be sick with “Chinese disease.” Trump’s first tenure. Countless fines for no fucking reasons. We got the first picture of a black hole. Remember the singularity vastness, the nothingness inside of the dead alien eye? The point of no return. Pristine beauty of total escapeless erosion. Five years before cancer killed grandma. A year ago now. Remember the warmth of her hands.
Yang: Palm trees, of course. California fires. Me and moms always on long highway ride. We drive down Oceanside Vandegrift Boulevard passing Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton on the left where yellow poison wormwood grows on the freeway to San Diego. This is a military base, map says. On the next corner sign is San Clemente State Beach. We drive by and follow the old North Pacific Ocean straight into La Jolla Shores. Waves. Summer salt.
Yin: The rounding of an auricle or seashell. Circle, echo, tunnel. Sound of inertia. Soft spirals. We arrive there by Thanksgiving. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, window says. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. I like that phrase, sticker on the glass. The only thing I know is that I was closer to god then than I’m now. Who moved? The second only thing I know is that samsara is an echo. Some coincidences have to wait a long time. An old indigenous man named North Star dies in the hospital, texting my mom but she never comes to see him. Me publicly crying in the NYC metro on New Year's Eve. Getting harassed on the streets. Asian hate. Declining world. The year of somebody committed suicide & somebody survivor story. The year when the neighborhood stopped looking after kids and started to carefully watch them. According to Chinese calendar, the year of Earth Pig has come to end the cycle.
M87 black hole, image obtained from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration.