Los Angeles Review 2023 Creative Nonfiction Award: Andrew Wei
Final Judge: Chelsey Clammer
Life Support by Andrew Wei
In North Texas, the place I knew as home for many years, the storms in late spring come down like a hammer. One warm humid afternoon, I stepped outside just as the trees began to rattle in the wind. My hairs stood on end; something old and animal whispered to me from a forgotten corner.
I was stuck in a job I hated. I lived out of a suitcase on weekdays, crashed with my parents on weekends, and somewhere between one city and another I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt dirty. I wore dry-cleaned suits and traversed an endless sequence of air conditioned offices. I showered in hotel bathrooms without having produced a single drop of sweat all day.
I was disappearing. I felt the need to do something absurd and dramatic, to prove to myself that I still existed. As thunderheads darkened our unremarkable suburb, I walked into the street outside my childhood home and lay flat on my back. First came a few heavy drops, then a roar. My eyes blurred with water, and I pleaded silently for something to shake me loose from the life I was
living.
*
I think I have always been trying to escape, though for a long time I didn’t know that was what I was doing. What awe I could find in my everyday existence came from lying in the dark on a
clear night, my head tilted upward toward the sky. Light pollution from the city meant I could only see a few dozen stars, but I often lingered in the yard long after midnight, cherishing even this limited glimpse into a universe so much older and vaster than myself.
The stars teach us that distance is time, and time distance. Light travels at a finite speed: it takes light from the farthest stars so long to reach us that we see them the way they appeared thousands or millions or billions of years ago. Said another way, to stare into the night sky is to look back toward the beginning, moments in our own past. “Searching for a lighthouse in the breakwaters of our uncertainty,” writes the poet Diane Ackerman, and indeed it is when I am most in need of answers that I find myself inexplicably drawn toward lights in faraway places, toward the horizon, toward memory.
*
I moved as far away from Texas and from my job as I could, hoping to discover what it was that I needed. I landed in Singapore in August 2019, where I worked for a nonprofit based in a converted shophouse. For five months, I was in love with everything. I loved the clamor of street hawkers at lunchtime. I loved watching the container ships anchored at sea, their running lights suspended in the haze. I loved the warm night breeze as I walked home along the river.
Then the pandemic swept into our lives, and I found myself isolated in an apartment that suddenly felt outlandishly large for me alone. When COVID-19 reached the United States, my phone filled with frightened texts from friends and family, accompanied by images out of a war
zone. The field hospitals erected in public parks. Emergency sirens wailing around the clock. In the middle of the night, as the sun rose on the Western hemisphere, I often awoke with my heart racing to check the latest grim statistics. I didn’t know what to do: it was like my country slipped further away every time I closed my eyes.
*
A man sits in a pool of light surrounded by soft darkness, in his own world, impossibly distant. In his hands is a long pipe, at the end of which spins an orb of molten glass glowing like a miniature orange sun. He raises the pipe to his lips. I am five years old and it is the first time I have seen a kiss. I wait, breathless, as the man blows gently into the glass — as it lengthens, cools, and is enveloped by the dark.
It’s hard to distinguish between my earliest memories and my earliest dreams. Before I moved to Texas, I lived in Corning, New York, a small town surrounded by hills that is perhaps best known for its Museum of Glass. When I ask my mother about it, a sad expression comes over her face. She must have been very lonely there. But I loved this glass town as a child, mostly because it was my first home and I was leaving it.
I didn’t see Corning again for almost two decades, when I made a pilgrimage in my early twenties to revisit the scenes of my childhood. To my disappointment, I found that the glassblowing demonstration was now well-lit, with a matter-of-fact narration and none of the
hushed magic that I remembered. Or perhaps it was my memory that had added those things over time.
*
Earlier this year, a friend from Denmark dragged me to Maine and spent a long weekend teaching me about ice. I had never set foot on a frozen lake, and I had to be shown where it was safe to walk, where the ice was thin enough that I might accidentally fall through. In a parallel world, these instincts might have been mine as well, in the way that people growing up in cold climates inherit such things. But my life had taken me elsewhere.
One evening after dusk, we ventured out on to the dark ice and lay down side by side, our breath steaming into the air as we looked up at the constellations. I had known the lake beneath me for less than forty-eight hours, but above lay a familiar terrain that I still remembered how to navigate by hand. The Big Dipper shone directly overhead: from there, we found the North Star by holding our fingers at arm’s length, using thumb and pinkie to measure the distance from one guide star to the next.
It is a common misconception that the North Star is the brightest star in the sky, when in reality it is exceptional only because it appears motionless throughout the night. Mariners have known this for centuries: as the Earth rotates on its axis, the constellations turn in a great circle across the sky, at the center of which rests a fairly ordinary star. Our instruments have improved since antiquity, but only in the last century have astronomers confirmed that the North Star is not one
star but three, bound together by gravity — themselves turning around their common center, seeming only to touch when viewed from far enough away.
*
What is it about catastrophe that I find so clarifying? In my apartment in Singapore, under strict lockdown measures, I finally knew where I belonged, and it wasn’t where I was. I needed to be at home: for the first time, I had a powerful sense of who my people were, and my people were
suffering, were dying, and there was nothing I could do about it from the wrong side of the world.
The word belonging suggests another emotion, longing. To long is to trace the distance between you and what it is you long for — for a part of you to be far away, unreachable except perhaps through a screen. My balcony overlooked the Singapore River, where I spent hours in the evenings watching the lit windows on the opposite shore. Thunderstorms rolled in every night, mountains breaking apart in the sky, as distant artillery seemed to flash on the horizon.
I was living in a capsule — unbelievably safe, sealed off from the hostile world around me. I was ashamed of how little was being asked of me, beyond boredom and homesickness, as if I could somehow siphon fear and pain away from my loved ones and take it into my own heart instead. By May 2020, it had been two and a half months since I had been face-to-face with anyone I knew, and a little longer than that, maybe three months, since I had touched another human being. On the rare occasions that pandemic restrictions allowed me beyond my front door, my facemask stopped me from sharing even other people’s air. I wonder what I found so compelling about this isolation. Never before had I been so aware of the sound of my breathing; it was like being an astronaut on a planet that wasn’t my own, donning layers of armor to survive what would otherwise be unsurvivable.
*
After my grandmother died, my mother returned to China to lay her own mother’s bones to rest. She didn’t take her husband, or her two sons. She went alone and returned alone.
There were no tears when she came back. My mother has shielded us so thoroughly from her hurts that I can almost imagine she is okay. But I have a pretty good imagination. Let me try now to imagine her one night, when Dad is out for an evening walk and the house is silent except for the crickets singing in the yard. She sits alone at the dinner table under a single lamp that hangs from the ceiling. Down the hall, under a painting of the yellow house in China where she grew up, her eldest son waits just out of sight as she puts her head in her hands. There in the kitchen, alone, perhaps she is back in that yellow house, with her chickens, her banana trees, her brothers and sisters, with the roof sloping so gently to the ground that a child can climb safely out the second-floor window — all of it, all of them young again, and alive. She doesn’t know that someone else is in the room. She doesn’t know that she is teaching her son to grieve as he watches her from the darkness and doesn’t say a word.
*
I left Singapore in the middle of the pandemic’s second wave, moving back in with my parents because it seemed the most obvious place to return to. From my childhood bedroom, I threw myself into public health work with an ecstatic sense of purpose, working around the clock to coordinate the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. I was ready to give everything of myself. On days when I forgot to eat, my parents left food outside my door. I often didn’t have the time or energy to shower. I lived off of the fierce certainty that what I did mattered to someone: I was making up for lost time, and each minute I spent at my desk could mean another shot administered, another life saved.
Life support is a term used in emergency medicine, meaning the treatments or techniques used to keep a dying patient alive. But life support also refers to the specialized suits worn into outer space or the deep sea, where the environment does not otherwise permit human life. These systems enable us to go beyond where we come from, beyond biological limits, carrying all the air and water and nutrients that our bodies need to survive.
Here on Earth, I don’t need a spacesuit, or maybe I have been living in one this whole time. By the time the pandemic concluded its first year, I had developed an involuntary revulsion toward strangers. My one concession to my physical health was to go on walks around the neighborhood, but I moved as if surrounded by an invisible barrier, a prickling anxiety spreading across my skin whenever someone passed too close by. It had been so long since I had thought about anything other than infection. I found myself holding my breath, averting my gaze, as if by making eye contact some terrible spark might pass between us.
*
I wonder if I am waiting for disaster to strike me, as if being wounded would help me make sense of this weight that I can’t explain. What is it that I have lost? How much of this grief belongs to someone else, and how much of it is yet to come?
One night, irresponsibly late, my friend tells me she’s never sure whether she’s allowed to give me a hug. You won’t let people love you, she says. A different night, a different friend, saying: Grief is just the pain of love you can’t give. My mother is still waiting there in the dark at the dinner table. It is possible to be thousands of miles away from someone but even further when they’re sitting right next to you.
All I want is to be held, but I don’t say it.
*
I grew up in a sturdy home on a well-lit street, where the air was safe to breathe and the nights only ever got so dark. But there are moments when we step out of safety, out of whatever keeps us breathing, so that for just an instant we brush against all that is dying and feel what it really means to be alive. I don’t know how to mourn every opportunity I have missed. I don’t know how to set down something that never was. What I have been trying to say is this: I have lived in
many places, and been infatuated with others, but in my desperation I find that I have yet to fall in love.
Since the pandemic began, I have spent every December in Texas with my family. My mother has become fascinated with birds, and at least once each winter, we drive an hour out of the suburbs to watch thousands of wild geese pass through on their journey south. A long dirt road leads us to a national wildlife refuge, where protected wetlands straddle the rich oil deposits on the Oklahoma border. We park and get out of the car. The cries of geese fill the silence between us.
Now the sunset blazes rust-red across the water. The moon hangs in the east where the Earth’s shadow is just rising over the hills. There is no sound but the wind and the birds. They search for a place to land, drifting down from the sky like snow, as the pumps in the distance nod their heads over and over.
Andrew Wei is a Chinese American writer raised in New York and North Texas. This is his first published essay; his poetry has previously appeared in EVENT, fields, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. A recent Master in Public Policy graduate, Andrew currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. He can be found online at alsoranaway.com.
26 March 2024
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