Part 1: A Day In The Life of a Modern American:
The day passes, and I’m still in bed. Ugh… not again Lillian. I try to get up to brush my teeth and it takes fifteen minutes of convincing myself to do it. Frustration builds, and I get so annoyed with myself in my head that I rush through the entire process and have stormed out of my room and into the bathroom to take a shower. The entire time, in my head, a silent movie plays: hurry up, stop being so slow, it’s so easy, just do it already, you would’ve been done by now. And this repeated loop continues until I finish the task and look back at the clock, and spend time feeling guilty for how long the entire endeavor took.
Sue Zhao writes ‘excerpts from a book [she’ll] never write,’ which read like small poems that paint a picture of a fleeting moment. You are the character in her short story and she is too. She narrates your inner thoughts, guiding you through their logic and creating realizations for you. The guilt you feel, she has felt too. The realizations she gives to you, she has had to realize for herself. The poems she creates are never clearly linked together, but they touch on feelings of love and loss I’ve left half buried that she coaxes alive, leaving me feeling fresh and unhealed all over again.
I think to the Puritans who have left me feeling this way, casting virtue upon work ethic and strength, the kind of stoic strength that does not admit to feelings or pain. When I was once a young American on the elementary school playground, I remember quickly learning what weakness was. It’s crying for your parents when they drop you off at school. It’s crying when a soccer ball hits you in the face (and so I knew not to cry, saving those tears for a movie, or a tantrum later to be had). It’s asking for help and sensing that it took too much time — our teachers were busy, and so I would resolve to always figure things out on my own. This behavior was rewarded. And this was the culture I was adapting to. I had never thought to trace these values back to the original Americans until I realized how much of everyone else I met in America was the same.
