the flood and its aftermath

biblical fantasies & qiu miaojin

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I moved to China to be with my then-partner, trying to figure out how we could make a life together under those extraordinary circumstances. During that summer I took a writing class taught by the brilliant

Sanjena Sathian

, the first and to date only time I have shared my work in a workshop setting.

Those were difficult times to say the least, in the world at large and in my personal life, and Sanjena’s class was a salve. It provided some structure to my days: there were peers’ pieces to critique every week, and I had to write and polish a piece of my own to submit for scrutiny. That was my first serious attempt at writing fiction, and I landed on a speculative story about a couple sheltering in isolation from a historic flood that has surged across the globe, a handy metaphor for my pandemic reality. I named it Every Creeping Thing That Creepeth Upon the Earth, a phrase taken straight from the Bible. It also contains a line that is on my mind often: I may have been a wretched wench, a wicked witch, and yet I have wrenched for myself this incredible happiness.

I would not call the piece my best work – whose first short story is? But over the intervening years I have tried to find it a home regardless, and it has finally been published in The Quarter(ly) Journal, as the very last piece in its Wet issue, which can be preordered here.

When the piece was accepted for publication, I read it for the first time in almost four years, and felt a strong urge to rewrite it entirely. I was shocked at the story I had spewed: the religious references despite not having been religious my entire adult life, the insecurity that loomed like a wave in the central relationship, one that so closely echoed my own. Most striking was just how abject the story had been: the protagonist’s desperation to leave the claustrophobic situation she had chosen, her corresponding determination to disguise how bad things really were; the mounting dissonance between the two. Spoiler alert: the story ends with the protagonist hurling herself into the water.

As I remember it, I had shared the piece with my partner multiple times, nonchalantly soliciting feedback, as if the story were no big deal, entirely apart from the nightmare we were living through. Was I entirely oblivious to the hopelessness I had portrayed? Was I trying to tell him, and myself, something?

In retrospect I made plenty of oblique gestures like this then. I had been working on my master’s degree that year, and the day I submitted my dissertation, I went downstairs to the gift shop and bought a handcrafted ring that I wear on my ring finger to this day, the first ring I have ever made a habit of wearing. We had been talking about getting a tattoo together, some kind of attempt to brand us as partners for life – a discussion that found its way into Every Creeping Thing – but as he procrastinated on the decision, I went ahead and got myself tattooed on my own. I don’t think I was conscious of my intentions, but it is no wonder that he might have read the worst into my actions, and perhaps as a consequence, drove himself – and us – into destruction.

*

Recently I read Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words From Montmartre 邱妙津《蒙瑪特遺書》, an epistolary novel dated just weeks before Qiu, a Taiwanese writer and LGBT icon, committed suicide in Paris in 1995. I had first tried to read it two years ago, shortly after breaking up with said partner, and found the book a strenuous chore: the arc of the narrator’s relationship, the devastation and distance of it, hit too close for comfort, and often sent me spiralling into hours of rumination that went nowhere. I spent weeks grovelling through the first half before abandoning it altogether. This time, after a Cantopop karaoke session propelled me to pick up something Chinese again, I gave it another go, and inhaled it within four days.

Last Words is not an enjoyable read. It is composed of a series of letters mostly written to a woman named Xu, who the narrator believes to be the love of her life and who has betrayed and abandoned her. For much of its length the narrator plunges over and over into the depths of her grief, recanting how cold and heartless Xu had been to her, iterating and reiterating her own theories of love and respect and betrayal and forgiveness. Now and again she readily admits to the violence in the relationship, her shame at her own faults, the fatalism underpinning her days.

To illustrate, a sample from early in the book reads (translated into English by Ari Larissa Heinrich): 請不要覺得負擔重。我只是還有東西要給你，且是給，只能給了。蜜汁還沒被榨乾，一切的傷害也還沒完全斬斷我牽在你身上的綫，所以我又回到你身邊專心為你唱歌。Please don’t feel burdened by this. It’s just that I still have so much to give: I want to give you everything there is to give. The sweet juice has yet to be completely squeezed from the fruit. All the hurt has not yet severed the cord I’ve tied to your body, so I’ve returned to your side to sing for you. The narrator’s sincerity is needy, excessive to the point of melodrama. In her review of the novel for Bookforum, Eileen Myles writes, “Is this even a book, I wondered at one point. Not because it was unreadable but because its flowery will is so very hard to bear.”

So very hard to bear, precisely for the narrator’s unabashed willingness to stare down her feelings and pin down on paper exactly as they appear to her in the moment. Her words perhaps call to mind the earnest, searching diaries of our own lovelorn adolescence, at once vapid and altogether too much, writing we would never want to see the light of day, that we cannot recall without extreme cringe. Have I not, at age 14 or 15, mechanical pencil in hand, once or many times, scribbled of my yearning to 愛得轟轟烈烈 – to love devastatingly, all-consumingly – carefully articulating the bombardment of 車s in each rumbling 轟? All the while, if a lover ever attempted to give me these words in a letter, the effect would have been insufferable.

But beyond the development of a certain self-consciousness, it takes audacity not to dress up your wounds in language, choosing instead to present them in all their glaring, bloody, gruesome glory. It takes courage to be utterly lucid about your grief, to admit it honestly not necessarily to others but above all to yourself, and to do so at its most acute, when the flood has surged to its highest point, not years later in retrospect when only the ruins remain and it is entirely too late. To write not in service of self-deception but in deliberate refusal of it: this feels like a noble goal to strive towards.

*

For whatever reason, between the tight publishing schedule of the magazine and my own workload, I never did rewrite Every Creeping Thing, and the published piece is now a time capsule of my emotional landscape circa a terrible time I would prefer to forget. It is unfortunately only in print, not in digital form, but if you are at all interested in reading a tender, sad, hysterical, and very watery story, just let me know.

Tomorrow also marks ten years since I first stepped off a plane in a city where I knew no one (Bangalore), to take up a job I knew nothing about (journalism), and jumpstarted my adulthood – one of the more reckless decisions I have ever made. A wild, wild decade this has been. Thank you to everyone who has been by my side for any part of this journey, dear friends who have witnessed (tolerated) my constant flailing, who have not minded saving a different phone number every year. YOLO, never forget, no regrets whatsoever.

I am about to spend the first half of September in Bogotá, and in October I will be making a whirlwind trip through Madrid/Málaga/Venice/Milan. Would love any and all advice, above all what to read!

Image is Gerhard Richter’s Seestück, 1969