by Tan Tuck Ming
For me, the question of nonfiction hews closely to the question of living in a world in which we are continuously produced as subjects of race, of gender, of capitalism, of power: to what and whom do I owe fidelity?
When we ask if objects have souls what we are asking is if it is made in China. When we ask if it is made in China we are asking if the object has a soul. The question of extraterrestrial life orbits in tandem with Chinese satellites. In thinking of the instructive power of light, touch the lightbulb that is made in China. Walk a body out over the night, defended from insects and unseen riot by a chemical plumed in China. Shower repeatedly with the powerful Chinese nozzle. Do you still turn away from God? Take a piece of paper and turn it over and in its whiteness you can read that it is made in China. Take your clothes out of the laundry basket and your experience of emptiness is not foreign to its production in China. China does not believe in a deficit of want because it is constantly machining desire. For the white noise machine. For the fake plastic plant. For the sheep placenta and the modern office. For the two-headed vibrator the Amazon reviewer sits on his Chinese-made bed to describe as I guess this has two ends so it’s really up to you. For the hole. For the extravagance of holes. For soap. For simple puzzles. For the handle of anything. For the time of year that is blue and loving. For the mouth teething grass. For the eyes listening to the length of your walk. For the bone gnawing for bone––my bone a bone stuck for bone and my body a body. Everyone knows the body, made in China, is the best specimen for exhibition. It is a shape and a future. Shapes and futures are conceptually Chinese, an abstract expressionism. At sundown, you are singing English with a Chinese voice made in China. You are five generations of diasporic progress. You eat the soil. You want to live. You want to love and you fear death and your mind flutters freely, uncontrollably, because liberal democracy is made in China. Martin Luther King Jr., the Chinese agent. The Pope, working overtime shifts for China. Octomom is a Chinese agent. Your mother is a Chinese agent. Hindsight is a Chinese agent. When you hit your head with your hands and cry, you are the endpoint of a shame, which is a supply chain beginning in China. In Chinese villages, old and young women are crying so your eyes can open out into water. The moan is not how one expresses pain in China. We live silently and shatter. Pain is a decision, which was calculated centuries ago in China. So is the lie. There are newer ovens. This is a good feeling. If you are dreaming of becoming an insurance broker or opening a Dairy Queen or renting a studio apartment, you are being dreamed by a laborer named Larry in Shenzhen. He is the enabler of love, or wonder, or what the woman ambling in the park calls the Chinese virus. All these things are part of an express delivery system: Everywhere, people have been receiving seeds in the mail from anonymous Chinese vendors, this century’s frontiersmen. When the seeds are planted in the ground, a forest bursts upward, already expertly wired. It takes three days for the internet to connect. You wake up, look in the mirror and realize there is no possibility left but to go around and be Chinese. Everyone is asking but there is no return policy. This is the requirement of cost-efficient Chinese production––only forward motion. Where could you even go? You watch the trains running all night to Xinjiang. You see the edge of the map where a person disappears, then more. You sit on a Chinese tree stump. A brisk wind that leaves you is like forgetting a word you need to say but cannot know. It travels around the world once and returns on your other side.
In nonfiction writing, reality is often put forward as an origin that we should seek to represent, but it’s more the case that there is no single origin but a multiplicity of narratives we are adjoined to and must contend with. For me, the question of nonfiction hews closely to the question of living in a world in which we are continuously produced as subjects of race, of gender, of capitalism, of power: to what and whom do I owe fidelity?
I wrote this piece as someone who is part of the Chinese diaspora in Western, majority-white contexts, where the discourse of China is increasingly twisted and loaded. To be part of this diaspora is to find kinship with all of these other objects, ideas, and sensibilities that are said to also come from China. It is, in this way, to be fastened to a point of origin that I do not clearly know or remember, to a word that is less a place than a specific narrative device. Writing about this honestly is less about sorting out the real from the not real but to project my own notion of China by working backwards from its many stray references, like a dog sniffing a scent, to speculate what came before me. The tools of speculation allow me to get closer to an unreality that bears its own truths of double-vision: the country that seems less a homeland than a relentlessly productive machine; the dwelling that seems both intimately near and impossibly far; an origin that can only be traced by scattering yourself in many directions.
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Tan Tuck Ming is an essayist, poet, and an MFA graduate at the University of Iowa. Born in Singapore and raised in New Zealand, his current work is interested in the shifting structure of the family, especially in the context of migration, displacement, and welfare. His work has been published or forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the Pantograph Punch, and A Clear Dawn, an anthology by Auckland University Press.