Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

The feeling he was free.

We will bear his blight, and others, trying to understand them as what naturally attends any plenitude, the rise of certain kinds of pests. But what gives us pause is what also may be happening to the rest of us, who have not gone to any extremes and never will and yet are differently engaged, not ultimately self-celebrating and self-aggrandizing like our health center muckraker but oriented in a way we haven’t quite been before. Are our thoughts angling as much toward ourselves as to our household or clan? Have we become as primary as the collective rest? Such indication may be in what we have begun to hear and see of the concern for Reg. B-Mor remains focused and worried about his whereabouts and welfare; there are growing calls for official information; there was even a lie-in at one of the main intersections of the settlement, in which a thoroughly organized group of younger people spelled out his name on the asphalt with their bodies, causing a jam that took some hours to undo, an inconvenience for sure but one we abided.

There are other Reg notations that don’t at first blush appear out of the ordinary. Newer tags, hand done, that only slightly revise what we’ve seen before, such as:

FREE ME, REG.

I MISS REG.

And amazingly, REG ME, which must have inspired the now popular eponymous song, whose lyrics, quirkily charming as they may be, are remarkable mostly in how much they reveal the fascination the singer has with herself. She goes on and on, and by song’s end, we can’t help but think only of her sitting at the mall café, her tea getting cold, waiting for a boy who might never come. We end up losing Reg all the more. Hey, that’s the point, some say, though it doesn’t feel in the least convincing on that score. And although the majority of us are still fixed on Reg’s happy images about the walls and streets, on the shapely simplicity of his name, on the hope that he will return to us unchanged and whole, it seems some of us have already skipped a few beats forward with no wearing effects at all.

What stands besides is that there has been nothing of Reg. Nothing at all, if you don’t count the wild rumors, which have him simultaneously manning a handscreen accessories kiosk in D-Troy, and gravely injured while attempting to escape from wherever the directorate was detaining him, and currently living among us after being cosmetically and mentally altered, which set off a brief period in which younger men of his build and height were regularly corralled by people absolutely sure it was he. Perhaps you find yourself trailing a gangly figure at the park, the kid jogging with a friend, a ball cap on his head, tufts of curly hair poking out the sides. You actually run alongside for fifty meters or so, eavesdropping on their breathy dialogue in the hope of gleaning some telltale remark or tendency that can’t be surgically erased — the way the bridge of his nose lightly twitches as he laughs, how he makes a tiny throaty rumbling urr if you startle him when he’s on his ladder — and while there is no definitive display, you can’t help but see him locked away behind that boy’s pale face and greenish yellow-flecked eyes, and reach for his pointy elbow. The boy sees this and swerves, sneering as though he’s seen a diseased cur, and then he and his friend bolt down a diverging path, giddily cracking up as if they know they just barely got away.

Which makes us think all the more that if we stop looking he’ll never emerge. It’s in the tilting and thrashing that we wangle our luck. Otherwise, as a wise man once said, we’ll be bound in shallows and in miseries. For the truth is that we can’t help but envision what may well come; for what happens when there are no more songs and postings about Reg or Fan, when all there is remaining are weather-faded portraits and scribbles on the walls? Will we look upon these as our originals did when they tried to make out the ghostly hatch of the old-fashioned firm names and advertisements for things like tooth powder on the sides of the derelict buildings and idly marvel at what times those must have been? Will we have forgotten how impassioned we became, along with the details of the cause?

Or will this capacity be a part of us now, inform from this point forward how we view these long runway-straight streets, these heartening low-shouldered homes, and our modest and well-meaning brethren, who have worked assiduously all these years in the grow houses and tanks and treatment ponds, hardly ever looking up? “B-Mor being B-Mor” is how the saying goes, but whenever someone repeats that now, there’s a rankling in the belly that makes you want to grab the person by the ears and bark, No more!

In fact, this became a refrain during the West B-Mor playground rally regarding the new promotion standard and led to a proposal of a general strike to protest it. Whether a work stoppage will really occur remains to be seen, as it would be a most serious turn, for it’s something that’s never happened in our history, not even when the directorate shut down two very busy health clinics for budgetary reasons or raised the minimum occupancy number for the older row houses after a second boomlet in our population.

You may wonder why the change in the qualifying percentile should be the inciting element when so very few of our children will ever attain it, the likely difference being one or two promotions a year, if any. Aren’t we, as is oft noted, a most practical group? For a couple of generations there was no means of promotion at all, which our forebears didn’t question, and once the chance was introduced by the directorate it was a double gift, for (1) being begun at all, and (2) rare enough that the character and constitution of B-Mor would not be eroded, say, by all of us constantly striving and angling as to how our children might leave. It is a lottery, aptitude based, of course, but a lottery nonetheless, and therefore functions primarily in the realm of imagination and dreams. We have already noted how the winners are feted, memorialized, and then duly consigned to a status like that of the heroic dead, shed of body, ethereal, mythically sublime.

But with this newly raised bar we can only ask: What else must we do? If someday not a single one of our very best can venture beyond the gates then the bargain is too skewed. Enough is enough. And it makes clearer now that the addition each year of those few hard-emblazoned names serves less to mark our progress or manifest our hopes than to parch the bitter seeds lurking beneath our endeavors, which is that where we are does not wholly comfort us. And perhaps never truly has.

Bo Liwei

Like the rest of us, Fan must have at some point gone by the monument and plumbed the etch of those letters with her fingertips, never thinking he was anything but a glimmer in the firmament. But here he was, as Oliver, though not in the least trying to hide himself from her. They were still standing on his lawn, the noise of the party briefly escaping whenever the front door was opened by someone going to their car or a child being trailed by his nanny. They would see her and Oliver, and wave, and he’d wave back, suggesting with his gestures that he was explaining something about the new house to Fan. But as he did, she thought he could not truly be Liwei, for she had been certain she would sense it the very moment she came upon him, that a certain feeling would overwhelm her, but there was no tightened roping in her chest now, no flitting chill across her skin. He didn’t much look like her parents, either, or any mixing of them, though in truth she herself could hardly remember their faces or those of the rest of the household, which made her wonder if she’d looked at them much at all. But then we know arduous journeys can make a blur of heart, and home.