Unreal City

I don't cry a lot.

Wikipedia says the average frequency for women is five times per month. For me, it happens maybe twice a year. The last time it happened for real was a year ago-- Beijing in the summertime, silken whirring of a restaurant fan, jasmine tea and thin-sliced Manchu wraps spinning atop a Lazy Susan. Some of those details are probably confabulated. But I had cheap plywood chopsticks in my hands, and my dad was talking. I'd heard it before-- World War II history, Japanese war crimes, Manchuria and Nanking. I had a western in my purse, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. That detail is not confabulated. I'd just gotten to a good part so I kept fingering the pages, while my dad waved his hands with the violence of a helicopter blade.

We make the same kinds of gestures in debate, my dad and I, but though he relishes those kinds of confrontations I try to avoid them. There are things I disagree with my parents about. I'm not the kind to let them know. They called me when I was in Portland, canvassing for Maine's No on 1 campaign. When I told them what I was doing there I got this spiel on anomie, but I just slunk into silence and looked at the sky. Disagreements make me so uncomfortable-- that's probably really bad. I think it's because I'm so terrified of being wrong I'd qualify all my assertions into absurdity anyway, and my relativism is the relativism of a coward and a fool.

But that time-- Beijing in the summertime, teacups and flatbread on the Lazy Susan-- I didn't go quiet and look away. And then I was sitting with my shoulders hunched, trying to read Lonesome Dove with tears blurring my vision. My face was swollen red, people in the restaurant were looking, but I couldn't stop. I remember feeling horrified, in this floaty, outside-myself way, trying to remaster my own rebellious body. I wasn't even thinking about war crimes anymore.

And honestly, it's not the kind of thing I spent a time thinking about anyway. I'm a petty person of rather impoverished empathy, something I feel guilty about all the time. So at least there's that. But I'm still not sure why I got so angry, there at the dinner table. I'd made my opening statement in a vague offhand way, contesting my father's broad-brushed vilification of the Japanese people (probably just a sort of rhetorical pose). It was just a throwaway comment; I didn't want to launch a debate, especially one I'd quickly make personal with those strange, shameful tears-- shameful because of the misrepresentation.

I never meant to masquerade as a person of passion. And I can't tackle Sino-Japanese relations in a single post.

Yesterday we went to a museum, a little block of brown-brick buildings where Unit 731 once operated-- the Imperial Japanese Army's germ warfare division. The dim gray enclosures where rats were bred, germs cultured, and men killed by other men trained to heal (I reminded myself), had been scraped clean and fitted with explanatory placards in Chinese, Engrish, and Japanese. I'm still not quite sure what I felt, walking the silent perimeter in my sunglasses, holding up a pink-edged parasol. The sun beat down over a tumble of rocks and yellow-green vegetation. I thought of the heatwaves shimmering past Lost Alamos, and the scientists vomiting into scrub-brush when news of Hiroshima reached their desert labs, and Oppenheimer with his remorse and beautiful eyes. That resonance didn't jar anything in me. I reminded myself that I was walking around what was once a charnel house, but the slaughter was too distant to be imagined (too wicked to be imagined), and there was no weight in my chest or sting in my eyes.

Inside they'd stocked display cases with ceramic bombs, medical instruments, old documents, and dioramas. I was glad they hadn't depicted the Japanese doctors with leering faces, depersonalizing them instead with surgical masks. They looked like hastily made sculptures, impressionism in 3-D, just a twist of limbs in agony and the steady-handed slash of a knife. They were vivisection scenes.

And I kept thinking, they should've used white light instead of yellow. More jarring that way, in the sterile vein of medical horror-- they'd kept the walls rough for the verisimilitude. Maybe there really is something wrong with me.

I'll write a little more later. I'd got other tedious thoughts, about groupthink and redemption and memorialism and the potentially masturbatory nature of guilt-- tedious because someone has thought them all before, with more finesse and less confusion, and my own ineloquence will surely betray me again. But it's late, and I'm tired, and though my eyes are dry (and will be), I'm starting to feel a little...