Dreaming of Chinese New Year
Sharon Zhang
Trigger Warning: discussion of sexual assault
In the morning, The Moment’s bottle of wine is still on the kitchen counter. The liquid inside is more brown than red, slobbery and the label reads five pounds Clubcard Discount. By brown, I mean illogical, in that there’s a crest in the colour, the bits at the bottom deflecting the light, and then sloping upwards into the gradient of day-old tea. It suggests bubbles, or something else suitably full of nothing. I pick it up, and, after a brief inspection, I drink it. Then, standing at the entrance of my flat, I throw the bottle all the way down the stairs. It doesn’t break. The crinkling of the fall signifies relaxation and letting go; I know it does.
My issue with The Moment is that he is not something that can be spun in any way other than that which it has already been spun – that is to say, almost entirely by people who are not me. A counsellor I saw five months after the fact, recommended by my Bodily History tutor, said I should contact Rape Crisis if I ever felt like this again. Those two words, capitalised – taken together and sublimated into a noun, signifying a state of uniqueness so unique that it deserves big letters – sounds through my accommodation all prescient and acute, but ultimately inapplicable. Yeah, right, I reply. I think that I’m a very self-aware person, I’m self-aware of my self-awareness, therefore of my Not Applicable Crises Plural. He offers me another appointment, next Friday at twelve. ‘I’ll take you up on that’, I respond, as I reroute his email to auto-spam. ‘It might take me a while to get back to you; I’m a busy person.’
When I was younger, my prototypical gone-wrong story situated itself around a first date. I was fifteen, we went ice-skating, and I fell and broke my knee in three places. I remember the next morning, shining my phone torch onto my bloated leg and noting the way it went all funny. The dulled glow of internal bleeding crept in through what was just the right position, so my own body parts looked like a screen. When I return to that memory, whatever it comes to me as, I think about the Teletubbies. All the stuff is inside, but in the wrong places. It feels heavy.
The first [WINDOW] makes itself evident by the second week, sitting in the same place as it was in reality. It’s cold enough that I can’t rest my head against the wall. Nithusha is outside so she’s left all the sliding doors open, signifying potentiality, meaning return or escape. Kit’s chopping up a little bump for me. This time, The Moment’s head makes a sickening crack, and I am hauled off to jail while Sun Kil Moon plays in the background. Then I am in an open field, the bridge between two/more worlds. My phone has been wiped. This indicates an acuity of detail I’m a little surprised by. My surprise manifests in my feelings the next day, an echo off Magdalen Bridge, and I don’t let myself think about the rental scooter colliding with an oncoming car.
Of course, I don’t recognise that this is my issue until half a year later. To be specific, I am sick – in a roundabout way – of something. Everyone is telling me what to expect, and the futures they forecast for me are shaped like a V: down and down endlessly, a river rolling into the mouth of anger, and then a tenuous uplift in an unspecific future. They’re playing by rape rules, I decide. That’s fucked. The Moment’s actions – minor as they were – are being made worse in the collective thinking through a brief and solely rhetorical association with the most horrific form of sexual violence. Google dot com is being groped comparable to rape obviously it’s not.
// On this medication my stomach is always empty and in [WINDOW] the knoll of my wrist cannot touch my own back //
In the Uber home, I hope Joanna Bourke can say something to me.
The words ‘bad events’ and ‘traumatic events’ are generally regarded as synonymous. However, as numerous trauma theorists have correctly observed, ‘bad’ events only become ‘traumatic’ according to the transcription of meaning. As historian Mark Micale acutely observed: trauma – as a concept, theory, and experience – requires not just new ‘events’ but an altered sensibility, a change in the consciousness of change, which now becomes threatening, incomprehensible, and unmasterable.
And through this, the hierarchy of classification is implied, my bad feeling, low and hot and sloping. If there’s any incomprehensibility, it’s all these languages and categories. Not my knees or my hands, nor The Moment’s. I am scared of my memory being filtered through this constructed meaning. I am scared that my memory will become the light that is blocked through an upside-down cardboard-box-fort that says “BEWARE” in red crayon. As in, everything is trauma or not trauma and all the names are terrible and inevitable. My throat feels bubbly as I sit in the kitchen with Josh and Zach. The Moment’s actions are like, the least bad form of assault, could you grab me a beer please?
After everyone leaves, and my flatmates are all asleep, I empty out a pack of Shanghai cigarettes, the ones that I bought as party favours for Chinese New Year’s Eve, into the toilet.
Because I refuse the naming, I am punished. A.K.A, I come back to [WINDOW], this time as Forgiveness Zhang. I say come because I am aware that the falling is within my control, or at least the tripping over bit is. The inevitability of [WINDOW], much like my knee, only makes itself obvious in specific positions of vulnerability. I am awake this time, and the venue has just shut. I am so high that I cannot discern what I’m saying, nursing a couple bumps of ket and a joint outside the smoking area. Ari thinks I look less fucked up than I am.
Earlier that day, I had told The Moment that it was okay, that I too had been insecure once. That really, I got why he did what he did. I was going for an implication that I knew him better than he knew himself, and so any sense of guilt he had was to be multiplied threefold and shot back into my own self. And what about the glowing bubbles of moving on; what did you think about that. A phrase that’s redundant, when you think of it – motion as a setting off into the imprecise rays of the imprecise something, an imprecision implied to be irrelevant. Right now, I am too scared to look down at my jeans; I think I’ve pissed myself. In this vomit of reality and dreamspace, my phone is buzzing with lists of apologies, requests to see me again, other gimmicks in kayfabe. In kayfabe, the chair goes through the table, knocks off the adorned plate, which clatters and crumbles onto my leg. And I respond, ‘my favourite one’. I don’t really care to be honest; it’s always Chinese New Year’s Eve. Then, playing pretend, my response: yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
It’s so fucked up, the [WINDOW], I mean. [WINDOW] isn’t even the right term, it’s really layers and layers of cellophane, this puddle of indescribable gloss between me and the world. I can’t stop thinking about the Teletubbies. The TV on the three-legged table in Canberra, playing the same episode again and again. Until an hour after my ninth birthday, the Teletubbies made me believe that the sun was different in England, that it had a baby’s face and was always singing. [WINDOW] itself is not unlike Teletubbies’ stomach-screen, static inside, floaty outside. Diffuse and thick, overlaid onto the air. If I could stir it I would hope the particles could settle. In the particles, The Moment sits and I’m the reflection of the red sun over the river, spread out wide and thin.
[WINDOW] where The Moment corners me and says he loves me (real) and instead of letting him touch me, reality slides out and I hit him. I wake up feeling remorseful.
In cafenowhere with my friends and all the sounds come out wrong like a bit of machinery broken down [WINDOW] in the distance
Much like how the Teletubbies do not show the invisible man who mows the lawn before filming starts, the actors getting into their big colourful suits, the gloss that coats my life feels fundamental, and therefore unnecessary to explain.
‘What can you tell me?’ I ask it.
I spawn with my back to the next [WINDOW], which manifests in the form of another field, this time inside my high school. The eucalypts are high and heavy over the crest of the hill. If I could take a photo, the shadows would make everything fuzzy anyway. [WINDOW] is thicker than ever this time around. I can barely see.
It proceeds like most others. First, a re-living of The Moment reaching over, of Chinese New Year. No one sees it this time, that’s pretty much a constant. All my friends from school are here, odd but not new. On the stairs there are potted plants and dumplings, and The Moment’s wine perforates through, all crispy and leaking.
After it happens again, and my friends are laughing at a joke The Moment makes, I step outside to ask Jess and/or Fred for a lighter, the latter of whom I haven’t spoken to in five years. Behind me, the world warps, and I’m outside the Oxford train station. I let my cigarette burn; I don’t take a drag. I try not to look. The [WINDOW] starts rippling around me. It’s saying visuals, it’s saying big pink and green squares. Between them I can still catch cutouts of the world, the prepubescent summer, the blocky wall of the old science building like physical lace. Maybe none of this would have happened if I’d chosen to dreamimagine triangles instead. The strongest shape, what bridges and hexagons are made of. When I say “this”, I mean falling back into myself, being assaulted and medicated and finding out everyone loves him anyway-despite-because. [WINDOW] life feels like a trapdoor (square, shit) that just reroutes you back into yourself. And/or two yellow portals, one above another, facing each other so you’re being spit out and swallowed again for the rest of your life.
‘My knee is acting up’, I say to DreamJessFred.
‘What are you on about?’
‘Can’t you see the particles? The glow?’
DreamJessFred turns away from me, or at least I think they do. The whole scene, moving through the [WINDOW], looks impressionistic, more focused on the playing of the light. Then I get it and language subsequently spills outwards.
Look, DreamJessFred, you need to help me, I swear, listen, [WINDOW] was never a window, fuck, and if I can just pry it open – it’s a screen, a sledgehammer, fuck – help me out here, Jess, Fred, Ari, anyone – I’m hitting [WINDOW], that is to say, I’m hitting the air, it hurts my hands, the particles are thicker than ever, the glow is getting brighter, just past the rippling, past the eucalypts, the V then the nomenclature of my life is NOT A V!!! Help me pry this thing open, I get it now, it’s a screen, it’s the Teletubbies, they’re singing and the sun is smiling, it’s an interpolation, my body is itching, I’ve pissed myself again, The Moment didn’t happen, it’s still happening, The Moment is not The Moment like a person but the [WINDOW], the [WINDOW] is not a [WINDOW] but a screen, the screen is ripping, my hands hurt hitting nothing, the air is hitting back, the glossiness, the ketamine, the comedown, the Chinese New Year party at my house, it was such a stupid idea, not being able to leave, but it only happened once, if only I could force this thing open, I can show everyone what I mean, [WINDOW], are you there, you’re right –
[WINDOW] flashes, a brief inoculation of not-light. DreamJessFred is still there. They’re on the side, destination Melbourne, my home thank God. Then [WINDOW] comes back, but confined to a small box. A television, a screen, a SCREENWINDOW, a gate into sensation shaped like []. No, a pool. The pool is rippling but definite, and, for the first time in six months, I am standing outside it. At the bottom of the deep end, the Good Life winks at me like a shining fish. I can’t reach.
These days, [WINDOW] is still there, but our relationship has ameliorated a little. I ask it for things from the Black Box it’s kept of the past six months – the feeling of the grass, the layout of my old flat – and it gives as appropriate. Sometimes it still flashes when I’m walking down Iffley Road. But then the particles stir, dissipate from memory, and I’m still standing right at the blocky intersection of my own life, it doesn’t even matter.
Cover image: Old Street sign, Shoreditch side. Image provided by writer.