Copycat
A. My dear friend Anna tells me about Lilia Carrillo, her beloved painter, as she furiously types an essay on Duchamp’s urinal. Anna discovered the painter because her aunt owns a Carrillo painting. She previously told me how someday, that painting will belong to her. Lately, Anna’s been most fixated on Carrillo’s only self-portrait, autorretrato from 1948. I met Anna over a year ago, through some course on eco-poetics. Now we’re a month away from the end of spring semester. I’m sitting across from her, looking at her downturned eyes, admiring how focused she is on her work. I note how Anna pursues life so organically: “I love it,” she declares, and then she’ll devote her entire intellectual life towards it.
B. In a few weeks, Anna will be boarding a flight to Mexico City to study Lilia Carrillo. In February, she received news that the university awarded her a “large” research grant, though I call it a “considerable” grant, because the school is cheap and Anna will barely break even for the summer. A staff member from her department conducts an interview about her, snaps a headshot of her in front of a tree. She emails me the story when it’s published, but I never read it. Suddenly, I feel an urge to visit Mexico. Is this what jealousy feels like? I occasionally wonder how Anna’s grant money might feel in my hands. But then the thought goes away by money’s unforgiving nature, how it craves to be spent, to touch as many needy hands as fast as possible. I can feel how substantial money is, though it’s never felt real. Almost like sex, or a kind of prostitution I’m too disconnected from my body to feel its allure. For all of Anna’s ideological stances against capitalism, her physiology absorbs the pleasure of what money allows. She lives for beauty, makes daily solemn vows to art. Her hunger for an aesthetically pleasureful life results in heartburn when she’s surrounded by ugliness. On the contrary, my body languishes and struggles to process the basic necessities. I can endure long periods of hunger without even realizing. Once, I broke my pinky and didn’t feel a problem until the next day, when the finger throbbed all red and swollen like a fat bee.
C. Over email, Anna sends me articles about Lilia Carrillo. From the little I have read about Carrillo, she never really spoke about her gender. But being a women’s and gender studies major, Anna speaks about womanhood on Carrillo’s behalf. “Surrounded by men,” Anna writes in one of her emails, “she can only speak of herself without words. Carrillo and her male counterparts do not share a common language, so how could she speak?” Carrillo belonged to an era of abstract expressionism, typically intense in its gestures. Yet Carrillo approaches her work methodically and carefully. Anna claims this to be gendered expression.
D. Anna and Carrillo are both Mexican. I am Chinese, still looking for an artist to love and study. My refusal to love is a racial expression.
E. The most important possession I own is my pocket dictionary. I found the book a few years ago in a shoebox under my mother’s bed. She first purchased it when she immigrated to America. I was surprised she still kept it—she’d long removed most remnants of her former life. The dictionary was one of a few essential items she budgeted her waitressing tips for. She must have been around my age. The little booklet helped her survive. It’s hefty, like a Bible. I imagine all the potential energy in my mother’s hands as she carried around the dictionary, translating the thoughts trapped in her body into a form. I cherish this dictionary like an art, flipping through stacked definitions like a book of poems, soaking each meaning until all sense dissolves.
F. I dropped out of my first ever class in college, “Experimental Drawing,” after my professor pointed his finger at me. I remember this finger decorated with pubey hair and a thick, engraved ring, lifted after all the students introduced themselves. He widened his eyes large like a dead fish and spoke in a huffy voice: “You have a gift, being Chinese. Take that lineage and artistry, and go look at all the Chinese artists of the past and emulate them as a Chinese person of today!” I hate you; those words emerged immediately. I had never hated anyone before, wasn’t sure what it even meant to hate, if that’s what was happening. Though the encounter did confirm how love would not be possible for me. Later, I searched for the professor’s name on the internet. He was an artist from Rhode Island and spent two years in Beijing, on a grant to take photos of architecture. Even more later, long after I dropped out of the course, it was that professor’s sandpapery voice that still lingered, never my Chinese ancestors “of the past.”
G. “What will I do?” I lament the summer to Anna. She advises I apply to the university’s summer program in New York like she did last year. “It was kind of a waste of time, but I found love,” she gushed. But she didn’t find it. Finding is, my dictionary informs, the coming upon by searching or effort. Anna doesn’t put effort into her life or search for it, never needs to. She lives in the center vantage point of all existence, her body as the receptor to pain and happiness. These emotional experiences give substance and depth to her personality, qualifying her as more interesting, appealing than someone like me, who coasts along life’s corner without experiencing anything real. I know Anna thinks this to be our fundamental difference. She’s always bringing me to club meetings and the parties she’s invited to, pestering me like my mother to “experience more.” She sees me, maybe secretly resents me, meekly observing time’s elusive passage, a lackluster pantomime peeling experiences belonging to more remarkable people like her. Anna’s the kind to be remarked, practically bursting with love like a movie. But when I’m feeling jealous or angry at her, I think about how she’s guilty of the same copying as I am. Is she not taking advantage of art and Carrillo? Of course, she does it more tastefully than me. She loves autorretrato, loves Marco, the tall Italian she met in New York, loves the capability to love, to feel herself extend itself and belong. Love, to hold dear. Anna loves because she has the receptors to hold. Anna loves me, but I don’t love her, I lack this ability. I think that’s our fundamental difference.
H. In my sleep, my mother tells me about moving from China to America. She’s young and Chinese again, wandering a street as her hands hover above her stomach, as if holding an invisible object. In dreams, I neither see nor tell. I’ve never dreamt words before. I dream of meaning by absorbing a language-less dialect, nonsense cradling my head steadily like the organs of a belief system. I realize my dream is lucid when there’s no dictionary to hold. I’ve stripped it away from my mother’s hands, and now, in this new dimension, there’s no way to remind myself what belief means, or how a dream’s supposed to feel. My mother’s face melts. It’s burning in this American dream. And because there’s no words to ask me to help, my dictionary doesn’t exist, no flipping to the page on what it means to save her.
I. I go to the library, scan a photo of myself and print it out small, tucking it on the page the dictionary defines “apple.” Apple, the fleshy, usually rounded red, yellow, or green edible pome fruit of a usually cultivated genus Malus tree of the rose family. The 5-letter signifier of a pome, a word once uttered you can’t imagine anything besides itself. When I’m transplanted into the dictionary like this, I’m assigned meaning: CHINESE, ORIENTAL, ASIAN. Rather than generating imagery of a fresh, colorful pome, I trigger sulfur-like imaginations: CHINK, CHING CHONG, CHINAMAN.
J. News of my acceptance to the New York program comes from an email by a woman named Ruby. Her email begins, “Congratulations,” followed by kind-spirited sentences. I text Anna about my acceptance; she replies, “congrats!” The cost of summer tuition is almost the same as Anna’s grant. So this is how the summer will go: me giving thousands of my parents’ dollars to the institution, Anna receiving institution money to go abroad. I search Ruby online and discover she is white and a poet. Her work has received numerous prizes and awards. She lists these accolades in her biography, as if a definition in the dictionary. Phonetically, it sounds like we have the same full name: /ˈruː.bi/ Wae-NG. But my last name is “Wang” whereas hers is “Wayne.” Wang means a Chinese ruler. Wayne means wagon driver.
K. I search for all the information I can about white Ruby on the internet. First I find her online profiles, study all the Macbook photos on Facebook, blurry images from parties she attended in college, old tweets about how great The Flaming Lips were last night, internet confrontations where she defends Sylvia Plath, self-promotion for her poems. I open a new document and list these facts as bullet points. She’s native to New York, spent vacations on her family’s second home on Martha’s vineyard, adores haikus and Ikkyu, quotes I-Ching, had a pet whippet named Rufus who passed away in 2012, posted dozens of haikus about Rufus, had a brief teaching stint in a small New York college but “hated how dictatorial institutions restricted her language” (one of the replies said, “your poor art!”). Had a husband who came out gay. Divorced. She might be gay? She moved to North Carolina, and she hasn’t posted about her writing in the last three years. The document fills up. I morph the facts into a story, script them into my fiction until I believe it as true, until Ruby Wayne feels like my biography.
L. My American-minded mother is thrilled about my summer in New York. I visited New York once when my mother freshly arrived in America, too fresh to be American. I was four and when we walked around Times Square with foam statue-of-liberty crowns on our heads. The streets overwhelmed me so bad I threw up on the sidewalk. People stared. Don’t think we had the appetite for America yet. But now my mother is assimilated, more nation-like. She considers intensely overwhelming abundance condensed in a small place like Times Square a kind of heaven. Convenience and possibilities to outfit, eat and buy oneself into a real person.
M. My professor for a compositional writing course returns my final essay and the pages are decorated by red pen marks. She’s made a diagram out of my work. Little dots and circles around certain sentences with annotated question marks, arrows connecting one paragraph to another. Her scribbles look like a piece of experimental poetry: “What does this mean? What do you mean?” But it isn’t an essay about anything! “Essay” originates from the French “essayer,” meaning to try. Essay in English also can mean the result or product of an attempt. So when the professor tucks the graded paper all folded up to hide my horrid grade, I am not dismayed because I have essayed, conveying attempted truth and my honest nonsense.
N. My first meeting of Ruby Wayne feels like a miracle. My fiction as reality, like meeting God from the Bible. “Is this real?” I keep asking myself. My hand grips the suitcase so tight I’ll only realize I’m hurting my palm after she’s gone. Her torso stretches long and lanky. She’s helping another student with their bag. Her serious face and mannerisms, exactly how I imagined a writer! Her voice carries a deepness and heaviness, making me too frantic and nervous to speak honestly and carefully. Thankfully, I don’t have to say anything besides “hi, Ruby.”
O. Over the cohort’s first dinner, white Ruby takes us to her favorite restaurant. I’m too nervous to stomach the falafel and baba ganoush, instead probing it with my fork. I anticipated this introduction, rehearsed a short script for it on the plane to New York: My name is Ruby, I like to read poems, especially adore Sylvia Plath (I only read “Daddy,” “Ariel,” and The Bell Jar the week prior). I also enjoy The Flaming Lips and Sparklehorse… It’s my first time in New York. I even practiced the natural pauses and nervous laughter. But when it’s my time to share, I’m stutters and nerves. I avoid looking at white Ruby as I deliver my introduction. I feel embarrassed and take it out on the pita, ripping it into tiny shreds. I refrain from speaking, flattered that white Ruby doesn’t engage in the conversation either. Students start discussing our generation’s self-obsession online. One student says something about social media and panopticons, citing Foucault to remark on our self-surveillance. He smirks smugly, utters the statement a bit like a lecture, I think because he’s reciting a professor’s lecture. Does white Ruby think the same? Finally white Ruby speaks, noting the effects of groupthink on culture, how we acquired certain tastes and preferences by being grouped together. This instills my confidence to speak, so I speak, elaborating on her spiel by citing Lilia Carrillo to claim how individuals within groups could resist homogenizing aesthetics and forms while still maintaining consistency. “This artist Carrillo made paintings comparable to her abstract painting counterparts, but she committed herself to a creative practice that was personal to her,” I say, this time without pausing. Later, the next day, white Ruby tells me about how she looked at some Lilia Carrillo paintings online and she was impressed by them. I smile like she’s impressed with me.
P. White Ruby teaches a class each week. She lectures about different figures from New York. One lecture on Susan Sontag, then another on Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m starting to understand “a figure.” “Susan Sontag” is morphing into something more fundamental than before. When white Ruby delivers her presentation, it’s difficult to discern if the ideas belong to Sontag or to her. White Ruby is becoming a figure, too. “Art isn’t mimetic,” white Ruby asserts. When I look at her, I feel my mind creating an image of my ultimate role model. It’s stunning! Is this the vision of an artist?
Q. Susan Sontag considered emphasis on interpreting art’s “content” as limiting, resulting in a loss of appreciating “form.” I think Sontag would’ve appreciated my artful, chinky-sounding parents, who carved my language out of a heavy concern towards form. There is an art to their sound, an art to all their hate. Sontag, could you interpret this? My sensations endure what explanation fails to experience: the form of their self-hatred, the ugliness of misshapen mouths, my unlucky inheritance.
R. Anna emails me a paragraph of text about her time in Mexico so far and attaches a photo of a Carrillo painting. “Literally and feeling-wise, larger than life,” she writes in the email. The painting contains hues of tan, red, and white. The lighter colors dust over the darker shades. She lists her frustrations about the limited existing archives of Carrillo compared to her male counterparts. I try to read the message in her voice, but I’m forgetting the inflections and intonations she speaks in, so I read the message with my own voice. I download the image and attach the painting in a new email to white Ruby. “Literally and feeling-wise, larger than life,” I write in the email. I hit send and then compose a reply to Anna. I thank her for the image and I ask her about her time in the program last year, whether she remembers white Ruby. “You know, we share the same name?”
S. Besides attending the weekly classes, the program doesn’t entail much else. I spend most evenings in Chinatown. In this country made into a town, guests are welcome to eat until they implode. I, too, come with the motive to eat dinner, but I lose my appetite once I arrive. Yet I keep coming back, waiting for that feeling people keep telling me a Chinese person should feel. I’m a tourist of tourism, taking inventory of where the crowd flows and lines form. One night, a man named Tyler guides a group down Mott. Tyler speaks with an accent and says his name isn’t Tyler. I then wonder if his accent is even real. His name is “Jiatian” but they can call him Tyler. “I’m from China,” Tyler informs them, like this fact gives him the ethos to speak on all Chinatowns. He describes “here” like it’s Treasure Island, the perimeter of hidden gold. Tyler guides the group to eight spots during the tour: two dumpling spots, shops specializing in bao, beef noodle soup, lamb skewers, “hamburgers,” and chop suey, as well as a Chinese bakery. I follow the group like a hidden attraction, observing patrons exchange cash for my inner treasures.
T. It’s been a month in New York. I feel bloated from wasting so much money. I wonder how Anna’s doing on the grant money. I keep purchasing books I see, some things on sale, poetry collections, lit-fic books with kitschy covers, a few things white Ruby recommended. Though I haven’t finished anything yet. Each morning I perform an embarrassing ritual where I put each of the books I’ve acquired in a circle and pick one like tarot. Who am I today? Then I read a few pages, morph into the character, and believe I am becoming someone.
U. Wandering in the bookstore, I thought about how I couldn’t buy anything. My bank account was practically nil. I didn’t want to ask my mother to wire me money, even though she would probably do it happily. In the poetry section, a single copy of white Ruby’s collection titled Loosenings is shelved. Plain spine, released by some publisher I’d never heard of. I’ve clicked on one of white Ruby’s poems online before. I scanned through the black pixels as fast as possible: Etherized, like a cloud, gone, pause. “Was this good?” I remember asking myself, though it wasn’t like I’d really read it. With the physical copy of her work in my hands, I still don’t want to read the poems. Instead I thumb through all the pages fast to create a blur of her work. All the poems become the same. My thumb gets stuck in a page and the blur stops. I am dislodged by the “oriental” (something of, relating to, or situated in the Orient) printed in the middle of a poem, staring back at me like a little window. I stare so long I don’t register the word as meaningful, instead just a scramble of letters. Ironically, “oriental” is the perfect word to describe how I feel about this non-meaning nonsense, an adjective that prompts further describing: “of,” “from,” “characteristic” of whatever you make of this unknown, faraway quality.
V. Thirteen days following my message, Anna replies: Honestly forgot her name was Ruby, but I just looked her up online and yes, that’s her. I remembered she was white and a poet (?), but mainly how off-putting she was. She assigned us these reflections on the artists she was lecturing about and then told us she was keeping our responses for a “conceptual” piece. Later that fall, one girl in my cohort found an essay Ruby published in a relatively large lit mag, an essay revisiting Andy Warhol and Valerie Solonas, and it included nearly direct passages from the girl’s assignment.
W. In what will be our last excursion, white Ruby takes the cohort to a play housed in a tiny theater in the Lower East Side. As we take our seats, the usher hands us folded sheets of paper. “It’s a questionnaire,” the usher informs, but he instructs us not to read the contents until the show has completed. White Ruby is in high spirits. I see her two seats to the left of me, beaming at the narrow stage. The show begins a few minutes after we take our seats. Three actors decorate the floor, no set pieces. They wear a black, white, and beige bodysuit with a matching mask. The black and white actors interact with each other aggressively—collapsing on one another, shoving, screaming. The beige one attempts to intercept, then becomes timid and hides behind the stage. No dialogue uttered during the 50 minutes of the show. The slip of paper includes three questions: 1) What is the race of the actor in black? 2) What is the race of the actor in white? 3) What is the race of the actor in beige?
X. The dictionary lists one definition of “slur” as a verb: to indistinctly speak, performing the words in a hurried manner. The other definition is a casting of insult, or disparaging remark. I draw a connection between assimilation, the process of taking in habits, attitudes, and mode of life, and the slur, how assimilating lives in the world of the slurry. The slur sings a song of references, insulting through allusion, using language as a hint, a suggestion of a reality. Upon assimilating, the innuendos of the slur hold meaning. The slur, previously an indistinct blur, gains clarity.
Y. In the last week of the program, white Ruby conducts one-on-one meetings to collect interviews about our experiences. My meeting lasts seventeen minutes. In the first five, she compliments what a great job I’ve done on the assignments. “They were brilliant,” she says. Her validation makes my head fuzzy. I tell her I saw a book of her poetry in the bookstore and bought it, how excellent I found the poems, then ask whether she’s working on anything new. The rest of the meeting involves white Ruby telling me about her new writing project. “It’ll be a form of automatic writing,” she tells me. A spirit is sending her messages, transmitted via subconscious writing. She grins like a child, tells me about how the practice originates from China. “Foo-gee. Have you heard of it?” I’ve never heard of it. “It sounds familiar,” I reply. “Topically, I’m going to merge my familial ancestry with my literary ancestry, something like the intersection of my relatives with Susan Sontag, Edith Wharton, Andy Warhol, all the figures we’ve been covering in our course. It’ll be an ultimate reflection of me,” she boasts. “That sounds brilliant,” I say.
Z. Anna and I rent an apartment in the fall. I move in after her and see she’s decorated the living space with a photograph of Audre Lorde. She’s gotten tanner, practically glowing from the summer. We exchange postcards, and I give her one of the books I purchased in New York. “I read this and thought of you.” She tells me anecdotes about Mexico but none of the stories stick. I struggle with listening to her. I don’t share anything about white Ruby or my summer. She’s still dating Marco, who sleeps over each night. I try to arrange my room, but it feels like a mausoleum, full of dead objects that don’t belong to me. There’s one last week of break before the semester starts, and I’m terribly tired but I sleep awfully every night that week, tossing and turning in bed for hours before my body allows me rest. One night, I dream of a scene with words. A spirit has infiltrated, starts speaking to me. He says, “This is automatic dreaming, have you heard of it?” I say, “It sounds familiar.” He’s my ancestor and he’s been watching me. He slaps me in the face. He’s fed up with me, he’ll be gone by the morning, when I wake up I’ll be drenched with sweat, hazy voice of the spirit still aching in my head. I’ll look for the bottle of painkillers and swallow a gulp of water down. When I put the painkillers back, I’ll realize my pocket dictionary’s no longer there.
Ruby Wang is an MFA student at UMass Amherst and contributing editor for Zona Motel. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Buckman Journal, Sine Theta Magazine, Poet’s Row, the museum of americana, and more. rubywang.carrd.co.
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