If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. “We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.” We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something.

If not brunch, then something else.Ī day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much.

Severance by Ling Ma