“Lulu”
by Te-Ping Chen
from the April 8, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
I don’t know Te-Ping Chen, but with a bit of searching this morning I see she’s a Wall Street Journal reporter who, in her interview, says, “I think journalism and fiction are both ways of being differently attentive to what’s around you.” I’m glad to get to know her work a bit better, and Lulu sounds promising: “a young Chinese man watches his twin sister become increasingly involved in dissident activism.” This premise combined with this opening paragraph makes me interested:
The hour of our birth had been carefully forecast, a winter’s day Cesarean timed to coincide with Dr. Feng’s lunch break. The doctor pulled me out first, indignant and squalling, like a hotel guest roused and tossed before checkout. Lulu came next, and was so perfectly quiet that at first they thought she wasn’t breathing at all. Then they thwacked her on the back and her cries joined mine and they laid us side by side, boy and girl, two underwater creatures suddenly forced to fill our lungs with cold dry air.
So, happy April everyone! I’m working a few days this week before taking off Thursday and Friday, which promise to have nice weather. I hope this story accompanies the pleasant beginning of spring nicely!
Please have a wonderful week — and share your thoughts below!
Technology addiction as a riff on all the old addiction narratives, the sanctioned AA kind, the unsanctioned or more subversive route explored by everyone from Burroughs to Bukowski, from Kathy Acker to Lidia Yuknavitch, this is fertile ground for a semi-political sibling story.
Here the addicted children assume that even their teachers are part of the same narcotized somnambulism. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that it’s like a crackhead or meth addict who says, well, the nine-to-fivers are addicted to their morning coffees and their 5pm Friday happy hours. The issue, of course, is the degree. When is it addiction and when is it normative, when is it abuse and when is it use? In this story, the narrator implies their extremities early when he says Lulu was a “glutton” (a sinner, and a deadly sin at that) who liked noodles and crullers. His rationalization that you can “win prizes” and make money with gaming is initially a justification bred of immaturity, and it doesn’t take Lulu long to become an addict herself: “I’m sorry, Big Brother. I couldn’t stop.” Nice Orwell evocation there as well. “Couldn’t stop,” yep, that’s addiction.
The early pregnancy and her response to it also shows that she’s only superficially the more mature sibling than the gamer brother, especially evident because of her certainty (adolescence is full of certainty, adulthood full of doubt). Her brother “envies” her confidence, another deadly sin.
Chen does a good job portraying actual oppression through the Xu Lei case and many other aspects of everyday Chinese society (most notably Lulu’s repeated imprisonment for sedition/subversion, of course) that should make Americans be a bit more thankful for how easy we have it, but also more vigilant and dedicated to protecting our freedoms. Doesn’t it make you ashamed to live in a land where justice is “a game” and so forth.
The idea of “one is addicted to computers for games and wants to make money with it and the other uses is addicted to promoting justice and feebly trying to incite change” had the potential to be a bit didactic but Chen is wise enough to realize that online activism does no more to better the world than online roleplaying games, that both are escapes, and that people just justify their own behavior in different ways.
The fact that they’re twins and each is “missing” a part of themselves (and it’s on the head) makes them inherently susceptible to the superficial allures of the internet; this is a subtly made point and increases the literary quotient of the story. Are their parents too blithe and bourgeois, or is parenting doomed to fail in the face of relentless exposure to tech? Later, when the parents lie that they’re daughter is pursuing a Ph D instead of admitting that she’s locked up, this exposes their traditionalist shame. The Song Dynasty’s reverence for words on paper (as opposed to the fleeting, manipulatable, deletable existence of words on websites) is a nice riff too. Illegal to burn paper vs. “things get deleted so quickly.”
Lulu’s and her boyfriend’s website is a “constant stream,” another nice language figure to point toward her addiction. It’s mordant clickbait, no more nuanced than whether the brother and his friends are ranked as warlocks or mages.
The police are horrific, but not wrong. Lulu never fact-checked her sources, she just spread “news” (similar to sharing needles). Her father’s question to her at the wedding is also ugly, but not wrong. There is a meaninglessness to trying to get justice for people you don’t even know. Helping others vs. self-deception is a tough one. As is, What is a “normal life”? As is, What’s the difference between being smart and being pragmatic? It’s a credit to Chen that she packs in so much philosophical weight/serious questions without speechifying on a soapbox.
Chen’s prose is mostly utilitarian but has a few thoroughly attuned and evocative moments. I particularly enjoyed: “As it turned out, she’d grown up riding the same bus route as I had, and in a city as big as ours that was enough to feel like fate. We liked to imagine that we had seen each other on the bus as children, stiffly bundled in the winter or swinging our legs impatiently in the summer, had maybe even clung to the same pole.” The wedding is also a thoroughly immersive scene throughout.
I like how Chen explores the line between rebellion and just being crazy. This is noticeable with the character of Mao Xin’s neighbor who thought the government owed him 7 years of army pay. At what point is it futile, even crazy, to revolt and resist? At what point do you admit that you can’t change your country from the inside and you need to flee your country before they come for you? (ie: Bertolt Brecht or Thomas Mann)
The spectacle of “Never say die. Never give up” at the video game competition at the end is a good riff on nationalism and hope, rebellion and resistance, the globalization of late capitalism and the pervasiveness of totalitarian regimes. Rather Foucaultian.
The conclusion risks sentimentalism but in its simplicity (it never stopped being a brother-sister story, and of twins at that) it deftly dodges that claim.
A highly effective story that is provocative without being abject. Not quite as well-written as Sally Rooney’s recent piece (Chen’s journalistic background shows a bit) or as imbricated, layered, and detailed as Lethem’s but this is three very high-level stories of recent vintage in The New Yorker. Glad to see them publishing some high-quality work again (and I haven’t read the C. Whitehead just b/c I’m not a fan of the novel excerpts, I’d rather just wait for the whole book).
Sean —
You did a nice job unpacking that story. I have a few questions, one of which I will bring up here. I can’t tell whether the author holds all dissent against authoritarian governments as addictive and pointless behavior or whether she is just drawing a portrait of one such person to show us that addiction to online gaming is not uniquely solipsistic. And can even be relatively innocuous.
One of your comments bears on this question:
“There is a meaninglessness to trying to get justice for people you don’t even know. Helping others vs. self-deception is a tough one.”
As is this:
“At what point is it futile, even crazy, to revolt and resist? At what point do you admit that you can’t change your country from the inside and you need to flee your country before they come for you?”
Can you distinguish in your reading of the story whether the author comes down on one side or the other? Or do you think she leaves it open?
I tend to think it’s always left open, the discussion is constantly changing and evolving, and to care anything at all about the author’s intentions or point of view is to engage in the intentional fallacy. Even if the author states in an interview that he/she thinks something in their work “means” something, that’s not the end of the discussion. The point isn’t what Shakespeare or Milton or Camus or Woolf or Franzen “meant,” it’s what people think of their fictions. This is sort of reader-response criticism stuff and can get slightly academic but to keep it brief, William, I would argue that all literature is dependent on the interpretation of the reader, and the interpretation that works the best is the one is the one supported by the best rhetoric.
When I post something on this site, that’s my interpretation at that time, and I support it with evidence and articulate my thoughts and my POV. What “side” the author, in his or her actual private life, “comes down on” simply doesn’t matter. Once the work is published, their opinion is no more or less valid than any other reader’s.
Like most subjects, the one raised in Chen’s story exists on a spectrum. The subject is how to respond to political oppression by one’s one government. On one extreme end of the spectrum is “resistance is futile, why bother” and at the other end of the spectrum is “resistance is necessary, fight to the death if you have to.” Where the author falls on that spectrum, where the characters fall on that spectrum, where you or I would fall in such a circumstance, that’s the stuff that’s fun to discuss and argue about. So I guess, in summation, just by publishing the story, the author always “leaves it open” to every individual reader to think about.
Sean —
I think I agree with you. Once the author sends the story out into the world, it must sink or swim on its own. Independent of the author’s feelings or opinions or intentions. In this case I think it’s open to us to interpret. My interpretation is influenced by the cases of the Russian anti-Putin journalists Anna Politkovskaya’ and Arkady Babchenko. Were they addicted/ Or dedicated?