menial intimacy
This Week in Reading
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
Goodbye, Vitamin is the story of Ruth, a half Asian sonogram technician who, freshly dumped by her fiancé, moves back home to Los Angeles to help take care of her father, who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
It is about small questions that are actually big questions, about the way we fixate on the small uncertainties in order to grapple with the ones far beyond our control. Instead of finding answers to the hard questions: why does her father have Alzheimer’s? Is he having an affair? Do her parents still love each other, she ponders the minutiae: what should they eat for dinner tonight? What kind of goldfish should they buy?
We often castigate the smallness of life. Don’t get bogged down in the details. Remember the big picture. Keep your eye on the prize. We bemoan small talk, write off celebrity gossip as petty when “so much is happening in the world”. But much of life is small and trivial. There are big conversations to be had about race and parenting and class and climate change, but a great deal of our lives is filled by parallel parking, shopping for pepper grinders on the internet, making toast. If we believe our lives matter, all of the parts matter, even the parts that seem small and silly and unimportant.
As her father’s health declines, he becomes the childlike one, and Ruth the caretaker. No longer capable of remembering his entire life, his, and the rest of the family’s scope narrows. The larger narrative structure slips out of view, and what is left is the day to day. One day Ruth throws dollar bills into a fountain, another day she prepares an entire meal of jellyfish.
I was back home in Seattle this past weekend. My life always feels smallest there. My life feels small because Seattle is small, and the suburbs smaller: squatty buildings clustered together, a fine layer of moss starting to creep over the roofs. I spend much of my time lying on my parents couch, eating raspberries and cold chicken I have shamelessly raided from their immaculate refrigerator. It feels small because the last time I lived there, I was a smaller version of myself. It feels small because only a fraction of my life is there these days, the responsibilities and the possibilities of my regular life waiting for me back in California. And it feels small because my parents lead a small life, by design. They got jobs and bought a house and had a kid and then retired from their jobs, and my mom drives my grandma to the senior center, and my dad goes for long runs and they go on trips together and drink wine on the back deck. It is a small life, but there is nothing wrong with that. They didn’t go into the world expecting to change it; they went into it wanting to make a comfortable, happy home. And that they did. There is so much to fill a life besides disrupting industries and discovering new species.
Forgive me for the narcissism of this statement but-- I’ve always felt like I was destined to do great things. I am not someone who is going to live a small life. But in recent years I have grown less fearful of smallness. And as big and expansive as my future feels, it is the smallest parts of my present that I love best. Flowers on my kitchen table, waking up to texts at 6 am, the weight of someone’s legs, resting in my lap.
The novel is interspersed with excerpts from Ruth’s father’s diary from when she was a young girl, documenting her childhood curiosities and observations.
“Today you asked me where metal comes from. You asked what flavor are germs. You were distressed because your pair of gloves had gone missing. When I asked you for a description, you said: they are shaped sort of like my hands.”
“Today was my birthday, and you asked me how old I was. When I told you thirty-five you seemed stunned. You asked me if I started at one. Then you asked: When do we die?”
These questions are both small and big at the same time. Life can be so big in its tiniest moments.
I have a seemingly endless well of conversational questions I like to ask people. Some of the questions are big (what trait of yours do you feel like goes unrecognized? What do you feel like is missing in your life right now?), but many of them are small (what food do you crave when you get to the airport? What type of pasta do you identify with most?). I’m genuinely interested in the answers to both types of questions. For a while I felt like my life was a series of intense heart to heart conversations. These days I enjoy the menial just as much. What time do you wake up? How many tabs do you keep open on your computer? Does Liam know he is the most worthless member of One Direction?
My friends have grown accustomed to being constantly pestered by asinine questions. I went camping with my high school best friend when I was home last weekend. “What piece of home decor do you think would make the biggest improvement to your apartment?” I asked her, as we wound our way around the base of Mt. Rainier. That is a good question, she responded seriously. It is not a good question, or at least not a big question, but I do want to know the answer.
I have long invited people into the crevices of my brain, told them about my hopes and fears and ambitions. The big stuff: that was intimacy to me. Now I want the intimacy of the menial. I saw the inside of your brain, but I want to see the inside of your life. Here is my life, today, in the trivial details: Today, I got Vietnamese iced coffee at lunch and now I’m buzzy and jumpy as I type this into my gmail drafts. Today, Spotify put Wolves by Selena Gomez as the first track on my daily mix. Today, Daniel texted me that the blackberries I picked in Washington and brought back in my carry on were the best he’s had in his entire life.
When Minnar was back in LA over New Years, she spent the night at my apartment. We stood shoulder to shoulder in my tiny bathroom, brushing our teeth. We made eye contact in the mirror and she made a face at me. This, I thought to myself, is what I miss. I still get marathon phone calls, six paragraph emails-- I still get the big stuff-- but I missed this, the day to day, the intimacy of sharing a life.
As someone who had a strained relationship with my parents for many years, the big conversations still feel uncomfortable to me. What I love about being home is the easy familiarity of it: how loud my mom’s footsteps are upstairs, teasing my dad for being such a godawful storyteller, the fact that there is always a really nice loaf of bread on the kitchen counter.
Anyways, how was your day? What are you thinking about lately?
Studio-ing
I have a piece in a show in Pomona this month! The reception is this Saturday, and it will be up all month, if you happen to be in the Inland Empire.
Further Reading:
This book reminded me a little bit of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, which is easily the best novel I’ve read in the past year. I’ve convinced at least five people to read it, and they all loved it too.