THE SUSPENDED AND THE WEEPING

Xiaowei Wang // Emeryville

Reflections and meditations

“The US is built on slavery, genocide, and imperialism. The US as we know it will die unless Americans reckon with their past,” said my ninety-one-year-old great-uncle last winter. He sends me multiple taiji videos every day, so that I can stay healthy during California's shelter-in-place. In Tianjin, where he is, movement restrictions have been lifted. He tells his daughter to send me a bundle of masks and Lian Qiao, the fruit of the forsythia suspensa tree. It's an herb in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that's been used in the battle against Covid-19.

The first few days of shelter-in-place in the Bay Area are full of grief and elation. Action gives some sense of control. I donate money, I volunteer for mutual aid, I give someone immunocompromised a ride to a doctor’s appointment. I drive along cinematic, sweeping expanses of empty six-lane highways. Emotions and sounds heighten in stillness. Two chickadees have made a nest in my exterior wall, so I wake up to a snowfall of pink insulation every morning.

Forsythia suspensa. A shrub, its fruit contains over 130 known chemical compounds, used for centuries by TCM for its anti-viral properties. It remains unproven in the West. From Nature, the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal: “Practitioners of TCM and Western-trained physicians have often eyed each other suspiciously...[Western medicine] typically requires randomized, controlled clinical trials that provide statistical evidence that a drug works. From the TCM perspective, this is too simplistic. Factors that determine health are specific to individuals. Drawing conclusions from large groups is difficult, if not impossible.” [1]

Discourses on data draw a shaky line. On one side, X very likely cures Y. The other side, claims of a TCM system with its own well-trodden logic, possessing an opacity that defies the world of data and statistics. Data easily slips into technocratic solutions, and solutions give way to feelings of conspiracy. If X definitely cures Y, maybe experts are hiding Z from us?

Waiting. I add “COVID vaccine” to a list of cures I am waiting for. I have a chronic disease, designated incurable by Western doctors. My disease is incurable because according to my doctor they know the mechanisms of action but not the cause. When I was first diagnosed, Ian Hacking's The Taming of Chance sat on my nightstand. “The most decisive conceptual event of twentieth-century physics has been the discovery that the world is not deterministic. Causality, long the bastion of metaphysics, was toppled, or at least tilted.” [2] Statistics and the body were founded on a shaky relationship, a bid for power by an astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet, writes Hacking. Average man is a construction. Still, average man caught on. Average man provides us with some kind of certainty. Where is the average, when normals become new abnormals?

Conspiracy feels thrilling because it offers a sense of control. Theories of the virus’s origins span from government labs to pangolins. American newspapers like to report on Asian countries with their location-tracking, contract-tracing apps. Impossible here, says one newspaper, because of liberal democracy's emphasis on civil liberties. Somehow democracy becomes the object in question. Google and Apple are ready to be heroes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that despite these companies, with their apps that claim to save the world, nothing is more effective than a solid healthcare system. That is the ultimate disappointment of conspiracy. Why isn’t there a magical solution?

Like love, conspiracy is a feeling that we all have explanations for, but little way to explain the feeling itself. As if enough explanations would give way to that moment of sudden clarity, the veil lifted from vision: surely, I am loved, surely in death is an explanation for life, surely all that waiting had meaning. Surely data will tell us something new. Data will reaffirm that ghosts don't exist, that hauntings of the past will be wiped away by technological progress.

A walking meditation to try, during this time in quarantine: standing in a relaxed pose on one side of the room, gently walk as if your heart was in the soles of your feet, a line connecting the top of your head to the sky, and the shadows of your ancestors trailing in a thousand floating threads from your back. When you reach the other side, tell me, what were you walking away from?

Notes:

David Cyranoski, “Why Chinese Medicine Is Heading for Clinics around the World,” News Feature, Nature, September 26, 2018, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7.
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1.

Author Bio:

Xiaowei Wang is a designer, writer, and coder. They are the Creative Director of Logic Magazine and author of Blockchain Chicken Farm (FSG Originals, 2020).