Which got me thinking, Is Xi Jinping Funny?

I knew where to turn for the answer, Communist-Party-Members.com, the official site for all Chinese cadres looking for the latest authoritative answer to, well, everything — even whether or not Xi Jinping is funny. What follows is my ranking of the quips in what I’m calling The Collected Jokes of Xi Jinping, all of which come from an article called “Xi Jinping’s Humor” published in 2018 to that aforementioned site.

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Xi Jinping’s Jokes As Told By Party Media

1. Autumn Spinach: While poking through a peasant’s refrigerator (as is his habit) while inspecting a Jiangsu village, Xi Jinping was delighted to discover a few water chestnuts and other vegetables. “Why, you must be well off!” he proclaimed. When shown that even more vegetables were growing in the yard — including radishes, cabbage, and spinach — Xi quipped, “Autumn spinach, sexy!” (It works better in Chinese: “Autumn” and “spinach” together are homophones for a beautiful woman’s eyes.) Rating: 3/10.

2. Prizes: At the close of a trip to Canberra on very important business, Xi Jinping announced that he was off to Tasmania the following day, meaning he’d’ve travelled to all six Australian states. “Do I get a prize?” he jested with the seated members of parliament, who all giggled and clapped once the translators had fed it through their ear pieces. Rating 2/10.

3. Pollution: Moved by a speech from the novelist Ye Xin during a conference on the arts in Beijing, Xi recounted his days riding in the bed of a truck back to the commune while a sent-down youth: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Rating 7/10.

4. Instant Noodles: After some complaints from the Maldives about Chinese tourists not eating out at local restaurants enough, Xi Jinping snuck in this laugher: “Our citizens must model civilization while abroad. Don’t litter plastic water bottles and don’t destroy their coral reefs. Eat instant noodles less, eat local seafood more.” Rating 1/10.

5. Key to the city: As he was accepting the key to the city of Buenos Aires, he was also handed a replica Messi Argentine national team jersey. That rascally Jinping with his dreams of Chinese soccer glory asked, “How much would his transfer fee be?” Rating 8/10.

6. Skinny Mini: Upon seeing how skinny the once plump TV host Cao Kefan had become while the later was representing Shanghai at the Two Sessions, Xi Jinping debuted this wisecrack: “You got skinnier, just like Shanghai’s government. The effects are noticeable.” Cao, delighted, responded, “You’re a very hip culture kid.” Rating: 3/10.

7. Cooking Oil: Concerned by the cleanliness of Beijing, Xi thoughtfully asked, “Where does left-over cooking oil go? Not into malatang I hope!” Thus prompted, Beijing city officials quickly disposed of 100,000 tons of waste oil. Rating: 4/10.

8. Ding Ding: Crowded by the press while visiting a Beijing exhibit of priceless artifacts from Chinese antiquity, Xi Jinping hit those jockeying journalists with a real laugher: “Be careful, everyone. If you break it, I’m buying it!” Knowing a good joke when they heard one, the entire corps broke into peals of laughter. Rating 2/10.

9. Smart Water: During an inspection of a “smart greenhouse” during a tour of Shandong agri-tech developments, someone accidentally knocked into a faucet, turning it on. To cut the awkwardness, Xi said, “Is that faucet smart too? As soon as I walk by, out comes the water.” Rating 3/10.

10. Swimming: While discussing water cleanliness with officials from Jiangsu, Xi said, “The netizen test for a lake’s pollution is if the mayor will swim in it.” What wisdom! Rating 4/10.

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All the above jokes are faithful translations of Party media’s description of “Xi-style” humor. So, what is our verdict?

Is Xi Jinping Funny? No, even with the benefit of a politician’s curve. Xi Jinping is just not particularly funny. His jokes are down to business — almost all are about his political campaigns. Some, for example, the “slimming down” of Shanghai’s government, have a hint of menace. There is very little word-play and what little there is is elementary… So no, Xi Jinping is not funny. Alas!

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It’s been an epic tour. The mannered cadence of previous tours, dominated by corporate armadas of fleet hypertrophied marvels of lab science, has given way to a free for all. Team car radios complain about the “Mad Max” atmosphere of the racing. There’s been heroics: the long-range attack of Ireland’s Ben Healey on Stage 6, the tragedy of the foiled 170km breakaway of Van der Poel and his trusty domestique Rickaert in Châteauroux, Martinez’s storming of the mountains on Bastille Day. Of course, Tadej Pogačar reigns over all.

In stage 12, a howling climb through the Pyrenees, Pogačar bloodlessly eviscerated his fellow riders. He ripped up the seam of the Hautacam, a hors catégorie climb, leaving his great rival Jonah Vingegaard of Jumbo-Visma gasping over his handlebars two and a half minutes behind. His uncanny attacks carve up stages with the illusion of ease. Pogačar rides the Tour as the cook in Zhuangzi cuts up an ox:

The cook laid down his knife, and replied to the remark, 'What your servant loves is the method of the Dao, something in advance of any art. When I first began to cut up an ox, I saw nothing but the (entire) carcase. After three years I ceased to see it as a whole. Now I deal with it in a spirit-like manner, and do not look at it with my eyes. The use of my senses is discarded, and my spirit acts as it wills. Observing the natural lines, (my knife) slips through the great crevices and slides through the great cavities, taking advantage of the facilities thus presented. My art avoids the membranous ligatures, and much more the great bones. A good cook changes his knife every year; (it may have been injured) in cutting - an ordinary cook changes his every month - (it may have been) broken. Now my knife has been in use for nineteen years; it has cut up several thousand oxen, and yet its edge is as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone.1

NBC’s coverage has also been a delight. (A far cry from the slop it produces for the Olympics.) The tour is easy watching. Rural France offers a rich tapestry of visuals: heifers’ tawny hides on bald Pyrenees hillsides, the terracotta of Toulouse, the vintage hay bailers of Bretagne, the neon Skoda team cars, churches & castles, fans in polka dot jerseys waving Belgian flags, and most of all those lithe gods of carbon: Pogačar in his world champion rainbow; Vingegaard in his Danish-flag time trial helm; the jesters of Lidl-Trek; the riders’ bulbous tanned calves.

The hosts are light and informative, diving into tactics and the mechanical marvels of the bikes, short histories of notable buildings, interviews with farmers and team captains.

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Then, when the racing ends and the day’s champions have vacated the podium… nothingness. The screen goes blank and inexplicably transitions toTHEMOVE, a cycling podcast hosted by the former cyclists Lance Armstrong, Bradley Wiggins, and George Hincapie with the help of their resident nerd, Spencer Martin. The podcast studios’ slate-grey studio has the charm of a QVC infomercial. The hosts hawk a pharmacopeia of supplements and vitamins. It’s uncomfortable to watch Armstrong and Hincapie, drug cheats both, sell the “secret” to their success.

The show is a grim slog of ex-athletes’ narcissism and nostalgia. What were Armstrong’s thoughts on Pogačars Stage 12 win? Unsurprisingly, they are about his former glories: “I was there — whether it was ONCE, Kelme or T-Mobile. Guys, I was ready to mow you down.” He mocks riders who jockey for positions outside the Top 40, ignoring the joy these mostly meaningless battles bring spectators. After one stage, we are subjected to Armstrong’s anger over viewers’ comments on his hair. The commentary is grey and flat as the aging outcasts who offer it. “Is The Tour de France Already Over?” asks a recent episode. It’s quite obvious the hosts wish it was.

Lance Armstrong has fought his way back into respectability, but at what cost? He is perpetually annoyed at the missives that cross his presenters desk. He reads the hodgepodge of fan mail, producers notes, statistics, and sponsorship fluff with weary disdain. Cycling’s Taliban has retaken Kabul; once free to go postal in the mountains, Lance Armstrong now shuffles paperwork behind a desk like the mortals he has long despised.

Bradley Wiggins cuts a tragic figure on the podcast. Distracted, twitchy, mostly aloof to the conversation, he adds nearly nothing. If his presence on the podcast is a lifeline offered by friends to help a troubled legend pass between his Charybdis and Scylla of addiction and trauma, then I salute it. It’s hard to understand his presence through any other lens.

I have little to say on George Hincapie, other than that I dislike him. The great shame is that the fourth host, Spencer Martin, writer of the insightful Substack Beyond the Peloton, is more or less ignored by his grizzled cohosts.

But enough of that.

The Tour goes on. Tomorrow, a mountain stage. Can anyone catch Pogačar? Unlikely. But rise early and immerse yourself in this greatest of races. Soak in the bonhomie, daring, and freedom of bike racing. Just remember to turn your TV off afterwards.

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Washington, D.C. — It’s a likely place for cars to crash. There’s no stop sign on Sherman and the one on Lamont is treated as more of a suggestion. What’s more, the house on the corner invites smash-ups.

A gonzo box of corrugated steel and burnt orange accents, it’s long been the butt of D.C. blog snark: “I hope whoever's turn is next doesn't remove that center block.” To the house’s right, row homes with the muted grey face lifts of gentrification pout with lipstick red doors. The ever-rarer mottled brown brick of the original builds begins to look like an affectation.

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I’m not surprised to see the crash. It seems right to me that cars collide there. Not that I wish bad things on drivers, or the neighborhood. No, that would be to misunderstand what I mean. The neighborhood is headed different ways. Whether that’s good or bad is neither here nor there. A car crash is but a physical manifestation of the slower moving clash taking place along the 14th Street corridor. Poor policy, individual desire, blindness, rush, an ex post facto justice — it’s all come to a literal head on the corner of Sherman and Lamont this morning.

Let me illustrate my point with another anecdote. Later on, I walk by a mobile phone and internet business aimed at the neighborhood’s long-time Latin American community, the GSM Manía Store. Out front, there is a torn-out payphone. How could there not be?

Perhaps these are the projections of my own fatigued psyche. I stroll on unable to shake the sense that the tear is widening.

As I’m passing the Salvation Army, I find anti-abortion activists have slipped pamphlets disguised as dollars underneath the passenger side wipers of all the cars along the block. The fake bills have the hallmark syncretism of true believers: a schizoid hodgepodge of allusions, numerology, Great Man and falling Nation, executed with the precision of more stable minds. The bills warn of an American Abortion Holocaust. They reference Levicitus 20: 1-5, in which the Lord commanded Moses to tell the Israelites that child sacrifice to Molech shall be punished through death by stoning. They claim post-Roe America has forgotten this lesson: “53 years of federally sanctioned child sacrifice.”

Donald Trump’s portrait dominates the bill. Though, unusually, his back is turned to the beholder and his gaze is focused on a point somewhere off far to the left. He wears a MAGA hat with an American flag stitched upside down. A lizard climbs his shoulder. I do not know its significance, though it may have to do with the “detrans” movement. Is his odd positioning meant to indicate literal RETVRN? I do not know. The bills are greyscale but for the muted red of the MAGA hat and the lizard. The neighborhood seems to have a uniform color scale for conflict.

Just as my pessimism threatens to overwhelm, I arrive outside the Panama International. Women sells mangos and refreshments under bright red umbrellas. To the grocery stores left, a mural flashes the same syncretism as the fake bills. But the menace of holocausts, child sacrifices, reptiles, and a leader who has turned his back on the people is here replaced with notes of hope.

The Hebrew word Shalom, for peace, dominates the top of the mural. In the center, Vanessa Guillén’s beatific portrait gazes out. She wears her Army uniform and is squared to the passerby. Below, two hands make a heart around multi-colored feet, perhaps Buddhapada. A quote from Guillén’s mother runs along the hands: “I cried a lot because I didn’t want her to enlist. Because in my mother’s heart, I already feared that I would suffer.” Two young Hispanic boys, perhaps thirteen, glide by on a single scooter. The boy behind wraps his arms around the boy steering, clasping a gigantic tin pot to his chest. In death, Guillén protects them as they giggle over the electric whine. Later on down the road, a mural of meso-American symbols features an Aztec cuāuhocēlōtl making a mudra, a hand signal popular in Buddhist and Hindu art.

These symbols, too, are confused. Yet they comfort. They acknowledge death, yes, and they invoke the ancient commandments we fail to abide by, but, in doing so head-on they connote an openness and possibility absent the fear mongering of the Trump pamphlets. Guillén faces the society that failed her. The Aztec wishes peace on the ancestors of his offspring and opposition alike.

Still confused I make for home. I’d not talked to anyone, too lost in my own thoughts. The sound of guitar draws me to Mount Pleasant. Past the farmers’ market and down the hill a small crowd of new parents and young children have gathered for a little concert. It’s the “6 ft. Aparty.” A mash-up of D.C.’s classic front porch sessions and COVID rules, the biweekly music sesh is the brainchild of Frank Agbro. As I make for home, I hear him pick up the guitar. Frank starts signing a song I can’t play but reminds me of Guru’s No Time to Play. I don’t turn back but I can hear the little children boogieing as Frank sings, “Never no time to play/ Gotta keep workin every day/ Never no time to play/ Gotta make moves with no delay…”

We turn our attention back to the game below. Two field goals send it to triple overtime, which soon melts into quadruple overtime. A two-point conversion gives Auburn the lead and Texas A&M the ball. The tense stadium doesn’t hold its breath, it expels it. A bloc of students, alumni, fans, and interlopers crush the field with sound. A&M’s quarterback finds the tight end on a shallow slant across the front of the end zone. The ball hits his hands as he falls to the turf. It’s dropped!

The athletes dash from the sidelines and right-on-their-heels follow the students, who flow down the bleachers and leap over the sharp holly hedge that ring them. They are rushing the field. An unfortunate few find themselves snared in waxy green barbs. Kate is already three rows down, skipping atop the bleachers in worn black cowboy boots she super-glued back together that morning. We sneak through a hole in the hedge and join the crowd in chanting “It’s Great! To Be! An Auuuuuburn Tiger!” under the lights.

Love in the shape of light green almond eyes has brought me here. Kate grew up in this loveliest village. She went to Auburn, as did her parents, as did her grandparents. Her brother is now a senior. He recently retired as president of Pi Kappa Phi. We’ve come to spend a game day with Elizabeth, Joe, and Wheeler, to steep and be steeped in the culture of a place a woman I love knows as home.

12 hours before we dance on Pat Dye Field, we leave the dappled sunlight of the home in the vale at Estate Drive and make for the outskirts of campus in Kate’s Jeep. We pass tidy brick ranch houses of a hue with the inflatable tiger mascot Aubies that adorn front porches. Among them rise new builds, barn-style moderns in shades of cream with walnut sidings, in front of which young children in navy Cam Newton jerseys play 500. Along interstate 85, Korean-language billboards advertise realtors to the executives, engineers, and technicians who run the Hyundai and Kia plants, and the smaller hosts of contract manufacturers that supply them. Next to the venerable Toomer’s Drug is The Irritable Bao, where the neon signs in Chinese buzz out “Stop by, foodies!” and the steamed buns taste is if they’re lifted from a Harbin canteen. We park at the Little House on the edge of campus and start the game day experience.

We pick our way through the white tents set up outside the stadium. Each canopy has a name, most in honor of families, corporate LLCs, or boosters clubs. Some joke about the money that now controls the sport: “NIL Collection Tent.” Others feature a playful religiosity, “Go to Auburn or the Devil Will Get You,” that hints at the menace of evangelical coercion that can haunt the life of those who live here. One, nonsensical to me, “GTHAGTH,” requires Kate’s translation: “Go to Hell, Alabama. Go to Hell.” Later in the evening, we’re with Kate’s parents at one called “The Locals.”

Sometime after noon, we meet Wheeler in his room at the Pi Kap house. He is a tall handsome youth with a shock of dark hair reminiscent of Ash Ketchum. He is a generous host, sharing easily his immense knowledge of the school and the mountain blue Coors Light stored in a beer fridge positioned under a poster of “The Rifleman” Chuck Person. Wheeler and Kate were neighbors with Person at their old place along Elise Lane, that is until he was entrapped by the FBI in a college basketball recruiting scandal. At the frat, the boys dress in the understated finery of gentry: pale straight cut jeans over Ariat boots, worn green Barbours atop white dri-fit polos with navy stripes. The girls arrive with spray tanned smiles ringed by jangling gold hoops and gold pendants and gold bracelets that announce the cataclysmic arrival of grand, outfit-coordinated plans for “the boys.”

We’re nursing beers on the back porch watching brothers play beer die when Mr. Coley approaches. “Old people often come with problems but they rarely come with solutions,” he announces. I first met Mr. Coley in July in a rustic cabin inhabited by his father along the shores of Lake Martin on the last parcel of Alabama Power land. Back then, Mrs. Coley told of their honeymoon in that cabin so many years before: Coley père had refused to vacate the property for the young lovers and demanded they notify him before going #2 so that he might hurry underneath the house and bang on the pipes with a wrench to avoid any blockages. Today, the problem Mr. Coley tells of involves missing composites, the arranged portraits of all members that decorate every bare inch of the fraternity’s walls. “Lose lips at an ADPI tailgate told of a raid at the house, and three bare nails in the entryway testify to that truth.” Wheeler turns to Jack, his fraternity brother, friend, and second youngest of the Coley men, and the two set upon some secret plan of action to recover the stolen photographs.

Around four, Kate and I leave for the white tents we’d passed earlier in the afternoon, lingering only along a roped off path outside the stadium to watch Tiger Walk, the procession of mascot, cheerleader, athlete, and coach that announces the beginning of the end of game day.

The rest of the evening passes as football evenings do: Conecuh Sausage, Dale’s Pale Ale, a shared fraternité of ease and rooting alignment. We enter the stadium and sit with Joe and his buddies near the 40-yard-line in the lower bowl. At halftime, Kate and I meet a D.C. friend, Justin, in the bowels of the stadium. He too is an Auburn man and not just any one at that, a Plainsman and perhaps more. We talk about the exigency of unrequited lust and Auburn’s chances in the second half. As the third quarter slips away we head back to our own seats.

A quarter and four overtimes later the game ends and the jubilant crowd heads to Toomer’s Corner to “roll the oaks.” In the days of yore, the purveyors of Toomer’s Drug would toss the telegraph ticker tape recording an away win over the oaks kitty-corner to the store. Today, fans toss toilet paper. We mummify the trees in TP. We circle them like maypoles, scrounging for rolls to launch across the boughs. The revels complete, we turn down the barred windows of Sky Bar with its covers and lines and the good ole comforts of 1716 for a good nights sleep.

The following morning I awake and find it strange that Auburn, this place of joy and culture and civility, has identified itself with “The Deserted Village.” The 1770 poem by Oliver Goldsmith tells of an Irish “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain” from where, upon the poets return, “all the bloomy flush of life is fled.” The American Auburn knows itself as The Plains. Aubie, the mascot, is also the progeny of Goldsmiths’s verse: “crouching tigers wait their hapless prey.” It is only upon returning to Toomer’s with Kate for a lemonade and a stroll do I begin to understand. Crews have gathered to rinse the tissue from the branches of the oaks. A man in a green crane shakes unfurled rolls that are stuck in the trees’ crowns. Pulp scooped into trash bags is piled on a flat bed trailer. A women in a cheer outfit takes senior pictures underneath a still-rolled tree.

I think, then, of Goldsmith:

That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the labour'd mole away;
While self-dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky.

As power washers remove all trace of Auburn’s victory from the Corner, Kate and I sip on lemonades and recollect. Thoughts of the game and the field fade under the clear blue light of the early noon sky streaked with clouds of memory: fraternity mischief, heeled boots on wet bleachers, embraces in the shadows of the great concrete heights of Jordan-Hare.

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After the boys wander off, a hodgepodge group of speakers address the crowd. Some call for the continuation of the intifada in Palestine, organizers for Bayan speak about imperialism and the Philippines, a formerly incarcerated man shares the joy he finds in activism. As the rally winds down, I approach one of the speakers as she hands out Welch’s gummy snacks. She’s a 28-year-old organizer from Virginia. She wrote-in Yahya Sinwar, the deceased Hamas leader, for president. Later, over text, she explains the vote as a message—less to the powers that be than to her “friends and comrades”—that she would not be complicit in genocide.

Across the way from the Palestine rally behind security fencing around Lafayette Square, a small group holds crosses and croons for Jesus over an acoustic guitar. Juan, a 23-year-old immigrant from Ecuador, holds a Jesus flag alongside his brother who embraces a large cross. Self-proclaimed history buffs, they’d driven in from Indiana in the days prior to soak in the election atmosphere and fallen in with this worship group after meeting them along the street. Although as a non-citizen Juan cannot vote, he supports Donald Trump. Unconcerned about mass deportations, he fears illegal immigration imperils legal immigrants: “if bad people come in, which is inevitable when you are not able to put the right checks and balances, people are going to blame the immigrant and its going to get tough.” The looming specter of Communism, he says, “is a lot more scary to watch than Trump using some fiery rhetoric when it comes to illegal immigration.”

The rest of the evening is subdued. Outside Crush, a LGBTQ+ dance bar along 14th street, a “cautiously optimistic” waiter cites Trump’s outsourced field operations as a boon for Harris. Along U Street, a smug group of “pro-abundance” liberals outside Sudhouse discuss the best place to buy cigarettes in the city. Inside Harlot Lounge, patrons smoke hookah while attentively watching the returns on a projector that dominates the room, while in Solly’s barflies ignore the television in the corner. A waitress at Dukem Ethiopian Restaurant tells me her vote is a secret and that the election is in God’s hands now, thus tipping her vote. A black man in a pink MAGA hat stares at his phone in the corner of the upstairs bar at Political Patties, where the walls are festooned with crass lies from past presidents: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and “I am not a crook.” Women stream east in large groups towards Howard to attend the Harris rally.

The last stop of the night is Capitol Fine Wine and Spirits along H Street Northeast. I ask Michael, who works the counter there, if he’s sold a lot of champagne. He says, “No. Only beer… and vodka.”

YMW has promised a friend he’d show at his stand up event so Charles and I agree to tag along. It’s at Johnny Pistolas, a beater of an AdMo joint the local prep school crowd has adopted as a winter break watering hole. Tonight its nearly empty. Kumail, the host, starts warming up the crowd. He’s bombing hard: “I look like the token Black college republic, but I am Jamaican.” He goes off on a riff about the Apple Jacks cinnamon stick and media representation. None of the score or so people present are laughing. It’s a portentous omen. The following acts bomb harder. The jokes beat a familiar path. Trump. Deloitte. The virgin-pedophile mustache continuum, “if I’m the latter you better hope I’m the former too.” We can’t stand it and so make to dip. My frame makes any exit obvious. Kumail gets a laugh when he takes the mic and says “damn, even my friends are leaving!” Before stepping out, YMW wants to angle for the bartenders’ number, “I’m working on my social skills,” he says with a wink, so Charles and I escape onto the second-floor porch for some fresh air. There’s one guy out there, his back to us with his neck held in the palsied crook vapers believe makes their puffing surreptitious. YMW comes back with catch in hand so we step off to The Blaguard.

We stumble upon his new roommates—from a Facebook housing group—on the walk. We invite them along. The rest of the night passes fast. A draft pilsner, a jumbo slice. One of the roommates shares a familiar story no less painful for having been told before. He’s Mexican-American, born and raised in LA, and his family mercilessly mocked his poor Spanish, giving him an aversion to speaking, you know the cycle. The other exhibits a fascination with big penises. After more talk of anal elasticity and colons than Charles and I can stomach we take our leave of YMW and his new roommates and head back up into AdMo.

We duck into a basement hookah bar operated by African immigrants. We’re the only patrons. The air is thick with vapor. The Mystics game reflects of the wall-length mirrors to my left. We two reformed cig-slingers unlatch the garden gates of our friendship and invite each other in for a stroll. We speak of love and friendship and memory and China.

“It’s not early,” Charles says. “No, it’s not,” I say. So we hug and walk our own paths into the cool Thursday morning.

My mind is far from James.

We’re back at it, she and I. The old adages apply. Cats and dogs. Two who tango. The sun and the moon, in romantic moments. On a cool Saturday afternoon over a patchy phone connection we’re something else. Eggshell hearts balanced on spoons held by pursed lips, racing to a catastrophe we blithely cheer.

So when Michael calls I’m relieved. “My buddy Ed—a mid-English guy—is hosting drinks at Union Market or we could head to James’ place.” James’ it is. We meet at a packie off 8th. I grab a sixer of Narraganset tall boys and get upcharged $11.99 for something that’s $7.99 at the Giant near my place. Michael tries to toss a pack of orange-flavored Trident to the register before I close out but he’s too late. He pays for it himself.

We stroll up to 602, where two guys wait on the cast-iron steps up to the top floor. Within seconds they identify themselves as Northwestern men. Michael and I glance at each other. Before our arrival, James texted Michael, “It’s gonna be small, lots of my friends are out of town before school starts.” James opens the door. There are nine men present, two of whom wear Hawaiian shirts. There are no women. I’m introduced to someone who went to Cambridge Rindge & Latin. He says AB had the best gymnastics gym. A German man working for SAP complains that a Hinge date didn’t enjoy his lecture on bureaucratic digitization. “Don’t get me stared on my controversial opinions. The pandemic, for example,” he adds. He’s wearing a black t-shirt blazoned, “It’s okay if you don’t agree with me: I can’t force you to be right.” Michael and I don’t accept his invitation to argument.

Michael and I tuck into the Narragansets and debate stable-coins. We argue in circles. Three women along with two men, whose sunglasses mark them as surely as Cain, enter the apartment. At a later juncture we talk, the men are high school friends from Lexington, Virginia. The first is a Marine, stationed down at Quantico. We talk about Mallow’s Bay. The other is in med school but then concedes he did five years in the Air Force. One of their friends is named Emily. She’s a teacher at a KIPP school in NE. I share my volunteer experience at a KIPP in Nashville. She pauses the party to point out that the German mans shorts match James’ Hawaiian shirt. The similarity is uncanny.

I’ve run out of desire to type. It’s near midnight.

I go home. I get scammed by my local kebab shop, which just changed ownership. The previous owner was an honorable man. He’d lie to my face and admit he did it—all with a smile and a story. The new family won’t even provide a receipt.

By the time I get back, Fred’s inside though his hand radio still plays. As I’m typing this I know he’s back out there. I can hear him hawking loogies in a worrying fashion. It’s a matter of great concern. One of many such matters if you’re tuned in.

“Love” by Eileen Chang

This is true.

In a village there was a girl from a moderately well-off family. A natural beauty. Many sought her hand, none successfully. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen that year. It was a spring evening. She stood at the back gate, her arm wrapped around a peach tree. She remembers wearing an off-white shirt the color of the moon. She’d seen the boy from across the way before but they’d never spoken. He walked over. Then, not far now, he stood still and, in a soft voice, said, “Oh, you’re here too?” She didn’t say anything. He didn’t continue. They stood for a while longer then went their separate ways. 

That was that. 

Later on the girl’s relatives, through a bit of trickery, sold her into concubinage in a far-off county. She was resold again and again. She survived innumerable tempests. In her old age, she still recalled that one instance and would speak often of that spring evening under the peach tree at the back gate, and the boy. 

That out of the millions of people you meet the ones you do. That out of the millions of years in the endless expanse of time’s wasteland you were not a step too early, not one step late—somehow right on time. There’s nothing to say then but ask, in a soft voice, “Oh, you’re here too?”

I am writing on the Four Won’t Youth today (Chinese of my age who won’t date, won’t marry, won’t buy homes, and won’t have kids) and translating some Eileen Chang poetry towards that end. In their rejection of the state-society’s barometers of adulthood, I see shades of John Cusack’s iconic line as Lloyd Dobler in 1989’s Say Anything…: “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” Dobler was a sort of American Four Won’t Youth, albeit an amorous one. But it was the set-up to that line that brought me back to Eileen Chang’s “Love.” The father of Dianne, Lloyd’s love interest, asks him about his career plans:

“What’re your plans for the future?”

“Spend as much time possible with Dianne before, uh, she leaves.”

“Seriously, Lloyd.”

“I’m totally and completely serious.”

Love, as Lloyd sees it here, is a fleeting instant—blink and you might miss it. The future is now and all-consuming. Somehow, that mix of Eileen Chang poetry and Four Won’t Lloyd’s views on romance bring me back to the stiflingly hot classroom on the first floor of Buttrick Hall where as a second-semester senior I took a modern Chinese literature course in Chinese. It was spring when I first read “Love.” We memorized it and were graded on our recall of the final line. Chang captures how memory is a mixture of confluence and effort. I have never forgotten this old woman and the ember of memory she stoked throughout her life. Words are failing me and I have an article to publish, so I will finish here: when writing, I listen to the same song on repeat. Sometimes for days. For the past 48 hours it has been Raspberry Jam by the Allah-Las. It creates a looping instance, allowing me to retrace again and again and again the thin tendril of memory and thought slipping through the folds of my mind. The mind is a loose sheet of sand made up of the grains of memory. Is it not a delight to find one and ask, in a soft voice, “Oh, you’re here too?”

“Where’s Maria?”

“In the walk-in,” Silvia says.

He strides through to the kitchen. Teddy opens the walk-in door and there she is. Maria’s drinking ShockTop out of a plastic quart jar she hides behind the mayo gallons. She’ll tell Monte the boys in the kitchen need a beer batter. Monte will know the boy’s made the batter before Maria clocked in but he’ll pour it anyway, angling the quart jar to give it a nice strong top. He likes the change that comes over her, eyes like TV static and a dewey smile. He imagines the foamy head caught on the peach fuzz above her lips.

Teddy grabs Maria’s bicep. She wrenches her arm away and then smooths out the ruched neckline of her sleeveless white blouse.

”Quit it, Teddy.”

“Sorry. Sorry.”

“What’s going on?”

Their breath hangs like a veil between them in the refrigerated air. Maria continues sipping on her beer. Teddy’s arms break out in goosebumps as his sweat dries. The front of his Pershing & Sons Landscaping tank becomes a salt flat pebbled with white deposits.

“I’m scared Maria. I had a dream.”

“Okay.”

“I dreamt that I got trapped on a forest road that got cut off by the blaze." Teddy’d signed on with a fire crew in the Lost Sierras for the summer. He hadn’t told Maria before doing it. Nor Greenie, his buddy since they were five-and-a-half and both got detention for releasing toads in Mrs. Kirtchner’s classroom. When he put his pen to the dotted line of the release form, he’d understood that the spiraling cone of summer possibilities had collapsed into a single certainty: he was departing. Greenie had flipped out. He’d never conceived of such a thing being possible. Maria’d understood it, when he told her. She’d been cold about it but Teddy had the reason why wrong. He thought she was heartbroken. She knew he’d leave Petersburg just as she was sure he’d come back. But she was gone, gone for real. There was no turning back once she got to Marshall. Huntington today, New York City next. Then the cities her grandfather told her about in a reverent voice as they picked through the snow-bones clinging to the shadows on spring hikes to the ridge line: Dar es Salaam, Valparaíso, Kuala Lumpur. Teddy’s departure simply meant the end of Jeeping with a boy after shifts at the Lep passed in quart jar dream. She might write about it later, she thought.

“What of it?” She asked.

“I dreamt I was going to die. I couldn’t see the sky. Embers like snowflakes were falling—”

“Embers like snowflakes, I like that”

“—were falling and they were burning through my jacket and it started getting hard to breath and I was in my Jeep with the top down and so I gunned it but there were some downed trees blocking the path and they were on fire too and soon the smoke started to black out the fire and that’s when I woke up.”

Teddy was panting now. The whites of his eyes shone in the dark of the walk-in.

“I’m scared of dying,” he said. “What the fuck, I’m scared of dying.”

“You’ve had a premonition,” Maria said.

“A premonition?”

“A premonition, a vision of what’s to come.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, about the premonition.”

“No! I’m going to die!”

“You’ve only dreamt it.”

“For a couple hours there, I lived it.”

“You lived out dying, huh.”

“Forget it.”

The rider first notices the boys on his initial pass through Mayfair. They’re riding a busted 49-cc burro. He lets Red Dust pull him up through the meadows above Kenilworth and into Maryland, across the settlements at Colmar Manor. The lengthening shadows tell him to head off the spirited bike and make back for town. Back through the aquatic gardens where birds sing through pistol play. The rider is pulling past Mayfair when the boys spot him. They spur on their burro, heels clacking useless against her plastic white frame. The boys are dressed sharp in light ripped skinny jeans, foamposites and hoodies. “Yah, yah, yah!” They’re jeering on the rider’s tail. He rips the reins to pull onto the East Bank Trail. The boys are in pursuit. He edges the filly left and they pull up beside him to the right. “Wanna race?” The boy riding pillion begins to laugh. The driver guns it and they’re off. The rider slinks low, finally one with the bike, and becomes the pursuer. Their shoulders shift together left and then right as filly and burro lean through turns. A rat snake whips across the trail. The old burro begins to falter as it climbs a rise. The rider catches the rascals and laughter breaks out. The boys flip a bitch. The rider says, “good shit, fellas. Good shit.” All parties ride off into the dusk.

We’re at Benitos Place, a Honduran spot off 11th. Eli, Reed, Kathryn, and I. A forecast of hail led us to abandon a planned trek to Fairfax for Korean. We’re nestled cozily around two tables seated next to a group of Salvadoreñas gossiping about something on Instagram. Three TVs show the Gold Cup game between El Salvador and Martinique. Two are synced. One has Spanish closed captions and the bottom half of another’s screen is framed by paper cutouts of the Honduran, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Mexican flags. The third, unsynced, runs seven seconds ahead. After the standard rounds of bullshiting and congratulations (Kathryn just earned her Georgetown masters), it’s time for stories. Kathryn has one to tell. It’s about the implosion of her old restaurant, an elevated bistro in the Newton of NoVA where she waitressed through college.

“So the owner is 82 and he gets a mail-order wife from Russia. The botox makes it unclear how old she is, let’s say late 30s. Fully a 40-year age gap. She claws her way into the restaurant and forces out the head chef. We all thought he was leaving for greener pastures, bon voyage and what not. Turns out he only learned he was getting the axe after he saw his own position listed on Indeed. He confronted her but offered to stay on for another month to train his replacement. By this point, I’m getting close with the accountant, who starts to fill me in on all the shady shit going down. First, she replaced all the art inside with really high-end pieces, all sourced from a Russian dealer. She replaced all the light bulbs with a Russian contractor. His final straw was learning she owns the bougie salon next door—I’ve literally never seen anyone inside—through her instructing him to transfer restaurant funds to the salon. He quit instead. Then one day, she accuses the head chef of stealing and fires him on the spot. They escorted him out. He probably just wouldn’t go along with her schemes. The thing is though, his wife was the general manager and his sons worked there too. So they all quit too. And like, nobody was running the restaurant. Hostesses would take turns doing admin. We ran out of menus because he was the guy who ordered the paper for them. Then, she travelled to Dubai, this is 2022, right after Russia invaded Ukraine. She said she was meeting people there for business. Has to be money laundering, right? The last oligarchs desperately getting assets out of Russia through her.”

I get to thinking of Robert Hanssen. The dead mole who lived in the same town as Kathryn’s restaurant. I recently took inspiration from him. I was back with the Saffron Tagliatelle crowd on Saturday night, round two of a nightmarishly long golden birthday week (a difficult gestation, apparently), and committing faux pas left and right. I compared a friend’s three-year-old niece to Hasbulla, the Dagestani dwarf, and accidentally tapped a friend’s ass when putting my hands behind my back. “Cancelled, Alex is cancelled!” What really did me in was a comment on another guest’s baking the night before. Ben had brought home-made almond cookies to the potluck. In a moment of candor, I told Clara (the birthday girl) and Angela (her friend, in from LA) what I truly thought of them. Not much. I’d assumed this was all in confidence. The following evening, Saturday night, Angela is punch-drunk and nibbling on one of Ben’s cookies. I’m in conversation with Ben, riffing on something stupid, when Angela steps in and says, “You know Ben, contrary to popular opinion, I really like your cookies.” “Wait what?” “Your cookies are good.” “Contrary to popular opinion? People don’t like my cookies?” Angela can’t remember who said it and fails to catch my eyes pleading for silence. Word quickly spreads: someone hates Ben’s cookies. The mole hunt is on.

Here comes my Robert Hanssen moment. “Ben,” I grab his shoulders, “I’ll find who said this and report back.” The only way out is through. Hanssen once led the FBI search for himself. Why, I can do the same thing! I make rounds at the party. Inquiring earnestly and pressing the other guests hard. After all, their sincere protestations make them the perfect straight men. “Whoever said that is heinous,” one guest says. “Do I detect self-loathing?” I ask. The dog-and-pony show is working, but perhaps too well because interest doesn’t wane. An hour later and the mole is still a whisper, “contrary to popular opinion” a new punchline. Then, in a moment of lucidity, Angela remembers who hated Ben’s cookies. Her eyes widen as she looks at me. “You! You said it!” Ah, shit. Repent now, bucko, or you really are cancelled. I find Ben. I’ve got an almond cookie in hand. “I’m sorry, Ben. I’m the one who hated your cookies but I was wrong. See, I love them!” My cheeks fill with hard-tack and yesterday’s nuts. “You’re just making it worse, Alex. This isn’t helping your case.” My Hanssen moment come full circle. Worse yet, I’m tagged immediately with a nickname that sticks. “The Cookie Monster has been cancelled.”

I cross Arlington Memorial Bridge and into my recollections. The night before, I’m at a dinner party in a refurbished two-bedroom with twin double hang windows overlooking Georgia Ave. It’s a younger crowd, graduates flush with their first years-worth of paychecks, gathered for a “golden” birthday on the 23rd. Everyone has Americana roots. Family and high school in Dallas, Knoxville, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis. Everyone has global appetites. A passing mention of years spent at an English private school in Shanghai elicit an inquiry into a familiarity with an ex who also went there. A table of ten conducts conversations in Chinese, Hindi, French, Spanish, Dutch. There is no bifurcation, yet, between the intellectual types (who are mostly preoccupied with extremism, domestic and global) and the business set (who seek out “technical” companies and work for Zuck and Musk). One woman asserts Thailand is not run by a military junta. Another interjects, “you are thinking of Myanmar.” Michael and I push back. She retreats into the mystical authority of the state, “I can’t call it a coup state because State hasn’t officially labelled it that.” We introduce our potluck offerings. Michael has made saffron tagliatelle. “Saffron,” he jests, “famously worth more than its weight in gold.” “The key question,” the guest and hostess interject nearly simultaneously, “did you steal it?” “I did actually,” Michael (a perennial good sport) affirms. “Good,” goes the guest, “because capitalism sucks.” So an adolescent thrill that sits awkward like baby fat on adulthood is refashioned as the shofar that brought down the Jericho of inequity. Later, a woman fits her fist into her mouth. A second guest copies her, “I can too!”

I arrive at Mount Vernon. Across from where the tour buses idle underneath oaks, drivers in folding chairs basking in the coolness of the tunnel they’ve created, is a placard acknowledging Ona Judge. Born Martha Washington’s slave, she accompanied the President and his wife to New York and Philadelphia upon his inauguration. They cycled her periodically back to Virginia to skirt a law granting freedom to permanent black residents of the non-slave states. She escaped at 26. North to New Hampshire. She married, had children, died at 75 in 1848. Are not all father’s embarrassed when their progeny inherit their sins?

I’m passing Union Station again, on the tail-end of my ride and the pro-Choice rally is on. Women with signs that hold “A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance” superimposed over a cartoon rendition of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia gather along its edge. Many wear the BANdanas. Their signs clash with the speakers message. The speaker, a white woman, speaks with calm assurance that those gathered there today are in the majority. Their opponents but a minority, “a loud one.”

At a crosswalk, an older woman on a bike with a side-mirror attached to her helmet approaches from the opposite bank. A car slows but she still brakes. As we pass each other, she looks me in the eyes and says, “you never know.”

The other day two cops in a Charger asked me if I’d seen the boys who like to hang on the rocks along I, “they think y’all sweet with it. Next time you see ‘em, call in a drug complaint. They relocated from the electric box on 8th.” I wave them off. We’ve all heard gunshots. My friend was assaulted by the Girl Robbers. At a game night in a Levi’s penthouse above Pennsylvania Ave months back, a Peace Corps friend abandons an effort to construe the Girl Robbers as radical feminism after we point out our assaulted friend was a woman too. I leave early and step into the immediate aftermath of a carjacking. The cops are there and I overhear their story in flashes of red and blue. A gun. A white Mercedes SUV. Shock. I bike home.

My bike was stolen off the front porch seven months back, a ‘90s Cannondale my father used to ride. It was the World Cup and the US was playing the Orange in the round of 16. Cam and I were at Dirty Water and it was before noon but there was a beer deal so we were both a bit tight. We step out on to H and there’s my bike. Not locked to anything but itself. Cam asks what I’m going to do. I say take it home. As we’re standing there, discussing the best approach, a man runs out of the packie and tells us to get the fuck away from his bike. I explain its my bike. He says that’s bullshit, he bought it the other day. I say it was stolen the other day. A crowd gathers. Cam, a former Ranger (“you sit in a shed in Georgia for 8 hours more than you jump out of planes”), sparks out of a beer haze. There’s always a crowd on 8th and H. It’s a key artery where the X2 meets the 90 and the 92, north-south-east-west. And the Electric Box Boys hang there too. A man steps to the front and appoints himself foreman of the street jury. He instructs me to state my case. I explain when my bike got stolen and where. It’s unclear who is the plaintiff, and who the defendant, that swings with the crowds move. Then its the other mans turn. He wears orange tinted shades and a patterned cravat of mustard yellow. He says he bought it at the pawn shop just there, spent $50 on it. I offer all the cash in my wallet. The foreman deems it fair. The Jury concurs. The man agrees. I hand him $12. He unlocks the rear wheel from the frame and we set off.

Back to the present.

I’m never in danger. But someone was last night. Someone driving that Accord. Someone stealing that Accord. Someone shooting into or out of that Accord. Everyone involved was in the grips of terror. It’s a terror that’s hard to ignore here in DC. And its senseless. To pooh-pooh it would be blind. To call it a hell hole would be disingenuous. But this morning there it is. A black Accord with a flat and a bullet hole parked across from my house. Cleaned by a drizzle. A recovery crew backs up down the block and the Jerr-Dan deploys its ramp. The chain grows taught and the Accord is drawn onto the back of the flatbed. The flat is crimped. The tinted back window of the Jerr-Dan’s cab is adorned with a looping white cursive, “Always Able to help!!!!"

The car is gone and the cruiser is too. All that’s left is a bag of 7/11 brand kettle chips under the dry negative of the Accord’s body.

So he summoned Nestor, that storied advisor to Agamemnon to his tent. (Alexander had instructed his poets to raise Nestor from the myth. He had left Aristotle to his own devices in Athens, preferring the literal manifestation of Homeric epic to his nasally childhood tutor.) Also in the tent was Qinshihuang’s man, a Mercader under cover as a cultural attache, a tactic the Qin emperor had borrowed from the NKVD, the famed Soviet spy agency he had come to admire through his geomancer’s readings of cracked ox scapula. Nestor, platinum blond with a beak of a nose, ducked in through the heavy Persian curtains that framed the entranceway and asked why he had been summoned. Alexander asked, “What is my destiny?” The Qin Mercader sat quietly, the ink of his brush spilling silently across his scrolls, taking copious notes on the social customs of the Greeks.

Nestor started in.

As you well know I have advised the greatest of the great. I have stood atop the ramparts of Troy. I have stormed the beach at Normandy. I advised Heracles on the construction of his palace on Olympus Mons. I was Lew Alcindor’s teammate at UCLA. All of which is to say, I have come to this immutable truth.

At twenty-five, man diverges. There are but two destinies. Some follow one path and some another. The first path is paperwork. Bureaucracy. The prophesied power of Excel. They will whittle their distal phalanxs and ischiums down to the nub in the service of others’ dreams. The second path is power. Capital. The sword. These men will stand atop the heavens and their will be done on earth. If only the former will handle the paperwork for them.

Alexander exhaled, content in his understanding of Nestor’s speech. Power, capital, and the sword were his. Bucephalus was a sonic boom. Conquest was play in the fields of the lord. His destiny was secure.

The Qin Mercader was astonished. It came to him that Alexander had not understood—indeed could not understand—Nestor’s prophecy. So he abandoned his planned assassination, figuring that Alexander was hurtling towards doom of his own accord, and set off on the treacherous return to Qin. North through the snow-capped Pamirs, east through the sands of the Taklamakan basin, south through the pass at Jiayuguan alongside mendicants and Buddhists, until he arrived at Qinshihuang’s side.

The emperor, having already survived two assassination attempts, one by no less an adversary than Jet Li, ordered the Mercader imprisoned. This was another lesson Qinshihuang had learned from the NKVD. The Mercader was struggled against and criticized and self-criticized and tested on the tenets of Leninism and Legalism until his inquisitors were satisfied that he was, indeed, a loyal man of Qin, upon which he was released. He then went to Qinshihuang to relay Nestor’s message on the entangled destinies of pencil pushers and titans. Qinshihuang immediately realized the significance of the prophecy. Who is really king if a man who counts beans can cut the Fates’ strings? As was his custom, Qinshihuang adopted an elegant, if sanguinary, solution. He would burn all the scholars along with their books and so divert the confluent streams of destiny. And so he did.

Our achtertuins will remain secret for now. But know this: as the evening winds down I recall a rainy afternoon in Aartselaar. Felix, Emiel and I are in Oma’s kitchen and fat Ramon is in the annex. Oma’s garden is impeccable. But there’s a hole in the hedge. The ditch is swollen with runoff. And all we need to do is duck low and pass through and then leap and we’re in the nettles and then we’re out and we’re free and the world is the garden and we three kleine rakkers can roam.

So here’s the joke. You’re Cheryl Hines now and you’re madly in love with a maniac. The punchline is you’ve got to play it straight. You’re the stooge, the feed. You’re playing it so straight you begin to worry people think its a comedy. You’ve done that before but this time’s different. You really are in love with the maniac and he doesn’t get the joke. But he does know his lines. And that’s the problem. He’s good. Real good. And if he knew it was a joke he might even enjoy it. But he doesn’t and you do. And I’m thinking about Cheryl Hines as I climb up C and head home. And you’re Cheryl Hines and you’re waiting for the maniac to tell the punchline but he doesn’t, he never does. He starts in again. And You’re Cheryl Hines Now. And the punchline isn’t coming. And You’re Still Cheryl Hines. And I am too. And the Maniac is only just now revving up.

Daniel pulls off the towpath eight feet beyond our bench. He’s wearing a through-hikers pack. His helmet is fastened snugly to his seat post rear rack. He is wearing a yarmulke and a white v-neck t-shirt. His face is pockmarked with acne scars thinly covered in a bramble patch of a beard. A small wooden board has been affixed to his head tube. He asks where to find water. I say, “right here, brother,” and offer my bottle. He doesn’t catch the Hulk Hogan reference and declines. “I carry 2.5 liters.” He’s headed to Harper’s Ferry. “Halfway.” To where, I don’t ask. “I almost hiked the Appalachian Trail, made it halfway.” He gives us his mileage. We’re off to Great Falls. We’re seeing the sights. Daniel says it’ll be either college or HVAC for him. He’s 19. Said he decided to bike upon arriving home from halfway up the Appalachians, “just sitting watching TV. Uh-Uh, I had to get active.” He declares that bikepacking and backpacking are 80% similar. He obsesses over equipment. “I’m a gear head,” he declares after our weary acknowledgment of his passion. “In England that means you’re addicted to coke,” Michael says. We return from the overlook and Michael asks, “so what sort of Jew are you?” But in a more polite way. “Orthodox.” “I’m reformed, I guess.” “No judgement here.” “We were conservative, before leaving for England. My brother bar mitzvah-ed in a conservative synagogue in London. But we sort of fell in with the reformed.” We say our goodbyes. I tell Daniel to wear a helmet. “But it’s sweaty.” I badger on. He takes my advice.

Michael says I’m too nice. That he wouldn’t have brought Daniel. We discuss whether he was a tad slow. We land on socially awkward. I posit he’s like all boys leaving hyper-religious communities. Michael says that’s romantic. I don’t tell him I’m selfish. That I wanted Daniel for a story. That I got one. We bike on. A pit-stop at Angler’s Inn becomes a lunch. She’s been there too. But not with me. False memory. We peddle on. DEADLY UNDERTOW. HEAD FOR SHORE. The Potomac is treacherous. Michael’s nose is red now, the ginger tinge of his beard receding under the scarlet of his cheeks. We split ways under the bridge. I’m parked at GWU. 7-11 coffee. Walking the dog after tequila. Mesh walls and salmon cakes. I tighten Red Dust atop the Baja and head east along K. A cop heading south banks west and stops in traffic, “was it hard to get the bike up there?” “No, not at all,” I gesture through the moonroof, “just twist that red knob.” “I just got a nice bike and I’m choosing between that and the rack.” My light turns green so I give gas.

So I drive through this city of monuments. The demented dentist litters the operating room floor with the marble remains of memory. They crumble on a second pass.