A decade earlier, Axiang and I had both been torn between two internal forces: the distant, quiet, impoverished, traditional villages that remained our ancestral homes, and the reinforced-concrete city, inaccessible and bristling with hostility, where we intended to put down roots. At the mercy of economic fluctuations, we travelled between the city and the village as though pushed by invisible tides that washed over city and village alike. Amid this relentless back and forth, villages had begun to imitate the city.
As grating as it may be to admit, it turns out that some of those hoary positive-thinking cliches the philosophers rail against are true, as long as we stick to the first-person plural. We are responsible for how our lives unfold; we can do things that seem impossible. But for those of us living in the heart of the American empire, with our duly elected president marching our society gleefully into hell, this news is far from reassuring. What we do with our lives does matter — as much as anything possibly could. That should keep us up at night.
What could’ve been. Classic speculative space art by Robert McCall
