A Year in Mediation

Yi-Ling:

Since our last Fossil, I finally returned to Beijing. In August, I did two weeks of hotel quarantine. In September, I stepped gingerly back into post-Covid China. In October, I re-visited old haunts – the climbing gym, my favourite brewery Jing A – and went dancing again, for the first time in months. In November, I moved into a new apartment and met new friends. In December, I ate hotpot with a dozen people. I started rebuilding a new life in changed city, a changed world – changed for the better or the worse, it is still too hard to tell.

Living in China today feels like living in the near future, but still, I have no idea where we are going. Lately, I’ve been hanging out with a lot of science-fiction writers, in hopes that they might give me some answers, some guidance, some prognostications on how to navigate this precarious and uncertain future. But I’ve realized - they don’t know either. Nobody knows. I’ve started asking a different question – not “where we are going,” but rather, in the midst of all this change – “what should we hold onto?”

A few weeks ago, I spoke over Zoom with the science-fiction writer and translator Ken Liu, to pick his brains for a piece that I’m working on. He’s a ridiculously eloquent, intelligent and thoughtful human being, sharing many things that I held onto like semi-precious stones. What do we hold onto? I asked. At this crazy, surreal, accelerated point in history, where everyone is simultaneously spinning the wheels of a rat-race spiral of productivity, but slammed to a pause in a global pandemic, what do we hold onto? His response, spoken in one breath, left a deep impression on me. I hope that you enjoy them, too.

Reject the myth of efficiency. Reject the myth of scale. Not everything has to be scaled up to be valuable, not everything has to be efficient to be worthwhile. Reject the idea that we are interchangeable collection of skills. Reject the totalitarian system that reduces us to mere pawns in that scheme. Remember what makes us human. Roots matter. Local communities’ matter. Local connections matter. Real-world relationships matter.

Sophie:

What is there to say about this year? I’ve been reading a lot of year-end pieces lately, years in reading and years in watching and years in childcare and years in sickness. I have been very moved by people trying to make something legible out of a year defined by suffering, dysfunction, and chaos. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do the same.

I’m writing from London, where we’ve moved into recently-invented category of lockdown called “Tier 4,” and the virus has mutated in way that we don’t fully understand but think might be very bad. Borders are starting to close to us. I am writing from my little study in our apartment in Islington, where I’ve been lucky, really lucky, to have spent most of 2020 writing and reading and scrolling and thinking. There is a strong dissonance between the indoors and the outdoors right now.

This year I’ve been grateful for mediated experiences, however strange they ended up being: for virtual exhibitions and friendships-on-the-phone and a Christmas cocktail party on Zoom and hopping around via Random Street View. I’m eager, too, for an end to this some of these virtualized and simulated experiences and a collapse back into the rhythms of life experienced IRL.

We’ve been sending out this newsletter less frequently this year. Both of us have gotten busier; we’ve also been tired. We haven’t found our way back to writing about words quite as often. We might next year, but likely at a similarly slow pace—the occasional missive from us to you, with links and reading recommendations. If you have any suggestions, questions, needs & wants, for the type of work you want to read, things you've enjoyed about Fossil Poetry—please send them our way! We hope you’ll continue to read, and in the meantime, wishing you a happy and safe new year.

Reading & Writing

SH:

Writing: A few things I wrote in the second half of the year that I’m proud of—a piece for Harpers about a digital haunted house. This NYT profile of Trevor Paglen, an artist whose work critiques and complicates surveillance technology. This on Edith Wharton’s fictional houses, for LARB. A piece on the landline in fiction for The New Yorker. A long reported feature for Slate on museums’ overreliance on (mostly white) volunteer labor. For The Guardian, a piece about those photos of empty streets that we all stared at in March and how they look now. Something for the New York Times Magazine on the TikTok teens! An essay about collecting, hoarding, and accumulating art. And a piece for the New York Times Surfacing series, illustrated with scented candles, on dying and lost smells. 

Reading: I’ve been making my way, very slowly, through Radical Love by Fanny Howe. It’s a collection of five novels, interlocking, and I’ve been floored by her images. I’m a few pages into the new Elena Ferrante and really loving it already. Also, honestly, I’ve been reading the internet a lot and I’m eager to take a break. Also, I wrote a long blog post about everything I read this year, if you really want the full rundown.

YL:

Writing: I began working on the book that I’ve been mulling on for three years & thinking about for ten - a work of narrative non-fiction on individuals navigating the Chinese Internet, and this year, am lucky to be supported by the New America Fellowship. I started writing a column for Rest of World called “Inside the Walled Garden” on the digital phenomena reshaping everyday lives in China, such as this piece on psychotherapy apps, this piece on the health code, and this on the rise & fall of Weibo as a platform for intellectual discourse. I wrote a piece for WIRED on GitHub - as the “last land of free speech in China” - and handed in a draft for a longform profile on a Chinese sci-fi writer, due to be published next year. 

Reading: I’ve been reading a ton of Chinese science-fiction: Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds, Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, and Ken Liu’s translated anthology Invisible Planets. Other highlights that got me through the year: Big Friendship by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sou – a fun, collaborative work of non-fiction I read before setting off from Hong Kong, late summer & Alienation, by Ines Estrada – a beautiful graphic novel, that I read one cold evening in Wuhan, and gave me shivers.