Tired Gods

In the silence of the nursery, a single child opens his eyes and sees four grand-ancestors and two parents staring back. He is not a baby; he is a structural load-bearing wall. He is a grandson, a son, a future husband, a future father, and a phantom limb. He is the missing brother. He is the ghost of the cousin who was never born. The emotional labor of a village is funneled into a funnel the width of a single throat.

Somewhere in a high-rise, a woman hammers a piece of pork flat. Thwack. Thwack. The violence is precise. Her children hide in the corner, tracking the rhythm. At dinner, the pork is served with a smile that doesn't reach the eyes. "Is it tasty?" she asks. The silence is loud enough to chew.

Because the lattice is broken, the rows collapse into one another. The mother looks at her son and sees a husband. She demands the protection of a father, the intimacy of a sister, the loyalty of a spouse. The son learns the art of the toggle: become a doll when she needs something to hold; become a stone container when she needs to pour out her unmothered grief. He is a shapeshifter, exhausted before he learns to speak.

Across town, a girl learns to be a little mother to her mother, a little wife to her father, and a ruthless, competitive brother to every boy in her math class. She keeps a collection of masks inside her Birkin bag. She tries to look Forever 21. She is terrified that under the LED mask, the goddess-skin is flaking.

They meet, this boy and this girl, in a coffee shop. There is no chemistry, only recognition. They have already grown up together in the psychic soup of a lonely generation. They feel like siblings helping each other with homework. A kiss feels like incest; a touch feels like strategy.

The implicit request is to become God.

If you cannot be Tian (Heaven) by scoring the highest on the Gaokao, you must at least be in the top 10 of the local League of Legends server. The God-shaped hole in the child is bottomless. It is filled with a grave’s worth of ambition. The scars from the belt ache whenever the rejection letter comes. A 10x leveraged bank and a beaten child are the same economic model: both are borrowing heavily from a future that may not exist. Both are systems that shatter rather than bend. They cannot learn because they cannot make mistakes.

The lover discovers you are not the eternal Tianzi. You are a 35-year-old salaryman with hair plugs. The epiphany is a crime. To let another human see you as not a god is a betrayal of the ancestors. The wedding vow is a contract: "I promise never to see you without a filter." 

Because Godhood is unattainable, the ego regresses to the last time omnipotence felt real, when it was reasonable to dream of becoming hokage or the pirate king. Grown men remain frozen in the angry silence of a twelve-year-old boy who was never allowed to cry.

A woman holds an insulin needle in one hand and a slice of cake in the other. Neither can be put down. Both are infinitely important.

Friends meet for brunch to compare luxury goods. They place their bags on the table like shields. Their hearts have shrunk to fit inside the logos. A name is called, and a stranger replies.

The makeup cannot be washed away. It has rusted into heavy metal poisoning. We ask ourselves: which pattern of scars is the prettiest?

From the sky, looking down, everyone looks so lonely. From the ground, looking up, the sky is still so far away.

At the banquet where no one truly pays, everyone still runs frantically in the hamster wheel:

Each son is a defeated emperor,

Each daughter is a wingless Nüwa,

Each couple is a brother-sister marriage in the underworld,

Each child is a new round—

Once again, another tired god