1
Nostalgia as a pathology was first defined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who, as a young medical student at the University of Basel, observed its prevalence among Swiss mercenaries serving in the lowlands of France and Italy. For these hired guns, the condition manifested as fever, fainting, anxiety, insomnia, stomach pain, cardiac arrhythmia, and death, among other symptoms. The disease was taken so seriously that whistling one particular milking song called “Khue-Reyen” became punishable by death. So, for a while the disease came to be known as mal du Suisse.
These days I often find myself thinking about Hofer’s mercenaries, stalking through the lowlands with a permanent whistle in their ears. I like to imagine them as an army of Werther’s, yellow-panted and blue-jacketed, each clutching an identical, damp notebook in their breast pockets. When I first learned about Hofer’s study in my freshman year of college, I used to think that a band of hired guns was a strange sample to select for the scientific study of homesickness. Now, nearly a decade later, I think I understand. Only a mercenary could contract such a fatal heartache, because he is further from home than a regular soldier. He has cut himself off from the heart.
Since I relocated to Sydney three months ago, I have experienced many symptoms of chronic nostalgia. At night I lie awake listening to NPR podcasts. I have lost weight, which I am secretly thrilled about. I have become obsessed with, consumed by, the news in America.
Nostalgia also torments me during my waking hours. Sydney is perpetually flooded with sunshine, a cultural export of California. If I close my eyes while walking through the farmers’ market in Pyrmont Bay Park, the scent of strawberries and saltwater teleports me to the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace. Like a famous ex-girlfriend, America is everywhere I look, in the form of movie trailers, advertising jingles, franchise restaurants, and cereal boxes. Here is what I have learned: as an ex-American, nostalgia is as inescapable as gravity—not a perfect analogy, I am aware, since an American flag flies on the moon.
To protect myself from inflammation, most days I just stick to my apartment. For those of you familiar with Sydney, I live on the nineteenth floor of a new development called Opera Residences in Bennelong Point. The place came fully furnished after the taste of someone I knew well. It’s not uncommon for me to spend the whole day here in the living room looking out into the harbor, making coffee, and aimlessly jotting things down, like I’m doing today.
It’s not that I can’t go back to America, or that there’d be men in uniform waiting for me at the airport if I returned. It’s just that I no longer have anything there to go back to. To be clear, I’m not in Sydney to hide. In fact, I’m actively putting myself in harm’s way by being here because this is one of the only places in the world people know to look for me. But I promised myself I would stay until I finished this book and hopefully cured myself of nostalgia.
I say “cure” because the warmth of these feelings toward a country that never embraced me strikes me as suspect. How can you feel nostalgic for a place or person you knowingly betrayed? I’ve learned recently that my feelings, in general, should not be trusted. I started to wonder if this sudden flare-up of nostalgia was masking a more chronic condition, something deeply rooted I haven’t come to terms with yet. That’s when I realized that in order to cure myself of this disease, I needed to investigate its etiology.
To begin, here is something that you must know about California. Its allure is simple. For centuries, gold has drawn the Chinese to California like mayflies to lamplight. Like iron shavings to a magnet. We flooded into the ports of Jiu Jin Shan (Old Gold Mountain—what the Chinese called Herb Caen’s Baghdad by the Bay) first on barges, then on planes. After gold, steel. After steel, silicon. That brings us to the present. Remember: we’ve always been looking for gold in San Francisco.
2
I don’t consider myself to be particularly spiritually attuned, but one thing I do know is this: if you want to really disappear, move into an ethnic enclave.
My adult home in San Francisco was at the corner of Stockton and Clay, in the upstairs loft of a Chinese restaurant called Club Mandarin. From the street, the Club Mandarin looked like an abandoned temple, with its portal-like moon gate and sloping double-eave rooftop resting on chipped red plaster pillars three stories tall. On the inside, twenty-five tables draped in faded white tablecloths dotted the vast dining room, ringed in by an ornate mezzanine on the second floor. There were usually no more than two or three families seated for dinner when I came home from work every day. Black-and-white San Francisco Chronicle clippings from the Mandarin’s golden era hung on the walls, evoking bygone days where the tables were pushed out to the perimeter to make space for a dance floor, and a band was stationed on the mezzanine. A tight spiral staircase tucked away in the back corner of the kitchen led to my loft, a nine-hundred-square-foot space with sweeping ocean views through five bay windows that I almost always blocked out with thick, light-proof blinds.
I don’t think it would’ve been an overstatement to call myself discerning. I subscribed to four different furniture magazines. I could (and did) spend two, three hours at a store in a single afternoon contemplating the slight difference between two nearly identical coffee tables. When it came to décor, I did not believe there were inconsequential decisions.
Here are some of the things that I had: a high-end Italian road bicycle I never rode, suspended perilously on the wall; a metallic, miniature replica of a Chinese scholar’s rock; three shelves of books from college; a GameCube; two different coffee tables; an aqua-blue Egg Chair designed by Arne Jacobsen for the Radisson SAS in Copenhagen; tarot cards; a brown leather Danish mid-century modernist sofa; an Indian tapestry; an ultra-high-performance La Marzocco GS3 espresso machine; a desk made from a single piece of California redwood.
The landlady, Madame Suyi, leased this apartment to me at $2,500 a month. The space, I am told, used to board eight or nine restless, hungry, fresh-off-the-boat kitchen workers at any given time back in the restaurant’s prime, before city officials shut the practice down. Unlike them, I’d arrived at the Club Mandarin’s doorstep not from the Port of Guangzhou, but Newark Liberty. This was my first and only home in San Francisco since I moved from New Jersey nearly five years ago. I remember how confused my friends and relatives were when they found out where I had signed my lease. Based on their collective grimace, they probably thought of me as some destitute street urchin from an Amy Tan novel. What they didn’t understand is my reasons for choosing to live in Chinatown were as conventional as could be. In real estate, people paid millions for vast lots and privacy hedges that protected them from wandering eyes and ears. In my view, it was much easier to simply pick a place where people wouldn’t be looking for you.
My usual Sunday routine involved pulling a double shot, putting on my sand-colored Bang & Olufsen over-ears, and booting up Samarkand.
Samarkand was the world’s most sophisticated online marketplace for hackers and those who needed their services. What set Samarkand apart was that all of the freelancers on the site had to pass a difficult timed coding challenge to register an account, and the challenge was constantly modified by an algorithm so there was no way to cheat. This weeded
out the amateurs and obviated the need for bias-ridden human processes like job interviews. Statistically, it was actually harder to get approved to work on Samarkand than to get hired at Google. As a result, the user base was probably ninety percent psychos from the Indian Institute of Technology. All activity was completely anonymized, so you never knew who you were working for (or who was working for you). The site used a reputation system based on customer feedback, and an algorithm aggregated those reviews to set your hourly rate. I had accumulated a high enough reputation score to bill my time out at $150/hour, which was in the 99th percentile of all users. And since I worked approximately fifteen hours per week, my activities on Samarkand allowed me to effectively double my yearly income.
Not that I saved any of it. I was a single, twenty-six-year-old college graduate with no desire to own an apartment or start a family in the foreseeable future. So I spent as quickly as I earned—on DoorDash omakase; premium productivity-enhancing adaptogenic mushroom powder marketed on Instagram; a nine-piece Le Creuset kitchen set, even though I didn’t know how to cook; and a small but growing family of Bearbrick figurines in various sizes and skins that lived in my bedroom. I found a masochistic pleasure in depleting myself and refuting the frugality that had been drilled into me throughout my childhood.
This, of course, gets us to the question of why I didn’t just quit my day job and freelance full-time. I still haven’t sorted that one out. I’m sure it had something to do with American notions of maturity, Protestant work ethic, and whatnot. Maybe I was just keeping up appearances, something I’ve more recently discovered I have a talent for. Just the other day, I was reading about this guy from Los Angeles who is the face of a movement called Nomadic Lifestyle Design. He’s this twenty-nine-year-old white dude who “quit his boring corporate job” to run a twenty-hour-a-week “internet business” that gives him the flexibility and funds to shuttle between sandy Southeast Asian beaches drinking rum cocktails and bedding local women. I realized with a shock that in financial terms, I could easily manage a move like that these days. In fact, many similarly exotic isles were only a short flight from Sydney. But something about it—maybe just the decadence and escapism of it all—triggered my disdain reflex. As a principle, I believe it’s best not to run from reality. Unless it chases you.
Usually when I was “on the clock,” so to speak, I was wired because I found the work highly engaging. The night all of this started, I was working on a cryptography project for what I guessed was a prop trading firm. The job was intellectually complex, but the implementation was simple; once I figured out the broad strokes, it only took me an hour or two to get the code working. After I sent in the deliverable, I got a cold Trumer Pils from the fridge, put a record on, and waited. A few minutes later, the familiar Samarkand notification tone sounded from my laptop, accompanied by a five-star review and a credit in my Bitcoin wallet. I took a deeply satisfying swig.
That was one thing Iiked
about Samarkand. It was disruptive in this pure, almost utopian way—capitalism without the capitalists. There was no obnoxious tech monopoly looming over it collecting rents. Everything was decentralized so that the platform’s take rate–the gap between what the customer paid and what you got paid—was essentially a rounding error, just enough to cover the platform’s AWS costs. The work that would’ve once occupied the entire week (forty hours at approximately $60/hour) of a complacent, second-rate engineer was now compressed into a couple of hours and reallocated to a hungrier, more talented, and deserving candidate. This wasn’t even some problematic outsourcing arrangement like those mega call centers in Delhi and Mumbai where you were exploiting people for pennies on the dollar. Samarkand was a pure meritocracy—equal pay for equal work, and competition on the basis of quality and efficiency.
Which was all great. But Samarkand also maintained an active community forum for its freelancers, called SamarChat. Imagine Reddit meets Stack Exchange. Usually after I finished my contracting work, I spent the rest of the night wandering in and out of threads. There was a fair bit of “talking shop,” and I’d say about forty percent of the posts were about arcane topics such as how to write an optimal search algorithm or generate a topographical analysis. As a mod, I contributed frequently to these technical discussions. But I’ll let you guess what the most common topic of discussion was.
That’s right: dating. Perhaps because of the total anonymity offered by the platform, there was nothing that the average Samarkite loved to fixate on more than his (and I do mean his) relationships, or, more accurately, lack thereof. Page after page of agonizingly detailed personal narratives describing a pivotal moment in a Samarkite’s budding romantic life, tales of anxious struggle and epic humiliation. I loved consuming these narratives, for reasons I’d rather not spell out but that should already be obvious to the reader.
That night, I was reading a long post by a user called Soren387 titled “Why Asian Women Won’t Date Men from Their Own Race.” In a pithy thirty thousand words, Soren387 laid out his argument as follows: because Asian men were emasculated by the American mainstream and Asian women were hypersexualized, the latter often abandoned the former to climb the social ladder by dating white guys. Questionable stuff (and totally unoriginal), but the post was climbing to the top of the “popular” page. Suddenly, a ton of users I had interacted with previously started to comment on this thread, critiquing and praising the framework. I had never seen such a frenzy of activity on the forum before.
After a few minutes, the dopamine rush from my espressos and Samarkand sesh wore off. I suddenly realized it was only eight o’clock and I still had about
six more hours to kill until I could fall asleep. I was thinking about boiling some water to make instant noodles when my laptop made a familiar sound. It was a Samarkand DM from someone I didn’t recognize, a user named viv798.
viv798: I think it’s about time for us to meet. Don’t you agree?
I clicked into viv798’s profile. There was no profile picture, just a status message that said, “On the run.” The account had approximately two years of activity associated with it—they’d been liking threads (including some of my own) dating as far back as 2016, but hadn’t made any posts of their own. I saw that viv798’s status bubble was green and sent a quick reply.
Who are you?
viv798: My name is Vivian. Do you believe in the possibility of a psychic connection?
What do you mean?
viv798: Through your work. I feel like I have known you for a long time. The way you think, the way you write, are beautiful.
Seemed sketchy. I took another swig of beer and responded.
What do you want?
The ellipses graphic showing that the other user was typing appeared, then disappeared, on the chat window. And then:
viv798: To talk. In person, as soon as you are able.
viv798: 415-910-7352. Leave me a voicemail. I want to know what your voice sounds like first.
Then she (or he, who knew) signed off. I stared at the screen for another couple seconds, then got a second beer from the fridge. I reread the conversation three times. Something about the cadence of the messages made me think of a blinking Morse code transmitter. Without fully understanding why, I saved the number into my phone.
I decided to go for a smoke. I floated through the restaurant dining room as invisibly as possible and slipped through the moon gate into the chilly evening. Turning at the corner into my usual spot, I ran into the same group of waiters from earlier taking a smoke break. They had their sleeves rolled up and bowties undone, the two flaps resting carelessly across the fronts of their shirts. Three of them were leaning back against the alley wall, the other two curled down in that particular squat position that seemed natural to many men of East Asian descent. From my position fifteen feet away I could make out the low murmur of Cantonese. The tallest man, Daniel, spotted me and nodded in my direction. I took my place in the alleyway and Daniel offered me a crumpled Lucky Strike. I lit up and inhaled.
My first ever cigarette was with these guys, about a month after I moved in. I ran into them by accident at the end of a long, lonesome walk around
Street—I hadn’t really spoken to anyone since graduation—and after a split second of awkwardness, Daniel, whose name I didn’t yet know, held a single cigarette out toward me wordlessly in the alley light. I accepted it like a rescue line.
Now that I had joined them the linguistic register of the conversation shifted slightly from pure Cantonese to Chinglish. I didn’t know Cantonese—Chinese schools in Bergen County only taught in Mandarin—so I missed a lot, but the conversation, which unfolded over four or five cigarettes, seemed to be about how much each of the men had saved to send to their extended families in Guangdong, which American movie stars they would cut off a finger to have sex with (Halle Berry, Uma Thurman), Daniel’s plans of buying a motorcycle, Tony’s problems with his bingliang (ice cold) girlfriend, and Jeffrey’s idea to open a BBQ shop on Grant Avenue.
After about twenty minutes, Jeffrey snuck a bottle of house red out of the kitchen and we started passing it between the six of us. As the conversation flowed, my mind wandered back to the strange message I had received half an hour ago. I wondered if it was possible. During all the isolated hours I had spent writing code and posting it on the Samarkand message boards, I had always hoped that hidden somewhere in that digital vortex of upvotes and downvotes was a spark of genuine human connection. Hear me out. At the fundamental level, writing code is not so different from, say, building a cabinet or writing a poem. The creation bears the signature of its maker. So it was a craft, and thus like any craft, a foundation for human connection. The darkness of the alleyway and my waxing intoxication put my spirit in an expansive state. Did I believe in the possibility of a psychic connection? I certainly wanted to. I fixated on the 798 at the end of her username and pondered the mystery of those three numbers. An area code? I googled it: somewhere in Illinois. I imagined a blinking computer terminal hidden away in a darkened corn silo. I exhaled, and the smoke gave form to my resignation. For me, Illinois was as far as China. What I needed was proof or a sign.
The staff and I were on our sixth or seventh smoke of the night when my ex-girlfriend Jessica and her boyfriend Nick walked by. I had hoped that they wouldn’t notice me, but they did.
“Michael?” Jessica’s shrill voice rang out from across the street. I waved back awkwardly, hoping they’d sense my energy and just keep walking. Unfortunately she was now crossing to my side, dragging Nick with her.
“Michael, oh my God! I haven’t seen you, since, like, Lawn Parties my junior year! What are you up to?” Her face was tomato-colored, which usually happened after one or two drinks.
“Just working,” I said.
“Ha ha, do you work at a Chinese restaurant?”
“No, but I live in one,” I replied. Fuck. That didn’t sound as cool as I thought it would. Jessica frowned for a second and gave Nick a look, as if to say, is this some kind of joke?
“So yeah, what’s new with you?” I continued.
“I just started a new job! Was getting kind of sick of New York and wanted something more relaxed. Seriously, though, do you work here? Who are these guys?”
“No, of course not,” I said, taking a step away from my friends. “Actually, I’m working on developing cutting-edge autonomous driving technology.”
“Ooh! Self-driving cars! Love it. So where are you working these days? Google? Uber?”
“No, General Motors,” I said.
Immediately Jessica started laughing as if I had just told a hilarious joke, then stopped abruptly when she realized I wasn’t kidding. “Michael, you remember Nick, right?” she asked.
I looked at Nick for the first time since they came over. He was in my freshman dorm at Princeton and had put on a few pounds since his days on the lacrosse team but still looked tall and broad, powerful, and, above all, very proportional in his dark wool coat. Of course I remembered Nick, but I was equally certain he didn’t have the faintest idea who I was.
“No, actually, I don’t think we ever got to meet,” I said. I extended a hand.
“So, Michael,” Nick began. His voice had an annoyingly friendly, almost patronizing ring to it. “Do you really live here? ...
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