You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked: dream-like reverie

It is 10pm on a regular Wednesday night, and here I am eating blueberry yogurt with grapes from the plastic liberté container and dreaming about this novel. To paraphrase a vignette, summarizing Sheung-King’s book is kind of pointless because this novel is an exploration of feelings and ideas, less focused on the plot. This is why this literary gem maybe doesn’t flutter commercially, but I truly think that Sheung-King produced a beautiful debut.

The stories are so gentle but so personal. I think a lot of people will flip open this book and find it to be rippling reflections of series of moments they’ve encountered in their own past lives. When I flipped through the first few pages in 2021, I didn’t linger. The novel seemed like another pointless, unorganized anthology of concealed emotions conjecturing about the trivialities of life. I couldn’t stay. I shelved it; I left it. Spontaneously this evening, I picked it up, and read most of it within one sitting, let the words melt into me, and slowly took it in and paused at moments to listen to the rain and reread vignettes.

What changed between the last time I stumbled upon this book and now? A lot. Love feels like smoking on a balcony thinking about the weather, getting groceries on an empty Saturday, and telling stories that swirl in your mind. Some stories may have a moral, or the slightest hint of amusement, or with no moral or need for amusement, simply to pass time. The stories in this book are little infinities. Little moments presented through a collection of memories, shared by the protagonist and his past lover (always addressed as you, which surprisingly softens the distance between the author and reader, creating a profound sense of intimacy). When you’re in love with someone, conversation feels infinite. It feels like exploring the margins of two minds, where thoughts begin and end. And interestingly, there may be thoughts that sit in the air, where boundaries are drawn within for which we may not overexert or overexplain even to the most intimate people in our lives, perhaps out of pride of being young, or perhaps out of the nature of preserving who we are.

This book is sad because every story was contingent on borrowed time. During a relationship, you cannot think about the end, or the possibility of an end. In those moments, there were no ends. And looking back in these memories, everything Sheung-King writes is encapsulates such meandering rosiness — not an overt type of happy-go-lucky feeling, but just warm nolstalgia, like sipping on red wine and holding onto that warm feeling in your stomach, and allowing yourself to float a little bit into something that has elapsed. That something is no longer yours to hold onto in this life, but you just float through it.

Reading Sheung-King is almost a dream-like reverie with all of the threads balanced carefully. Because this novel is constructed by blips of ordinary memories that the protagonist reminisces on, with him and his past lover, and often these memories are them telling each other stories — folktales, love stories, or art they saw, novels they read. These threads envelope one another and many of these “stories within stories” serve as motifs and metaphors for the two characters’ own love story without forcefulness. The two aren’t a perfect couple, but the two characters are dangerously sharp, alluringly dreamy as they wander through life almost aimlessly, perhaps due to the novel constructed out of chronological order, without specifying their overarching life directions, but nestled within small moments. During moments, the lovers are opaque, even to each other. When they exist in each others’ space — so intimately, with their thoughts inside one anothers’, when their bodies are touching each others’ on the other side of the world, they become temporary and transparent. Love, feels so delicate. What does it mean to truly know a person? And how can one do that?

There are such simple, intimate moments. In the words of the novel, I’m going to make a silly attempt at recreating them because I wanted to briefly frame these moments on this little space in the internet.

Just to build up the context of the atmosphere, they’re lying in bed and she shares a story about the largest antique market in the city of Beijing, and how they’d play Kenny G to remind people in the market to go home when the day ends and clear the vendors. She throws some sass and says, “shoulder massage, please!” While he looks at her and thinks of the last story he told her about a celeste fox, and how she could be one in this life. They listen to Kenny G’s “Going Home” (which was one of my fav elevator jazz pieces of all time growing up & i chose to play the saxophone out of all band instruments in grade three purely because of Kenny G’s “Going Home”, but that is entirely unrelated to what i’m explaining here.)

As the song plays, I imagine myself a craftsman in Beijing, walking home to Kenny G after a day’s work. I open the door to my house and announce that I am home. Kenny G is still playing from afar away.

I notice a little mole on your lower back, to the right of your spine. For some reason, at this moment, I feel like I know you.

This next one doesn’t require much context, but she sometimes just chooses to excuse herself from the middle of a conversation in a bath tub, or leave the bed without explanation. She has her own mind and own direction, and sometimes just acts spontaneously, and whether that is blunt or by default a way of unkind exclusion, I think that’s arguable. Because you are still your own person, and not someone’s.

I find you sitting on a red couch in the living room with your legs crossed. You are eating an orange. You are naked. Above your head hangs a black and white photograph of Ai Weiwei giving Hong Kong harbour’s financial district the middle finger. I take out the Polaroid camera and take a photo of you. In the photograph, you are naked, a piece of orange is sticking out of your mouth, and you are giving me the middle finger. You like the picture. A week later, you slip it into my wallet without me noticing. I will carry it around from then on.

Isn’t it so beautiful, so intimate, with so much overlap in thought and trust within and between the characters? At least I find it to be. There’s almost a stubborn freedom like a bird in a cage in this woman he loved, even though the two of them chose to be bound together, temporarily and transparently, sharing space and time.

There aren’t a lot of explicit or outward qualities of the two characters laid out on the page, but through the conversations and the lens in which they see the world, and how they think, and how they interact with each other, and how they interact with the world, beautiful feelings are scattered here.