By Alvin Lu
He was writing four, five essays at a time now. As reports of successes from early applicants began to circulate (there’d been an admission into Columbia) and the late-deadline applicants made their final push, Eddie considered bringing in a second writer, but Horace told him to hold off. Eddie was amazed. Horace’s turnaround time per assignment hadn’t changed, but he was now moving through batches of essays instead of one at a time. How’d he do it?
Horace no longer wrote a single essay paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, on a through-line, as if he were speaking it, as if the applicant were speaking through him. He no longer saw the essays as personal statements as such, or counterfeits thereof. Certain applicants’ accomplishments and bearing, as they came across on paper, outshone others. Certain reported experiences resonated more than others. But really, although he’d never admit this to any of his clients, Horace had begun to see them all as spiders in a pot. What individuality there was, through the skein of the application papers, he lent to them. In the end there was but a single persona behind these brief statements of character. Each only constituted a shift in the angle of perception of this basically loathsome person who appeared, at intervals, as the yearning dreamer, the ambition-fueled youth, and the social climber. It was the same essay he was always writing, with excerpts and revisions of excerpts submitted as his final work. Of course details could be substituted, tone and personality could be reimagined, but finally each essay was worked from the same block of stone. His system was to break it into statement-units, with “turns” that shifted between sections. The timing of these turns for each essay was identical, which allowed them to be worked on in parallel.
It was such an effective little process he thought he couldn’t be limited to four or five. Maybe he could produce ten at once? The limit was how many biographical details of how many candidates could he keep in his head at the same time. Fifteen? Twenty? The true limit was how many clients Eddie could bring in at the same time. Since Eddie didn’t feel like throwing out his own standards of personalized service, they were stuck. Horace was fine with that. He didn’t need more money for now. Instead, encouraged by the sense he’d come the closest he ever had, or would, to omnipotence, or omniscience, he was moved by a desire to see how far he could push his program. Beautiful, but the feeling passed, no longer to be even remembered, as soon as the writing was done.
Eddie was impressed, but realistic. “No need for that level of efficiency, because at a certain point you start to see diminishing returns. Better channel that energy somewhere where it can make us something else besides more essays. Thanks to you, my problem isn’t turnaround time anymore. Now it’s the clients themselves, asking too many questions, asking for revisions and extra services, at all hours of the day, in general too needy. If you have an answer to that, we’d really have a business.” Eddie wanted to pursue this line of thought, so he invited Horace over to his home. It happened they had some new assignments to go over, which they could have done at the office, but because Eddie’s partner was in that day, he thought it better not to get together there. It was the first Horace heard of this business partner.
“I didn’t mention him to you before? Things aren’t working out.”
Eddie lived in a new apartment high-rise near the Sun Yat-sen memorial, in the more modern part of town, of wide boulevards and open, concrete spaces. Taipei 101 was not yet the skyline, all of it, then. Charlene received Horace when he arrived. At her feet was a small white dog, which she said was just a mutt who’d one day followed her boyfriend home, “Animals are like that with him.” The hardwood floors of the apartment were pale beige, the walls white, like the dog. The living room opened onto a view of the city. As a guest, Horace had brought a customary gift of pineapple cakes. Eventually Eddie emerged, barefoot, in jeans and gray MIT T-shirt. They went back to his study. Horace sat on the floor and turned on his notebook computer.
They had their usual system, where Eddie would fill in some background about the applicant in question, since he would have spoken to them once or twice before. Then he’d rough out a breakdown of the essay, hitting on what he thought should be the highlights, the job and extracurricular experiences to be emphasized or, as needed, tailored. For these initial steps, Horace would silently type away at his computer. He’d mostly only speak afterwards, when he’d offer his take, if it differed from his boss’s.
“This first one’s for the son of a business acquaintance of my father’s. It should be pretty straightforward, but we need to do a good job. The second one’s more of a pain. The situation with her’s like this. I’ve written two essays for her already, but she wants another revision. She made me promise to get her a draft by tomorrow morning, but I don’t think we can do it, not unless we skip dinner or you pull an all-nighter.”
“If I get out of here by nine or ten, I can finish off both drafts by midnight. I told you I’m a fast writer.”
For the first client, who was applying to a prestigious East Coast business school, they had to produce not only a personal statement but responses to a series of short-answer questions. One of the questions asked the applicant to describe an ethical dilemma the applicant had experienced and how he or she had resolved it. Eddie said he didn’t understand the question. It must have been something new, because he’d never seen it before this year, but now it was everywhere. Horace mentioned how Wall Street had a few well-publicized scandals last year, and probably the question was these business schools’ way of acknowledging them. He found himself explaining to Eddie what an ethical dilemma was.
“It’s like cheating on a test.”
“No it’s not. If you cheat on a test, you cheat on a test. You know what you’re getting into and what the consequences are if you get caught. I don’t see where the dilemma is.”
“Okay, you’re right, it’s not a dilemma. It’s just a violation. The real key to this question, it’s kind of a trick question, is the last part. ‘How you resolved it.’ It’s a trick, because if you’re in a dilemma over whether or not to commit a violation, the ‘correct’ answer is simply not to do it. By the time you’re in a dilemma, it’s too late, you’re already compromised. Anyway, the truth is, everyone who answers this question will be making up an answer, just like we are. Did the client give you any suggestions from his personal experience?”
“No. He totally didn’t understand the question.”
“Okay, let’s put a pin in this one. I’ll come up with the situation and how to resolve it later.”
Already Horace was working out in his head, not so much the details of the situation, but the shape of the sentences to be formed.
The second applicant had a less stellar academic pedigree and presented more of a challenge. Horace reviewed her personal statement, which she’d gone ahead and written on her own after Eddie’s previous efforts. Eddie called it “horrible.” Most of it was about the applicant’s experience as a private tutor to the children of the wealthy. She bragged that, by only targeting families in affluent residential areas, she could charge rates five times the average of her competition. She reported the exact figure of her annual income, which she said was enough to put herself through college.
Actually, Horace thought the essay was pretty decent. It was, at least, kind of interesting.
“Sounds like she’s got a good thing going.”
“It’s not a real business. What business school cares if she’s a private tutor? In the essay I wrote, I made up a summer job for her at an ad agency, but she didn’t like it. Then she turns this in. If she doesn’t like what we give back to her, I’m thinking of saying, sorry, here’s your refund. I mean, partial refund. You’re just not worth the trouble.”
“Clearly, she’s proud of what she’s done, the money she’s made. Who puts themselves through college these days? These are real accomplishments. We just need to finesse them a little, so it doesn’t look like she took advantage of people. Let’s say we stick to your ad agency idea, but mention how she managed to help the agency land a key account and was given a bonus for the year. It was something she did on her own initiative, without her boss’s pushing her, see? Being a self-starter, her ability to target and persuade affluent customers, these are good attributes. Let’s not lose those. We just need to alter the framework a bit, put them into a more institutional context. My only question is, if we fictionalize her work experience, we’ll need some evidence, letters of recommendation, that sort of thing.”
“No worries. I came up with the agency idea because my brother used to run one. It closed last year, but he left me all the stationery.”
“You use the same stationery for every single client?”
“Only for the ones that need a little extra work experience. So far it hasn’t been a problem.”
Eddie made some coffee while they waited for Charlene to finish dinner. “I’m curious how you write the essays. It’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought to myself. I just did it. But now that you’re already writing all of them, I wonder what goes through your head when you write one.”
“I don’t think that much when I write, either. Just stick to a few basic principles.”
“Which are?”
“First, what comes out, in our work, shouldn’t be a total fiction. It should be like a photograph of the applicant’s spirit.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Of course, sometimes, for instance, you need a starker background to make certain qualities that might not otherwise stand out better.”
“I like how you put it. It’s like touching up a photograph.”
“Yes, but I don’t work with an ideal in mind. Of course we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that our primary mission here is to get our clients into the best school we can. But a second principle applies, to get the applicant into the school most suitable for them, even regardless of what they might think. To do that, and this relates back to the first principle, you need to present the most accurate portrait possible, even if that means emphasizing things that seem, on the surface, to be ‘marks.’ This way they get into the school they deserve, or the school that deserves them.”
“But my main selling point to them is we put them in the best light.”
“If there was only one ‘best’ presentation, there’d only be one essay we’d need to write. Obviously that’s not the case. And let’s face it, if everyone were given their choice, they’d all end up at just a handful of schools. Which isn’t going to happen. Put it this way. One of our main services is to ‘clean up your English,’ something our clients are pretty self-conscious about. But a too-polished essay from a foreign student risks coming off as suspicious. The problem is the essay doesn’t jibe with the person as they appear on paper. That’s why I work in some quirks of language, ‘mistakes’ a non-native writer of English as a second language would make. To utilize some verbs as nouns, invert natural syntax, build inordinately compound sentences, use passive speech. I don’t purposefully make any mistake, but think carefully, what kind of mistakes would this person make? Now the essay becomes a warmer artifact, you actually make the applicant more memorable, because I’m sure every foreign applicant comes off as more or less the same to the screeners, which is why in the end all they really care about is the TOEFL scores. Some hint of human exchange, no matter how trite, works in your favor. Isn’t that all you’re asking for in a personal essay? That one bit that might help push a borderline case over the edge? I know that’s hard for some of our clients to swallow, but what gets the job done isn’t necessarily the fluid, subtle, witty, beautiful English they expect.”
“I don’t know if I agree. But who knows? It’s my job to explain what we’re doing if they don’t like it. If we need to change our approach, I’ll let you know.”
Charlene called them in to dinner. Eddie refused to talk business the rest of the night. He broke out a bottle of white wine, and the conversation went on about food and travel, with a little bit of personal history thrown in. It turned out Charlene had written a Master’s thesis for her degree in German literature on Brecht. The “American dishes” she’d promised, Horace discovered, were pasta with garlic bread.
Every time he came home he climbed past his landlord’s unit. The elderly couple liked to leave their front door open, with just a screen door between them and the landing. Sometimes Horace caught glimpses through the screen of the husband or wife talking on the phone or watching television with the volume turned up so loud the sound was distorted through the speakers. Sometimes he ran into them. They were shy. Maybe he intimidated them, he thought, although they were the ones who’d invited him into their home. Or maybe that gesture had been made out of respect to Meredith, whom they’d adored. After all, she’d been a beautiful young woman, and a foreigner, while he was a Chinese man whom they were relying upon as if he were a foreigner. Maybe he confused them. Were they to speak to him in Chinese? Or were they to wait for him to engage in the patient mime play Meredith used to put on for them? He’d been tempted to do it too, but it wasn’t his style. Instead he’d say, in their language, just tell me what you want.
His room was an addition on the roof of a mixed-use concrete high rise. The ground floor was a showroom selling refrigerators, the upper ones single-flat units. These kinds of setups were very practical. To get to the addition, which had a separate entrance from his landord’s, you had to go through the roof access. From there you had to kick through a pile of sandals to cross an open-air deck covered by a canopy of corrugated plastic. Horace saw his landlord there, watering the potted plants on the guard wall, and then remembered his promise the night before to fill out his immigration forms. His landlord turned to Horace, with his usual nervous look, a small, balding, round man. Behind him, out past the guard wall, was the sight of more buildings like this one. Beyond them were the green mountains that surrounded the city and which, in their incongruity, lent it its unreal quality.
Horace thought his landlord was going to remind him about the forms, but instead he mentioned Meredith had called earlier that evening.
“I couldn’t tell where she was calling from. She sounded far away. It was a bad connection.”
“Did she ask for me?”
“She did, and I tried to find you. I even went up to your room. It was late, but you still weren’t home.”
“Did she say when she’d call next or how she can be reached?”
“No.”
Without saying another word, the old man went downstairs and returned with an old rotary phone and the forms he wanted Horace to fill out. Horace followed him into the addition. He tried to find a place for him to sit down, but there were only really two choices: the chair at the desk, or the bed. The clutter belonged to the couple’s only son. Zippered vinyl wardrobe. Pencil boxes. Japanese comics. Boom box. Electric fan.
His landlord ignored the invitation to sit and scrounged around behind the desk. He found the wall jack Horace didn’t know was there. Once the phone was plugged in, he hit the receiver a bunch of times.
“It’s the same line as downstairs. If it rings, don’t pick up. I’ll pick it up. If it’s for you, I’ll yell.”
“What if I want to make a call?”
“I don’t care if it’s not a toll call.”
“I’ll reimburse you for any calls I make. Don’t worry about that.”
“No, no, you don’t worry. I brought this so she can talk to you.”
He didn’t know how he’d managed to get along for so long without one of these, but it was true he didn’t talk to anybody much since Meredith had left. The only reason he met Peter and Samantha the other day was because he happened to run into them.
After his landlord left, he picked up the phone. The dial tone was the sound of vast distances across oceans and continents. Then it stopped, interrupted by much closer breathing on the other line.
“Hello?”
“Sorry. I’m just checking out the phone.”
“Oh, I wanted to make a phone call.”
“What? You’re downstairs already!?”
He worked the rest of the night. The following morning, on his way over to Eddie’s, he slid the forms under his landlord’s door. He and his wife were on their usual rounds, buying soy milk and the morning paper. Horace needed to get to a language school near the central train station before the administrative offices closed for lunch, since he’d made a resolution not to re-enroll at the university. Working on the visa forms and essays last night had confirmed that for him. Because of his work for Eddie, he’d been skipping classes, which was annoying the teacher, and this made him too ashamed to show up for class, which irritated the teacher further, the whole thing becoming a vicious cycle. The problem was he needed to be in school to renew his visa, and Eddie’s wasn’t the kind of work that came with sponsorship. Apparently there were black market services you could hand your passport over to and have it returned no questions asked, but he wasn’t quite ready yet to go down that path.
The alternative was these privately run language schools all over town. The thing with all of them was that, once you paid tuition, the courses could be self-directed, so they became a scheme for getting around student visa requirements. He’d actually thought about going to them before, but Meredith had stopped him. For some reason her sense of scruples didn’t extend to working for Eddie but to these schools, which she suspected of renting passports during their processing period to illegal immigrants. It was a completely unfounded theory, wacky even for Meredith, but Horace conceded, even if nothing outright against the law was going on, there still seemed something shady about them.
At the school, the office aide gave him the curricular options. With the membership card, she explained, he could walk into any one of the franchises throughout the city to utilize their self-service language labs, which consisted of booths outfitted with an audio cassette player, headphones, TV, and VCR. Each branch also came with a library of videotapes and textbooks. It was pretty much the same setup he’d wanted to pitch to Eddie. While he applied for the membership, he asked for the visa renewal service and gave the aide his passport.
Once he was done, he walked a few blocks, in the wrong direction from where he’d wanted to go, and found himself in a neighborhood he’d never been in before. He wasn’t quite sure where he was, but later, after looking it up, he found out it was the old shipping docks and entertainment quarters. In the nineteenth century, this had been the area just outside the city walls that received the trade coming in to Ta Tao Cheng wharf from Fukien. The wall was mostly gone now. All that remained of it was the north gate near Hsimenting, which could be found these days, in jarring juxtaposition, under a freeway overpass. As Horace wound his way deeper into the narrowing streets, away from where he wanted to go, where the landmarks were more clearly laid out, the colonial Meiji-era buildings, made of red brick with baroque engraved façades, began to dominate, hosting storefronts that sold what might have been sold in them in the middle ages: dried plums, herbal medicines, tea, cloth, knives, and handcarved seals. They were all either being torn down or built up. Smoke from the incense and the burning of ghost money poured out of the temples which, through their rituals, seemed, more than anything official, to determine the patterns of life in this area, those same patterns which Confucius had once said were better left being neither definitively known or unknown.
Moving their way toward him were drums and horns. The horns blew long and plaintively. A procession walked by no more than a few feet in front of him. Some of the paraders moved on foot, others on the backs of flatbed trucks. They were dressed either in period costume or yellow windbreaker jackets and baseball caps.
He bought a red-bean cake from a pushcart vendor and followed them to the City God Temple. The single-level temple seemed barely able to fit more than a half dozen worshippers in its main altar room, which doubled as a storage area for motorcycle helmets. Horace put his hands together. Having come all the way here, it was the least he could do, he thought, and he closed his eyes when he was told, not by a robed priest, but a man in a golf shirt, to leave, since the deities would be arriving soon. Horace didn’t know how much of the city the City God still presided over. It wasn’t, he imagined, the districts of the modern city, say, where Eddie lived, but that of the old one, which, at some point in time, extended to the now nonexistent walls or some yet more esoteric boundaries. Earlier he’d seen at the head of the procession four men carrying between two rods on a palanquin the miniature icon of the City God himself, but this procession he took not to be of the god returning home, but of visiting dignitaries.
The first to enter was black-faced. His torso was his head. Unlike the others to follow, he was not a giant, but the size of the head gave a sense of bulk. Probably he was human-sized in order to enter the temple, which the others, giants, could not do. Gods did not make direct approaches, but staggered around drunkenly in the cleared spaces the crowds made for them. It wasn’t necessary for them to meet the exigencies of time or logic by moving in a straight line. The black-faced one swirled into the temple and danced a jig.
Above the heads of the crowd, a green plastic garbage bag taped to an upper story window waved. Under their robes, the gods wore tracksuit pants and running shoes. But it was the bystanders, not the gods, who were illusory. The procession was the point of the spear pulling reality along it like fabric caught on a needle. The movements of the gods were quick, a function of their size. If you looked away, by the time you refixed your gaze, they’d turned their back to you and were heading back to the truck. The mundane closed in, for a moment, only for the whole dance to start up again. This went on and on. Wasn’t everyone just lulled back into the sleep they mistook for wakefulness?
Alvin Lu was born and lives in San Francisco. He attended Brown University, where he received an MFA in writing, and has worked as a journalist, a salaryman in Tokyo, and a publisher of manga. He is the author of a novel, The Hell Screens, and has been at work on a pair of interrelated novels, from which the section in this issue of Your Impossible Voice is excerpted. More writing at City God.
Issue 1 | Fall 2013
The Traiguén Epidemic
Seven Strategies for Survival (in a small town)
Excerpt from The Weapon in Man
The Devouring Economy of Nature
Here the neighbor screams for Frankie
I’m waiting for you like waiting
Dear No. 2 Pencil, Decomposing in Whiskey
Excerpt from a Novel-in-Progress: La NENA in the TL
Eighth Grade Science: Darwin Et Cetera
The Apple