The Pickup Code
(The following text was translated from Chinese with the help of ChatGPT, and edited by me.)
Dear friend,
In this past year, there have been so many days when I was on the phone with you on my way home. Most of the time we chat about the work we’re doing, but these calls are also porous and loose, like a cleaning sponge, soaking up all other elements of life. I’d make a call to you as I wrap up my day and pack my bag, then talk while walking until I reach the parking lot. The seasons here all feel the same, and this whole year has felt as if it were just one long summer.
It was always already dark. Everything around me would be tinted a dusty grayish purple. I’d be starving; the evening wind would be a little chilly. And I would always stand under that long corridor above that underground garage, pacing in circles by the elevator doors as we talked, until we ended the conversation in a hurry. Even though science is, to begin with, inseparable from my life, the fact that the two of us were doing research together made work and life even more tightly intertwined. On my way home, it felt like I was crossing the blurred borderline between work and life, and our conversation had turned into something dangerous, as if it could completely punch through the wall between the two worlds. In truth, we never really finished talking. Dialogues ran like an unending river, flowing through every part of my life. Even as I’m writing this, I still have a window open chatting with you about a random ad with a bunch of people eating hot pot from our shared childhood memory and about a bitter cake (yes, bitter) you and your girlfriend had for your second anniversary.
Today I was sad because of you, because you sent me this message on WeChat: “I feel like I’m becoming superstitious. Before getting on the train, I bought a coffee, and the pickup code they wrote was ‘May everything go smoothly（诸事皆顺）,’ and suddenly I felt a little better. Hey, do you know about this? In China, when you order Starbucks on your phone, there’s a pickup passphrase.” Then I saw the photo you sent: on a plastic to-go coffee cup, the label reads “May everything go smoothly / medium / iced / cold brew.”
And then an image emerged in my head: you, alone at a high-speed rail station, in the black T-shirt and black pants you always wear; maybe with a big black backpack beside you, like the one you once left at my place—you are surrounded by the noisy flow of people passing by—people dragging suitcases, holding children. The train arrives; you line up as usual; you scan your ID and board. Suddenly, I can feel everything that is happening in that station: that familiar sticky smell mixed with sweat and dust; the heaviness of lugging bags; a cup of cold brew that isn’t really cold anymore, its surface beaded with condensation.
What were you thinking? What were you feeling? I don’t know how you carry on with your life, because I only have to imagine myself inhabiting one second of your day, and I already get the urge to cry. I realized that it takes only four hours to arrive at Beijing—by the time I finish writing, time has already flown past us, and you’ve arrived in Beijing. You’re finally seeing your father again after two years. But why do I feel as if your message has trapped me in that train station, trapped me in a moment where I have never actually existed?
Is it because, all at once, I’ve gained a kind of real, unprecedented understanding of what you’ve been through?—though this is not to say I truly understand it completely. But if that’s the case, then when I listened to you talking about these experiences before, was I only listening passively, without truly feeling it? Or perhaps, as it unfolded, the pain has become deeper and more complex—and my own feeling, even if it was less than a thousandth of yours, still deepened because of it?
We talked about Lee Chang-dong’s story “The Leper”. You, too, are on your way to see your father, though the story differs in many ways (the father in the story seemed to have chosen, willingly, to fabricate a lie for a void ideology). And yet, the experience you lived through seems to me more fictional than a work of literature. You are the protagonist, and so your fate always pulls at the reader’s heart—meaning mine.
I tried to recall six years ago, in May, the last few days before you graduated. I told you the library was unbearably hot, and you brought me breakfast from a café near campus (thank you—I had almost completely forgotten this). Downstairs from your dorm, we inherited your coffee machine and dozens of Nespresso pods, along with that big black backpack you wanted to store at our place. The next day I left campus, and I had no idea that would be the third-to-last time we would see each other in the next six years.
Even though our chat history is almost daily—or every other day—I’ve realized I can’t trace what actually happened to us over these six years. I used to think that this kind of continuous contact, communication with a written record, would preserve everything. But all my memories are blurred. I thought it would be a simple, truthful story: just write it down as it happened. Instead, I had to approach it like a mystery, the way one approaches a scientific question. So I did what I know best: I asked myself a series of questions. When did you first tell me about that huge thing that happened to your father? How did it change you? And then how did it seep into my life, changing me?
I discovered, with a kind of horror, that I couldn’t find any trace of this major event—and that I had completely forgotten the moment when, as an outsider, I first entered into it (though I believe you would certainly remember). I tried searching our chat logs for keywords: “my dad,” “my family,” “my mom,” “my grandma,” “property,” “confiscation,” “politics,” “struggle,” “persecution,” “court,” “trial,” and so on—everything that might be related. Each term produced a pile of messages, but about the actual event, I found nothing. Maybe I should have expected this. Because all of it is unspeakable, there were no victims nor perpetrators. On this land of ours, injustice does not exist.
I found this message from you: “We can’t talk about this online,” and the only thing I seemed to understand was that your father had disappeared. And yet I accepted that fact immediately, without insisting on why it happened. I didn’t ask anything further.
Why? If we truly spoke, wrote, and asked—what would happen? Is there really a pair of eyes watching everything we say or do? I felt dizzy—isn’t this futile searching the best proof that we are inside the Panopticon that Foucault imagined? I have never, never felt so viscerally that we are two inmates staring at each other—and that our attention, our mutual gaze, though born of pure goodwill and empathy, has become the most fundamental link in this omnipresent surveillance. We become our own guards: stop asking questions, pretend not to hear—so that “they” can control us without effort. I don’t even know who “they” are.
To keep answering the questions I posed above, I decided to do some comparisons with controlled variables. The two times we met later happened, respectively, before and after the event—so I decided to focus first on the moments when we actually saw each other in person. This seemed to drastically simplify the problem: it turned >83,891 lines of chat history into two meetings. I used the “brain-on-a-stick model” we once proposed to justify this simplification. We once asked whether human relationships could be entirely non-physical—like how the two of us could maintain a relationship through messages without seeing each other physically in real life. If so, then were our bodily presence completely irrelevant to our relationship? Would nothing change if we took our brains off and plugged them into sticks? Funny enough, when we first proposed this theory we were still in school together, seeing each other often. Later, when I searched our chat logs for “brain-on-a-stick model,” every instance read something like, “The brain-on-a-stick model is not viable; it was a product of youthful ignorance” (I’m dying laughing). Maybe this is indirect evidence that physical interaction is the superset of spiritual interaction—and maybe that can help my analysis further.
I saw you at the end of my first Ph.D. year, that summer. We took an evening walk around the Engineering Quad. My first year hadn’t gone well. I felt out of place at this school, and I’d fractured my kneecap in a bike accident and had only just recovered. I missed college. After all my rotations, I realized I didn’t have a better option than going back to the lab I’d started with. I was still passionate about the same research questions, but I also felt I was in a period of rapid growth and wanted to learn so many new things. I didn’t yet know how low the lows would go in the years to come, so the backdrop was still optimistic. You were the same as always: same haircut, same glasses, same black T-shirt and black pants—plus a silver watchband, which I always noticed when you pushed up your glasses or scribbled on scrap paper.
The Engineering Quad was immaculate, surrounded by classroom buildings and cafés. Lots of people sat outside working or chatting. The most striking view was the giant, smooth spherical marble sculptures placed around the plaza. Those perfect spheres were set into the ground, utterly unmoving; their gray-white or pale brown swirling veins made them look like celestial bodies. In the middle of the plaza were a few ring-shaped oases—little green mounds covered in plants, with some tiny oak trees growing on them. We were no different from other students: walking around, then sitting under an oak on the grass, talking. The sky was dimming; the grass felt a little damp. The oak canopy above us hung low but dense. We talked entirely about frustrations at work. You said your greatest confusion was not knowing whether the methods you were developing had any real biological value in application. Everything felt quiet around us, except for the wind—that dry, cool summer-evening breeze carrying the slightly bitter scent of stems and roots. And then we said, “We have to do something together.” That wish actually came true. I still find it unbelievable.
The year before last. After four years, I finally returned to Shanghai—but only for one week. I had to see many friends; I had to go back to my hometown to see my grandparents; and I had to spend a day taking pre-wedding photos. Yes: I decided to get married—actually, by then I was already married—and I felt I still hadn’t fully digested that decision. Did I truly understand what love, commitment, and compromise mean? When I try to observe my past self by walking through memory, I disturb how she existed—like trying again and again to hit a moving target. So do I have to forget about resurrecting the reality and recreate her instead?
That afternoon I had to go try on dresses for the photoshoot, so our time together was limited. In the café you complimented, “This diamond ring is so huge and sparkly, seeing it in person,” but that just made me feel ashamed. We had spent a lot of time talking about my decision to get married. Perhaps the shame is associated with the ring—how it made the beginning of marriage feel like a strategic ambush, a purchase and an exchange—and how I ultimately gave in. Back then, I hadn’t read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, but when I did I understood exactly why Yeong-hye, forced by her family to eat meat, refused to submit even unto death; and why she can never survive it. I don’t regret my own submission, but I keep asking, even until now—why can’t this world allow everything to emerge and dissipate as they naturally are? Perhaps human connections are the purest thing, until promises contaminate them.
Maybe that shame and unease also came from the gaze on the ring, one I rarely ever feel with you, but which is almost everywhere in the rest of the world. Jewelry, clothing, appearance, body, me as raw material for girlfriendhood and wifehood. These things hardly exist in the space we created. You are the room that always answers. My questions always receive responses. The room is filled with the things I bring, along with other intriguing objects I’ve never seen before. This room opens with a single passphrase: “Lately I’ve been feeling/thinking…” In this room, I don't feel the need to disguise or perform; in this room, I can forget as much as possible those bio-political constraints. I had felt completely, utterly free. I don’t want anything to contaminate that freedom.
But is that too selfish of me? What has become increasingly clear is that for a long time, I have been transparent to you, yet I don’t actually know what has been happening to you, or what you’ve been feeling. We took a walk around the school where your collaborating lab was. Shanghai’s winter was overcast. You were still in black. Before, you had mentioned that you might return to the U.S. to look for a postdoc, but now you felt it was impossible. You even told me you wanted to go into industry—you felt you couldn’t keep indulging your interests anymore; you had to shoulder the family. Not long before, you’d interviewed at a VC firm and even bought a suit for it, and you told me, “Today I look like I sell insurance—honestly I might not even look as good as actual insurance salespeople” (I burst out laughing again). I felt I couldn’t accept any of it. I didn’t understand: why does even giving up science have to be necessary? I told you you couldn’t give up, that you didn’t need to carry so much responsibility for your parents—if you know it’s what you love, why not do it? You simply said to me, “Reality is harsh.”
I think, selfishly, I wanted you to stay in academia only because it would make it easier for our friendship to continue—so I could keep having that room… But is it mutual? Have I given you a room, too? I feel more and more deeply that I don’t know anything you feel—except perhaps in certain moments, when a few words or an image pierce through by accident, like that moment at the high-speed rail station. Or perhaps even that is only a fantasy I’ve created.
We asked a woman passing by to take a photo of us at the school gate. It is the only photo we have taken together in all these years—behind us, the school’s name gleaming in gold, a school that has almost nothing to do with either of us. Is this another kind of non-physical evidence? We never even thought to take a photo together. The two people in the photo look almost unfamiliar to me. You once told me that you felt other people’s impression of me was very different from the impression you had in your mind. I think I know what you meant.
I’m grateful you still chose to continue in science, because only then could we finally fulfill that wish—“to do something together.” But after writing all this, I feel as if my vision has become much clearer. My wish could come true in the Room of Requirement—isn’t that the most natural thing in the world?
When I saw the pickup code you sent me, my mind filled with scenes from films and novels, but I told you: “This isn’t a story I can write.” Am I like Elena betraying Lila in My Brilliant Friend—betraying my friend through writing? I don’t think I’ve reached that depth yet. I still haven’t fully answered my questions. More questions keep emerging.
The real world imprisons me. Elena Ferrante says fiction isn’t for making up stories; it’s for being able to fully speak the most unspeakable truths. So if I make a wish—that in the future I can express, completely, this non-physical, literary world we live in—can that wish also come true?
P.S. I realized that this article, til here, is already longer than our paper; I’ve been gifted with some creations once again, and it makes me feel blessed. I am the most selfish friend.