Ling Ma's "Los Angeles" and My Own Wish Fulfillment
When I was seventeen years old, my biggest dream was to attend the musical theatre program at the University of Michigan. It feels almost illegal to write these words, like taking my top off at a fancy dinner, like showing my lacy pink bra to God and everyone in the middle of Carbone, because I held that dream close to my chest for longer than I’d care to admit. As a senior in high school, I derived the majority of my self-worth from the encouragement of my teachers, parents, and peers. There was no room for me to step back and breathe, because that exploration could be unbearably vulnerable, opening up my worldview to a blank page that might eventually bear inscriptions of failure and fear. I didn’t think to wonder what made me happiest when nobody was looking.
Truthfully, I enjoyed performing, but I had a writer’s heart. I scribbled songs and poems in the margins of my notebooks while I sat cross-legged in the air conditioned waiting rooms of university theaters all across America. At this point in time, I was still woefully unaware that my personal, internal microphone could be much louder in those margins than in any 32-bar cut. As a child raised in the musical theatre tradition, I’d been under the impression that most other art forms were in some way inferior, that we were the carriers of some creative torch entirely untouchable by the mortals down on Earth. In my mind, gaining recognition as a performer was the only way I could convince the world (and myself) that I had value.
I did end up majoring in musical theatre, and while I loved my program, the psychological toll of its constant evaluation was too high a price for me to pay. I knew after my first year that I wanted to write instead. I felt lucky that my school took a holistic approach to its curriculum, encouraging us to embrace our full selves and explore our passions, artistic or otherwise. A more Broadway-centric experience might have had me sitting miserably on my hands, cut off from my full creative potential, a fish self-flagellating for its inability to climb a tree. Still, a goal is a goal, and I desperately wanted to achieve mine.
Maybe that wish fulfillment and its ripple effect explains my admiration for and connection with Ling Ma’s brilliant short story “Los Angeles,” in which she explores the messy realities that often accompany the pursuit of our objects of desire. Ma’s anonymous narrator lives in a mansion with her husband, children, and one hundred of her ex-boyfriends (who reside in a wing that “extend[s] behind the house like a gnarled, broken arm”). The otherwise-unnamed Husband speaks in a foreign language with a dollar-sign alphabet, unintelligible to everyone except the narrator (in moments of particular emotional turmoil, he speaks in cents). The narrator has two particularly memorable boyfriends: Adam, an abuser, and Aaron, a soulmate; her life, marked by wheatgrass and tile and mostly devoid of sensation, takes a turn when Aaron moves away. Ma’s odd, insightful prose reveals a narrator who suffers from palpable growing pains and an uneasy, life-altering nostalgia, and in the end, even a house with the “nicest view in the Hills” is not enough.
“My point of entry into writing a story is usually some sort of fantasy or wish fulfillment element,” Ma said in an interview with Maris Kreizman, “that is what I try to inhabit first before I get deeper into the story.” This particular narrator describes a desire for consistency, and with her husband, she receives just that. When she asks Aaron to move into her Los Angeles home, he obliges, and the other ninety-nine exes follow suit. Each character’s unspoken wishes appear at their most fully-formed in conversation; on his first date with the narrator, her husband asks her to take off her shoes: “let’s see how tall you really are.” His true question seems to lie just below the surface: “who are you, and how much space do you intend to take up?” The fulfillment of their dream turns nightmarish, not just in its tragedy but in its eerieness. Ma leads the reader through a dilapidated haunted house with only a ring light for illumination.
The story is heart-wrenching in its depiction of the passage of time, of the rust that grows on every gold medal the narrator holds. In moments of panic or fear, a kind word or a kiss on the cheek is more than enough to soothe her; in moments of uncertainty, a goal, no matter how irrational, can make a powerful compass. She can almost ignore her favorite ex-boyfriend’s tattoo removal scar, the one that used to spell her name, until she can’t anymore. “The truth,” she says, “when it finally hits you, sounds a lot like a slot machine hitting the jackpot.”
Maybe it’s a futile practice to cross-examine the past, but I can still say with almost absolute certainty that the death of my dream at that time was the best-case scenario. The prestige, the oohs and ahhs that were sure to follow my admission that senior spring, would have been more than enough for me, and therein lies the problem. Writer and educator Rachel Simmons calls this a “performance goal,” in which the desire to be judged by others as competent outweighs the desire to actually participate in an activity or learn a skill (e.g. “I want to be a world famous figure skater, but I don’t really want to figure skate”). This idea, this desire for validation in all its forms, has followed me throughout my adolescent and adult life as I continue to learn which pursuits and undertakings I legitimately enjoy. My dreams take new shape on a regular basis, like curls of smoke from a campfire, warm and translucent and bound for heaven.
The narrator’s solace comes in her moments of embodiment, of love and heartbreak and self-sufficiency; it isn’t until Adam’s return that she comes to regard herself as “vulnerable” and “alone,” regardless of the house and the husband and the overflowing bank account. “And yet,” she says, before she runs after her ex-boyfriend, you can’t help but root for her as she breaks her final sweat of the story: “I really, really want to catch him,” she says. “I want to masticate him with my teeth. I want to barf on him and coat him in my stinging acids. I want to unleash a million babies inside him and burden him with their upbringing.”
Ma’s language in this section becomes grotesque, invoking blood, sweat, and a miscellany of bodily fluids, but by the time the story has finished, you get the sense that her narrator has broken free of something, that she might just keep running forever. She continues to be consumed by desire, but the quality of that desire has become something guttural, something grounded in the human spirit that seems almost inexplicable by modern biology. “He jumps beyond my reach,” she writes, “but I am close. I am so, so close.”
At seventeen, I practiced singing the same notes over and over again in hopes that some perfect placement might make me worthy. At twenty-two, I grasped at love with my fists like a baby until I developed the fine motor control it took to hold my own hand. At twenty-four, I’ve begun a new practice, one of self-love that does not hinge on accomplishments or validation. When I see a flaming hoop, my first instinct isn’t necessarily to jump, but to break out the fire extinguisher, so that I might achieve my dreams without a trip to the burn unit. Sitting at my desk, confronted with the loneliness of a writer’s life and the lack of companionship afforded to me by my laptop, I wonder what else has been kept from me by some cosmic force, some celestial dog owner keeping the chocolate locked in the kitchen cabinet. I wonder what will be served to me instead and how much sweeter it will taste.
