Yuxin Zhao - 'The Moons' wants to mess with our assumptions about the nature and shape of time, of distance, of literary forms, and above all, the physics of desire and longing. In this painstaking documentation of daily living, dreams are currency for exchanging intimacies, and snacks become timestamps for measuring absence, during which events seem to nearly happen or only half-happen

 

Yuxin Zhao, The Moons: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog. Calamari Archive, 2024

The Moons documents an intimate affair between two women living on opposite sides of Earth, a relationship confined mostly to a messaging app. The wax and wane of this seemingly doomed long-distance entanglement gets tethered with the raw details of the narrator's day-to-day—most of the text, in fact, is lifted straight from her private journals, which permit voyeuristic access into her secret inner circle. Fragments of autofiction in varied formats are woven in to further explore themes of queerness, desire, identity, reality versus virtuality, the private versus public self, immigration, displacement, time, family, history, and political oppression. Emerging from this patchwork of confessions is a courageous disclosure of inevitable heartbreak—the narrator attempts to reconcile her sexuality and global modernity with her traditional Chinese identity, and to adapt her collective ancestral memory and biorhythmic mood swings to the gravity of the present day.

A log of food, sex, and proximities, Yuxin Zhao's The Moons is a body unflinching, regurgitated, deconstructed, and shapeshifted in ongoing encounter with defamiliarization. It is a durational project of profound tenderness and yearning. Be eaten by the poet.—Jhani Randhawa

"The Moons wants to mess with our assumptions about the nature and shape of time, of distance, of literary forms, and above all, the physics of desire and longing. In this painstaking documentation of daily living, dreams are currency for exchanging intimacies, and snacks become timestamps for measuring absence, during which events seem to nearly happen or only half-happen. There is a brave sincerity in writing all the minutiae, leaving nothing out, littering the narrative with crumbs and candy wrappers which come to stand in for small pleasures or disappointments, both sad and exacting. This book will leave you very, very hungry, yet strangely filled to the brim with delicate wisdom."—Stella Corso

"Multilingual and multicultural, Yuxin Zhao applies paradigms from the fine arts, from science, math, and semiotics, to her writing practice. Manifest in an exhaustive, even obsessive, particularity of detail and observation, is a surreal understanding of the underlying arbitrariness of such paradigms, even as they remain necessary to the possibility of human discourse. A quotidian strangeness and deadpan humor suffuses the circadian spaces of eating, working, travelling, and corresponding until we, too, feel the dynamics of history, family, gender, sexuality, and ideology begin to transmute into spiraling, recursive fractals of experience and endurance. There can be no all-defining foundation for identity. The relationality of this outlook struggles to create an intimacy or space of acknowledgement even as Zhao's Oulipo-like constraints radiate a lunar chill. Both revelatory and concealing, The Moons is a tidal hybrid of memoir, documentation, and characterization, a parafiction that inhabits the uncanny truths we habitually repress, ignore, discount, or talk over, but at heart remind us that "chest is the best storage place" for a mortality like ours."—Jon Wagner, Emeritus Professor of Critical Studies and Writing, California Institute of the Arts

zhao impales the candied fruits of romantic and filial love with a sharp bamboo skewer, which we grasp with desperate hands.

reading this book will allow you to understand the taste of toilet paper, cookies that corrode one’s teeth, and memory games played across screens and generations.

the moons is a cultivation of love conducted across a digital terrain, then harvested in accordance with lunar sequences.

a scientific hypothesis that declares our life’s arithmetic might end cinematically, despite our most careful calculations.

—Daisuke Shen, author of Vague Predictions & Prophecies

A multisensory and hypersensitive work that provides an eerily intimate portrait of the reckoning and peril of everyday life. Obsessive, mesmerizing, and excessive in its unflinching devotion to detail and documentation, Zhao's text takes the age-old adage "You are what you eat" to its extreme, uncanny potential. Food and consumption become a fractal lens to view a fractured self, the byproducts of relational construction and deterioration brought together by the act of eating in a constant reminder of impermanence and mortality. A beautiful and evocative work..—Janice Lee

excerpt:

SAGITTARIUS

11/8

1. last night the fire alarm went off 2.5 times in 4 hrs. i covered my

head with the comforter. after a while i started to wonder if i was

the only one hearing it? no doors opened, no footsteps ... was

the alarm only sounding in my room? was i hallucinating? i fell

asleep after the last 0.5 time and was woken up 0.5 hours later by

the noise of the blender. someone making a breakfast smoothie.

corned beef, swiss cheese, sauerkraut on bagel. medium chai

(hot)

2. 1 orange. this time the oranges are sweeter, but harder. don’t

know whether it means i’m bad or good at picking out oranges.

the other day C and i both changed the background image of

our chat. now mine is a pic of her standing in front of a mirror

in her dorm, face half-hidden behind her phone, dressed in a

dark-grey knit skirt, a light-grey knit coat, and a sky-blue sweater

with a koala on it. it’s a kids’ sweater. we like to imagine us living

together as a family. we’ll mix up all the kids’ clothes and wear

them ourselves at random. yesterday had a revelation, i realized

the phone in her pic is exactly vertical. scrolling through the chat

window, the right edges of her dialogue boxes pass the long edge

of her phone, 1 by 1, they make perfect parallel lines.

3. 1 slice of bbq chicken pizza. medium watermelon lemonade.

thought it’d be strange, but it was good.

11/9

1. a nurse tries to draw my blood and fails. she thought it would

be easy. she found my vein, but i wouldn’t bleed into the syringe.

she tries twice on my left arm, once on my right. she says, i’m

fire rooster going to be mad at you. if you’re not a bleeder, you should have

told me so i wouldn’t poke you like this. you’ll walk out like a pin

cushion. after 3 failed attempts, she says let the doctor try, she’s

good at getting people to bleed. the doctor tries on my right arm

and fails in this way: she inserts the needle—no blood comes out;

pulls out the needle and reinserts it—no blood comes out; pushes

the needle deeper inside the vein—no blood; shifts the needle

under my skin so it pierces the vein from a different angle—no

blood; nudges the needle around so it pierces a different vein—

no blood comes out and it starts to hurt really bad. that other

doctor 6 years ago had failed to draw my blood in the same way.

and remember being carried to a hospital at the age of 5 and

someone sticking a needle in my arm, and that someone failing

too? i’ve always been a person from whom it was hard to draw

blood. 6 years ago that doctor felt she could try as many times as

she pleased. it didn’t hurt, but caused a bruise the size of a fist.

now, this doctor apologizes and leaves the room. i hear her and

all the nurses discussing who is going to try and draw my blood

next. i hear someone say they work in the er. this er nurse had

a different uniform because they worked at henry mayo. such a

strange name for a hospital. the other day i told C about how

when i was 5 a doctor said i had a shorter trachea than most

other people and C said she would like to see me hiccup. while

i was waiting for nurse no.3 i carefully studied the poster on the

wall behind me, the one that teaches people how to examine

themselves for breast cancer. it starts with what is breast cancer

and goes into the 4 stages of breast cancer and ends with detailed

instructions of how one should feel one’s breasts with the pad of

3 fingers. begin on the outer circle and close in. press the nipple

to check if there’s any discharge. such a graphic reminder that

part of your body could go wrong just like that and even if it

doesn’t, you’ll die anyway. it was a long wait, but satisfying to

finally see my blood quietly float into a glass tube. the nurse and

i laugh at how hard it was and she asks, would you like to hold it?

she hands me my blood. it is not as warm as i expected. lukewarm

at best. scrambled eggs with hash browns. last night the alarm

went off again. wonder if it will go off every night from now on. C

says someone must have been smoking.

Yuxin Zhao is a writer from Hangzhou, China, and currently based in the UK. She writes experimental fiction and poetry on migration and/or immigration, family history, and queer desire. Her writing has appeared in Full Stop, 7x7 LA, O BOD, and rivulet. Three Forms of Exhaustion, a chapbook, was published as part of the DanceNotes chaplet series.