COME ONE, COME ALL! Charles Des Vœux’s Cabinet of Curiosities combined with the Most Spectacular Show in Greater Albion! All three rings, two menageries and seven monster shows under one unbroken stretch of purple and gold canvas!
Behold the breathtaking complexity of New Machinery! Sample the Veritable Banquet laid out for all six of your senses!
Murmur in awe at the myriad exotics! Marvel at the Museum of Living Wonders! Now containing:
The Last and Only Cosmonaut to have Stepped upon the Sun,
The Unparalleled, Unholy, Unfettered Leviathan of the Un-sea,
The Gravity-Defying Feats of Fearless, Featherless Falling
and
The Girl with a City Inside of Her.
By the seafront, all month. To all of which one ticket for the usual price admits.
The city is loud inside of me, seething with sound and motion, screaming like a siren—a thousand sea-summoning mermaids tear open their throats, and from their salt-stained lips, an inhuman, apocalyptic chorus. I can feel it in me, that breathless blinking pulse of the city—it dictates the very beat of my shuddering heart as it streaks light under the dark of my skin, clawing through me like the webbed fingers of those very screaming mermaids.
The grid of those light-lined streets, you can trace the map of it on the cracks of my skin. Dry in this arid, autumn air. Amid the creases of my palms, my wrists, my elbows are etched the city’s every junction, every roundabout, every notched and forking road.
My lungs breathe out the soot, the smog of my city into clean, fresh, country air.
This is what you’re here to see, isn’t it?
The Girl with a City Inside of Her.
Now. Come closer.
You can’t possibly see properly from all the way over there, lurking behind that folding screen. I won’t accuse you of gawking. I am sitting here upon this stool quite openly. You’re in a cabinet of curiosities, after all. You are allowed some measure of curiosity.
If I hold out my hands and open up my palms like a book, like an old children’s game, you can see that very map I spoke of. The green of my veins under this papery skin marks out the draconic hills, outlines the islands, the imperially named harbour, the new territories, almost.
At least be close enough to taste the smoke from my lungs. Breathe it in. It’s like swallowing a coil of barbed wire. Let it choke tears from your eyes. You can always pick up some milk to wash it out later. You know you should have worn a mask.
But it’s all part of the experience, isn’t it? To share this miasma of mine whilst you admire the infamous skyline—the hills roll along my knuckles, but the skyscrapers I carry along my spine. You can see the shadow of it score my back as I breathe in, protruding with my ribs. Those jagged buildings, all woven together with night, they form a cage of my chest and capture my breath as surely as its sun-warmed sides still the air and stop smog from dispersing.
It is beautiful in spring, though. Most places are.
Now remark upon how far this little fishing village has come, how much has changed, and how far it will fall. Everyone does.
Let me tell you a secret that is no secret at all, friend: It’s real, my city. All of it. All its glass towers built upon dragons and concrete boxes full of people. The suffocating mists that rip tears from your eyes, the hounds that shackle with their bite, the sirens that fill the night air with screaming. They’re all real.
People always write about my city as though it were fiction, a dream of cyberpunk and neon. Or as though it only existed inside of me, that you can only see it through me.
It is in the past, all rotting signs, rice hats and rickshaws, shrouded in sepia. Or it is future, a place intangible and impossible, like predictive sentence. As though you will all be exactly like my city tomorrow.
But faraway things are still real. Still exist. The now still happens for them and it is all happening now. As I speak these words to you and you try to glimpse it all in the way my eyes refract the limelight.
Can you read in these scattering motes of light the myriad laser light shows that dance along the waterfront every night? Or do you see every luminous phone screen, cracked with wear and flickering with messages?
I am a deeply imperfect, inaccurate window into that world beyond. I am limited by the canvas of my own skin and the ink that brews within my spleen. It’s all too indistinct. When the city is that vast and I am but one. I cannot tell you what’s happening, for all that I feel it deep in my bones. A disquiet. Like sirens singing undersea, their sounds shuddering through my solid mass, through flesh and blood and bone. Every siege, every slight, every struggle. Every pair of hands bound, every pen sealed, every torn down post-it-note trodden into the ground.
How did I end up this way, you ask?
I was born of the seas and the skies, a patchwork of bird and fish and beast. Little boats found sanctuary on little islands and from there I was born. Among the strings of dried saltfish and bitter storms.
I was washed up on the shore seeking shelter and—
No, no. Sorry.
I was born just after a war that brought a proud, terrible empire to its knees. No empire is worth mourning, so I shed no tears for it, but there is always suffering in the wake of collapse. I was a footnote in an unequal treaty, a pawn only notable for the humiliation it caused emperors—
No. That’s still not right.
If I close my eyes, maybe I will remember better; the singing is louder when I close my eyes.
I was born in my city. Like hundred before me, I was born in one of the hospitals on a hill. It would have overlooked the bay and the city, but whitewashed walls are short and all around we were circled by tall, imposing towers. I like to imagine it like a ritual. Surrounded by concrete monoliths. That I was summoned into being in the middle of an urban Stonehenge.
That is nothing but fancy. I was born to parents who loved too much to stay apart and brought me up with three tongues instead of one.
No, I did not…swallow my city. Though I suppose it would be logical. A girl hungry with ambition devours the city of her birth to gain a smudge of fame. To wear this starry diadem before you and claim ostentatious titles. To make a living and a life out of being The Girl with a City Inside of Her.
This is such a comfortable, enviable life, after all.
Am I not queen of this little sideshow? Am I not the reigning mermaid of this little aquarium? Do I not have a whole hundred square feet of tent to call my audience chamber—larger by far than many cages people call home?
Are my fluttering yellow ribbons not delightful? My paper stars, paper birds, and red paper lanterns. My throne built from the prows of pirate ships, crescent-moon sickles, and rock-shattered ploughs? My beautiful collection of black bauhinias.
But no, I did not court this life. I did not devour my city out of some misplaced ambition.
I simply thought I outgrew it—yes, my endless city defined only by borders, the sleepless city of infinite amusement, I thought I tired of it and left.
But you cannot leave without it changing you.
At first, I thought it was just nostalgia. I had merely recognised a familiar tune, a truncated inflection, a snapped syllable. I was just full of memories, ghosts of my childhood being summoned up by my disquiet mind.
And in a way, I wasn’t wholly wrong.
But this city. It stays with you. Clings to your bones, seeps into your marrow, and re-dyes your blood. Fills your lungs and hollows out the fist-like chambers of your heart. Refashions you into its creature.
They say blood binds, thicker than water.
I remember it being preached, part of a hymn, perhaps. I was at boarding school, all pigtails and restless questions.
“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”
No, that’s not it.
But I remember sitting there, shirt collar chaffing and hands restless in boredom. My mind retreated within, folding into itself, soul crawling into that space I held my city, tight and tiny like a fairy tale walnut, a nest of secrets each nestled against half-memories half-truths.
The wood-panelled walls of the chapel could not hold me. Those murmuring teachers and blank, empty pages were a pitiful distraction.
I watered that seed within myself, nurtured that kernel I kept within myself.
Everything that is nurtured grows.
Which is all to say, the city I hold within myself, I am not bound to it. Blood and gold do not hold me. I am no imprisoned Julian; my city is not my anchorhold.
Nor am I some shackled Andromeda—though I suppose my mother did tell me I was strung up like a chicken in my last life; I was born with an executioner’s mark on my ankle. She said I must have been strangled. That is another story, though. One I don’t know.
What is true, and I do know is this: I kept a piece of my city within myself when I left, watered it with my tears and sighs and in turn it has rewritten me, like a translated lyric contorting to the rhythms of the new language.
My city roils inside of me. I am all its innocence and all its whores. All its horrors and all its wonders, its scandals and strangeness. Strength and superstition.
I am everything the Old Master—you call him Confucius here, do you not?—would not speak of.
Do not be so scandalised. I’ve not even begun to mention the red lanterns, the yellow industries, the eternal performance… And you know what this place is capable of. What your people have done. What they can do.
I see the crowds here are thinning.
Is time for the dancing horses? I saw them listed on the flyer, I think. The musicians play the music to match the pace of the horses. Though the backwards riding is very flashy. And the show every other hour. With trapeze artists. They are well worth seeing; they really do embody the abstraction of flight. Much more impressive than the Leviathan of the Un-sea, if you ask me.
You linger, though. Is it the spectacle? All this smoke and skirmish. Though this too will pass. Our memories are short but it is enough to remember a thousand other masks. I am biting my tongue.
I can feel them circling, you know. The crows, the carrion birds, the sharp-beaked storytellers who feast on suffering and sorrow. They find the bitter taste of it all intoxicating. I can hear the edges of their gossip, their whispers, their peddled rumours.
Eternally, outsiders write our obituaries but still, my city continues. Dead and dying and still, here.
You want this to be neat. If it cannot have a happy ending, then it can be a grand farce. A great tragedy. A morality play about empires and hubris.
Just for it all to be over. So you can draw conclusions.
But.
Feel it. It is in my pulse.
Press your fingers to my wrist and tell me this screaming, yearning, thrashing city is dead. It may be some gasping fish drowning on dry land, but our eyes are still staring and there is life yet.
Our museums may be emptied and our walls stripped of wishes, but we are here still. You cannot claim us dead and turn away. I want nothing of your pity.
I am not crying. These aren’t tears. My eyes just…water sometimes. Smog and smoke would do that to you.
And I am not hysterical.
You can see me press my lips together. I am swallowing a thousand words for every single one I utter. I am guarding my tongue. All three of them.
I am just…speaking.
The silence can’t come until you turn away. Though I can feel so many eyes darting off, distracted. Illusions. This pearl of the orient is not luminous enough. Let bloom the paper parasols and unfurl the scarlet banners.
I suppose in the end, that’s what everyone wants. To hollow us out, bleach away our colours and use us as a blank canvas for their own stories. Repaint us as an exaggeration of ourselves. Something more pliable, more obedient. Something on strings.
Be it the hounds of mist and murder, the counters and the cutters who make numbers in their towers, or even the masters who pace at the border. They hunger for a perfect quiet that they can fill with their own visions.
I know my voice drips with a longing reminiscent of nostalgia, but my city was never some perfect utopia. No place so born of blood and broken dreams can be. And I am under no delusions. It has long been a playground for the rich. Their faces and fancies may change but a gilded amusement park it remains.
Still, beneath all of that. Around all of it. We all lived out uncommon lives. It’s not just some mirage in the East. It’s full of people.
And for all that I may carry the city with in, for all that it is burst my skin and written upon my bones.
It is far more vast than me, more real than me, and very much besieged. Every illuminated aluminium-frame window, every postage-stamp-sized balcony, every gleaming headlamp, all cutting through the dark, through me. The groaning engines of every car stream through me and I remember each time the tides try to turn, like a waterclock running backwards.
I keep almost telling you about the sieges, about the falls, about every damned, lost—
My city is quiet.
It happened drop by drop, like they were pipetting poison over a boiled frog, like they were trying to suffocate you by pushing cotton roses into your throat one at a time.
Slowly, but then all at once: Silence.
It is unnatural and I am not sure I can bear it. My own thoughts are rattling too loud.
Everyone who has ever left my city is like this, you know. I am not special. We all nurse inside of ourselves fragments, shards from each of the places we have called home. Some of us just hide it better. Keep it a little more quiet. Turn to it a little less.
Most don’t pick at it until it becomes a festering, monstrous thing that cannot heal.
But everyone carries something of their past.
I am not so remarkable. I just have a little bit more, wear it a little closer to my skin, and made it my business to that pain into some semblance of a performance.
I foolishly think that this might make a difference. If you could look into my eyes and see the graveyard of hope that my city has become.
But that is not wholly my fault. The audience also makes it so.
I mean, those are the questions that you have been asking, are they not?
History is defined as much by readers as much as it is by its writers. If victors are left with nothing but a void, then what good are their words? What does it matter if we open veins onto pages if there is no one to witness it?
The silence is unbearable. My city was never made to be quiet, but the silence towers, teetering. It is like the blade of guillotine high in its frame, straining against its rope. I can feel it about to fall, the silence.
The fear is building. I am watching my words, counting my teeth with my tongue.
It is getting worse. It is in the moments like this that the other voice gets loud. That I think back to…
I can show you. The messages. I do not know who leaves them, but I find them among the coins in the hat we pass around at the end of the show. Sometimes smuggled in an old pamphlet, left tied to these ribbons.
Here. This one.
You don’t have to suffer.
Your city may be lost, but you do not have to suffer with it. Cut yourself free. You may witness but it can never be enough. Your pain will not save it.
Let go. You cannot let it define you.
I not crying. This is just laughter. Bitter mirth streaking down my face. Bitter joy torn from my throat.
The promise is always powerful, always seductive.
I can imagine cutting it from myself. Peel back this gaudy map-worn skin. Pry open my ribcage and crack my sternum. Pull out that thunderous, pulsing city like a second heart, this tight fist of want and love and anger. Grasping. In my grasp.
I don’t think it strange that I should want to cut out that quiet. The loud was everything but unbearable. Distracting, perhaps. Overwhelming, even.
But it is not this suffocating quiet. Even the mermaids have stopped singing, even if the shackled hounds continue their work.
You cannot free me from this. Pure, free silence may be calling but my city is the crucible that forged me and I can have no other shape. No other heart.
But if you would take a fragment of my city from me, just another reflection of the whole, another quotation to add to the library of your self. If you can hold it within yourself and know it as a living thing. If you can watch and witness.
If—
Editors’ Note: A version of “The Girl with a City Inside of Her” originally appeared with “Angela Su: The Magnificent Lives of Lauren O” and was part of her solo presentation at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022.
© 2023 Jeannette Ng
