The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt.2: Xian Mao

 

2024 Pleasures

by Xian Mao  

 

This was a year of changes: I finally finished medical school; I was officially diagnosed with autism; I started testosterone. And as I look ahead to 2025 where I will be entering into the next decade of my life, I am filled with trepidation and excitement at the prospect of becoming a human being. On more days than not, I feel less like a functioning adult and more like a puppet. Perhaps that is why this performance of “Confrontation” from Jekyll and Hyde by drag king Pippin Panic is so compelling, and why the story itself compels me out of all classic gothic monsters.

 

 Speaking of monsters, I loved the Dungeon Meshi manga and anime and its focus on the culinary preparation of fantasy monsters. Not only were many of the dishes delicious, but its ethos of consumption as a vital part of being alive was really stirring. I also related heavily to the protagonist and his struggles connecting with others, feeling closer to the monsters he is fighting compared to other adventurers. I had a similar reaction to My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book 2, and how marginalized identities lead to identification with the other.

The video that truly brought me to tears is the September Trilogy by Ava Hoffman, a series of Line Rider maps that tell the personal story of falling apart due to transphobia and abuse, and the arduous task of putting herself back together. The last song, which ironically was the video I found first, feels like the epilogue to I Saw the TV Glow, my (predictably) favorite new movie of this year. Because what can we do when we cut ourselves open and find the truth, except go back to living and living and living again?

 I always feel some nervousness when writing these retrospectives. My years change by summers, so winter is merely a continuation. In addition, I’m still struggling with the ultimate imposter syndrome of being an adult. I don’t know where this shame comes from, but in order to disassemble this panopticon, I want to spend a paragraph on YouTube object shows. Many of these were initially made by teenagers in the early years of the internet, but it’s incredibly gratifying watching animation and writing skills develop and becomes a playground for existential questions, such as how one can find meaning in a predetermined existence in Inanimate Insanity, or rage against an incompetent god in ONE.

As animation targeted toward adults, especially ex-mall goths like me, becomes more mainstream, I find myself drawn more toward imperfect projects made by small-scale creators. The animatics of JazLyte, especially Night Walkies, resonated with me in part because he includes extensive commentary on the process of creation.

 

Here are some last, scattered things I loved this year. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville made me jealous of the expansive, complex world he built. I took the first step in reading Isabel Allende with House of Spirits. Chappell Roan was my most played artist, but my favorite new artist was the British rapper Ren. And while I look forward to taking my niece to see Wicked, I’m more excited about Nightbitch, myself.

 

This is the year I take steps to further be myself. And that means embracing the weird, the childish, the overcomplicated, and the iconoclastic. To bring this full circle, I end with a quote from the first book I finished this year, Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. “There is no end; there is only means.” And I mean to become unapologetically myself, especially in a world that threatens to destroy me. 

 

Xian Mao is a queer non-binary Chinese American writer and family medicine doctor whose works with Aqueduct Press include poetry in Climbing Lightly Through Forests, an anthology honoring Ursula K. Le Guin, and the novella Apollo Weeps, a 2024 

finalist in the novella category for The Subjective Kind of Chaos Award. They also have short stories published in Undercities (Dirty Birds Press), Rattus Futura (Manawalker Press), and Nobody Left to Blame (Owl Canyon Press). Their short play "Fantasy Roadtrip," focused on the relationship between a young adult and her uncle with schizophrenia, was produced as a part of the 2017 DC Queer Theater Fest. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, they have called the Northeast home for over ten years. In their (very limited) spare time, they enjoy knitting, making art, playing video games and spending time with their pets.

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023, pt.5: Xian Mao

 

2023 In Review
by Xian Mao 

 

 

Like the Kesh of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, I have moved in a spiral this year. I found peace and hope in its quiet fictional anthropology, and it has left me with a passage that captured regret and grief. Names in Kesh society change with a person’s growth. In “Stone Telling,” the narrator’s mother asks to be called by her previous name after her lover abandons her again. In that moment she goes from Willow to Towhee, from graceful tree to small songbird, she seems to shrink within the narrative. Loss has ripped away her growth. As someone who places significant value on the role of names, I ask myself, what does it mean to go back to who you once were, to let go of your current existence?

A confession: the investigative portions of Apollo Weeps, where Owl sits with minor characters and listens to their stories, was directly inspired by Jonni Phillips’ storytelling in her incredible film The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, where characters tell their backstories in long unbroken monologues animated by guest animators, many of whom also provide the voice acting for the character. Her most recent movie, Barber Westchester, was a great way to begin 2023. A continuation of her miniseries Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners, Barber barely addressed any of the questions raised in the series and instead focused on the titular character and their struggles as they leave their hometown and live in a world that actively rejects them (on the airplane ride to their new job at NASA, one of their arms falls off and gets flushed in the toilet). Phillips creates a rich landscape filled with struggles both mundane and extraordinary, where the most relatable facets of life are juxtaposed with the ridiculous, creating a rich emotional reality that is enthralling to exist in. I look forward to Phillips’ further work expanding the world she has created and joining it all together in her upcoming movie Take Off the Blindfold, Adjust Your Eyes, Look in the Mirror, See the Face of Your Mother. 

China Miéville is an author I need to read more of. King Rat is exuberant, an exploration of non-human senses and leftist politics passed from father to son, through the lens of two things I love: music and rats. The final confrontation with the Piper ended in a cosmic twist common in the New Weird genre, but to me this one felt earned because it depended so much on how jungle music is played and listened to. Through this book I have made a small dive into the genre, and in doing so realized how much it has influenced much of my favorite video game music in the way tracks are layered and leitmotifs come and go.

This was a year of short stories. I loved revisiting the words of Banana Yoshimoto in Dead-End Memories and enveloping myself in the delicate way she describes pain. I picked up Bound in Flesh: an Anthology of Trans Body Horror and was immediately drawn into the first short story, “Wormspace,” where an understanding of BDSM and specifically subspace are necessary to truly appreciate the story’s nuances. I have circulated this short story among my friends and now I am regularly sent pictures of worms. This specific intersection between desire and horror was also felt in Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, which would have been on my list last year (along with Skinamarink) if I had made time to watch it then. There’s also a bittersweetness in discovering the French film Eyes without a Face only this year, as a quiet horror movie focused on forcing parental expectations and medical transformation on a masked protagonist feels like something written specifically to my tastes.

The short story that has inspired me the most this year was Samuel R. Delaney’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…” which focuses on spacers, bodies considered objects of perverse sexual lust for some due to the removal of their gonads. We sit with a spacer as they journey through different parts of the world, their body always an object of scrutiny and politicization. It’s easy to draw a line between the story and the current debate surrounding the use of gonadotropin inhibitors, or “puberty blockers,” in transgender and gender diverse adolescents. The short story gave me pause to think, if transgender and gender diverse individuals weren’t currently used as a political wedge, what would our existence look like in a society that continues to uphold capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy?

In other instances of old becoming new again, it was a small miracle to watch Nimona in movie form, after having followed the initial graphic novel while it was being published as a webcomic. The main character remains as wild and frenetic as ever, but it was interesting to see how ND Stevenson tackles the story now compared to when he wrote it at a much younger age, in a time both similar to and very different from now.

I stumbled onto the work of Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švenkmajer by chance, and I have been entranced ever since by how he combines real life with stop motion and claymation to distort our sense of reality. His works, especially his 1992 Food trilogy, fills me with a visceral reaction followed by cerebral analysis. I have always loved how animation can push the boundaries of what can be depicted visually. I have mentioned two animated projects already, and I will let others sing praises for Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Instead, I want to highlight some excellent independent short animations that have left an impression on me. Many of these are student thesis films, which I love to watch as they are filled with passion and ambition.

• TEHURA by Wei Li: a pensive and heartrending exploration of having one’s culture commodified. 

• Rat Snacks by Anthony Kos: fluidly animated nonsense that puts Looney Tunes to shame 

• The Name by Alexander Aguilar: the perfect representation of the power of names, especially for transgender individuals 

• BOLAVK/WEREWOLF by Niko Mlynarčík and Štepánka Milulíková: a dark parable that sent me back to my teenage years 

• MISSION POPO by Jennifer Wu: cyberpunk grandma. Need I say more? 

• Goodnight, Sweet Dreams! Pajama Mammal-Saur by Averi Roes-Kern: this simultaneously lulls me to sleep and makes the back of my neck prickle. 

• Watchmaker at the End of Time by Sheriff Shaheen: there’s something so charming in the way characters move in the sketchy world where all the sound effects are made by the animator 

• Midnight Garden by Sapphira Chen: this animation made me feel emotions known previously only to shrimp 

• So Long, Caz! By Jingqi Zhang: another meditation on time. The ducks in fight reminded me of the bird scene in Night on the Galactic Railroad 

• Big Top Burger Season 2 by Ian Worthington: this series about a clown-themed food truck continues to be one of the funniest series on the internet, with a mind-boggling conclusion to surrealist hijinks. 

• Into the Wild by Little Dragon Studios: I talked about how influential the Warrior Cats series was last year, I might as well bring it up again this year with an amazing adaptation of the first book


Finally, two actual play series have been my faithful companions this year. Dimension 20 remains fun and engaging, with the most recent series Burrow’s End being among their best work. And I am slowly catching up to Friends at the Table, whose most recent season Palisade is both a continuation of previous season Partizan, named best mecha anime of 2020 by Crunchyroll, and a culmination of all the worldbuilding in their previous science fiction series, welded together in what is known to fans as the Divine Cycle. If Le Guin is to be believed and capitalism is set to fall like the divine right of kings, I want to continue pursuing art that asks the question, what happens next? 

 

 

Speculative fiction has always been Xian Mao’s home. At the end of their college career, and the precipice of the 2016 election, their first short story, “Silk Moth,” was published in Dirty Birds Press’s Undercities anthology. Another short story, “Carry the Ocean,” was published in Strange Constellations. Their poetry has appeared in Aqueduct Press’s Climbing Lightly Through Forests, a poetry anthology celebrating the life and works of Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin, along with Terry Pratchett, Lawrence Yep, and Octavia Butler, are major influences in their writing, which often focuses on isolation, generational trauma, and contending with history.Aqueduct Press published their novella Apollo Weeps as a volume in the Conversation Pieces series earlier this year.

Apollo Weeps by Xian Mao

 

 I'm pleased to announce the release of Apollo Weeps, a novella by Xian Mao, in both print and e-book editions. The novella is the eighty-sixth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series. It's available now at www.aqueductpress.com.

Read a sample of the book here.

Owl thought they had left their hometown in Iowa for good, but the promise of a story hidden in the catacombs of the historic Cassandra Theater brings them back fifteen years later. The story is not centered on the theater itself, however, but on Madeleine Grey, the theater's star actress and Owl's high school crush, and her twisted family tree.

Apollo Weeps is a love letter to theater and the twisting plots of Stephen Sondheim musicals. It is a modern adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, as well as a meditation on race in America: Owl, a transracial Chinese adoptee, uncovers a story about a Black actor in the Midwest and the generational trauma his descendants face.

Across generations, a family tree's roots run deep.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, pt. 3: Xian Mao

 

Being Seen and Being Messy
by Xian Mao

 

How can I, a queer Chinese American, not begin by talking about Everything Everywhere All At Once? The moment Joy’s face appeared on screen, I knew. It didn’t take the warm kisses from her supportive girlfriend; just the expression, the posture, the clothing tipped me off that this was a story about queerness, on top of a story about Chineseness, neurodiversity, missed opportunity, and, well, everything. In a way it was also too real; the clenched-fist acceptance Evelyn had for Joy, the lack of language Joy has in communicating her sexuality to her Cantonese-speaking grandfather. My partner puts it best: “If you want a look into Xian’s family life, watch this movie.”

Perhaps the greatest insight I had from this movie, however, wasn’t Evelyn rescuing Joy from a nihilistic end, but Waymond teaching Evelyn how to love the simple things. The fact that the Waymond who saves the day is the gentle, goofy Waymond from Evelyn’s own universe brought me to tears, even as the Waymond from the Wong Kar-wai universe gave the thesis statement of the movie. Much of my resonance with this character comes from my own stepfather, who shares Waymond’s kind and silly nature.

I am forever indebted to this movie, because through the language of the Everything Bagel (or, in my mother’s own malapropism, the “黑(hei) Donut”) I was able to fully come out to my mother. At last, she understood that being my authentic self isn’t a selfish choice, but a necessary one, between existence and annihilation.

There’s so much to say about a movie that made me cry about rocks, and also featured a fight scene with plot-relevant butt plugs. Everything Everywhere All at Once says many things, some better than others, but it’s intentional in its messiness. Perhaps the true self is messy and incoherent, it posits. Perhaps that’s the beauty of it all. 

The other creative work that defined this year for me is the musical A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson. From the frenetic “Intermission Song” with its Sondheimian riffs and wholesale reference to “The Music and the Mirror” to the raw emotion of “Memory Song,” A Strange Loop had me proselytizing its music to my peers even before it came to Broadway. It breaks my heart that it’s closing before I can go see it, but I’m glad it has garnered the attention and praise it deserves.

I will use the song “White Girl Music” to transition to talking about music. If “Memory Song” is my favorite based on raw emotion, “White Girl Music” hits a very specific chord with me—my own musical tastes, from discovering Liz Phair in college to refamiliarizing myself with the Indigo Girls this year. The Indigo Girls hold a strange, special place in my heart because I was introduced to them by a lab mentor back in high school. Looking back at my barely closeted self, I understand now that talking about Indigo Girls was code for being queer. Unfortunately by then my generation had moved on to Tegan and Sara as the du jour “queer two-woman acoustic band,” but listening to the Indigo Girls in earnest feels like a return to my roots. I am choosing to connect with parts of queer history I was not there for, but which inform who I am today. “Chickenman” is also a phenomenal song with an escalation that at first listen left me breathless.  

One band I absolutely was present for was My Chemical Romance, and they now have the honor of being the fourth band I have seen live. Their music spoke to me as an angsty teenager, and seeing them live as an adult is an out-of-body experience. Half of me is screaming at the top of my lungs, and the other half is holding the screaming child, telling them it’s going to be okay. The absolute joy with which the singer Gerard Way plays with gender onstage, from dressing as a teacher with red scarf and pencil skirt at my concert to the literal sheet ghost the next—gender euphoria is contagious. 

This was the year when I treated my younger self with kindness and indulgence. One of my formative writing experiences was being a part of a Warrior Cats roleplay forum, first on Neopets and then migrating elsewhere. Amidst the utter messiness of my middle school self, the friends I have made online feels like a great love story. The utter joy and trepidation as I made the Discord channel and waited as people who I have not heard from in almost a decade join was definitely a highlight of my year. It was like seeing old friends I thought I had lost forever.  

While Warrior Cats series are not a work of literary genius by any degree (though they are a great middle grade talking animal series), they mattered to me immensely when I was young. Defunctland’s documentary on the Disney Channel theme hammered this home for me, as I had vivid sense memories stir up when I heard the various bumpers, returned to my best friend’s carpeted floors as we watched television while my mother was still at work. There is something heartrending and magical about the pieces of ephemera that wedge themselves into our soul. The most wonderful thing is when those pieces are found again, and new memories can be made.

 

Speculative fiction has always been Xian Mao’s home. At the end of their college career, and the precipice of the 2016 election, their first short story, “Silk Moth,” was published in Dirty Birds Press’s Undercities anthology. Another short story, “Carry the Ocean,” was published in Strange Constellations. Their poetry has appeared in Aqueduct Press’s Climbing Lightly Through Forests, a poetry anthology celebrating the life and works of Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin, along with Terry Pratchett, Lawrence Yep, and Octavia Butler, are major influences in their writing, which often focuses on isolation, generational trauma, and contending with history.Aqueduct Press will be publishing their novella, Apollo Weeps, next month, as a volume in the Conversation Pieces series.