I woke up early today, when the fog was just beginning to burn off. A little after seven, I helped my daughter pack up her car and waved goodbye from the sidewalk as she drove away. She’ll be spending most of her summer working in the kitchen at a sleep-away camp near Yosemite. She chose this job because for the next two months she’ll be offline. She’s brought art supplies, books, a journal, and a tiny pocket-sized notebook for jotting down the things she’d ordinarily put in her phone. She won’t be using her phone until she’s ready to come home. There’s a landline in the office for emergencies.
My daughter has never lived this way. For just about as long as she can remember, there have been smart phones. Texting and social media are second nature to her, and everyone in our family, distributed as we are up and down the West Coast, is in frequent touch through our devices.
What she’s doing this summer, I think, is journeying into the world I knew as a child and young adult, a world where you could be truly alone, unreachable, incommunicado the moment you stepped outdoors.
The minutes or hours spent between places, whether stationary or moving from one place to another on foot, on a bike, or in a car were transitional and fluid. If you were sitting on a beach or hiking in the woods, the landscape around you and the people beside you were all you knew, all you needed to know.
Nowadays it takes intention and discipline to re-create what used to be everyday life. People expect you to be available, and we’re all enmeshed in a field of constant interactions that buzz around us like static electricity.
I’m very happy for my daughter, and I’m also relieved that she arrived safely. I know this because 1) she texted me after she got there and 2) I was tracking her for the last ten minutes of her journey.
I appreciate the irony of tracking my adult daughter into her wilderness refuge, the whole point of which, apart from earning money for the coming year of art school, was to unplug.
In my defence and hers—because she doesn’t have to share her location with me—it was a four-hour drive from here to Yosemite, and she did it solo. She drives back and forth between LA and the Bay Area four or five times a year and keeps location sharing on, just in case.
This morning, a little before eleven, which was when she expected to arrive at the camp, I checked to see if she had got there or was at least close. I watched the blue dot slide along a narrow, snaking highway sketched on the solid green of open space. I imagined a thick evergreen forest. The dot looked like a bright bead on a string.
The dot scooted along. Still no sign of the camp. I read more of the Sunday newspaper.
I glanced at my phone again. The dot had stopped moving less than a mile from the spot on the map that marked the camp.
The dot pulsed but didn’t advance. I felt a twinge of worry, but I tried not to worry. Maybe there was no signal.
I went back to reading the paper.
“I’m here,” she texted.
I touched the screen and added a heart to her message, then put away my phone. I have her address. This summer, we’ll write letters.
How to cite: Lingenfelter, Andrea. “Just Another Day: Andrea Lingenfelter.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/andrea-another-day.
Andrea Lingenfelter is an award-winning translator, poet, and scholar of Sinophone literature. She is the translator of two collections of Wang Yin’s poetry, A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts (New York Review Books, 2022) and Ghosts City Sea (Seaweed Salad Editions, 2021). She is also the translator of The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (Northern California Book Award winner), Hon Lai Chu’s The Kite Family (NEA Translation Fellowship winner), Li Pik-wah’s (Lilian Lee) Farewell My Concubine and The Last Princess of Manchuria, and Mian Mian’s Candy and Vanishing Act. She is currently translating Zhai Yongming’s book-length poem Following Huang Gongwang Through the Fuchun Mountains. Her own poetry has been published in journals including Plume and Cha. She teaches literary translation as well as literature and film of the Asia-Pacific at the University of San Francisco. [Andrea Lingenfelter and chajournal.blog.]
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