Before Completion: A Playlist for the January 2020 Issue

For our January 2020 playlist, we asked contributor Jenny Zhang, whose poems “My baby first birthday” and “ted talk” appear in the issue, to curate a selection of music for us. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

By certain calendars, it’s a new year and decade. The one previous was eventful. Some of my friends were melancholy. Some of us finally admitted we had been lying. Everything was not okay ... what we posted about versus what we really talked about. Even health—especially health—could be an addiction. Productivity was another form of tyranny. I got invited to parties but couldn’t pay rent. (“I meet myself at every mask collapse”—Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, “Raw Girl Money.”) Of course unhappiness over time can feel like stability. Some relationships look best on a feed. Being “real” and “transparent” became profitable too. Everything profitable eventually damages. More and more people were accepting fascism into their hearts and it wasn’t even the obvious people. Maybe it was indulgent to dance but it felt great. It felt hopeless to look for love but also impossible to completely forgo connection. I may have gotten deeper but I’ll always be petty. Some of us cried while driving or paying someone else to drive. I did it once on a bus and later someone tagged me in their stories #authorsighting. (“Isolated,/these incidents teach us the wrong lesson”—Daniel Ruiz, “Panorama in Night Vision.”) Privacy became a rarified commodity, requiring untold resources to have it. Closing in on a decade of sincere advancements and sincere regressions, the powerful continued to violate the vulnerable, the same family lines continue to benefit from exploitation. Can we finally admit our stories are not linear? Everything circles back to a different place. (“This is not a feeling. This can be, I think, a conversation”—Wo Chan, “june 8, the smiley barista remembers my name.”) I threw three coins in the air six times and drew solid line broken solid broken solid broken. Hexagram 64 in the Yi Jing (known in English as the I Ching or the Book of Changes). It was the last and final hexagram. I was elated. I was thinking linearly, like someone who grew up in America. I was at the end of a long, tiring journey. (“How can a person walk in a shroud/all the miles of their life”—Emily Berry, “Unexhausted Time.”) I wanted to move on. I couldn’t take any more bad news. I looked it up in a book: “Before Completion” and chuckled. It was the most Chinese thing ever for the last step to be: careful, you aren’t there yet. Why should anything be absolute? It’s not a stretch to say people who won’t be humbled by what they don’t know are extremely susceptible to abuse, both enacting and receiving. That said, sometimes you just know. It’s more than a feeling. I never knew how to talk about music or poetry, maybe because I don’t know how else to protect my enjoyment of them. It’s not that deep, it’s just what I like. Sixty-four songs to listen to when it’s not over.