The paper was well-received — surprising, considering I’d promised a 15-minute talk on Daoist hagiography and then spent at least five minutes on Kim Kardashian. I’d sat at a table in the Modern Language Association convention hall for an hour, working on my PowerPoint over drip coffee and a veggie panini. This entailed sifting through Kardashian’s Instagram for images that struck, for me, the right allegorical note. Now her surreally beautiful face stared out of my slides several times over, interspersed with fragments of medieval Chinese.
I was the last panelist to go. As the two senior scholars before me clicked through their slides, I sat jittering at the presenters’ table, capping and uncapping a squat water bottle. The audience was scant, a mere handful of unfamiliar faces spread thin throughout a large convention room. It would appear that three Sinologists talking posthumanism made for a less enticing prospect than Judith Butler, who gave the keynote the night before — I’d sat on the floor in the cavernous hall she’d commanded because there were no seats left.
I say “three Sinologists.” But seven years working toward a Ph.D. in history have trained me to seek precision in my language, against my natural inclinations. And so I feel compelled to revise, suturing on qualifiers until the sentence grows uglier and more true. This panel is two Sinologists, and a sometime aspiring Sinologist. Two Sinologists, and a soon-to-be lapsed Sinologist. Two Sinologists, and a ghost.
In the field I trained for — a meandering phrase that now feels easier to inhabit than my field — you can get through a lot of schooling and still be innocent of Derrida. But the professor who organized our panel on posthumanism and premodern China is an expert in theory as well as Sinology. Citations to semioticians stud his book, and so I was afraid to talk theory with him — though I couldn’t help but feel that my presence at the MLA was “hauntological,” Derrida’s neologism. My stiff-shouldered, blazered shape at the lectern was a phantom afterimage of ambition.
My stiff-shouldered, blazered shape at the lectern was a phantom afterimage of ambition.
When I answered the call for papers last March, my scholarly aspirations still pulsed with a nervous vibrancy. I could imagine futures flung far away from my partner, moving so often that my friendships had the brevity of a TV season. I’d plug away at the same manuscript for years, but the scenery behind me would shift with the flashing ease of a green screen. These futures were lonely, but I was still working toward them.
But by the time I rose to speak in January, those ambitions were dead. Time now felt out of joint, the future disarticulated from the structuring shape of the past. The present around me, meanwhile, was filmy and membranous, something to be passed through.
It was like I’d moved somewhere outside of Ph.D. candidacy and left my body behind. I wrote in a half-defunct blog that my academic career was haunting me. But maybe, like a spirit tethered to the Gothic ruin of a house, I was the one doing the haunting.
There’s something eerie about academe’s slow pace. You hear about candidates getting rejections from jobs they applied to a year ago, a visitation from the grave of old hopes. That never happened to me — I bowed out of the market before my first season on it. But my MLA abstract was accepted in March of 2019, and my MLA paper was delivered the following January.
In those nine months, I, like so many others, set aside the notion of joining the professoriate. But it wasn’t like the laying down of a burden, the deliberate gesture of a hand moving over a shelf. I just woke up one day with a dizzying lightness: The old ache of the job market was gone.
For a few weeks I tried to maneuver this absence into a less abrupt and alarming shape. I’d go on the job market, but only look at postdocs and visiting assistant professorships. Apply for internships in “industry.” Say nothing to my adviser until I’d weighed out the difference between a conversion and a phase.
I spent that summer learning about academic and trade publishing at a workshop hosted by the Los Angeles Review of Books: a collegial boot camp with a heavily alt-ac staff, where Ph.D. candidates came to reflect on our collective and individual tolerance for precarity. At the same time, I interned at an all-remote publishing start-up — filing breezy profiles of indie presses, reviewing books that cited no sources and made no attempts to situate themselves in a genealogy of the field. None of this made use of my academic training, which I realize now is exactly why I found it fun. Ph.D. programs aspire to turn out rarefied specialists; I’d misused mine to cultivate a rigorous dilettantism.
For seven years, I made decisions that counted against my purportedly professorial goals. I spent as many credit hours learning Latin and Old Irish as I did refining my classical Chinese, even though I was supposed to go to market as a Chinese historian. I never did make it to the conferences of the American Historical Society or Association for Asian Studies; I didn’t even apply. The conferences I liked best were the ones where I felt like an outsider: an early Chinaist among Ming-Qing specialists; a philologist pontificating to fashion theorists; a historian at the MLA.
By the time I started looking for flights to Seattle, it was November, and I’d secured a full-time offer at the publishing start-up. And I came clean to my adviser, after months during which the sight of any woman with her length and lightness of hair would send panic through my bloodstream and shallow out my breath. When she emailed to check on me, I found myself in her office, blurting out phrases from a script I’d thumbed into the Notes app on my phone: that I was so grateful to her, that I’d been offered a job outside the academy, that I was going to take it. She gave me a hug and told me I should do what was right for me but that I should still finish the degree. The relief was as palpable as the panic it superseded.
After that conversation, my dissertation project felt drained of urgency. But the MLA paper was far worse: a sepulchral obligation from what felt like a wholly different life. The words sunk down into the paper with the finality of a gravestone as I wrote them. A week later, at the MLA, they rose up from my breath like phantoms, floating to the corners of that near-empty room. Afterward, the exorcistic shock of being done made the sweat bead at my hairline.
I still have the copy of the paper I read from, pocked with the inky emendations I made hours before I stood at the lectern. Sometimes, I fish these pages out of my backpack, thinking it’s past time to revise them into a chapter. But when I start to read, I can’t seem to make it through more than a paragraph. My gaze snags on fragments in an order that makes no sense: a Donna Haraway epigraph; a line where I scratched out “seven” to write the numeral “6"; a bold, parenthetical note to move on to the next slide. I flip through the paper slowly. But my brain has gone silent, and the words feel dead on the page. I don’t know what to do with them.
