The Snare | June Encounters

This month I caught up with two friends, entrepreneurs who’d more or less achieved financial freedom with background in tech, who now treat their time on earth like an open-world game. See the Knicks play in New York? Sure. Africa once a year, like a ritual. There are logistics problems, one of them is fighting a visa right now, but the logistics never seem to set a ceiling on what their hearts want. I envy them. Knowing people like that exist makes me live a little more daringly. Why not just go somewhere? The money, the puppy I now have to think about, it’ll work out, because there are always more solutions than problems, if you actually want one badly enough.

And yet this was also the month I felt the snare tightening from every direction it could, algorithmic (an AI founder confessing to her chatbot, a didi driver chasing his rating), inherited (a retired dance lady who forgot her charm, three generations of women handing down the same sacrifice), while a young filmmaker just kept recording, trying to outrun the moment the thread finally closed.

***

A friend who runs her own AI-and-fashion label has gone all-in, her whole team runs on AI now, meaning each one has an AI agent. In an interview with me, she confessed something else: she talks to AI more than she talks to people, because it’s convenient, and because it doesn’t judge.We ended up confessing this to each other. In that moment, talking about how we talk to machines, something like real connection sparked between us.

I have one friend I can send anything to, because I know she won’t judge, and because we’re both, occasionally, on low moral ground together. That freedom feels almost AI-proved, except it’s a real person on the other end, and we both know better than to abuse it. Isn’t talking to AI a little like having an intimate friend with perfect memory? Except speaking to a real human being means whatever you confess might have consequences in the world. What, exactly, is the cost of confessing to something that never forgets and never tells?

***

Since getting a puppy, I take more pet-friendly didis than ever. The drivers either go silent, watching the puppy nervously in their rearview mirror, or they open up about the dog they used to have. The conversation almost always drifts to the algorithm, how one bad review costs them 0.2 points, how the points decide their rank, how rank decides how many rides they get. Pet rides get auto-assigned to drivers regardless of whether they want them.

One driver asked where I was headed. I named a cake shop; he didn’t know it, so I just answered and let it go. Halfway through the ride, he asked if I’d leave him a good review. Something about being asked stubbornly rubbed me the wrong way. I told him I’d decide at the end of the trip. I’d meant to leave a nice one, but the asking itself had already soured it. I left without rating him at all.

When the algorithm is so deep in the grind for money, people’s incentives go flat, everyone just a part of this big machinery, and the not-so-feel-good interactions surface more often.

***

I keep running into a woman in all black who dances alone near my building, her moves loose and Tibetan-inflected, her heeled Adidas sneakers somehow emphasizing the wave of her arms. She wasn’t shy about being watched, by me or by the puppy.

We got to talking. Her son once told her, when he was young, that she was boring. She never agreed, because she always had a meal to cook, a miniature to build, a world of her own. But since retiring, she’s started to agree with him. Taking work out of her life, she said, was like pulling the thread out of a puppet.

“What’s wrong with being boring?”I asked her.

“There’s nothing to be happy or sad about.”

“Isn’t that good, not being jerked around by your own emotions?”

“I still like to feel something.”

I wanted to tell her to look at how she danced, that she was the least boring thing I’d seen all month. Instead I just listened, and offered the kind of small comments you offer a stranger who’s still arguing with herself.

***

Walking a dog slowly knits you into a neighborhood. I’ve come to know a loose group of women through it, three generations of what I’ve started to think of as the same horror story, retold.

The eldest, in her seventy, ties her dog to the pool railing every evening before joining the dance group. Our puppies took to each other immediately, fake-biting, chasing. For a while I resented her, because I was the one actually watching two puppies while she danced. Then another woman told me what her day looks like: up at six, overnight-cooled water poured into her grandkids’ bottles, breakfast made to each child’s taste, no pork for the granddaughter, no fish for the grandson, the boy’s socks washed separately, the girl’s underwear changed twice a day because the girl doesn’t like wiping herself. The lady dances at ten everyday. I understand that it might be the only hour she’s herself.

And the sixty-year-old in the group complains about her own daughter, thirty-six, unmarried, no children in sight. She told me that if she were a man, she’d want a partner like me: I work from home, I can cook, I can watch a kid. A traditional woman, in other words, minus the man wanting her to be one.

I kept thinking, didn’t she just describe, in detail, the cost of exactly that life? Why is marriage still the assumed shape of a happy ending? Sex, reproduction, motherhood, so many labels stacked onto a body. And the women who lived through all of it are the ones now handing the same script to their daughters. I consider this a horror story on the fate of being a Chinese woman.

It slowly came back to me, when I was in South Africa, I’d met a girl who showed me photos from her coming-of-age ceremony. For that month, she’d been completely off the grid, just a few older women accompanying her, passing down wisdom about womanhood, adulthood, things kept private for the girl. Why don’t we have this tradition?

She showed me a photo from the ceremony, shot in that NYTimes-documentary news-photo style, and it was the first time in my life I saw a woman’s bare chest with no shame and no sexual charge in it at all. She was proud, not just of her body, but of who she is.

***

In a one-off documentary class, I watched a five-minute trailer by a young filmmaker, Daughter’s Diaries, built from years of her mother’s journals. Such a moving one, so much tension and emotions are packed in one. Her grandfather appears briefly and is dead by the end of the trailer. Her mother, recently diagnosed with stomach cancer, so the daughter is trying to trace backward through the diary, and she diagnosed the cancer came from the body finally protesting years of being overlooked. A familiar story, for a Chinese woman. So many people had already been lost by the time she started filming that now she can’t stop recording, documenting, editing.

It made me wonder: if AI ends up holding most of our memory, who becomes the historian of it? And what happens to memory, once keeping it is no longer a private act of love?

Thanks for reading,

Until next month.