Cleo Qian is a surreal and enchanting writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Shenandoah, Pleiades, and The Common. She also was a winner of the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Competition as well as being nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
It’s no surprise her debut collection Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go has been hailed as “Hypnotic” (TIME), “bold and enchanting” (Publisher’s Weekly), and “luminously written” (Kirkus). The stories explore modern Asian and Asian American women as they navigate the trials and tribulations of technology, redemption, fandom, and impulse.
Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go is available now. You can read the title story below.
On the evening Lily had come back into her life, Emi had been waiting at the green frog train carriage outside of Shibuya station. Her phone was out; she was texting. She’d been back in Japan for just two months.
“Excuse me. Emiko . . . ? Emiko Miri?”
She looked up to see a tall girl standing in front of her, one hand laden with Tokyu Department Store shopping bags. She was pretty but basic, with her dewy makeup, creamy white sweater, and tall black boots.
“You’re Emiko, right?”
“Um—who—” Then it hit her. “Lily?! Lily Bae?”
Lily broke into a wide smile and started speaking in English. “Oh my god! It’s been so long!” She reached her free arm out and Emi automatically stepped forward for a hug. Instead, Lily dropped her hand and they ended up half holding, half shaking hands. Her skin was warm, and she squeezed Emi’s fingers tightly, in what felt like real welcome.
“I’m waiting for a friend—Ken Goto,” Emi said. “You remember him, right?”
“Oh wow, I haven’t heard that name in years!”
They stood outside the green frog carriage talking. Lily was effusive—but then, she always had been. Emi could not get over the feeling of shock. How to react when you meet one of those figures from your past whom you had once known intimately, but was now a stranger, with years of distance in between?
Emi had spent her elementary school years in Maryland and moved to Japan with her parents for middle school. She went to M International, which was filled with the children of diplomats and expats and returnees from abroad. That is to say, they were students on the fringes; the school was populated by transplants, transients, and outsiders.
Lily had been president of the art and design club at M International. She had an older-sister vibe, which Emi, an only child, newly arrived to a different country, at first tried to resist but felt inexpressibly comforted by. Though Emi didn’t stay in the club long, even after she left, Lily reached out often, checking in on her, advising on teachers, classes, homework, tests, or coming to eat lunch with her and catching her up on gossip. On weekends, Lily sometimes came to Emi’s house and watched TV with her or helped her sew. There were certainly times when Emi wondered what Lily, the pretty, popular, older girl, saw in her, but then again, Lily seemed to be friends with everyone, so perhaps the attention she showered on Emi was no different from what she gave others.
“So, you and Goto went to the same college?” Lily asked.
“No, I went to a college in the States. Have you heard of the New School?”
“Not sure . . . Where is it?”
“New York.”
“Oh, wow! That’s so cool! What did you study?”
“Um, fashion design.”
“Oh my god, that sounds so glamorous.”
“It wasn’t, seriously. But what about you? I can’t remember where you . . .”
“Oh, I went to school in Kyoto. But what are you doing, are you back in Tokyo for good?”
Emi explained briefly that she had just moved back after interning for a year in New York and that she had landed a new job at a design firm. “Goto and I are going out to drink, do you want to come? He found this old-fashioned standing-only sake bar in one of those back alleys.”
“No, I have to deliver these.” Lily indicated the shopping bags. “I’m kind of a personal assistant to this weird lady, I’ll have to tell you about it next time. We’ve got to catch up now you’re back!”
“Sure,” Emi said, pretty sure this, their first meeting, would also be their last.
But instead Lily actually dropped her shopping bags and pulled out her phone. “What’s your number now?”
When Goto found Emi, several minutes after Lily had disappeared into the crush of people entering the subway, Emi told him, “You’ll never guess who I just saw.”
“Who?”
“Lily Bae!”
“Really? That’s crazy. Was it just like, a total coincidence?” He pulled a face. “Did she explain why she dropped off the face of the earth?”
And this was the real reason Emi didn’t think she was really going to see the other girl again: at the start of Lily’s final year of high school, she’d ghosted.
Lily had been out of town for the summer recess, visiting family in Korea, and when she got back, she and Emi were supposed to meet at a café. In fact, Emi had wanted to confide in Lily, lean on her; her parents had been fighting, and Emi was afraid of a divorce. But when she showed up at the café, Lily wasn’t there. She never arrived, and when Emi called and texted, she didn’t pick up her phone or answer any of her messages.
The next day Emi came to school angry and ready to hear an explanation. But Lily was absent—and none of her friends knew where she was.
Lily didn’t show up to school that day, or the next day, or the day after that, and when Emi eventually asked her homeroom teacher, and Lily’s friends in the grade above her, she heard Lily had suddenly withdrawn from school.
The abandonment was like a shock of cold water. Emi wandered the school halls half-dazed, feeling like she couldn’t be sure of what was real. Eventually she learned that Lily had moved to Seoul, but this didn’t explain the emails, texts, and voicemails Lily had failed to return, or the fact that she had just up and left without any warning. Emi was devastated that she had had to hear the news through a rumor and not from Lily herself. How could she have left without saying anything? No warning, no closure, no last hug goodbye.
*
It was with a sense of déjà vu that she took the train to a café in Nakameguro to meet Lily for lunch after their run-in. The walkway by the river was shiny in the aftermath of a rainstorm. Emi wove between the weekend shoppers, pulling her hat lower over her eyes.
Lily really was in the café. It was surreal to see her sitting there, in the flesh, chatty and friendly, with her hair long and loose, asking cheerful questions so Emi didn’t have a second to feel awkward: what she’d done at school, how she’d gotten her job, what it was like being a designer at an advertising firm.
“Are you happy there?” Lily asked intently.
Emi shrugged and sipped her milkshake through her straw. “It’s fine.” She was a contract employee, and the work was boring, but it was a job.
“What are you working on in your free time? You were so creative at M International.” Lily laughed.
“I’m not really working on anything . . .” And in front of Lily, she felt small. In high school, Lily’s energy and praise had rubbed off on her; Emi had picked up on the enthusiasm, threw herself into activity after activity. With Lily’s encouragement, she had believed in her own boundless potential and creativity.
But after Lily left, she stopped her hobbies. She lost all her inspiration. Had she ever been creative, or had it all been Lily, had Emi only been leeching off Lily’s zest for life? Emi had never felt that same sense of possibility again. After Lily, her days felt so thin and wispy, like scraps of tissue all pressed together, combined into an opaque curtain that she couldn’t see through. It didn’t matter where she was, New York, Tokyo, the moon—nothing in her life ever moved.
Though Emi desperately wanted to, she didn’t ask Lily about her disappearance in high school. Lily acted so naturally, as though they had been apart for only a few months, not years. What would she even say? Hey, remember when you just stopped talking to me without any explanation? Remember when you disappeared from my life for seven years? Remember when I left you a thousand voicemails, emails, and messages asking what was going on, and you totally ignored them?
Lily wore her hair in the same long style she had as a teenager. Her style of speech was the same. It was like time had not moved at all since high school. Emi suddenly wondered: The life she had lived in the years since she’d known Lily—had it been real? The places she’d been, people she’d met, the little she had accomplished; suddenly she doubted whether it had all even happened.
For her part, Lily said she had gone to Kyoto Arts and Crafts University and was working as an executive assistant and an occasional model. This was, Emi reflected, the kind of job pretty girls like her would have.
“I’m just temping at different places, mostly.” Lily waved her hand. “I have to have room for my other projects.”
“You mean your modeling?”
“No, no, I’ve been getting involved with this arts collective. Well, it’s an arts collective, but they do a lot of other stuff, like meditation, classes, workshops . . .”
“That’s super cool,” Emi said, envisioning the artsy, creative people Lily must have surrounded herself with. “What is it? What are you working on?”
Lily leaned in. She had a way of cupping her chin in her palm and looking at you when she was explaining something, a behavior that was maddeningly familiar, and Emi tried to sit back, but already she felt herself invested again, wanting to stay in the warm glow of Lily’s company, her attention, her obscure plans. Lily looked at her consideringly.
“What?” Emi asked.
“Have you heard of the Anti-Civilization Committee?” Lily asked.
Excerpted from the story LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO by Cleo Qian, found in her debut book of the same name. Copyright (c) 2023 by Cleo Qian. Published by Tin House.
One thought on “Read an excerpt from the title story of Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go by Cleo Qian”