“Peking Duck and the Death of Meaning”  

  

So here they are again, sitting in a restaurant, locked in yet another meaningless, soul-draining generational conflict that will solve nothing and leave them both irritable and vaguely nauseous. Phil, 54, wearing a Let’s Go Brandon t-shirt that he ordered from Facebook and genuinely believes is the height of satire, is flipping through the sticky, laminated menu of Lucky Dragon, a Chinese restaurant that is neither lucky nor particularly Chinese, given that it’s owned by a guy named Steve. Across from him is Sage, 21, home from college, freshly radicalized by a semester of critical theory and fully prepared to burn every remaining bridge between them for the sake of The Discourse. Above them, the massive backlit menu board hums faintly, its bold, faux-Asian lettering advertising the house special: PEKING DUCK. And that’s where it happens. That’s where Sage’s entire body goes rigid, where she suddenly sees, in all its horrific clarity, the problem.  

  

"Oh my God," she says, eyes wide with the horror of fresh discovery. Phil, who has spent the last fifteen minutes griping about how you can’t even say Merry Christmas anymore, perks up immediately, thrilled to see that she is about to have An Opinion.  

  

"What."   

  

Sage gestures furiously at the sign. "Peking Duck?! Are you kidding me? I can’t believe they still call it that." Phil squints at her like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick. "Uh. Yeah? It’s a duck. From Peking."  

  

"No, Dad. It’s not from Peking, because Peking isn’t a place. It’s called Beijing now. Peking is outdated colonialist garbage—Westerners just couldn’t be bothered to say the name right, so they made up their own version and now we’re stuck with it."  

  

Phil leans back in his chair, smirking like a man who knows he is about to ruin her day. "Well well well. Look who’s getting all worked up over a duck. Sage exhales through her nose like a dragon about to incinerate a village.  

  

*"It’s not just a duck. It’s the principle. It’s Western imperialism erasing native languages and forcing their own names onto things. Like how India was Bombay until the British left. Or how Taiwan was called Formosa because some Portuguese dude thought it sounded pretty. It’s a classic example of linguistic hegemony—"  

  

"Linguistic hedge money?" Phil interrupts, deliberately mishearing her in the way he does whenever he thinks she’s being too intellectual about something.   

  

Sage’s eye twitches. "Hegemony."  

  

"Yeah, well, I think it’s dumb."  

  

"Oh wow, incredible counterargument, Dad."  

  

Phil, sensing that he is now winning (winning, in this case, meaning "irritating his daughter into a level of rage where she forgets syntax"), leans forward, steepling his fingers in mock contemplation. "So what should they call it, huh? If Peking Duck is too offensive for the woke crowd, what’s the correct term? Oh, let me guess—Beijing Waterfowl?"  

  

"I don’t know, just something accurate."  

  

"Oh, oh, I got it—Oppressed Indigenous Chinese Avian Dish." Sage’s hands grip the table like she’s resisting the urge to flip it.  

  

"Dad—"  

  

"No, no, wait—Anti-Colonialist Roast Quacker." Sage inhales sharply, eyes wide in absolute, cosmic horror.   

  

"You are—"  

  

"—the reason nothing ever gets better and the planet is dying and my generation is going to inherit a flaming husk of a world because people like you refuse to change literally anything—"  

  

"—just because you think being an asshole is principled—"  

  

"—and now I have to sit here and eat fucking LO MEIN like I’m not watching civilization crumble in real time—"  

  

"—and all you care about is making sure no one takes away your goddamn racist duck!"  

  

At this precise moment, the waiter arrives, looking profoundly tired. Not just work tired, but deeply existentially tired, the kind of tired that comes from years of serving people who have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. "Are you ready to order?" he asks. Sage exhales through her nose. "Just rice." Phil, grinning like a man who thinks he has just Won A Debate instead of simply exhausted another human being into submission, slaps the menu closed.   

  

*"I’ll have the Peking Duck." He says it extra loud, like he’s making some kind of political statement. The waiter does not react. The waiter does not care. As he walks away, Sage glares at her father with the force of a thousand dying suns.  

  

"You did that on purpose."  

  

"Absolutely."  

  

And then, just as Phil is settling into his smugness, just as he thinks he has achieved the perfect fatherly victory, Sage—without breaking eye contact, without blinking—picks up a soy sauce packet, peels it open, and dumps it directly onto his hat.  

  

It is the most satisfying thing she has ever done.  

  

  

  

“Lucky Dragon Blues”  

​

It’s cold in that Midwestern way that isn’t just a temperature but a feeling, a deep marrow-seep of loneliness and exposed nerves, the kind of cold that makes you talk to yourself just to prove you still exist. The neon sign above Lucky Dragon flickers in a sickly red, casting halfhearted reflections on the wet pavement, and Mark—32, unemployed, unshaven, vaguely contemplating the metaphysical implications of his own breath in the air—steps out into the street, holding a large brown paper bag filled with way too much Chinese takeout for one person but exactly the right amount for someone whose primary method of emotional processing involves fried food and solitude. He is carrying this meal, his meal, with the reverence of a holy object, a last vestige of human kindness in a world that is entirely indifferent to his suffering. Inside the bag: sesame chicken, egg rolls, crab rangoons, extra rice (which he hadn’t needed but ordered anyway, a knee-jerk decision made in the moment when the waiter looked at him a little too long, a little too knowingly). He had not wanted to admit, through the transaction of ordering, that he was, in fact, alone.  

  

The couple inside the restaurant, the loud girl and the man in the stupid shirt, were still going at it when he left. Some argument about Peking Duck. He had watched, in that vaguely detached way people watch reality TV, as the girl’s entire body radiated fury and the dad—definitely a dad, the dadliest kind of dad, a Dad as Concept—smirked the smirk of a man whose entire existence was a power struggle with his own offspring. Mark had envied them. Not because he wanted to be them, but because they had something to fight about. Because now, outside in the freezing dark, carrying an absurd quantity of food meant for no one but himself, Mark had nothing but silence.   

  

It had been 47 days since she left. (He knew this number with the same certainty that a prisoner knows how long they’ve been locked up. Not that he had been counting, exactly, but the number was there, lodged in his brain, undeniable and unmovable, like the high-score on an arcade game no one has beaten in years.)  

  

The ending had been, in retrospect, inevitable. If you charted the last few months, the little snags, the slow accumulation of tiny withdrawals from the emotional bank account, it was obvious. But the thing about breakups is that knowing doesn’t stop it from hurting. He had been an idiot. That was the thing. Not in some grand, dramatic way. Not in a cheated-on-her, wrecked-the-car, ruined-her-life way. Just in the small ways. The ways that add up. The forgetting to ask about her day, the half-listening, the way he would default to his phone when she was talking because, deep down, he had assumed she would always be there.  

  

Except, she wasn’t.  

  

And now it was just him, in this city that he did not belong to, carrying his Too Much Food in a brown bag that was already starting to leak at the bottom, the oil soaking through like an accusation. He walked down Main Street, past the same sad buildings, past the empty dive bar that still had a Bud Light Presents: NFL Sunday Ticket! sign in the window even though football season had been over for weeks. His breath curled in front of him, a tangible thing in a world where nothing else seemed to be.  

  

It wasn’t just her leaving. It was what her leaving revealed.  

  

Because the thing is, when you’re in a relationship, you can kind of ignore the larger existential horrors of life. You can, for a time, pretend that there’s some structure, some meaning. There are inside jokes. There are traditions. There are good morning texts and What do you want for dinner? conversations and all the mundane, miraculous things that make the days feel less like a countdown to oblivion.  

  

But when that’s gone? When it’s just you, and the weight of your own consciousness is suddenly all there is?  

  

Mark had always considered himself a realist. He wasn’t religious. He didn’t believe in fate or destiny or cosmic order. But that also meant there was no safety net, no way to avoid the brutal, unyielding reality that life is just things happening, one after another, until it stops. And if that was the case—if life was just a series of meals and walks home and endless, looping thoughts—then what the fuck was the point? He turned the corner onto his street, where the streetlights flickered like they, too, were on the verge of giving up. His apartment, second floor, a space that still had her things in it because he couldn’t bring himself to remove them, was waiting for him, waiting with all its terrible silence. The bag in his hands was growing heavier. He imagined, briefly, the version of himself from a year ago, the version who had once walked home with takeout for two, who had once carried a bag like this knowing that, inside, there was a meal they would share, curled up together in the glow of the TV, making fun of some bad Netflix show.  

  

And now it was just him. Him, and the food, and the cold, and the relentless passage of time. At the door to his building, he hesitated. Just for a second. Just long enough to register the quiet, the absence of a text from her saying hey, are you home yet?  

  

And then, because there was nothing else to do, he went inside.