The Overachiever

Editor's note · excerpt

This issue is for the generation that was promised something. Promised: if your test scores were high enough, you'd vault out. If you went abroad far enough, you'd escape. If you came back precisely enough, you'd be respectable. Then the promises were cancelled. Zhaozhao writes a 28-year-old overachiever, post-resignation, learning to write again as if she were eight. Yingmeng writes a male body, "excreted into the night," in the same office tower. LYJ, in four short stanzas, names the diagnosis: what left my mouth was not me. All three are writing about one thing — a person raised by a script, then abandoned by it, learning, slowly, to speak. We do not write prescriptions. We publish only how they are learning to talk.