The Overachiever

Editor's note · excerpt

This issue is for the generation that was promised something. If your test scores were high enough, you would vault out. If you went far enough abroad, you would escape. If you came back precisely enough, you would be respectable. Then the promises were cancelled. Zhaozhao writes a 28-year-old overachiever who, after resigning, begins 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, sets down a diagnosis: what left my mouth was not me.