In 2013, I left my job at an advertising firm and started writing fiction. I wrote more than thirty short stories, a few of which were published in the local city journal, which was perpetually on the verge of folding. Then, on the sixth of November, 2015, my dad had a sudden heart attack, the result of a hereditary disease that had already claimed five or six people in my family, the first of them at the end of the Qing dynasty, my great-great-great-uncle, a superb woodworker who could make anything from a coffin to a comb. When he was fifty-five, his heart exploded and he died on a pile of lumber. It happened so abruptly, leaving him bleeding from every orifice, that his family thought he'd been poisoned. They cut him open, and discovered that his heart was full of tiny wood shavings, enough to build a foot-high pagoda.
Ever since then, my family has suffered from heart disease, about three in every ten of us, men and women, though it's not as serious now that times have changed-none of us are woodworkers anymore, and surgery can save us. The procedure in question involves fitting a tiny engine into one of the heart's chambers, to make up for the weakness caused by the organ's abnormal fissures, and placing something like the filter of a water dispenser into the aorta, to prevent impurities from entering the heart. This operation wasn't available in my city, L, at least not anywhere I trusted, mainly because of the difficulty of fitting the filter membrane, which in L------- would be placed by hand, with something like the muscle memory of a carpenter, unlike in Beijing or America, where robots were used. Our health insurance wouldn't be accepted in America, so when my father had his attack I arranged for an ambulance to take us from the local hospital to Beijing.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 09, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 09, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
