would be absurd to expect all employees to be happy all day long. But when the seed of discontent is sown, it can spread like contagion. With Sunny Chen’s suicide, the negative PR impact has been amplified.
In my dealings with him, he didn’t strike me as a brave man so much as a desperate one.
Yet it was Sunny Chen who blew the whistle and became an international – what?
A star, some will say. But he’s gone. So technically, a more accurate analogy would be ‘comet’.
Phipps & Wexman protocol defines him as a saboteur.
While to the police, he’s now some red-pink mush in a bag which will be stored in a refrigerator unit along with similar bags containing parts of other Chinese people, all clearly labelled using a standardised numerical code linking each specimen to a police case file. Every discipline has its own methodology, but this at least is what I imagine happening to Sunny Chen’s pulped remains, which will later make their way into a traditional Chinese coffin.
They make the body disobey the mind , he’d said. The spirits had got inside him and made him act against his will . They’re our blood, but they hate us.
The French term un acte manqué describes a form of self-sabotage whereby the unconscious sets about wrecking – for whatever reason – what the conscious has built. Could it be that one version of Sunny Chen sabotaged Jenwai while another turned a blind eye? And that when he’d returned to normal and seen what ‘they’ had done, he’d panicked and felt such remorse that his only recourse was suicide?
Mental breakdown explains both Chen’s suicide and the uncharacteristic behaviour that preceded it. That’s the slant I’ll use in my report, to explain his arrival in the Ziploc bag. For now, it’s the closest I’ll get to the true answer.
But if the Sunny Chen case were a piece of origami I would flatten out the creases, work out where I went wrong, and start again.
Outside, the moon is a thin, luminous scrape and the stars throb weakly above the sea. I switch off my computer and swivel my chair from side to side in rhythmic arcs. I can hear the gulls screech.
Is human hamburger a foodstuff that a hungry ghost might crave?
CHAPTER 3
Sometime at the end of the twentieth century there was a breakthrough in the world of origami. Before then, it was considered impossible to fabricate an animal or other form that had a large body and thin appendages from a single sheet of paper. This limited your range of designs. Anything like an insect with feelers, for example, was out of the question. But then, thanks to mathematical computer models pioneered by the physicist and origamist Robert J. Lang, which involve dividing the original piece of paper into circles and then sub-dividing the circles into creases, you can make just about anything with protrusions. A millipede. Mating locusts. A spiked sea urchin. Or Lang’s famous hermit crab, which I am tackling now. The back-coated kozo paper I have chosen is tough, but thin: Indian Violet with a black dot pattern. I began it when I moved here and it is now one-third complete. It’s a job requiring both paper clips and tweezers.
On balance, I’m glad I have to recast the Taiwan report. Chen’s suicide means that some of his more cryptic behaviours – the dark references to ‘the pressure’, the preoccupation with the muddy smear, the ancestor-talk – can be seen as symptoms of his breakdown. But my own culpability is another matter. I’ve never previously known anyone who committed suicide. Will it take the rest of my life to process what has happened? I don’t know.
If Freddy were here, he would say, ‘Yet’, as per the rules of a playful accord we have concerning unacquired knowledge, whereby if one of us said they didn’t know something, the other had to say ‘Yet’. And then the other one – usually me – would provide the missing information, or we’d look it up, or just speculate.
But it is
In my dealings with him, he didn’t strike me as a brave man so much as a desperate one.
Yet it was Sunny Chen who blew the whistle and became an international – what?
A star, some will say. But he’s gone. So technically, a more accurate analogy would be ‘comet’.
Phipps & Wexman protocol defines him as a saboteur.
While to the police, he’s now some red-pink mush in a bag which will be stored in a refrigerator unit along with similar bags containing parts of other Chinese people, all clearly labelled using a standardised numerical code linking each specimen to a police case file. Every discipline has its own methodology, but this at least is what I imagine happening to Sunny Chen’s pulped remains, which will later make their way into a traditional Chinese coffin.
They make the body disobey the mind , he’d said. The spirits had got inside him and made him act against his will . They’re our blood, but they hate us.
The French term un acte manqué describes a form of self-sabotage whereby the unconscious sets about wrecking – for whatever reason – what the conscious has built. Could it be that one version of Sunny Chen sabotaged Jenwai while another turned a blind eye? And that when he’d returned to normal and seen what ‘they’ had done, he’d panicked and felt such remorse that his only recourse was suicide?
Mental breakdown explains both Chen’s suicide and the uncharacteristic behaviour that preceded it. That’s the slant I’ll use in my report, to explain his arrival in the Ziploc bag. For now, it’s the closest I’ll get to the true answer.
But if the Sunny Chen case were a piece of origami I would flatten out the creases, work out where I went wrong, and start again.
Outside, the moon is a thin, luminous scrape and the stars throb weakly above the sea. I switch off my computer and swivel my chair from side to side in rhythmic arcs. I can hear the gulls screech.
Is human hamburger a foodstuff that a hungry ghost might crave?
CHAPTER 3
Sometime at the end of the twentieth century there was a breakthrough in the world of origami. Before then, it was considered impossible to fabricate an animal or other form that had a large body and thin appendages from a single sheet of paper. This limited your range of designs. Anything like an insect with feelers, for example, was out of the question. But then, thanks to mathematical computer models pioneered by the physicist and origamist Robert J. Lang, which involve dividing the original piece of paper into circles and then sub-dividing the circles into creases, you can make just about anything with protrusions. A millipede. Mating locusts. A spiked sea urchin. Or Lang’s famous hermit crab, which I am tackling now. The back-coated kozo paper I have chosen is tough, but thin: Indian Violet with a black dot pattern. I began it when I moved here and it is now one-third complete. It’s a job requiring both paper clips and tweezers.
On balance, I’m glad I have to recast the Taiwan report. Chen’s suicide means that some of his more cryptic behaviours – the dark references to ‘the pressure’, the preoccupation with the muddy smear, the ancestor-talk – can be seen as symptoms of his breakdown. But my own culpability is another matter. I’ve never previously known anyone who committed suicide. Will it take the rest of my life to process what has happened? I don’t know.
If Freddy were here, he would say, ‘Yet’, as per the rules of a playful accord we have concerning unacquired knowledge, whereby if one of us said they didn’t know something, the other had to say ‘Yet’. And then the other one – usually me – would provide the missing information, or we’d look it up, or just speculate.
But it is
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