Lei Wang has been a science journalist in Hong Kong, a private investigator in San Francisco, and a life coach in Shanghai. A graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, she writes speculative prose that explores what-ifs instead of how-tos. Her essays have appeared in Ecotone, The Lifted Brow, The Reader Berlin, and the New York Times’ Modern Love column. She is currently at work on her first book of creative nonfiction, a secular myth buster on spiritual enlightenment. A rational mystic, she believes there is something fundamentally true in spiritual and religious teachings that have gotten lost in the language and dogma of them. If you’re a smart skeptic, she wants to make you otherwise. Email: leiiwaang [at] gmail.com
Website: https://lei-w.com/
by Lei Wang 1. The Odyssey I did not expect to enjoy this recent adaptation of The Odyssey, and indeed I did not. I watched for purposes of cultural touchstoning and schadenfreude, the way I enjoyed survivalist fiction as a child. Thank goodness I, unlike the main character in Hatchet and Brian’s Winter, get to…
by Lei Wang The first meditation retreat I ever went to was also the worst one, at least circumstantially. A new meditation center was in the process of being built and in the meantime, we were in a series of concrete boxes with tiny fortress windows, fluorescent lights, and corrugated tin roofs with the nails…
by Lei Wang Stephen Colbert in conversation with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: COLBERT Which is better, to know or not to know? TYSON To know. Of course. COLBERT But why? Why is it always better to know? TYSON Well, you asked for my opinion. COLBERT Yes, that’s what Oedipus thought too. “There are two…
by Lei Wang I used to be one of those people who used science to try to explain everything. The poetic part of me suspected science wasn’t the only ultimate truth, but I resisted my own knowing. I really did believe at one point that dopamine and oxytocin were the causes and conditions of love,…
by Lei Wang I’ve been under the weather for about three weeks now: not so incapacitated as to make watching bad TV the only respite, but not quite well either. A persistent, on-off sniffleupagal achiness. The CDC says respiratory illness rates in Iowa right now are Very High, the highest it’s been in years, and…
by Lei Wang My trick for falling asleep is pretending I actually have to get up to do something else. I imagine that the alarm has just rung, the obligation must be borne—any moment now, I must leave the cocoon to pack for my early flight or send urgent essay feedback—but I am deliciously malingering…
by Lei Wang The world is scary right now. I know this to be true, and yet from 14 years of meditation exposure I also know to ask: is it scary… here and now? Here, where I’m writing, in the library of the campus music building, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking a Zen garden…
by Lei Wang Lately I have the feeling that everything is speaking to me. This is concerning, not least because there is a family tendency towards mild schizophrenia. As a delinquent intellectual, I have read only a tablespoon of Jung and have never gone to analysis; in fact, I have resisted treating life like literature.…
by Lei Wang If not for COVID, I would have moved back to China after my MFA instead of staying in Iowa City. Instead of not seeing him for three years, I would have married my fiancé at the time, an Italian kung fu master in Shanghai who had the peculiar fate of teaching Chinese…
by Lei Wang If there’s ever an apocalypse, I’ve told my friends, please sacrifice me for your continued survival. Eat me early on, while I still have viable meat. Don’t be shy. I’m not offering out of selflessness; I’d just rather not suffer. I am afraid something might be wrong with the survival part of…
by Lei Wang My best friend sometimes requests on first dates that they both get there 45 minutes early and work at the coffeeshop or bar together in silence; if her date doesn’t have their own quiet work to do, they can otherwise entertain themselves or just watch her write. But Do Not Disturb. She…
by Lei Wang I solemnly swear this is not a column complaining about my parents. But the first time I listened to this ten-minute meditation on Imagining Ideal Parents by the clinical psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dan Brown, I cried the entire way through. Also the second, third, fourth, etc. times. “Imagine yourself as…
by Lei Wang My mother, who was a doctor, always wished she could have been a teacher instead. She was assigned to be a doctor in 1970s China in the weird way the government assigned people to careers then, based solely on test scores. (My dad, assigned as a programmer, had really wanted to pursue…
by Lei Wang It’s my birthday twice a month, every month. Or at least I treat each 13th and 27th as if it were my birthday. I don’t ask anyone else to pretend with me; I keep to the usual annual celebratory imposition. It is an internal orientation. From morning to night on the 13th…
by Lei Wang “In bardo again,” I text a friend, meaning I’m at the Dallas airport, en route to JFK. I can’t remember now who came up with it first, but it fits. Neither of us are even Buddhist, yet we are Buddhist-adjacent, that in-between place. Though purgatories are not just in-between places, but also…
by Lei Wang I have often been envious of how characters in stories don’t seem to need to do dishes or laundry or buy groceries, except when it serves their story, like a meet-cute at the farmer’s market or perhaps a juicy conflict between two in-laws over the most efficient way to load the dishwasher.…
by Lei Wang [This is part of a series on bringing magic to the everyday through imagination.] Someone once told me the trick to fasting: take long walks. That way, your body believes you are at least on the search for food and temporarily forgets its hunger. When you’re in the mode of actually solving…