Completely Subjective: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “Water Becomes Water”
When I first visited Italy, I was excited to find out a temple-turned-church, complete with Latin inscriptions, was a mere brisk evening walk from my hotel. I also found there was a McDonald’s next to the temple. The irony felt deliberate, as if the universe had tired of subtlety, as if the collision of the ancient and the hyper-modern no longer required a gentle introduction. Morbidly curious and attracted to the familiar, I entered the McDonalds. I don’t even like McDonalds.
I ordered without thinking (McCafeⓇ Americano), as if the impulse to consume, to replicate the familiar in an unfamiliar place, was instinctive. Outside, the temple—built for gods whose names had long since lost their currency—had been turned into a church, then into an architectural curiosity, and now into just another stop on the walking tour for families wearing baseball caps and cargo shorts. Inside, the air was stale in the way only over-filtered air can be, numbing, as though sterilized not for health but to remove any trace of the local atmosphere, any suggestion that I was anywhere different.
A German backpacker in line had ordered in English, without hesitation, and the cashier responded in kind, his accent as muted and undistinguished as the generic background music that filled the space. No one flinched. A transaction so seamless it was almost automated. An American family nearby laughed, too loudly, their son tugging at his Yankees cap as if to declare his allegiance to no particular place but to the world that had made that cap ubiquitous, that had made it so that you could be from anywhere and still buy the same thing, still speak the same language, still find the same McDonald’s nestled between the relics of a forgotten empire.
Here, in the shadow of history, where emperors once decreed and saints were canonized, I was confronted with the soft, banal ubiquity of modernity—a brand, a slogan, a signature dish that could be replicated across continents and languages. McDonald’s, the great equalizer. The dissolution of borders, of cultures, of identity, neatly packaged between two sesame-seed buns.
I wondered then if this was the point, if we had finally arrived at the moment when borders and distinctions had ceased to matter, not because we had transcended them, but because we had erased them so completely. The world had flattened itself, and we had all been absorbed into the same mechanized system, our personal narratives less important than the efficiency with which we could now glide through them, one country to the next, one city to the next, each time less certain of where we were, or why.
How easy it is to mistake this for freedom. The illusion that you can be at home anywhere, that the world is now accessible in a way it never was before. But in that accessibility, something essential is lost. You don’t belong to a place anymore. You belong to the system, to the machine that makes it all possible. It governs where you eat, what you see, how you move. You are never really in Italy, or France, or anywhere. You are simply moving through the apparatus, consuming the same experiences over and over, indistinguishable from the next person, the next moment.
I threw the McCafeⓇ Americano away and walked outside. The temple was still there, unchanged and yet completely changed. How easily we adapt, how quickly we turn the unfamiliar into the familiar, how what was once sacred becomes another product to be consumed, another icon to be packaged for our convenience. Once a monument to pagan gods, then consecrated in the name of Christianity, it now stood wedged between boutiques selling leather handbags and a café that advertised Wi-Fi and cappuccinos in bold English letters. It seemed that everything, sacred or not, had become a footnote in a larger, increasingly mechanized narrative—one dictated not by kings or popes, but by corporations whose reach extended far beyond their national borders. The McDonald’s sat there, not as an anomaly but as a testament to this new reality, where nothing was sacred anymore, where everything, even identity, could be packaged and sold, replicated until the original no longer mattered.
Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “Water Becomes Water” (translated by Eleanor Goodman) invites us into reality, where the relentless machinery of globalization impinges upon the intimate fabric of individual existence. The machinery of globalization encroaches upon the most intimate aspects of life, where the erosion of distinct identities under the weight of a homogenized, borderless system is not just metaphor, but lived experience. Like the temple and McDonald’s, side by side, the poem reflects how personal and cultural narratives dissolve into the anonymity of a globalized age, blurring the lines between the sacred and the commodified, the authentic and the replicated.
“Water Becomes Water” opens with a line that says everything about the world we live in, and nothing at all: “Water becomes water’s shape in the water.” It’s the kind of truth that feels inevitable, and for a moment, you nod along, lulled by its simplicity, before the dread sets in. This isn’t about fluidity or freedom; it’s about how you lose yourself without even knowing you’ve lost anything. Zheng immediately immerses us in a world where fluidity is the norm, not just for water, but for identity itself. However romantic a “fluid identity” may sound in abstract, the reality is stark: In a world flattened by globalization, you’re poured into a mold, shaped by forces so large, so impersonal, you no longer recognize where you end and they begin. This imagery of transformation conveys a fundamental truth about our current age: as global networks permeate every aspect of life, individuals are shaped not by personal choice but by the rigid contours of a digital and economic machine. We are, quite literally, contorted into the shape of the systems we inhabit.
The machine is the poem’s central metaphor, an inescapable force that dominates everything from dusk to dreams, piercing us as we move through it. “Inside the machine we become the image of the machine,” Zheng writes, suggesting that our very essence is altered, reconfigured to reflect the mechanical, profit-driven systems that govern modern life. In this world, humans are no longer autonomous; they’re cogs in a machine so vast that even their defects—physical, emotional, spiritual—are woven into its design. The line “we must use a defective good to prove we are defective goods” strikes with cold clarity, capturing the grim truth that the very flaws of the system are both the cause and effect of our own brokenness.
We are not allowed the comfort of distance. In this mechanized world, everything is connected, everything serves the machine: “use movement to complete the machine’s deficient movement,” Zheng writes. There’s no escape, no part of life that isn’t implicated. Even language, traditionally seen as a means of resistance or self-expression, becomes another tool of the machine: “use the reality of words and screws to realize our own reality.” Here, words are as mechanical as the screws that hold the world together. Both are tools for constructing a reality that ultimately serves a system indifferent to individuality or humanity.
In this machine-driven existence, the self becomes fragmented, alienated. The imagery is precise and unsettling: “from the assembly line separate out the finger as it returns to my body.” This dismemberment speaks to the alienation of labor, where the body becomes a tool, an object that is put to work, separated from its humanity. The idea of the body’s fragmentation—parts of the self being severed, reassembled, and returned—captures the dehumanizing nature of modern life. The workers, particularly the women who “start the long climb up the screws’ ladder,” embody the relentless, often invisible labor that powers global capitalism. Their climb is both literal and metaphorical: an endless ascent that leads nowhere.
Zheng’s language is spare, surgical in its precision. The assembly line, the iron nails, the screws—all point to the ways in which labor reduces people to mere functions within the larger system. “We become phantoms of order forms or profit,” she writes, suggesting that our identities are not only shaped by these forces but hollowed out by them. We are ghosts, traces of human beings reduced to their utility in the marketplace.
The poem’s reference to “Henan wheat recogniz[ing] Anhui flavors” and “Dongguan videotapes search[ing] for Tokyo tastes” is not just a nod to the superficial aspects of global trade; it is a critical examination of how cultural and economic forces redefine local identities. In this age of digital omnipresence, where every interaction is mediated through screens and algorithms, our sense of place becomes increasingly fluid. Zheng’s imagery suggests a homogenization of experience where distinct cultural and geographical markers are eroded, leaving behind a disjointed and disoriented sense of self.
The final lines of the poem are devastating in their bleakness. “All that’s left in the sky is a pure orphaned moon,” an image of isolation and loss. The moon, once a symbol of the unattainable, of something beyond the human, is now a solitary relic, floating in a sky that has been emptied of meaning. This image of the orphaned moon mirrors the poem’s recurring theme of cultural erosion: just as water dissolves into water, distinct regional identities—Henan wheat, Anhui flavors, Dongguan videotapes—blend and lose themselves in the flow of globalized sameness. The women workers’ “long climb up the screws’ ladder” is a Sisyphean effort, a never-ending struggle within a system that offers no salvation, no escape.
Zheng doesn’t let us off the hook. She’s not interested in offering us a way out or a return to some idealized, pre-globalized existence. Why would she? This is the world we’ve built, and we’re as much a part of it as the screws, the algorithms, the assembly lines. We’ve become defective goods trying to transcend a defective system, all while we continue to perpetuate it. There’s no clean break, no utopian vision on the horizon—just the relentless churn of the machine and the shapes it forces us into. There is no alternative.