Previous
Chapter 6
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Care, Self-Destruction, and Self-Indulgence
Isolation
Meaninglessness
Repression
Summary
Analysis
Reva asks if the narrator is sure she really wants to get rid of all her designer clothes. The narrator, who called Reva earlier to say she was cleaning out her closets and that Reva was welcome to take anything she’d like, says she’s sure. The narrator observes that Reva is “like a kid in a candy store,” unable to restrain her greed as she eagerly pores over all the narrator’s designer clothing and accessories. As Reva carries her haul outside, the narrator tells her that she’s going on a trip and will be back June 1. When Reva asks if the narrator is going to Rehab, the narrator replies, “Something like that.” Reva tells the narrator she’s proud of her, then she drives off.
This chapter opens with more hints about the plans the narrator began to formulate at the end of Chapter Six. It’s worth noting that giving away one’s personal possessions can be a symptom of suicidality, and so Reva’s lack of concern at the narrator’s vague explanation highlights the degree to which their friendship has deteriorated over the past several months. The narrator’s comparison of Reva to “a kid in a candy store” points to Reva’s greed as well as her pattern of using material goods to distract her from her inner struggles. The narrator had thought that Reva’s mother’s death might prompt Reva to be more introspective and honest with herself, but this doesn’t quite seem to be the case.
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With Reva gone, the narrator returns to her apartment and systematically gets rid of all her furniture other than her mattress, her dining table, and a single folding chair. She also keeps a couple towels, two sets of sheets, her duvet, a few pairs of pajamas, underwear, and basic hygiene supplies. She has instructed Ping Xi to bring her one large pizza every Sunday afternoon. Whenever she regains consciousness, she will drink water, eat a slice of pizza, and do some basic exercises. She’ll also wash her clothes. Then she’ll take another Infermiterol, lose consciousness once more, and start the whole cycle all over again. In this way, she will finish her year of hibernation.
The narrator’s plans come more into focus in this passage: it appears that she plans to carry out her hibernation to the extreme in the remaining several months of her project. It’s unclear how or why she feels this will help her, given the negative toll her quasi-hibernation seems to have had on her mental health thus far. The narrator has had numerous moments of clarity throughout the novel where she acknowledges, directly or indirectly, that repressing her pain is only hurting her. Yet she repeatedly brushes these thoughts aside, falling deeper into her isolation, repression, and patterns of self-destructive behavior.
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The locksmith arrives later, and the narrator instructs him to install a lock outside the door—that way, anyone inside will need a key to exit the apartment. This will ensure that she cannot exit the apartment in an Infermiterol-induced blackout. If she dies by jumping out the window, so be it.
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On January 31, the narrator takes one last walk outside. During her walk, a couple asks her to take their picture. She does so, with shaky hands. After that, she throws her cellphone in the river. She returns to her apartment building and instructs the doorman to grant entry to Ping Xi, whenever he arrives. Then she goes to her apartment and waits.
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Ping Xi arrives a while later with a contract for the narrator to sign, should she change her mind at any point during their project, but she refuses to sign: she will not change her mind. Inwardly, she considers how Ping Xi thinks of her like his stuffed dogs: he is “an opportunist and a stylist, a producer of entertainment more than an artist.” He has no interest in knowing himself or changing: “He just want[s] to shock people.” Though he’s a “hack,” he knows how to work the system and is successful. She spots something on Ping Xi’s chin and realizes it’s a tattoo of red pimples.
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Ping Xi outlines his plans for the project—he’ll take lots of footage with a handheld camera. The narrator doesn’t care what he does, so long as he keeps her locked up and does not leave any trace behind after he leaves the apartment. Ping Xi is fine with this: it will benefit his project for her to be “naïve.”
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The narrator explains to Ping Xi that she’s doing “work” of her own. Ping Xi asks why the narrator doesn’t just burn her ID and passport if she wants to reinvent herself. The narrator says she’ll need those things when she wakes up, to access her bank accounts, for instance. Even though she plans to emerge as a new person, she’ll still look like herself on the outside. Ping Xi claims that this isn’t an “authentic rebirth,” but the narrator ignores him. She tells him that she’ll leave a Post-it note on the table to let him know about anything she needs. Then Ping Xi tells her, “Sweet dreams,” and he leaves. Alone, the narrator takes the first of her remaining 40 Infermiterol tablets and lies down.
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The narrator awakes three nights later. She expects to see scratches at her door—evidence of her unconscious desire to escape—but finds none. She walks to the kitchen and finds evidence of Ping Xi’s presence—beer cans and tin foil smeared with remnants of a burrito, she guesses. She writes a note reminding him to remove all trash and cross out the dates on the calendar. She takes a slice of pizza from the refrigerator and eats it cold. For a moment, she considers that she could die here, should something happen to Ping Xi. But her fear dissipates the moment she turns off the lights. She thinks about Trevor proposing to his new girlfriend and thinks about how stupid it is to want anything to last “forever.” Then she drifts back to sleep.
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The narrator’s “second awakening” happens in the afternoon, three days later. She awakes with her thumb in her mouth. This time, there’s no trash left behind. She drinks a can of the ginger ale she asked Ping Xi to bring and thinks only briefly of Reva and her cans of diet soda.
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The narrator’s third awakening marks nine days locked inside her apartment. She feels her muscles atrophying. Things continue in this way, with the narrator waking every third day, and Ping Xi marking days off on the calendar and removing the garbage. He comes and goes without her knowing (or remembering). She continues to leave notes for him with things to bring on his next trip over.
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When the narrator wakes on February 25, things are different. For one, she’s curled up under a towel on the floor instead of on her mattress in her bedroom. She walks there and finds the door locked. She can smell the familiar scent of turpentine. Images of the “sleeping nudes” Ping Xi has been painting of her flash through her head. She remembers them as being mediocre. Anyway, it doesn’t matter: he can still sell them for lots of money, claiming that they’re “self-conscious critiques of the institutionalization of painting,” or some nonsense like that. The narrator takes another Infermiterol and falls back asleep.
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As May nears its end, the narrator thinks she’ll start to feel restless soon. She can sense spring emerging outside. On May 28, she comes to and knows this is the last time she’ll take the Infermiterol. She takes the pill and “pray[s] for mercy.” She drifts in and out of consciousness and imagines that she is being lowered into the ground by the machine that lowered her parents’ caskets into the ground at their funerals. She feels afraid and has the sudden urge to revisit every moment of her life. She reaches out and feels she has latched onto someone but can’t know for sure. She registers that she is crying and tries to focus on that sound. She feels that she is going nowhere and is nothing, then she loses consciousness.
The narrator wakes up on June 1, 2001. Sunlight shines in through the blinds. She hears a bird chirp outside and knows that she is “alive.” Just as she’d requested back at the start of their project, Ping Xi has left her clothing, her credit cards, her ID, and some cash. There’s also water, an apple, and a bottle of sunscreen. At first, she thinks the sunscreen is a thoughtful gesture on Ping Xi’s part and feels touched, then she finds the note on which she requested him to bring it. Her white fur coat hangs from a hook. Beside it is a Post-it note from Ping Xi, who apparently bought her the coat. He says he’ll “miss working with [her].”
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The narrator opens the door, which is unlocked, and makes her way down to the lobby. Her muscles are weak, and the light coming from outside is disarmingly bright. The doorman and a woman in the lobby ask her if she’s okay. “People are so nice,” she thinks. It’s another week before she’s strong enough to walk around the block. She walks farther and farther each day. By August, she has bought a battery-operated radio and carries it to the park each day, listening to jazz stations. She feeds Corn Flakes to pigeons.
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The narrator doesn’t think about Ping Xi until she calls Reva on August 19—Reva’s birthday. Reva comes over the next week. She’s wearing a new perfume, the narrator notes. Reva doesn’t say anything about the random, unmatching furniture the narrator has since bought from various thrift stores. She says nothing of the narrator’s six-month absence, or her missing cell phone. She complains about her new boss, talks about her new job.
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Reva removes a New Yorker magazine from her purse and tells the narrator about a sad story she just read in it about a Chinese American student who got a bad PSAT score and threw himself from the roof of his junior high school. It’s only after he has survived this that his parents tell him they love him, and the student thinks “it pained them more than the cracking of [his] shins and femurs” as he hit the pavement. The narrator thinks the story isn’t all that great but tells Reva to continue. As Reva reads, the narrator pictures Ping Xi in her head. In that moment, he strikes her as a “reptilian, small-hearted being,” one of many who obsess over money and socializing to avoid confronting reality.
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Reva reads the whole story, and the narrator can sense that she is only doing so to pass the time. She knows Reva doesn’t want to hear about her “rehab” experience: she wants this meeting to end so she can “go and leave [the narrator] forever.” Reva finishes the story and remarks on how sad it is that “certain cultures can be so cold,” and the narrator agrees. The narrator realizes then that she does not want Reva to leave. She thinks about how beautiful Reva is in that moment, “with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears.” She tells Reva she loves her. Reva says it back.
Ping Xi’s exhibition, “Large-Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman,” goes up at Ducat in late August. Someone sends the narrator a review. She’s surprised to see that Ping Xi rendered her “in the style of Utamaro woodblock prints.” There are also videos of her. In some, she is weeping. Ping Xi has dubbed over the narrator with voicemails from his mother, shouting angrily in Cantonese. One critic describes the narrator as a “bloated nymph with dead eyes.”
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In early September, the narrator goes to the Met museum: she wants to see “what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone.” She looks at a still life and hopes that the artist didn’t just throw out the fruit when they were done: “that they’d had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing.” She gets too close to the painting, and a nearby guard yells at her. Suddenly, she has the striking revelation that her future is unknown: “it didn’t exist yet.” She is making it with each action she makes, each thought she has. “Things were just things,” she thinks. She reaches out to touch the painting. The guard lunges toward her and pulls her back. In that moment, she realizes she’s “free.”
Later, the narrator finds a letter from the real estate agent informing her that someone has made an offer on her parents’ house. She wanders to Central Park and watches as a child asks his mother to identify a bird he has just seen. The narrator wanders on, finds a payphone, and call the real estate agent. She tells him to go ahead with the sale. Then she calls Reva, who is at the gym—can they talk later? They don’t.
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