Effloresce
by Katherine Li
In 1850, Rudolf Clausius developed the first law of thermodynamics, which states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant. This energy can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created nor destroyed.
Take, for example, my family. We are a closed system. The sum of our energy remains constant, even when it takes on different forms: over time, rage turns into bitterness; happiness dulls to a slim sense of satisfaction. Some things change, but others don’t. Despite my parents approaching their twenty-fifth anniversary of being Canadian citizens, their way of thinking remains profoundly Chinese. This, of course, is a natural product of immigration. Having been born in Canada, my way of thinking is mostly shaped by Western thoughts and values. This is also a product of being a second-generation immigrant. And so, regretfully, clashing is inevitable.
Over the years, I have had the time to observe my family carefully, and I’ve noticed this phenomenon: though my family sometimes hesitates to believe in science, they will always pressure me to study it. No matter what I say, it’s always, You should be a doctor. Or, you know, at least a pharmacist.
*
In March of 2022, I decided to look for a summer job. It was the dead of night, and I was sitting at my kitchen island, nibbling on frozen mango chunks. I had been afraid of getting a job during the worst years of the pandemic, which happened to coincide with the years during which teenagers like me usually start working. I suspect this caused a delay in the development of some aspect of my emotional maturity. No driver’s license, no job, no romantic prospects—I felt like I had missed out on the formative experiences every teenager should have had.
How To Find A Job:
1. Search for a job in your field of choice.
2. Realize you’ve never had to write a CV before.
3. Write your CV.
4. Work.
Given that I was looking for a summer job, there was no rush to actually get hired, only to apply indiscriminately and hope that something would stick. I turned my laptop on, opened Google, and searched “Summer hospital jobs for students Montreal.” I wanted to make use of my skills, meaning I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t wasting two years of my life pursuing a degree I didn’t really want, and I figured a CEGEP-level science education ought to have been enough to land a job in at least one sector of a hospital.
Fortunately, I was right.
*
How to Be a Janitor:
1. Clean.
The second law of thermodynamics states that in any spontaneous process, there is always an increase in the entropy of the universe. Put simply, all natural phenomena progress toward disorder. Messes, according to chemistry, are unavoidable. The laws of the universe can’t be broken, but every day I spent at the hospital, scrubbing floors and walls and toilets, feet aching, afraid I would catch an infectious disease, I wished I could somehow bend the universe to my whim. So I gave it a shot.
*
How to Evade the Law:
1. Don’t talk to anyone.
Easy. There was no time for talking, and besides, there was almost nobody to talk to. I was working the evening shift on most days, from 1:00 to 9:30 p.m. Whenever I showed up to work, a manager would hand me a set of keys and a pager. I would walk through the underground passage connecting the main building to the new pediatric ward, take the elevator to the sixth or seventh floor, and load my cart with cleaning supplies. The people working the evening shift clean patients’ rooms after they’ve been discharged from the hospital. Nurses stick a variety of posters on the door of each room, indicating the mode of transmission of the disease inside, and I would disinfect according to procedure.
On my first day, I worked with another Asian girl. I watched her perform what seemed like a choreographed dance, laying towels, sopping with disinfectant, in strategic corners of the room, emptying the trash and refilling the soap and toilet paper. Then, she fenced off the bathroom, cleaning until it was spotless before moving onto the main room, working clockwise to keep track of where she had already been. I was amazed at her efficiency, but most of all, I was impressed by how seriously she took her job. She and I were in the middle of cleaning when she received a call—we were needed in another room, urgently because the patient was going to arrive soon. She dropped everything and rushed to the other wing of the building while I trailed behind, dazed.
I thought we made a good team, might even make good friends, but then her shift ended, and I was left alone with a pager that would beep every thirty minutes when the fastest I could clean a room was in forty-five. Though I followed the steps I was taught as best as I could, my body was ill-suited to the work—I was unaccustomed to spending all day on my feet, walking twelve thousand steps per shift, and my back ached from having to bend over so often.
2. Make up a really, really strong alibi.
An alibi is only effective if it involves the possibility of losing something you’re not willing to lose.
I’ve only been here a week, you know—I’m new. And I live with my grandma. I haven’t had the chance to get fitted for the N-95 I’m supposed to wear, and I clean so slowly anyway, it would take me forever to finish that room—so can I take the non-COVID room instead?
Funnily enough, my grandma herself wasn’t concerned about getting sick at all, though she insisted I ingest a plethora of traditional Chinese medicines to “boost my immune system.” But she hates hospitals, and always seems to relive memories of my grandpa’s death whenever they’re mentioned. She couldn’t look me in the eye when I recounted my days to her.
Yes, grandma, I clean the rooms after the patients get discharged. I scrub the walls and the bathtub and the toilets and the floors; I douse the entire room and all its furniture in disinfectant. I wear a gown like the nurses do. I’m very careful. Too careful, sometimes. I missed my dinner break again.
3. Don’t break the law.
To evade the law, one must look to not break it at all. This might seem contradictory, but to prevent the universe from getting messy, you must constantly clean it up, not look to prevent messes from being created.
This rule, however, was getting difficult to follow. I could feel myself deteriorating both physically and mentally the longer I spent there. The calluses on my feet were excruciating to walk on, and my hair, which I washed every day to get the grime and bacteria out, turned into little more than an oily mess atop my head. Though I wish I could say I got fit during the month I spent working, every night, I would proceed to eat a second dinner at 10 p.m., have dessert, browse my phone, then have a midnight snack. I told myself that in my free time I would complete an online course, and learn how to play Ravel’s “Sonatine,” and bake bread, and learn German. But I was so exhausted after each shift that all I could do during my free time was scroll through social media or read a few pages of a book.
I hoped that working as a janitor would at least give me a leg up on others looking to work in healthcare by allowing me to understand the inner workings of a hospital. But the thing I came to do—observe medical professionals at work—was virtually impossible, given the shifts I was assigned to. And truthfully, naively, I wasn’t expecting the work to be so difficult.
Sometimes, I was called into a patient’s room to clean. I remember when I walked in on a teenage girl lying in bed, her mother pacing around the room, waiting for a nurse to arrive. The girl was wailing.
Maman. J’ai mal. Ça fait tellement mal, maman.
I couldn’t bear hearing her suffer, but what could I do? Keep cleaning. Pick up the trash scattered across the room. Scrub the sticky floor. Don’t look at the patient. Pretend you don’t hear anything when the nurse says, Sorry. There’s nothing I can do. The medicine should kick in in half an hour. Leave quietly. It wasn’t uncommon to hear children screaming. In pain, in fear—I don’t know. Maybe both. I don’t think there was much of a difference.
*
My dad loves to run his mouth when it comes to international relations, going on a tirade about the West’s negative portrayal of China at least once a week. He says that the West doesn’t appreciate its workers enough, while simultaneously condemning them for “being too lazy.”
In China, people work hard because they feel a sense of duty to their fellow citizens, to their country, to their history.
Chinese societies, traditionally, are collectivist in nature. The family takes precedence over the individual. The concept of filial piety is one of the pillars of Confucianism, which, for better or worse, still pervades Chinese tradition. Disobeying one’s elders isn’t something to be taken lightly. And so, society, being comprised of multiple families, all of which value the larger unit over its separate components, can sometimes take precedence over the family.
Try as I might, I felt no sense of duty towards my job. I think, when working in a hospital, lacking this quality makes the work much more arduous. I felt respected, sure, but I’m a person who needs to know that my contribution to a cause is not only respected, but appreciated for me to find joy in it. At the hospital, I was just too unnoticeable to make much of an impact on anybody. If I wanted to do my job well, I had to be invisible. And I had had enough.
When I told my mom I was thinking about quitting my job, she frowned. You know you can’t just quit because it’s hard, right? Remember, you chose this. I did choose to work there, but I was miserable. I felt like I was rotting in that building. And besides, I was only there to please my family.
What’s the use in stopping now? It’s not like something terribly bad happened to make you want to quit. The best thing you can do now is work hard.
I thought of how my mom owned a coffee shop for over a decade. How she worked tirelessly, day and night. Up by 4:30, gone by 5:00, and home only twelve hours later. How much she gave and how little she received in return, when her shop closed during the pandemic.
Still, I wanted to quit. Isn’t it enough to just want to quit?
*
If I could have, I would have studied something in the humanities or social sciences. It’s not that I hate science, but I’m just not particularly good at it. Frankly, I find my science classes boring. Sure, I can press on, but there are other options. And I say if I could because my family would never allow it.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t like science. Boredom, lack of interest—these are trivial things. You change your mind so often anyway. Who’s to say you’ll still like your humanities a few years from now?
My mom studied accounting because her grades were too low to stay in the science stream, and accounting was a field that she believed would always be in demand. When faced with my countless attempts to convince her to let me study something else, she told me to switch to finance.
I think I would rather study science than finance. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why those were the only two options available to her.
*
The third law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value when its temperature nears zero Kelvin. What people tend to forget is that it’s more of a theoretical concept than a physical phenomenon. Nothing has ever reached a temperature of zero Kelvin. The entropy of the universe is ever-increasing, and will always tend towards disorder.
But when there is no energy in a system, it cannot become disordered. This knowledge soon became my lifeline. If I were to somehow clear all disorder from within myself, perhaps I could achieve peace. I’m a devout atheist, but still, when facing an arduous moment in my life, I pray to God.
*
How to Pray (as an Atheist):
1. Find a nice, quiet spot to connect with your deity.
The employee lounges were peaceful in the evening. I had grown used to ignoring the beeping alarm that went off whenever a nurse was being called to a room.
2. Address God. Be respectful.
Oh, mighty God, please, let my family understand me.
3. Know your purpose.
I know that since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, a system that has no energy can only become disordered if it receives energy from an external source. I am my own system.
*
When working at a hospital, one must be thorough. Nobody wants to come for a checkup and leave with gastroenteritis. In a way, a hospital is also a collectivist society. And like the collectivism I was accustomed to, it started to guilt me into acceptance. I had made up my mind to quit, but then I began to think my job wasn’t so bad. The pay was good, and on weekends, I was assigned to the maternity ward. New parents were about the only people happy to be in a hospital. For once, I worked with a team of other janitors instead of alone, and being part of a community instilled a sense of duty in me. Once, a nurse even gave me chocolate after a long and tiring day.
We are normal people. We’ll live normal lives, by working like normal people.
My family is convinced that to make a living with an Arts degree, one must be special. Chosen by the heavens. Talented and filled with an unwavering resolve.
Besides, you’re only you.
I am only me.
*
A school therapist once asked me why I didn’t want to switch programs.
Don’t factor your family into the equation. Why don’t you want something better for yourself?
I answered simply: because it would be weak to do so.
Is that something you’re saying because of your family’s opinions?
It’s not as easy as you make it out to be, I told her. (Besides, how could a white woman possibly understand what I was going through?)
She nodded, then smiled. Still. Is it so wrong to want to study something you enjoy?
*
The zeroth law of thermodynamics was created after the first three were firmly established. It is said to be a useful way of defining a temperature scale when thermometers aren’t available. When two systems are in equilibrium, and in equilibrium with a third, then all three are in equilibrium with each other.
To make a functional system, one must look at the individual unit. To achieve harmony, all units must be operational; all units must first work as units. You could say I chose my path by myself. You could also say I was forced into it. Either way, you would be correct. I’m not sure I can distinguish between my parents’ desires and my own.
I kept showing up at my job until it was late July. By then, I knew it was time to resign. It wasn’t fear, it wasn’t laziness, it was much simpler than that. I was just tired.
*
My parents want my future to be stable. I also want this. But we want it in different ways. If following the so-called stable path leaves me constantly thinking about what I could have done instead, can that even be called stability?
I never went to see the therapist beyond that one time. Even so, as I handed my uniform in, her words came back to me.
You know, choosing something you enjoy over something you can simply do is a courage all its own.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Katherine Li is currently a student at Université de Montréal. In her free time, she reads, writes, and plays classical piano. On weekends, you might find her at a coffee shop or secondhand bookstore.