![]() ![]() ![]() Her heartache eases only when Amy faces the presence, letting it settle in with her. Even when the memories are erased from her mind, Amy cannot ignore her history, which manifests as an incorporeal, endless shadow. With precise prose, Chung guides us from horror to soft tenderness-while still reminding us that we cannot run away from our pasts. When I reached the end of the story, I could only marvel at how skillfully Chung has funneled our contemporary tendency to suppress our traumas into such a satisfying metaphor. Amy moved on from her mother’s illness and death by ejecting it from her mind-but in return, the presence appeared, and now it never leaves her side. The genius of Chung’s story lies in its speculative elements: the presence first appeared when Amy erased her most unpleasant and difficult memories using a technology she helped develop. On the advice of her only friend, Amy goes to a spa in an attempt to relax the presence away. The presence slides into the passenger seat of her car and follows her into rooms. ![]() She’s divorced, unemployed, depressed, and worst of all, stalked by something described merely (and brilliantly) as a presence. In Gina Chung’s “Presence,” from her forthcoming collection Green Frog, Amy Hwang wallows in her horrors. And yet we choose to ignore our traumas in favor of sentiments like “it’s fine,” “thoughts and prayers,” and “man up,” hoping that everything will, truly, be fine. My Worst Experiences Haunt Me From the Memory Cloudīaldwin once wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” To move forward, we must accept what has happened, and we must face how we feel. ![]()
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