The Digital Generation
Six Women (1975) by Alex Katz
By Emily Hoang
Grey’s Anatomy showed us how to be doctors in sixteen seasons, a steal compared to medical school. Every day, we logged into Netflix and watched cut after cut together. Like any class discussion, there were stupid questions in the beginning but that was ok because we were just interns trying to eavesdrop on the twisted sisters’ conversations and craning our necks to watch a surgery. We were hungry and everyone saw it.
We soon became residents and it was our turn to make real incisions and it was nerve-wracking. We learned how to run towards pain and inflicted our own, under the pretext of a return to a semblance of wholeness. We played god, returning breaths back into bodies. And yet— we still said amen, amen, amen before and after each surgery, seeking forgiveness from our hubris, only for it to become a trivial routine.
They didn’t tell us it would get easier. They didn’t tell us that we were walking around with mirrors, each patient skewed to reflect a part of ourselves we couldn’t ignore. They didn’t warn us about reflexive dismemberment. That each time we looked at our unpixelated selves, the eyes looking back looked less and less like our own.
By graduation, we were ready to enter the real world; there were too many limbs and not enough bodies. We started stapling parts onto ourselves, coats of arms, legs, organs, until we were only recognizable by our hands. When our bodies finally gave out, they didn’t care. They threw us in a pit behind the hospital, backs against the heat, as we burned.
Emily Hoang is a Chinese-Vietnamese American writer from San Francisco. Her work has appeared in GASHER Journal and Black Horse Review. When she’s not writing, you can find her running, eating, or exploring new spots around the city.