Red Lights Are A Mirror

Tuesday, 1:07am. Chang’an Avenue. The intersection is empty, both my hands are at ten and two on the wheel, and I am not moving. The light is red. It’s been red for forty-three seconds. There’s not a single car coming the other way. The bike lane is a black ribbon disappearing into the dark. I am parked. Frozen.

Some guy in a white Tesla behind me lays on the horn.

“Dude! Green!”

I see that. I wave weakly into the rearview. He flips me off and goes around me. He makes the left. He disappears. Now it’s just me, this empty four-lane, and the worst intersection of my life.

Wait. What am I doing here?

I want to talk about this, and the only reason I can is because my dad and I had dinner earlier Tuesday and I left the table at 8:15pm. Then I drove. For four hours. I don’t know where I was going. I don’t think I was going anywhere. I just knew I couldn’t sit at that table anymore.

My mom had made his favorite: braised pork belly, the caramelized kind he likes rock-hard. My sister and I both secretly think it’s disgusting but we eat it anyway because that’s the deal. Mom set the table with three bowls, three pairs of chopsticks, a small glass for baijiu in front of dad’s seat, and nothing in front of mine. He’s not a drinker. I’m not a son-of-his. That part stung more than the fight.

The fight was about my cousin’s wedding in October. Or about money. Or about why I’m 32 and “still doing that freelance thing.” You know how Chinese family dinners go. The subject doesn’t matter. The volume matters. By the second glass he was on the subject of my rent. By the third he was on the subject of my mother and how she worries. I tried to be neutral. I was not neutral. He said a thing about me being “stuck.” I said a worse thing about him being “a man who only knows how to do one thing at a time.” He put down his chopsticks. I got up. My mom said, “He’s your father.” I said, “I know.” Then I got in the car.

I drove for four hours.

I drove east on the Second Ring. I got off at the wrong exit twice. I stopped for gas once but didn’t actually need gas. I turned the radio on, then off, then on again. I almost called my sister at one point but then I figured she’d take his side because she always takes his side, and I’d rather be alone at 1am in my Honda than be alone on the phone with my sister at 1am. Four hours later I’m sitting at a red light on Chang’an, not moving, and that is when I want to write about red lights as a mirror. Not the side mirrors. Not the rearview. A different kind of mirror. The kind that only activates when you literally cannot move forward.

Sounds dramatic. Let me try again.

Red lights are weird because they’re the only place in adult life where you’re forced to stop and not have anything to do.

Not scrolling. Not driving. Not talking. Not even pretending to do anything. You’re sitting in a two-ton metal box, alone, at an exact geographic coordinate, with nothing to look at but the steering wheel and the reflector paint on the road and the rearview.

The rearview.

That’s where the actual mirror part kicks in.

I remember the first time I really noticed this. It wasn’t even at night. Sunday morning. Maybe 10am. I was driving home from the gym in Jinqiao, post-shower, hair still wet, and I pulled up to a red light right by the school zone. This little girl was crossing with her grandma, holding a puffy jacket in her fist. She looked at my car. I looked at her. She waved. I waved back. Then I happened to glance up into my rearview just as she crossed in front of me and I caught my own face doing something I’d never seen myself do.

I was smiling.

Like an idiot. A real, unforced, not-for-anyone smile. The kind my mom used to say I wore when I was four. The kind that pulls at the corners of your eyes so hard your cheekbones hurt. The kind that doesn’t have a why.

Why was I smiling? Because a child waved at me? Because the gym had been good? Because the sun was low and warm and the street was quiet?

I still don’t know. I don’t think I want to know. I sat at that red light for two cycles. Missed the green twice. Just so I could look at that face a little longer.

That’s when I figured out: red lights are a mirror.

Not the kind you put on your wall. The kind that only shows up when you stop.

Why a child’s wave pulled that out of me at 10am on a Sunday is still something I can’t totally explain. Probably just endorphins. Probably just sun. Or maybe it was that I was the kind of person a kid felt safe waving at. I don’t know. I want to be that person. I forget that I want to be that person, and then the city reminds me.

Today, the Chang’an light, I was forced to look at something else.

What I saw: a 32-year-old who had said something cruel to his dad over wedding banquet RSVPs. A 32-year-old whose knuckles were white on the steering wheel. A 32-year-old who hadn’t called his mom back, who was sitting in a dark car at 1am, ignoring green lights because his chest was tight and his stomach was doing that hollow thing.

You know the thing. That hollowness that starts under your ribs and crawls up. The one that makes you want to open the car window even though it’s 8 degrees outside. The one that turns every breath into a negotiation. Yeah. That one.

I tried to drive through it. The light turned red again. I tried the horn. It didn’t help. I tried scrolling. I dropped my phone into the footwell and didn’t pick it up. I tried calling my sister. She didn’t pick up. I tried to turn around. I made it across three lanes and pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot and just sat there with the engine running for twenty minutes.

But the red light kept coming back to me.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about red lights. They’re sneaky. They wait. They know.

I used to think they were a hassle. A small inconvenience between me and where I wanted to go. When I was 23, driving down to Suzhou for a friend’s wedding, I floored it through two yellows and felt like a movie star. When I was 26 in California on a work trip, I ran a red on Mission Street and got a ticket — $480 mailed three weeks later, which I only paid because the rental company threatened to blacklist me. When I was 28, I had a job that had me driving across Shanghai twice a day, and I started timing the lights. There were stretches of road in Pudong where I could hit 7 greens in a row if I hit 38 km/h exactly. I was proud of that. I was a “timing artist” with my mother. (Ha. That joke still hurts, more than it should.)

But somewhere in the last two years, red lights stopped being a hassle. They became a kind of appointment I was keeping with myself.

I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s because the city’s gotten denser and the lights come more often. Maybe it’s because I’m not 23 anymore and I don’t feel like flooring it. Maybe it’s because the things I need to look at have gotten heavier. Or maybe I’m just tired.

Whatever. The point is, I started to actually use the red lights.

I’d pull up, stop, and just sit with whatever was on my chest. Some nights it was a fight I needed to apologize for. Some nights it was loneliness that had been hanging around for months and I was pretending was just “needing some space.” Some nights it was the fact that I have the same job I had four years ago, the same apartment, the same morning coffee order, and I’m starting to wonder if that’s a comfort or a coffin. Sometimes I cried. Not loud crying. The kind where your eyes just water and your throat does that swallow thing and you stare straight ahead and pretend nothing is happening. I cried at a red light near Jing’an Temple once for twenty minutes. Three cycles. The traffic cop on duty knocked on my window and I told him my dog had died.

I don’t have a dog. He let me sit there another full cycle. I don’t remember his face. I remember he had kind eyes and a uniform that didn’t quite fit his shoulders.

Okay so maybe he’s not a cop. Maybe he’s a security guard. He still let me sit there. That’s the part that mattered.

But that’s a pretty sad way to use a traffic light, right? Sitting there with a stranger’s kind eyes, crying about a dog you don’t have. I know. Trust me, I know. It felt ridiculous even as I was doing it. Some part of my brain was yelling: “Pull yourself together, this man is going to think you’re unhinged.” And the rest of me was just sitting there, leaking out the eyes.

So what did I do. I sat there. The “unhinged” part of my brain shut up and I sat there. I let the guy tap my window. I let him say, “Hey, you alright, friend?” I told him my dog died. He nodded and walked back to his little stool thing at the curb. I sat for the whole cycle. Then I dried my face, took a breath, and went.

So maybe I’m saying this — the red light gives you what you didn’t know you needed: an interruption, a witness, a stranger who taps your window.

So tonight, after the dad dinner, I pulled up to that Chang’an red light and instead of going around me, which is what I usually do when I am wrecked — meaning I keep driving until the hurt gets small enough to be ignored — I just stayed.

I called my mom. She picked up on the third ring.

“Are you okay?” she asked. She always knows.

“No,” I said. “I was mean to dad.”

A pause. The kind she does where she’s choosing between three things to say. Then: “I know. He knows. Come home when you’re ready.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He said he’s sorry about what he said. He doesn’t know how to say it direct. You know how he is.”

I know how he is. He’s my father. I’m his son. We have the same exact problem: we don’t know how to say the thing we need to say without wrapping it in three layers of crap first.

“I’m sorry too,” I told her. “Tell him tomorrow. I don’t want to do it tonight.”

“Okay,” she said. “Drive safe. Don’t go through red lights.”

I laughed. Genuinely. The second real laugh of the night.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Ma.”

I hung up. The light was still red.

I looked in the rearview.

Same idiot. Same face. Same wet eyes. But something in the jaw looked different. Less tight. The knuckles on the steering wheel weren’t white anymore. The thing under the ribs was still there but it had loosened up, like a knot you don’t fully undo but you loosen enough to breathe through.

The light turned green.

I went. I made it home at 1:48am. I parked. I sat in the driveway another four minutes because the car is a kind of red light too. Then I went inside. I didn’t message my dad. I didn’t text my sister back. I went to bed.

I didn’t sleep. I am writing this at 3:14am.

I keep thinking about that little girl in Jinqiao. The one who waved. I am 32. I don’t have kids. I don’t think I want kids anytime soon. But I remember that wave because it was the first time I caught myself smiling at a red light. I remember the Chang’an red tonight because it was the first time in a long time my face showed something other than tired.

In between there have been a thousand red lights. Most of them I ran through. A lot of them I sat at and didn’t really see. The Jing’an Temple crying one. The Suzhou wedding one where I was a movie star. The Pudong “timing artist” stretch. They’re all there, every one, somewhere in the rearview.

You don’t get to pick which one shows up and what they show. You just pull up. You stop. You wait. You see.

You see.

But okay — is any of this useful? Am I going to write this, hit publish, and never be wrecked at a red light again? No. Definitely not. Next Tuesday there’ll be another dinner, another wrong thing said, another red light I sit through for too long while someone honks. I’m going to cry at another Jing’an Temple intersection in six months. I’m going to run a red one night when I’m feeling invincible, and I’m going to pay another $480 ticket, and I’m going to be a worse driver for it. None of this is fixed.

If you’re reading this on the subway at 8am or in your bed at 2am or in a 7-Eleven parking lot at 4am wondering why your chest is doing that thing, you probably have your own version. I bet you do. Maybe it’s not red lights. Maybe it’s the elevator at your office. Maybe it’s the line at the airport bathroom. Maybe it’s the 4am stare at your phone in the dark. Maybe it’s the 30 seconds between waking up and getting out of bed where you suddenly remember everything. Whatever it is, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a place modern life has built for you to be forced to stop and look. And the looking is the worst part. And the worst part is the only part that’s any good.

I don’t have anything to say about that. I am still in the middle of mine.

Tomorrow my dad and I will probably not talk about it directly. We’ll do the Chinese-dad thing where we go buy groceries together and he points at some fish and I say it’s too expensive and he buys it anyway and we walk home without speaking and that is the apology. The fish is the apology. The fish is always the apology.

I am going to try to be okay with that.

But I’m sitting here at 3:21am, car parked, dishes not done, and I am looking in the mirror that this Chang’an red light gave me. I don’t love what I see. But I’m not turning away.

That’s all I got.

[“Personal Essay”, “Late Night Driving”, “Family Conflict”, “Self-Reflection”, “City Commute”