I guess you can't buy an epiphany: "Winner" by Ling Ma" (O.Henry 2025)

First, an update:

I said I might have to ditch blogging about contemporary short stories in my last post. That might still happen soon, but for now, I have a little bit of daylight and might as well keep going. I had already half-written this post anyway. 

Having been off of work for the past almost eight months provided me with an interesting perspective for reading "Winner" by Ling Ma, which I now launch into. 

Winners and losers

It's pretty common to speak of a capitalist society in terms of winners and losers. Those who really believe in the system tend to speak as though the winners--those who accumulate wealth--deserve to win and those who lose--the poor--deserve to lose. Critics of the system point out that there is a lot of contingency involved in who makes it and who doesn't. It could have gone a different way. Another word for "contingency" in this sense is "luck."

The unnamed narrator (N) in "Winner," a second-generation immigrant from an unnamed foreign country, knows she is lucky. She was struggling to survive in the system just like most of us, working late hours and coming home at night to eat, drink, and watch TV before passing out in her small apartment. Then she won $60 million in the Powerball. That's not Elon Musk money, but it is enough to never have to work again.

Immune...or maybe not

Common wisdom suggests that lottery winners often end up unhappy, although at least one article suggests that's not the case for most. According to widely accepted belief, which the story seems to at least partly accept when it warns of winners "falling into destitution," lottery winners are at profound risk of losing their moorings, making bad decisions, getting depressed, and blowing all their money in a short amount of time. Publicity surrounding the cases where this has happened may tend to make many people exaggerate the danger in a sort of availability heuristic. But even if the danger isn't as prevalent as many of us have been led to believe, the danger is there, and even if the average lottery winner doesn't blow all their money, there's still the question of what to do with your life now. Malaise can set in as winners struggle to figure it all out. 

N should be immune from the malaise. The tendency to blow money is American: “It is not choosing the ‘big’ things that is fundamentally American but the blind insistence on grandiosity despite the reality of circumstances. It’s not living beyond your means, it’s the unceasing, headless insistence on ‘the best,’ whatever that is.” But N, as a second-generation immigrant whose boss praised her because she's "no American," ought to be immune, right? She ought to be grounded in whatever traditional values she was raised with, the ones that make her work longer hours while slacking Americans dip out of work, right?

Sort of. N doesn't seem to have blown all her money. She thinks, while she, her husband, and her child drive around town on a Saturday, that they could be mistaken for a normal, middle-class family. Their home does have some extravagances in it, but they're extravagances that are accruing in value. She insists on buying toys for their child, but that's hardly going to bankrupt them. 

So N managed not to blow all her money, but she's also pretty clearly rudderless and unsure what to do with all her luck. That's why, when she finds the keys to her old apartment, she makes a totally unnecessary trip back to the building where she used to live.

                        This story got this song stuck in my head, so I'm paying it forward to you.

Normally, if keys are a symbol of anything, it would be of unlocking some clue that leads to enlightenment or resolves a difficulty. Finding a key should be the thing that immediately precedes the main character's epiphany, but in this case, it's the opposite. Finding the keys leads N to become more enmeshed in her confusion. It's significant that the keys are on a "daisy key chain." This could mean, of course, that it's a keychain in the shape of a daisy, but it also suggests the notion of the "daisy chain," when one thing after another is linked together. It suggests that as much as N's big moment of winning the lottery should have freed her from her troubles, she's still linked to the same things that were troubling her in the past, like her need for acceptance from her boss and, by extension, her parents. The keychain isn't a symbol of solving a puzzle; it's a symbol of staying stuck. 

This is one kind of daisy chain. Also, I think Daisy Chain would be a good name for a female professional wrestler.

Critic of the system...or maybe not

In N's pre-lottery days, she worked in an insurance brokerage company. She was miserable, working for another person whose origins were in the same country as N's parents. N's boss took advantage of this to shame N into working longer. N hated working there and was generally unhappy in life. She sees having won as having "narrowly escaped" her life. 

N is full of quips critiquing capitalism. There's the comment quoted above about Americans always wanting to choose the best of everything. (If that's true, why do so many people shop at Walmart?) Then N calls insurance brokerage "ugly and corrupt, like all things healthcare-related in the United States.” She notes with sadness the creeping gentrification of her old neighborhood. The old liquor store now has a mural on it of "animals punching each other in a rainbow boxing ring," surely a metaphor for the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalism and how it's covered over with glitz. She also notes that her old apartment isn't too far from her current one, a nod to how in America, the rich are sometimes a block away from the poor. 

This might make it seem like N is anti-capitalist, but she's not, at least not enough to really get away from it. She notes that money did do one good thing for her, which was to enable her to get fertility treatments that made her son a possibility. When her son is struggling for life in the NICU, the only thing N can think of as an enticement to her son to stay alive is that all her money will give him a nice life. She promises him a nice life through plastic, the same material the fake bushes in front of her old apartment are made of. N then follows this up by spoiling her son with toys. Her husband notes that they're "doing it wrong" by raising their son this way, but N only responds with a non-committal "I hear you." 

Escapee returns to the scene of the crime

N refers to herself as having "escaped" from her former life, and confesses that this makes her feel guilty somehow, although she knows that "being lucky isn't a crime." So why does she go back to the old apartment? Not just go back, but break in, using her old keys? She justifies it by saying you "can't trespass into what's familiar," but I don't think this is a sound legal defense. Being lucky might not be a crime, but breaking into an apartment is. It's the kind of risky behavior people engage in when they're deeply bored. 

There's something about N that makes her want to go back to her old life. She keeps going back to the old apartment, and while there, she's applying for work. It's something she and her therapist have cooked up, to get her back to "gainful employment" (whatever that is). She claims that going to the old apartment is the most "productive" (whatever that is) that she's been in a long time. Unsure what to do with herself, N resorts to nostrums of capitalism, seeking "gainfulness" and "productivity." 

It isn't just N, either. Her old boss, "Mr. B," has sold the apartment building for "a tidy sum," enough that he can now retire to the fancy old folks home not far away. But even though he seemingly hated working when he owned the place and did nothing but watch TV whenever tenants came to him with problems, he now keeps coming back to the building to tidy it up. He asks N, without any sense of the irony he is engaging in, what he's supposed to do with his retirement, watch TV all day? 

I'm sure we all know people who talk their whole lives about retirement, and then when they get there, they complain they're bored and go looking for something to do, often another job. I have to say, after eight months of being quasi-retired, I do not understand this. Not working for most of these last eight months has been everything I ever dreamed it would be. The only thing that's ruined it has been the need to look for work, which in many ways is more time-consuming than work is. (I have a pension, but it's not enough to live off of by itself for long. We've been slowly going through savings and trying to live thriftily, but at some point, I'm going to need a job.) People who get antsy in retirement actually make me angry. I do not understand it. With full and real retirement, I would: do volunteer work; workout; read; write; put more energy into this blog; fuck off and do nothing when I feel like it. I foresee zero existential crises from this lifestyle. But N and Mr. B both seem to not know what to do with themselves now that they have the gift of time, which is really the best thing money can buy.

N's dull-headed epiphany

N sort of finally cracks this revelation near the end. "I think the real trick is to convert money into time," she declares, as though this is any kind of discovery. She ends the story by crawling into bed to take a nap, insisting that time is hers to waste if she wants. It appears that the closest thing she's had to a revelation is to stop feeling like she needs to "produce" or be "gainful." She can waste time if she wants to. In the words of her therapist, she can take up space, both in the temporal part of space-time as well as the spatial part. N worried there was something "disgusting" about this kind of sprawl, but her therapist assures N that she is "American," meaning it's her God-given right to take up as much space and time as she can afford to. Her spreading out beneath her sheets in the middle of the day is her taking up both space and time. 

Sometimes, stories present us with clear and strong epiphanies. The character thought one thing, then went through some kind of experience that made them think another, and now they've changed for good. Other stories present us with a very minor epiphany, one that more closely mirrors the kinds of changes people go through in life. Then there are stories that present us with false epiphanies or refused epiphanies, where the protagonist either is offered a chance to change and decides not to or the protagonist thinks they've made a change for the good, but we, the reader, can see that they're actually going in the wrong direction. There's probably an argument to be made that N has either made a minor change or that she's actually experience an anti-epiphany, a faulty realization that will actually do her harm. Life has come to her, presenting her with a valid point in the same way her husband has presented her with a valid point about raising their child, and N has politely ignored the advice in favor of her own mistaken beliefs. N's therapist has helped her into her bad realization, although maybe the therapist can be forgiven, because the bad and somewhat stereotypical therapist advice--to take up space--is partly a result of N not being honest during her sessions.

N misses both what's good and bad about capitalism

As a lottery winner, N's story is really capitalism in microcosm. All winners in capitalism have some luck; N just knows it. Her awareness of her luck, in addition to her status as a quasi-outsider as a result of her feeling uncomfortable being an American, should make her able to provide a unique perspective on the contradictions of capitalism. But N is too busy being swallowed up by those contradictions. 

On the one hand, in spite of her proclamations about the disgrace of American health care, she's unable to see what's bad about the system she lives in. She doesn't notice the bushes at her old apartment are fake until she gets up close, and she doesn't realize her old apartment she's crashing into is now the model home that nobody lives in until Mr. B catches her in the apartment one day. She literally can't tell fake from real. 

On the other hand, she also misses some of what's good about capitalism, and yes, in spite of all the terrible contradictions and inequalities of capitalism, there are some positives. Her skepticism about healthcare ignores all the hardworking nurses and doctors in the NICU who help save her son when he is born. N sees these doctors and nurses quickly moving from one patient to the next, rather than spending all of their time with her because she is rich, but she doesn't note the egalitarianism of the NICU, the way the caregivers treat every patient the same. 

"Winner" seems on the surface to offer a critique of capitalism, but looking deeper, as N does with the bushes, one can see that this isn't really where the story's headed, because its protagonist isn't capable of looking at it closely enough. There are some scattered observations about the lack of logic in the system, but nothing coherent and unifying. The story works better as a study of the psychology of the lucky winner. Whether destitute lottery winners are really as ubiquitous as believed, it's certainly true that capitalism's winners of all types, whether they won the lottery, inherited a building from their parents, or simply had enough things go right in life that they are finally able to retire in comfort, often act in ways that don't make a lot of sense. What we're really all chasing in the rat race should be time, but we need to develop ourselves such that know what to do with it when we get it.