About three years ago, when I moved back in with my family and was stuck indoors at the height of the Covid lockdowns, I began recording every story my parents told me on my phone’s voice memo app. This started as an idle curiosity, which quickly became a habit, which then became a kind of crazed Pavlovian response. If Dad had a new story about a stamp in his collection, I would turn on the microphone. If Mum was absent-mindedly humming an old folk tune: turn on the microphone. Any in-joke, unfamiliar idiom, obscure reference to some pre-Cultural Revolution film no-one remembers: turn on the microphone. Call it pandemic delirium, call it diasporic guilt, call it digital hoarding – whatever it was, by the end, I had amassed 44 hours 52 minutes and 22 seconds worth of recordings. This impulse to record began around the time I started university, when I had a file on my laptop called ‘stories.TXT’; I would write the stories down rather than taping them. I was feeling what I later understood to be an intense sense of loss – of childhood, of home, of the time I had left with my ageing parents, then entering their 60s and 70s – but which at that point was only legible to me as a fretful, anxious compulsion. I wanted time to stop, and if that wasn’t going to happen then I could at least attempt to collect some dregs of the past, as if, in a fit of magical thinking, I could somehow extend my lifetime backwards even as time dragged me forwards.

The audio files were supposed to flow into that text file (now a Google Doc). My plan was to start with the unedited audio – more accurate, less room for human error, though unwieldy – then compress it into written form, a kind of lossless to lossy conversion. But that never happened. The recordings piled up and up and I couldn’t stop myself, but I also couldn’t muster the patience, or the tolerance (who can listen back to their own voice without cringing?) to transcribe them.

Of the nearly two days of audio now sitting dormant on my phone, I doubt if I have listened back to even an hour’s worth. There are, however, some broad patterns that emerge almost immediately. Mum talks more than Dad: that much has always been true. Mum is emotive, effusive; Dad is slow, laconic. Certain dates – 1976, 1989 – appear again and again. Periodisation comes naturally: the countryside years are lonesome, the university years are frantic. Everything is ‘bourgeois’ or ‘intellectual’, until it isn’t. England is a transformation: The Beatles, Manchester United, Hugh Grant. Everything seems to come back to the fact that they had kids too old, and we grew up too fast, and the years have passed by too quickly.

In other ways the files are completely surprising: names and places I don’t recognise, anecdotes I’m certain I haven’t heard before. Until I started writing this essay, I was convinced I had started compiling them in May 2020, but they only date back to November. Mostly, though, I am shocked by how ugly I find them. This might be an obvious thing to observe about tinny, low-fidelity voice notes captured on a mid-range Android phone bought four years ago. But it’s also true in less obvious ways. Often I’d record while we were cooking, or on long car journeys – times when the distraction of light handiwork brought our guards down. As a result, the recordings are smattered with the interruptions of chopping, clinking, beeping, vrooming, gushing, splashing, hissing, coughing, sneezing. They are less interviews than they are extended passages of domestic caterwauling. A sound editor would have an aneurysm.

The microphone has a blunt objectivity; nothing is hidden. It captures everything you want it to, and everything you don’t. I never understood how inane my conversation can be until I listened back to these tapes; how rude, how graceless. Maybe this was a side effect of the desperate, reactive zeal I began to approach my recordings with, like a news reporter eager for a soundbite, or a predator hungry for prey. There is a sad contradiction that, in attempting to capture it, you distance yourself from the most intimate moment precisely as it is happening. You become a spectator and not a participant.

I’m not sure how much use there is to this objectivity, in the end. The microphone is merely another imperfect tool, an attempt to answer the impossible question of how to represent infinite reality with finite technology – this is a kind of magical thinking, too. I wonder if I would have been happier if I had abandoned this logic and just taken any set of data points, however arbitrary, to be meaningful. Perhaps I could find meaning in the app’s ill-fated attempt to process Mandarin-speaking voices into an English auto-transcript, which ends up reading a little like garbled experimental poetry – one example from the 12 July 2021:

To be very lovely. This isn’t always true. It’s yellow. Modern world translator. Many times. Even myself. So that when you don’t show it to a window, where you know why

Or perhaps there is beauty in the app’s visual rendering of the files’ oscillating soundwaves, each one infinitesimally different from the next, like so many Monet Haystacks.

Ironically, in its noisy, wide-angle rendering of private life, the microphone’s perfect memory is most valuable to me for its subjectivity. A stranger combing through the recordings would learn little about the plot points of my family’s life, but they would learn a lot about everything else: the restless, buoyant dynamics of family conversation; the chaos of the kitchen before dinnertime; the confusion, the arguments; the disarming surprise of vulnerability; the flinty mother, the modest father, the nervous son. How strange to seek to produce a document of fact and end up with a document of feeling.

I don’t know what to do with these files now. I will likely never listen to them all the way through. It feels embarrassing, hearing one of your conversations played back to you verbatim, like reading a diary entry from when you were a teenager. No sooner are the words spoken than you think of a way you could have said them better, a way you could have chosen to be more honest but didn’t. How do we ever stand it in the moment? Perhaps because there is not this feeling of standing behind a glass pane, watching a scene you recognise but cannot control.

It is painful, though, giving up this one-time hope of transcribing the conversations into written form. It seems like one more way of submitting to the entropy of my life, that maybe I will never become a complete, self- actualised person without something in me breaking first. I need those ambitions in order to live – that one day I will organise all my photos and drawers and hard drive and start to exercise and fix my sleep schedule and on and on. But then it might be that ambition is just a way to keep myself from living, lingering in the promise of a perfect future rather than an imperfect present. Mum told me recently that the photos she took back in the eighties and nineties she has still never organised; they are now collecting dust on a shelf in the upstairs bedroom. I don’t consider my mum to have not lived a complete, self-actualised life.

The more macabre part of me thinks that this trove of audio files will comfort me when my parents die, that the sound of their voices and the memory of old conversations will sustain me. I don’t believe this, deep down. Unlike home videos, which have a clumsy, analog charm, these recordings hold no nostalgia for me. In the most bitter assessment, they are the folly of a depressed 22-year-old who believed that such tracts of obsession and digital distortion might grant eternal life. In pushing the ‘record’ button I was trying to keep the past alive, but I think what I was really doing was sounding its death knell, marking the point at which it became fossilised as memory and no longer as life. It is like giving an actor a lifetime achievement award, a supposed gesture of celebration that actually signifies your irrelevance (Marlene Dietrich called it the deathbed award).

Still, I find it hard to turn my back on these records. They are fossils, yes, they are pieces of deadwood. Wouldn’t I rather have fossils than nothing at all? I could never get the time to stop, but what good would it have done me not even to try? Perhaps this is the fantasy of any compulsive hoarder, understanding that all their collecting will amount to nothing in the end, believing in it anyway. I believed in my recordings, even when they were ugly, even when they were absurd. If I am to try and live in the imperfect present, perhaps all I can do is believe.
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Ian Wang is a writer living in London. His work has appeared in ArtReview, The Baffler and Tribune.