by Chantal Tseng

Doppelgänger Part II: Tricks of the mind

It occurred to me quite randomly yesterday that I have converged two people into the same person. Have you ever experienced this? Have you ever forgotten someone’s face and then replaced it with another? Maybe think a little about it first. Let me explain.

Back in the early 90’s, one of my teenage summer jobs was cleaning houses. My employer drove around in a blue Volvo with all his equipment in the back of the car shepherding myself & my friend from nice house to nice house to dust shelves, sweep floors, vacuum carpets, mop bathrooms, assassinate weekly home spider invasions, polish mirrors, that sort of thing. I’m not really certain how old I was at the time, maybe 15? 16? I have some very distinct and not so distinct recollections of him: Born again Christian, always upbeat, definitely an extrovert, possibly a gravelly-voiced white dude, maybe in his late 30’s or 40’s. I recall we almost got into a terrible car accident on the freeway once. His survival instincts had kicked in fast as lightning, reacting quickly to veer out of the way of the vehicle that was about to make all our lives defunct. He was a bit shell-shocked and kept talking about how amazed he felt to have had the wherewithal to check his mirrors and react so perfectly. #Quicksilver

There are other snippets here and there floating around my memories. I remember how fascinating it was to go around all these nice strangers’ homes cleaning their wares and not be intrusive. I was always very careful. Except when it came to the every other weekly occurring spider annihilation at THAT ONE blue house near the lake. Never took casualties. Never enough vacu-suck for that creepy crawly nightmare. Seriously every other week it felt like they were just playing dead, having a laugh at my expense and then showing up again like malicious spider zombie demons.

Ok, no it wasn’t this bad. BUT still. If I hadn’t been there to destroy them, maybe they would’ve Arachnaphobia’d the entire house, block, street, town…world?

Fast forward to my early days living in D.C. There was a bartender-manager who eventually left his gig and opened his own place to some success for a few years before sort of just disappearing into industry oblivion. (Read: he may have moved to the suburbs.) Minus the born again Christian vibe, my memory of him is essentially a clone of the Cleaner. I am not sure when exactly my mind decided to make them a single visual relic. Intellectually, I realize they are completely different people. And yet, if I think of them separately (however fuzzily) I cannot help but conjure only the image of the Bar Owner. I think my brain just let the Bar Owner sort of overpower the identity of the House Cleaner, at first slowly and then completely. Don’t be freaked, but the associative memory of these two unconsciously morphing into one being with the face of the latter now forever ingrained in my head is not unlike T-1000 in Terminator 2 assuming the body and voice of his victims. Aside from the murdery part, of course. Although, now that I think about it more, I have essentially killed off the Cleaner in my head and replaced him with the Bar Owner.

T-1000 is arguably the most famous cinematic doppelganger in history. Here in Terminator 2, he is about to kill Lewis the guard. RIP LEWIS. You never had a chance in hell, sir.

On the flip-side of what is fast becoming a dark macabre doppelgänger story, I cannot help but also summon to mind that excellent cameo scene in Wandavision when her “brother” re-enters her life looking not at all like her dead sibling Pietro, but very much like the version of Quicksilver Peter from the X-Men Days of Future Past film. They are to us, born from the same comic book character mythos, albeit from different storied universes. Yet, most noticeably, they have different faces and bodies. They are the inverse of each other’s doppelganger and I applaud this meta move within our pop culture’s ever expanding sensibilities for the ability to understand itself and tease.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson v. Evan Peters in the Quicksilver/Pietro/Peter mutant role. It’s Age of Ultron v. Days of Future Past, two films vastly diverging from common ground save for a character here and there.

I wonder if I will ever be able to sever the Cleaner & Bar Owner from each other and see that just as Pietro and Peter are not the same person, so are they not. I may be too far gone. If I ever meet the Cleaner again, I feel certain I would have no recollection of his true face. I find this mildly disturbing. Mind over matter has veered off the path of quick silver and into liquid metal, you might say.

Doppelganger 2:1 Dry Martini: 2 oz. OP Anderson Aquavit, 1 oz. Izidro Rainwater Madeira, 2 dashes of orange bitters
by Chantal Tseng

Doppelgänger Part I: Beyond Namesake

I was definitely a kid playing some kind of Hero’s Quest fantasy board game when I learned the term doppelgänger. The concept that there might be someone out there that looked exactly like me was kinda neat but also scary. Neat because in my youth, rarely ever meeting anyone who even looked like me in my varying (we moved around a lot) white small town existence, it became an intriguing thought that maybe my twin was on the other side of the world. As I got older and traveled to Southern California and elsewhere, then it became odd because when I met other people who looked a little like me, I rarely felt any connection to them. I never even met another person sharing my namesake until I was in my late twenties. I decided it was cool to be so unique. It seemed silly, almost boring, that there were so many Jennifers, Amys, Michaels & Jims in the universe (no offense). A guy in college alleged that his ex-girlfriend in high school was named Chantal but that was weird in of itself since he seemed to be attracted to me as if he was destined to only fall for my namesake.

“There is another.” – Yoda tells Obi-wan and confounds a franchise till this day.

And of course, playing the ever popular celebrity look-alike game was just a total let down. I’d met a girl who was the near spitting image of a young Sandra Bullock and a guy that could totally double for Jet Li. But when people would venture to tell me who I looked like, they would say Lucy Liu or whoever the most famous Asian actress was of the era. Later in life, at my local pool hall, that at the time I had been visiting regularly for almost ten years, multiple guys would call me by the name of the only other Asian woman regular patron. This would occur on a random yet disturbingly recurring basis. Once again, we look nothing alike. She was tall, fashionable, wore glasses and was way less socially awkward than I am. Truly there is no mistaking us. And regardless of the inherent flattery from being compared to an attractive celebrity or acquaintance, one cannot help but feel like a blank clonal android entity that others customize based on their experience versus my own being.

Scene from Westworld, HBO

But people don’t truly see other people until they have a conversation or share a meal together or some kind of other neuron fusing experience. We need visceral connections to solidify the details of another human. To level up out of a sea of faces and become the person whose name finally sticks, something deeper has to click. Alas, people tend to see me as generic Asian girl or woman until they learn something else that unlocks the door. It’s disheartening but totally true. It makes one feel invisible but only for one’s particular racial profiling which is a very bizarre yet American experience.


“The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn that all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.” ― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

Doppelganger Green Beast: 1 oz. Green Chartreuse, 1 oz. fresh lime juice, 1 oz. cucumber simple syrup, 2 oz. chilled water shaken over ice. Baby Yoda is Grogu, an entirely different force sensitive future Jedi than Master Yoda. Just sayin’. Obviously, they are pretty much doppelgangers. But then it seems Star Wars in general creates entire species of doppelgangers. Incidentally, the original Green Beast cocktail is made with Absinthe.