The Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers Senior Meditations Collection

The Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers
Senior Meditations Collection
Readings from Members of the Senior Class
Phillips Exeter Academy
Spring 2011
Edited by Todd Hearon
This volume is made possible through the generosity
of The Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers ’97 Memorial Fund
PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY
Exeter, New Hampshire
2011
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers ’97
April 10, 1997 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Colby Wilkinson
March 24, 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Pooja Jayaprakash
March 31, 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Bryn Launer
cover art:
“IPPOLIT” by Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers
April 7, 2011 .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Ved Rajkumar
cover design: Nancy Shipley
Communications Office
April 14, 2011
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Theo Motzkin
April 21, 2011
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Evan Strouss
May 5, 2011
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Alison Economy
May 12, 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Grace Eggert
May 19, 2011
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Charielle McMullan
May 26, 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Yoanna Zheng
Copyright © 2011
by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy
June 1, 2011
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
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Ac kno wle dg ments
Many people contributed to the creation of this volume, the series
it inaugurates, and the fund that makes both possible. Grateful
acknowledgment is given, first and foremost, to Pamela Bailey Powers
and Robert M. Powers; Zach Iscol ’97 and his parents, Kenneth
and Jill Iscol; Bonnie Weeks and the staff of Alumni/ae Affairs
and Development, Phillips Exeter Academy; Karen Ingraham,
Nancy Shipley and the office of Communications, Phillips Exeter
Academy; the members of the 2011 Senior Meditation Selection
Committee—Robert Thompson, Linda Safford, Christine Robinson,
Matt Miller, Erica Plouffe Lazure and Todd Hearon; Lundy Smith,
Chair of the Department of English, and, not least of all, the teachers
of the seniors represented here.
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Prefac e
iii
Each spring, eleven members of the senior class at Phillips Exeter
Academy are selected to read their senior meditations on Thursday mornings in Phillips Church. The readings represent a range
of student voices and experiences found in the much larger number of meditations composed that year and submitted to a selection committee at the end of winter term. At times profound,
by turn whimsical or philosophical, always personal, these meditations stand as a kind of culmination in the students’ Exeter
career—a holding forth, a taking into account and making shape
of some definitive experience, and an invitation, finally, for the
listening audience to be included in the personal as it ramifies
into the collective and communal. Owing to the recent establishment of The Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers ’97 Memorial
Fund, these spring meditations are for the first time gathered into
print, along with Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers’ own, which inaugurates this annual series.
Todd Hearon
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This volume of
Senior Meditations is dedicated to
Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers
Infinitely Loved and Loving
January 1, 1979 –
Midnight, November 17, 2003
“Self-portrait,” final artwork by Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers,
completed November 14, 2003
Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers spent her life,
from infancy on, in and out of Cystic Fibrosis
treatment at Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. She died from complications of
Cystic Fibrosis five and a half weeks short of
her twenty-fifth birthday. During her last year,
she was intermittently an in-patient for more
than six months. Shan would go into the hospital for weeks of I.V. antibiotics, physical therapy, and breathing medications and then pop
out to make her life full. That last year, she devoted her time to her writing, her art, graduate
study at Harvard at night, work at Russell Orchards in Ipswich, Massachusetts, tutoring
children in Math and English, and travel to
visit her beloveds, Patrick Sweeney ’99 in
Kentucky and Amy Barsky ’97, in San Francisco/
Oakland, California.
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In addition to being a graduate of Exeter and
Sarah Lawrence, through her brief life Shan
taught at PEA’s summer school, attended the
Universities of Santa Barbara and Galway, Ireland, as well as Oxford and Harvard. She
toured the United States, by herself, on a
Greyhound bus, visited Glacier National Park,
Canada, Mexico, and France. She also worked
at Starbuck’s and Hutchins Organic Farm in
Concord, Massachusetts.
Throughout her last year, Shan watched certain films over and again and read. The movies
included Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, The
Hours, Wit, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and for pure
fun and laughter, Waking Ned Devine. Her last
readings came to One Hundred Years of Solitude,
which she would read in Children’s Hospital’s
stone-animal-filled garden. Lexi Greenberg of
Shan’s Sarah Lawrence days, Ben Bines, a dear
friend of Shan’s from early childhood, and
PEA beloveds Amy Barsky and Patrick
Sweeney all gathered and cared for Shan, at
home, as she lay dying through her last breath.
Among Shan’s last words came her biddings to
all of us: “Provoke a lot of laughter. Love unconditionally. And, read The Brothers Karamazov or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Your
choice!” Amy and Lexi read to Shan from Solitude as Shan slipped from her last hours of life.
As fate would have it, another of Shan’s
beloveds, Zach Iscol ’97, was a Marine deployed in Iraq during Shan’s last days. He had
no way of knowing she was in her last hours,
yet simultaneously by chance, a world and a
war away, Zach also was reading One Hundred
Years of Solitude.
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“Born Still” is Shannon’s meditation which she presented at Phillips
Exeter Academy, Phillips Church, April 10, 1997. Shannon began and
ended her reading that day with two songs by The Pogues: “And the
Band Played Waltzing Matilda” at the beginning and “I’m a Man You
Don’t Meet Every Day” at the end. Excerpts from those songs are included as epigraph and coda to her meditation here.
Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers
Shan’s parents, Pamela and Bob, have made small edits to the original
copy of “Born Still”; those edits primarily spring from small changes
Shan made when she presented her meditation to the PEA community.
The edits also include a very few changes to punctuation and spelling.
THE flush comes after the meds have run their course. The medicine
is painless on entry. You can follow the first of it: a rush; up the arm,
cold in the shoulder, through the neck into the lungs. Then you lose
time. Aware of the mucus being cleaved away from its fleshy walls,
making you whole again. Ignorant of the minutes. Yellow serum runs
fast. The last of it, diluted and warm, leaves you empty. The flush
comes now. Skin around the needle’s stem is left sore and tired. Veins,
red and soft, are dirty. God, it stings when it goes in. Takes its time to
push the last remnants out and through. Then, once that is gone, it
continues to flow. Clear and pallid like water, it drips from the bag to
the tube, through the spike, through the vein. Only repairing injury,
assuring open passage. Does nothing but flow and take you along.
Every moment drip drip drip—you can sleep, awake and still it flows.
Until the instant you look away and the last of it fades down, and disappears into you.
An audio recording of Shan’s PEA meditation reading as well as her
Children’s Hospital interview and written versions of her novel, poems,
and essays and copies of her art are available at www.ShannonNissaBaileyPowers.com. All are invited to share in her website!
Please feel free to contact Shan’s parents, Pamela Bailey Powers and
Robert M. Powers, at [email protected] if you have questions or
need more information.
Now those that were living did their best to survive
In a mad world of blood, death and fire
And for seven long weeks I kept myself alive
While around me the corpses piled higher . . .
And when I awoke in my hospital bed
. . . Christ, I wished I was dead
Never knew there was worse things than dying
And no more I’ll go waltzing Matilda
All through the green bushes so far and near . . .
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda
Who’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me?
(from “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” The Pogues,
copyright Eric Bogle)
Born Still
April 10, 1997
This is for my parents.
* * * *
There had never been a thought of living. Never been hope for a cure.
I took pills, three with meals, two others every six hours. I always had.
I figured I would forever. Mothering was far from me when I found
out people with Cystic Fibrosis die from Cystic Fibrosis. Reflection
was far from me. I played a different role, the child, the movie star. So,
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content with pretend games and my father’s puppets, I accepted dying
young. A life expectancy can bestow great freedom. Knowing where
you stand and a respect for the time you have. My end was a part of
my life. There was no fear. There was no regret.
I never paid attention in the doctor’s office when my mother would
question new developments and treatments. I was always restless to
leave. I knew I could run. I knew that was good. I knew that when I
came in for pulmonary function tests everyone was overjoyed to have
me puff into the machine. I was an exception to the rule. I didn’t
know. I couldn’t read the numbers. The skinny boy with the red face
had one quarter my lung capacity. I didn’t know; I knew he was half
my age. I knew I could run, I knew that was good, I knew they studied my disease. I knew it was in a laboratory. I knew Children’s was my
hospital. And, goddamn it, above all I knew I was going to die. But
then I was given “a chance.” There was the doctor’s prognosis: “She
could live to be forty, thirty. If she keeps up her health, her lung function is higher than my own.” I planned to be dead by twenty-eight. I
was quietly devastated. Stripped of my consistency, my certainty, the
answers to my mother’s drawn-out concerned questions made me hope
. . . Thus began my desire to die.
* * * *
People revolted me. I had no tolerance for their habits nor their seemingly false relations with one another. I liked being alone; it was
cleaner that way, less to lose. I saw old women decorating themselves.
They pencil in eyebrows, plucking at black hairs springing from moles.
The fat ones wear skinny shoes as disguise, their feet ballooning out
from the tops in great, bulging humps. I would watch their baggy faces
squint at babies, their tongues slapping their lips after each breath,
flicking futilely in attempt to moisten their ancient, wrinkled mouths.
I hated them. They were so gray—no—pale blue, so used they were
transparent. I loathed their ignorance, their belief that any reason
other than medicine preserved their decrepit shells, allowing them to
drag on day after day. I envied it. I hated them for going on. I hated
them for leaving me, my beauty, my young face, behind. What right
had they?
There was no sanction in youth either. I felt so far from any innocence. I knew one can go only for so long with no recognition of time.
The children on my street, at whom I would peer from my living room
window, were too bright. Their clothes—neon colors, pink hair ties,
orange jeans—were blinding. I could hear their voices echo and
screech each moment of daylight, and it tortured me. The children
were vibrant. They would dart across streets like dragonflies, never
noticing me in my solitude nor having to. They were their own meaning, each the center of a universe consisting of those who loved them.
They had eyes only for the relevant, the beautiful. I sat and waited for
those children to wane, to grow. Though, to my eyes they never got
any taller. The mothers would stand by, some still plump from delivery, cradling pink fleshy bundles of urine and vein. (Have you noticed
you can see the veins in a baby, in its temples, its neck, its ankles?)
They would walk with their children, speaking to them in tones of
anger, love and praise. The children would respond to their voices.
The sons walked like the fathers. Daughters would race each evening
to jump into the arms of dads just arrived from work.
Sweet was life, and I hated it. It seemed so lost to me. I had given up
all I saw before me. So I spent time concentrating on watching peo-
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ple live as though through an hour glass. I envied the dead babies, for
they did not know their fate. I believed I clung, rotting, to life. The
babies had fulfilled their destiny at conception—to die, to pass away.
They summoned no courage; they did not need to recognize their lives
had been milked sour. That is all I let myself see, and I was afraid. Unable to live with the uncertainty of death, I scorned its members. Mothers, fathers, old women, and their children decorate life; they help us
pass our time with beauty. I pretended their presence abhorred me, when
in truth I felt only envy. I envied soft wrinkles and fading pink in cheeks.
I longed to hold my arms in gentle curves around and towards a child,
my child. Innocence and make-believe were lost to me, my father had
become mortal; just a man. And, as hard as I had pushed during this
time of my life, I could not cleave myself away from my drive to continue. I hated life because I did not have the courage to let it go.
* * * *
Sidney’s eyes were dark and yellowed about the edges, long lashes, spiraling glances towards and away from me. We sat on the stoop in Harvard Square every day to “spare change” for booze and cigarettes. He
looked sick, but he was smart and he had a full smile. Bouncing when
he walked, he told how life was to be eaten, spent quickly, and spread
out. He told me everything I wanted to hear. The sun was bright and
hot every day. And every day a group of punks and he and I would
march each afternoon into the graveyard to sip drinks and pass time
away. He loved me because I smelled good and was clean. He loved me
because I was innocent. He loved me because I was smart enough to
know why he drank and because I wanted to be taken along. We both
wanted to speed things up a bit—to run out faster. He was running
out faster; he had been trying longer. He had created his own death as
I was struggling to do. We spent the days wrapped in each other,
wrapped in a comfortable destructive pattern, wrapped in the sun and
the trees of the graveyard. The nights we spent in the Somerville
house, with any punks, skins, or lost alcoholics who could provide
wine or rent. The nights were so much slower than the days. It is
slower to be drunk in the night because there is no movement in the
street or in the clouds to distract from reason.
Before passing out each night, Sidney hunched himself over the
wooden record player. His small body, in black tattered clothes,
wrapped itself into itself. Boxed wine in a Christy’s cup, stolen from
the trash, swayed with his hand. The red liquid would spill over and
follow the lines of his hand down to his wrist onto the black vinyl.
The mattress was soaked in yellows and grays. Ingrained by ashes, bits
of dirt carried in by the bottom of our boots, hair, and spit, it was one
of three in the front room. We would begin sleep-entwined, soft and
still. But his body fell from consciousness always before mine, and then
our separation would begin. Sid’s breathing echoed in my ear, shattering the in-and-out pattern set by those sleeping around us. In the
dark, I lay encased by the smell of cheap liquor, urine and bodies. I
concentrated on his throat’s heaves and crackles. The sound scared
me, even as it assured me that he was still with me. His eyes, waning
yellow moons, would flicker and roll beneath their sunken lids. Each
finger strained apart from the other, clenched as if grasping an apple
from its perch. His arms were crossed over his chest and would jerk,
pushing me throughout the night. His hands filled the space between
the jaw and shoulder, hugging his neck, squeezing as he twitched. His
feet kicked and stiffened and kicked and stiffened. His muscles rolled
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him over and back as his veins began their withdrawal. He sweat to
clear himself of the poison; he shook from the lack of it. His belly rippled, aching with the absence of sweet alcohol.
I would lie close and awake, smelling, feeling gravel falling from
creases into my ears, sticking to my neck. I would shape my body
around him as he twisted. I tried to hold him as I had in the beginning
of our sleep. Each night it was this play of illness and love. Each night
as I wrapped about him I thought how it would be if the shaking
stopped. Would it be then that his heart would fill with fatigue and finally rest? I wished it would and prayed for his salvation. I never slept.
I never closed my eyes, only rotated night after night around his fading, longing body.
* * * *
There was beauty in Sidney Grindstaff. He let me go because he knew I
did not belong caught and dying with him. He touched my face and
kissed me once. With our parting I began the return from the swirl of
sex and fists and smoke which had carried me for so long. I had lost time.
I had burned away my fear of death, embracing self-destruction. I had
not noticed my jeans fading and beginning to smell. I had not noticed
smoking a pack a day. I had not noticed my hair reeking of alcohol and
sweat. And before I knew it, I was cleared of my envy to live. I had grown
again to expect to die. In this familiar expectancy I searched for the comfort and freedom which had existed before they began to find cures for
Cystic Fibrosis. I found nothing, and I realized why.
“But you started out whole, Sidney.”
“I’m not anything now. Do you know how much I sleep, Shannon?
Fourteen, eighteen hours a day. I’m dying more than you.”
“Fuck you, you started out okay.”
I had found salvation in another person killing himself because it
was a comfort not to be the only one. Then, with the remembrance
of this conversation held on a stoop outside a glasses shop beside an
alley in Harvard Square, fighting for my friend or lover or killer to
stop drinking, I knew the difference. He had not begun with
swollen blood vessels in his throat. A sign of the final stages of alcoholism, they bled and streaked his vomit bright red. His face had
not always been thin and drawn. His hands were once stable in the
mornings, not shaking so hard he couldn’t twist the cap off the bottle. Sid had eaten himself away. I had begun broken; he had begun
whole. He had no one to stop him, no one had cared, and he had
taken his lovely body and ruined it. He knows what he has done
and though his eyes brim with hope that he could be wrong, his
smile betrays his faith and in his sweet face I know he knows what
he has done. And it is in my grief for you, Sidney, that I find the
strength to recognize what I have. Yes, I began with less than you.
My lungs were already rotting at my birth. I cannot digest food
alone. I cannot fight off sickness. And I may not live much longer
than you. I am angry at you because you are beautiful and you
should live longer. But I am angry at myself for committing your sin
in not recognizing what I have. My mother loves me and has given
everything to save her little girl. She remained in the doctor’s office, after every appointment, with my dad, while I would play in
the hall. The same hope in her eyes as in yours. I am guilty. I have
taken life for granted. I have thought only of my own fears and anxiety. I have risked AIDS, drug addiction and happiness because I could
8
not take responsibility to live.
How I searched for experience! How I wanted to be cured of my mortality quickly, like medicine through my I.V.! In my quest I have lost
innocence, pride and simplicity. I am guilty. I tell my mother of my
guilt, and she writes me a poem. It ends, “This is the child of light.” I
do not see myself as light. I have done much wrong and caused much
pain to those who love me. But. Still. My mother tells me that I am
Yeats’ Glimmering girl, with apple blossom in her hair plucking golden
apples from the sun. She is a poet, she tells me how I am.
Her poem tells a story. My father and mother meet with baskets of
fruit, blankets, and sunlight at the Dell. From his plane over Plum Island, off the garnet shore of Massachusetts, my grandfather would
greet my grandmother during the war; there, too, my father would woo
my mother, call out to her, she among the bayberries and salt pans. I
was born the first of January. My mother wrapped me in wool and
linen, called me her baby bunting. She sang, tuneless and comforting,
throughout my childhood. She and my father watched as I hunted
through the grasses of my aunts’, and at my grandmother’s house, for
eggs colored pink and pale blue. They watched me discover dresses
and wars. I built with blocks; I received presents; I read alone in dim
light. They led this new life towards its point, while always preserving
its youth.
Apple, pear, Mirabel plum; Wild Hickory moon; After the leaf fall, holding the stem. These images, magical and earthy, allow me to tie together imagination and reality.
My mother has told me of my beauty, my joy. She holds me close and
through her arms whispers her truth unto me. She sees me whole and
unbroken. Her verse sings my innocence. Born of her, I know that
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what she tells is part of me. Mobiles, fairies and horses become familiar to me once more. Her eyes, hazed in unconditional love, produce
words. I read them over, and I am this child of light.
* * * *
I now live my life as a calm mixture of living and dying. I take the
breeze into my hair and let it blow through the curls and away. I am
not reaching to live or to hate or to fall. I am not reaching at all. I
have been given a chance and a perspective. I see what is possible. I
accept what is not. I forgive myself for giving away some of me, I forgive myself for taking away some of my mother and my father. I still
love Sidney, but I haven’t spoken to him in awhile. I am taking a new
medicine called DNase. It thins the mucus in my lungs so that I can
live longer. I am not sure how much. I am HIV negative; I am not sure
how. I think I might be falling in love again. I’m not sure if that’s fair.
I am thankful. I am not yet ready to die. But at least I can say I love
what is mortal.
* * * *
So on comes the flush. It hurts as it pushes through and extracts remnants of anger and love and fear. It burns on entry, because I am sore
and a little tired. After some time though, the jagged edges of my insides fuse together once more. Walls are thinner, but holes are filled.
Flow continues to flow. Clear and pallid. I am still. I am awake. I cannot feel its motion, no push no pull, it just exists and carries me on-
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ward. I will not know for sure where it ends. It will fade into me and
complete me. And that will be the end. As we all have an end and we
are all forever fading into ourselves and away.
My life streams through me—I am unaware of its pace and purpose. I
am awed by its power and brevity. Respectful of its belonging to me.
Wondrous of its departure and, though I am not yet unfaltering, when
the time comes, I hope to die victorious—content to let it go.
So be easy and free . . .
I’m a man you don’t meet every day.
(from “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day,” The Pogues)
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Colby Wilkinson
March 24, 2011
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
—T.S. Eliot
MY story begins at the base of a volcano in San Salvador called Quetzaltepec. Our bus driver, Armando, had already made the climb several times so he was staying behind, blasting Spanish pop music. We
eagerly gathered at the mouth of the path, ready to see our first volcano. The volcano was actually active and could erupt any day, but our
logic was that if it didn’t yesterday maybe it won’t today either. There
are plenty of safer tourist sites we could have seen on our one day of
touring but our adviser, Doug, wanted us to see this.
The volcano climb was on the fourth day of our trip, and was the break
we all needed. I had travelled with the Keene, New Hampshire, Interact group to El Salvador. Although it was a nice hiatus from the cold
New England weather in February, this was anything but a vacation.
On the first day of the trip we arose at six a.m. for breakfast and to
pack the bus, for this was workday number one. Starting the workweek off with a productive first day was crucial to a successful week.
We were there to build six new houses for one of the poorest villages
in El Salvador. Even at seven a.m. we were all glued to the bus windows as we made our way to the worksite. It was a whole different
world from our quiet New Hampshire neighborhoods. The lack of an
enforced speed limit made driving an adventure in itself. The sidewalks were packed with people trying to get to work or school, some
14
people that clearly had no other place to be except the streets, and
families who were trying to sell potato pancakes and beans to pedestrians. A rich smell of exhaust gave the city its signature smell; if someone would blindfold me and take me back to San Salvador I would
know exactly where I was. Slowly the buildings got smaller and the
roads between stoplights got longer until we were into the wilderness.
I thought I had seen poor before, but this was beyond my comprehension. The houses were sticks tied together with hard mud packed
in between the cracks. The roofs were scrap metal and palm tree
branches, probably not enough material to stop leaks during a light
rain. The floor was dirt and certainly not flat, and the smell of burning garbage seemed to enclose us in our worksite.
Just to give you an idea about the building process, when we arrived
a different volunteer group had already cleared and leveled a piece of
land about twenty feet by twenty feet. Holes were partially dug for
poles, and strings outlined the edges of the house. Each house had two
bedrooms, an open kitchen and a patio. Our job was to mount each
post in the ground and slide slabs of concrete down the pole’s grooves
to set the walls. When we left, the house was not actually done, but a
week later another group from Keene came to weld the roof and screw
in the windows and doors.
When we arrived at our worksite one of the sons from the family my
team was building for was already digging holes for the poles to be cemented into. His name was Miguel and he was slightly taller than me,
with a thin build, skin that had been tanned into leather from the relentless sun, and calloused hands from helping his mother build his
original house. Throughout the week while we sucked down water
and worked in shorts and cutoff T-shirts, Miguel worked in flip-flops,
jeans and sometimes long-sleeved shirts. Suffice it to say he was much
15
more adapted to the conditions. He rarely spoke, but when he didn’t
know what we were saying he would just smile as a signal of how grateful he was that we were there to help his family.
During our work breaks we were too energized to sit in the shade and
drink water (which is probably what we should have done), so we
played soccer. The people of the village had set up two wooden rectangles at each end of a rocky, slightly grassy field next to the brick
schoolhouse. After a few minutes of chasing around the locals who
were far superior to me as ball handlers, I decided it was best for me
to observe. I sat down and watched the locals play against people
from the group I was with, some of whom were varsity soccer players.
The locals scored time and time again as if they had game-planned
that morning on how to beat us. It was beautiful to watch their coordination and grace, and the way they knew exactly what the other
was thinking when they executed a give-and-go. Sometimes they
would juggle in front of a defender as a tease, laughing and balancing
a glass of water in one hand. While they blew by defenders with powerful agility they could see teammates at all angles around them, even
though it looked like they were looking straight ahead. Miguel in his
ragged jeans and torn T-shirt striking a ball with his hard, calloused
feet into the upper corner of the goal reminded me of posters I used to
have of professional soccer players. I envied the locals their athleticism
and understanding of the game, and most of all their joy as they imagined themselves scoring the game-winning goal in the World Cup;
each one of them told me someday they would be playing in the
World Cup.
We started our climb up Quetzaltepec and immediately wondered why we
were so eager. The terrain was rough and steep, and our legs burned within
twenty minutes. To block out the pain we focused on the beauty of our sur-
16
roundings. The last eruption was in 1917, and it had left an array of natural artwork for our viewing pleasure. Rock sculptures were twisted and
shaped in ways I didn’t know possible, and some were covered in artistic
graffiti. We also admired the makeshift architecture of the locals. They had
taken the framework of cars and old billboards along with tree branches and
bricks to build shacks with multiple rooms. Some even had businesses on
the side of the paths where they tried to sell fried banana and coconut juice.
The top of the volcano looked within reach at times, but as we walked on it
seemed we weren’t making any progress.
The third night in El Salvador was the highlight of the trip for me
personally. We drove forty-five minutes in our school bus (of course,
blasting Spanish pop music and pretending to know how to dance) to
an orphanage on the side of the highway. As soon as we walked
through the gates we were swarmed by children ranging from age four
to ten who couldn’t hold back their excitement. Immediately the orphanage playground, which was usually just a large driveway with a
basketball hoop and some picnic tables under a canopy, became a circus with simultaneous games of soccer, tag, basketball, and duck-duckgoose (more specifically, pato-pato-ganso). The older kids at the
orphanage were shy at first, but they soon were able to sit down with
the Spanish-speaking kids from my group who could actually hold a
conversation with them. I stuck to smiling and saying hola for the extent of my communication; to be honest, I was one of the shy ones too.
While the group members I was with ran up to the kids and threw
them on their shoulders where they shrieked with joy, I sat down at a
picnic table and grabbed some pizza and soda. At one point I looked
over to watch one of the orphans dunk a basketball with the help of
my friend, Matt, and when I looked back to my plate my soda was
missing. I looked under the table and found a boy hugging the soda
with one arm with a “gotcha” smile on his face. This is how I met
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Jorge. He was one of the shy ones, too, so we got along great. I sat
with him and continually filled up his cup with soda, and he smiled a
smile too big for his face each time I reached for the bottle to refill his
cup. My best friend, Mike, was pretty fluent in Spanish, and Jorge told
him he wanted to get on my shoulders. So I put him on my shoulders
and ran around bouncing him up and down, spinning so all the lights
looked like a blur, and chasing people while Jorge laughed and yelled
ir alla (go there!) until he couldn’t breathe. And that continued until
my neck ached and Jorge was exhausted so we both sat down for more
pizza and soda. When we were sitting at the picnic table relaxing after
our meal, Jorge leaned on me until he fell asleep. We left shortly after,
and I carefully laid him down on the picnic table bench before I
headed for the bus.
We soon reached a level of steepness on the volcano where only rocks and
shrubs were present, not houses, so we were forced to make our own entertainment. We joked about feeling the ground shake—maybe the volcano
was erupting and we would all have to sprint down to the bus for a great escape! It seemed like such a silly idea, the volcano erupting at any moment.
I’ve seen eruptions and rivers of lava on TV, and I’ve made my own volcanoes with baking soda and vinegar in elementary school, but being on the
side of something that at any moment could throw molten rock into the air
was too serious to be anything but a joke to us at the time.
To pack for our trip to El Salvador we used one suitcase for our personal belongings and one suitcase for donations. We spent the week
sizing up our family for clothes and the night before the last day we
went through a hotel room full of clothes, shoes, stuffed animals and
most importantly soccer balls to pick out a selection for our family.
When we arrived that morning at our family’s house (the one they
were living in while we finished their new house), we met the rest of
the family. I spent most of the time with Miguel, so I don’t remember
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the rest of the family’s names, but I remember an older daughter who
had a daughter of her own, another son, and the mother who was the
head of the household. Miguel told us his mother was a maid in town,
which explained why we never saw her during the day. The lack of a father was evident, but it passed through my awareness like the pain from
my blisters I had grown to ignore. I somehow was elected to help carry
in the clothes for our family, and I got a firsthand view of the inside of
the house. I tried to hide my shock, but I may have given it away by not
blinking. This looked like a camping trip gone wrong, but it was their
home. There were fire coals in the corner heating a pot, with several
dirty dishes waiting to be filled for breakfast resting by a bucket of drinking water. A couple of wooden chairs sat in the middle of the house
around a makeshift table that had previously been a billboard. In the
bedroom (the one bedroom for all five of them), a mattress rested on the
dirt floor, surrounded by piles of clothes that I was about to add to. The
mattress had mud stains on the side, probably from when it rained, and
I could see tiny bugs crawling in the grooves of the pillow top. This scene
froze me when I walked in, but I went about my business of delivering the
clothes and promptly left. On my way out I smiled at the mother who was
beaming about her family’s new clothes and shoes.
After an hour and a half of climbing we finally reached the top of the volcano,
and all jokes of eruption turned into silent gazes of astonishment. We were
looking directly into the crater of the volcano at a small lake in the middle. I
couldn’t tell if the lake was just a small pool or an actual lake because it was so
far down. It took awhile for me to gather the nerve to look over the edge, and
even when I did I was lying on my stomach clutching rocks on either side of me.
I don’t really have a fear of heights, but the straight drop to the base of the crater
put butterflies in my stomach. We took pictures and repeatedly gasped “wow”
as we stared into the crater, for there were no other words to describe this feat
of nature.
19
On the last night we had a dinner at the hotel where we had an open
floor for discussion of stories and feelings we had from the trip. I sat
quietly at my seat listening, smiling on the inside because I had helped
make the world a better place. We heard funny stories about failed
body surfing attempts at the beach, cute stories about little orphans
who wouldn’t let go of legs when we left the orphanage, but I still remember one speech as if I heard it yesterday. It came from our group
adviser, Doug, who is a local funeral home director who had the idea
of a volunteer organization for high school students about twenty years
ago and turned it into Interact. He told a story about a mentally disabled child at the orphanage that he had taken the time to learn
about. His mother lived under a bridge in the city, and had a powerful addiction to cocaine. At night she would send his sister, who was
only fourteen years old, out into the city to make money through prostitution. His mother would then take the money she earned to buy
drugs to meet her addiction needs. If the child cried, his mother would
lick her finger and dip it in her precious cocaine and then in his
mouth. The cocaine nearly destroyed his brain before he could walk,
and he was left paralyzed and severely mentally disabled. His mother
died under that bridge when he was three years old, and he was then
taken to the orphanage. At the end Doug thanked us for all our efforts
during the week, and expressed his gratitude to us for giving up a vacation to see how the majority of the rest of the world lives.
After a week in El Salvador our shoulders were sunburned, our hands
and heels were blistered, and our bodies were scraped from the concrete slabs, but the feeling of accomplishment canceled out all those
temporary injuries. We showed up staggered by this new world we had
seen only in magazines and on TV, and left knowing we made it a better place. Little did I know that San Salvador would have a much
larger impact on my life after I returned home.
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We arrived in Keene at one a.m. after our sixteen-hour journey, and I
immediately slept for sixteen hours. When I woke up it was as if my
prospective of the trip had become clearer than when I was actually
there. My hypothesis now is that I needed to remove myself from that
environment to see all angles of the trip, the way you step back from
a finished project for inspection. Maybe it was my brain’s way of not
overwhelming me with emotion. Maybe it was the idea that in order
to be conscious I needed to remove myself from time, and therefore
while I was in El Salvador I couldn’t be completely conscious of what
was actually around me. Whatever it was, I was glad it kept me from
comprehending my surroundings in the moment.
While I was there I watched the beauty and grace of the local soccer
players as they played keep-away from our team. In that moment I saw
all the positive characteristics: the athleticism, the joy, the cohesiveness of their team. What I didn’t see was the depth of the situation. I
didn’t see their rib cages protruding from missed meals, even though
it was right in front of me. I didn’t see their pain from missing their fathers. I didn’t see their stomachs full of parasites. They told me of their
dreams, but I didn’t really acknowledge the fact that they had a slim,
if any, chance of being in the World Cup. What did they have to look
forward to? I was looking forward to graduation and college, while
they didn’t look forward to anything because nothing was there. They
learned the basics of reading and writing in their brick schoolhouse,
but there was no school close enough for them to attend after that.
Their future was in that village, and probably the reason they were so
good at soccer was because it was all they had.
It is still a tough concept for me to grasp today: the fact that Miguel
and I are made out of the same material; we are both human, and yet
because I was born in a different physical location I have an opportu-
21
nity of a bright future while he lives his days playing soccer and hoping it doesn’t rain because his family’s mattress will get wet. When I
met his family, I just shrugged off the fact that he never had a father.
Where would I be without my parents? I needed to put myself in his
shoes to imagine his pain and struggles. But did he even have shoes?
The orphanage was an eye-opening experience while I was there, but
again I didn’t comprehend what I was seeing at the time. I saw Jorge
enjoying the one night a year he got to eat pizza and soda, and the
one night a year he got personal attention. And I thought that was
nice, it was nice he that got that one night a year. However, while I
was there I never thought what it would be like if I switched places
with him. I would return to my warm house where my family would be
waiting, where I could eat three meals a day and sleep on the couch
watching TV all day if that’s what my heart desired. Jorge, on the
other hand, had no parents and was lucky to get three meals a day of
watered-down soup and saltines. He had no one to go to when he had
a problem, no one to talk to about girls, no one to ask why the sky
was blue. Once he woke up from the nap he started while I was there,
would he think I was just a dream? Was this a dream he had often?
Looking from his point of view made me lonely, even though I could
leave my imagination at any moment and reenter the present where
I had a family. Again the idea floated around my head: how could
Jorge and I be made out of the same elements and have such different
fortunes? I had opportunity, while he had a dim hope of someday leaving the confines of that parking lot with a basketball hoop.
Next, Doug’s speech hit me. I heard the story of the cocaine mother
and thought, “How terrible; no one should be treated like that.” Now
that I was home, I could really take the time to attempt to understand
the story, even though that wasn’t quite possible. My parents gave me
22
every opportunity, while the mentally challenged boy’s mother made
him into a vegetable incapable of feeding or clothing himself. He
probably didn’t understand any other way of living, but that idea
made me feel guilty about being able to care for myself. It wasn’t fair
that we were the same organism, but because he was born in one of
the poorest countries in the world to a drug-addicted mother he had
to suffer through countless days staring at children playing while he
sat in a wheel chair. Even putting myself in his shoes was impossible,
because whenever I tried to see things from his point of view I tried
to imagine what he perceived, but I wasn’t even sure what his brain
could perceive.
These small incidents on my trip gave me the idea of the same conditions on a larger scale. The majority of the world. That’s what Doug
told us when he thanked us for that week, but it didn’t process at the
time. It was such an overwhelming idea that the majority of the world
didn’t live like Keene, New Hampshire, with our public education,
our low crime rate and four grocery stores. Instead, the majority lived
like over-populated, crime-filled, poverty-stricken El Salvador.
From my living room I revisited the moment I stared into the crater of Quetzaltepec. I looked down once again in astonishment, but now a different
kind of astonishment. I was looking down the same ledge, at the same lake
at the bottom of the crater, but now it didn’t seem like a wonderful feat of
nature. Now it was like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun that at any
moment could go off with the destructive force far superior to any gun.
Someday, any day for that matter, that volcano will erupt destroying all the
natural artwork we witnessed on the way up, all the humans who smiled and
waved when we passed them on the way up, all the makeshift houses we noticed. In one instant and act of nature all humanity in the area that had
nowhere else to go would be wiped out, forgotten under the molten rock and
23
ash. The concept seemed so clear once I was home, but while I was climbing that volcano waving to locals it never crossed my mind. In that moment
we were giddy with the view of the lake in the crater, when the reality was
that we were standing on a ticking time bomb.
24
25
Pooja Jayaprakash
March 31, 2011
I just want to curl you up and put you back in my stomach, my mother tells
me sometimes. She has always shared her love through touch—her forehead against mine, her hand under my chin, her fingers in my hair. I will
always remember my mother’s hands in my hair, her thumbs separating
sections to braid and the pads of her fingers sliding over the strands as
she wrapped the sections around and around.
When I was young, she called me her little Krishna, tucking hair through
the dark Vs in my braid. Krishna became my name when my mother was
happy. She was Yashoda on these days; the bright days when she would
scoot around the stove singing in Sanskrit, searching for vegetables and
cardamom. When I walk through these days in my mind, I wear a tiny
nametag labeled Krishna and she wears Yashoda, so that I remember who
we were.
Krishna was the most human of the Hindu gods—a king who grew up
a cowherd in a small town and died from an infection in an arrowwound. His childhood is preserved beautifully in paintings—his skin a
cloudy blue and his arms round with fat, ringlets crowding his forehead
and cheeks. He is crowned with a peacock feather in a gold headband
and a matching flute hangs from his soft fingers. Yashoda was the village
woman who found the blue infant outside her door. She doted on
Krishna every second—in paintings, she drapes jewelry around his neck,
feeds him crumbling sweets and cradles him in her arms. Devaki, the
woman who bore him, never knew him as a child. The gods warned a
wicked king that his nephew would grow up to be his murderer, so he
imprisoned his pregnant sister. But a family friend carried the newborn
across the seas, and Devaki stayed locked away for years while Krishna
26
grew up in the arms of Yashoda. My mother believed his true mother was
Yashoda, who possessed Krishna in his prime. I simply said they were
both his mothers. My mother smiled and said that he and I were lucky
to have so many parents.
The baby Krishna had two great loves: Yashoda and trouble. When
women bathed in the river, he took their clothes from the bank and sat
in a tree. He herded the cows with his flute, but he also charmed the villagers away from work. And given the choice, he would eat nothing but
butter. In my favorite story, Krishna steals a pot of freshly churned butter from the village women. The furious women go to Yashoda, and
Yashoda finds him licking the butter off his fingers—but she loves him
too much to punish him badly. My mother always laughed when she
told the story, delighting in his mischief and innocence.
On bright days, she was Yashoda. She wrapped herself in dark saris and
a silken rope of black hair twisted down to her knees. She was warm
and playful, pinching me and brushing my hair and feeding me, and her
black eyes shone like mirrors under her red bindi. Sometimes she just sat
at the table, her head leaning heavily on her hand, and studied me as I
ate, eyes locked on my face for minutes at a time. She only told the butter-stealing story because I loved it; her favorite story was much shorter.
Yashoda catches Krishna eating mud, and she grabs his wrist and demands that he open his mouth to show her. My mother would ask softly
what Yashoda sees. And again and again she would tell me: she sees the
entire universe in his mouth.
My mother prayed every morning and evening in a little room filled
with Hindu portraits and idols. Krishna stood with crossed arms in the
center, framed by a variety of gods and goddesses. She cut flowers from
our rose garden to offer to each god, perching the flower on the edge of
the frame or the crown of the idol. Pink and white petals spilled over the
27
tiles. I sat with her in the mornings and learned the prayers. And I marveled at her devotion, so clear in her gaze when she looked into the
paintings, her brows furrowed and her lips parted. Her face was always
full of questions. When she spoke to me of the gods she spoke of motherhood and childhood, and she spoke with wonder in her voice.
She said she didn’t leave much behind in India besides her earliest memories, those of the flowers spread over her mother’s funeral pyre—roses
and jasmines. She said that as long as I was here, everything she needed
was here too.
The year she taught me to wear kajol, my mother stopped calling me
Krishna. She stood at the mirror and taught me to rim my eyes with
black. I was fourteen. She smiled and told me my eyes were shaped like
almonds. But after that, she ceased to be Yashoda. Yashoda played with
Krishna—she held his baby cheeks in her hands and saw the galaxies.
She always did for Krishna, rather than teaching Krishna to do for himself. The stories with Yashoda ended with his childhood; we were pushed
beyond our repertoire. Krishna grew past Yashoda and my mother was
lost. The universe was gone from my mouth, so she called me by my
own name.
I know why drawing someone is an act of love. It is because you trace
each subject’s outline with a stick of graphite, you seek to understand
the curves and angles of their being with a dark black line. Index finger
and thumb pressed together with the graphite in between, hand resting
against the paper to steady the line as the tip moves across the paper,
feeling its way around a person’s form—their truth is in their angles,
and in drawing them I learn who they are.
The tongue wraps itself around vowels and flattens to support consonants, tasting each word and phrase before it slips through the lips.
28
Every spoken word carries the weight of a careful drawing, because it has
been traced the same way.
I have a mark on my tongue, and my mother tells me it means that
everything I say comes true. A careless brush of brown, slanted across
the tip. The thought struck her once when we ate dinner: she was talking about my father, and she remembered the mark on his tongue. She
wrapped her fingers under my chin and told me to open my mouth. I
did, and she shook her head and told me to be very careful.
My mother’s name is Sathyavathi, which means truth, and my father
bears the mark on his tongue. They met through an advertisement in
the marital section of an Indian newspaper. Both divorcees, both seeking a second chance at a family. He sent her a photograph of himself in
sunglasses, his hair caught in the wind. Her picture was much stiller, a
polite smile in black and white. They were married in India and wedding photographs were taken of the bride and groom side by side in
carved chairs, hands curled around the wooden arms. I was born close
to a year afterwards—my mother had always wanted a girl, she tells me.
My father wanted to name me Mary, but somehow I was her child to
name. I have never seen her holding his hand. My mother still takes
my hand in her own, walking through malls and airports. And I have
never seen them kiss. But I have learned to always kiss their cheeks
when I say goodbye, my father’s dark stubble and my mother’s soft scars.
My father has the same mark on his tongue, the flick of brown. I have
found that he doesn’t say much. He speaks to me most in his car. See,
you have such beautiful eyes, he tells me, turning from the driver’s seat.
His brow furrows, his long fingers splayed across the steering wheel. I can
feel the weight of his foot on the gas pedal, doubling the weight of his
stare. He turns the car off of the main road. Sometimes he is unnerving—he skirts around me in silence, graying eyebrows hanging over his
29
eyes, moustache bristling around his mouth. When we sit together, he
gently rotates my forearm to search the translucent skin for veins, because he never could leave work at work. Today, somewhere in my
twelfth year, his eyes leave the road to watch my face, and I have nothing to say. Sometimes he chooses his words, and today he is pleading.
But I still have not forgotten the beauty of bones under skin. A ribcage
becomes a shadowed ladder up the torso; a shoulder blade becomes the
base of a wing. There is a shock of beauty in something so fragile. He
must know it as he searches my veins, the blue lines snaking and colliding to form a delicate map of my body. Later, in the damp obscurity
of our garage, he leans closer and squeezes my arm. The door handle
clicks open and my father leaves. I cross my legs to rest in this car still
full of his silence.
Hip bones, collar bones, carved into skin—we’re all made of bones, he
says, and it’s true. My mother was a runner, a machine of muscle, and
she braided my hair as it fell, folding the dark hair over my vertebrae.
She’d touch them sometimes; brush her fingertips over the line of buttons and shiver.
Does the memory of touch come away with each layer of dead skin? Or
does it reach deeper into the tissue, like a scar? When someone takes
their hand away, there is a certain cold that burns the skin where their
palm once rested. The chill gathers like condensation to shape them in
their absence. I am branded with a thousand different outlines: my
mother’s forehead against mine, my father’s fingers around my wrist.
They are still here when they leave.
I will always remember my mother’s hands in my hair, her thumbs separating sections to braid and the pads of her fingers sliding over the strands
as she wrapped the sections around and around. She taught me how to
braid my own hair: how to reach behind my neck and search for three
30
sections with thumbs and forefingers, tucking the hair into itself until
the braid reached past my shoulder. To bring the rest over my shoulder
and watch the hair wind, whipping into a smooth braid. Her older sister
taught her, and pulled the strands tight until they stung her neck.
If you ask my mother, where did you get these scars? the answer is either
fire or small pox. She had small pox when she was very young, living in
her family’s small house in the village. The right side of her body was
paralyzed, and she was isolated in a room floored with cow manure. I
didn’t understand the disease until I saw a picture of a young girl with
small pox. Her skin was covered in tiny raised circles, close together
enough to form a sickly fabric. I ask my mother, did you have those same
lesions? Yes, she says, mostly on my hands and face. The biggest problem is
that they can get into your eyes and cause blindness. How did you treat it?
I ask. There wasn’t really a treatment, she says. Antiseptic and waiting.
Her house in the village is small and cement, and there is a sudden
square recession in the floor beneath a square hole in the roof. A square
pool of rainwater gathers in the floor after storms. Here my mother grew
her scars by the fire of heated metal, wielded by her father. Here she
and her three sisters cooled each other’s burns and braided each other’s
dark hair. But it was her father who taught them to sing: to whisper the
Sanskrit prayers, endless devarnamas in silken ragas. My mother complains that she cannot sing them in tune, but my father has always loved
her voice.
My grandfather’s voice is fuzzy around the edges, blurred by one-hundred-and-six years of use. Every time I’ve seen him he has been sitting
on the same stone bench in his house, pan spittoon by his side. Our conversations are disjointed—I sit next to him and my mother sits next to
me, translating my English into Kannada. I have only communicated directly with him once, at his request. I sang to him.
31
Last year, my grandfather started screaming in the middle of the night.
He wakes the neighbors and throws things—all the dishware is stainless
steel and the walls are cement; I can hear the endless echoes without
being there. His toothless shouts must be lost in the crashing—I don’t
think anyone knows what he says. He is driven by the rhythm of the
word tradition: one-hundred-and-six years have branded him with its
beat. It shakes him still as he waits in this wasted body, dust collecting
along his bones.
I remember a night when my mother went into her car in the garage to
cry. I do not remember when, and I cannot remember what I said to
her, but we had fought and she had walked away. I followed her across
the cold tiles, out of the kitchen and down the hallway. I opened the
door to the garage just seconds after she had closed it and I could not
find her; I thought she would be looking for vegetables on the shelves.
And then I saw something shaking in the backseat of her SUV, a shiver
between the lines of the windows. I opened the door and sat next to
her and put my arms around her. She pressed her face into my shoulder
and shook, and I held her tighter and tighter and she seemed like she
would never stop shaking. I remember my arms pressing into her ribcage
and her ribcage pressing back, spreading with each sob, knocking into
my arms as I tried to hold them together.
I have drawn my mother twice. In both pieces I was most careful drawing her eyes, and in both pieces her eyes are closed. She is peaceful that
way: fingers curled, eyelashes dark against her skin. She is warm and
unmoving. I am afraid of shaping her eyes wrong. Open, her eyes shine
like black mirrors, and she always makes eye contact. The shine in her
hair draws itself, the zigzag of light across strands, but her eyes are too
much to draw. I have never drawn my father, the dark stubble on his
cheek or his thick eyebrows or his soft, wrinkled hands.
32
My father loves driving. He has never been a passenger sort of person.
In India, we stole my uncle’s motorcycle to drive through the dust of
the village. It was years ago—I sat behind him and he drove in wide circles, laughing. I will always remember him in cars, though—long fingers splayed across the wheel and brows furrowed in the rear-view
mirror. There was only one day, when I was very young, that I found
him in the backseat. I think we were going out to buy groceries. My parents had been waiting for me in the car while I cried in the house after
an argument with my mother. I finally walked out and opened the back
door to see my father. It was always my mother who sat in the backseat
with me. He sat smiling his nervous smile—he’s always had an uncertain smile. He said he thought he’d sit with me as a surprise. I sniffled
and whined for my mother. I don’t remember the expression on his
face, I just remember that he opened the door and went very quietly to
the driver’s seat. He still never sits in the backseat. Sometimes I can
hear the echoes of his voice, telling me to be surprised. Some days, sitting in the front seat with him triggers the echoes, and I wonder if he
remembers too.
I have a nightmare about driving with my father. All I remember of it
is this: I am sitting on my hands in the passenger seat, and my father
says, You slept with him, didn’t you. You little slut. He turns from the road
to look at me, and I wake up. Waking, the word still echoes in my head,
in that specific way only my father says it—with too much l and a sharp
t, born of his mother tongue and his pride.
Andre Dubus acknowledges, quietly, that we are all terminally ill, each
breath and step and day one closer to the last. And in the face of mortality, he writes that touch, finite and concrete, forms union with another
person, and in that union we experience life. In the instant of the touch
there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and
goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality. Dubus describes
33
the eternal touch—and that is the touch with which I am branded, with
the hands of my father and the kiss of my mother. In a dream in Robert
Hass’ prose, a mother awakens with no hands, and this to me is unfathomable; I feel the pull of my mother’s hands in my hair and I cringe
to think of that dream. Does the memory of touch come away with each
layer of dead skin? Or does it reach deeper into the tissue, like a scar? I
see now that Krishna grew up with Yashoda’s love in his skin. My father
traces my veins and I trace my bones, and the lines and shadows come
together to draw my body.
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35
Bryn Launer
April 7, 2011
SO here’s the deal. I could write about my daddy issues, or my fear of
abandonment. I could tell you about how my mother is always working,
and the pressure that comes from my younger brother’s being perfect
and maybe gay. But I’d rather tell you a story that isn’t directly about me.
This is the story of a woman named Jackie and her baby daughter Chase
and Chase’s father the dentist and my mother the doctor and the rest
of us caught up in this black hole.
Let’s do some math. The state of Idaho has a population of 1.5 million.
Twenty-five percent of those people are under the age of eighteen. That
makes about 300,000 people in Idaho under the age of eighteen—which
is the age that my mother, a pediatric surgeon, specializes in. Including
my mother, Dr. Ellen Reynolds, there are two other pediatric surgeons in
the state, which divides out to 100,000 potential patients each. Out of
these, my mother gets about ten new patients a week.
One of those ten was Chase.
When Jackie got her first ultrasound, she was told that Chase’s heart
was pointed the wrong way—rotated 180 degrees, with the bottom of
her heart facing the sky. The doctors told her that it was fixable, without any lasting consequences.
I have a few memories of Jackie back then, when she was still pregnant.
My brother went to the same school as her son CJ. I remember seeing her
sometimes, picking him up outside the kindergarten classroom. Her face
was unlined and young, ready for another happy child.
But when Chase was born, other things were wrong. Her heart was on
36
the wrong side of her body, she only had one lung, and her esophagus
and trachea were fused together. Two hundred years ago, she would have
been dead within the hour.
This is when I first heard about her. My family often discusses my
mother’s cases over the dinner table. We talk about how each of our
days went, of course, but invariably my mother has something interesting to share. Sometimes she brings home pictures of her cases. All of the
organs look the same to me—pink and squishy—and I’m still not sure
how she tells them apart. That night, she brought Chase’s file home, and
showed us the upside-down heart and the lonely lung.
It was an inherited genetic defect that caused the problems, my mother
said, but the specific gene is still unknown. There have been only two
other recorded cases of the same thing happening, of the same genes
lining up to twist the organs together and forget about one completely.
We sat at our round oak table and ate the zucchini pie that my father
had made because he was the only one who had time to cook. The chatter ranged from Chase to grades at school to my brother’s blossoming
passion for ballet. But through it all I could see my mother glancing
back at the photos in her bag, plotting her next plan of attack.
She still had hope for Chase then.
The biggest problem was that she couldn’t breathe. With only one lung
and a messed up trachea, Chase needed to be on a ventilator 24/7. I remember going to the hospital with my mother, and hearing the machine breathing for her. My mother was so busy those days that
sometimes she would take me to work with her in the afternoons just so
that we could have time together. I would grab a ginger ale from the
hospital kitchen, and sit at the nurses’ station and do homework. Other
times I would make rounds with her, peering over the gray plastic rails
37
of the hospital beds at the preemies and shaking hands with the tighteyed parents.
I have a few theories as to why she brought me with her. One of them
is that she wanted to show the parents that she had managed to keep at
least one kid healthy, that she really was qualified to save their babies.
Or maybe she desperately just wanted me to understand, to see what
she did every day and why it took so much out of her.
It took a lot out of me too, although I haven’t admitted it to my family.
When my mother came home, I’d take her temperature so to speak. I
had a list of questions to judge her mood, and reacted accordingly. Whatever mood she was in inevitably affected the whole family.
When my mother came home angry, we retreated to our rooms.
When my mother came home sad, we slipped into a quiet unease.
When my mother came home happy, we savored the moment and gathered together, but there was always a feeling that this was only temporary.
On the first day that I saw Chase, she was happy. I ran out the front
door and climbed into the car where my mother was waiting to pick me
up. On the short drive to the hospital, we listened to Josh Groban. The
hospital was only seven minutes away, enough for two songs. When
my parents bought the house, they had partially selected it for its proximity to the hospital, so when my mother got late-night calls she
wouldn’t have to drive far.
Once we had navigated the labyrinth of hallways to the fourth-floor Pediatric Ward, I checked the fridge but they were out of ginger ale. When
we made rounds, there wasn’t any special fanfare when we got to Chase’s
room. It had all the usual fixings: gray plastic bed, flowers, brightly colored stuffed animals, pulled-thin parents with the skin stretched too
38
39
tight over their cheekbones and too loose under their eyes.
allowed the production of milk far longer than it should have.
“This is Chase,” my mother had murmured, with a hint of pride that I
didn’t recognize until later.
Every three or four days, my mother would operate on Chase just to cut
out and cauterize the scar tissue that would build up in her throat and
prevent her from breathing. At the time, I wasn’t aware that she worked
on Chase so frequently. I realize that I say “worked” as though Chase
were a car at the mechanics to be tuned up. But there were so many
things wrong with her, and they were so confusing to me, that it was the
same concept.
“Hi, Chase,” I said.
“Your daughter is beautiful,” Jackie said from the corner. I turned and
smiled in thanks—when these comments came up I let my mother field
them.
“Thank you, we feed her Miracle-Gro,” my mother joked. It fell flat
amongst the beeps and pings from the monitors. Jackie smiled thinly
and turned back to the book she was holding. When I looked at her
eyes, they weren’t moving along the page. They were fixed on the base
of Chase’s hospital crib.
I leaned over and touched one of her little hands. She was smiling and
looked right at me. Her eyes were the same shade of gray as mine.
When we were back in the hallway, my mother told me that she had put
in a tube in order to hold the trachea open the day before. This was one
of many twelve-hour surgeries she had performed to cut out sections of
damaged or abnormal trachea.
The twin problem to Chase’s trachea was her esophagus. Until my
mother had operated, the two had been fused together. Her esophagus
never healed enough for her to eat, so she received her nutrition
through a feeding tube that went directly to her stomach, held in place
with white-gridded tape that pulled at her soft skin. For a year, Jackie
pumped breast milk every four hours. Most mothers can’t sustain pumping milk for more than a month. Jackie managed twelve times that,
waking up in the middle of the night to provide for her baby. There
must have been something special in her genetic code, something that
They weren’t confusing to my mother, however. She spent hours rifling
through medical journals and online databases, looking for new procedures that she hadn’t tried yet. As the weeks passed, her moods began
to coincide with how Chase was doing, and she became even more
feverish in her search for options. Chase’s genetic condition was frustrating in its rareness. When I was explaining it to my brother, I told him
that something had gone wrong when she was still cooking in the oven,
and when the timer dinged and she popped out, the dough hadn’t properly risen and the outsides had burnt.
Until then, I hadn’t realized just how much of my life is based on how
my genetic code lined up when my chromosomes first began
to separate.
I talked to my mother once about it. She told me that she knew exactly
what was wrong with Chase, she just couldn’t fix it. And I think that
that is what bothered her the most. No one ever wants to be helpless,
especially not when lives are on the line. But she handled it diligently,
better than I ever have.
While Chase was wrestling with her genetic inheritance, I was slowly
realizing my own. My father, his mother and father and two of his sisters, as well as my mother and her mother, all suffer from depression.
40
It’s passed down from parent to child, this insidious chemical imbalance. Those are the words that I always use: chemical imbalance. It
seems so impersonal and rational.
For me, depression came out in flares, like sunspots. I snapped at people for no reason, alternating between aggressive and manipulative.
Anything had the potential to irritate me into lashing out. When I was
alone, I would slip into doldrums, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling for hours. The more I didn’t do anything, the worse I felt about it,
and the more my symptoms worsened.
At times I think that my family’s having gone through the same thing
made it worse. I never saw a psychiatrist; instead my mother prescribed
me twenty milligrams of Prozac and got the prescription filled at the
hospital. When I was feeling down, I got no sympathy, because most of
the other people around me had gone through the same thing to some
extent. Sometimes my father would launch into long-winded speeches
about serotonin receptors, and I would retreat into myself until he was
done. Looking back at a calendar, I’m aware that time passed during
those months, but I can remember only a catatonic haze and the sun spiraling along the sky and my white-gridded ceiling.
After a while, the dosage of Prozac began to kick in and my anger settled. I still have problems with motivating myself, however. Some days
I hate the thought of being dependent on pills for the rest of my life.
Other days I’m thankful to them for keeping me sane. Prozac is the closest I get to religion, in that regard.
I’ve been thinking a lot about God lately. Human history does show
that we’re programmed to believe in something. Almost every primitive
and modern society has some sort of ideological belief. So by not believing, I almost feel left out, like I’m not capable of it. Maybe I have an
41
allele for non-believers’ syndrome. I’ve never received a miracle or a
sign or even Jesus’ face in a pop-tart. In turn, I’ve become bitter and
disrespectful. When I’m forced to attend services, or when the Reverend says at Evening Prayer, “Please pray with me,” I don’t even pretend to pray. I sit ramrod straight with my chin up and stare right back
at the altar, feeling proud for being stubborn.
Over the years, I’ve managed to pull this loathing into myself, for the
sake of others around me. But I still go out of my way to avoid religion.
I fulfilled my course requirement at Exeter for Religion with Philosophy,
the furthest I could get from it. When I visit my Mormon cousins in
Utah (all thirty-five of them) I plan my trips so I’m not there on a Sunday. I realize that having to attend a service is an irrational fear, but I’m
coping with it by being overly avoidant.
Religion was Jackie’s way of coping. We have an ornament on our
Christmas tree that’s from her, a wooden angel of healing. She always
wore a silver cross and kept a Bible by Chase’s crib. I’m not sure how my
mother felt about this. I think that she would have rather been recognized for herself rather than as just another instrument.
Instrument or not, she was good at what she did.
When my mother’s pager goes off, the whole house can hear it. During
that year, it went off countless times for Chase. There were various emergencies, all stemming from her breathing issues. Chase was never off a
ventilator, but the scar tissue in her esophagus and trachea still built up
and blocked her airway. Her one lung also failed sometimes, requiring
another set of pumps. It was like there was one of those music boxes that
had a cylinder with raised rods that hit each key with a metallic plink inside her cells, but instead of the cylinder hitting a thin brass key, time inevitably hit another genetic sequence that unleashed more problems.
42
The ventilator was big and made of the same gray plastic, with red and
green push buttons and various tubes snaking out of it. The mechanical sound of her breathing put Darth Vader to shame, but it was comforting to hear. That rasp was the only sound Chase ever made. The
tube she breathed through entered her trachea below her vocal chords,
stuck tight with the white-gridded tape, bypassing any ability to make
a sound. When she was upset or in pain, her face contorted and tears ran
out of her eyes, but she never made a sound. It’s funny how they used
to say that a happy baby is a quiet baby.
Neurologically, Chase was normal. One brisk fall day, I brought her a
bright red elephant. When I leaned over her crib and waved it in front
of her eyes, she lit up and I could see her silently chortling. She was kitted out in a striped sweater and a matching hat and booties. Jackie always bought her new cute little clothes, bright patches against the sterile
white and gray of her surroundings.
That day I stayed for a few hours, reading books to Chase while Jackie
dosed off in the corner. She spent so much time in that hospital room
that her husband had rebuilt the closet to hold her clothes. I didn’t see
him around much, or rather I didn’t register him. I’m sure he had been
there many times when I had visited, blending in with the furnishings,
holding the same book every time, turned to the same page. Jackie went
home so rarely that she showered in the hospital bathrooms.
When I shut the book that I had been reading, Jackie’s eyes popped
open, and I was reminded of the Indians that could be ready for battle
in a matter of minutes. I chatted with her until my mother came back
from making the rest of her rounds.
As we pulled out of the hospital, my mother leaned over the steering
wheel and picked out one tinted window of the dozens embedded in
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the red brick of the hospital. She told me that that was Chase’s window.
She’s never pointed that out for any other patient.
When Chase turned a year old, my mother began devoting her time to
making her well enough to go home. Up until then, Chase had spent
her entire life in the same room in the hospital. Once my mother had
cleared out as much scar tissue as she could, loaded her up with antibiotics, and removed blockage from the lung, Chase was ready to go home
for the first time.
Everyone told my mother what a good job she had done. They praised
her for her diligence, her intelligence, and all the other words that end
in –ence and appear on the Congratulations! cards. After a year, all the
nurses and staff knew Chase, and she was loaded into the car with
dozens of flowers and balloons. I was with my mother when they drove
off. I remember studying her face, looking for a trace of excitement or
pride, but there was nothing.
“Aren’t you happy?” I asked her.
“I have a feeling that this is temporary,” she replied, and we watched the
stoplight turn from green to yellow to red.
For the next week, Chase was at home, sleeping in her own bed, and
spending time with her family. I have a framed picture on my dresser of
me with my hair pulled back, sitting on Jackie’s couch with Chase. She’s
looking right at the camera and smiling, and I always notice with a start
that our eyes are exactly the same color.
When the seventh day had passed, Chase’s welcome had run out. Her
genetic fate couldn’t be overlooked, not even with the help of the best
doctors in the state. Sometimes there’s not much that can overcome
what’s coded in your DNA. She was rushed back to the hospital where
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45
my mother performed another twelve-hour surgery, mostly to repair her
trachea again. A week away from medical professionals had taken its
toll. Although my mother removed the scar tissue from her throat, it
never truly healed again.
Jackie and her husband had switched off the ventilator and held one of
Chase’s hands each as her lonely lung failed without the help of the
machine. It wasn’t painful, my mother had given her drugs so that she
wouldn’t feel the suffocation.
During the next two months, I didn’t see Chase as often. The two times
that I did, she was pale and weak, unsmiling despite my red elephant.
When I brought it up with my mother, she said that Chase’s problems
were finally winning. Going home had been the tiebreaker.
There weren’t any drugs for Jackie and her husband, though. They sat
in that room with Chase for twelve hours after her death, holding her
and stroking her hair. I have this image in my mind of Chase’s cold body
being pressed to the breast that supplied milk for a whole year out of
sheer determination.
I was in the living room doing a puzzle when my mother came in, laden
with medical journals. She sat and paged through them until I brought
up the question.
“How’s Chase?”
“She’s… alive,” my mother replied.
“What are you doing?” I asked cautiously.
“I’m figuring out how I can make her death as easy as possible.”
Chase’s time had run out. My mother had tried every possible surgery,
but Chase was contracting infections and becoming resistant to antibiotics. The goal had switched from curing her to keeping her out of pain.
I understood what my mother was doing: making sure that when she
did die, it wasn’t in the operating room under bright lights in a frantic
frenzy of surgical tools and beeping monitors and blue-masked doctors,
but in the arms of her parents.
It was a Friday, I remember the gray-eyed sky. My mother packed up her
bag and left for the hospital. She had told me she would call when she
could, but she never did. It was only when she got home and was crying on the couch that I knew it had been done.
Jackie told my mother that without the noise from the machines and
monitors, those twelve hours were the most peaceful that she had ever
spent with Chase.
The funeral was on a Wednesday. Chase was wearing a knit sweater
with a hood and pompoms. I was wearing black. While I held my
mother’s hand, I realized that this was the funeral of one of her own
children. The priest began to speak. Most of it blurred together, but I remember my mother stiffening when he spoke about Chase’s life. In more
eloquent terms that I have chosen not to remember specifically, he described her short life as being in a fog. This fog was impenetrable, kept
the doctors from being able to save her because it was all so mysterious
and inexplicable, he said. When she passed, he said, the fog had been
lifted and she had risen up.
“I understood perfectly what was wrong with her,” my mother had said
to me. “I just couldn’t fix it.”
When I was standing there in the cold, with the fog far above my head,
I realized that everyone is helpless in some way. I saw Jackie sobbing
and saying over and over that she never believed this would happen. I
saw the nurses dabbing their eyes and I saw my mother turn away. Any
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remaining faith that I had, left with Chase that day.
A year later, and Jackie has a new baby, a healthy boy. I see her when I
pick my brother up from school, and I give her a hug. Her hugs are firm
and desperate at the same time, and though the skin has smoothed on
the forehead, her eyes are still tight with grief.
When I call my mother to ask her about the surgical aspects of this
piece, we talk for an hour. Until now, we haven’t spoken about those last
two months and the funeral. I realize that Chase’s death was the reason
she suffered for a year from increased depression and a detachment from
her patients and even her family. I hear her voice stiffen when she describes the priest, and I hear her waver when she tells me that Jackie always believed that Chase would live.
The last thing she said to me is still stuck in my head.
“I operate on sick children your age, and your brother’s age, every day.
And there’s only one reason why I do it. When I take time away from
being with you to take care of other people’s children, I feel like you
and your brother are somehow cosmically protected. It’s a tradeoff so
you’ll stay safe.”
That’s a lot of pressure, I think. I’ve never ridden a bicycle without a helmet. Someday I will though, once I’m able to get air through my vocal
chords. Someday I’ll leave off the pills and figure out how to make myself happy. Genetics can really fuck up our lives, predetermining so
much before we’re born. When Chase died, we bought a star and named
it after her. There’s something ironic about how long-lived stars are, unless they get sucked into a black hole or run out of fuel and explode in
one bright bang.
I don’t need a star. Whatever’s predetermined for me in all those little
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double-helixes running through my veins is going to come to pass, but
that doesn’t mean I can’t define my own destiny until then. And I’m no
longer going to be doing it for just me. I’ll be doing it for a woman
named Jackie and her baby daughter Chase’s memory and Chase’s father
the dentist and my mother the doctor and the rest of us who climbed
back out of that black hole. And I already know that one of us, at least,
became a star.
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49
Ved Rajkumar
Flying Home
April 14, 2011
I was born brown and American in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but I
remember nothing about the place save for the one time my family went
back there to visit UNC and see a few friends. Before I turned one, my
family and I moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, for four years, where
my younger brother was born. It is probably my relatively brief time
there that is to blame for the fact that for most of my life, America
meant Paul Revere and the Boston Red Sox. From Lexington we moved
to Trivandrum, Kerala, my parent’s hometown. This was a six-month pit
stop while my father was settling in at a new job in Hong Kong, but living in India for the first time in my life taught me that race can only
unite a group of people to a certain extent. My life as a real “expat”
began when we joined my father in Hong Kong, and after two years we
continued to lead that lifestyle in Singapore, where I have lived for the
last eleven years. Singapore is probably second only to New York City
in terms of racial diversity. The main ethnicities represented in Singapore are Chinese, Malay, and Indian, but there are also fairly prominent
European, American, Korean, and Middle Eastern communities. I get
asked where I consider “home” quite often, and my usual quick response
is Singapore, as I have lived there for most of my life. This answer, however, does not take into account the fact that I have only one “local”
friend whom I see occasionally or that I feel like a tourist when I speak
to Singaporeans in what they would describe as an American drawl.
Singapore is a beautiful country and a great place to live, but it is only
a home in the sense that my parents live there and I feel at ease using
the public transportation.
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To be honest, my initial reaction to the attacks on September 11 was no
reaction at all. I came down the steps from my bedroom with my
younger brother at around six–thirty in the morning, and our mother
was waiting for us at the dining table with breakfast ready, as usual. She
told us that bad men had hurt many people in New York. Sitting at a
table in Singapore, I processed this information in my mind as I did my
eggs with my mouth. My mother must have been crying earlier, but I
had no idea. I responded the way I usually did to my mother, “Oh.” This
must have been another of the horrible headlines I had read almost
every day on the front page of a newspaper lying on the table. In our
third grade class that day we drew pictures and wrote letters to the principal to express our sadness. Many of my classmates did not go to school
that day either because their parents feared that our American school
would be a possible target or because they had known someone in the
Towers. I had heard that the bad men had also bombed something called
the Pentagon so I drew a five-sided orange figure and a plane flying into
it. My note to the principal was frank. I told him that I didn’t really feel
anything about what happened that day. Our teacher read some of the
other student’s responses to our class, and after hearing theirs I was praying that she wouldn’t read mine. I felt horrible. I felt selfish. Looking
back on my reaction to the events of September 11, I feel even more
self-absorbed and unsympathetic, but even if I had drawn from my most
selfish well, I should have felt remorseful and fearful knowing how that
day was going to change the rest of my life.
I was nine years old in July, 2002, when my father and I traveled from
Singapore to the US to meet my mother and brother in Lexington, Massachusetts. We were in the domestic terminal of John F. Kennedy Airport and were waiting to board our flight to Boston.
“We might have to take off our shoes,” my father whispered to me.
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A dark-skinned woman in front of us handed her green Pakistani passport to the flight attendant and was asked to step to the side. We moved
towards the attendant and handed her our blue passports, engraved with
the golden words United States of America. My father, clad in “J. Crew’s
finest,” and I, wearing a Boston Red Sox T-shirt, were asked to step to the
side along with the Pakistani lady. We removed our shoes along with
her. My father and I received our American passports only after a security man had sent our shoes through an X-ray machine and had searched
us from head to toe with a metal-detecting wand.
The concept of race had been foreign to me for most of my life when I
was rudely awoken to the adult reality of division and placement in the
aftermath of September 11, 2001. Up to that day, the color of my skin
had been different from my friend’s but this difference had never meant
anything. September 11 and the plans of a few extremists gave my
brown skin a meaning I had never expected nor desired. Suddenly, I
was identified, and suddenly I was marked as something specific. My
idea of home became a function of this identification based on race.
In Singapore, my friends were Filipino, American, Swiss, Persian, Taiwanese, Black, and Indian, to name a few. This was in seventh grade,
when it had been long enough since 2001 for the color barriers to have
faded again. My friends and I knew and saw little difference in each
other. My skin might have been darker than most of theirs, but what did
that matter when I played ball with them, beat them at FIFA, or discussed the latest Kanye album with them? After years of living with
people of almost random race, I had been conditioned to the point of
complete disregard of color and ethnicity. We were boys before anything else, and friends before that, and that was a beautiful thing.
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The lines along which we were divided appeared again in eighth grade
when a derogatory name for Indians evolved: “brampi,” or “bramp,”
which somehow stood for “brown piece of poo.” It was used half-jokingly, but nonetheless in a malicious way. One day I walked into the
locker room before gym class to find a group of kids crowded around a
corner of the room tossing a shirt back and forth while yelling, “Come
on, brampi!”
“Oh, it’s okay, Ved. You’re a cool Indian,” said one of the boys as if to
console me and assure me that I was safe.
As I changed I glanced at the Indian boy in the corner, who was still
struggling to retrieve his shirt. With both of us shirtless, there was very
little physical difference between us, but I knew that it was a lot harder
for the boys in the locker room to harass me, someone with whom they
had played basketball, discussed hip hop albums, someone considered
one of “them.” Just about everyone in the room was doubled over in
laughter, except me and the boy in the corner. I bit my lips and my eyes
scrunched into a glare as they continued to taunt the boy. I was not
against a little locker-room joking and teasing but it hurt to see it connected to someone’s race or the color of someone’s skin, especially mine.
The emergence and dying down of this new derogatory word brought
the undercurrent of ever-existing division to light, even in a place that
boasted racial diversity.
When I was fourteen my parents and I decided that I would leave them
and my brother in Singapore to study and live in Exeter, New Hampshire, beginning in my ninth-grade year. My best friends at the time
were Raffy, who is Filipino, Raphael, who is Swiss, and Phillip, who is
Dutch. All four of us attended the Singapore American School and
wore our school uniforms, which had an eagle above the left chest, during the school day. Once they got home, however, Raffy would quickly
53
remove his uniform and replace it with a red and yellow Manny Pacquiao T-shirt, Raphael would slip off his uniform to reveal an undershirt with the red and white cross of the Swiss flag, and Phillip would
head to soccer practice wearing an orange Holland jersey.
The four of us went out to dinner with Raphael’s parents about a month
before I was going to leave for the US. We entered Margarita’s and took
our seats so that I sat opposite from Raphael’s father. Mr. Grissemann
has a thick mustache and medium-length graying hair that hangs over
his forehead. He is a typical European, distrustful of America and its
foreign policy and a die-hard fan of his national “football” team. Probably after a few margaritas Mr. Grissemann asked me, “So, Ved, are you
looking forward to going to the US?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty excited for school, but I’m sad that I have to leave my
friends.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something. Go to America, take their education;
their education is very good.” His hair began to bob furiously. “But whatever you do, do not become American!” I had never felt so American
in my life.
America has a well documented history of racial hypocrisy. In one of his
most famous poems, “I, Too, Sing America,” Langston Hughes wrote:
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
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Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
The country that boasted freedom and independence enslaved
thousands of people and then, even after emancipation, told them
to “eat in the kitchen.” After September 11, there was a new class of
people who sang America but were not heard. Men and women of Arab
and South Asian descent were discriminated against and Islam was vilified. I am not a Muslim, and, luckily, I was not in the United States to
witness the hate that followed the bombings, but being a member of
America’s new racial target helped me come to a similar understanding
of America as Malcolm X did early in his life. It also set me on the same
mental journey of finding home.
Malcolm X, named Malcolm Little at birth, was born in 1925 in
Omaha, Nebraska. His father, Earl Little, was a Baptist minister and an
advocate of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey. Garvey was famous for
drawing crowds in Harlem, and giving black men and women a sense of
pride in their race. His most well known and ambitious, albeit imprac-
tical, venture was the “Back to Africa” campaign. Garvey held that
black people could not live under the repressive laws and social circumstances that America endorsed, and he also believed that all black
people throughout the world were similar in that they had suffered some
kind of discrimination. “Back to Africa” was both a mental and physical tool of empowering black people with a home, a place where they
were accepted and treated as first-class citizens. Naturally, white supremacists did not like the idea of empowering blacks. In 1929 the Little’s home in Lansing, Michigan, was burned down, and two years later
Earl Little’s body was found in the middle of the town’s road. The police, people expected to uphold the justice and individual rights that
America claimed to have built itself upon, judged both incidents as accidents, and no investigation was made into the actions of the Black
Legion, a white supremacist group that had been harassing the Littles for
years. Malcolm persevered through the loss of his father and eventually
his mother when he and his seven siblings were put into foster homes.
After working hard in his schooling, Malcolm discussed career options
with his favorite teacher and told him that he wanted to be a lawyer.
The teacher, even with the knowledge that Malcolm was a very bright
student, told him that becoming a lawyer was “no realistic goal for a
nigger.” America had failed Malcolm from the time he was very young.
Unfortunately, it did not take much time for him to discover the
hypocrisies of the land of the free and the brave.
During his time in jail, from 1946 to 1952, Malcolm Little became intrigued by the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.
By the time he was released, Malcolm was a devout follower, and he
had changed his last name from Little to X. Little, Malcolm explained,
was a slave name, a name forced upon his ancestors by white slave owners and a name that replaced his family’s original name and identity. X
represented his lost name, his lost heritage, and his lost home.
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When I board the plane to go back to Trivandrum, in India, the first
thing I notice is the smell. Indians are notorious for being pushy and
smelling bad. The plane is packed with dark-skinned people jostling to
get to their seats, and there is a pungent odor of onions. When we touch
down in the Trivandrum airport and the plane finally stops moving,
grown men spring out of their seats to grab their luggage as quickly as
possible. We reach the immigration officer after a long wait, and the
smell of whiskey in his breath overwhelms me. He takes my American
passport and marvels at the different stamps inside it. He says that I
travel a lot. I tell him I do. Then, in Malayalam, he asks me if I speak
the language. I tell him I can understand, in English.
My favorite part of Trivandrum is my grandmother’s food. Her kitchen
has a distinct smell of spices and vegetables. Amachi’s, or Grandma’s,
beef fry is always a hit with me and my brother, and every time my
mother tells her that we are coming to visit, Amachi starts preparing the
beef and her specialty “masala.” Most of my extended family lives in
Kerala, so another ritual of going to Trivandrum is a day-long, relativevisiting trip. As is custom in most of India, guests are treated especially
well when visiting, and my father, who is the favorite son at most of the
houses we visit, is doted over by all his relatives. We are treated to tea,
sweets, and an extravagant meal if we are staying for lunch. The feeling
of being with family, however, is something that surpasses the tangible
pleasures that they present us with. Walking on the land that my ancestors inhabited and being with people who share my blood, after living in the racial cacophony of Singapore and the United States, is
calming in a way.
I used to compete in state tennis tournaments in Trivandrum. My parents would drop me off at the courts early in the morning, and I would
wait there till my match was called. This meant plenty of time with the
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other boys, except, for most of the time, they would stand bunched together and I would sit on a bench by myself. I heard whispers of “American” occasionally and felt isolated in a group of people who looked as
much like me as I had ever been with. Maybe it was my clothes or my
haircut. Maybe it was my Nike shoes, which were just as battered as
theirs were. Without my opening my mouth, they had known I was different. When we finally warmed up to each other and began to talk, I
found the boys to be very friendly, but every time we spoke, I would
have to repeat myself, and I would have to ask them to do the same.
Like many black people who had returned to Africa hoping to feel as
if they had finally come home, I was disappointed when I returned to
the home of my ancestors. Langston Hughes himself, who was of
mixed descent, felt like a foreigner when he visited Africa. In his book,
The Big Sea, he wrote, “There was one thing that hurt me a lot when
I talked with the people. The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was a Negro. You see, unfortunately, I am not black.” Unfortunately, I am not Indian.
I, too, sing America, and apparently I sing it without saying a word.
India is the home of my parents, but my home cannot be a place where
I am seen as an outsider. I, too, sing America, but my American citizenship is not enough for me to be fully accepted in the country in
which I was born. Many people in my circumstance call themselves
“global citizens,” but that is no consolation for me. There is no home on
the globe for an American of Indian descent who has lived in five different places. The world is my oyster. I can navigate an airport comfortably, board a plane, and go just about anywhere, but every time I
step into the plane and take my seat, I wish I were flying home.
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59
Theo Motzkin
Embrace the Shadow
April 21, 2011
This meditation is dedicated to Maggie Hogan.
Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink and you’re dead.
My ninth-grade English class sat transfixed on the floor, necks frozen into
uncomfortable positions and eyes magnetized to the TV screen. Terrified,
we looked on as an unlikely hero and heroine managed to liberate a time
machine from a cadre of predatory, extra-terrestrial angels and send it on
its way back to 1969, thereby saving reality and avoiding a time-tossed
death. Summarized like this, the plot begins to sound like your typical
episode of a science-fiction series—but I was a hardened veteran of the
sci-fi/fantasy world, and nothing had ever scared me like this.
Later that night, as I switched off the overhead lamp in my room and
slid under my comforter, my thoughts returned to those angelic
antagonists. They were, I mused, the most frightening villains I had
ever encountered in a work of fiction. Impossibly fast, the “Weeping
Angels” possessed a seemingly infallible defense mechanism: when
observed, they immediately transubstantiated into stone. Unable to
harm them, the heroes had been forced to stare at them continuously
in order to confine them to their statuesque forms and evade their
terrible power: once touched by an angel, a human would be
transported decades into the past with no hope of return. Only by
tricking them into looking at each other could one permanently subdue
the creatures—but they covered their faces to prevent just such an
eventuality, thereby acquiring the name “weeping.” They were
formidable in daylight, but unstoppable in darkness.
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Whoever had dreamt them up was a genius, I thought sleepily. He had
created a monster that evoked the primal human fear of the dark. When
I was younger, I had always left the lamp on in the hallway to puncture
the blackness of my room, but I had stopped doing that long ago. My
room was perfect for sleeping, so dark that there were barely shadows . .
NO!
Suddenly, I was sitting upright on my bed, shaking, eyes darting all
around the room. What’s that?! A face?! No, just the bookshelf—what?!
A moving shadow outside—an angel! Could it come in?! Full of terrified
energy, my hand darted to the pulley that controlled the shutters and
gave it an almighty yank. Light. Light. Give me light!
The orange glow of the streetlamp outside illuminated a shadowy
room, empty except for one fourteen-year-old boy nearly frightened
out of his wits.
I am a hypocrite.
The thought surprised me a little: I was expecting something more along
the lines of I am being ridiculous. My “conscience,” however, seemed to
have accepted the fictional angels as a real threat, and was instead
admonishing me for . . .
Faithlessness.
What?
Where is your faith?!
Faith?
You say you believe in God and in the Bible?
I do!
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Then PROVE it! Trust God to protect you from the angels!
My fear dissipated instantly. This was about integrity: I maintained that
I believed in the Biblical Deity. I was not a liar. I would stand by my
professed faith. I closed the shutters and sank down into my pillow, eyes
shut against the shadows.
Gam ki elekh be’gei tsalmavet, lo ira raa ki ata imadi. I whispered the words
into the darkness. Gam ki elekh be’gei tsalmavet, lo ira raa ki ata imadi, I
said again, louder this time. Gam ki elekh be’gei tsalmavet, lo ira raa ki ata
imadi! I spoke, confident tones echoing ever-so-slightly off the walls.
Those words, quoted from Psalm 23, verse 4, became my mantra for
fighting fear. Any situation which incited a worry for my wellbeing, from
a bedroom populated with imaginary demons to dark alleyways on a cold
Jerusalem evening, could be ameliorated with that simple statement of
absolute faith. Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I shall
fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Although literally translated “shadow
of death,” the Hebrew word tsalmavet connotes deep, impenetrable
darkness. The words served to banish both the dread of corporeal
dangers—muggers, terrorists, light-footed black-ops assassins—and the
fear of fantastic evils with which my mind could impregnate the night.
For a year-and-a-half after that first frightful night, I would always
recite the verse before falling asleep—sometimes even in broad
daylight, before taking a nap. There were other prayers I said before
bed, but those were secondary, and I allowed myself to omit them when
I felt especially tired. In contrast, Psalm 23:4 stood firm: unless I
involuntarily fell asleep over homework, I never desisted to declare
that I, Theo Motzkin, feared nothing, because an omnipotent God
protected me. Gradually, however, I began to forget even that, and
eventually bedtime prayers succumbed altogether to an Exonian’s
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erratic sleep schedule. After a while, I found that I said the words only
when feeling particularly frightened.
The pain began in the spring of my upper year, commencing after a
particularly strenuous Glee Club rehearsal where I had attempted to sing
higher than was comfortable for my voice. Worried that I had somehow
damaged my vocal chords, I complained to the school doctor about a
constant throb in my throat. She immediately dismissed my concerns
and accused pollen allergies of inciting the discomfort. Three days-worth
of Zirtec validated her intuition: the pain lessened and then disappeared
entirely. I gave it no further thought.
Since New England’s vibrant spring had proven the ache’s source, I
assumed I would no longer need anti-histamines when I returned home
for the summer. Two weeks after landing in Israel, however, I noticed
that a new discomfort had crept up into my throat. Since Exeter required
a yearly check-up with the family doctor, I decided to bring the pain and
its resurgence to his attention.
The familiar icons greeted me the morning I walked into his office: a
photo of a boy sitting in a window, staring at a rainy landscape; a
measuring stick, adorned with grinning cartoonish animals; and a
physician’s prayer, inked in Hebrew letters onto crisp brown parchment.
The words, which pledged professional responsibility and pleaded for
divine guidance, followed a small painting at the top of the page: a single
yellow snake coiled around a simple staff. The nehushtan, as it is called
in Hebrew, represents the legend of the brazen serpent, a Biblical tale
that remembers a terrible horde of venomous snakes sent by God to
punish the defiant Israelites. Although furious with His people, God
hears the pleas of his prophet Moses and instructs him to fashion a
serpent of molten copper. God then breathes life into the statue, which
curls around Moses’ fabled staff. Any Israelite who looked upon the
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ensnaked rod—the first nehushtan—was instantly cured of poison. The
tale teaches that suffering and succor alike emanate from God alone,
and that a healer can only heal with His grace. The nehushtan is a sign
of the physician’s absolute deference to the divine will.
“Take off your shirt,” he said after measuring my height, weight and
blood pressure. Expecting him to conjure a stethoscope, I hastily
removed my T-shirt and took a long, deep inhalation. “Turn around,”
came the next command. Confused, I did as instructed.
“Hmmm.”
Thirty seconds passed in silence.
“You can put your shirt back on,” he finally said, sitting down in his
leather-backed chair and motioning for me to sit also. “Well, I think the
acne is getting to the point where we ought to do something about it.”
Ever since my transition into puberty, I suffered from particularly papular
acne on my back; however, since its location posed no cosmetic liability,
Dr. N— had hesitated to attack it in the past. Anti-acne drugs are
known in medicine for their nasty side-effects, ranging from increased
sunlight sensitivity to flaky skin. Now, however, he seemed to have
changed his mind. And so, in spite of the searing summer sun, Dr. N—
prescribed me one 100 gram pill of minocycline per day, with the caveat
that I was to take it with a little food and refrain from consuming milk
products two hours before and after ingestion.
“What about the pain in my throat?” I asked as I prepared to leave.
“Oh,” he shrugged. “That’s just part of the human condition.”
As soon as we left the clinic, I turned to my mother, a trace of panic
joggling my voice. “What the hell does that mean?!”
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She tried to reassure me, told me to be patient, reminded me that she
had had an unexplainable pain in her throat once, and that it had
disappeared after two weeks. Although far from comforted, I resolved to
remain calm. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do but wait.
Over the next few weeks I began to notice something odd: after singing,
the pain changed. The constant throb I had by now grown accustomed
to would suddenly be replaced with a scratchy burning at the base of my
throat. Alarmed, I stopped singing, and the irritation subsided, leaving
the old pang in its wake. I refrained from song for a whole two weeks
before deciding to give it a try. Four notes was all it took: the burning was
back, stronger than ever before. And this time, it was here to stay.
Over the course of the next two months, I was transformed, too: a
change to parallel the transformation of the pain in my gullet. My entire
existence seemed to align itself around that fire in my throat: I awoke in
the morning and knew I was in pain; I could scarcely think of anything
else while awake; and after a day invariably spent in anguish, I would lie
down, sure that tomorrow would mirror today. When you’re in pain,
nothing else exists; nothing matters except that constant reminder that
something is wrong with your body and the primal fear that the flaw will
never be fixed, that the pain will never subside but remain to torment
you forever. Laughter, mirth, affection—even the warmest happiness
must eventually break and kneel at the feet of pain, the unshakeable
tyrant of body and mind. I had ended the school year bright-eyed and
optimistic; now, I reverted to a surly moodiness which slowly but surely
lapsed into something I had never yet experienced: a simmering
depression from which I would frequently lash out in anger.
My parents took me to see many doctors, but none of them could figure
out what was wrong with me. Although one diagnosed the cause of the
original ache as allergies, I was now beyond his help. “It might be acid
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reflux,” acknowledged another, referencing a malady that is colloquially
known as “heartburn.” “But only a gastroenterologist would be able to
tell for sure.”
One day in mid-August, I called my mother to my room. While I leaned
back in my black mesh-backed desk chair, my mother sat down on the
edge of my bed, a glimmer of worry in her face. It was often there, these
days, when she looked at me.
“I can’t live like this.” My tone remained level and cool; it was still just
a statement of fact.
She nodded. “I understa—”
“No, you don’t understand!” I packed as much frustration as I could
muster into that same cramped volume.
“Theo—”
“You don’t know what it’s like!” I hissed. “You don’t know what it’s like
to be in pain all the fucking time! You don’t know what it’s like to wake
up and wonder if every single morning, every single day for the rest of
your life is going to hurt like this!”
She said nothing.
“I feel,” I said, the words half-choked in the fire, “like this is never going
to end. It has to end.”
“We’re going to see another doctor soon, the head of Ear-Nose-andThroat at Hadassah Hospital—”
“It has to end,” I interrupted, “before I go back to school.”
She stopped speaking, though she did not look at all surprised.
“I can’t go back there like this. I have to be able to sing.” I had
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67
successfully auditioned for the Concert Choir that previous spring, and
had been looking forward to singing with the Academy’s elite vocal
ensemble more than anything else. “I can’t be there and not sing.”
“You don’t think we’ve been paying attention to your problem?!” she
sobbed. “We’ve been making appointments, taking you to doctors,
buying you pills . . .”
“Theo, I don’t know what to tell you . . . I can’t promise that we’ll be able
to fix it by then . . .”
“It’s not good enough. Solve the problem, or I will.”
“Well, you have to.” My voice took on an icy sharpness I had never
heard there before. “Because if you don’t find a cure to my pain by the
end of the summer, I will.”
“What do you mean?” she said. The slight hesitation in her voice, so out
of character for the stalwart problem-solver I called Mama, told me she
had already guessed.
“I will kill myself.”
I had not thought of this response in advance, but now that I had said
it, it seemed like the inevitable conclusion: it was, after all, the only sure
way to be rid of the burning forever.
She kept her gaze level and her silence intact.
“Don’t you have anything to say?!” I finally cried out.
She began to cry.
“You’re cruel,” she said.
For one short moment, I forgot the burning. Her words cut deep, deeper
than my pain; for a split second I considered taking it all back and falling
into her open arms—but then the burning was back and I was cold once
again. I’ve come this far. I can’t turn back now.
“I know I am cruel,” I replied levelly. “But it’s the only way to get you to
actually pay attention to my problem.”
She almost choked on her next words. “You’re cruel! Cruel to your
parents who love you! No, not just cruel—you’re evil!”
Although I would not have said it—even if she had not stormed out—
I knew that, too. Pain had not merely vanquished my happiness; it had
conquered kindness and compassion as well.
I expected my father to be angry when he heard about what had
happened; instead, he rescheduled my Hadassah appointment for an
earlier date, and took me there himself. The great ENT specialist who
greeted us was a small man with graying hair and the silvery ghost of
a beard. The only distinctive feature about him was the large black
yarmulke upon his balding crown.
“Are you on any medication?” he asked as soon as I’d related my story.
I had been taking a slew of different pills in order to try and lessen the
pain; I gave him their names.
“Anything else?”
“Well, I’ve been taking minocycline for my acne for about two months
now.”
He thought for a second. “The burning. How long did you say you’ve
had it?”
“About two months—oh.”
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69
He nodded. “Did you know that minocycline, if taken improperly, can
cause damage to the digestive system?”
front of him, I knew he wasn’t really to blame. He had done his best; the
nehushtan on his office wall indicated the true culprit.
“No . . . the doctor who prescribed it never told me that . . .”
How can a God who allows his creations to suffer be good? It was not
a new question; theologians, philosophers and Holocaust survivors had
all asked it before me, and some of them had even found an answer.
However, absurd as it may sound, I had never understood their reason
for questioning. Pain—profound, prolonged pain—had existed in my
mind only as an academic concept, not as tangible, terrible truth. Only
after my world had aligned around pain did I realize that it in fact
existed—and that its philosophical implications were so vast. If an allpowerful God can prevent pain, and chooses not to, doesn’t that make
Him . . . cruel?
He opened Google.com on his computer and searched “minocycline.”
“There we go, first hit: minocycline side-effects. Can cause damage to
the esophagus, including ulceration. So it looks to me like minocycline
is the culprit here.”
His tests confirmed it: the drug had upset my digestive system, acting as
a catalyst for gastric reflux which had sent stomach acid spouting up into
my esophagus, causing the burning. What five doctors had not been able
to discover in two months, he had discerned in two minutes.
Initially, I felt only glorious relief. I now knew the source of my pain and
how to cure it: stop the minocycline and take two antacids every day.
The effect was immediate: within a week, the pain had virtually
disappeared, leaving only a nagging scratchy sensation at the base of my
neck. The last embers proved stubborn, but I imagined that, in time,
they too would be doused.
God allows us to anguish in agony and then forbids suicide, trapping us in
a never-ending cycle of suffering.
I was wrong: as soon as my prescribed supply of pills ran out, the coals
reignited. Suddenly, the pain returned, and with a vengeance: it attacked
everything from my lower chest to the base of my larynx. By this point,
Exeter’s fall term had commenced, and the fate that I had dreaded had
snuck up on me: I was at Exeter. I could not sing.
One day near the end of autumn, when the pain was especially bad, I
slumped down at my desk and opened Mr. Internet. Absent-mindedly
fingering the cooking knife I had come to call refuge—just in case I ever
did man up to it—I searched the first thing I could think of: pain.
Google’s first few hits could have been expected: scientific articles,
medical sites and Wikipedia’s two-cents’ on the subject. On some strange
whim, I turned to the second page of results.
As if in tandem with its physical counterparts, the depression, too, had
festered: it rode arm-in-arm with a deep, hateful resentment of Dr. N—.
He did this to me. He didn’t tell me about the other side-effects. It’s ALL
HIS FAULT!!! But much as I wished I could wreak my revenge upon
him, much as I fantasized about murdering his children one by one in
. . . Evil?
But much as the corrupted logic of pain might condemn the Creator, I
could never believe it.
A site of inspirational quotes, huh? Yeah, right. As if I need more BS in
my life.
I clicked the link.
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71
Evan Strouss
And there, cast on the moronic glow of a white computer screen, was the
answer.
Alone in the Woods
May 5, 2011
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
—Buddha
Pain, the body’s physical reaction to a physical problem, had not been
the architect of my depression; suffering, the emotional response, was at
fault. Pain has no intrinsic effect on human life; only our relationship
with it truly affects us. Suffering.
And I had let it. I had watched idly while my world revolved around it,
trying nothing to alter its course.
ON his choral work, “Hope, Faith, Life, Love,” set to E.E Cummings’
poem of the same name, choral composer Eric Whitacre writes that it is “a
repeating meditation.” The text itself is simple, consisting of eight words:
hope, faith, life, love, dream, joy, truth and soul. The song itself has lived
with me since the concert choir performed it in my tenth-grade year. I intended for it to provide a structure for my own meditation. I know its musical soul, and I find that each word speaks to me. But it has given me more
than a direction: It has provided a newfound meaning, for without all eight
qualities, no trip through the woods is complete.
It’s not God’s fault. It’s mine.
*
Although they lived in different times, traveled different places and
spoke different languages, the Psalmist and the Enlightened One had
curiously agreed on the fundamental truth behind the so-called “human
condition”: both believed that, while physical ills were immutable, the
afflictions of the spirit could be cured. Though I walk in the valley of the
shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Death is
inevitable. Fear is optional. Man can vanquish his suffering, embrace
the shadow and release the goodness and happiness in his heart from
bondage at the throne of pain.
I have not always been able to live up to this legacy. In moments of
frustration, I still blame pain for my suffering, forgetting that the two
can be independent of each other if I choose to make them so. I have,
however, reconciled with the thought of Dr. N—, a God-fearing man
who did his best—and with God, a man-loving Creator who can only
do His best if I accept pain—the reality of His world—and let Him in.
The trunks of the trees behind my house hunker into the earth. Their
great branches unfold and deflect all light that tries to penetrate to the
terrain below. To look through their foliage is to look into the unknown, for 100 feet in is a clearing of some light, and past that: complete darkness. The total blackness, the absence of light, was what
scared Matt and Nick, my neighbors, and me as we faced the tree line.
That was the summer when time seemed to transcend itself, and each
hazy day rolled lazily into the next. On that particular day, something
moved us three nine year olds to explore what lay beyond the first
clearing. The sun was obscured by a layer of gray clouds, and the sounds
of our voices calling out greetings were muffled by the humidity.
We met by the edge of the trees, each toting a bag with food, notebooks, pencils, and extra socks. The essentials. We wanted to make a
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map to discover what lay beyond the world of our neighborhood. And
the uncharted woods tempted us. We strode beyond the tree line. For
neither the first nor last time, we ventured into the woods.
As I have discovered, we all eventually trek through the woods, the
undiscovered. What begins with a wish develops into a process to fulfill it. I have often journeyed into the uncertain to find my dream
granted. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine illustrate this beautifully
in their musical, “Into the Woods.” The cast consists of fairy-tale characters, each of whom has a desire. They venture into the literal woods
of their world, crossing paths as they go. But whether it is the woods behind my house, or the metaphorical woods of a fictional land, there is
nothing more impacting than a journey through the unknown to
achieve fulfillment.
Those who know me know my love for all things Sondheim, especially
“Into the Woods.” They have heard me jokingly call Sondheim “God.”
What they often fail to recognize, however, is the truth in this humor.
Sondheim has frequently filled the void of my otherwise godless life.
His works have given me direction, and a faith in what is to come. Before I recognized his presence in my life, I used to imagine that an invisible camera followed my every move, and that even the most
mundane activities were motivated by this unseen force. One day, although I can’t remember the day exactly, I must have awoken, walked
to the bathroom, and continued my day, absent of the other pair of eyes.
I wonder on occasion if that was the day my faith temporarily left me,
and with it, a sense of meaning, regained after an eighth-grade project
on Sondheim. Now, there is no greater antidote to anxiety than turning to his music, and my treasured DVD of “Into the Woods.”
On the brink of potential destruction, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella sit under a tree, waiting for the approach of a giantess wreaking
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havoc across the land. Little Red has just discovered her house trampled
and Mother nowhere to be found. She promptly joins a party that is plotting to kill the giantess, but she has second thoughts as the time for the
ambush draws near. By killing a living creature, she thinks that she is
going against the morals set by her now absent elders. Cinderella tries to
reason with her, but can come to no conclusion. Finally, she sings.
“Mother cannot guide you, Now you’re on your own. Only me beside
you, still, you’re not alone.” She continues: “Sometimes people leave
you halfway through the woods. Do not let it grieve you. You decide
what’s good. You decide alone, but no one is alone.”
Until a recent viewing, I considered this song cliché. Now, circumstances have changed. I used to imagine my life was waiting for me to
start it. It was as though I were in the midst of a rehearsal. And though
I am often convinced I am the type to live for the moment, I found myself huddled in my room on the eve of my eighteenth birthday, hugging myself, feeling a little frightened, and very much alone. When a
friend asked earlier that day what I planned to do on my last night as a
child, I drew a blank. “You’re closing a chapter of your life,” she said.
“The rest of your life is about to begin.” The closure was what scared
me. How could a whole chapter of my life have ended already? It wasn’t simply a prelude; a whole chapter of my life had been written, and
I wondered who on earth would want to read it.
In the forest behind my house, Matt, Nick and I reached the clearing.
We sat down on a large rock under the stifled light shining down.
Nearby, a cicada rang his appreciation for the burning weather. We
wiped the sweat off of our faces, and listened to his music.
“That bug lives to be almost eighteen,” Matt said. “He’s older than we
are.” Nick scoffed. Matt was prone to exaggeration, and we were ac-
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customed to disbelieve him. He was, as it turns out, telling the truth.
The Magicicada lives on average thirteen to seventeen years, exceptionally long for an insect. The bug spends the first several years of its
life underground, until an entire brood emerges into the summer light
all at once. The life experiences of three nine year olds suddenly felt insignificant compared to the ancient bug. His song tapered off into a
drone as we walked past the wizened creature, and we continued to map
the world ahead.
In the world of fairy tales, on the brink of catastrophe, Cinderella continues to sing to Little Red. It is time for Little Red to take responsibility, but Cinderella reassures her that she is not alone. Cheesy? Maybe.
But there is no denial that truer words are rarely spoken. In an interview
with The New York Times, Sondheim himself said that “All fairy tales
are parables about steps to maturity. The final step is when you become
responsible for the people around you, when you feel connected to the
rest of the world.” It was during the last hours of my childhood when
the creeping responsibility settled in my consciousness, and the fear
that perhaps I was all at once alone. The love my parents had given
me, and the love that I returned had in no way prepared me for the
dreams that would soon become overdue, and the vast darkness I’m not
sure I can navigate on my own.
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witch, and shut in a tower without any doors or stairs in order to shield
her from the world. It is a dysfunctional dynamic, and Rapunzel yearns
to explore the region outside her tower. But as the witch pleads with the
girl in “Stay with Me,” the love in her mother’s eyes is not unlike what
can be seen in my own mother. Their relationship does not end well,
however. And a sheltered Rapunzel goes mad when the true world unfolds before her. She steps in the path of the giantess in a craze, and is
trampled. The witch looks on with regret, and at the end of the musical, she has learned her lesson about what it means to be a parent.
“Careful the things you say,” she warns. “Children will listen.”
A week before my birthday, my mom took out old pictures of me and
we flipped through them, sighing and laughing at each one. One of her
favorites showed the four of us, cuddled together on the couch. There
is so much love in my parents’ faces as they turn their eyes to my sister
and me. These pictures always confirm that fact, and I often wonder if
this kind of love is unique to my upbringing.
As I trample a path in the woods before me, this mantra seems to bear
some weight. How much of how I identify myself is based on what I
heard and experienced from my upbringing? Another of Mom’s favorite
pictures is a faded photo of baby-me sitting in the kitchen sink, while
Mom washes my hair. My eyes are puffy, and my face is red from what
looks like the cry of a lifetime. I can still recall the hate I held for baths,
which my face clearly shows. As we browsed the baby photo album,
Mom stopped at this picture, smiled at me and told me the story I had
heard many times before, but I listened as though it were the first time.
In order to stop the tears, she would sing “I’m Gonna Wash Those Bugs
Right Outta My Hair,” to the tune of the South Pacific song: her favorite
musical. I grew up with the sounds of South Pacific and The Sound of
Music, but it was during bath time when I remember the seed being
sown, and when theater stole a place in my heart. Time progressed, and
my passion grew into an obsession. I got my hands on every musical theater book I could find, and I forced my family on several pilgrimages to
Broadway. It seemed I had found my one true love. It gave me meaning.
In “Into the Woods,” there is a parent-child relationship with a different kind of love. While she was a child, Rapunzel was taken by the
My dreams hit a speed bump on the first day of my ninth-grade year. It
came in the form of an encounter in a computer lab. My friend and I
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sat in two swivel chairs, whispering. We chatted excitedly about our
classes, and the hugeness of everything on campus. In the middle of
this conversation, a tenth-grader interrupted and slouched on the chair
next to us, grinning seedily. We exchanged greetings, and he asked us
what we were up to.
“I’m auditioning for this term’s show,” I told him. “I’m really nervous.”
“Fag,” he dripped with a laugh. “I did tech once last year. Everyone in
the theater is a fag.” I returned an uneasy laugh, but my stomach turned.
My friend next to me giggled. I looked away from the tenth-grader’s
eyes. How could he have known? The implications of his statement,
however, were far more disturbing than the fear that my cover would be
blown. Obviously he was making a generalization about my sexuality,
but what scared me was that the generalization he made was correct. It
was in that moment that the fear of becoming a stereotype sank in. I
knew of course the stereotypes associated with homosexual men: the
lisp, the tight pants, and most prominently, a love for all things musical theater, Barbara Streisand, and Liza Minnelli. Never did I connect
these generalizations with my own personality, however. And this slimy
tenth-grader had taken what I saw as a legitimate piece of my identity,
and turned it on its head, turning my interest into a product of my own
gayness. Truth interrupted my moment of joy with a wrench, and my
perception of my own soul moved beyond reach.
Back in the woods of my childhood, Matt, Nick and I journeyed
through the darkness around us. We ran forward excitedly when we saw
a stream, teeming with life. I had no more taken a step towards the
water when I felt a series of prickling on my legs, and was shocked to
see hornets crawling up my bare calves, taking stings of my flesh. We
screamed and ran back, out of the darkness, beyond the clearing and beyond the almost-adult cicada, not to stop until we reached the safety of
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my house, and never again to venture into the woods now that we knew
the truth of what lurked there.
Beyond my freshman year, I largely forgot the event with the tenthgrader. Sure, it might be the stereotype to do theater, but maybe that
was okay. I focused my mind instead on how to best open up about my
sexuality, and to be accepted and comfortable. My only potential rolemodels were on TV, but Christian Siriano on “Project Runway” looked
happy. I incorporated phrases from his arsenal and added them into my
vocabulary. “That is so fierce,” he would say. And so would I. One day
in the spring I realized that my neck was naked. I asked my mother if
she would buy me a scarf. I liked to fling it around my throat dramatically. And so, I began to shade in the areas of who I imagined I should
become: a coloring book character. He wore skinny jeans, a long scarf,
and a vapid smile. And he was completely unfamiliar.
I realized of course that I was descending down a slippery slope of stereotypes, but it was my deepest conviction that by turning myself into a
one-dimensional character straight from the TV screen, I was making
myself easier to understand and accept. The witch’s prophecy, “Children will listen,” was fulfilled, as it often is. I listened to what was
around me, and developed myself as such. It wasn’t until I thought back
to that first day of school when I realized what I had become: Just another generalization, I was too uncreative and much too frightened to
form my own soul.
On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, it hit me that I still could not
wrap my head around who I was. I discerned a long time ago that my
sexuality was not what I wanted to use to define myself, but I still lacked
what one would call an identity. Cinderella faces a similar problem in
“Into the Woods.” She has a wish to attend the King’s festival, but is
conflicted when deciding between a frightening but luxurious life of
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royalty, and a safe, terrible life with her stepmother. In a song near the
end of the first act, she sings, “How can you know who you are till you
know what you want which you don’t?” She tries to reason her way
through a decision, but can only come to the eventual conclusion not
to decide, and in doing so, consequently chooses the life of royalty.
If Cinderella’s journey through the second act is any indication of what
happens when one is trying to discover oneself, then perhaps definition is not what I must seek. Discerning what one wants often does not
guarantee an easy road. The prince continues his unfaithful ways despite his love for Cinderella, and so under the tree where they plan to
kill the rampaging giantess, Cinderella is just as alone as Little Red Riding Hood. But in the finale, she gets the last word—“I wish!”—one last
time showing that even though she may not understand what she is
wishing for, she continues to wish.
To this day, I continue to define myself, yet I know the dangers of taking it too far. By shading the coloring book of who I think I should be,
I become exactly the person who I don’t want to be. A lot of what I understand about myself has been passed down from my parents and the
culture of my home. Arguably, however, every fiber of my life is my
own. I spent the last night of my childhood afraid of what was ahead.
Facing the woods as a mature adult is frightening, but I have learned,
as Cinderella sings, “You decide what’s good.” To find one’s way, one
must understand when to be alone. No one, from the seedy tenth-grader
to the likes, even, of Stephen Sondheim, can take my steps for me.
What seemed cheesy in the statement, “no one is alone,” became reality at the end of my freshman year. Confused and frustrated at my search
for identity, I made a blog to channel my rage towards my loneliness inside the confines of my secret. I created an email account, called Intothewoods (the obviousness of my identity must not have even crossed
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my mind, given the email address and my open love for the musical).
Within a week, I abandoned the website in fear that I would be discovered. Recently, I revisited it with a beating heart. Partly in shame of
my juvenile freshman self, but more in total devastation in remembering what I felt when I wrote them, I could barely bring myself to read
the entries. Not so much time has passed between that and now, but it
feels like millennia. In my inbox, I opened an email from a former
friend, with whom I now exchange no more than a simple “hello” in
passing on the paths. I close with her words, because her generosity will
always reassure me just as Sondheim’s words have, that understanding
my independence, and my search for it in the woods, is not an independent effort.
“Your blog is really touching,” she said. “I'm sorry for what you’re going
through right now—but even if you are fighting a war here, trust me,
you are nowhere near losing. Don't worry about being unsure about the
future and who you are in general. I was actually just freaking out about
that . . . I literally have no idea what I want to do with the rest of my
life. After I take all my required high-school classes, what the hell am
I going to do? I want independence, but I’m not completely sure what
to do with it. That’s what high school is for, figuring that stuff out.
“I hope you realize that your friends are really there for you—that’s what
friends are. There’s nothing worse than feeling alone in a room full of
people, and hopefully you’ll be able to talk to your friends soon. They’ll
listen and support you. I promise. I guess I’ve been kinda ranting to you
to in this email, but, well . . . you’re not alone. There are always people
here for you.”
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Alison Economy
The Twelve Houses
May 12, 2011
I dwell in the stars, the twelve houses of astrology. My Pisces, the intuitive, creative, and most fragile sign, comes last in the Zodiac and rules
the House of Self-Destruction. These houses shelter the sections of my
life; their walls divide neatly the pulsing tangle of all that I experience.
I. The House of Self-Destruction
May you live in interesting times.
I found this proverb in a fortune cookie alongside my lucky numbers,
and lately, it has been reverberating in my thoughts. It reads as both a
curse and a blessing, depending on what, exactly, the giver means. (September 11 and the first moonwalk both certainly qualify as interesting
times, but I know which one I would rather have witnessed.) One of history’s most fundamental debates is whether great people create interesting times, or whether from the interesting times arises the need for
heroes. It is impossible to separate completely the figures from the age.
All I can do is make the best of the luck I was given.
I have lived in nine different houses, but my maternal grandparents’
home in New Jersey has been a constant presence in my life since I can
remember. It is a beautiful old white house, full of buried memories and
closets to explore. After so many visits, my siblings and I remember the
contents of every single space, and now investigate out of nostalgic habit
rather than genuine curiosity. This summer, though, we unearthed something new: my grandparents’ wedding album. Even on this happiest of
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days, my grandmother was not smiling. It scares me to look at her and
wonder if I am destined to retrace her path. The resemblance between
her sixty years ago and me today is unmistakable. Visual signs, the round
faces and dark hair, could in the future be revealed as only part of an allencompassing genetic similarity.
Dementia is hereditary on both sides of my family, alcoholism strongly
on my mother’s. My grandparents were both raised with pain manifested
in heavy drinking and passive aggression. Decades later, they now treat
us just as they treated their own children. My aunt told me stories about
being singled out at dinner as an example, positive or negative, to the
others. Last Thanksgiving, in the study with my two siblings, my grandmother waxed eloquently about me being her favorite of us three. My
siblings shot me jealous glares while I tried to avoid eye contact with
anything except the champagne carpet. Our generation, with the sort of
optimism our elders always say is typical of youth, hoped that we had
escaped the circle of self-destruction. It took a little longer to discover
we were not nearly as invincible as we had thought.
I am fifteen years old and about to begin my Exeter career. My mother
and I flew into New Jersey the day before to visit my extended family before making the five-hour drive up to New Hampshire. I have never before visited my family without my siblings. Tonight, we gather at my
uncle’s house for a barbecue. One Scotch turns into too many as the sky
fades murky lavender. My grandfather stumbles between the food table
and the alcohol table to make himself another drink. He pours one for
my grandmother as well. She drinks each one faster than the first, and
when she tries to cut her steak she lacks the necessary coordination.
Mumbling to herself, crying, she sways at the table. She cries for her
first-born son, my uncle, who has recently died of a sudden heart attack,
and for the memory she feels deteriorating. I am a silent onlooker who
perceives without acting.
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After a time, my grandfather understands that it is time to go home. He
struggles to stand up and holds my grandmother in his precarious grasp.
None of my relatives attempt to prevent them from driving; out of patriarchal respect or a sense of futility, we just watch them leave. My
mother and aunt, the blood relatives, drive after them to make sure they
arrive home safely, and the rest of the adults gather in their own circle
to discuss in hushed tones a scene they have witnessed all too often but
would rather ignore.
As for me, I move to the kitchen, alone and wishing my sister were there
so we could stand on the linoleum together and wonder when everything began to change. The well-stocked bar was a permanent fixture at
all family functions I had ever attended, but the atmosphere never
slipped beyond jovial inebriation. For the first time, it strikes me that my
grandmother is not so immutable as I had imagined. I survey the damage around me (scattered dishes, a broken plate) and decide to start fixing what is still in my control. I clear the table and begin to wash the
dishes, hands still shaking. After awhile, my uncle finds me in the
kitchen and takes me into his arms. “They love you so much, honey. I
promise,” he says. I let myself pretend that his broad, six-foot figure can
shelter me from such pervasive loneliness and confusion, but it is hard
to miss the silences of what he cannot bring himself to admit: no matter how much they might love me, there is a black-labeled bottle named
Johnnie Walker that they love even more.
II. The House of Honor
In History, I am allowed to pass judgment on those who came before
me, to create depth or simplify them as I choose. Having such a pro-
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found understanding of the way strangers think and act never fails to
fascinate me. Sometimes, I think I use the histories of others to ignore
my own. Our family get-togethers bring me a quietly unsettling sense of
isolation. I watch as quick tempers, strong livers, and loud voices form
a chemical mixture that can coalesce into a perfect storm at any given
moment. I am never a part of the action, but blood-bound to witness it.
My family loves one another deeply but they bury their emotions with
a stoicism inherited from our ancestors, nineteenth-century immigrants
who bore hard work so that their children’s children might attend college. I have difficulty joining my relatives in turning a blind eye on anything that threatens the façade of perfection, and especially the curse
we have all inherited.
On a clear autumn day in New York City, a metallic rainfall of blood red
fire and falling bodies brought down the foundations of all that my forebears built for me: the security of capitalism, the dramatic juxtaposition of steel piercing into the horizon. Eight years old then, I remember
watching the way the buildings fell matter-of-factly onto themselves
like a house of cards on the television screen, but did not believe
that three thousand people was that many. We had been studying the
Holocaust in school; compared to eleven million, three thousand
seemed so mundane.
Addiction and destiny, for me, are in tandem. As a teenager, my cousin
Robert had been the eldest child watching helplessly as his parents went
through a divorce that was hardly amicable. He tried to hold the family
together again after the death of his father six years later. Perhaps the
medical issues that had first exposed him to painkillers had made the
heroin inescapable, or perhaps he had been from the beginning too weak
to resist. He was once an aspiring pharmacologist, but now, at twentyfour, he knows his substances more personally than he ever would if he
had finished school. It is impossible for me to witness the disease without wondering where I fit into it. Am I already an addict, just waiting to
see if it ever develops into an actual dependency? Is there a different
path I can follow, or is some invisible hand herding me to the end? I like
to think I have more control than that. But no one ever plans on succumbing to the disease; it just happens.
I was ten years old and received the news that my favorite horse had
been put down. She was the kind of horse who always stopped when she
felt her charge begin to slip, the kind that bore my fumbling commands
with grace. Too young to understand the significance of words like
mercy, Minnesota winter, and degenerating arthritis, I believed her owner
to be a murderer without cause. Now, I, too, had something to grieve
about on that day. Though I could not understand abstract, national sorrow, a man I had once respected killed a horse in cold blood, and I began
to know pain. National and personal histories collide, but when generations have passed and no one can remember living on the soil that was
originally in contention, there must be reconciliation. It took me a few
years to realize that putting her down had been an act of compassion. I
understand the need to hear the hinges click on one epoch in order to
begin another, but I have not yet been able to draw a line from the truth
we must remember to that which we may distance ourselves from. Can
we still seek vengeance for the attack on our soil nearly ten years ago?
Are my ancestors responsible for the life I have inherited?
Hereditary disease can be traced back for several generations, but the
genes of humanity as a whole regress further. I never considered living
through history. I believed it started and ended long before I was born.
Two years later: September 11, 2003.
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III. The House of Self
I don’t believe in a singular God. There is no man in the sky watching
over me, no Judgment Day. And yet, there is something, some entity,
which continues to mystify me. Every time I see geese in their blurry V,
escaping for the winter, I wonder how they always know where to go.
Jagged mountains jutting into the Washington clouds, the first signs of
autumn in New England, even the flat, endless plains of the Midwest
that I stared at for far too long are beautiful in their own way. Evolution
alone cannot account for such moments of sheer wonder.
These are life’s surprises. To anticipate the future is both futile and boring. At thirteen, my zenithal aspiration consisted of owning a horse farm
in Wyoming that stretched farther than the horizon. How we change. I
move away from each new house I build because there is always something I wish to improve on. Yet I stop somewhere, and through some felicitous roll of the dice, I have thus far turned out all right. Not great, not
perfect, but all right. Life progresses in a fluid timeline, reminding me
that everything happens for a reason, even if I cannot name it at the
time. All I can do is live as if forever is an endless chain of interwoven
moments, present tenses stretching toward the mountains, and today
there is nothing in front of me except the rising vermilion sun. Illusions
fade, silver tarnishes, and even sequoias must someday grow their last
ring. As Prospero reminds me in The Tempest, the life I live will end just
as surely as the curtain falls at the end of the show.
. . . like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night came to the art museum a few years ago. Something about the perfect geometry of its contours, the textures I could not
see in a print, made me fall in love with it again. Swirling chiaroscuro,
immeasurable wordless beauty, fleeting knowledge—the strokes of a
madman. I am reminded of it now with you, two of my best friends, as
the sun sets on Seattle. Our foursome met when we all needed an escape from a place we hated. Now sixteen, you two have found ecstasyinduced fever dreams beneath an artificial blacklit sky, and I have found
boarding school. Erika found a bottle of painkillers and then we all
found guilt, too. I did, at least. I tell myself that my presence would
have been enough to restore her will to live because I would rather believe that I could have saved her than accept the inevitability of her attempt. I will never forget calling her after the hospital pumped her
stomach and moved her to the adolescent psychiatric ward: how far the
distance between us suddenly seemed. The three of us here in this abandoned mill on the shores of Puget Sound doesn’t feel right. She moved
across the country before I returned and I never saw her. Do you know
that it’s been over a year now but I still can’t walk into a drugstore, see
the rows of pills, and not seize up a little at the thought of her contemplating which one to buy?
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We look at the graffiti around us, the proof of all our lives. Generations
of teenagers painting over each other, intersecting crossroads, primary
hues, the illusion of rebellion, undying love later crossed out. A tree
grows from a yawning crack in the floor. I made the honor roll, and
you’re counting down the minutes until you can string yourselves out
again. The spaces between us are too vast, and I know this is the last
time we will be together. You who molded me in so many ways become
my history. For tomorrow, we gather close and snap a picture—click,
flash, frozen. One moment in so many, one star in Van Gogh’s revolving, seething, surging sky.
IV. The House of Home
My grandparents’ house was noticeably deteriorating when I returned
last Thanksgiving. If I hadn’t been there so many times before, I might
not have noticed how shabby it has become. I note as well the details
that my grandmother’s waning mind prioritizes. She could never remember the date I would hear from college, though I told her several
times each day, but always recalled the school I was applying to. She remembers my favorite foods, asks about my classes, and will sometimes
quote back the letters that, I realize guiltily, I no longer write nearly as
often. Every few minutes, she asks what my plans for the day are or what
I want for dinner; logistical questions must be answered several times.
At night, she drinks, sending her already-fragile mind into a labyrinth
of fiends and further confusion. She insists on doing the dishes after dinner, clinging to her past as a 1950s housewife. I, the favorite grandchild,
am the only one who can send her upstairs. I put my arm around her
and try to steer her toward the stairs. Though her shoulders are frail and
bony, she is obstinate and requires much cajoling. When I was in grade
school, my grandparents would slip my siblings and me five or ten dollars for doing the dishes, but now, our only reward is the knowledge that,
for one night at least, my grandmother will not fall onto the unforgiving kitchen tiles.
Whenever I return, I am reminded that this is my past and my future,
everything I wish I could avoid. I will not be fortune’s fool, but I will
no longer deny the inevitable, either. Every time she asks me the same
question, I respond just as if it were new, and we often repeat the same
conversations several times in one day. From these interactions, more
than anything, I have learned grace. She has instilled in me the poise
to remain buoyant while she is engulfed in her own torrential seas, and
the ability to accept that sixty years from now, this could easily be me.
I smile blandly, trying not to cringe in the face of this perverse funhouse mirror.
V. The House of Philosophy
There are three things that I know to be true: I am alive. I am not alone.
I will be all right. I don’t know if I am condemned to repeat mistakes
from the history of my family in particular or humanity in general, I
don’t know if there was an Original Sin, and I don’t know what the future holds. But I know three things, and for now, that is enough.
I know a man I believe to be a time traveler; anyone who speaks so fluently the language of the past could only have lived through it. It is because of the time traveler and a woman who strikes me as a modern
incarnation of Emily Dickinson that I learned to mark the stages of my
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life in rows of composition books, because of them that I discovered language. If my family often seems a reflection of all that I cannot change,
my friends and mentors show me the life I can build separate from these
imperfections.
Imagine a corner so large that being backed into it
does not mean an ending, but the beginning of a journey
toward the wall, toward the place where walls meet.
These lines come from a poem called “The Astronomer and the Poet”
by Jessica Piazza. They ring true to me, from my position at the edge between adolescence and legal adulthood, unsure, unstable. The next time
I see the decades change, I will be the same age that my mother was
when she married my father. The future scares me, but more than anything I crave impermanence. Measure my life as miles a ship traverses in
the ocean: out in the open water, in the void of the Great Unknown, the
stars and the moon still bring her safely into the harbor.
I spent part of one summer at a writing seminar in Vermont, in a little
white room at the top of a long staircase, learning from my Emily Dickinson. There, I met my first love and most brilliant teacher, sitting across
the table and scrawling down everything Emily Dickinson said. Gray
and brown eyes smiled at each other, first tentative steps, and we spent
the next three weeks trying to create a lifetime. We live on different
sides of the country and never saw each other again, but I still preserve
the conversation we had, in all seriousness, about the house we would
build when I turned eighteen and we could get married. What we have
instead are pieces of writing we published and dedicated to each other,
and memories of unadulterated happiness that would have been spoiled
once we built our house and realized we were never meant to last.
Distance and oscillation have governed my relationships for as long as
I can remember. I have never maintained the same best friend for more
than two or three years, and have never shied away from moving on.
Sameness has a soothing cadence that may rock me in my dreams for a
while, but when I wake up, the pendulum has swung and it is time to
leave. In the last three years, Exeter has become the closest semblance
of a community I have ever known. Inside these hallowed brick walls, I
have found friends I will carry forward—Prospero’s cloud-capp’d towers
and gorgeous palaces reaching beyond his reverie. I still do not have one
singular, structural house, but in the memories that stretch back for miles
and will continue in front of us, I have found a home.
VI. The House of Reincarnation
Triangles are the most perfect of geometric shapes, even and stable. This
contrasts with the Greek letter Delta, the symbol assigned to transformation. The triangle is thus change and changelessness all at once: port
and open water. Like the pioneers with their prairie schooners, I began
moving west at an early age. A year in New Hampshire, ten in Minnesota, seven now in Washington, overlapping with three more in New
Hampshire that neatly connect the vertices, are the proof of my journey,
cornerstones of my future. I am a wayfarer, heir to Ginsberg’s generation, “who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard
wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts.”
Once, I heard a story about a man who escaped the World Trade Center, faked his own death, and created a new name for himself. Tempting
as it sometimes seems to shed the identity that defines me, this sundry
patchwork life is the house I have built for myself, and the one I will
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Grace Eggert
stay in. Tomorrow, I will be an alcoholic with no history or memories, I
will realize that transience sometimes brings loneliness, and I will devour voraciously the lives of others because I am afraid to face my own.
Tomorrow, I will claim my ancestral throne in the House of Self-Destruction. Or maybe tomorrow, I will grow into the person Emily Dickinson and the man I believe to be a time traveler know I can be when
they see my best and tell me I can do better. Maybe tomorrow I will renounce my throne but today, there is nothing in front of me except the
beckoning indigo promise of the night sky, primordial, eternal.
The Changeling
May 19, 2011
MY sister and I were born on March 5th, 1994, in New York HospitalCornell Medical Center. I am the older twin by eleven minutes. I was
a Campbell Soup kid, wide-faced, chubby-cheeked, born with a full
head of spiky dark hair which earned me the nickname “Mrs. Tiggywinkle,” after Beatrix Potter’s little old hedgehog woman who lived
in the side of a mountain.
Lila was a Gerber baby, with silky blonde locks and an angelic oval face.
Looking back over our baby books that so lovingly document each tiny
accomplishment of our first year, it is clear that she took the lead; smiling, reaching, rolling over, sitting up, crawling, standing, hitting each
milestone before I did. I was by all accounts the mellower baby, to the
point that our pediatrician expressed concern over my own development.
My parents, previously overjoyed with Lila’s progress, began to worry
quietly about their older daughter, and so when, around my first birthday, I began to catch up to and overtake my sister, it was met with
great relief. More and more, Lila and I laughed and played together, as
we began to notice the world around us.
There is a family video of this time in our lives, the two of us sitting
together in an empty Pampers box, fifteen months old, sitting knee to
knee, rocking the box then turning towards the camera and laughing,
looking into the lens. This is the last moment captured where Lila and
I are connected, a single happy spirit in two bodies.
We’d moved from New York City to Boulder, Colorado, when Lila and
I were ten months old. It is there that we learned to walk and talk,
celebrated our first and second birthdays, and it was there that Lila
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began to drift away, slowly and imperceptibly, disappearing in increments like a river under the creeping growth of winter’s ice. It
was as if she were called away by the fairies in Yeats’ poem,
“The Stolen Child”:
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.
She was lost in some other layer of reality, the fairies’ changeling child.
In the backgrounds of our family videos, you begin to hear my parents
behind the camera. “Lila. Lila!” they insist, trying to call her back to the
lens. But she stays absorbed in the fabric of chairs, in some world unseen
by the viewer, her eyes turned away.
It was only during our move to Massachusetts that someone else called
attention to how far from us she had wandered. My mother drove my
sister and me across the country, stopping at an old college friend’s
house in Cincinnati. The day after we left, the friend called my father,
back in Boulder.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said to him, “but we watched a
PBS documentary last night about kids exactly like Lila. It was about
autism.”
At two-and-a-half years old, my sister was diagnosed with PDD-NOS—
Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified. This is
the catch-all phrase for children who don’t display every symptom associated with classic autism. In Lila’s case, the missing symptom was
the obsessive-compulsive behavior commonly seen in autistic children.
The hardest part of Lila’s disorder was the timeline, her slow backwards slip from star twin to changeling. She has what’s known as the
regressive type of the disorder, developing normally for the first year,
before autism began to steal her away. My first real memories of Lila are
of that cruel rewinding.
I remember sitting on our old wicker sofa in Cambridge, watching Winnie the Pooh over and over again in the heat of summer. We both loved
it, would sing along when Pooh began to float away on his balloon:
I’m just a little black rain cloud,
Hovering under the honey tree,
Only a little black rain cloud,
Pay no attention to little me.
Lila began to wander in circles through the house, library to living room
to kitchen to library, stroking one side of her nose with her index finger,
taking her thumb out of her mouth to sing the first line of the theme
song over and over again, just the name. “Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the
Pooh,” her brain stuck on repeat, lost in the drone of the words.
She began to lose the rest of her language but for the occasional phrase
committed to some deep recess of her memory, and my parents would
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battle the regression, sitting with my sister at the bottom of the stairs
and begging her to repeat after them, “Tree. Tree.” Lila would stare
away silently, absorbed in some world hidden in the texture of the wall
behind them. Sometimes she would lie back on the sofa, thumb tucked
safely into her mouth, watching dust motes dance in the sunbeams
above her. She was caught in those swirls and eddies of Brownian motion, being borne away by the same imperceptible winds. By three and
half, she had lost all speech.
It is the memories of that year that make me burst into tears every time
I hear so much as a snatch of melody from that Winnie the Pooh video.
It reminds me of everything that we lost: my sister, my twin, my other
half, carried away on Winnie’s balloon.
It was that same year that I began to understand my role as her protector and defender. Once, on the playground, a little boy came up to
me, shoved his face into mine, and sneered, “Your sister’s stupid.” I
looked at him, and said, “Which one of those ladies is your mother?”
as I gestured towards the benches ringing our sandpit. He pointed her
out, and I walked over.
“You need to teach your son to be nicer. He just said my sister’s
stupid. She’s not stupid. She has autism. I think you need to explain
that to him.”
That was one of the last times I knew how to protect her.
Half a year later, we experienced the first of many of her disappearances. Our parents had put our first house in Cambridge on the market, and the realtor had forgotten to lock the street door, which led
directly onto a very busy Huron Avenue. My mother was changing my
diaper when Lila disappeared. She immediately checked that street
door, and found it unlocked. My father arrived home at that moment,
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and Mom sent him upstairs to call the police, telling him she didn’t
know whether Lila was still inside the house, or had wandered out.
The police arrived to the darkening neighborhood within five minutes. Two squad cars, one containing a canine unit. The dog was a German Shepherd. His handler asked Mom for a piece of Lila’s clothing,
so they could identify her scent. My mother went back inside, and returned with the green-and-blue-striped baby blanket my grandmother
had knit for Lila. Mom began to sob. The officer pressed the blanket
against the dog’s nose, and the two of them set out around the house
at a quick jog. Moments later, they reappeared in the front doorway.
“She hasn’t come outside.”
With that, both the officers and my parents locked the door and began
to search the house. I remember following the grown-ups room to room,
ending up in the third-floor playroom. I could hear her humming to herself, but we didn’t know where the sound was coming from. There was a
tiny door at the edge of the wall that led into a low crawlspace, lined
with pink insulation, fiberglass spun like cotton candy between the
beams. Lila had crawled in, and was sucking her thumb by the edge of the
roof. I remember watching Dad trying to entice her out with a pint of
Ben & Jerry’s. When that didn’t work, he crept out along the rafters, risking falling through the ceiling below, and grabbed Lila by her feet, carefully, gingerly towing her back to the solid floorboards behind him. My
mother started sobbing again, and we thanked the officers profusely, patted the dog, and rushed Lila to the bath to wash off the itchy insulation.
I remember feeling absolute terror for Lila for the first time, but not
the last.
When we were six years old, a month before we were due to move to
Berkeley, California, Lila had a dangerous episode of another symptom
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of autism known as pica. Unlike a typically developing child, she’d never
outgrown her fascination with putting strange things in her mouth: sand,
dirt, soap, and other inedible objects. This time, she tried to eat a Christmas ornament—a shiny red glass sphere. She chewed it up and swallowed it, the shards slicing into her esophagus. She started vomiting.
My mother tried to soothe her stomach with ginger-ale, not realizing
what she’d eaten until she began to vomit the shards of glass. The vomiting continued for the next several hours, until finally she was throwing
up what looked like coffee grounds. My mother called my father home
from his nearby office in the middle of the day, and together they called
the pediatrician, who told them the coffee-grounds were half-digested
blood, and to take her to the emergency room immediately. What I remember is rushing into the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital down by the Charles River. An hour and a half later, my mother
rode in an ambulance with Lila to the Children’s Hospital in downtown
Boston, sirens blaring, my father and I following in our car. Lila and my
mother stayed in the hospital overnight. I went home with Dad.
We moved to Berkeley when Lila and I were six. She had developed
her own vocabulary of hoots and whistles, long musical trills. She
began to bolt more and more frequently, to the point that we installed
an electrified wire that ran around the top of our fence, and bought her
an ankle bracelet that would trip an alarm if she left. I remember my
friends coming over and touching the fence on dares, laughing when
the low jolt ran up their arms. It felt like you had missed a step on a
long staircase, falling briefly out of the world.
Around the age of ten, Lila started to display some disturbing new patterns of behavior. She began to have raging tantrums, screaming and
biting her arms until she drew blood, smashing her head through walls
and windows. Shiny calluses spread from her hands towards her el-
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bows, marked by pale semi-circular tooth scars. Lila began to reach for
us, too, straining towards our faces and hair in pain and then lunging,
biting and smashing any available flesh.
It began to take both of my parents’ strength to hold her down until
these tantrums passed, to keep her from harming herself or us. I remember Mom weeping every time she had to hold her daughter down.
Lila slept less and less, wandering through our house and outside under
our magnolia tree, howling. She would break into our cupboards and
the icebox, to eat and pour out any liquids over the kitchen floor. We
began to lock everything. There were childproof magnetic locks on all
our cupboards, a bicycle lock on the refrigerator, a coded number lock
on my room. The gate latches were hidden and rigged to brass bells. I
was no longer comfortable bringing friends home. Lila was too difficult
to explain, too scary.
When I was twelve, driving to Tilden Regional Park with Lila and my
father, she attacked me. It wasn’t the first time, but it marked the beginning of my quiet fear of my sister. Along with protecting Lila from the
world, I had to protect myself from Lila. I was sitting in the front passenger seat of my dad’s Volkswagen Beetle, where I could be bitch at the
switch with the radio. Lila was sitting directly behind me, completely
silent, so I didn’t expect the arm that snaked rapidly around my neck.
With her other hand, Lila grabbed my hair, and slammed me back into
the headrest. She was screaming, teeth clenched, in my ear. It took Dad
a moment to register what was happening, by which point Lila had
begun smashing my head over and over against the car window. I was
starting to black out. Dad pulled over to the side of the road as quickly
as he could, and I popped open the door and rolled out, vision completely dark, as Dad fought to control Lila. She began to slam the side
of her fist into her own nose until it bled, dark and sluggish. I stayed outside on the pavement, too scared to cry.
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I began to avoid Lila, afraid of being alone with her, hating watching
my father dote on her after screaming at me for imagined slights. I remember being alone in the living room with her the summer before I
left for boarding school. She was sitting on the sofa, sucking her thumb
and humming quietly. My father had just woken me up by throwing a
laundry basket at me and screaming about how I would grow up to be
a pig just like my mother if I didn’t clean up the goddamn house. Then,
I had watched him walk over to Lila and coo at her. “I love you, Lila
Bean,” he said, face lit up with a huge smile.
When he’d left the room, I looked at Lila. I walked over to the sofa,
bent over, and grabbed her forearm. I pinched as hard as I could,
squeezing my index finger and thumb together. I was so angry, so filled
with rage and jealousy and frustration. Lila began to cry, her keening
echoing off of the high ceiling, and my parents rushed toward her. I had
already backed away, beginning a sprint to my room. I felt like I was
going to be sick because of what I had done.
Leaving for boarding school allowed me to ignore the Lila problem.
For the first time in years, I could live my own life, see my friends, instead of spending my free time alone and avoiding two-thirds of my
immediate family. Still, there were uncomfortable moments. Listening to my friends talk about missing their siblings, when to this day
most of my friends have no idea that I even have a sister, because I
can’t stand to hear the question, “Why haven’t I met her?” another
time, can’t face the deep loss I am reminded of every time I say, “She
has autism.” My twin has autism, and I am here at Exeter, in this beautiful place with every privilege in the world.
I have tried for the last several years to repent for the deep-seated anger
I felt that summer. I spent my free afternoons volunteering at a barn
for abused horses, getting kicked and bitten by thankless animals in
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the hopes that one of them might be rehabilitated by our unconditional love. I was perfect for it, having been trained my whole life in
that wordless communication one needs to comfort the broken.
At the end of my upper year, my cousin Sasha revealed to me that she
had gotten me permission to visit India with her for a month that summer, on a trip her school had arranged. It was a chance to visit the
country I’d wanted to see since I was five, listening to my parents’ stories of their travels through India and Nepal.
And so it was that last June I found myself on a beach in Mumbai,
talking to two Indian students my age—Shahid, a Muslim, and Dobli,
a Christian. It was monsoon season, and where Delhi had had thick
layers of dirt, Mumbai had streaks of rot and mold, puddles of shimmering rainbowed water. We sat on dirty sand, surrounded by trash.
Small shacks of corrugated tin leaned against one another, wandering
down to the beach’s water-line. Within them, loud, tired men yelled
to me, “Tourist! Tourist!” each beckoning me to his stall of trinkets.
Shahid and Dobli were speaking rapid Hindi, so I almost missed
Shahid’s transition to English as he asked me, “What are your plans?”
“Well, I'm going to be applying to colleges in fall,” I said.
“No, you mistake me.” Shahid consulted his friend in Hindi, who then
asked, “What do you want to achieve? What will make you happy?”
At the time, I had no answer, but I've been thinking about the question ever since. In my Hinduism & Buddhism course at Exeter this
fall, I began to consider it in light of the Hindu concept of dharma,
which translates loosely as “duty.”
With no caste system assigning my dharma, it has been my responsibility to discover it. My sense of duty has a great deal to do with Lila.
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Charielle McMullan
Knowing that when our parents are no longer with us, her protection
will fall solely to me, every opportunity I take is for two people. I have
known, sometimes without knowing that I do, that Lila’s well-being
rests on me in the end. After sixteen years, I feel this in my bones. It
has led me to believe that in a broader moral sense, those of us who are
able act on behalf of an invisible constituency: those people who, due
to handicaps mental or physical, social or economic, are unable to pursue the same opportunities as ourselves. Every decision I make, I make
for two people. Every challenge I face, I face for us both. My sister is
always with me. She is my ever-present shadow and second self.
My dharma is to stand up for those in the shadows, to use my own life
for their benefit. To answer Shahid and Dobli, were they to see me
now on this continent so distant from their own, I would be able to say
that the only thing that will make me truly happy is to continue my
role as protector and defender, to grow and learn until I am strong
enough to keep us both safe, to draw as much of that invisible constituency as possible into the light of day.
I’ve been working on writing this meditation for a long time this year,
discussing my memories of Lila with my mother, asking her when certain things happened, to tell me more about the times that have gone
fuzzy in my memory, or things that happened when I was too young to
remember at all. I told her about my earliest memories of Lila singing
her Winnie the Pooh mantra, all those years ago.
On January 18th, she received her daily email from the Writer’s Almanac. This is A. A. Milnes’ birthday, and that morning’s missive
quoted Milne himself: “Wherever they go, and whatever happens to
them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a
little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” I hope that Lila’s world
is like that of the enchanted Forest, and that, at the end of things, we
may play there together.
Unpaved Roads
May 26, 2011
95th Street: Predominantly African-American community on the south
side of Chicago, known for the sale of drugs and excessive violence. 95th
Street is my home. Every morning as I walk to the train to get to school,
I pass shattered beer bottles, used needles and joints, and even a man
camped out in front of the liquor store, waiting for the doors to open. I
attend Phillips Exeter Academy which means that I should be writing
about a magical fairyland with nicely trimmed grass and rosy-cheeked
children playing outside and where the only sounds you hear are the
sounds of birds twitting, lawn mowers humming. I’m instead going to
take you to a place where phrases such as, “I got the good green” and “A
Man, where’s my money?” became the alarm clock for daily life.
I am thirteen years old sitting in my room after school contemplating
life outside my house door. I should be out enjoying myself and stop
acting as if I am better than the people of 95th. There is a woman who
lives in the house next to ours. We know she is bad news. Kendrick, my
younger brother, and I place our ears on the walls and listen to her flog
and belittle her eight-year-old autistic son. I should do something, but
what can I do? Kenton, my eleven-year-old brother, is bouncing off the
walls. He has just been diagnosed with ADHD. I can’t get him settled
down to do his homework; my patience is running low. I should be
stronger and think about the fact that my mom has to deal with this
every day. My mom sends me to the store to buy milk. Instead of complaining, I should hurry up and get going so I can make it back sooner.
I am nearing the bus stop when to my surprise, the bus to the store
storms right past me, leaving a cloud of dust around me. I should be
patient and stop swearing at the bus.
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In the midst of the guns and gang violence, 95th Street has its positive
aspects. I like the fact that I am able to commute easily from my home
to the homes of family members. I am fourteen years old, and it is a week
before school starts; my uniforms pants need to be hemmed. To solve
this problem, I am going to take a trip to Grandma’s house. It is a weekday so I hope the bus driver will allow me to pay one dollar to ride the
bus. I know I am no longer thirteen years old and should be paying two
dollars, but if the hoodlums can vandalize the bus without a problem,
than I can ride the bus for one dollar. Before I step onto the bus, I cover
my face with a pink scarf. I need to look younger and this is the only way
to accomplish the goal. I get on the bus and insert my dollar into the fair
box. The bus departs the station and we are on our way. The bus stops
at 103rd Street: a familiar street to me. I glance out the window and
search for the tall, lean man who made me and slayed me. Yes, I spot
him. There he is, just what I remember him as: tall, lean, cigarette in one
hand, brown bag in the other. He is my father. I feel rage crowding in my
heart and then my hands and then my legs and then my mind. I should
be forgiving, but I’d rather jump off the bus, and ask him where he has
been for the last fourteen years of my life. As the bus zooms off, I watch
my father put a bottle to his lips. I reach Grandma’s house and she embraces me with a warm hug and soft kiss. She hems my pants and sends
me on my way. I walk out to the middle of the street and to my surprise,
the bus back to 95th Street is coming. I jump on, but this time when the
bus stops at 103rd Street, I get off. I step in front of Eric, my alcoholic
father, and wait for him to register me. I catch a whiff of his body: it
smells of cigarettes and hard liquor. I clutch my fist and gently hit it on
the side of my thigh. I should walk away before I cause more damage
than the bottle he’s drinking from. I walk away.
I am sixteen years old, attempting to get a grasp on life. I showed my mom
that I am somewhat independent and can learn to survive in the world of
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95th Street and beyond. I have left the shadows of pride and made 95th
Street a part of me. At age sixteen, I no longer feel like an outsider; I know
how to cook and sew; I don’t take the bus to my grandma’s house as much.
I never stop at 103rd anymore. I get the second phone call in my life from
my father. He says he received a bill in the mail from my school. I tell him
that he has to pay it. He’s not my guardian, but is legally responsible for it.
He shows no regard for what I say to him and asks if my mom needs a copy
of it. He doesn’t pay it.
I am seventeen years old and I am nearing my fourth year at the Chicago
Military Academy. The almost four years I am spending here as a cadet
have been the best and worst of times. I should tell the story: My alarm
clock sounds at five a.m. on this glorious Monday morning. I hit the
snooze button and roll back over to sleep. I know I have to go to school
so I should get up and get ready. I am an ordinary cadet who doesn’t care
about the military and what it has to offer. I despise marching but I do
it because I am getting graded on it. I should be more respectful because
it was my choice to attend this school. I should take a step back and
look at how sharp we look when we march as a unit.
After school, I go to my job. I am working as a tour guide for the Art Institute of Chicago. On my breaks I like to look at the Renaissance paintings. With my eyes, I am dissecting a painting entitled “The
Crucifixion.” I have never seen a more moving piece of art. A young
Arab boy with beautiful black hair and roman eyes beside me inquires
about this portrait. I should be focusing more on the portrait than I am
on his face and eyes. After we talk about “The Crucifixion,” he asks for
my phone number. I am hesitant to give it to him because he is Arab and
I am black. I am seventeen years old and I think it is time to have a male
companion. We exchange numbers and a long glance of passion. A few
dates, a kiss, and family meetings unite us.
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I am seventeen years old and feel it’s safe to call 95th Street home. I have
grown to accept and embrace the 95th Street lifestyle: the guns, the gangs
and even the summer barbeques. Each of these things has encompassed me
and each of these things has constructed me. My father makes a few attempts
to call me, but I make every attempt to avoid him. I should be respectful
and answer his calls, but I remain bitter and watch as he drowns in his pool
of self-worth. I do not accept my father.
I am in my last year of high school and I have been deceiving my counselor for a long time. I should have told her the truth when I had the
chance. I should have told her that I was not going to college. She thinks
I am a bright student, but I know there is always room for improvement.
I depart the school building and head over to Crew training. A fight
breaks out on the bus and there is blood, three shattered windows, and
three teeth lying on the steps of the bus’s back door exit. If the police and
a new bus come within the next ten minutes, I should make it on time
to practice. I make it on time. I walk into women’s locker room to
change into my training gear and storm down to the erg room. The
sound of the ergs whistling and heavy breathing of my teammates brings
music to my ears. I should have come earlier because now I am seated
next to a person I dislike with a passion. I should not be so insensitive
but I don’t support jealous people who enjoy seeing me lose.
It is a Monday morning, and schools are closed due to Columbus Day. I
am lying awake marveling at the quiet atmosphere. I made it through
one night without being awakened by the voices of dealers or raspy
voices of the street alcoholics, or the fast moving steps of addicts desperate for a quick fix. Times like this don’t come often: peaceful night
sleeps and waking up actually feeling rested. What is that I am hearing?
[Whistle] It’s a bird twitting. All creatures seem to be at ease on this
morning. Things finally seem real. I should probably let this moment go
before . . . “A Man, where’s my money?!” There goes the moment; gone
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in a split second. Now that I have been awakened by the native bird
call of 95th nature, I start life again.
After work, the boyfriend asks me if I want a drive home. I should have
taken the offer but I want to be alone so I can think about my life. It is
a good night to ride the train because all the hoodlums are not present
and all the school children have hopefully made it home. The redline
train going back to 95th Street never felt so smooth. I feel as if I am flying. This feeling won’t last forever so I am holding on to it.
It is March and I have yet to submit a single college application. I am
walking towards the counselor’s office thinking about how to break the
news to her. I walk in and tell her flat out that I am not going to college
but I have chosen another route. She stares at me in disbelief. I want to
run out but I stay and try to explain. I tell her that I am not ready and I
want to learn more. She thinks A’s imply genius. I think otherwise. I
should tell her the truth: that Chicago Military Academy hasn’t taught
me enough. “What more do you want?” she asks. I don’t tell her what I
want is to believe. Believe that there’s more to life than sex, drugs, hiphop and gangs.
High school is a tough time for everyone. Regardless of the military structure, CMA still had its share of problems: in-school drug sells, teen pregnancies and even fights. During my first three years of high school, I was
labeled lesbian because I had not been spotted with a male companion,
ground my pelvis against a boy’s during school dances, and most importantly my hips had not spread—this showed that I was not sexually active.
I kept a small pentagon of friends, but continued down my path of solitude.
I don’t look back on my days as a cadet at CMA with resentment, for I
know it was every bad word spoken against me, every dirty look, public
school lunch, and stolen homework assignment, that has shaped me into
the person I am today.
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It is Saturday and life couldn’t get any better: The house is clean and the
drug dealers that normally stand loitering in front of our house are
nowhere to be found. I can safely go out to pick up the mail without interrupting one of their business deals. Mom has just entered the house
with bags full of groceries. We are going to eat good this month. Mom
tells me that she forgot to get seasoning for the chicken. I do not want
to go to the corner store, but I should keep in mind that I too will be eating the delicious bird sitting in the bag. I return from the store with the
seasoning. Mom tells me to get down to business: I walk over to the
brown bag that holds the bird and remove it from the bag. I sit the bird
down on the kitchen counter and move the dishes from the occupied
side to the unoccupied side of the kitchen sink. I place the bird into the
sink and begin to wash it. I am washing the bird as I would a baby: gently, cautiously and gracefully. Mom is talking about prom again. I am not
sure if I would like to go. Everyone speaks of it as if it were some seventeenth-century grand masquerade ball. I think prom is overrated: a $500
dress for one night. I am not too keen to go to prom, but I don’t think
it matters, given the fact that I know I am going because it is Mom’s
dream. I should make Mom’s dream come alive. Of course not every one
of Mom’s dreams will come to life. For example, Mom wants grandchildren. How can I bring a child into this world if society thinks I am just
having this child for government benefits? How can I do my lot in life
if every step I take towards living a normal life seems to be taking away
from life? I should be more positive about this, but I can’t escape reality.
Every parent has a dream. The parents living on the good side of 95th
Street want to see their children graduate high school and then college
and get married. On my side of 95th, a mom’s dream is to see her daughter make it through high school without getting pregnant. A mom wants
to see her son walk outside without getting initiated into a gang, sit in
class and actually pay attention, make it to senior year without drop-
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ping out, and if accepted to college, make it through the three-month
summer break without being mugged, shot or killed. This is our lives.
I’m eighteen now and I know who I am. My life has been, up until this
point, an unpaved road. A road with no warnings, flooded with road kill, dirt
and rocks. I think about 95th Street with its dealers, addicts, hoodlums, and
little children and how I have grown to call this place my home. Did I plan
any of this? Did I know these things were going to happen? Does the pot
know it’s wrong to call the kettle black? I remember the mornings I walked
on the cracked sidewalks to the train, in the mindset that I didn’t belong
there. Of course, I was caught in the idea that I was the only one suffering,
but now I know that 95th Street was suffering, the abused autistic boy was
suffering, the seventeen-year-old mother of two was suffering, the dealers
were suffering, the addicts were suffering. For God’s sake, everyone was
suffering! I didn’t consciously or unconsciously pick this road—actually I
didn’t pick it at all; I didn’t have a choice. I know that I don’t come from a
fairyland full of twitting birds and clean roads, and that’s okay. There are
pretty birds on 95th Street too, if you know how to listen.
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111
Yoanna Zheng
June 1, 2011
I believe you all know that I was a week late for school. Some of you
might even know the reason why I was late: I had gastro enteritis the day
I was boarding the plane from Hong Kong to New York and was required
to return home. But what you all didn’t know was what happened after
I went back home. A few hours after I’d got home, I had a big fight with
my dad, because I asked a question. A question which my dad considered rude, irrational, emotional, inappropriate and, all summed up, womanish. That day I asked him, “Dad, have you ever loved me?”
Perhaps the question was emotional and irrational; I usually filter my
feelings when I communicate with Dad. I’ve learned that feelings should
be shared only among women, with my mom and my grandma. With
my dad, you shared reasons and thoughts. Dad and I talked about everything: politics, economics, military strategy, history and business. We
did not talk about love.
I suppose the question was inappropriate. “Have you ever loved me” is
just not a question you ask your father. You might throw this question at
your boyfriend, if you caught him cheating on you. But you don’t throw
it at your father, partly because he will not and can not cheat on his
daughter, but mostly because it shouldn’t be a question at all. It shouldn’t be. Every dad loves his daughter. Right?
Wrong. In China, you can’t take a father’s love for granted, not if you
are a girl. As my dad’s rage erupted right after I posed the question, my
mind slipped back into the past. Back to the days when I despised myself as a female, back to the days when I had started constructing the
Berlin Wall between my heart and my dad’s, even further back, to the
days before I was born, where the story begins. It is a long story to tell.
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113
*
A very, very long time ago, long before America even existed, China
fostered an ancient dynasty; its name was Qin. In 221 B.C., Qin was an
agricultural society, where men sweated in the field and the women wove
in the huts. The clear division of labor created an imbalance between
the two sexes. Sons were more valuable to the family, as the responsibility for producing food fell onto their shoulders, and male supremacy
emerged in all sectors of the society. 2000 years of feudalism solidified the
value of men in the minds of the people, so when modern China was finally founded in 1949, the preference for sons among families was simply common sense. In the first twenty years of New China, families kept
their old traditions: having five or six kids, the more the better to work
the fields. Then in 1983, such an ingrained pattern was broken
overnight: the government started birth control in Mainland China by
launching the one-child policy, under which each family could only
have one child. It changed the culture radically; to implement the
change, a red book, recording every child’s birth information, was distributed to each family. It was called Hukou, officially, but this tiny, palmsize, not-so-innocent book was soon nicknamed the Red Bomb. The
timer started to tick if more than one child was documented under the
Hukou in a family. When the supervisors, known as the detonation guys,
detected the additional kid, the red bomb exploded, and the economic
basis of the family was blown up: the parents would either lose their jobs
if they were working for the government or be taxed twice as high if
they were working for private companies. So unless you were very rich,
rich enough to afford the taxes, you made sure to have only one child.
And if you could have only one child, you made sure it was a boy. Al-
though the government painted the most conspicuous buildings with
murals of parents hugging their little girl with the line, “A daughter is
just as precious as a son,” those orphanages began to fill with precious little female infants, abandoned to make room in the book for the one precious son. This is the world I was born into. On February 5, 1992, my
mother gave birth to the first and theoretically the last child. It was a girl.
It was me.
*
Growing up with four male cousins, I learned early all about male dominance. Bumping along in the back of my dad’s Jeep, I learned that my
first step towards happiness was to be accepted by boys and men. I used
to escape from my embroidery lessons to join my cousins’ play fighting.
I started as the last one to be picked but ended up as the one no one
would pick. They said whichever side had me, that army was doomed because I had no muscle, I didn’t know how to fight, and I was weak. I
cried, then my disabled aunt would whizz across the room in her wheel
chair, my mom would hurry out from the oily little kitchen, and this
joint force would scold my cousins’ naughtiness and coax them into playing with me. However, my cousins only sneered harder at me because of
my tears, my weaknesses, leaving me always alone. At those numerous
times, I yearned to be stronger in order to be accepted.
Naturally I modeled myself after my dad, not mom, because Dad is the
strong one. My dad is a self-made man. With only an elementary education, he started his career at the age of sixteen as a maintenance
worker in the town’s broadcast station. His willingness to work and do
whatever had to be done, no matter how trivial or how unrelated to ma-
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chine repairing, won him respect and opportunities to rise. When he
was about halfway up the ladder of success, he met his future wife, then
the daughter of the governor, when he helped the governor with the gas
holders. She was the key to a higher social status, and by the time I was
born, he had already become the CEO of the company, through hard
work, strong will and good luck.
that trip, I climbed up a hundred-meter steep mountain with bare hands,
without any safety facilities. When a boy, who was a year younger than
me, clung to my shirt with shivering hands and screamed, “Mommy!”
every five minutes, my chest was filled with pride and satisfaction. I was
stronger than you! Unlike you, I am not sissy. I laughed silently and
smiled at my dad over his shaking shoulders.
Bumping along in his Jeep, my strong dad passed down his appreciation
of strength and his hatred of vulnerability to me. I nodded and echoed
his values. I remembered heading down 56 West Street one night with
Dad. As the Jeep pushed silently into the crowded street, he rolled down
the window and asked me to use my eyes, ears, nose and brain to observe. Outside our car in the dim streetlight, I saw a line of young ladies
at the edge of the road. They were dressed in colorful, low-class dresses
and wore thick make-up. They were all loud and clung to every male
passer-by with a big red smile. Dad squinted at them and told me that
those young girls were prostitutes. I was shocked, but as soon as I recovered I copied my father’s scornful face, belittling the women. I had renewed an unshakable resolution: I will be strong. I won’t be like that.
By the time I was ten I had internalized all my father’s biased opinions
of women. Women were bad drivers, women had no concept of time,
women could not climb up steep mountains without screaming
“Mommy.” Women were the embodiment of weak. As he taught me to
look at other women harshly, I learned to look at myself in the same
way, unconscious and unaware that I was ultimately a female.
I remembered Dad raging at women drivers. He would yell, “You can’t
overtake in a bend!” and then he would angrily pass the car that had
just overtaken him, showing me that the horrible driver was a woman
every time. I still hear the scorn in his voice when he said, “Woman.
Again.” And I promised myself: I won’t be a bad woman driver when I
grow up. I will be strong. So to show my determination, I accompanied
him in the game. Whenever we encountered the crazy female drivers, we
pushed up our eyebrows and let the word slip from our nostrils: Woman.
I remembered camping with my dad, the only girl on the road-trip. We
slept in a broken tent that was crawling with worms and showered in the
icy cold river. I could’ve cried and complained, but I never did. During
*
When I was eleven, my family moved to Macao. Like Hong Kong,
Macao is part of China but it is not counted as a part of the Mainland.
The advantage of Macao is that the one child policy doesn’t apply there.
There is no red bomb called the Hukou, there is no people’s enemy called
the Supervisor. It is basically a paradise for families in pursuit of the second child, usually the son they didn’t get first time around.
When Dad told me Mom was pregnant and we were moving to Macao,
I was old enough to understand that my gender was a misfortune to my
dad. Once his business friends, accompanied by their sons, detected it
was a girl who stood beside my father, their respectful looks converted
to pity and mockery. As they scanned me up and down, I knew what
they were thinking. They were laughing silently that even a man like my
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dad who had everything, money, rights, reputation and influence, lacked
the most essential meaning as a man: he didn’t have a son to continue
his legacy and success. I puffed up my chest, determined to refute those
silent, narrow, feudalistic jeers; but my dad, the strong dad who never surrenders in any confrontation, evaded their glances, looked down to his
toes as a five-year-old boy, and I knew that he was not on my side. My
heart hurt as if it were torn over and over in the grinder. My dad was that
type of man who spat blood without word; who gave over to victories
and never gave in. But in this one area, he contradicted himself because
he was in pain. My father was in pain. Because I knew he was in more
pain than I was, I vowed to myself that anything that could end his pain
would have my consent; so I voted strongly in favor of my mom’s pregnancy and moved to Macao.
On April 8th, 2003, the lady who was then not young anymore gave
birth to the second child of her family. It was a girl. Another girl. It was
my sister.
On my sister’s one-month-old celebration party, my father’s best friend,
a sergeant, proposed a toast I would never forget. He rocked my sister’s
cradle gently, and stared at her peaceful sleeping face. As if the glance
burned my sister, her long eyelashes brushed quickly against her eyes like
the beating wings of a nervous butterfly. The sergeant giggled, then turning around to face my parents, my grandparents and our family friends,
he cleared his throat and calmly but loudly made a blessing. Then he said
his beloved friend, my dad, should exert every effort to pursue a son,
even if it meant abandoning the family.
The room went silent. It was a dead silence. I turned to my right where
my dad stood. He looked blank, confused, and somehow tempted, as if
the option was turned over and over in his mind but was about to settle
down, with a “yes” on the front. I looked to my left and saw a similarly
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dazed mother. She, too, seemed to have a thousand thoughts dashing
through her at that instant, but they were easy to read: there was pain,
fear, and more pain and fear. I knew what she feared. No one would be
there to protect us. I knew I had to fend off all the force of the black
hole pulling my dad away from the family and protect my mom and little sister from being harmed. I could do it, I told myself, Dad had built
me strong enough to do that. So what happened next was that I stepped
forward from the invisibility, one hand crossed at my waist, the other
pointed at the sergeant’s nose with my index finger, and in the next ten
minutes I engaged him with all the filthy, nasty, inflammatory words I
knew at the age of eleven. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream and kick
and hide behind my strong dad. I was sore as hell, but I broke into laughter. As long as I was strong enough, Dad would see that I could replace
the son. I could be the family’s son, and everything would be fine.
From then on, I peeled my femininity off and hid it in my dreams. I
started to walk like a man, talk like a man and imagined myself as a man.
At home, I listened to my mom’s sorrow and tried to prove my existence
to Dad. Outside home, I stood tall against my dad’s friend’s mocking
glances and finger-pointing. I grew to hate any male peer, and I always
felt I had to conquer them to feel that I was better than them. I know
now I didn’t really hate them; I hated being a girl.
Though I wanted very badly to be strong, I knew the stronger I looked
from the outside, the weaker I really was on the inside. I was hating who
I was, and that meant I, too, was in pain.
*
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It was around this time that I began to get to know my mother as a person. Perhaps it was this pain that drew us closer. She read me her diary
about her first date with Dad. Her cheek glowed rosily as she read out the
excitement she had frozen forever on that page when she received the
first red rose from Dad. The romance she had with my dad was the best
thing that had so far happened in her life. Slowly, I started to learn more
about Mom, who until that point of life existed as a blurry figure who
took care of me, but who was not to be respected, for she had no time
concept, could not drive a car in a proper manner, held no job, who fell,
in sum, into my dad’s category of the weak. Not someone I wanted to
learn from.
Indeed, Mom was weak; she is overpowered by the men in her life and
bad luck seemed to be a recurring guest. She scored high enough in the
college entrance exam to get into an accounting university, but her governor father hid away her application, forcing her to pick up a career early.
He insisted on making her a teacher. Refusing to teach, my mother continued her own self-study in accounting, and her hard work finally paid
off when she found a job in a competitive commercial company, only to
be fired after a week when the people began to suspect her governor father to be an anti-communist leftist. Though she might work as hard as
my dad did, she never achieved anything. But she looked in my eyes
cheerfully. “You know what, Daughter? My biggest achievement was to
fall in love with your dad and give birth to you and your sister. Even now,”
she said, “my heart still beats so fast whenever I see your father.”
Her face, a face like a child who gets her favorite candy, so innocent but
satisfied, struck me as so foolish. Yes, I cursed under my breath, foolish.
It was foolish to bet on other people but not yourself; it was foolish to live
for the others, centered by their needs. I saw these as the ultimate defects
of Mom, the source of all her pain and weaknesses.
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But some part of me, no matter how much I denied it, knew that it wasn’t all foolish. It was what made her enjoy even a seemingly negligible
life. It was what made her strive to do her best, made her capable of coping with disappointment. It occurred to me that perhaps, just perhaps,
love actually made her a strong person.
She could’ve abandoned her once-powerful father when he fell ill. But
she didn’t. She was the one who paid the high medical expense, and of
her three sisters the one who spent the most time nursing him.
Love gives her the strength to bear with failure. She almost died when
she was delivering my sister. The doctor said that after the delivery,
mom’s belly was filled with extravagated blood. She survived but could
never ever bear another child to fulfill Dad’s want. She never put the
blame on her little daughter, not even mentioning it.
She told me she accepts failures, never blames and strives to live on because she loves us. She loves her rigid father who always seems to bring
bad luck to her, she loves her husband despite all the pain his want has
given her, and she loves me and my younger sister despite our not being
precious sons. “And you,” she said, winking at me, “don’t have to be the
son. You are my precious daughter.”
I felt her comfortable softness wrap around me, but I resisted it. I had to
be strong, and I did not want to be influenced by any emotions. But a
mounting voice covered my protest. The voice said it is the emotions,
love, fear, pain that make us genuinely human, and it is the honesty towards these feelings and generous acceptance of them that gives us, the
fault-filled us, strength.
Being with Mom, who in character seemed to be in total contrast to
Dad, inspired me to reexamine my understanding of what it means to be
strong. Striving hard towards a goal is accounted as strong, but the tol-
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erance of failure also reflects the strength of human kind. Dad is a strong
man with the confidence to achieve his aims, but he seems to lack the
ability to deal with things that fall out of his control. Mom has a greater
capacity to admit sorrow, forgive failures, and accept pain, but she also
loses herself as she centers too much on the others. Seeing my parents
more clearly, I came to the stark realization that I, too, was too centered
on others. I had built my life, my identity, around my dad’s needs more
than mine. All these years, I denied my gender—called it weakness—
and tried to fake myself into being someone else. At that moment, I understood the reality that my father wanted a son, but I was a girl with all
kinds of weaknesses. But it was fine, because being the girl who laughs
when she wants and cries when she is sad, was exactly who I was. I had
tried to kill her a long time ago, but now I held her close. For a long
time, I hadn’t felt so safe, as if I was again in my mom’s womb, safe, warm
and comfortable. I felt never so at peace with myself.
*
But my peace was temporary. As much as I wanted to be my own person, I knew my life reflected my mom’s, tied to a powerful dad. And this
man was obsessed with having a son. So when April 12th, 2009, came,
with the news that the test-tube baby was a girl, another girl after my sixyear-old sister and me, the past threatened to revive. The sergeant’s
blessing six years ago echoed in our house like a ghost or a curse that
was about to be fulfilled.
This time, I was struck by a deeper wave of helplessness. At least in the
past, I could deceive myself that as long as I was strong enough, the family could be saved. I had accepted the truth, but despite the peace I’d
found with myself, I was not sure if I could keep peace in the family now.
And in fact, I was right. And in the upheaval to come, I was to learn
even more stunning facts from my mom about my origins.
That afternoon the fan was buzzing, and Mom was flipping through my
newborn sister’s Hukou. Since she was born in Mainland China, her
name is documented under the name of my dad. My mom looked preoccupied, so I asked her what was on her mind. “Names,” she said. She
frowned but took my hands and told me that when I was born, the family was not rich enough to move to Macao, so my grandparents suggested
that my name should be documented in my disabled aunt’s Hukou,
which would allow my parents to bear another child. My dad agreed and
was even ready to send me to my grandparents’ to live. Only my mom’s
fierce dissent prevented that. Mom nervously clenched my palm, as if
fearing that this knowledge would further tear the already fraying family apart. “You know your dad always respects his parents, it didn’t mean
anything,” she said. “Please don’t over-think.” But I couldn’t help thinking. Why would Dad agree to give me away? I tried to shake off the question and curved a smile to comfort my mom. But I was plagued with the
growing question: why?
The knowledge began to eat away at what I thought was a foundation of
love and support for me. If my grandparents first proposed to give me
away, what about those times when they caressed my hair and told me I
made them proudest? What about the favors from my disabled aunt who
always wheeled in a lightning speed to protect me? Was this all illusion?
Were they nice to me because they truly accepted me as a girl? Or was
their niceness on purpose and in scheming? Were they trying to prove
Mom wrong and show her that I could have had a better life with them?
Were they out to make her regret her decision not to end Dad’s agonies
over his first child?
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And what about Dad? Was his desire for a son so mad that he tried to
beat the girl out of me and turn me into a son? Knowing he hadn’t
wanted me at birth crushed me, and up floated all the details that I had
not noted before. Like how Dad never bought pretty dresses and dolls
for me but only model cars. How Dad never shielded me behind him or
told me he would protect me, but rather shoved me into the open, to
take the knocks. It became clear to me that the question lingering was
whether he did it because he hated me or because he loved me. I always
thought that it was because he loved me and was allowing me to fill
the role of son. But if he truly loved me, wouldn’t he love who I truly
was? Wouldn’t he declare aloud that I was always his precious daughter in front of his jeering friends? Wouldn’t he be the one to point at the
sergeant’s nose, and scorn the sergeant’s proposal? Did he even love
Mom? And the family?
I never posed these questions because I was afraid of the answers. What
would I do if Dad told me he had never loved me and left the family?
The fear of disappointment prevented these questions from slipping out
of my mind and dragged me half a globe away from home to Exeter. Here
I still occasionally communicated with the pain of my sisters and my
mom, but I chose to stay away from them, particularly from that of my
dad. Even when I returned home after four months in Exeter, I didn’t
touch on the topic. I didn’t dare to.
But then came the day I tried to board the plane from Hong Kong to
New York, almost puking my stomach out. Dad, receiving my call, didn’t hurry to take the latest train to Hong Kong to bring me back home.
I had always traveled around alone, planned ahead for myself and considered the absence of my dad beside me as a sign that he believed in my
strength and independence. But that moment, very sick and defeated, I
just wanted to be protected by my dad for once. I wanted to hide in his
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big hug, and be assured that there was always a place for me, that I did
not have to be tough. Like other Chinese girls, I wanted to be protected,
loved and even spoiled. It didn’t happen.
So once I managed to crawl back home half-dead, I wasted no time to
break into his room, sit right across from him, and ask this rude, irrational,
emotional, inappropriate and, all summed up, womanish question.
“Dad, have you ever loved me?”
There was a long silence. When he finally spoke, he answered the question by commanding me to sharpen my communication skills before I
came talking to him again. “You are out of line and out of your mind. I
have worked twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week to pay all
your expenses. What do you want more? ” he said. He was not joking,
and I could tell that he was hell mad.
Once I despised love, despised emotional weaknesses, but now I realized
that love was truly important to me. I wanted to be a loving person and I
wanted to be loved, too. But it seemed like even my father didn’t love me.
I didn’t talk to him during my extra one week of stay at home. A week
later, I went to Hong Kong Airport again and alone again. And again,
fleeing from my family. But before I shut off my mobile phone on the
plane, I received the following message from Dad:
Dear Daughter,
Today is your mom’s and my twenty-first anniversary. It was since your
birth that I slowly started to learn how to be a father. Perhaps in this process
I have been indifferent to you. But that was not because I didn’t love you,
I thought only in that way could I make you a stronger person. Perhaps I
used the wrong way to love you. You could see that my attitudes towards
your two younger sisters were improving. Also, your mom is the one I hoped
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to be with forever. I know that I’ve gotten so used to her cares that I often
took it for granted. I promise I will work with you to change. Your mom, you
and your two sisters are the meanings of my life.
Dad
It was not the answer to all my questions, and there was still no “I love
you” in the text, but tears had already flooded my face. Because right at
that moment, when the plane was taking off to the broader sky, his message also inspired me to understand love in a higher dimension: I could
be loved by the others but only by first loving myself. While my father
confessed that he might have loved me in a wrong way, I too loved him
in a wrong way. All these years, I tried to be anything but myself to please
him, and the reason behind that is that I love him. I love him so much,
even at the expense of not loving myself. This was what mattered to me,
the knowledge that I do not have to hate myself in return for my father’s
love or anybody’s love, and the knowledge that love is unconditional
and mutual. Because as long as I love myself and that aging man with the
beautiful name, “Dad,” I know that he will come to love me and only
more. We have a lifetime to figure out our problems, and with my secret
knowledge, I know that one day, we will get there.