by Erin Chen
Chapter 0:
There is a memory here. It exists, though with such liminality that you can only attempt to grasp what happened. When did it begin? When did it end? There are no such things—beginnings and endings—only potential.
In this in-between, you are neither full nor empty, only the expectations and remorses of previous generations. Before you are branded with almond eyes and the name of hungry Taiwanese commoners, a mother and father pour their love into a room. Picture books wait to be read, sonatas wait to be softly played into the ears of an infant. Apparently, symphonies increase the likelihood of genius in a child.
Do they?
Chapter 7:
It hits you that you exist in this body when sitting cross-legged in a gymnasium, knee-to-knee with your classmates. Their high-pitched chatter vibrates in your ears and reverberates through the deep room. Something is happening—some upcoming festival—and images begin flashing across a screen. When a Korean flag appears on screen, you cheer and find only your voice to have burst from the crowd. A boy nearby looks at you with the innocence of a 7-year-old child who can only judge because everything is new and foreign at this age. You shrivel back into your skin, wishing to catch the words from the air and stuff them back into your being.
Chapter 6:
You are mundane, so very mundane, but you are also special for the following reasons: you attend an elite private school in New York City (and were admitted to several, this is the key). You were selected to speak for the incoming kindergarten students. You are bright.
None of these facts are lucid to you.
None of these facts are lucid to you.
Chapter 8:
The first time you feel hatred for your last name is when you attend school in Hong Kong. In the beginning, you only harbored molecules of dislike. Dislike for the simplicity of the name, its foreignness, the way it couldn’t roll off your tongue in smooth multi-syllabled enunciations. But as you walk into a classroom with five other Chens and find that you are not Taiwanese here, or Korean, or truly American, but a Chinese-looking homozygote, you can only hate.
It is not really the Chinese that fills you with hatred. It is the realization that everything they believe about you is true, that you are truly just a stone in the great Oriental monolith.
Chapter 1:
When Korean babies reach 100 days of age, their families celebrate by holding a series of traditional festivities. You are adorned in finely woven robes and surrounded by family, rice cakes, and miscellaneous items that determine your destiny.
You reach for the credit card, and the room erupts in cheers.
Chapter 14:
Los Angeles is quiet. You drive through sprawling space and find so much emptiness between each pocket of humanity that you stop gazing out the window. The streets are illuminated by their distance, not the yellow street light that washes over the sidewalk in scarce intervals. Perhaps it is because you remain in the leftovers of N95 masks and self-quarantining. Perhaps it is because you are Asian.
Later, you make the terrible decision to walk to Whole Foods with your manic grandmother in the disconcerting chill of the LA winter evening. Google Maps tells you 10 minutes, so you say 10 minutes, but 10 minutes with a miniscule old woman is far longer and far more troublesome than the straightforward path says. She shakes in the cold. How much longer? 10 minutes, Grandma. You said 10 minutes. It has not been 10 minutes. We’re getting there, Grandma. Are you going the right way? Is this the right path?
You feel the violence before you experience the anonymous man. The route brings you into a local neighborhood, and the emptiness forces you silent. Except it isn’t empty, there’s a man on that porch ahead, he is waiting on a stoop for you. You stare ahead and quicken your steps. He speaks, and the word cuts against your ears.
Eventually, you arrive at Whole Foods. You immediately text your Uncle to pick you up. While you wait, your grandmother paces up and down the parking lot. You eye the topless homeless man careening to your right, and he looks straight at you.
He bares his teeth.
Chapter 12:
You walk the humid path from classroom to home with your father. The air is muggy, but you smile through the thickness. You have just finished a presentation, and you presume this to have gone well.
And yet. Your father tells you in exactly this order: that he is proud of your presentation skills, that you spoke well, that he worries you will peak too early.
Because you have yet to comprehend what it means to be as small as you are now, to only take up this much room and have the potential for more, you nod your head and gently wrap the words into your stomach. For the next years of your life into the rushing present, you will occasionally lie awake at night contemplating the trajectory of your peak.
Chapter 17:
A man is approaching you. This thought rings in your mind as you turn a wrinkled page of your book, humid park air rustling against your neck. You don’t need to look up to know that his gait is determined, his gaze flits all over your body, and his target is you. The stranger inches closer until he’s sitting next to you on the bench, then suddenly you are pressed about your thoughts on immigration only for him to fling a prepared response back at you. You are told that where you’re from–Malaysia, supposedly–is where the good immigrants are from. You are lectured that Mexican immigrants are ruining New York City.
This is who you are. You are both the recipient of their praise, and the subject of their violence. You are a shifting trope, a model minority when you receive another A+ on a test and a perpetual foreigner when at US customs your mother, who holds a green card, is interrogated upon arrival.
Your last name is meaningless in this encounter. You are meaningless.
Chapter 17:
It is 7 AM in the morning. You have to take a final exam. You are running late to school.
This does not matter to your father. Your apartment could burst into flames, burn down until only cinders and ashes are left, and he would still be sitting in the corner of his couch with his mouth full of pointed words. You can not tell whether you have stopped screaming or just started to. Everything happens between here and there, and it is so rapid and controlling that you have no choice but to stand in the midst of it and be dragged away by his criticism. His spewing forms a broad river that washes over you and seeps into your heart.
You carry your stained heart on the car ride to school, then dispose of it in the first trashcan you see. Your final goes successfully. Why wouldn’t it? That is your only power.
Chapter ?:
That night, you return to your room to find your father sitting on your bed. He is poised so casually, so aggressively, that your breath becomes shaky with rage.
Something like an apology slithers out of his mouth like a wretched, unwanted child. Then:
You may feel like you are putting in 100 percent. But to me, that isn’t even 50. And I know you can do more.
In every iteration of this timeline, there will be a man waiting for you on a stoop, park bench, bed. He will whisper to you, and you will cry, or mourn, or collapse from the exhaustion. In this iteration, you loathe.
The loathing you feel consumes you for days. You run on these fumes until you are running on nothing at all, until you aren’t running anymore, until only your body is left.
And since you exist inside this body, you have no choice but to wake up the next morning and stare at the white ceiling, and stare, and stare.
Erin Chen is a current high school senior studying at Singapore American School. Originally from New York but having lived in Hong Kong and Singpore, Erin enjoys writing of diasporic and transnational experiences. She is also an avid lover of matcha, cats, and her human-like dog.