I have started to suspect that when people, especially professors, tell me, “You should write a story about this,” what they actually mean is that I am over-sharing and they don’t know how to respond.

****

Before I was one, my mother went to Chicago for law school. She sent me, the accidental baby, to live with my aunt and uncle in the town where she grew up. She had never told me much about the town, only one story of her leaving it, walking to the neighboring town.

She was five. Time and distance meant little to her, but she had gained a sense of numbers. She was counting the streetlights to see how far she had gone. An idea suddenly struck her: When she wasn’t looking, would the lights behind her still be there?

It was the only poetic, philosophical moment that my mother ever shared with me. Other than that, she had always been the practical, get-things-done, strong woman.

Where did that five-year-old go?

*

The name of the inland town was Tong-Hai-Kou, “Port to the Sea.” Back then, I couldn’t decipher the poetry in it. I couldn’t cherish the stars. Tong-Hai-Kou meant the giant piles of bull shit, the backyard of rowdy, running geese, and the grey, brown rye fields that marked the end of my world (why would people say they are golden?). I didn’t hate it either. I just didn’t quite fit in.

I never learned to read the stars. There were plenty when I grew up. On summer nights, my aunt and uncle would drag the bamboo bed out to the empty space in front of the house. They would cut watermelons in halves, scoop them into a bowl, and place the bowl on the bed. I would lie on the bamboo bed with my cousin, twelve years older, and aimlessly look up to the sky. Sometimes, our legs got pinched between the bamboo chips, and we would let out a little scream. Other than that, we mostly stayed silent. Cicadas chirped and then their chirping was so loud that we couldn’t hear them.

Beyond the rye fields was Xiantao, the city Tong-Hai-Kou was subordinate to. Relatives coming to visit from Xiantao would bring orange sodas in glass bottles and Big White Rabbit candies in tin cans. Beyond Xiantao was Wuhan, the provincial capital. Wuhan was not a city but a mosaic of ideals. It was the bridge that looked bigger than our whole town, the supermarkets, the modern women wearing short skirts, walking straight out of the advertisements. Beyond Wuhan was Chicago where my mother was, where she sent me letters written on Garfield letterheads.

I was not from the stars, the watermelons, the bamboo bed, the geese, the rye field. I was from farther away; from places I had never been.

*

When we heard an airplane in kindergarten, all the kids would run up to the roof and shout, “Airplane, come down, take me to the sky!”

I was the only one who had been on an airplane, so I wouldn’t join them in the shouts.

*

The kindergarten teacher once hit my palm with a stick five times because I didn’t attend the morning exercise. I was late to school that day. When I arrived at the classroom, there were five other kids who didn’t go to the morning exercise. They had told me we didn’t have to go that day. We stood by the door and watched the other kids on the cement playground doing exercises, and I discovered how funny we must have looked every day.

The other five kids each got hit ten times, because they were more guilty for misleading me. I still finished the term, because my parents had already paid for it.

*

Mother had written me a letter for my eighteenth birthday. I had not managed to bring myself to read it. I was afraid of the potential of her tenderness.

****

I was seventeen and L was eighteen, high school sweethearts, too young to show up at his mother’s funeral as a couple. She had been fighting cancer for eight years, but we still could not believe that she was gone. Every moment that she was alive, we took as proof that she would be alive forever.

He would not speak to anyone else. His father and aunt greeted people as they came in, but he stood, merged into the wall. When I arrived in the black dress and black heels I bought the day before, he lifted his head and said, “You are beautiful.”

We did not, like we had assured his mother before her deathbed, take care of each other forever.

*

Since dad turned Christian, I can’t talk to him.

****

Spring 2016, Sienna bleached her hair. Sienna used to keep bangs to hide the red birthmark on her forehead, but when she bleached her hair, she also got rid of the bangs. The birthmark looked like an island and the ocean around it had just ebbed. From then on, she mastered the skill to make her hair look beautiful, effortlessly, even unintentionally.

It was the time when Sienna began to truly shine. I believed it was also then that she picked up her way of smiling: she’d tilt her head a little and look up at whoever was speaking and smile with the corner of her eyes, as if the smile was a secret only between the speaker and her.

I soon bleached my hair too, dyed it pink, and later, grey, blue, purple, green – everything. I dyed it mostly because I didn’t want Sienna to think that I was a copycat, but I told people it was because I wanted to be de-racialized. Not the stereotypical quiet Asian girl, but also not someone eager to blend into a world that she inherently could not blend into. The colors faded and were reborn, time after time. I felt like I let go of my black hair, my native tongue, and my comfort food for nothing. I read so much western philosophy and mythology that I believed in it—that mankind is one that we think similarly with “categories” Aristotle had summarized that we all fight wars break hearts look into oceans and listen to the blind poet don’t you see I’m a New Yorker too and then I learned it was a lie and finally I just wanted to be visible, at all.

Either way, the pink hair still worked.

*

Some people arrive at places like everything has just started when they arrive. But I feel like I got everywhere late. I was not even invited and then I was late.

****

Two days after Martin died and one day after I learned about it, I was locked inside the Bahn in Berlin. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and in the stop announcements in a foreign tongue, I had fallen asleep as if I were waking up from a dream.

I was waking up from the dream where the ambassador’s voice was jammed like an old cassette, “He didn’t make it he didn’t make it he didn’t make it he didn’t make it.” Di, the woman who had picked me up from the airport, put her hand on my back as I slid off the sofa and sank into the floor. I couldn’t tell if I was screaming or dead silent, for I couldn’t hear anything at all and my whole world was filled with the jammed cassette playing he didn’t make it he didn’t make it. If only I had arrived a day earlier – but what difference would that make? The scalpel that cut open his chest had sliced me into pieces, and I had to wake up before losing the shape of a woman. My eyelids became heavy and in vertigo my pieces of flesh regrouped.

In my sleep I sensed the train had stopped. I stood up, still half asleep, and all the lights went off. The air in the train turned into a blue that one would see in a forest, misty and mythical. I walked slowly in the woods towards the front of the train and heard a wind only audible in extreme silence. Eventually, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the silhouette of the tunnel gilded by a ring of light. I drummed on the window, and I couldn’t feel my hands.

A station agent’s astounded face approached the window. A moment later, the train moved, and light stung my eyes. When the door opened, I realized I didn’t know where I was, not only because I got off the wrong stop in a city that was not mine, but in a deeper sense.

Danke. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m sorry for falling asleep here. I’m sorry for causing you trouble. I’m sorry for frightening you. I’m sorry for my swollen eyes. I’m sorry for not speaking German.

I walked out of the station, dizzy again from the daylight. I didn’t know there was so much light in the world, and so many layers of light.

*

I do not know which moment hurts me more.
Moment 1: I screamed at him, calling him the cruelest person on earth. 

Moment 2: He ran towards me, uncharacteristically cheerful, swinging his arms like a duckling, with no clue that it was the last month of his life.

*

Sienna and I tacitly decided to never talk about Martin. We watched Bergman on my topper that served as a movie-watching mat and drank way too much wine. Sienna sometimes fell asleep next to me while some movie played in the background, and she would breathe securely like a baby bird in her nest, but she would always wake up in the middle of the night and find her way upstairs to her room. “I’m not used to sharing a bed with people,” she said.

Little trace was left about what had happened. Cambridge remained in time, sealed in the summer of 2017 when I hadn’t met Martin yet. There was only one time when Sienna noticed that I was quiet at dinner in a restaurant and asked me what the matter was. I said, “The man who just walked by looked like… Just a little.” I swallowed the name, and she swallowed the rest.

*

I had a dream where Martin was gluing little trees to a little pavement. He looked tired, hunching over like an old man. And then, wrinkles fissured on his face, and his hair turned grey. His eyes became smaller and more squinted. I didn’t disturb him, just watched.

“I knew they had made a mistake,” I thought to myself, “I knew you’d grow old.”

****

There was a day that I discovered I had stopped loving him. It was like discovering the butterfly I had kept in a wooden box had died, not witnessing its death, and not knowing when it died.

*

After one of the first dates while we were sitting in his car, Alex, who later became my husband, told me about a dream that his mother had had the day before. She had divorced Alex’s father many years ago and had since happily remarried.

“She said, ‘In the dream your father and my husband both extended their hands to me. I hesitated for so long, and I took your father’s hand.’” I immediately started crying and leaned towards Alex from my seat, over the drink holder and onto his lap.

I said, “I will not be like Mama. I will always choose you.”

It was the truth, but I didn’t know if it was the truth for the right reason. I wasn’t in the position to choose, and mostly, what was I to choose between? The worlds had broken away from each other when Martin died, the “could-haves” and the “is,” and it was like comparing apples from yesterday to oranges from tomorrow.

*

Since Alex started working, he could not see me. I walked like a phantom. He would not notice that I had sat on the couch next to his desk. He would not hear me call him. “Bear bear,” I would say, “Bear bear.” He would not hear me. After a long while, he would look around the room and discover me. “How long have you been here?” He would look surprised as if he had just woken up, or as if he was just born.

Alex became a nameless and formless mass hovering around the room, the absence that marked places not to go. Do not go: The chair at the desk is taken. The stool at the table is taken. The couch is taken. The bed in the master bedroom is taken. Go now: The chair is clear. The stool is clear. The couch is clear. The bed is clear. Then, even that vision was gone. I feared sitting on him when I did not see him. Just to be safe, I took long walks in Chinatown twenty minutes away. I wandered on the street, knowing no one, having nowhere to go. The peddlers along the streets seemed like a gigantic banner in brown, fluttering like waves. The fake LV bags the peddlers sold seemed like embers on the seabed. The hawking, the bargaining, the chitchatting, and the pushing around sounded like wind squeezing between the small gap between a door and its frame. When I returned home, the day would be gone. Alex would not notice my return or my earlier absence. The only time he noticed, he asked, “I’ve been so busy. Why can’t you take care of me a little? I’ve always put food on your desk when you were on deadlines.”

*

“Marriage is an interesting experiment. Like the United States.”

When he said that, we were watching the 2020 election.

*

For one year I was the mistress of my husband. He found someone who always put food on his desk, but still could not let go of me. The eight months following, he was gone, like a gold ring with my initials carved on the shank that I had to pawn. There were many things I kept doing after we were no longer together. First, I wore my wedding band every day. Second, I put him down as my emergency contact. This scene, a dream, a vision, an ambition, kept walking into me, a dressed-up, poised, uninvited guest. He got a call. The person said, “Your wife is at our hospital and please come here immediately. Here is the address.” Then he would have to come. There were many times that I knew where he was. A dinner with mutual friends; a party; a movie. If I were to plan to run into him, how far should I stand? By the door, one block away, two blocks away? But I never went.

*

I asked Alex if I could keep his mother when if we get divorced. I asked if I could have that in writing. She had said she would always see me as a daughter, but I needed that in writing. Very recently, his mother had told me this story about leaving him under his grandparents’ care when he was five months old.

“I squeezed out tears because everybody was looking at me, and I had to pretend that I hated to part with him for the image of a loving mother. But I was happy – I finally had time to myself. Of course, after a while, I started to miss him. But I was so happy when I dropped him off.”

Whatever he had done to me, I somehow always saw him as the five-month-old, more unloved than he had known.

****

“Aren’t you afraid of growing old alone?” 
“It’s hard to say if I would live till the day of growing old alone.” 

-- Mom, Aug. 17, 2021, Durham, a phone call that ended with her crying and never speaking to me for a month

“I invented this all-purpose response for everything. ‘How are you?’ “I don’t want to think about it.’ ‘What are you up to?’ ‘I don’t want to think about it.’” 

-- An old friend, Sept. 4, 2021, Harlem, phone call

“My grandpa would just, in the middle of a game, say ‘I’m no longer having fun,’ and stand up and leave.” 

-- Mary, Sept. 18, 2021, Upper East Side, engagement party

“My mom conquered her midlife crisis by opening a factory and owing a lot of money. Now she has other things to occupy her mind.”
“What kind of factory?”
“They make coffins. My stepdad is an artist and they thought they’d combine their resources.” “I’m so tired of living but I’m so afraid of turning into a corpse.”

-- New roommate, Sept. 28, 2021, Harlem, couch

*

“How sincerely can a writer break her heart? How can she live a life that is not even a bit performative?” You asked yourself, staring at the drafts on the phone. You can’t. You went to your laptop and wrote even that down.

****

I walked by the other beds in the recovery area, looking for Rin, my almost-lover turned close-friend. She was barely awake.

When she saw me, she teared up a little.

“How are you feeling?” She shook her head. She stuck her hand out of the blanket and I held it. She told me that she thought she would cry when she woke up from the surgery, but she didn’t. However, when she saw me, she immediately wanted to cry and didn’t know why.

The second day, she said, “I feel as if I’m having jet lag.”

The third day, she woke up and said, “I feel wronged.” 

“I know.”

“But I don’t know why, and by whom.”

“You are wronged. Why do you have to go through this?”

“Yes,” she was crying a little, “yes.”

*

I was afraid that she wanted alone time , but I also wanted to stay with her as long as I could. I was afraid that she was too polite to ask me to leave. I was afraid that she wanted me to come as soon as possible when she said, “Come at your pace; don’t sacrifice anything you planned for me.”

She was afraid that I would rather be home, relaxed, or write my papers than getting her water, cutting her food, or adjusting her catheters.

I was afraid that me getting her water, cutting her food, or adjusting her catheters would make her feel weak.

She was afraid that not letting me get her water, cut her food, or adjust her catheters would make me feel useless.

“We are just too polite,” I said, “And considerate. Can we not?” She laughed and said, “I can’t laugh – the incision hurts.”

*

One week before Rin’s gender affirming surgery, we were lying on her bed,  still keeping that friendly, polite distance. But we could finally talk about it, or talk about it and pretend that we were joking about it.

“See, I think you and I could really work.”

“…I’ve been thinking about that for a year, but I thought it was inappropriate to say it.”

“Same?” She said in an ironic tone.

“Your surgery is next Friday? Do you feel like using it before it’s gone forever? See, I had always been curious, especially after feeling the eight pack.”

Rin giggled, “I actually haven’t used it for two years. I… prefer other ways.”

I was worried that I had said the wrong thing, but Rin, with her increased sensitivity, reached her arms over to comfort me.

“It’s all right. You didn’t miss much. I was so nervous before and I probably didn’t perform well anyway. And now, the hormones interfere with it.”

“Okie.” I feigned disappointment.

We lay in silence. Socrates, the cat, tried to squeeze his head between our heads.

And then, we talked about boobs. And then, we fell asleep.