Everyone has something, some defining moment. A parents’ divorce, a broken leg, a dead dog. A moment that has made you who you are. Me? I’ve got nothing. Nada, zip, zilch. 22 years and I can’t pick out a single climb or drop in this fairground ride of a life that has emotionally resonated with me all this time. No great suffering, no fascinating adventure. Just a middle-class suburban neighborhood, an immediate family more or less intact. I’ve never been interesting. I’ve never had a story.
My traumas have not been extraordinary. They have come in pieces, in little moments you could brush off and pile up in the cobwebbed corners of your memory for a rainy day when you finally had time to assemble them into the grotesque puzzle you’ve hidden away.
When I was younger, my parents wanted me to have everything. This is because my parents grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, where they had lost everything. But we lived in America now, this land of opportunities and refugees, and when you’re born Chinese in America you can grow up to be anything except American.
The world I grew up in raised me to hate the color of my own skin.
Like, one day in the third grade when I brought dumplings to school. The cabbage filling had started to smell, as cabbage does, by the time lunch came around. When I tried to open the container, I got the most disgusted looks a 9-year-old has ever seen from a table full of people I considered my friends. Noses, one by one, catching the strange odor. Heads, one by one, turning to stare. I didn’t eat lunch that day. I buried the dumplings, still in their Tupperware, as deep in the trash can as I could reach.
Like, in fourth grade I used to steal my mom’s eyeliner to try to make my eyes look rounder. I would smear it on riding the bus so my mom wouldn’t see since I was still too young to wear makeup. I remember it was Chanel, I remember lying to her that I hadn’t seen it when I forgot to put it back one day, the thin metal tube burning at the bottom of my backpack.
There were years of keeping jade figurines tucked away in corners when people came to the house; of hiding mismatched cushions and shoving slippers in closets and letting my white friends parade over our pristine carpets in their dirty shoes when my mother would have spanked me for it.
There were years of not inviting my parents to school events so the other kids wouldn’t hear their broken English. I did not yet understand that each struggling sentence was not a mark of failure, but rather a badge of honor won from years and years dedicated to living in a second language.
There were the years without “I love yous,” the years of “this isn’t good enough, why didn’t you do better?” The words that now, years later, I know mean “I love you” in their own language, but it wasn’t a language I spoke at 5 years old when everyone around me was American and I only learned what “I love you” sounds like in English.