4

She had that dream again — chimpanzees under her bed. Human-looking animals scare her. So does Ronald McDonald. So do cameras with flash. So do new environments.

She’s going somewhere new soon. A place called Canada, so mommy can birth the baby in her tummy. She packs up her plastic dinosaurs. She promises not to cry.

6

She’s crying again

(a boy was mean to her). 

What’s wrong? She can’t answer. The teacher’s face is uncomprehending. 

She decides to be selectively mute for one year. She pores over library books while the other kids play. The English script fascinates her — squiggly, swirly letters — so different from the square Chinese characters.

9

She stops taking ESL lessons. Her English is already native level. This makes her fit in, makes her comprehensible. 

She starts playing soccer, and she’s wicked good. She’s better than the boys. She’s faster, stronger, tougher. Sometimes she wishes she was a boy so her mom would stop nagging her about being “unladylike.”

One evening, while she’s preparing for soccer practice, she hears a sudden thud. Daddy pushed mommy down the stairs. Mommy screams

(this is "unladylike").

Her face is uncomprehending. She pretends this never happened.

11

She’s crying again

(mommy wants to move back to China).

O, Canada! The crunchy maple leaves, the fluffy snow, the wild geese soaring over dandelion fields. All of it gets locked in a chest in her heart, a chest labeled “childhood.”

Exiting the Shenzhen airport, she is hit by a humid gust of South China air. She hates it here.

She’s an outsider again. A banana — yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Not understanding Chinese, she retreats to the comfort of Anglophone scribbles. Vonnegut is her favorite.

Boys begin looking at her differently. She dresses like a boy so they’ll stop. She reads about MeToo and takes a summer course on philosophy. She thinks about the world, and her place in it.

14

She got into the “best” international school all of China. This makes her feel smart but also makes her nervous. 

She gets an award for Top History Student. She loves history — a winding river, currents dividing and converging. 

Her history teacher accuses her of plagiarizing her essay on the Russo-Japanese War because it’s “university-level writing.” She argues with him about American politics.

16

At the start of Junior year, she becomes inexplicably stupid. She can’t write anymore. She hides in a bathroom stall for entire schooldays. She’s a little girl again. Crying, crying. What’s wrong?

She is diagnosed with clinical depression. 

—

This is the best she’s felt in her entire life! The depression has been vanquished by an invincible euphoria. She learns Latin, reads Plato. She interns at an art museum.

She can’t sleep for more than 3 hours a day. She spends her nights haunting the empty streets, blasting Mitski, thinking…

A madwoman.

17

This is the worst she’s felt in her entire life. She is a piece of human trash.

She must eradicate herself. This is the only way to absolve her bottomless shame. Always the perfectionist, she plans a perfect suicide.

—

She is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. 

This knowledge empowers her. She observes herself with scientific detachment. In the process of delving within herself, she dredges up that incomprehensible evening. All those repressed memories float to the surface.

She remembers shielding her mother from his blows. She remembers MeToo and the boys in school. 

18

She reads and reads and reads — knowledge is her only salvation.

She writes and writes and writes — art is her only relief. 

She remembers A Room of Own’s Own. Perhaps she is a female genius, cursed by her femaleness. Forever incomprehensible to this misogynistic society. 

Washed clean by her tears, she rises again,

a Phoenix from the ashes,

a bursting star.

Knowledge is her own salvation,

art her only relief.