Eden Onpeng

Tag: love

  • Seeing Dead People: where one’s past bleeds into the present

    Seeing Dead People: where one’s past bleeds into the present

    As I was about to give birth to my firstborn child, I began to see dead people in the faces of the people around me.

    It started during the second night of attempted labor induction. My husband was sleeping in the couch next to my bed. I lay in my bed, fading in and out of sleep, partially dilated and waiting for my baby to come.

    The door opened. One of the assistant night nurses walked into my room to take my blood pressure. I looked at her, saw my late friend Megan’s face, and did a double-take to check my reality. From her fine-textured blond hair to her blue eyes and the freckles on her face, and even her calm, rational demeanor, this nurse was my late friend Megan’s doppelganger. Megan had passed away suddenly in 2019 from a heart attack. I had seen her a few days before she died, and she had mentioned having angina and had an appointment with her cardiologist scheduled for the following week. But then her brother reached out to me when I was at work a few days later and told me that Megan had passed away in her condo.

    Although I knew this was not Megan, seeing someone with Megan’s face, hair, and body being alive and well in the world filled me with a sense of peace. It was like peering into a parallel universe in which a version of her was alive.

    I tried not to stare too hard.

    Was I going insane, trying to find the familiar in the unfamiliar?

    Or was my transition into motherhood bringing up feelings of loneliness and memories of old faces? I would have loved for Megan and my sister to meet Baby Daniel. And although I am willfully estranged from my parents, I grieve the relationship I wish I had with them…an emotionally safe one that does not exist.

    Or was I dying? Isn’t it a thing that people see their departed loved ones right before they die?

    Ultimately, the induction failed. After reaching 7 centimeters of dilation, I burned with fever from amniocentesis and Baby Daniel’s heart rate began dipping with each contraction. The nurse and doctor spoke to me and a few minutes later, I was rolled into the operating room for a c-section. Compared to the two nights of attempted labor induction, the c-section was quick and completed after 40 or so minutes.

    After the c-section, Baby Daniel was placed in a clear plastic bassinet in our postpartum room, next to my hospital bed. I reached over the edge of the bassinet to hold his tiny, soft hands—and before my eyes flashed the memory of my mother holding my sister’s stiff, gray hands in the casket.

    I gazed at Baby Daniel and saw the baby eyes of my sister staring back at me. But perhaps all newborns look the same: freshly decompressed from being squished inside a uterus for the past several months.

    Daniel was conceived not long before or after my sister’s death. Because of the close timing of the two events, I could not think of one without remembering the other.

    I have found it is more socially acceptable to celebrate than it is to grieve. Celebrations are social, but grief is personal. One’s celebration makes others feel good. One’s loss makes others feel uncomfortable—partly because different people grieve differently and we don’t know how to comfort everyone (some want to be left alone, others don’t want to be alone). Grief has a shelf life, a socially accepted window of time in which it is okay, or even expected, to express grief, and after that window closed, I felt I was supposed to shift, at least publicly, to being excited about my pregnancy. It was easier for others to celebrate with me about the pregnancy than to grieve with me about my sister. It felt like I was supposed to be excited now since I was pregnant, even though my sister’s death was nearly as fresh as my pregnancy.

    But the thing was, although I was happy about the pregnancy, I was still dealing with the emotional fallout of my sister’s suicide, my estrangement from my parents, and the childhood trauma I had spent most of my adulthood avoiding.

    Needing the space and time to grieve, I withdrew into myself.

    And now, as I navigate new parenthood and Baby Daniel’s first days in this world, my mind straddles the past and present, grasping for connections, no matter how tenuous.

    My Mother’s Motherhood

     As a new parent, I have finally reached the same life stage I’ve only ever known my parents to be in. My mom had me when she was 20. My dad was 27. During the dark hours of the morning I wonder what it might have been for my mom, who had met my dad through a matchmaker in her village and then moved across an ocean to marry him and have a baby without any family or extended relatives in America.

    Baby knowledge was harder to come by in 1990, when I was born. Nowadays I can enter a search or question in Google or parenting forums for informal advice and parenting perspectives and anecdotes, but back then, my mom would have relied on whatever she learned while growing up or asking people, or maybe a book. Without her “village,” my mom was left to handle a newborn baby equipped with only her own knowledge and instincts. I don’t know how she treated me as a baby.

    When I was six, my brother was born, at 8.5 pounds. I pretended to sleep while my mom held and screamed at my baby brother to sleep. Her thunderous voice and the rage behind it scared me. Silently, beneath the covers of my bed, I begged to God to make my brother stop crying. But he would keep crying all night long.

    My sister was born seven years after my brother, at 10.5 pounds. She would also cry a lot at night. While trying to rock my crying sister to sleep, my mom would get frustrated and say things like “hope your whole family dies” (sounds more succinct in Chinese) and “I wish I had aborted you,” which makes me suspect my sister was a surprise baby.

    Nowadays, a web search reveals tips and advice for dealing with a fussy baby. And a foray into parenting forums would find other parents with whom one could commiserate about baby sleep issues. My mom had none of these resources in the ‘90s. On top of that, my mom had left behind her family and friends when she moved to the United States to marry my dad.

    On one hand, my mom was making the most of what she had. But then I remember the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse she inflicted on me and the rest of the family—deep harm that her lack of knowledge or trauma cannot justify, harm that eroded the confidence of her children, and harm that comes from denying the harm that she and my dad inflicted. After remembering these things, I remind myself that having a hard life does not excuse her decision to abuse us. Then I feel angry. And the cycle of thought repeats until I get tired of it and start scrolling through Amazon for a quick distraction.

    I’m filled with gratitude for the resources I do have today. My husband shares household tasks and nighttime shifts with me. I go to therapy. I have access to internet resources and forums that offer tips and anecdotes that help me feel less alone. I’m no longer in touch with my toxic parents so they cannot add to my level of stress.

    Regression & Upheaval

    Becoming a new mom has sifted old memories from the bottom of my pond into the surface. How was my mom when I was a child? How will I be as a mother to my own child? I catch myself sliding back into memories, hangups, and issues I thought I had already processed. Childhood abuse. Sexual abuse. Why are we going through this again?

    In a recent therapy session I expressed grief about the relationship I wished I’d had with my parents. But this was something I’d worked through several months ago. My therapist asked if I was reconsidering my estrangement (a hard no) or if I just wanted to express my feelings of grief (yes), and suggested that instead of using the word “regress,” I can use the word “upheaval” to reframe this resurgence of old memories amid my transition into motherhood.

    I have also been thinking about my sister’s suicide. My mind has preoccupied itself with futile exercises such as wondering how things were like for her during her last days and moments, imagining the pain she must have felt for a long time, and what abuse she suffered alone from our parents. And feeling shame by how I had let myself assume my mother had somehow softened and changed with two subsequent children, even though the likelier truth was that she had learned to hide her worst impulses from me after I moved out. I also think about how I failed my sister by playing along with our parents’ “happy family” façade.

    On the outside, I looked like I was functioning well. My sister wouldn’t have seen the anger that simmered just beneath the surface, or how growing up with my mother’s temper and my dad’s enabling had molded me into an anxious, self-hating, fearful people-pleaser. My sister must have felt so alone in her own experience. She was in so much pain but could not see it reflected in anyone but herself, because I was hiding it deep inside me all along.

    During late night feedings at 2 AM, I look at Baby Daniel and see my sister’s eyes staring back into my soul. It is too late for me to save my sister but I can still protect my baby.

    The “Shit Pie” Metaphor

    Recently I came across the “shit pie” metaphor for situations in which abuse has occurred, where things are great when they’re good, and terrible when they’re bad: If you are eating a pie, and it’s an amazing, delicious pie with fresh, luxurious ingredients, but then you find out there is also shit in that pie, do you keep eating that pie? When I feel conflicted about my decision to cut off contact with my parents, I think of the pie and how sad it is to throw away a whole delicious pie because of a piece of shit in it. It doesn’t matter how good the rest of the pie is; the shit has contaminated it and made the entire pie unsafe to eat.

  • Losing Friends as a New Parent – Is It Really Inevitable?

    Becoming a parent is a big life transition, one I’d been dreading for quite a while because of what I’ve heard from other people. You’ll never see your friends again. People drop off the map.

    I did have a friend (let’s call her Cang) who dropped her end of the rope after becoming a parent. We weren’t part of each other’s core friendship groups (she too maintained a group of old friends from middle school) so maybe this was part of why she chose to cut me out. After a couple of planned dates that didn’t work out from her end, I reached out to her via messages, and while she would respond, she ultimately stopped initiating. And eventually, after a few more one-sided exchanges, I stopped initiating, and as a result, we haven’t communicated since December 2023 when I reached out to her to wish her a merry Christmas and a happy birthday. Her son was about three years old.

    Maybe Cang felt there was a disconnect because I wasn’t a parent and she was, and perhaps there were things that I wouldn’t understand as a non-parent. Maybe she had outgrown the friendship since becoming a parent. This could be true, and I think she might have dropped me because I was always on the peripheral of her friendships–nice to have but not core–and so she could afford to drop me when priorities became tight. I imagine she would prioritize her middle school friends, and I get it.

    Our friendship died slowly, via slow “ghosting,” where I noticed only when I reached out, and later on, when I reviewed the time stamps and realized it had been a long time since I had last reached out to her, that she hadn’t initiated in our last few interactions, and that I now had little to talk about with her. There was no breakup message, she simply stopped watering the friendship and let it wither away. In her garden of friendships, ours was ultimately pruned via thirst.

    I pushed away my hurt and moved on with life even though it haunts me now, as I am about to give birth. I suppose I have the option to reach out to her again now in hopes of reconnecting now that I am also a parent, but the hurt remains and I don’t like the idea of being discarded again as soon as my compatibility wanes.

    Some of the things I cherish most in the world are my close friendships with my ride-or-die homies. These are the homies who showed up for our courthouse wedding, officiated by low-budget Bernie Sanders, who hugged me tightly during the fallout of my first marriage, and who went to my sister’s funeral. Even as my pregnancy progressed and mobility became an issue, I made it a point to host gatherings to bring my closest friends together–a precious thing in today’s fast-moving world and our adult lives. I grew up feeling very lonely, and friendships were like a ray of light in my mostly isolated existence, a lighthouse in the stormy waters of my childhood.

    As I’m on the cusp of giving birth, I dread losing these friendships. I’m afraid parenthood will somehow change me or my priorities to the point where I will drop these friendships, like those stories I’ve heard about people who disappear into parenthood and fall off from their friendships.

    I guess I’m afraid of the Unknown: where my mind will be as a new parent. I’m afraid I will become (due to brain changes, post-partum depression or stress) someone who no longer cares about these friendships, who lets them wither away like Cang did with my friendship. After I’m afraid my new priorities as a mom will cause me to drop everything that made me “me,” like my reading, my writing, and my friendships. Will these things no longer be important to me? Will I change that much as a person?

    I hear so much about new parents who feel like they’ve lost who they were before becoming parents. But I also hear that it gets better with time, as the baby grows and learns to sleep through the night.

    I guess this is something I won’t know until I’ve crossed the bridge. And perhaps these fears are unfounded based on the actual facts. Although I am the first in the group of homies to become a parent, my friends have been so supportive. They’ve filled our home with love. They’re going to be really cool aunties and uncles to Baby Daniel. Perhaps because I have this on my mind, and because it’s so important, I will find some way to maintain these precious friendships with my homies. Our friendships may change, just as they did when we became full-fledged adults with adult responsibilities of jobs, bills, and other duties, but it would mean the world to me if our friendships evolve, rather than wither, as we move through these new life milestones.

  • Cool Asian Americans: on double eyelids, belonging, and learning not to measure worth by beauty

    Cool Asian Americans: on double eyelids, belonging, and learning not to measure worth by beauty

    While my body fights off this uncomfortable cold, I will share a little something with you that I scribbled down recently after reviewing Kaila Yu’s memoir, Fetishized. This is a vulnerable reflection about my own personal relationship with feeling beautiful as an Asian American.

    ***

    Cool Asian Americans. Import cars, pinup models, house parties, clubbing, and raves…This was a scene I never belonged to as a young Chinese American, partly because my family lived far from other Asians.

    I grew up near the border. The only times I saw other Chinese Americans was during the weekends, when my parents would make the long drive to the Chinese-Vietnamese supermarket in City Heights, and drop me and my brother off at Chinese school held on the second floor of a Buddhist temple.

    The other reason was because I was fat, ugly, and socially awkward. Of course, it didn’t help that my home environment was stifling and oppressive.

    Kaila Yu’s memoir stirred up old pain and feelings of envy in me, and I am ashamed to admit this. I found myself envying her freedom to sneak out at night and party with friends (clearly her parents weren’t as scary as mine), her beauty, and especially her outgoingness and success with making friends with the cool Asian crowd–the very types of people that excluded and made fun of me in Chinese school.

    But despite these differences between us, I found her inner experience very relatable because of how she used beauty as a tool or standard by which she could obtain that external validation she craved, in order to fill the void of self love within her.

    I found myself comparing us in our respective journeys toward self-love and acceptance, and decided to use her life story as a launching pad from which I could explore my own. 

    She and I were opposite sides of the same coin – deep down we both yearned to belong, to find social approval, and to be loved.

    While Kaila was slim, beautiful, and roamed San Gabriel with the cool party Asians, I was an obese, pimply teenager saddled by heavy AP textbooks, stuck inside my parents’ house because they wouldn’t let me go out. Where her father ignored her, my lecherous father paid me too much attention. Where her mom seemed supportive of some of her choices, even recommending plastic surgeons for her, I endured my mom’s rages, unable to hide because I wasn’t allowed to leave the house without a chaperone.

    The brief experiences with cool Asian Americans that I met at Chinese school and while volunteering in Taiwan (AID Taiwan 2007) were laced with pain and exclusion. As I mentioned earlier, I was overweight and riddled with acne, I didn’t wear the cool shoes or the cool brands, and I didn’t have the charm or social skills to navigate through social situations with unspoken rules. 

    Volunteering for a month in Taiwan to teach a English to kids in disadvantaged towns was a nightmare for the overly sheltered introvert I was, who went from spending most of my time studying and reading at home after school to being surrounded by hundreds of outgoing and outspoken Taiwanese- and Chinese-American teenagers with practically zero time to myself. I felt like I had to be “on” all the time. It was exhausting. I ended up dissociating a lot, even on stage when I was supposed to speak. 

    I was sitting alone in between activities one day during volunteer training when I overheard another volunteer say to his friend, “She doesn’t know how to suck up to people. That‘s why she has no friends.” 

    That line cut me deeply, because it felt true, I was shy and had a hard time talking to people, let alone flattering them. It was so painful to have my very insecurity identified and voiced by someone else. 

    I tried to be nice to him nonetheless, to turn the other cheek, to prove him wrong about not being able to suck up to people. We made eye contact through the bus window at some point. I waved at him. He just stared back at me coldly, like I was nothing more than a pimple, unworthy of his friendship.

    Sometimes when I’m laying in bed at night, that volunteer’s words haunt me and I feel like hurling myself down a deep chasm in the ground and staying there forever.

    While training and volunteering, I saw how the little kids at the schools and other volunteers admired the prettier girls who had the slim bodies and big eyes. They were treated with a sort of kindness and interest that I envied. I wanted to be liked that way, to navigate the world with beauty and ease. 

    From those experiences I came to the same conclusion as Kaila: that beauty and status are important and must be chased. Kaila was much more successful at being beautiful, and much more adept at navigating social situations.

    The silver lining of being fat is that the extra fat gave me some decent B cups, so I didn’t stress as much about my breasts, except for when my dad would leer at them and ask me if I was wearing a bra. He did this into my early 30s, until I estranged myself from my parents for other reasons. 

    My Obsession with Double Eyelids

    After that volunteer trip, I became obsessed with double eyelids and the fact that I did not have them. It didn’t help that I was told I had small, slanted eyes my whole life, from both racist kids at school and also well-meaning friends (“your eyes are so chinky!” a Filipino friend had exclaimed to me back in middle school). I looked at the kids at my Chinese school who had bigger eyes, and told myself, If only you had bigger eyes. You wouldn’t have gone through all that bullying about having small, slanted eyes. You would have been accepted by the other Chinese Americans at Chinese School. People would have treated you better. You would have been beautiful.

    I became obsessed with getting larger eyes. I repeated to myself my conclusions that if I had prettier eyes via a crease on my eyelids, maybe my life would be different. Maybe I would be treated better by other Chinese people. Maybe I wouldn’t have been bullied as much for the shape and size of my eyes as a kid. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. 

    I learned how to use double eyelid tapes and glue to temporarily achieve that crease on my eyelids, and once had a terrible experience when I tried using Nexcare, a liquid antiseptic bandage instead of eyelid glue, figuring that an even stronger glue would lead to stronger results (and totally ignoring the label warning to KEEP OUT OF EYE AREA). The burning in my eyes was a temporary trip to beauty hell, a painful punishment for my vanity. I was spared a trip to the ER by rinsing my eyes with lots of water.

    I never ended up getting the double eyelid surgery, partly because of the cost and the recovery time (I have a lot of fat in the eyelid so an incision would likely be necessary), and partly because of the principle. A small, morally defiant part of me felt that if I got the surgery after all the fuss I’ve made about Asian beauty standards, then all the people who made me feel like shit for the way I looked would win.

    It’s weird: I felt more self-conscious about my monolids around other East Asians than I did around non-Asian people, who didn’t seem to understand the concept of a crease or double-eyelid unless the surgery was very drastic. Since I didn’t hang out with a lot of East Asians, I wasn’t as frequently triggered.

    But sometimes I do wonder what my life would have been like if I’d gotten it. Maybe it would have made me finally confident, like the way post-surgery people sound in their testimonials (“I feel so confident now!”). Or maybe not. Maybe I would’ve continued being the same person with the same insecure struggles, only with a line on my eyelids and $3,000-$5,000 poorer. Maybe I would want to fix my nose or jawline next.

    The Fleeting Nature of Beauty and Social Approval

    Kaila’s book reflects how popularity, status, and social approval is fragile, fleeting, and hard to maintain, no matter how successful we’ve been at obtaining them. When Kaila’s sex video (the one for which she was coerced into) went viral, her guy friends not only watched it as a group but then some of them defriended her afterward—a huge WTF for me. Being beautiful didn’t make her immune to experiencing trauma or a social fallout.

    Throughout my young adult and new adult years, I flagellated myself for not being pretty enough, for not being charming enough, for not having the social skills to navigate social situations. Deep inside I was telling myself that my life would have been less shitty if I were prettier.

    I was spending too much time on social media, too much time gazing at doe-eyed actors on Taiwanese soap operas, and too much time contemplating perfection as depicted in magazines. I was yearning for acceptance from the wrong type of people, people I likely wouldn’t click with anyway, where even if I did manage to grab ahold on some clout for a little while, it wouldn’t last. It would feel hollow because I would be trying to mold myself into an image of beauty rather than being a self I was comfortable in. 

    Part of my self-dissatisfaction was from wanting to be the type of person that enjoyed certain things. I didn’t really enjoy crowded environments (unless my senses were numbed by alcohol or drugs) but wanted to be the type of person who enjoyed those glamorous events, from EDC to raves. When my current partner didn’t want to go to EDC or a rave with me (he’d done so in his youth and was over that phase), I told myself it was because I was too ugly for him to take to EDC or raves, and that if I were prettier, he would be more down to go with me.

    With each rebellion and plastic surgery, Kaila slowly distanced herself from her old self (Elaine Yang) whom she described as shy and nerdy–the one her father didn’t pay attention to. And yet, over time, her new persona (born from people’s expectations due to her success as a sexualized and fetishized pinup model) became exhausting to maintain. She struggled with trying to manufacture a sense of sexual ease she didn’t naturally possess. And after some traumatic experiences, she’d had a hard time getting back in touch with her own body and enjoying her sexuality on her own terms. The latter part of her memoir is about exploring what she can do outside of the context of her looks, and sometimes being pulled back into that old context anyway because of her past, and also because of how popular fetishization is with audiences.

    With my current partner I very briefly explored a fun, party-girl side of myself with the fake lashes, the cocaine, and the parties, but have since mostly gone back to my introspective, creative, and bookish roots, partly due to being in my thirties, working through trauma, my sister’s suicide, and being pregnant and shifting into a new phase of my life.

    But every now and then I would come across something that brings me back to those self-resentful feelings of not being enough–pretty, smart, charming, etc. Unlike Kaila, I got to the point where I could make a living based on my looks. I yearned so much to be beautiful enough to be paid for my looks, like stripper-hot or Cafe Lu-hot, the kind of beauty that guys admire or revere when they talk to each other about the girls they’ve known.

    At this point it is just a form of self-torment, but it has gotten easier now that I am in my mid-thirties. I don’t relate to the grief that some feel when their pretty privilege fades and they can no longer charm themselves out of a driving ticket, skip the line to enter an exclusive club, or make every man’s head swivel whenever they enter a room. The silver lining to being plain for all of my life is that since I never had these privileges, I cannot lose them.

    I wish there was a special word I could use to end this spiral and insecurity forever. Like, “Abracadabra! Now you won’t give a shit about this stuff anymore!” (I’ve tried it, but it didn’t work.)

    I still avoid watching East Asian soap operas like K-dramas and Taiwanese soap operas because my mind gets pulled back into that idealized world where the main character (the special one!) is always the one with the big, beautiful, double-eyelids, the 100-pound frame, and the delicate, v-shaped jawline. I wish I were strong enough to resist being triggered but the fact is that East Asian pop culture is a trigger for me, so I do other things to pass my time.

    These days, to cut myself out of this thought-spiral of beauty-is-everything, I get off of social media, and go to Walmart or the park to look at regular, everyday people going about their lives, without the glamorous filters skewing things. Yeah, there are some good-looking people and some not-so-good-looking people. And in my life there are people I love and cherish who don’t fit in that stripper-hot box either, like my grandma–are they less valuable as human beings because they are not sexy? Of course not. So why am I using that standard to hurt myself?

  • Life Is for the Living: healing from grief & the fear of forgetting

    Life Is for the Living: healing from grief & the fear of forgetting

    I’ve been grieving my sister’s death for about four months and I feel guilty because it seems I’ve somewhat adapted to this reality—a world without Victoria, or at least, a world in which she once lived but is now dead. Her first hundred days postmortem was around her birthday, so based on Buddhist beliefs, her soul has peaced out into the next stage of the cycle.

    If somehow her soul had been lingering on earth, then at this point she is probably gone now. But to me, she has been gone for a long time already.

    Although I addressed her body directly during the eulogy, I didn’t feel her presence at the funeral even when I saw her oddly flattened and reshaped (perhaps from the brain autopsy), grayish face in her coffin. She was long gone by that point. I didn’t feel her. All I felt was the presence of Presbyterians who were all too eager to use Vic’s death to denounce Islam, Buddhism, and individualism and freedom in favor of “conservative family values.”

    She is dead now. And life goes on. It hurts to think that. I guess if I were dead I would want my loved ones to honor my memory but then I would want them to go back to thriving in their lives. I wouldn’t want them to be super hung up over my death. It would be really lame to watch them mope for like twenty years from the afterlife.

    Beaches still make me sad. Because they remind me of losing her.

    I’m tired of my face hurting from crying so much. I don’t want to cry over her anymore. I don’t mean this with anger. Just in the sense that I love, loved, and will love her. But she is dead now. Her own story ended and is now only filtered through the lenses of the people who knew her.

    Perhaps the very act of writing this means I am not just throwing away her existence or the fact that she once existed.

    Maybe writing this is both an act of remembering and an act of moving on.

    Maybe writing this is an act of love, both for the Victoria that once breathed and lived, and for the Victoria that is dead and gone.

  • Finite in the Desert: a vignette about stargazing in isolation

    Finite in the Desert: a vignette about stargazing in isolation

    Paul’s car convulsed and died in the desert. Climbing out and waving away the fumes, he looked at the bright stars blazing over the hills.

    These stars are fucking bright, he thought enviously.

    They were out there, waltzing with each other, dying, merging, rebirthing, all in gargantuan proportions over cosmic scales of time.

    And here he was, a lonely sack of flesh with a dead car out in the desert on a rocky planet, breathing air.

    Beneath the starlight, shadows oozed out from beneath the towering cacti. His final argument with his brother was a mite in the face of the ancient paths of the celestial bodies that carried on, heedless of all the bullshit that happened here on Earth.

    So much had come before him. And so much will come after. His brother’s life was not even a blip on the universe’s radar, and neither was his.

    His hand twitched. His instinct was to pull his phone out of his pocket to memorialize this moment but instead, he dropped his hand to his thigh instead. No photos would do this justice. The cold desert air caressed his face. He let his mind wander.

    A pang of loneliness sliced through him. If only his brother were here to see this too. James was no longer here. And while his big brother’s life didn’t matter on the cosmic scale, it meant the universe to Paul.

    With his car broken, Paul could go nowhere until the tow truck arrived in the morning.

    That night, he fell asleep beneath a bright blanket of stars and dreamt of his dead brother.

  • You Beautiful Dumbass: A Frank Letter from a Grieving Sister

    Hey Victoria, you beautiful dumbass. You were two months away from graduation. You were almost free. But whenever I talked to you about moving into your own place, you would respond with, “Mom and dad won’t let me.”

    I get it. You were scared. Mom and dad are controlling as fuck. And Mom is scary as fuck. Things would have gotten better, but you will never know now. You must have been in so much pain to make that decision. The future must have seemed so bleak, that the only way out was in an urn.

    And now you’ve been pulverized into ash, and are likely sitting in our parents’ dark living room. I’m sure Mom cries over you a lot. I wonder if your ash form enjoys being at home, or if you would rather be elsewhere, free in the wind. I wonder if your fat cat Smokey recognizes that the box of ashes is really what’s left of her favorite human, or if she is still waiting for you to come home from college, so that she can snuggle with you on the couch again.

    There is so much beauty in the world. From the gold of a sunrise to birds chirping among the trees, I remember you and all the beauty you can’t experience anymore, not because your time was up, but because you chose to end your time on earth.

    I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I didn’t know at the time that Mom told you not to hang out with me, but I could have reached out to you more often. I should have been more frank with you about what she did. You must have felt so alone in your own experience. Our family was run by secrets and control and fear and guilt. And I abandoned you to deal with it on your own. I am so sorry.

    I hope that wherever you are, you will have found peace.

    I love you, and happy 22nd birthday, my sweet sister.

  • The Perfect Daughter: a short story

    I have successfully molded my daughter into the perfect daughter. She is meek, quiet, and obedient. She goes to school and then comes home to study. That is all a child really needs in life. She used to whine about not having friends, and I told her, what good are friends? Your family is your friends. Your friends don’t pay the bills for you. Your friends don’t buy your clothes or pay for the roof over your head. A little girl shouldn’t be out running around with friends.

    I don’t remember when she stopped whining about it, but the last few years have been peaceful. I think she finally understands what it means to honor your parents. After all, her father and I sacrificed years of our lives working so that she could go to a good college, become a doctor, marry a man from the homeland that we find for her, and have children that we will babysit for her. After everything we’ve done for her, all she has to do is step up to the plate.

    Because her father and I both work full time, I work in the evenings while her father works in the mornings. So she spends most of the afternoons and evenings with her father, until I come home late at night. Her father complains to me a lot about the clothes she wears—that they are too revealing and thin, and that the curve of her nipples are showing through the material. So I buy her baggy clothes from the men’s section of the department store—modest clothes. After all, we tell her, Chinese girls don’t dress like sluts, not like those white and Mexican girls at school.

    Her father is a jokester. He likes to spank her on her butt. She tells him to stop, but I remind her that she is lucky to have such a loving father. Most girls don’t have such a warm and loving father. Sometimes he will pull her into his lap on the couch and give her a nice massage on the back and thighs. I wish he would massage my back. It is sore after my long days at the factory.

    But we know the rest of the world would take this out of context. So I tell her that everything stays within the family. She grumbles but knows better than to defy me. After all, I disciplined her with a plastic clothes hanger throughout her childhood. I stopped when she was fourteen, but I’m sure she remembers, especially when I raise my voice at her. When I see her flinch, I know she remembers our lessons.   

    But today…she threatened to tell a school counselor. She is accusing her father of sexual abuse. Her father was incensed. “How could you accuse me of raping you?” he said. All he did was joke around, how could she accuse him of raping her?  

    That’s right, How dare she! All we have ever done as parents was take care of her. We did our best. We bought her food, we paid for her violin lessons, we paid for her Chinese lessons, we bought her clothes, we gave her shelter. She is the most ungrateful child ever. I am in shock.

    We told all this to her. We screamed this to her until it slowly, finally started to sink in, as her defiance faded into a sullen silence and tears. I explained to her that I had warned her to not wear such slutty clothes—she is in this situation and it is all her fault. I made sure she cried to make sure she really understood. I told her she is wrecking our family for her selfish reasons. Why, because her father didn’t like the way she dressed? All he was trying to do was protect her! Now she is accusing him of rape. Ridiculous, and so incredibly selfish—her betrayal of our family cuts deep.

    We no longer allow her to walk to school. We drive her to and from school, and monitor any and all calls and text messages that go into her phone. I watch her when she takes out the trash, to make sure no one kidnaps and rapes her.

    She cries and refuses to hug me when I hold my arms out to embrace her. I give her lunch money anyway because I love her. She is becoming so Americanized, it is really sad. But marrying a traditional husband from China will help keep the culture alive.

    –EPILOGUE–

    Our plan for her life was all set. That was all she had to do—just go to school, get good grades, go college, get a job as a doctor, marry a Chinese man, and give us grandchildren. She had everything ready to go. She didn’t need anything besides us.

    But she decided to take her life in the bathtub.

    All that money we spent on her. All that work in raising her. All that blood.

    They all went down the drain.

    THE END

  • We Would Be Sand Dollar Rich: a memoir

    Work was far from my thoughts as I wandered along the sand on a Wednesday morning, a week after my sister had killed herself. Waves curled and flattened against the shore as I ambled forth, my eyes cast downward in search of calcium-rich remains of mollusks. This morning, the beach—not the city named after the beach, but the actual beach—was deliciously lonely, with only one or two people out on the southern shore, and a few people fishing on the pier.

    Then I saw it—a round disc, face-down in the wet sand. I picked it up and groaned with disappointment.

    The front center of the sand dollar was broken like a sinkhole, exposing its hollow heart to the world, as dark, watery sand gushed out.

    So close to perfection. And yet…

    I wanted something whole.

    I dropped it back to the ground and continued down the shoreline, between the water and row of tidy rental properties. At some point I found another sand dollar with the five-point grooved star intact on its front center. And then I found more sand dollars, broken and whole ones alike. I kept the whole ones in my linen blazer pocket for safekeeping.

    Where were all the people on this sunny Wednesday morning? The kids were probably at school. The adults were at work, or pretending to be. And with the signs telling visitors to KEEP OUT OF THE WATER due to sewage contamination, others were avoiding this beach.

    As for me, I was here to say goodbye to my sister.

    Victoria died in her dorm room at college after taking a toxic substance. It wasn’t even a fun drug so I couldn’t say that at least she died having fun, or doing what she loved. It wasn’t fentanyl mixed into cocaine. There was only one reason to take it.

    I later learned she had spent lots of time scouring forums for information on how to do it. Did it matter if it was the pain that began her journey to find the end, or the pain that led her to finish it?

    I researched online to learn what my sister might have felt during her last moments.

    As it took effect, she might have felt short of breath, panting for air but without relief. Perhaps she started to vomit in her body’s effort to reject the substance, or developed a throbbing headache. Then the dizziness and lightheadedness set in. At some point she lost consciousness. Her organs began to fail, and finally, her brain, starved of oxygen, died. By the time they found her, her blood had turned chocolate-brown and her skin and nail beds had turned blue due to the oxygen deprivation.

    Did her life flash before her eyes during her last moments, before she sank into oblivion?

    She was two months away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

    My sister was quiet and kept a very light online footprint. But in the wake of her sudden death, people came forth to remember her: her fiance and his family, our family and its broken dynamics, our extended family, our friends, and her club mates at school. There are probably others whom I will never know, people who cared about her.

    The funeral was open casket. I looked at my dear, sweet sister, and realized: this is no longer her. Victoria, wherever she was, was no longer here, in this gloomy funeral home filled with grief, love, pain, and religious people who used her death to criticize today’s young people for suffering under “modern values” of freedom and independence, and to talk about sin, heaven, and hell. I found none of the sermons comforting.

    For several nights after the funeral, I had trouble falling asleep, because I kept envisioning her casket face: face gray, powdery, and flattened; her closed eyes and lips stretched out; eyes sunken in their sockets; and lips too swollen.

    She must have been so blue when they found her.

    The last times my sister and I hung out were last summer, right after I had stopped talking to my parents. I had realized my parents would never change, and that the same abuses would be covered up again, just like they were two decades ago. I couldn’t trust my parents to not repeat the old patterns with their grandchildren.

    To celebrate my sister’s twenty-first birthday, my husband and I took her out to a local brewery along the beach. We ate tacos and drank beers. “You can drink legally now,” I joked.

    Little did I know, she had been drinking heavily for years, possibly self-medicating for the pain she must have carried.

    Victoria didn’t talk much when we hung out. We would make little playful sounds, like “meow,” to fill in the silence. With all the stuff I had gone through with my parents, I still held out hope that maybe I had borne the brunt of the abuse, that maybe they had mellowed out with age, and were less cruel with her than they had been with me. They had me when they were much younger. They were just figuring it out. They beat my sister less, but beating is not the only form of abuse.

    But I had learned to play along. In order to function in the family, I had swallowed my hurts and denied the sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse our parents had wrought upon me—because otherwise my rage and pain would bubble over with each meal, each visit.

    I buried my memories and pretended my parents were just stern Asian tiger parents who had meant well but didn’t know how to love. I pretended that only the kind and non-abusive ones existed.

    In essence, I had two sets of parents in my mind: the abusive ones, and the safe, non-abusive ones from whom I yearned for approval. I could not reconcile the two. But even then, bitterness would simmer over at times. To preserve the peace within the family, especially while both my grandmother and siblings were living there, I kept shoving those feelings down. Because they were my parents, and it was safer to treat them as the parents I wished they were.

    I went through the motions of being family to my parents: Christmases, birthdays, parent holidays, weekend visits, etc. I hugged my mom who had made the entire household walk on eggshells with her violent rages, who had made me drink from her lactating breasts at the age of thirteen. I shook hands with my dad who had groped and slapped my ass all the way until I was sixteen or seventeen. I tried not to think about that. I would smile and make small talk with my sister who sat in the corner on her phone, who did not enjoy hugs, and who was probably suffering her own version of hell in that family but remained quiet because she did not trust me enough because I had played my role too well—

    What if, by being too scared to rock the boat, and by playing along for so long, I had normalized the dysfunction in my family? What if, by pretending everything was normal…I had made my sister feel alone in her pain?

    In pretending to accept what was broken, I had become part of the very dysfunction that bound the family together. All Victoria could see was what I was pretending to be—a loyal daughter, a peacekeeper, someone who could live with it. She didn’t know I was suffocating too.

    And now, in death, she felt nothing. But what did nothing feel like, when there was no more of you to feel or perceive anything? My brain went in circles trying to comprehend the concept of nothingness. Deep down I also hoped there was some sort of an afterlife, where an echo of her essence hung around, hopefully at peace. And maybe one day I would see her again. Or maybe we would both rest in oblivion while existing in the little trail of mementos we left from our lives, and in the memories of the people who loved us.

    I made it to the end of the beach, where the strip of sand narrowed until it disappeared beneath some rocks and water. Here, the waves rushed forward erratically. I jumped atop a large rock, narrowly missing a wave as it slammed against the face of a rock wall.

    During the last few weeks of my sister’s life, she had written that “my mom kept talking shit about my sister…Trying to pit me against her…Says that my sister should have no reason to hangout with me if she doesn’t hangout with my parents…My mom also told me to not introduce you to my sis lol.” I wondered what my mom had said about me to her over the years.

    It must have been hard for my sister to meet with me that last summer at the beach. Our sisterhood and friendship was a secret. We both knew my mom would be unhappy with her hanging out with me on her own. We were supposed to hang out again but she canceled, saying something had come up. We made other plans, but none of them worked out.

    A bird competed with me for shells, but it was looking for a quick meal rather than a keepsake. I found a few empty ones and stashed them into my straw bag.

    I had reached the end. It was time to return now.

    On my way back along the shore, I found more whole sand dollars and thought back again to that last summer with my sister at the beach, how we had combed the beach for shells and sand dollars but had found nothing intact and only broken pieces.

    I thought of her and her sun hat, her quiet smile, and all the things we knew but didn’t say to each other. My linen pockets were full and sand dollars stacked atop my hands like wide coins. If she were here, we would be sand dollar rich.

  • emerging from the grief cocoon and into springtime

    On the surface I seem to be getting by all right—I go to work, chitchat with my coworkers, wring my hands at meetings, and get things done. Then I come home, I make supper, I hang out and laugh with my husband and cat, and occasionally hang out with friends. The litter box is still changed, the laundry is still run, and the world goes on.

    But if you look closer, you will see that the grief has worn its mark on my face and body—my expression feels heavier, more solemn. I stopped wearing my false lashes. I grew my blond out and cut the colored ends. I stopped styling my hair in the mornings. I’ve pretty much stripped down my morning routine to the essentials. I gained a few pounds. I’ve grown white hairs but I attribute this to regular aging since my dad had a salt-and-pepper head of hair by his mid-thirties.

    During the late night, whenever I get a quiet moment to myself—usually after my husband has fallen asleep…I look into the mirror and see my parents—all the sacrifices, all the guilt, and the feeling of never living up to the ideal, overachieving, pure and chaste, and obedient daughter. Never enough.

    In the beginning I listened to a lot of YouTubers who talk about the dynamics of growing up with narcissistic abuse, such as Dr. Ramani Durvasula and Dr. Jerry Wise. Their videos were immensely helpful to me when I was in the throes of deep guilt and doubt—I kept asking myself, Am I the difficult one for feeling this way? Am I being unreasonable in my decision? Maybe it wasn’t that bad…I mean, it’s not like they left scars on my back from whipping, or broke any bones… Maybe it’s actually quite normal for parents to do those things to their children and demand their secrecy afterward, so maybe it’s actually quite common, but people just don’t talk about it… My brain was playing happy montages of normal moments I had experienced with my parents, as if telling me, See? It wasn’t ALL bad…I had to write down a list of all the things I experienced—Dr. Ramani calls it the “ick” list. Once I looked at the paper, the collection of all the things they did to me, I realized, absolutely not. It was not normal. And even if it were, it was wrong and very fucked up, and they must understand that to some extent if they demand so much secrecy.Subscribed

    A part of me was also scared that I would cave and return to the previous status quo, especially around Christmas. I kept getting nightmares of them showing up at my work, or in our house, demanding to speak to me, telling me about all the sacrifices they had made for me and how ungrateful I am, and downplaying all the things they did to me.

    I feared I wasn’t strong enough to maintain this unnatural decision to divorce myself from my parents. Maybe it would just be easier to go back to pretending we’re a happy family because family is so important to my mom and dad, and family was what they’d used to justify the secrecy. You keep secrets to protect your family, and to do otherwise is to be a homewrecker who is trying to tear the family apart. Other people wouldn’t understand. Only your family can…even though we do not talk about what happened. These were the rules of the house I grew up in.

    Winter was normal in a way, with the usual lovely festivities at the end of the year. But underneath the surface, my mind fell to doom and gloom amid the shorter days. My joy and energy, while present enough to participate and share the experiences with my husband, were stunted by the weight of the estrangement and the resulting loneliness. I withdrew from my outer social circles.

    I am also surprised by how everyday life seems to go on in spite of this inner turmoil. Perhaps I was alone even before the estrangement. I’ve been enjoying my weekends more—spending time with my husband and cat, writing, visiting the library, etc.

    So even though the grief continues beneath the surface, it has not wiped me out the way I feared it would.

    As the days get longer and the sun gets sunnier, I am ready for a change. I called up my hair stylist and I am going to get my hair colored again—I hadn’t done it in two years, and you know what? I think it’s time to move on from Sad Eden Era hair.

    While Dr. Ramani and Dr. Jerry’s videos were crucial in the beginning in helping me understand my feelings and why they were valid, after a while I found that the videos were pulling me back into that place of rage and bad memories, so I started watching other types of videos—writing videos, lifestyle videos, etc.

    Over time I have settled into this new normalcy. The waves are there but they lap quietly at my ankles instead of pushing me off my feet and twirling me in the water.

    I will not forget what happened to me, but I am focusing on my new life: everyday shenanigans with my husband and cat, my novel in progress, my day career, our friends, and all the things in between—soaking in the sunlight during my afternoon lunch breaks, hearing the sounds of the ocean and feeling the grains of sand between my toes, laughing at a silly joke with my loved ones… and maybe one day, I will look into the mirror late at night and see myself and feel enough.