Eden Onpeng

Tag: writing

  • 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.

  • Pandan in Autumn: a short story

    Pandan in Autumn: a short story

    A clump of brown leaves tumbled down beside Jenny and into the mud.

    An icy breeze went through the fibers of her sweater, biting into her skin. She shivered and pulled her rust orange cardigan closer to herself. She had long lost feeling below her waist—the bench beneath her might as well have been carved from ice. She was sitting under one of only three trees in the park—and the other two had already gone bald.

    Grumpily, she reached into her wicker basket purchased from Amazon and pulled out a plastic-wrapped apple butter sandwich. She had made sandwiches to enjoy with her grandmother after this but felt like eating something sweet to cheer herself up.

    She unwrapped the sandwich and snuck a bite. It was…underwhelming. Cold, cloyingly sweet, sticky, and gummy. The bread stuck to the roof of her mouth as she chewed. It needed to be toasted but it was too cold out here.

    She had planned for a week to experience this—a quintessential autumn picnic, the kind that Youtube influencers filmed themselves enjoying with a cup of pumpkin spice latte and twirling among the colorful leaves. Such glee. Such joy.

    But here? It was cold as hell, and Jenny could have sworn she witnessed a drug deal between a guy in a green beanie and a couple of guys who pulled up in a pickup truck. A few feet away, a homeless woman kicked trash can over and cursed at the top of her lungs.

    This wasn’t New England. It wasn’t even Colorado. But it was the closest thing to a fall experience she could get around here in her little town, in a tiny park the size of a six-car parking lot.

     This isn’t fun. Why am I still here?

    Maybe fall would be more enjoyable in an actual fall town than her local drug dealer’s workplace. She could save up for a visit. What if she was more in love with the idea of fall than actual fall?

    Her cell phone vibrated. It was her grandma. “Hello Gran,” she said. “I’ll be on my way soon. I made some apple butter sandwiches but to be honest they’re not very good.”

    “Don’t worry,” said Grandma, laughing. “I’m sure they’re fine. I was wondering if you would be able to bring over some rice flour and green onions—I’m making your favorite croquettes and ran out.”

    Her grandmother lived in an apartment on the other side of town and Jenny visited her once every two weeks. She would have invited her grandma to picnic here but her grandma preferred to stay at home.

    “Of course, Gran.” Jenny’s stomach grumbled at the thought of eating her grandma’s croquettes, a combination of chewy rice flour, minced green onions, shredded carrots, and minced pork—it was more of a family recipe—it wasn’t anything she’d ever seen in a restaurant menu. They said their goodbyes and hung up. She stood up from the cold bench, pulled her wicker basket onto her elbow and strode out of the park to drive to the Vietnamese supermarket a few blocks away.

    As she filled her basket with green onions and rice flour, she saw some pandan cakes—green stripes of pandan-flavored jelly interspersed with layers of mung bean—and decided to get some to enjoy with her grandmother later. Maybe the quintessential autumn for her didn’t have colorful leaves and New England scenery, but it had her grandmother, some delicious fried croquettes, and pandan cake. And maybe the apple butter sandwiches would taste better after she toasted them.

  • We Were Bold, We Were Six

    We Were Bold, We Were Six

    The apex of the tall metal slide towered over our heads as it breached the clouds. It took forever to climb the stairs to get to the top, and by the time I made it, I looked down at the ground, now comprised of a smattering of colors and moving shapes. I trembled. If I fall…

    I spent the first six years of my life in inland Northern California. During the winter it would rain and then the puddles in the soccer fields would freeze over, creating a smooth, matte surface. My first-grade classmates and I would take turns jumping on the ice until the top layer cracked like a the surface of a creme brulee, soaking our shoes and socks with icy, brown water.

    School rules forbade us from going to the end of the field, where the fence overlooked a large swimming pool with multiple lanes. Whenever the teachers on duty caught us venturing towards the fence, they would grab a megaphone to call us back with threats of yellow cards or (gasp!) red cards.

    On some mornings a thick coat of fog would wrap itself across the field and we kids would mistakenly think it would disguise our presence as we hurried toward the fence, only to hear a teacher’s voice sputter angrily from the megaphone.

    At six years of age, I had already experienced moments of terror and tension at home–getting beaten by my mother, and watching her beat and scream at my dad and grandma. My father groped me but at the time it seemed like a normal thing within the family, under the banner of playful affection from a Chinese father. The weight of this experience wouldn’t catch up to me until later, as I underwent puberty.

    At school, away from hitting hands and groping hands, I was able to enjoy the moment with my friends, exploring the forbidden edges of the world, and pressing our feet on ice to see how much it could hold before cracking. We were bold, we were six.

  • After the Glitter: a short story

    After the Glitter: a short story

    This is what happens when you peak in high school, thought Vanessa Phan, looking at a photo of herself and her friends from the late ‘90s. I fit into size 00 Guess jeans back then, she mused, as a wave of bitterness washed over her. I ruled the quad with Jenna Tran and Ana Xayavong. Boys adored us. The possibilities were endless.

    She was smoking in her car with her windows rolled down in the parking lot of a strip mall. She checked the time and rolled her eyes, leaning back against her torn leather seat. “Eight more fucking minutes,” she muttered under her breath. Her former coworker, Tina, had left to become a CNA at a senior home nearby. Vanessa’s new coworker, Patty, was nice and all, but kept making mistakes with the register that Vanessa had to fix.

    She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. I was beautiful once. But now, shadows grew under her eyes. Wrinkles were starting to form on her forehead—and she was too broke to afford Botox, Dysport, or whatever else people with too much money were injecting into their foreheads these days. She looked like a faded, tired version of who she once was.

    Vanessa worked at a chain dollar store in a small, shithole town in the middle of Dusty-Ass California—no, not the cool beachy side or even the cool foresty side, but the side that was as hot as a furnace much of the year. But at least it was not the one she graduated from. That would be too humiliating. From Facebook, she knew that Ana had gone on to earn her cosmetology license and now worked at a salon cutting hair. Jenna went to community college and became an LVN at a big hospital. And Vanessa? Well, her life took a detour after high school.

    She never told anyone from school, but her father would snoop.through her underwear drawer and ask her questions about it. And she would hear him checking her bedroom doorknob at night. One night she forgot to lock it and woke up to see him hovering over her from the side of her bed, with his right hand moving inside his gray pajama pants.

    After graduating from high school, she moved in with her 23-year-old boyfriend named Peter and hung around with him and his friends. Pete was in a gang and he didn’t talk much about it with her, only that it was better the less she knew, and she never pressed him for more information. During the week, she would work at a pizza shop. On the weekends, she would go out clubbing with Pete and his friends.

    A breeze of hot air from outside blew her brassy blond hair into her face. She was long overdue for a hair trim—her parched hair was plagued by split ends. Her nails—well, she gave up on regular manicures and pedicures a long time ago. But it’s not like she was clubbing or raving these days.

    But it was so fun while it lasted.

    A ghost of a smile crept into her lips as she took another drag from her cigarette.11 PM felt like a beginning of many fun possibilities; 5 AM felt like death, as she was coming down from the ecstasy. But in those sacred hours between 11 PM and 2 AM, the world was magic. The music and bodies melted into each other with warmth and movement. Sound waves swirled around her as the deep bass beat in rhythm. As the high coursed through her body, she felt at one with the world. Infinite.

    Then the morning would come. Her glitter and sequins, which had felt like magical shimmers the night before, felt garish and bleak in the unforgiving light of dawn. Her throat was parched, her makeup was peeling, and her head throbbed. She would hide from the world in Pete’s dingy bedroom with the curtains shut, trying to be as quiet and still as possible. Is this all it will ever be? a small voice in her head would ask.

    One day, she received a phone call from the police. Pete had been found in a ditch with two gun wounds in his back. The cops wrote it off as gang-related and left it at that. Of course the cops didn’t bother to do a thorough investigation, she thought bitterly. They didn’t give two shits about him. Vanessa cried at his funeral, along with Pete’s friends. Even though they’d had a rocky relationship towards the end, they had also had a lot of good memories together.

    After Pete’s death, as she lay in their bed and listened to the overhead fan creak in the ceiling, she reflected on their relationship and realized she had overlooked a lot of things when Peter was still alive—his temper, and how he had punched two holes in the bedroom at separate times during their relationship. One time it was because she kept confronting him about a girl named Angel who kept texting him late at night. The other time it was because a handsome waiter made a joke about the menu and she had laughed back. “Look what you made me do,” he said, as the holes in the wall gaped and cracked. He would also get very close to her and punch the air around her head. Maybe one reason she’d been so willing to overlook these things was because she had nowhere to go. She didn’t want to go back to her father. She didn’t want to leave Peter and the life they had shared together, outside of those rage episodes.

    She felt bad for remembering these things. It felt like she was tarnishing the image of him as her hero, the one who pulled her away from her creepy father.

    But his death had given her another point of clarity. In the haze of the clubbing and raving, she and her old friends from high school had grown apart. Their friendships had withered away and now it felt weird to text them out of the blue.

    Then she’d found out she was pregnant.

    Although she had never truly joined the gang or participated in running its businesses, she still wore the gang colors when going out with Pete and his friends. One could say that she was affiliated, even if she wasn’t a direct member. People knew she was with Pete.

    She didn’t feel safe in this town anymore. She quit her job at the pizza shop and found an apartment about two desert towns away, which came with a roommate—an older lady named Janice who worked as a lunch lady at a nearby elementary school—and a job at a dollar store. The owners of the dollar store were cheap and there was no air conditioning (only an old, rattling fan), but a shitty job was better than no job.

    She had packed all her belongings in her beat-up car and driven down the freeway on a quiet Sunday morning. During the drive, her thoughts drifted as she drove along the desert landscape. Sometimes her free hand would go to her lower belly, where baby Daniel was a little tadpole curled up inside.

    When Tommy was born and the nurses plopped him onto her chest, she touched his little hands and little face and couldn’t believe that such a precious thing had come from her and Pete.

    And now she was out here with little Tommy, in The Middle of Nowhere, California. It was hot and boring here, but at least she felt safe.  She’d gone to the small town’s resource and referral agency, which had given her a list of low-cost daycare options, including CalWORKS and Early Head Start, which Vanessa somehow miraculously qualified for. She would be picking Baby Tommy up after her shift today, like she does every day.

    Her phone alarm went off. She turned it off and took one last drag of her cigarette before opening a root beer bottle and dropping the cigarette inside, where it joined a forbidden stew of old root beer and other cigarette butts—a melting pot of tar soup. She looked back at the baby car seat through her rearview mirror. I should quit, she thought.  She shook the bottle to drown the cigarette butt and placed it back down beneath the passenger seat.

    Her hand caught on something beneath the seat. She pulled it out.

    It was a college brochure she had pulled from the mailbox yesterday, that she’d forgotten to take out of her purse. She flipped through it. There were the usual offerings of the nursing degrees, but she saw a program for Certified Nurse Assistant. Her former coworker Tina had left the store to become a CNA, saying the pay was better and that training didn’t take very long, even if the work was harder.  Maybe she could text her tonight to ask about how things were going.

    Vanessa wasn’t sure if this CNA path was the right fit for her, or if there was anything out in the world that she was “meant” to do like those sappy people talk about in inspirational videos.

    She didn’t want to work at the dollar store for the rest of her life, especially since the owners were thinking about raising the prices to $1.99, something about tariffs. A few months ago they had already raised the prices to $1.50—which had already hurt business, as customers grumbled to her about how Walmart was cheaper now.

    Tommy was too little right now for Vanessa to work and go to school, but maybe when he was a bit older, she could figure out some daycare options to take classes in the evening.

    Right now she was barely making ends meet—having a roommate and using state programs for daycare and food assistance was helping her and Tommy survive, and she had squirreled away some savings when she was still living with Pete. But now she and Tommy could really use that extra cushion. Even if CNA wasn’t the right program for her, the local community college still offered other types of careers. She imagined herself working in an air-conditioned hospital, with the fresh smell of sanitizer and clean walls and floors. She pictured herself typing away on a computer in an office (also air-conditioned), with a stylish little bag next to her, and being able to buy nice things for Tommy.

    She tucked the brochure back in her bag and locked the car. As she walked back towards the dollar store, she found herself smiling.

  • 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?

  • Nicole Kidwoman and Her Dream Son: a short story

    August 2025

    Mary bit into her $1.50 hot dog as she stationed herself at one of the red picnic tables outside a Costco. In this age of skyrocketing grocery prices, the $1.50 hot dog was one of the last holdouts from a simpler time.

    She eyed the purchased eggs in her cart with disapproval. Eggs were once lauded by frugal cookbooks as a cheap protein, the holy grail of poor people and large families.

    Not anymore, she thought. She couldn’t remember exactly how or why eggs became so expensive, even after the bird flu or whatever wiped out those eggs the first time, but she had a feeling it was probably the liberals.

    The other red picnic tables in the food court were filled with families with baby strollers, shopping carts, and the occasional pigeon or two. Opportunistic, thought Mary, watching two pigeons fight over a pizza crust. And who wouldn’t be, in times like these?

    Five years after the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, the era of face masks, hand sanitizers, and six-feet-apart social distancing now felt like a bad dream.

    She had survived the Great Toilet Paper Panic of 2020, when supply and distribution lines were disrupted, leaving store shelves empty and depriving the hardworking American people of a crucial element of life: toilet paper.

    May 2020

    She had never been more relieved to see toilet paper.

    Mary had lined up outside the department stores before dawn to get a crack at the toilet paper. She had screamed, flailed her arms, and shoved her way through the throng of facemask-donning people heading toward the stacks of toilet paper.

    Although she was a petite and scrawny 5’0” middle-aged lady with mousy brown hair tied back into a neat ponytail, she managed to sharp-elbow a thick woman (Latina, probably, figured Mary) aside to grab a unit of toilet paper – a generous block of 30 Kirkland 2-ply toilet paper rolls, sealed together with plastic.

    “Fuck you, bitch!” cried the woman, who had fallen to the ground on her generous tush. “My family needs that!”

     “It’s not all about you, you know,” Mary piped as she pushed her cart quickly away before the woman could reach up and pull the block of toilet paper off the cart. “Maybe you wouldn’t need so much toilet paper if you stopped eating all that Taco Bell.”

    Mary hated Taco Bell. She had made the mistake of eating at a Taco Bell next to a mortuary once, which ended in food poisoning that lasted two weeks, and her having to discard her favorite pair of funeral underwear (it was beyond saving).

    Back at home, two unopened blocks of 30 Kirkland 2-ply toilet paper rolls sat on Mary’s shelves, still sealed together with plastic. But in these uncertain times, Mary felt she needed to stock up. It was unclear how long the supply chains were going to be disrupted.

    Guilt fluttered in her chest as she pushed the cart into the bread section and thought of that woman’s family, but she quickly dismissed it. It wasn’t her fault that these women were underprepared.

    And judging from their looks, they were probably illegals (pronounced “eel LEEgals”) with huge families at home. She smiled to herself through a veneer of cherry Chapstick. The President had promised to stop those damned eel-leegals from invading America—by building the Great Wall of America, with each piece of the wall yet another point in America’s crown. But that was only half the battle. It was only a matter of time before America would be cleaned up from the eel-leegals that were already here. 

    August 2025

    After finishing her hot dog, Mary drove home in her white hatchback Yaris. After unloading and putting away her groceries and her spoils of war, a fresh block of toilet paper, she boiled water for tea, twisting the finicky stove igniter several times until sparks flew and a scratchy, blue and orange flame flared. Placing her hot Lipton tea on a coaster on the coffee table, she sat on the couch and turned on the television. Nicole Kidman came on the screen with a tight, shiny forehead and frozen eyebrows. Mary liked Nicole Kidman, with her voluminous blond hair, alabaster skin, and icy, blue eyes. Kidman reminded her of a time before the movie studios started pandering to D-E-I people with all this woke-ism. It was no wonder theaters were struggling these days. There was a time when most actors in Hollywood were white—the way it should be, thought Mary.

    The afternoon slipped by as Mary watched television in her beige living room. As with many things that one became accustomed to in one’s surroundings, Mary barely noticed the little knickknacks or dusty, framed photographs on the wall.

    But today, as Netflix broke into yet another unstoppable 75-second commercial, her gaze wandered to the wall.

    One of these framed photographs was taken in the ‘90s, featuring herself, her late husband Ted, and their lost daughter, Anne. They had taken the photograph at a department store’s portrait studio department—Sears, perhaps. Ted had worn his gray Sunday suit and combed his brown hair to the side as he always did for work and church. On his wrist was his trusty old Timex watch with the wide face and Roman numerals. At that time Mary had big, permed brown hair with blow-dried bangs curtaining her forehead and doll-like blue eyes rimmed with dark lashes. And sweet, little Anne, she must have been five or six at the time, she was wearing a tartan plaid dress and her wavy blond hair was accented with a large green bow. Anne sat on a stool while Mary and Ted flanked her on both sides and smiled in front of a brown, textured backdrop.

    Oh, Anne, thought Mary to the photograph. You were so perfect, with your beautiful blue eyes and your lovely blond hair. You were a perfect little girl.

    Why did you give it all away?

    Anne was gone now.

    In Anne’s place was now Angelo, her “son.”

    Mary’s wistful smile gave way to a frown. “Where did I go wrong?” she whispered to the photograph. Perhaps she should have made a bigger point to insist on Anne coming with her and Ted to church. Anne would sometimes stay home to play computer games. Perhaps Mary should have pushed Anne to wear more dresses and banished those ugly oversized T-shirts and baggy cargo pants from the house later in Anne’s childhood, as Anne began to shop for her own clothes.

    “No. Ted and I did our best,” said Mary, nodding firmly as yet another commercial began. And how many damned commercials does Netflix have these days?

    As a cheese commercial played, Mary’s thoughts wandered to the moment her sweet, beautiful daughter became a son. She wrinkled her nose. “If God wanted me to have a son, he would have given me one to begin with.”

    November 2010

    Her daughter had gone to college a few hours away from home. And then she’d come home with her beautiful blond hair shaved short like a boy’s, wearing a sports jersey and cargo shorts, and a flat chest.

    “You—what happened to you?” sputtered Mary.

    “Mom, Dad,” said Anne, her voice shaking. “I’m transitioning. You’ve seen me struggle all throughout my life. I’ve always been a man and now I’m finally living as I truly am.” 

    “And why didn’t you say anything to us? Why did you tell us anything before you went ahead and chopped off your hair and breasts?”

    “I’ve been telling you all this time!” exclaimed her daughter-who-was-now-a-son. “I’ve always told you I’ve never quite felt right. All you told me in return was that I would grow out of it.”

    Mary did vaguely remember such conversations, but her impression at the time had mostly been of Anne whining about not liking dresses and being petulant about closing her legs when sitting. They had gotten into lots of arguments over Anne’s insistence on wearing boys’ clothing.

    Mary had entered Anne’s room many times during her adolescence under the banner of cleaning it. She’d found and thrown away a lot of Anne’s boy’s clothing, and read Anne’s diaries, photo booth strips, personal letters that she’d tucked away inside old binders—some were even love letters from girls! She tossed them out and chalked it up to a silly phase that Anne would soon outgrow.

    You think you’re so slick, Mary had thought. But no one outsmarts me in my own house. Whenever Anne asked where a particular garment was, Mary would widen her eyes and shake her head cluelessly.

    “Did you chop off or bind your chest?” Mary asked, enraged. What a waste of God’s gifts. A blasphemous waste!

    “That’s none of your business, Mom,” said Anne.

    “I gave birth to you and your chest, that is my business!”

    Ted in the meantime, had been drinking coffee or whatever he liked doing, Anne’s memory wasn’t too clear on that little part now. He shook his head at no one in particular and walked to the bedroom, leaving Mary and Anne on their own in the kitchen.

    Mary glared at her wayward child. She stared at her up and down, appraising how flat her chest was, how rough the skin on her face looked.

    “I changed my name. My legal name is now Angelo Williams.”

    “Angelo?” cried Mary. “I can’t keep up with you anymore. Not only are you a boy, you’re now Latino too?”

    “Angelo comes from Anne!”

    “No, it does not! If you wanted a boy’s version, you would have gone with Andrew!” Not that Mary would have approved anyway.

    “I guess you’re right. Maybe I just liked the sound of ‘Angelo.’”

    What would people think, thought Mary with horror. How would she be able to explain it to everyone—from her and Ted’s church friends to their extended family members?

    “You bring shame to our family,” said Mary, shaking her head while looking up and down at her child. “After everything your father and I have sacrificed for you. After everything God has given you. You spit at us. You spit at all of us!” She admitted it to herself then: she had been in denial of her daughter’s struggle. And now it was too late to bring her daughter back in line.

    A realization came to her: maybe her daughter had been “transitioning” for a while and only kept up appearances at home—lying to Mary and Ted. That would explain why Anne had so many boys’ clothes that she never seemed to wear.

    “I never asked for any of this!” replied Anne.

    “How are we going to explain it to everyone?” continued Mary. “Our once-beautiful daughter is now a TOTAL ABOMINATION!”

    “Is that what I am to you, Mother?” Anne asked quietly.

    “We gave you everything,” said Mary, beginning to cry. “You chose to throw it away.” She felt so betrayed, in realizing that Anne had waited until she was at college before transitioning—when Mary and Ted were helpless to do anything about it. Had Anne transitioned during high school, Mary knew of some camps that seemed to have fixed the “gay” problem for the children of a few friends from church…

    She stopped sniffling for a moment. There was one remaining option: the ultimatum. “You stop all this nonsense. Or we are cutting you off. No more college. No more support.”

    “I see,” said Anne.

    That night, Mary heard some furniture moving around. She went downstairs and saw Anne moving suitcases and boxes of things out of the house.

    “You’re leaving us? Just because we don’t approve of you trying to be a boy?”

    “I’m tired of this,” said Anne, sounding exhausted. “I’ve tried to explain to you who I am my whole life, but you never listened.” She hoisted a final box—a box of her favorite childhood books—onto her hips and, with her free hand, closed the front door behind her. The curtains glowed from Anne’s headlights as her car pulled out of the driveway.

    Mary ran to Anne’s room and was met with an emptiness as she regarded the space now devoid of Anne’s favorite posters, toys, and things. Anne had taken all her favorite things and left the rest behind, including Mary and Ted.

    Mary sank to her knees and cried into the empty space. Her sobs echoed back at her. From the other room, Ted snored.

    December 2010

    The lights glowed and the bells jingled, but Mary’s heart felt hollow inside, as she stood numbly next to Ted in their pew at church.

    It was easier to explain that Rebellious Little Anne had decided to abandon her parents for because college had brainwashed her and because she hated wearing dresses. Over Christmas dinners of roasted ham, mashed potatoes, and Jello salads, Mary told relatives and church friends that the liberals at school had corrupted her daughter and Anne had decided she was too good for her own parents now.

    Some of the more conservative, God-fearing family members took Mary’s side, cursing Anne and her new wayward path into sin. Some referred to the story of the prodigal son (or daughter), suggesting that perhaps one day Anne would come back, and that God’s grace could still save Anne (if she was willing). Others simply nodded along. Mary could tell they were humoring her, but she was too heartbroken to get into a moral debate.

    She did enjoy hearing stories about other parents who’d been similarly abandoned by their liberal children. These made her feel a little less alone. She clung to the company of other righteous churchgoers who denounced the sinful ways of young people in modern society. They understood what it was like to lose your child to the world.

    August 2018

    Over the past two years, Ted had suffered from chest pains and congestion.

    One morning, Mary woke up and Ted was dead.

    The funeral was held at a gloomy little mortuary next to a Taco Bell on the side of the freeway. Everyone sang “Amazing Grace.” The entire parlor stank with the cloying stench of lilies. Mary’s voice cracked through her tears as she tried to sing. She gave up during the second refrain and let everyone else sing.

    Once everyone was done singing, the pastor read lines from the Bible and preached things in comfort of the surviving members of the family, but Mary found her gaze drifting to a handsome blond boy sitting about three seats away during the sermon.

    Mary could see that Anne had fully “become” Angelo over the past eight years—a handsome, broad-shouldered man with a square jaw, wearing a black suit and trousers. Short, blond curls crowned his head.

    Angelo looked like a Greek god. Sure, if she looked hard enough, she could still catch glimpses of her precious little Anne (how could she not?), from the little mole on the right elbow to the curve of the nose. But if she had never met this beautiful boy before, she would have assumed he was born this way, God-given and all that. He did look a lot like a younger, more robust version of Ted. She remembered feeling both awe, at how science had progressed to enable such a transformation, and disgust, at how science had allowed the human race to stray further from God.

    She waited for Angelo to approach her after the service but he never did. He never even looked her way. She felt invisible in this new world, with a dead husband and a new son. She thought about approaching him but felt unsure of how to face her new son.

    While Suzie Jenkins (Ted’s overbearing aunt who reeked of cigarettes and dog breath) prattled on about her own husband who had died two years ago, Mary watched over Suzie’s shoulder as Angelo walked to the parking lot, got into his car, and drove off.

    There was no reception. Ted’s family wasn’t big on parties, and Mary was too heartbroken to host anything. She said goodbye to Suzie and went to Taco Bell, where she ordered ten tacos with salsa packets and devoured them all, after which she was violently afflicted with the Montezuma’s Taco Bell Curse and had to sacrifice her favorite underwear in exchange for her life. The gods were eventually appeased, after two weeks of nonstop vomiting and diarrhea. If Ted’s ghost were still wandering the home, he would have been scared into the afterlife.

    September 2025

    She still dreamt of Angelo showing up at her door. Sometimes he would be apologetic; other times he would be flippant and defiant. Sometimes she would slap him, other times she would embrace him and cook him his favorite meal, beef stroganoff.

    In one of her dreams, Angelo declined the food, saying that not only was he a man, he was now also a vegan. Then she would wake up in her bed with a pounding heart and hands curled into fists. Other times he would show up at her door as Anne, but a grown-up version of Anne, the way Mary would have wished Anne to be like, a lovely, smiling young woman in a tartan plaid dress, with wavy blond hair flowing over her shoulders. Not unlike a younger, blond Nicole Kidman.

    Mary had grown comfortable with living alone, but she thought of her darling child often—a child that had become all but a ghost in her life, just like her late husband. Whenever the doorbell rang she jumped with the hope that perhaps Angelo had finally decided to come home. When she would see that it is a mailman or worse, a solar salesman, she deflated with jaded disappointment. Of course. Why would Angelo come, after all these years? When she felt tender, she wanted to embrace her son and tell him she accepted him now. When she felt hurt or proud, she wanted him to grovel and beg for her forgiveness.

    One night, after watching the news about yet another school shooting (she forgot which), she pulled out her phone and created a fake social media account under the name of Nicole Kidwoman.

    She found Angelo’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, both under “Angelo Williams.” He is a registered nurse at a hospital. He married a Latina named Josefina (And didn’t invite me! thought Mary, chagrined). They had two beautiful children. Mary wondered how they did it. Maybe they adopted. Regardless of how they obtained the children, the children did look quite happy in the photographs—cheeky, ruddy, and cherubic.

    She looked up his and Josefina’s address online. The photos on Zillow seemed to match the interiors of his house from his Facebook photographs. She decided she would go to his house to see her precious little grandchildren. Angelo clearly didn’t want her in his life, but her grandchildren deserved a chance to know their grandma.

    The next day, Mary drove up the hill to a house in a nice neighborhood with trees, clear sidewalks, and smooth pavement. She carried two large gift bags, for the two children, a boy and a girl. Not that it would matter in the end, Mary thought as she clicked open the white picket fence to Angelo and Josefina’s house.

    Her heart fluttered at the sound of children playing and laughing from within the house. She rang the doorbell.

    Footsteps from within. Pitter-patter. The door opened and Josefina poked her face out. “Hello? Hi there!”

    “Hello,” said Mary, mustering up all of her confidence but feeling rather shaky anyway. “I am Mary, Angelo’s mother. I…er… I brought these gifts over for my grandchildren.”

    “Ah,” said Josefina, her face puckering up. “Angelo has told me about you.”

    “Wow, your English is very good,” complimented Mary generously.

    She stood, waiting to be invited in.

    “Angelo’s not home right now,” said Josefina.

    “I see. May I leave these gifts with the little ones then?”

    “Yes,” said Josefina. “I will give it to them. Thank you.”

    “May I see them?”

    A boy with brown hair and hazel eyes about the age of six or seven poked his head out from behind Josefina. “David,” said Josefina. “This is your other grandma. She has brought you gifts.” She stepped aside enough for Mary to hand David a blue bag with dinosaurs printed all over it. David accepted the bag shyly.

    “And what do you say?” asked Josefina.

    “Thank you,” said David shyly.

    “You’re very welcome, David. Grandma loves you.” Mary looked at Josefina. “And where is the other one, I believe you also have a girl—Ashley?”

    Josefina narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been stalking our social media, haven’t you.”

    Mary widened her eyes innocently. “Oh! Why, I wouldn’t know how to use that!”

    “You’re not that old. My parents are about your age, and they use it all the time.”

    Bitch, thought Mary. “Well, not all parents have been blessed as yours to have such tech-savvy kids in their life.”

    Josefina raised her dark eyebrows. “Huh,” she said flatly. “I wonder why.”

    Mary left the pink bag with unicorns for Ashley with Josefina and drove home without seeing her granddaughter.

    That night, after heating up some lasagna leftovers and pouring a glass of milk for dinner, she turned on the television to see Latinos being wrestled onto the ground by multiple masked ICE agents.

    “I wish they’d deport Josefina,” she grumbled, but immediately felt bad afterward because then her grandchildren wouldn’t have a mother. And despite being so irritating, Josefina appeared to be a good mother to David and Ashley.

    Mary wished Josefina (and her daughter-son, for that matter) wouldn’t hate her so much so that she could see her grandchildren more. She wondered what Angelo had said to Josefina about her. Probably not nice things, Mary surmised.

    The evening news, which went from showing ICE officers pulling mothers away from crying children to the President hemming and hawing about the Epstein files, made Mary feel heavy and crummy. She used to get a high from these reports. It felt like a righteous rush, seeing spoiled and entitled liberals get what they deserved, whether it was Laotian and Vietnamese criminals being deported to South Sudan or smug reporters being kicked out of the White House.

    She picked up the remote and turned off the television. These days, the world felt less recognizable to her every day. Or maybe she was just getting old.

    She cleaned up her supper and turned on the stove to heat up some water. The igniter was acting funky so she held it down for a long while until the flame finally ignited in blue and orange sparks and a soft hissing sound. She placed the kettle over it.

    She puttered around the living room, dusting old photographs on the wall. After a while she wasn’t feeling well so she went off to bed early.

    That night, she had a dream about Angelo knocking at her door. She knew it was him right away. Overjoyed, she ran to the door. She was ready to let go of everything—past grudges, old resentments, and all the bad mojo between her and her son. You received my gifts, she said. Did David and Ashley like them?

    Dream Angelo smiled at her—a gentle, handsome smile that twinkled in his eyes—the first smile from him she had seen in more than fifteen years. Yes, Mom. They loved their gifts.

     I am so sorry, son. I should have been more supportive to you. At the end of the day I love you no matter what you are. If you turn into a worm I will put you in a little tank with lots of nice dirt and twigs.

    Thanks, Mom, replied Dream Angelo.

    Please come in. Mary ushered Dream Angelo into the house. Somehow he felt taller as Angelo than he ever did as Anne. I have something for you. She pulled a drawer open and handed him Ted’s old Timex watch, the one he wore every day for decades. Your father would have wanted you to have it. It was a proper men’s watch. Perfect for her son.

    Mary and her son hugged each other tightly. The room glowed with sunlight and Mary could hear the faint presence of Ted near them. Smiling through tears, she closed her eyes.

    In the distance, she could hear a loud beeping—probably a neighbor’s new annoying gadget. She could feel the heat coming into the house from outside. It was quite warm, really. But she didn’t care. Because right now, she was finally reunited with her son—a moment she had dreamt of for years. She could die happy now.

    The End

  • Unable to Create…When I’m Happy?

    Unable to Create…When I’m Happy?

    I’ve experienced a weird mind shift this past week. I had a good time celebrating our friends’ birthdays. Saw our baby in the ultrasound. I’m still riding the high from the weekend.

    It feels as if I’ve split from the person I was just a couple weeks back. I can no longer relate to the novel I was working on. I tried reading it and it was all doom and gloom. It makes sense, in a way. I worked a lot on it right after my sister killed herself and while I was grappling with childhood trauma, and a lot of this writing reflects the dark place my mind was in at the time. At the time, I was able to relate to the sinister, oppressive elements of the world I created. But now it all feels too gloomy, or maybe I have left. The chapters I felt resonated with so much at the time now feel cringy to read through.

    The wise advice is to step away from my novel for a bit, but I feel a bit bummed out about my writing. This is my second draft novel, and it is only 40k words in. The first one is done but not yet revised. It seems that maybe a long form work like a novel might not be the right fit for me, especially with a baby on the way.

    Is all my writing fueled by unhappiness? Am I unable to create when I am happy?

    I wonder if I can channel things aside from pain in my writing. This would be interesting…

  • Goodbye to Gareth: a short story about a man and his orange cat (part one)

    Anthony rolled the dice. “Deal,” he said.

    The casino was long past its glory days. The buttons on the slot machines were sticky, the seats were worn, and there was a perpetual odor of citrus freshener and ammonia on the stained carpets.

    Three girls clad in cheap sequins and satin twitched their bodies with stiff, lackluster movements on the stage to the right of the gambling floor. They faced their catatonic eyes towards the ceiling and walls.

    The slot machines and card tables were half empty (or half full, depending on how you looked at it). Most of the people there were senior folks wearing “Swingers Club” t-shirts, with bald heads and wispy, gray and white hairs. Anthony cringed at the thought of their wrinkly, sagging bodies writhing and their toothless mouths opening and twisting with pleasure. He wondered which casino bus had taken these retirees in from the city to spend their social security checks.  

    So what brought Anthony to this air-conditioned shithole in the desert?

    Gareth, his fourteen-year-old orange tabby, a plump, twenty-pound pumpernickel of a senior cat, had passed away on Monday. He’d fallen ill over the weekend and when Anthony took him to the vet, the vet had said his cat’s organs were failing rapidly.

    Anthony held Gareth during the euthanasia. Gareth let out his final breath with a small rattle as Anthony whispered over and over again, “You’ve been a good boy.”

    Up until then, it had been Anthony and Gareth, living in their one-bedroom apartment in a shitty desert town not too far from this casino. The town was one that rich and adventurous folks from Southern California drove through on their way to Vegas, the home of much more luxurious and well-kept casinos.

    But no, the desert he lived in also had its own casino—the Palm Casino. Anthony couldn’t afford the prices of the Strip, with their add-on fees and upscale dining costs. Besides, he wasn’t looking for a posh experience.

    He just wanted to get away from his town, a town he had lived in for most of his adulthood. It was sufficient when he had Gareth. He worked from home as a computer tech support guy for a small company in California. He wasn’t required to, and thus never attended any work holiday events, and he was paid well for someone who lived outside of California.

    Anthony’s little apartment was kept at a cool 72 degrees during the summer, where temperatures would soar to the high 90s or 110s. From 2015 to 2025, every day, he would wake up to Gareth’s loud meowing, feed Gareth, brush his teeth, scoop the litterbox, shower, heat a bagel and slather with cream cheese, make a cup of coffee from the Keurig, and log in to his computer for work. He would break for lunch in the middle of the day, microwave some lunch, and watch a daytime show while Gareth cuddled with him on the couch. Depending on his workload, he would clock out at some point in the evening and fix himself and Gareth their respective suppers.

    Once the evening was sufficiently cool outside, he would pull on some sweatpants and take a walk along Dune Avenue, a long stretch of street with the desert brush and cactuses in the background, one liquor store at which he would occasionally buy chips and soda (his guilty pleasure was tortilla chips, nacho cheese, and Mountain Dew), and one gas station that overcharged because there weren’t any other gas stations nearby for miles. Anthony seldom saw any other pedestrians on the streets during his walks, and he preferred it that way. His walks would take half an hour, and then he would return to take another shower and sit on the couch with Gareth while watching a movie or playing a video game on his Xbox. After that, he would brush his teeth, retreat to the bedroom as Gareth pounced on the bed, and go to sleep.

    This was good. He enjoyed this life. But it was tragic, a great injustice, Anthony felt, that cats’ lifespans were only a fraction of a typical human’s.

    And now, with Gareth gone, the silence in his apartment and the empty streets around his building, were too much.

    He needed a distraction. And to see people. How long had it been since he intentionally sought the company of humans? As he drove home from the crematorium with Gareth’s ashes in a box on the passenger seat, he saw a billboard on the side of the road.

    25 miles until Palm Casino.

    Yes. This was it. He drove past his apartment and kept going, towards Palm Casino.

    Continued in part two: https://edenonpeng.com/2025/09/02/goodbye-to-gareth-a-story-about-a-man-and-his-orange-cat-part-two-the-end/.

  • Gas Station Coke: Damian’s Dilemma (a fictional vignette)

    Gas Station Coke: Damian’s Dilemma (a fictional vignette)

    The light in the gas station bathroom flickered as if controlled by the wings of a moth. The trashcan next to the toilet was overflowing with crumpled up toilet paper, with a pile of trash next to it, as if the last few patrons had given up and tossed their trash where it belonged logically (near the trash can), even though the original destination (the trash can) was no longer available.

    Damian glared at himself in the mirror, which had been etched in multiple spots with things like “Jill + Bob,” “God was here,” “FUCK YOU,” and “call 725-777-7777 for coke.”

    Coke did sound good. His current stash was dwindling, and it hadn’t been very long since he’d had his last bump. In fact, it was time for another one.

    He pulled his wallet out of his pocket—a black bifold Calvin Klein that his mom had bought for him from Ross—and pulled out his credit card, behind which the delicate resealable plastic bag sat.

    It was originally an eight-ball but was now half of that. He needed to make this last. It was going to be a long night.

    His keys jingled as he withdrew his keychain from his other pocket. His mail key was too small for what he was about to do. He would need to use his house key. It was girthy enough to hold a generous bump.

    His nostrils burned as he snorted up the small hill of white magic. He wasn’t sure how to describe the sensation. Fresh? No. It was sort of artificial. Maybe even medicinal, in the way it burned. It was probably cut with something like baking soda or worse.

    Thankfully, the coke numbed his sense of smell, because the restroom smelled like old shit. The poor gas station attendant was the only one there, and he was stuck in the convenience store, helping customers with cash payments for gas and other stuff. Maybe the gas station attendant had given up on trying to keep the bathroom clean, and was waiting until near the end of his shift to take care of everything as much as he could.

    A sense of alertness washed over Damian. Then he sobbed out loud, gripping the sides of the grimy sink in front of him.

    No. The coke wasn’t helping.

    Nothing could help him now.

    Tonight, he was going to betray his best friends. He and Chris were going to kidnap Ken and Bryan and take them to the Aqrabi compound where everyone participated in the Ascendance ritual.

    No… Chris’s voice spoke in his head. Damian had spent so much time with Chris in the last few years that his mind had created a little version of Chris to guide him even when he was away from him. Chris’s voice in his head was confident and assuring. You’re not betraying your friends, you are SAVING them. You are helping them reach their True Universe. I mean, look at Ken and look at Bryan. Do you think they’re the types of people to find Ascendance on their own?

    “I guess not,” replied Damian out loud.

    That’s right, said Chris’s voice. And this would bring you closer to your own True Universe.

    Damian wept, this time for his True Universe, where he could have everything he wanted, at the same time. A special universe created just for each person, including himself. He wanted that so badly. He wanted to be free from the pressures of his life. His parents’ expectations. His mom’s weird possessiveness.

    Behind him, the door knob shook twice, as someone attempted to enter the bathroom but could not because Damian had locked it.

    It was time to go. The gas station had no clock, but Damian knew he had been in that restroom long enough.

    It was time to save his friends.

  • 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.