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 seven 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • No Watch, No Phone, No Goddamn Map: an urban vignette

    DOWNTOWN IN THE MORNING. FUCK YEAH. FUCK YOU. AND YOU. AND YOU. I’m goin’ down the road with my trusty old backpack and a pocket full of ROSES. HEY YOU WHO DO YOU THINK YOU’RE LOOKING AT. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU TOO! Oh. It is me. Pete. They must’ve cleaned the windows. WELL FUCK YOU ANYWAY. IMMA TAKE A NAP HERE AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME.

    I dunno what time it is. And you know what? It doesn’t matter anymore. I can just tell by the temp and the gray that it’s early but not too early. The office and working folks already made it into the office, there were a lot of people passing through our street and walking around our tents earlier but now it’s quiet again and the sun is out.

    You ask how long it has been? Been what? Oh, since I’ve been out here? Man. It’s been a while. I stopped counting a long time ago. I guess you can say life threw me lemons and I jumped into a fucking ocean of lemonade or some shit like that. I was living with my wife for a while but then we lost our house…and my drinking got bad, and things got worse from there…My wife left me after we lost our house, she blamed it on my drinking. She was probably right, but I also blame it on the feds. They were looking for me everywhere. They bugged my phone, my car, and our house. I saw them on the street and at the store, and when I saw them at work, that was it, I bounced. I dunno why they were coming at me, they just were, and they wanted to screw me over. And now I don’t carry none—see? No phones. It’s safer that way, ya know? I move around so they can’t track me. But they might still catch up to me someday.

    But for now, here I am. Sleeping under the stars every night. Well, maybe not the stars and more like the smog. But close enough. Just making it day by day, you know?

    You’re nice. Not a lotta people stop to talk to me. Thanks for the sandwich. Appreciate it. I don’t got much teeth these days, see? But I can still eat sandwiches. It’s good.

    I feel it coming back. Imma finish this sandwich real quick. You should probably go now. People say I get belligerent and mean. I’m sorry. I probably won’t see you again but maybe it’s better that way. God bless.

    FUCK YOU ALL!!!!!!!!!! I JUST WANNA GO TO THE STORE TO GET SOME FUCKING JUICE BUT YOU ARE ALL LOOKING AT ME. STOP THE FUCK IT. YOU SUCK! YOU SUCK! YOU SUCK!!! IMMA HEAD DOWN BROADWAY AND FUCK YOU ALL. IT’S JUST ME AND MY BACKPACK AND POCKET OF FUCKING ROSES. YES AND THE WORLD. THANKS JOSH. FUCK YOU, THOMAS. GO TO SLEEP, IT’S FUCKING TEN IN THE MORNING. YES, I MADE THAT UP. I DON’T GOT A WATCH.

  • 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.