I’m doing the best I can / So please don’t give up on me
— Accept Me, Janet Jackson
Theme: It’s 2022 and we’re not supposed to talk about our bodies anymore, we don’t know what kind of journeys they’ve been on, especially the ones that aren’t ours. On my screen, a real housewife eats a sandwich in the sauna, and the other real housewives laugh at her for carrying a footlong in her purse for moments she feels faint. They all sit with their lips curled, makeup dripping from the sweat, still fully clothed. It’s called detoxing, Emily. But it’s turkey, Heather. Somehow I empathize with both women?
I had to start somewhere, and there was trying to remember. The virtuosity of silence is its mimesis. The more I sat, the more a voice inside me said keep going every time I started thinking, In the beginning… Two months into being unemployed, the goal of mindfulness, of rediscovering myself in a plentitude of time and no tasks dwindled through the ecumenical feed of Instagram. Tsunamis bled into Shein hauls, Adele cancelled Vegas, an iceberg disappeared.
In bed, I am stimulated and sedated, life a long REM cycle where the occasional podcast is my normalizing portion. The joke is that we are all in sweats all day, pounding wine while the sun is still up, given wfh, given the vid, given euphoria, euphoria, euphoria!!! Seasonal depression, Postmates. The content is that we have no content, and the government pays us in reel views. I don’t think people are all really living this way, but how am I supposed to be living then, what’s the dream life I’m to manifest, what’s the dream, whose life?
My real life is a mess, that’s true. I’ve been using my mom’s bank account to pay people for stuff on Venmo without her knowing, and now she’s filed a complaint for fraud. Do I tell her it’s me, I’m sorry, I never have enough money, I am always buying something for myself and occasionally for others too. Bella Hadid gave away $25,000 worth of coats to the Bowery Mission. If I hadn’t bought a bunch of shitty Zara blazers the other week I would have saved enough to have enough to actually help someone, is that it…?
Theme: how many mistakes can you make before you truly lose all hope of being upcycled, before you’ve run dry the list of people willing to take a chance on you? If you can’t come to grips with the pain your actions cause someone, is that what makes you a sociopath? Once a virtual therapist on BetterHelp asked me during my free trial if I had ever been seen for bipolar disorder, and I knew she was referring to my two faces of death and hunger. Death is when you don’t care, hunger is when you care too much.
When I was a child but not a kid, my grandmother was dying. Her name was Mood and I knew almost nothing about her, what she thought, how she felt, but that she had no conceptual understanding of a sandwich. Because my parents, after they divorced both vanished (I was 12 and it was 2006), she was the head of our provisional home, but she was 80 years old and only managed the strength to pack us lunch and blend hot bean smoothies for breakfast before the bus. The smoothies, somehow both thick and watery, were pitch black and mildly sweet and entirely gag-worthy, giving me an emotional allergy to beans for the rest of my life.
When it came time to open my brown paper bag at noon, I found inside a mass so densely wrapped, it looked like a crude Papier-mâché model of the earth. Like the layers of a rubber band ball, my meal had been wrapped first in paper towel, then saran wrap, then aluminum foil, and then sealed airtight in a Ziploc bag. My eyes darted across the long lunch table looking with nervousness and envy at the other kids and their snappy breadsticks and salami rollups. I wanted by some miracle to find green grapes and crackers and cheddar cheese in my security detailed lunch, but instead: two mushy slices of potato bread, raw spam and congealed Kraft Singles and ketchup. It wasn’t even cut in half or sheaved of its crust, and I wondered if the sandwich was so protected because my grandmother was afraid of her creation just as much as I was, to have kept it sealed and wound up in layers that only dispelled my hope the more I worked to eat, a kind of hope reserved for hungry children. I wouldn’t have even minded bland norm-core carrot sticks, forget the ranch! I didn’t dare dream of Lunchables and Capri Suns since I was taught rightly that foods that came individually packaged were grossly overpriced. But I think I had hoped that maybe, my grandmother might surprise me with some knowledge of the world that I didn’t have to figure out for myself, so that I’d be spared the uneasy shame that sprouted like mold every time I was surprised by the grotesqueness of my lunch in comparison to my classmates’. I wanted her to teach me something. But this is the kind of death in the face of hunger. After all, she was dying, lying on her side in front of the tv watching VHS tapes of I love you, I’m sorry, tapered like a squid leg with her hands in prayer below her head, looking like an uneven slice of spam on a sack of yellowed cushions. So I ate my sandwich and I walked home, wondering what in her youth Mood ate as lunch meat.
Theme: If I didn’t cry when she died, does that make me shitty but not in an interesting way? What is a narrative arc if life is just a loop of a straight line: you black out, you punch your boyfriend, he forgives you, you do it again. Occasionally, you will do too much coke or rub a dull kitchen knife across your skin, knowing full well the knife is dull. And then you will pray to God and say, I feel unlovable because no one’s ever loved me but if you say you have loved me… then with shallow sighs of confessional modesty, admit, it’s not you, it’s me, you abstain for a few nights, turning over and over again in your head the correlation between the diagnosis and the pain: (1) How did I get here? (2) Why am I like this? (3) Am I like this because of how I got here? (4) Did I get here because I am like this?
Until finally someone at the bar with a toucan nose swishes a bottle of sambuca the color of cucumber Gatorade in front of your face, his wire-rimmed glasses crooked, his 6’3 frame crooked too, as he stoops down to brush Dorito dust off your cheek and ask, what the fuck is your problem? You think hard and recall a demon child, an angel child? Who cooked flat skirt steaks from the clearance freezer at Key Foods until they were brown all the way through for dinner to feed her little brother most days after school, and late into the night after helping him with his homework and signing his parental consent forms, google photos of “Britney Spears naked” on the communal desktop that sat in the kitchen, pressing her finger down on the keyboard to see how many x’s would fit in the search bar: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Theme: how much credit can you give your childhood, how much agency do children really have. It’s time to reparent yourself, says the virtual therapist. Did you say, Repentant? But how do you learn how to receive parenting, and how could I trust myself to be my own parent? I would trust my own judgment least of all because of my parentless past. If I parented myself, I’d still be the one parenting me out of negativity. (I’m saying it twice for dialectical emphasis.)
The virtual therapist says these things to make you feel in control. But every person who’s stepped into or over my life I never asked to know. I am not angry since I’m not a kid, my grief is noble. I’ve purged the ktown axis of evil from my path, the bilious feedback loop of young adult folly (I was 23 and it was 2017). An average night of puking into a box of onions on KRUSH’s fire escape after barreling out of their kitchen’s emergency exit because the bathroom line was too long and I couldn’t hold down the Goose on half a Cava bowl, combing toothpicks from the fruit platters at Maru out of my hair, every iPhone ring, clink, jjan, a tick-roll of the time cards flitting at the station to mark another missed train back to Queens, where my father who ghosted me for over a decade suddenly resurrects himself in front of the bus stop on Kissena, calling for me to stay with him instead of couch surfing around town like a nomad tallying hood lines, for me to come crash instead in his Pomonok projects jail cell where the roach dust would get into my eyes and give me giant capillary conjunctivitis, pumping cans of beans in his arms like dumbbells for exercise while he paces. And I am satisfied deep down that now it’s his turn to wait for me through long nights, just to hold his daughter’s hair while she revolts against his weight, his absence, his cheap fingers trying to pocket a pair of crushed earbuds off the street to see if they’re still in working condition, asking how much – for a pair of sneakers, how much is a burrito bowl at Chipotle, how much is a box of wheat thins, how much did my daughter of a bitch drink tonight, ee michinnyunah, an affordance of innocence and rage. But I’m done, I’ve run away, I run only for recreation now, to sport athleisure around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena before noon, repeating to the beat of my thudding feet, thinking I am making progress, “Even if I am slow, I am strong.”
On this side of the American pancake, my mother lives in a UFO parked high above the side of a mountain with a wraparound ledge overlooking a sunny golf course, surrounded by gingkos and kumquat trees while the Angeles Forest goes up in flames, billowing behind us. The birds’ nests and shrubs and snakes are all waxed off like a left eyebrow, soot in dull heaps smoldering, a cooling cup of coffee. The ochre sky smells like burnt popcorn and at night the coyotes cry in moonlight like heartbroken women. My brother and I are two Benjamin Buttons reverse-ageing in our mother’s new home after fifteen years apart, having had no contact before the pandemic made us all sentimental and we fell down the chute, a new trade route into our mother’s very awkward arms, for us a two-fold purgatory. When we first moved in, we sat on the stoop below our dizzyingly unfamiliar house, sub-zero we call it, a place for clandestine smokes when the walls are still buzzing with our mom and her church friends late at night and there’s nowhere left for quiet. While we smoked wordlessly, we hoped the silence would mask the irony. Sad about climate change but can’t quit the Parliaments? There’s a set of gardening gloves lined in red rubber lying flat against a hot stone like a pair of cockscomb offering. My brother asked, over and over, interrupting the low hum throb of my thoughts, “Nuna, isn’t it funny that now we have to get them to let us leave? Aren’t we just so nice for staying? Like, what were we all doing before this?” Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, couldn’t remember what it was like to not feel naked even when they were naked. Does fallenness wipe memory?
In the beginning, snow fell on a Sunday at home, in fells like bright skeins, peeped through thick plastic slats on the bay windows opposite a Sunset Sail by Peter Max, big orange head the color of Tang with a ring of yellow, stiff-peaked like waves of unwashed hair, while my mom slid chopped scallions off a wooden cutting board into the bubbling Shin-ramen. Sundays were my parents’ only day off but my dad was always nowhere to be seen, and I would catch my mother sometimes turning all of his coat pockets inside out to fish for stray phone numbers, fingering the wires of our landline tempted to call whoever was on the other side. After eating, we followed my mother outside and she used our only shovel to shovel the driveway. She shoveled quietly and intently, as if lost in thought, concentrated on the task at hand, and my brother and I played halfheartedly in the snow, waiting for her to finish, so we could all play together. When our fat neighbor walked out in knee-high Ugg’s and a lopsided beanie, her cheeks ruddy and her blonde hair stringy, she panicked at the eight inches of frost, wondered aloud how she would ever get out, and I (I was 9 and it was 2003), thought to do a good thing. I stomped over untrodden snow to get to her lawn and offered to help. My neighbor, this large white woman, waddled back into her house to grab her shovel and thanked me boisterously, adding with each thanks a complaint about the weather, as if to magnify my heroic efforts, and I kept glancing over at my mother, hoping that she would catch me in philanthropic action, would flash a smile and be proud that her daughter was working so hard to help a poor woman.
She didn’t look over once. When I finished shoveling as much as my small body could, I skipped over to my mom, who had finished also, and had begun spilling a snow fortress around my brother. He sat there, dumb and moonfaced, smile dulled from the cold. When I plopped down into the shield next to my brother, she glared at me and said, “You are ungrateful. I shoveled snow so that you would not have to, so that you could enjoy yourself and play. But instead of offering to help your mother, instead of realizing mother’s sacrifice, you wander over to help a lazy stranger.” How could I have been so stupid? I cried while she continued to build.
The word for hard(hearted) is the sound of knocking on wood, ddak-ddak.
Theme: I did it for me, I did it for you, dumb bitch! I had worked so hard to earn the right to be crazy, but the world still broke me, telling me over and over, be sexy and divine, when divinity doesn’t make happiness, and my sacrificial sexy was just managing not to shit where I ate. Every morning here I wake to the sound of my mother praying loudly in tongue, sometimes in a deep train grumble, sometimes in a cigarette trance ululating, every incoherent syllable ringing like a gong in a cave, a perfect backdrop to this pastoral dreamscape I’ve stumbled into with such luck, nowhere to run, no one to fuck, what does my mother pray for now that she’s rich? My brain’s plugged in like a Tesla, sucking in the solar paneled green juice. A neighbor gifts us a bottle of biodynamic Tsolikouri to welcome the overgrown prodigal children home. But where have they been all this time, the little lady asks? I lounge in a basket chair staring straight at the sun, the quiet solitude of wealth grinding against my residual angst, twitching at the thought that surely, once my body betrays its origins today will combust. Having floated my way to the controlled vastness of all some such comfort, I decide to pick a fight with Jason Segel when I see him strolling casually in the neighborhood without his mask on: Jason!! Huge fan but I will post your unmasked ass on social media if you don’t let me tell you a joke … ok, ready? Which vegetable is most likely to come from a broken family? … Kohlrabiiiiii… (or I suppose all cruciferous vegetables)
My mother tells the neighbor that I’m the girl you saw in the New York Times. She is I, I am she, or I was she but she certainly didn’t think she’d become me, unemployed, laid off, at 27 (it is 2022), and writing in the notes app of her phone at a red light: REMINDER: pay third installation of Revolve shoes Afterpay. I can’t hang anymore, the world convinced me I was talented, and once I started to believe it, the talent vanished. I can’t think of anything new to say than that I am jealous of who I could’ve been, before I was plagued with the pressure that everything in this world needs to mean something, to let the tension lie senseless, just as my father when confronted by my mom, where are you going, what are these numbers, he’d say, what’ll you do with what you know? 알아서 뭐하게? Even if you knew, what would you do? What can I really know but feel I know, or I know I feel? – syntax, that brilliant egg that stays an egg coddled or hard-boiled, means crying is crying, from sorrow, suspension, gain.
In the photo below the heading, “Resiliency Helps 8 Students Win Times Scholarship,” I am a high school senior (I am 17 and it was 2012) smiling at the camera in a vintage powder blue blazer from D&G, wrested from the back of my mom’s dusty closet, with the clearance tag from Century21 still stuffed into its sleeve. I accented the jacket with a leopard print circle scarf from J Crew, and $24.99 wedged oxfords from Forever21. Thrifty chic urban high schooler both an achiever and a survivor, crowned by the city of New York for overcoming a home life they call Adversity. I imagined the men on the Port Washington line scanning our faces on the front page of the Metro section as they zipped into Penn Station, believing that their admiration of our resilience, as a supporter of the Times, made them charitable, for being able to recognize how hard we had it. And how if you triggered in these powerful men the feeling of gratitude, you could swipe the money they sweat off in thanks. Power in positioning poverty. But the sob story having run its course, I’m the prodigal daughter who went back to fucking the karaoke bar waiter in his dingy studio above the train tracks of the Murray Hill station in Flushing. And he would make jokes about railing me whenever the express train zipped by for a long minute without stopping.
Theme: My friend Diego says the structuralist approach would be to know yourself by knowing what you’re not, definition through opposition: like the things I don’t enjoy or the things I don’t think. At least if not to know the thing exterior, then to know yourself. Don’t analyze or schematize, be comforted by the possibility that you can know, let the beauty rest in the futility of that possibility, because at least by this you transcend alienation. I think Diego means to tell me that the epistemological pursuit is relational, that I’m not alone if I feel connected to a thing by knowing it. For example, I was eating eggs this morning and my taste buds were doing little cartwheels, my tongue swirling in foamy butter and yolk-silk. But my brain was assaulting it from the side, “Feel guilty! Feel guilty!” There’s a forest on fire outside, how can my indulgent tongue not know the difference in wartime? Which is more honest, the brain that denies my tongue its feel-good out of reverence for nature’s dying, or the tongue that by nature only knows to know its nature, dying? What would Debbie from the Amanda Show say in the girls room that is life but her classic punchline: “I like eggs.” The girl just likes eggs, and I get it, the obstacle is the path, keep going, keep going. In the beginning, I thought condoms grew like four-leaf clovers in the baseball field behind our triplex in Bayside, I got a 2360 on my SATs, the Lord was always there with me, and the more I didn’t know, the less I felt lonely.
Yvonne Cha is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
West Coast and NYC poet and painter Suchi J Pritchard is currently an MFA candidate and adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. Her writing has appeared in The Cleveland Review of Books, Ghost City, Prompt Press, Trestle Ties, Killjoy, The Warren, The Brooklyn Rail, and WHITEHOT magazine.