*Non-Fiction — May 29, 2021
How to Write “Death”
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Whether it was erguma’s house or nainai’s house or the house of an auntie or uncle, I came and went, a ghostly apparition. I floated in and out of spaces, giving crooked grins and vigorous nods to no one in particular. When addressed, I emitted pleasant sounds of affirmation, soft little mmms and ahhs. My elders thought of me as a quiet girl, shy and sweet and predisposed towards politeness. But I knew the truth. I was losing my first language.
My parents knew too, and they made it even worse. They didn’t send me to Chinese school like erguma did with my cousin, whose Mandarin, despite years of weekend classes, still sounded like a tape playing backwards. My dad, a former teacher in Shanghai, took things even further. From the Chinese bookstore, he purchased children’s workbooks by the dozen, filling my section of the shelf with lesson plans, reading assignments, writing exercises. I wrote an essay every week in my broken grammar, recited idioms and passages by heart. I wanted to please him as best as I could, though nothing ever seemed to stick.
It was discouraging, to say the least. But what really shut me up was my dad’s cardinal rule: no English at home. Even if I was stranded in the bathroom without a roll of toilet paper. Even if I were being murdered. To my parents, any English phrase, like “all you need is love,” or even any string of utterances vaguely resembling English, like “beep beep beep beep yea,” translated to, “Fuck you, Mom and Dad! Welcome to America!”
At dinner, between slurps and smacks, my parents spoke to each other in rapid-fire Mandarin. If I ever chimed in using The Forbidden Language, my dad, red-faced and indignant, would interrupt me with his signature death knell:
“Ni shuo shenme?”
I paused. My ears burned with shame.
“What are you even saying,” he said in Mandarin, feigning incredulity. “I can’t have a conversation with someone who doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know how to say it,” I said, also in Mandarin. I turned to my mom and looked at her pleadingly.
“Chinese,” she replied in English, head down in her bowl of rice. I gave her a withering stare, which she ignored.
Sucking my teeth, clenching my jaw, I could feel my left frontal lobe whirring like a hard drive, straining to find the proper lexical files. There were many entries in English, lots of cussing in other languages, and a paltry bit of Mandarin.
“Today in the class where you learn about all the little things in your body, I learned about how all the red little things and all the white little things in your blood take your breathing and make you alive.”
“The class is called 生物学!” my dad proclaimed, chopsticks in mid-air. “The red little things are 红细胞! The white little things are 白细胞!”
The No-English rule watered down all meaning in my words. It was easier not to say anything. It was easier just to listen.
After dinner, my dad regaled me with stories from his past. He used Chinese vocabulary suitable for my skill level, distilling complex, far-away topics like feudalism, communism, and nationalism into the most basic terms. We sat in his small office, he in his faux-leather office chair, me on a stool dragged in from the kitchen. The room contained a table, a desktop computer, mounds of documents, books, dog-eared papers, and cartons of Marlboro Reds and Chunghwa smokes, which came in crimson-and-gold boxes like Mao’s little red book. The scent of cigarette smoke clung to everything, and the ash settled everywhere: on the carpet, in his teeth, on the front of his wrinkled polo shirt, and—if I sat too close—in my hair. I didn’t know how to say “secondhand smoke” in Chinese, so I just let it happen.
“During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong relocated every high school student in Shanghai to the countryside.” My dad reclined in his chair. He crossed his big white legs and closed his eyes so that all I saw was his flat face, which was my own. “So when we were your age, we labored on the most remote farm in the country.”
“Wow, really?” I said in Mandarin. “Mom did, too?”
“We went to different farms, but yes,” he leaned back and the chair let out a dramatic squeak. “Oh, it was so grueling! We worked ourselves to the bone every single night, and there were no toilets in the countryside. We had to shit in a hole in the ground, and in that hole lay feces upon feces upon feces, animal and human. I was so afraid of falling in, so afraid of a fly crawling into my asshole, I couldn’t go for months.”
“Um, wow.”
“By the end of the program, my stomach was so distended,” he said. His mouth slackened, his small eyes brightened. It was a wistful expression that came to him whenever he talked about China, even though all the stories he ever told me involved, in some way, poverty, corruption, war, censorship, the Japanese conducting experiments on people, or feces. To him, 國內 did not mean “domestic,” though that was the official definition, according to my pocket-sized Chinese dictionary. To him, the word would always mean “motherland.” Mao was an abusive ex he just couldn’t get over.
If I ever wanted to see what my fellow freaks were doing, I would log onto Livejournal, the social network du jour of the early 2000s. I posted on my LJ from my dad’s small office, hunched over the computer in the dark. Bathing in the glowing aura of the monitor screen, breathing in errant cigarette ashes, I read fanfics, downloaded ROMs for my SNES emulator, took hundreds of personality quizzes (“How addicted to Livejournal are YOU?!”), saved and reposted images representing my burgeoning tastes in culture: excerpts from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, clips from Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I catalogued all the ways in which my body repulsed me: my greasy eyelids, my thin lips, the texture of my elbows, the pudge in my armpits. I hated how, for a fifteen year-old girl, the back of my hands looked ancient. In lieu of spoken language, text and jpegs and hyperlinks stood in as devices for articulation—they were purer than inflection, sentence structure, blood and bones.
If I ever wanted to see what my fellow freaks were doing, I would log onto Livejournal, the social network du jour of the early 2000s. I posted on my LJ from my dad’s small office, hunched over the computer in the dark. Bathing in the glowing aura of the monitor screen, breathing in errant cigarette ashes, I read fanfics, downloaded ROMs for my SNES emulator, took hundreds of personality quizzes (“How addicted to Livejournal are YOU?!”), saved and reposted images representing my burgeoning tastes in culture: excerpts from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, clips from Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I catalogued all the ways in which my body repulsed me: my greasy eyelids, my thin lips, the texture of my elbows, the pudge in my armpits. I hated how, for a fifteen year-old girl, the back of my hands looked ancient. In lieu of spoken language, text and jpegs and hyperlinks stood in as devices for articulation—they were purer than inflection, sentence structure, blood and bones.
My favorite Internet freak was meluhhknee, an aspiring artist from Raleigh, North Carolina who went simply by Mel. According to the birthdate listed on her profile page, we were only a few years apart, though to me, Mel seemed much older in looks and experience. She had a long nose, shiny and pronounced, like one of those prosthetic noses actresses wore whenever they needed to transform into more interesting characters. Dark circles lined her lidded eyes with smoldering intensity. Mel liked to style herself in thrift store clothing, take timed self-portraits on her DSLR. It was how she transformed into a ‘50s nurse, medical cap tilted ever-so-slightly to the left, and a ‘70s roller girl clad in striped knee-highs, boombox in tow. A symmetrical pair of jellyfish tattoos bracketed her collarbones; a vibrant Metroid sprite adorned her forearm. She was ghoulish, Lolita, white trash, and punk-rock, all at once. This was her sorcery: she was a multitude of Mels.
“You should change your username to meltitudes,” I commented on her LJ, snickering to myself. Occasionally, I was touched by genius.
Her user profile revealed a list of esoteric interests: abandoned buildings, androgyny, avant-garde fashion, avoiding sleep, Basquiat, Bauhaus, benzodiazepines, Charles Bronson, circle pits, classic video games, dumpster diving, entheogens, exaggerated gore, isolation, lomography, lucid dreams, Metroid, Peter Murphy, power violence, Ralph Steadman, ridiculous dancing, squid attacks on cities, stomach blast beats, synesthesia, thrash, Viennese actionism, and Vincent Gallo. I couldn’t make sense of anything, especially “ridiculous dancing.” Why list that as an interest? What does that even look like? I could only relate to “classic video games,” “Metroid,” and “isolation.”
My parents never let me speak English around the house, but they always let me use the computer for as long as I wanted. They either felt guilty about the elementary school plays, parent-teacher conferences, and middle school graduations they had missed back when they both worked seven days a week at their East LA convenience store, or they were simply ignorant of the Internet’s many perversions. One time, my dad walked in on me streaming hentai. I had minimized the video player right as he barged in, just as he always did, but I was sure he had managed to catch a glimpse of my screen: a cartoon girl with huge cartoon tits was getting reamed in the ass by a huge cartoon dick. The cartoon girl was squealing incessantly, like a dolphin getting fucked. I had my headphones on, so my dad couldn’t hear. He fumbled around the room for his cigarettes. He did not dare to look at me. What could a father have said to his teenage daughter in an excruciating situation like this? Part of me enjoyed watching him squirm. He told me it was time for dinner. I told him to give me five more minutes.
With its gated communities, California Blue Ribbon schools, monolithic ethnic churches, and well-manicured parks—perfect for the elderly who took languid morning walks through the grass—my neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley was the kind of place that attracted upwardly mobile immigrant families like mine. A thirteen-mile stretch of shopping malls, Asian restaurants, fast food chains, and Southland sprawl, it was sunny suburbia in its most unremarkable form: flat, dry, devoid of all seasons.
With its gated communities, California Blue Ribbon schools, monolithic ethnic churches, and well-manicured parks—perfect for the elderly who took languid morning walks through the grass—my neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley was the kind of place that attracted upwardly mobile immigrant families like mine. A thirteen-mile stretch of shopping malls, Asian restaurants, fast food chains, and Southland sprawl, it was sunny suburbia in its most unremarkable form: flat, dry, devoid of all seasons.
White kids like Mel didn’t really exist at my high school. We had Dylan, a pimply punk, and splotchy-skinned Steven P., who lugged around an enormous tuba. I knew who was who because my high school had a West Coast-style campus where kids did not walk linearly down the hallway of a brick building; rather, they were all splayed out in the open air, like starfish. The classrooms, many of them portable trailers installed on top of dry dirt, were flimsy, harshly-lit structures that just made the indoors feel pathetic. We sat out in the sun, on the lunch tables, in the quad, on the concrete, in the grass. Never inside.
Everywhere, kids commingled. Latinx kids, Asian kids. Mexican skaters and Filipinx hip-hop heads. Kids fresh off the boat from Hong Kong—no doubt illiterate like me—and hapa kids who would later move to Taiwan in pursuit of stardom. The Mexican rockabilly girls, who wore red on their lips and cut their bangs short and blunt, were the only girls who really played around with their looks the way Mel did. They dyed their hair bright colors, sewed patches into their Jansport backpacks, clomped around the dusty grounds in their suede creepers. But even though we all spoke the same language—a mix of proper English, cussing, and slang culled from hip-hop and R&B—I was far too aware of my physical body and all its meaty tics to truly interact. Analog was too much to bear.
In history class, I sat behind our homecoming queen, Tiffany Man, who often spilled her shiny long hair, black as onyx, onto the edge of my desk. Sometimes she curled the ends of it, so tiny spirals collected in a pile. Sometimes she tied her hair into a ponytail, which would bounce around whenever she laughed or raised her hand or nodded to whatever the teacher said. She never turned around to acknowledge my presence, unless it was to pass back handouts or a sign-in sheet. How neat her handwriting was, how each buoyant letter lined up so perfectly with the next.
Then there were girls like Mary Tran, who liked to pluck off her natural eyebrows and draw in angry ones. Mary wore winged eyeliner, Cortez sneakers, and baggy sweatpants so comically large on her tall, rail-thin frame, they seemed cinched on through sheer cosmic force alone. Her big pouty lips were always upturned in a vague scowl, possibly due to the fact that the mere concept of eye contact—mad-dogging, she called it—offended her deeply. She exhibited an impressive bravado—like Mel, she had a tattoo, of a lotus flower—but there was a hardness and a cruelty in her, and in all the other Asian Baby Girls I knew, that terrified me. I kept all my angst to myself, but these were the girls who showed everyone how they truly felt inside: threatened. These were the girls who fought tooth and nail to rule in the unpredictable world of adolescence, its social order ever-changing, its emotional landscape treacherous.
The only way to survive was to make an example out of those who were deemed easy targets. I remember how a few years back, Mary and a group of Mary-adjacent girls jumped Becky Lee, a brace-face who never cussed because she openly loved God. It was after PE, in broad daylight, right as we were all outside waiting for the bell to ring. The girls found Becky by the basketball courts, an idling lost lamb, plump and pale. They descended on her. How violently her backpack flailed in the air as the girls—first one, then three, then five—pummeled her in all directions. I stood and watched and did not intervene. No one did, lest they suffer the same fate. By the time Mrs. Peterson broke up the fight, everyone had scattered except for Becky, her crumpled body emitting low sobs.
I only spoke to Mary once, in sixth period art class. She rarely went, but the class was large and unstructured enough for her to get away with it. And besides, Ms. Gavin, a gray-haired granola hippie whose son kept trying to kill himself, had other things on her mind.
One afternoon, I was doodling sperm zygotes in my sketchbook when Mary asked out loud if anybody knew how to write Chinese. I paused and looked up from my desk. Then, I did something that surprised me.
“I can,” I replied, my voice hoarse. “I can write some of the characters.”
Mary looked at me as if I were a toad that had just sprung into her periphery. Cautiously, she walked toward me and handed me a blank piece of paper from her sketchpad.
“Do you know how to write ‘death’?”
“Yes.”
What a relief. To me, nothing was more shameful than not knowing how to write a Chinese character. Each mistake reaffirmed how, despite the readings and the workbook exercises and the English ban at home, I would end up just like my cousin: a foreigner in my own home. Death, I could write.
Bent over the piece of paper, I visualized the back of Tiffany Man’s head and slowly wrote 死 with my Sakura Gelly Roll pen. The stroke order came to me automatically: a definitive, horizontal line from left to right, followed by four short strokes for the left radical, and a sweeping curve for the right, marked with a branch. Mary hovered over me, intrigued by the mechanics of calligraphy. When I finished, I handed the paper back to her, my palms slick with sweat.
“Thanks,” she said coolly, studying the character with an almost spiritual reverence.
I watched Mary regard my penmanship, slowly tracing the stroke order with her eyes. But as soon as she noticed me looking, she regained her thick-skinned composure and left my orbit for good.
I floated back to my cartoon sperm, drawing wiggle lines around their tails to indicate forward movement.
Someone had left a comment on Mel’s most recent photo post, “Plastic Joints.” In the photo, Mel sits on the floor of an attic bedroom, her yellow gingham Lolita dress and yellow scarf headband matching the mustard yellow walls. She mimics a doll’s blank expression, and her arms hold a dingy teddy bear. The comment read: “I hope your nipples have gone moldy. I like them that way. They look nicer. I have a giant pustule of love, and I want to pop it on your chest.”
Someone had left a comment on Mel’s most recent photo post, “Plastic Joints.” In the photo, Mel sits on the floor of an attic bedroom, her yellow gingham Lolita dress and yellow scarf headband matching the mustard yellow walls. She mimics a doll’s blank expression, and her arms hold a dingy teddy bear. The comment read: “I hope your nipples have gone moldy. I like them that way. They look nicer. I have a giant pustule of love, and I want to pop it on your chest.”
The vulgarity of these words shocked me, but so did the intimacy. Nobody had seen my nipples before, except for my mom, and that was only because she had birthed me. What was it like to be an object of desire, to compel a stranger on the Internet to wax poetic about your boobs? I felt embarrassed on Mel’s behalf, yet also envious of the attention. Did she know this person? Were they an old flame? Maybe they were a creep. Or maybe they were just like me, expressing themselves as best they could with the limited number of files in their hard-drive brain.
In bed, between consciousness and sleep, I twisted beneath the sheets as a flood of soft, flickering images rose to the surface of my mind. I imagined the sensation of a caress, the shadowy presence of another human being in gentle motion, their heart beating in tandem with mine. I considered that it might be Mel stroking my body, swaying to and fro, but I preferred the alluring wiggles of the unknown. I imagined our communication to be wordless. English, Chinese, gifs, whatever. No utterances were needed, except for the occasional mm or ahh. We would simply sway in the darkness, like tube worms. Through synchronized nods and gingerly touches and the rhythmic, sparkling knowledge that we were finally, finally no longer alone in this world, we already understood.
A yearning swelled inside me like a wave rising to its crest, nudging me into tender wakefulness. For a moment, I sat with the feeling, let it course through my veins. When it didn’t go away, I flopped onto my belly and rubbed my bare thighs together, pressed them hard against the smooth cotton sheets. It was no use. I knew what I needed to do to get off.
I slipped out from the covers and quietly padded down the stairs toward my my dad’s ashen office. The dark night seemed to dampen all my senses, but when I booted up the old desktop, its familiar glow enveloped me in the purest sensation: possibility. Teeming with electricity, I opened up my Livejournal and started typing:
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong relocated every
high school student in Shanghai to the countryside, and my
dad had to shit in a hole in the ground. In that hole lay feces
upon feces. My dad was so afraid of a fly crawling into his
asshole, he couldn’t go for months.
I added: “I will never complain about the restrooms by the library ever again.”
I added: “I will never complain about the restrooms by the library ever again.”
And: “Have you ever had a fly crawl up your asshole?”
I closed the window and trudged back upstairs, back into my bed.
The next morning before school, I checked my Livejournal. My post had racked up 30-plus comments expressing equal parts wonder and repulsion. I imagined thirty people across the continent—a French jock in Montreal, a bipolar nerd in Baltimore, a Pakistani activist in New York, a gay teen in Houston—all reading in unison, all letting out one big, collective, “Um, wow.” I had about 300 followers and an active readership from a smattering of users across North America. No one had ever had a fly crawl up their asshole.
May mornings in the foothills—crisp air, mild dew, a soft layer of gray stratus blotting out the sky—always made me feel like things were moving forward in a way, as if a reprieve from the sun relentlessly beating down on our teenaged bodies somehow marked the passage of time. That day, I ran my fastest mile ever, netting me a high-five from Mrs. Peterson. That day, while eating lunch among a group of acquaintances, I overheard that Mary had just died. 死掉了.
May mornings in the foothills—crisp air, mild dew, a soft layer of gray stratus blotting out the sky—always made me feel like things were moving forward in a way, as if a reprieve from the sun relentlessly beating down on our teenaged bodies somehow marked the passage of time. That day, I ran my fastest mile ever, netting me a high-five from Mrs. Peterson. That day, while eating lunch among a group of acquaintances, I overheard that Mary had just died. 死掉了.
“It was late at night,” Leda Tang said to the group, her voice taking on the practiced objectivity of a news reporter’s. “She was in the passenger’s seat.”
“I heard two wanksters were speed-racing down Pathfinder Road,” Andrew Hardin chimed in. “They just plowed right into the car.”
“We just saw her yesterday. Now she’s gone forever.”
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“It’s so weird.”
A low chatter buzzed among the dozen or so kids that made up the lunch crowd. They sat in a circle on the ground, styrofoam lunches warm in their laps, talking and talking about Mary Tran.
A superstitious person might have seen this as a sign, an omen, a testament to the folkloric powers of Eastern calligraphy. My parents, however, used to be Maoists, and Maoists had no room for the transcendental in their household, not even for the Buddha. As much as I was taught to revere my first language, I never thought it had the power to kill.
I sat silently near the edge of the group, dumbstruck, as the kids crammed fry after fry into their mouths.
“Wait.” Leda turned to me, which prompted everyone else to do the same. “Didn’t you have art class with her?”
The group stared at me expectantly.
I thought about the look of awe on Mary’s face as I wrote “death” for her in Chinese. In my memory, her drawn-in eyebrows and upturned mouth had lost their menace. Her lotus tattoo had simply become a feature, like a mole or birthmark. In that moment, remembering the last time I saw Mary before she died, she looked at me the way I looked at people on the Internet: as if I were a conduit, tapping into some form of expression she could not access herself. And even though I didn’t know the difference between 踉 and 跟, in that moment, I knew at least one word that mattered to her enough so that she got the same look that my dad did when he talked about China: the clarity in his pupils, his edges softening in real time. Did she balk at me, having witnessed her in such a compromised state? Her reputation as a hard girl was intractable, even in death.
I thought about her parents, first-generation immigrants from Vietnam. Here is where their American dream had morphed into a night terror, paralyzing and lucid. They were just figuring out the semantics of the Western world, but now, they didn’t have to. In exchange for their eldest daughter, the land of opportunity left them with a grief that could translate across both hemispheres.
I wondered whether Mary had a Livejournal.
Then I thought about Becky Lee’s flattened marshmallow body, how she had to take the whole school year off to emotionally recover. I pictured her during her recuperation, praying at night to God. She must have begged Him to exact mighty vengeance, to deliver Mary her just desserts.
In this moment, I became acutely aware that each and every one of us at school had an expiration date, and for some of us, that date would come much sooner than expected. When it came, everyone would know about it somehow, even if it was ten years or twenty years down the line. We would all feel sad, we would all think of the parents. And even though none of us wanted death for anyone, some of us would think back to the hurt, and in the secret, vindictive parts of our hearts, we would feel a tiny sense of justice.
I didn’t know how to express any of this, at least not in person, through gesture or tone. But for once, I found comfort in the notion that I could work this all out in due time, on my own, in my own way. I did not have to say a single thing.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I didn’t really know her that well.”
Mary’s absence was not felt in class. Ms. Gavin probably didn’t even know she had died. For the next few weeks, whenever my mom drove down Pathfinder Road, I saw Mary’s memorial from the passenger seat window. It was a sparse shrine on the sidewalk made of prayer candles, framed photos, and flowers that had already begun to wither in the heat. Once summer rolled around, all of it was gone.
I suspected my dad was reading my Livejournal. We shared the same beat-up desktop computer, after all. Aside from when I was watching hentai, I never deleted my browser history. It was a faithful log of my daily activities, as progressive as a child’s growth chart. My dad didn’t bring anything up, and he never indicated otherwise, but one day, something in him had changed. From that day on, I was permitted to speak English around the house. I could even teach my mom a word or two, like “Spongebob” and “mp3.”
I suspected my dad was reading my Livejournal. We shared the same beat-up desktop computer, after all. Aside from when I was watching hentai, I never deleted my browser history. It was a faithful log of my daily activities, as progressive as a child’s growth chart. My dad didn’t bring anything up, and he never indicated otherwise, but one day, something in him had changed. From that day on, I was permitted to speak English around the house. I could even teach my mom a word or two, like “Spongebob” and “mp3.”
My dad never explained his change of heart. Maybe he was living in a state of denial that I would never read the same newspaper as him. Maybe he was just tired from working seven days a week at the glove company in Industry. Still, in his complacency, in his silence, after all the grade-school level workbooks had been completed and boxed away, I received a quiet permission to fumble. It was as if I were a performer on-stage, and I had just flummoxed a line or a move. I imagined my dad in the audience mouthing, “That’s okay.”
Another thing happened that summer: Mel deleted her Livejournal. She deleted her profile, her photos, her extensive archive of old posts. Almost all evidence of her lived experience had been wiped from the Internet, save for one curious design feature: when users deleted their blogs, their former usernames appeared with a strikethrough, like they had just been crossed off some imaginary hit list. The crossed-out meluhhknee didn’t make me feel as sad as I thought I would feel.
I tried to imagine Mel as a student at my Blue Ribbon school, sitting in front of me in class, but I couldn’t tell if she was tall like Mary, or if she sat up straight like Tiffany. I had never seen the back of her head, the texture of her hair. I had never seen her handwriting. What would I have said to her in real life anyway? Perhaps I would have grinned, nodded, made little sounds of affirmation as she talked about the leaves changing, the snow falling, the creaking in her attic, the ink on her skin. Perhaps we would simply sway.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 9. View full issue & more.