INHERITED
RONA WANG
I.
In the first-floor girls’ bathroom, my friends mercilessly sweep ink as black as an ache around their eyes to make them look wider. They silently thank the Lord, or Buddha, or the Final Exam Gods, or whomever, for their eyelid folds and pale smooth skin like the moon on a clear night. Maybe it’s enough to trick others into thinking they are beautiful.
As close to beautiful as Asians can get, anyway.
None of us talk much about everything we are not. Instead, we quietly slip into the winking, shimmering mirages the rest of the world expects. Syrup smiles. Ambition braided into our shiny ebony strands of hair.
We are never failures. We are never mistakes. We are brimming with sweetness and adrenaline.
During third period, the boy next to me asks me only half-jokingly what dog tastes like. I’m so taken aback, all I know how to respond with is tight laughter, stippled with apprehension.
After school, I slip into Walgreens. The air-conditioning is cranked up so high it eats into my skin. Everything in the store pulses steady and immaculate: the fluorescent lights, the soft piano music bouncing inside the walls. In aisle 3, the shelves spill over with boxes of hair dye. The packaging is adorned with the smiling visages of cream-skinned women with tresses glossy and voluminous.
That evening, I bleach my hair orange, the color saturating my scalp. Mama screams when I step out of the bathroom. My little brother laughs full and expanding.
It’s my own small rebellion against everything I have been told I should be.
As close to beautiful as Asians can get, anyway.
None of us talk much about everything we are not. Instead, we quietly slip into the winking, shimmering mirages the rest of the world expects. Syrup smiles. Ambition braided into our shiny ebony strands of hair.
We are never failures. We are never mistakes. We are brimming with sweetness and adrenaline.
During third period, the boy next to me asks me only half-jokingly what dog tastes like. I’m so taken aback, all I know how to respond with is tight laughter, stippled with apprehension.
After school, I slip into Walgreens. The air-conditioning is cranked up so high it eats into my skin. Everything in the store pulses steady and immaculate: the fluorescent lights, the soft piano music bouncing inside the walls. In aisle 3, the shelves spill over with boxes of hair dye. The packaging is adorned with the smiling visages of cream-skinned women with tresses glossy and voluminous.
That evening, I bleach my hair orange, the color saturating my scalp. Mama screams when I step out of the bathroom. My little brother laughs full and expanding.
It’s my own small rebellion against everything I have been told I should be.
II.
I date a boy for ten months, a boy who tells me Asian girls are his favorite.
He has eyes darker than night and he carries me until I forget what solid ground feels like, because he doesn’t trust me to walk on my own. He knows, better than I do, that I am an exotic flower, swollen with nectar and light, fragile as blown glass.
His bedroom is sparsely decorated, but above his desk hangs a calendar with photos of Japanese women in varying degrees of nakedness. They are all doe-eyed and cherry-mouthed. Baby fat still left in their cheeks.
We are both the stubborn type, but only he gets away with it. I secretly resent his slouches and shrugs, the recklessness he is allowed. The only thing I am permitted is breathing shallow and shuddering, like a thief.
He has eyes darker than night and he carries me until I forget what solid ground feels like, because he doesn’t trust me to walk on my own. He knows, better than I do, that I am an exotic flower, swollen with nectar and light, fragile as blown glass.
His bedroom is sparsely decorated, but above his desk hangs a calendar with photos of Japanese women in varying degrees of nakedness. They are all doe-eyed and cherry-mouthed. Baby fat still left in their cheeks.
We are both the stubborn type, but only he gets away with it. I secretly resent his slouches and shrugs, the recklessness he is allowed. The only thing I am permitted is breathing shallow and shuddering, like a thief.
III.
Too often, strangers on the street wave and holler ni hao. Their mangled pronunciations are tinged with contempt, like, see, I know your heritage. I know everything about you.
Sometimes, they say konnichiwa instead.
I’m told my slow, simmering irritation is unreasonable. How can I blame people for getting mixed up? Once, a girl with her pale skin powdered to make her face whiter even told me, “All Asians look alike.”
Sometimes, they say konnichiwa instead.
I’m told my slow, simmering irritation is unreasonable. How can I blame people for getting mixed up? Once, a girl with her pale skin powdered to make her face whiter even told me, “All Asians look alike.”
IV.
My brother is the only Chinese-American boy in the fifth grade. He is embarrassed when Mama volunteers at his school because of her accent, lilting and a constant betrayal of Beijing smog. He asks her to stop coming, and she does.
When his friends come over for the first time, an army of ten-year-olds wielding Magic: The Gathering booster packs and fart jokes, Mama wraps jiaozi by hand. After she’s finished boiling them, I watch her painstakingly line the dumplings up on a ceramic dish. An oily sheen glistens over the translucent skin.
Once I yell to the boys that dinner’s ready, they race to the kitchen table, skinned elbows knocking into each other’s torsos in scuffled haste. Their eagerness dulls when they see the platter of food.
“What is that? It looks gross,” one of them says.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” another declares, and soon they’re all gone, back to playing video games upstairs.
The heavy, feverish blasts from the television fill the silence as my mother and I eat the jiaozi by ourselves.
The next time the boys come over, there is Domino’s delivery waiting on the table.
When his friends come over for the first time, an army of ten-year-olds wielding Magic: The Gathering booster packs and fart jokes, Mama wraps jiaozi by hand. After she’s finished boiling them, I watch her painstakingly line the dumplings up on a ceramic dish. An oily sheen glistens over the translucent skin.
Once I yell to the boys that dinner’s ready, they race to the kitchen table, skinned elbows knocking into each other’s torsos in scuffled haste. Their eagerness dulls when they see the platter of food.
“What is that? It looks gross,” one of them says.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” another declares, and soon they’re all gone, back to playing video games upstairs.
The heavy, feverish blasts from the television fill the silence as my mother and I eat the jiaozi by ourselves.
The next time the boys come over, there is Domino’s delivery waiting on the table.
V.
At home, my parents ask me to proofread their emails and teach them the correct pronunciation of certain words. They unraveled their native tongues to knit in enough English to cross the Pacific but it’s not enough. The language is still rooted in a different alphabet, one with hooks and swoops that don’t fit in their mouths. It doesn’t matter if their voices are filled with stars if nobody is listening.
My grandfather is one of the most admired professors in Beijing. Decades ago, he gave lectures on national television and wrote a best-selling textbook. Students cling onto his words.
When he comes to visit us in Oregon, none of that matters. His hands, thin and spotted with brown, tremble when he fumbles for enough change to get on the bus. His worn leather wallet heaves and dimes tumble to the floor like broken teeth.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, sorry.” It’s one of the few words he knows in English, and the one he uses most often.
The driver snaps pink bubblegum out of the corner of her mouth and rolls her eyes. The others waiting to get on, grumble. Somebody behind us mumbles something about should stay in their own country.
My grandfather is one of the most admired professors in Beijing. Decades ago, he gave lectures on national television and wrote a best-selling textbook. Students cling onto his words.
When he comes to visit us in Oregon, none of that matters. His hands, thin and spotted with brown, tremble when he fumbles for enough change to get on the bus. His worn leather wallet heaves and dimes tumble to the floor like broken teeth.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, sorry.” It’s one of the few words he knows in English, and the one he uses most often.
The driver snaps pink bubblegum out of the corner of her mouth and rolls her eyes. The others waiting to get on, grumble. Somebody behind us mumbles something about should stay in their own country.
VI.
I have stage fright. When I perform, the heat from the audience’s eyes glides off my skin. I can feel their bristling presence, the attention, and it’s like inhaling smoke.
Signing up for the school-wide slam poetry contest doesn’t quite top the list of reckless, stupid ideas I’ve had, but it comes close.
In the afternoon, the sunrays whistle white-gold through the library windows like a spotlight. As competitors go up one by one and the minutes crawl by, I debate the pros and cons of faking a bout of food poisoning.
The emcee calls my name.
My poem is the aftermath of:
My friends’ eyeliner. What does dog taste like? That calendar, all the girls so delicate they might shatter. Quick, sputtering intakes of breath. Ni hao ni hao ni hao. The abandoned jiaozi. The tremor in both my grandfather’s hands and his voice, sorry sorry sorry.
There’s so much more, too much. The actress with her eyes taped up, who decades ago won an Academy Award for playing Chinese. The kids in second grade who yanked up the outer corners of their eyes with their fingers so they could be like a chink. All the times I’ve been told, You are so lucky to be born smart. The man who yelled out, hey geisha doll! as I stood on a street corner. When, at the Wal-Mart my aunt shops at, somebody smashed in a four-year-old girl’s scalp with a tire iron because the girl was Asian, the news outlets barely stirred.
My poem is fueled by:
Resilience. The hope that swells in restless Beijing streets. Temples painted crimson and gold, a millennium’s worth of hushed prayer woven into the walls. Parents who fought for a dream electric enough to sing through our veins.
If their words still contain traces of their birth country, isn’t that a reminder of their perseverance?
I do not stutter and I do not falter. The audience shimmers before me, hazy in the heat.
At the end, steady applause washes through the room. The world etches back into focus, and I realize my legs are trembling. The judges murmur.
“I didn’t think, like, Asians actually faced discrimination,” one kid whispers as I sit back down.
After a few more minutes, one of the judges hands the emcee a sheet of paper.
She calls my name again, this time as the first-place winner.
What?
I stare at her in shock, then realize with a jolt, I’m supposed to stand up to retrieve my prize.
Later, after all the congratulatory nods and handshakes and hugs, a Chinese-American classmate comes up to me. We had freshman English together but never spoke. She’s smiling.
“I could really relate to that.”
Signing up for the school-wide slam poetry contest doesn’t quite top the list of reckless, stupid ideas I’ve had, but it comes close.
In the afternoon, the sunrays whistle white-gold through the library windows like a spotlight. As competitors go up one by one and the minutes crawl by, I debate the pros and cons of faking a bout of food poisoning.
The emcee calls my name.
My poem is the aftermath of:
My friends’ eyeliner. What does dog taste like? That calendar, all the girls so delicate they might shatter. Quick, sputtering intakes of breath. Ni hao ni hao ni hao. The abandoned jiaozi. The tremor in both my grandfather’s hands and his voice, sorry sorry sorry.
There’s so much more, too much. The actress with her eyes taped up, who decades ago won an Academy Award for playing Chinese. The kids in second grade who yanked up the outer corners of their eyes with their fingers so they could be like a chink. All the times I’ve been told, You are so lucky to be born smart. The man who yelled out, hey geisha doll! as I stood on a street corner. When, at the Wal-Mart my aunt shops at, somebody smashed in a four-year-old girl’s scalp with a tire iron because the girl was Asian, the news outlets barely stirred.
My poem is fueled by:
Resilience. The hope that swells in restless Beijing streets. Temples painted crimson and gold, a millennium’s worth of hushed prayer woven into the walls. Parents who fought for a dream electric enough to sing through our veins.
If their words still contain traces of their birth country, isn’t that a reminder of their perseverance?
I do not stutter and I do not falter. The audience shimmers before me, hazy in the heat.
At the end, steady applause washes through the room. The world etches back into focus, and I realize my legs are trembling. The judges murmur.
“I didn’t think, like, Asians actually faced discrimination,” one kid whispers as I sit back down.
After a few more minutes, one of the judges hands the emcee a sheet of paper.
She calls my name again, this time as the first-place winner.
What?
I stare at her in shock, then realize with a jolt, I’m supposed to stand up to retrieve my prize.
Later, after all the congratulatory nods and handshakes and hugs, a Chinese-American classmate comes up to me. We had freshman English together but never spoke. She’s smiling.
“I could really relate to that.”
RONA WANG is eighteen years old and a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has won five national medals from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Her writing can be found in The Best Teen Writing of 2016 and 2014, The Sierra Nevada Review and The Adroit Journal.