Looking back it was almost like I was born to be mistreated.
There was a girl who would step on the heel of my shoes every morning during the assembly; or just any time the class stood in a line. This went on for one or two years, and I just let it happen. I didn’t like it, having the heel of my foot rub against the grainy sole of her shoe. The feeling of my sneaker flopping up and down, I would step my heel back into the shoe and just like everything in my life, a pattern, a loop, she steps on it again. I eventually got really annoyed. I told my mom and she wrote the girl a letter, I never gave the letter to that girl, she continued for so long until one day the wrinkled old letter fell out of my backpack and landed right where she sat. I didn’t realize what happened but I eventually figured that she read it because the letter found it’s way back to me, and the girl stopped stepping on the back of my shoes.
Velcro replaced laces, for most children’s shoes. I didn’t fully know how to tie a shoe until I was in grade 6. That was the only loop that broke, i imagined the girl looking up and down, the blurry characters on the sheet, mom’s signature. I was stripped out of everything that made me special and reduced to the shell of a village child. No wonder I tossed the novels and drowned inside manufactured dreams. Mom should have never let me wear those white nylon stockings. But there wasn’t a better choice.
And the toddler that, in Tomas’ words, put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket and sent downstream, the child that would greet her father by the door and ask to go to the beach. The child that had her father suck the alcohol out of liquor chocolates one by one and ate them like pitted cherries, has known how to manufacture that dream all her life. Other people’s dreams. I know exactly what she did. And it was only yesterday in the long dream she crouched over a piece of brown cardboard and wrote with markers, I love mama, over and over again. How come a person was born such a good liar and grew so weak? A few years later mama asked if you’re happy, or in bliss by direct translation, and you happily said “no, my last name isn’t Fu”, and there just like granddad’s magazines about erectile disfunction she froze and said to not mimick things you see online. “Xíng Fú”
And there she heard a eight year old child, speaking loud and clear: “I’m not pleasured by sex”. It wasn’t even a matter of pronunciation. And funny enough, although it took her a moment, the eight year old knew exactly what it meant. She joked like the way she scribbled on that cardboard. Ma ma, I love you mama. The character split apart, of course I didn’t know what love means. And the two sides split and split, má, mà, m?, n?, m?, n?, m?. And I kept writing. Woman. Horse. Woman, horse. There was a sense of shame in the way that I counted female horses when trying to piece them together to form mama. The subtle shame that’s still, exactly where it was 12 years ago. You didn’t know what love was, you didn’t know what bliss meant, of course they had no interest in visiting your life.