fifteen
the halfway point
Unlike most people, you could fold our lives in half, with two different existences on either side. One half was China; the
other half, the United States.
Your life is frozen in time, and as such, a perfect split. Mine will keep going—if all goes well. One day, the China portion
for me will be a smaller and smaller piece, until it’ll be only the beginning, the mere introduction of a version of myself
I still do not know.
But today, the inflection point is in the middle of everything, and that’s what I think about when I try to see when things
changed.
We are never the same once we come over the ocean.
In the before life, I am your partner, your double, and I follow you everywhere.
You teach me everything I need to know. From you, I learn how to skip rocks the farthest across the pond by flicking my wrist just so.
I learn how to spread the exact right amount of chili crisp on my mantou.
I learn how to leap over the garden walls of our house perfectly without messing up Nai Nai’s climbing roses.
We sleep in the same room, whispering in the dark. I know that you share generously but fear being taken advantage of, that
you dream of making our family proud by making a big discovery that you can put your name on. You long to come to America
and join Mama and Baba, while I dread it. I don’t know them, but I know you.
After, you become quieter and more introspective. You seem to make the transition with ease, yet I wonder what toll it takes
on you. I want nothing more than to cling tighter, but you push me away. You tell me I’m a baby, that I need to grow up and
be on my own, that you are too busy, always so busy. Maybe it would’ve happened even if we had stayed in China, but I’ll never
know. To me, it seems as though the move is what changes you. And I cannot let go of that, as hard as I try.
You do not try to teach me anymore. But still, I learn.
I watch you work yourself to the bone late into the night and never ask for help from anybody.
I watch you carefully edit information to Mama and Baba to exclude what might make them uncomfortable or disappointed. I watch
you polish away at yourself like a river stone, until you are hard, smooth, and bright, all the imperfections rubbed away.
Once I start middle school, I realize that all the girls have started wearing makeup.
Shiny gloss across lips and eyelashes long and inky dark with mascara.
My bare face feels like yet another way in which I stand out.
I begin to swipe makeup samples from mall counters.
I watch videos in the dark, of how to shade colors without a crease on my eyelids, how to make my sparse lashes curl.
Mama asks, “Is school going well? You fit in?”
Her anxious worry fogs up the windows.
I know without hearing it directly that she would not like her eleven-year-old daughter wearing makeup. A frivolous distraction,
she would think. The mark of an unserious girl.
I also know other things about her, because once upon a time, you told me. That our mother’s family was poor. That they wished
for a boy, but in China, they could have only one child, which turned out to be an undesirable girl. That she worked harder
than anyone and outscored everyone at her school on the gaokao, the college entrance examination. That you remembered her
crying bitterly when she left us behind. I had been only a baby.
I weigh all these things together. What I owe her against what I owe myself.
I tuck my makeup, precious as gems, into the inside pocket of my backpack, where she won’t look. I go to the girls’ bathroom
in the mornings once I get to school and methodically apply my armor before facing the day. Before I go home, I wash it all
off so I can return home a barefaced innocent child.
I tell Mama nothing.
This is what I learn from you.