Before I was born, my life had already been written for me. It wasn't in the stars. I was never meant to shine brightly. But I read it in the varicose veins on my mother's calves, pored over the gory details in crow's feet scrawled at the corner of my father's eyes, and wondered if I could change the miserable existence carved out for me by every dreadful ticking second that came with the passage of time.
It may be hard to believe, but this was a thought I had when my mind was in a better place. I was hopeful, utterly convinced that the world was a ball of clay I needed to shape in just the right way to have it fit in the palm of my hands—anything to believe that things could be different.
These days, I'm finding it hard to hold on to that same relentless optimism.
My goal, from a very young age, was to die young and die rich. I never said that first part aloud for obvious reasons. I didn't want to take a trip to the psych ward. I had heard enough stories about grippy sock vacations and pills that made you feel different. To be frank, I also didn't voice the thought because I didn't want to die, at least not until I proved something.
It made no sense. Dying early was part of the goal, but I never truly wanted it. Life was a series of negotiations to delay the inevitable. Please don't die yet, I would plead with myself. One more day. One more month. A few more years. Maybe until our dreams come true, dreams I didn't dare speak into existence for fear of them being trampled.
I was looking for any excuse to hang on. But I would be lying if the thought of eternal rest didn't appeal to me.
As the eldest daughter of an immigrant family, it became apparent that whether I lived or died wasn't my choice. My fate was sealed the moment my head breached my mother's womb and I began the long, exhausting trudge of what was the rest of my life. As soon as I could think, I was taught to share, care, and nurture. My two younger siblings were practically my surrogate children, starting with my younger sister and years later, my younger brother.
I never considered myself motherly, unless what qualified as motherly was the mental calculus of constantly putting the needs of others above your own. My food was never my own food, every dinner a battle of clacking chopsticks over the best dishes my mother cooked. My clothing never stayed where it was supposed to, subject to the whims of my fickle sister.
It was love in its own peculiar way. I saw parts of myself echoed in the way my sister picked up crocheting right after I did and in the cartoons that my brother watched. They knew the love of our mother, but most of all, they knew my love. They felt it in the way they saw me picking them up after school, cooking secret late-night meals when my parents were asleep, and answering hushed questions they were afraid were too inappropriate for old people's ears.
Killing myself would traumatize them or worse, inspire them to do the same. And there was nothing worse than hearing the words "I was just doing what you were doing" while I still breathed. Such an accusation would make me turn in my grave.
My darling children aside, there was also the matter of my parents. They were like all immigrants — hardworking, self-sacrificing, and masochistic. It wasn't completely their choice to be that way, but they convinced themselves that they needed the kind of tenacity that would allow them to put their blood, sweat, and tears into all of their endeavors. They had a vision for their life that I didn't completely understand, but I was a part of it, just as much of a project as the bakery they opened up.
We all were. They just happened to be the hardest on me.
I was a key part of their vision, the prototype meant to test the limits of everything they wanted. I would embark on the impossible journey to be the perfect child. And I wouldn't exactly fail to become the person they wanted me to be.
I tried really hard to be good at whatever it was life demanded of me. There was no question that I had to do well in my classes. I spent hours studying for a neat row of straight A's that I brought home to my parents four times a year. The errant B was a devastating blow to my ego. Although I was never punished for it, knowing that I couldn't live up to my personal standards was punishment enough.
Imperfection meant I had to redouble my efforts. How could I enjoy life if I couldn't live by my own rules?
I locked away my phone. I couldn't afford to waste time on things that didn't serve me. I wouldn't allow myself those short-lived spurts of dopamine, not when I was chasing something far more satisfying.
And I scarcely had time to touch my phone anyway, with all of the chores I balanced in between my studies. I read books for English class while washing my family's clothes at the laundromat, practiced Spanish conjugations while scrubbing dishes, and scribbled proofs for math problems in between sweeping and mopping the floor. Somehow, I even managed to memorize useless scientific facts about the weather while cooking dinner.
One might wonder where all of this motivation came from. But living the sort of life that I did gave me enough of a push to cultivate a near-superhuman level of discipline. I tasted the masochism that thrummed through my parents' veins like fresh blood from biting the insides of my cheeks.
For one, I was never like the other students in my public school. I wore laughably outdated hand me downs and slept on a bed crammed in between my siblings. And every day, without fail, someone would bully me into letting them copy my homework since I also had the misfortune of being bright and surrounded by idiots.
If it weren't for my teachers telling me to keep my grades up to get into a higher-ranked school, I would have lost hope in any chance of my life getting better early on. My sharp memory and spongy brain seemed like more of a curse than a blessing, enhancing the suffering of my preadolescence by putting every moment in my mind's catalog in perfect high definition video. I held on for three painful years in middle school, imagining a life so perfect that the sheer bliss of it was beyond my comprehension.
Then, all at once, things got better.
One day, I woke up to the clean, soft expanse of my own bed. After years of toil, the family bakery had done well enough to earn me personal sleeping space. Granted, I still shared a room with a younger brother and sister, but I got good sleep for the first time in my life, free from stray kicking feet.
And my neat rows of straight A's took off like a flock of well-trained doves, earning me an acceptance letter from the second-best private school in my city, Two Bridges Academy. I had also been accepted into what was considered the best private school, St. Mark's Academy, but only one of those schools offered me a scholarship.
Best or second-best, what I did was worthy of a meal I didn't have to cook. As I sat elbow to elbow with my family in a restaurant sipping hot tea and scanning the menu for the cheapest dishes, I felt a sliver of the unattainable bliss that was always present in my daydreams.
My mother pressed a dark blue box into the palm of my hand. Swarovski. Fake, no doubt. She would never do something as frivolous as spend money on the real thing. But from her, the gesture meant the world.
I held the star necklace up to the dim restaurant lighting. "You're meant to do great things, Yan," she said. For a moment, I saw the glimmer of her old dreams in the facets of the plastic crystals.
My heart faltered. I felt a crushing weight on my chest. What was it that they expected me to be? I was still just their daughter, with or without the acceptance to Two Bridges Academy.
But I knew it wasn't that simple. They were counting on me to be so much more than that. My entrance into the academy was one of many steps that I had to take to free my family from the mistakes they made ever since they landed and planted their roots in the United States of America. After four years of rigorous schooling, I knew they were counting on me to make it into a prestigious college and get a high-paying job.
As I spooned mouthfuls of egg drop soup between my lips, I tried to quell the disquiet in my chest. I would never admit it to them, but by then, I was already tired of life and all the demands the universe made of me.
There had to be an end to everything I did, right? That night, I dreamed of eternal sleep and kept my intrusive thoughts to myself.
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