Exiled

Sophia Shan

“you can imagine them passing by like rafts in a heavy green canal, travelling through the window of your mind—or the large canteen windows—and far away.” but still i hunch into a knobby ball, feeling all-too-aware of the rolls of flesh pushing into one other on my stomach. i sometimes want my mom, my mom who is the punchline to every joke about Asian parenting but still more complex than that. i want to be running freely in a field, unaware of my main-character existence but simply breathing in the floral perfume. the sun has come out after the slightest injection of spilled-out fog into the terra cotta sky and the angels and warmth of the day sing that i am good, kindhearted, and possess auspiciously unshakeable mental health. i want the laugh of wind chimes, the springy, bony step of baby deer and tresses like cornsilk, but…I’ll settle for whatever, whatever is this here. In the hundred and thirty years since the Immigration Exclusion Act i have somehow become unfit to strap on a conical bamboo farmer’s hat or to sink my stocky, pale calves into rich rice paddy mud, and then someone lifted my face to examine me and discovered no, i was not an immigrant.

i just talk too much about social inequalities and i’m scared of judgement and i often push aside basic social conventions so i recited mantras over and over to convince myself and others that these things don’t matter and no one can hurt me. i want to spit out other people’s expectations without a loud, hacking noise. while i can close my eyes to the flashing green symbols of my genetic code, they’re still there, moving down the cracks. i want to pull the plug so that shiny clean porcelain comes rushing back, and i want to feel the haze of gently monitored sleep come over me…but we don’t have space among all the greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere for wants. i read that walking barefoot on the ground, particularly soil, heals you and draws up tiny imperceptible roots between you and nature, but if i did so, what would it think? among the insignificant changes between the dynasties of years ago and the authoritarian government which runs this rooster-shaped land now and all the cultures which passed, why have i hated it so much? why did i wait like a coiled spring to be released from a predator? why, when this soil is being leached and burned and crying out for passionate environmentalists to defend it?

do i dare disrespect the Family that wants to see me alive across the glass Lazy Susan piled with meat and fish dishes, if nothing else?

there comes a point where i am a tourist to my own culture, where that i can’t convey that glimmering globalization woven into the fabric of my being anymore. one day i plan to thrust out into uncharted waters where the other empty, insecure ships traveled to the destination (“the real experience”) and beached on the hot sandy shores among the whales. and i’ll wait for a Chinese proverb about the piercing sky and selflessness to whip past my ears, but it won’t come.

 

 

*Sophie ignores the writing rules in punctuation and spelling, and that is her unique style. The magazine has respected her wish.