2024

July 4, 2003.

Independence Day: a bit too on-the-nose, I think. There I was, the offspring of two Chinese immigrants, a chubby little bundle of American Dreams, freshly seceded from the womb. 

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Hidden within the old family album residing forgotten on the basement shelf, a thick film of dust supplanting its front cover, is a green-tinted photograph from the hospital. It reveals me clutching tightly at my mother’s chest, pink and ugly like a shriveled apricot. Pooling at the corner of my right eye is a crust of thick white mucus. Perched atop my head is a beanie striped red, white, and blue, the benevolent spirit of patriotism keeping me warm. My mom gazes down at me with a soft smile dancing upon her lips.

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Never had she imagined herself a mother. She was estranged from her own mother after a lifetime of neglect and animosity, a separation now physicalized in the vast and frigid Atlantic. She had been so determined not to perpetuate that legacy. She wanted to be independent, beholden to no one, shoulders free of all weight. She wanted to pursue her career, to live a life of her own, not change the diapers of crying screaming things that would grow up to resent her.

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But her husband wanted to pursue his career, and also to pursue fatherhood. Snug in his tenured professorship, he was ready to start a family. If his wife could not fulfill his wish, he would leave her. And so she complied.

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Out came James, and so she left her senior management position at the consulting firm that had sent her adventuring across the globe with the power to make or break companies from Los Angeles to Singapore. She had once gotten her tires slashed by a disgruntled employee freshly laid off thanks to her expert advice, but no matter. She loved the work. Her knife-sharp personality rendered her well cut out for this cutthroat industry.

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But that life of adrenaline and thrill was now behind her; staid domesticity awaited. Out came Jacqueline seventeen months later, bursting from her birth canal like a firework.

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Despite her initial resistance, she would grow to care for these crying screaming things. In almost an approximation of love. Almost.