2024

A pink splotch revealed itself on the square of toilet paper after I wiped. A gasp escaped my lips. I spun around to check the toilet bowl, and saw little pink wisps swimming upon its surface. Finally. Finally! Thank fucking god. The color of the blood was weak and pale, more akin to cherry blossoms than cherry fruit, but it was still real. I rushed back to math class, flooded with relief and brimming with hope. 

My five-month stint of anorexia had banished my period for two and a half years, despite my weight rapidly skyrocketing far beyond its original starting point. Malnourishment had sent my body into triage; it elected to keep me alive first, before it could consider making new life. I personally didn’t care that much about losing my period – it was nice, actually, not having to wear adult-sized diapers that bugled and chafed for a week of every month. I had once asked my mom if I could try tampons instead of pads, and she responded that she would not allow foreign objects to enter her daughter’s body, and that I was never to bring up the conversation again. 

Being periodless meant living in fear and shame every day, not because I particularly cared, but because my mother did. She held it over my head as evidence of the health-destroying effects of my “vegan lifestyle,” even though I had lost my period a year before I renounced meat. Every time I refused hard-boiled eggs or the braised pork belly I had once loved, she would sharpen the sword of Damocles looming over me: “See? This is why you have no period.” Controlling my actions, my activities, my aspirations was not enough – my mother had to regulate my very physiology, to extend her autocratic regime into the biopolitical. 

Every morning, she would weigh my backpack on our digital scale, refusing to drive me to school if it was over twenty pounds. I had textbooks and gym clothes and electronic devices to transport; she didn’t care. Schoolwork was less important than the future integrity of my spine.

She refused to let me wear ripped jeans if the temperature dipped below fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit at any point during the day, because she said I would get too cold and then get sick. I accidentally wore a pair on a day where the high was fifty-nine degrees, but the low was fifty. She raided my closet and confiscated every pair I owned.

For my fourteenth birthday, my mom gifted me a Fitbit Alta HR, a compact little smartwatch that tracked exercise, heart rate, and sleep. I fell in love with that watch, not knowing it was a Trojan Horse. In order to enforce my strict 9:30 p.m. bedtime, my mom began making me wear the thing to bed – despite the fact that it suffocated my wrist and lit up in my face – so that she could monitor my sleep. 

Each morning, I had to send her my previous night’s sleep chart, a little blue graph in the Fitbit app that probably wasn’t even biometrically accurate. If I didn’t hit eight hours, I would be punished. Each minute I fell short of the eight-hour benchmark would translate into an equivalent amount of time spent in indentured servitude: my mother could order me about according to her whim, be it bleaching the kitchen counter or scrubbing mildew from the shower or mowing the lawn.

“Mom, the fact that you track my sleep makes me really anxious,” I tried to explain one morning. “Which makes it harder to sleep.” 

“You need to evaluate yourself for why you’re generating unnecessary anxieties,” she retorted.

“I just told you! Your tracking is what creates the anxiety!”

She scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Go ahead and fortify your tendency to blame everything on other people.”

All of this, declared my mother, was in the name of health, because she simply cared about me too much. She wanted me to have a regular menstrual cycle, she wanted me not to get scoliosis, she wanted me to get enough sleep. Of course, I was grateful that she cared. But it felt like my flesh, my blood, my organs were under surveillance. Like my body didn’t belong to me. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. 

In ninth grade Wellness class, we had learned about the cycle of abuse in romantic relationships: Boyfriend does some fuck shit, Girlfriend cries boohoo, Boyfriend brings her flowers and swears it will never happen again, Girlfriend forgives him, cycle repeats. That’s my mom, I had thought, staring at the handout displaying a cartoon boy holding out a cartoon bouquet. My mother is the boyfriend.

Things would be so good – all hugs and kisses and I-love-yous – until they weren’t. I would always do something, say something, be something wrong, and she would erupt in volcanic fury. My mom would never apologize or promise to change, but she would eventually calm down and act like nothing had happened, returning to the hugs and kisses and I-love-yous. That would be enough for me to timidly hand her my heart once more, hoping against hope that maybe this time, finally, she wouldn’t break it. 

When I would have panic attacks at school, Ms. Riemer or Dr. Henry would offer me copious tissues as I hyperventilated in their English classrooms, as well as ample assurance that none of it was my fault. I never fully believed them. If I could simply change myself, then maybe things would be different. 

The rational part of me knew that my period was just a proxy, a scapegoat. The irrational part of me believed that it might be the key to my mother’s approval, the key to ending the cycle of fury and flowers once and for all. If I got my period back, my mom would see that veganism was not in fact destroying my health, and then she wouldn’t be so mad about it, and then we wouldn’t fight anymore, and then everything would be okay. So when I saw the blood in the toilet during math class that Tuesday, I thought it meant salvation. 

When I returned home, I eagerly broke the news to my mom. She hugged me and kissed my forehead with elation. “See? I told you,” she gloated. “Look how quickly it came after you gave up your veganism.” A wide grin decorated her face, the first I had seen on her in ages. 

I wanted to tell her that correlation did not equal causation, but I dared not open my mouth. It’s over, I thought. It’s finally over. Thank god. 

Her happiness lasted two blissful hours.

For dinner, my mom made a stir-fry with shredded pork and scrambled eggs. I picked half-heartedly at my plate, struggling to swallow without gagging. Under duress, I had recently caved even further, accepting meat back into my diet in order to evade disownment. It made me sick.

“You’re not eating enough,” my mom snapped. “I eat more than you, and I have a fifty-year-old metabolism.” 

“That’s not true. You don’t see everything I eat,” I pushed back. In fact, the vast, vast majority of what I ate was hidden from her sight. She would not see my secluded binge of almonds, chestnuts, roasted sweet potato, kabocha squash, kiwi, and clementines later that night.

She pursed her lips and placed both palms flat against the dining table. “Yesterday, I spent forty minutes on the phone with the Adolescent Medicine people at Boston Children’s, and I told them about your eating habits. They said you should see a psychiatrist. They think you have an eating disorder.” She shook her head aggressively, her voice so heavy with incredulity and disgust it was like they’d said I was a necrophiliac.

“Mom, I objectively eat more than you in aggregate, but just not at this particular meal on this particular day.” 

“Yeah, because you’re always snacking at night. Consuming so many empty calories. So unhealthy,” she retorted. The ‘snacking’ she was referring to was bingeing, which she did not remotely understand, which she never failed to berate me for when she caught me scurrying back and forth between my room and the kitchen. 

“So what is it?” I asked, exasperated. “Am I not eating enough, or am I eating too much?”

“You just need to eat normally,” she barked. “You know,” she began slowly, “if you were to go back to vegan plus eggs, but just no more snacking, I would go for that.” 

Was this a concession? Would she really let me stop eating meat? “Okay, I’ll take it,” I agreed eagerly. Maybe this would be the impetus I needed to finally get me to stop bingeing.

Bewilderment wrinkled her forehead. Shit. This was not a real proposal. She was just trying to make a point. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you – are you going to drink soup?” she sputtered. My mom had been trying for so long to get me to drink the broth she made from boiling pig bones purchased in Chinatown, claiming it to be a nutritional powerhouse, a panacea for all that ailed me.

“Um…that’s not – that’s not really vegetarian though,” I replied meekly. 

Bam! My mom battered the dining table with her fist, leapt up, shoved her chair against its wooden leg, and slammed the door to the kitchen with such force it sounded like a gunshot.

“GO FUCK YOURSELF! I AM SO DONE WITH YOU!” she screamed, frothing at the mouth. “LEAVE! I DON’T WANT YOU TO BE HERE! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!”

My ass remained firmly glued to my seat. My lips parted to give way to sound, but nothing came out.

“JUST SAY YOU’RE NOT MY DAUGHTER ANYMORE. THEN I DON’T HAVE TO CARE IF YOU DIE OR GET SICK OR CAN NEVER HAVE CHILDREN. I DON’T CARE! I’M DONE! FUCK YOU!”

She stormed off into the kitchen, only to return half a heartbeat later. “If you want to know the reason why I can’t have peace of mind even after Jamie got better, it’s because of you.”

Shellshocked, I floated mutely to my room. I crumpled to the floor, curled into a ball, and began to rock back and forth, back and forth. I was jerked out of my stupor when my door flung violently open.

“Mark my words,” my mother hissed, brandishing her index finger like she was trying to slice open the air. “You are the one who makes this family unhappy. You are the one who makes me unhappy. And if you’re unhappy, that’s all on you.” She stomped away, only to swivel back immediately to scream, “ALL ON YOU!”

My mother didn’t speak to me for the next forty-eight hours. She had swung to the pendulum’s far side. There was no middle ground: it was either total suffocation, or total neglect. After I missed the bus on Wednesday, rather than ask my mom to pick me up, I trudged the two miles home in the freezing snow, ravenous wind gnawing at the tips of my nose and ears. Because she had occupied the living room, where my desk was located, I hid in my cramped bedroom, eating and doing my homework on the carpeted floor next to my sky-blue twin bed, using my history textbook as a hard surface to write upon, which strained my lower back and made my neck ache. 

On Thursday, I texted my dad to ask if he could send me and pick me up from tennis the next day. I didn’t want to face my mom, and I didn’t want to burden her with driving me, because she always ranted about how she hated being treated like a chauffeur and how I always took her for granted, as if my time mattered more than hers, as if she had nothing else better to do. My dad said okay.

I found my mom sitting at the dining table and tiptoed toward her, holding my breath. “Um, Dad’s gonna send me and pick me up from tennis tomorrow,” I informed her in a near-whisper.

“You should just give custody to your father and go move in with him, if you think that will make you happy,” she sneered.  

I shook my head vigorously. I would totally do that, if I wanted to live with my evil stepmother, and move to a new school district halfway through high school, and have my mother never speak to me again. 

“I’m relinquishing my role as a parent. I’ve given up on you. You’re a fucking idiot,” she sighed. “I knew I shouldn’t have had children. Look how miserable they’ve made me.”

I kept my eyes carefully focused upon my hot pink Nike slides that doubled as house slippers. 

“You know, two days ago, I’d never been more angry in my entire life. I wanted to trash the entire kitchen, but I was only able to restrain myself out of fear that Jamie might get hurt.”

“It was just –” I faltered. “It was just a miscommunication. I wasn’t saying definitively no to the soup,” I tried desperately. “I was just like, confused, because you’d just proposed letting me be vegetarian again, so I was just trying to clarify the terms of the agreement.”

“Bullshit!” she snapped. “Since when was food ever a negotiation?”

I scraped the hangnail off my right thumb with my index finger, relishing the sharp burst of pain for its temporary distraction.

“You make me feel more depressed and hopeless and helpless than even in Jamie’s darkest days,” she snarled, twisting a blade deeper and deeper into my flesh. “If you really loved me, then you would just eat normally, but you can’t even do that.”

“I do love you –”

“If you truly love someone, you have to give them what they want most – and you refuse to do that.” 

My jaw unhinged from disbelief at the unfairness of the statement. The hypocrisy. Her street was clearly one-way only. 

“So here’s the bottom line,” she said finally. “Either you do exactly as I say, or you cut yourself out of the family entirely.”

The next day at school, I broke down sobbing uncontrollably six separate times. The first was during gym class, the next while talking to my English teacher, the time after that while I was studying in the library, then three times during Spanish. After I blubbered through my subjunctive oral exam, Ms. D, the teacher’s aide I was close with, pulled me into the hallway.

“What’s going on, kiddo?”

I fessed up. 

After my long and meandering summary, I concluded, “I’ve been looking for Mr. Luu all day, but he hasn’t been in his office.”

Ms. D’s face hardened, and she beckoned my face closer to hers. “Kiddo, just between you and me,” she began, her voice low and grave. “If you go to guidance, they will report it to the Department of Social Services, and things will get a whole lot messier.”

Oh fuck. I wanted to slap myself for my stupidity. Thank god for Mr. Luu’s absence. Thank god for Ms. D’s warning.

“I’m taking you to see the school psychologist,” Ms. D declared.

“Ms. D – no, I – really, I’m fine – I don’t think –”

“C’mon,” she insisted, dragging me by the elbow. “Trust me, Ms. Rivers is a very safe person to talk to.”

I sat in the back of a small room, which was divided in half by a privacy partition, which made it feel even smaller. Facing me was a young-ish lady with boxy glasses and straight blonde hair that fell past her shoulders.

“Tell me what brings you here,” Ms. Rivers said in her chipper, honey-dipped voice. 

“Um…” I stalled. “Could you, like – clarify your mandatory reporting obligations please?” I asked, more cautious now after my initial recklessness. 

“I’m impressed by your lack of trust,” she quipped. “It’s prudent – after all, I’m a complete stranger to you.” Ms. Rivers went on to explain that unless I was in imminent danger of physical harm, or was likely to harm myself or someone else, then everything I told her would remain strictly confidential.

“Okay,” I nodded. Fuck it – there’s nothing to lose, I thought. Can’t hurt getting advice from an actual trained psychologist.

I spent the next hour telling her everything.

Ms. Rivers tried to help me formulate a game plan. “You should find an outside psychologist,” she suggested. “Maybe they could even serve as a mediator between you and your mom.” Yeah right, as if my mother – who didn’t believe in therapy because no therapist could tell her something she couldn’t just figure out herself by reading a book – would ever agree to let me see a psychologist, let alone see one herself. This well-meaning white woman just didn’t get it: Asian families didn’t do mental illness. That shit was for decadent westerners of weak moral fiber.

“You should go to your dad’s house this weekend,” she suggested, but I knew how that one would turn out. The previous year, there had been a little debacle involving my brother’s birthday and an ice cream cake.

“You should sleep over at a friend’s house tonight,” she suggested. “It might be good for you and your mom to have some space from each other for a night.” This idea was actually a good one. I already had plans after tennis that day to go to Miki’s house, since we had a debate tournament to prepare for the next day. Miki was the whip-smart, quiet but hilariously sarcastic girl in my AP World History class whom I had roped into being my debate partner earlier that year, because really I just wanted to be her friend. She had chill parents who were okay with outlandish propositions like sleepovers. 

Ms. Rivers’s final suggestion was that I should write my mom a letter, so I could fully articulate my thoughts without interference or intimidation. I deemed this a good idea, too – I always had so much to say when scrawling urgently in my little brown journal at night, but when I was actually face-to-face with my mother, my brain would shut down and my vocal cords would seal off. With a letter, I might regain my voice.

“Oh, I wrote your mom plenty of letter,” my dad informed me in the car after picking me up from school, following my abbreviated run-down of current events. “Totally ineffective.” 

I deflated. 

During the car ride, we realized we’d had a miscommunication: when I had asked my dad to “pick me up,” he had thought I meant only from school, when I had meant from tennis. “Jackie, ah,” he groaned, frustration creasing his forehead. “You need to be more clear!” I apologized profusely, praying my father would not forsake me.

He didn’t. He waited in the lobby of the tennis club for the entire two-hour session, so that I would have someone to take me to Miki’s. He didn’t even make me feel bad for it. He was so unlike my mom, who would scream at me that I was a selfish brat who treated her like my servant if I accidentally made her wait two extra minutes in the pickup line because I was saying goodbye to a friend. Everything was transactional with her, everything tit-for-tat, every minute and deed and sentiment tallied up on a ledger. My dad, unlike my mom, never said “I love you” to me, never gave me hugs or kisses. His love was the quiet kind, the kind that spoke its presence in temporal generosity and easy forgiveness.

At Miki’s house, I allowed myself to laugh freely as we gossiped and played with Boba, her absurdly adorable Pomeranian fluff ball whose little pink tongue and sassy trot made me all googoo-gaga. We sat on the floor of her room with laptops open, hunting down research papers elucidating the benefits and pitfalls of below-market-rate housing. 

Before my dad took me to tennis, I had texted my mom that I would be sleeping over at Miki’s, but she hadn’t responded. Feeling apprehension creep its spidery legs up my spine, I texted my brother, just in case. Jamie responded almost instantly: my mom hadn’t known I was sleeping over and was mad, and she hadn’t even known I had a debate tournament, which made her even more mad. “Mom says you’re not allowed to sleep over,” he concluded.

Suddenly unable to breathe, my knees turned to jelly and gave out. As the room spun, I crawled on all fours into Miki’s closet. Hugging my knees tightly to my chest, I heaved rapid, shallow breaths between guttural sobs that caught in my throat. Miki watched my panic attack helplessly through the small opening in the closet doorway, telling me that everything would be okay.

My phone vibrated again. “Come home,” Jamie texted. “It’ll get so much worse if you don’t.”

“I can’t,” I replied, wishing he could grasp my desperation through the screen.

“Please come home,” he tried again. “If not for your sake, then for mine.”

That got me. 

Miki and I attempted, not very successfully, to write out our speeches and cross-examination responses, as I intermittently wept and shuddered with dread. My mom arrived in Miki’s driveway at 11:00 p.m. Sandbags weighed down my legs as I trudged toward the car, bracing myself to meet my end.

But to my shock, the ride home was fine. Awkward, tense, and silent, but fine. The calmness perturbed me. Her talk remained casual and aloof and benign, never veering toward the danger zone of our fight. She seemed utterly unruffled, as if the past few days had never happened.

I took a shower upon arriving home, for the first time in years having to scrub dregs of blood from between my legs. Stupid fucking period. You promised so much, but delivered so little. As I walked back to my room, wrapped in a towel, skin glistening with fresh wetness, I passed by my mom’s open door. On her bed, she had laid out an array of business-casual outfits. Button-up blouses joined black pencil skirts atop her white down comforter.

“Try this on, baby.” She held up a black H&M blazer with the tag still attached. I met her eyes with a questioning gaze. My mom explained, “For your tournament tomorrow.”

She does love me.

Fury and flowers, fury and flowers.