March 18, 2018: The day I went vegan

 

In their various ways, both my parents had been telling me for years that I had serious faults in my character: that I was too stubborn, too selfish, too opinionated; that I lacked charisma, lacked tact, lacked common sense. That was why I was so hard to like. That was why I had it coming.

One day in eighth grade, my mom delivered yet another lecture about my shittiness, insisting that I never thought about how my actions impacted other people, and that anyone looking from the outside would instantly see me for the self-centered, petty, inconsiderate, arrogant, and unreliable person I was. They would see me as someone who could not be counted on. She cited my brother as the paragon of generosity and integrity, and I wished desperately to be him. I felt grateful that my mother cared enough to point out my shortcomings, that she gave me a chance to patch my holes before other people saw them gaping. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be happy. 

After that, I decided to take action. This character overhaul would fit neatly into my larger matrix of self-improvement, along with my recent decision to stop being a fatass. I was determined to shape myself toward my highest potential – I would have the perfect body, the perfect grades, the perfect personality, the perfect conduct.

I began maintaining a running list of “Personality Flaws (aka why no one likes you),” whose twenty-one items included “You’re judgmental,” “You’re stubborn,” “You don’t know when to shut up,” and “You’re insecure & constantly need external validation.” I began maintaining a daily “3-2-1 journal”: at the end of each day, I would write down three things I was grateful for, two positive traits I noticed in other people, and one aspect of myself that needed improvement. I began jotting down inspirational quotes in an aqua, pocket-sized journal: “The quality of a man’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor” – Vince Lombardi; “Personality is a product of cultivation. The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with” – David Brooks. 

I began voraciously consuming self-help books: Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Amy Morin’s 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, Carol Dweck’s Mindset, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, David Brooks’s The Road to Character, and of course, Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, imposed upon me by my mother, who had informed me that I had no friends and couldn’t influence people. 

And then I read The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. In it, he proclaims, “compassion is the wish that all sentient beings be free of suffering.” I wanted to listen to the bald guy in a robe who was basically World Peace in the flesh. I wanted to practice true compassion. Shit. All sentient beings?

I remembered poor Ganny, our beautiful jet-black Araucana who squawked and thrashed in vain as my mother slashed her throat with a pair of kitchen scissors over a patch of grass in the front yard. She commanded me to hold a small blue porcelain bowl to collect the cascading blood. My tiny kindergarten fingers trembled as I watched Ganny convulse with her last gasps of life.

Jamie and I mourned the demise of our pet. My mom scoffed at our softness, which was no surprise. We had watched her stab a muskrat to death with a pitchfork and drown twenty chipmunks in a sunflower seed–baited bucket without batting an eye. She had been raised in the Yangzhou countryside, where slaughtering livestock and eliminating pests was par for the course. When she was a child, my mother’s city-dwelling parents, who of course found value only in their son, had offloaded her to the care of her aunt, who would insult her and hit her and teach her how to gracefully slit the neck of a chicken. 

My mom proceeded to pluck Ganny bare in the kitchen sink, boil her soft pink flesh into tough white meat, and prepare a pot of noodle soup from her remains. She forced us to eat it. We slurped at the “Ganny noodle soup” in sickened horror, my stomach somersaulting with guilt. But still, most chickens were not my beloved pets, and so even after the Ganny tragedy, I continued to eat chicken nuggets and chicken fingers and chicken teriyaki, as well as twice-cooked pork belly glistening with fat, and fried rice laden with greasy hunks of Chinese sausage, and Peking duck roasted to golden perfection.

Because after all, I was the designated family carnivore. I despised all things green, all things cellulose containing. The seedless grapes and orange slices my mom packed me daily in my elementary school lunchbox would land not in my stomach, but in the garbage bin. Once, my mom refused to let me leave the dining table until I finished all my veggies, so I sat in front of my plate of untouched bok choy for hours, the ticking clock hazy from the tears blurring my vision.

That’s why, when the Dalai Lama implored me to “extend the scope of our concern further and further, to eventually encompass and embrace all sentient beings,” I was initially hesitant. I wanted to turn away, to avert my gaze, but I couldn’t. My curiosity had been piqued.

I began to learn about the “meat birds” bred to be so large their legs snapped under the weight of their own bodies, about the male chicks thrown in grinders because of their uselessness to the egg industry, about the cows forcibly violated with insemination guns and the calves torn from their mothers to keep the dairy industry flowing. I learned about the greenhouse gas emissions, the particulate pollution, the freshwater consumption, the deforestation, the soil erosion, the damn cows burping us into catastrophe. The more I learned, the less I was able to stomach those foods that brought such suffering upon so many sentient beings. Meat became about as appealing as a wet sock. When served to me, I would pick at my plate absently, barely tasting, almost gagging on the guilt of each bite. Finally, I pulled the trigger, and became a vegan.

Going vegan was great. It cohered very well with my rigid, perfectionistic tendencies; I was almost gleeful for another set of rules to follow, another group of foods to cut out. The moral righteousness allowed me to justify my self-imposed deprivation. At last I could attain true purity, in diet as well as in ethics.

But mostly, going vegan was awful. Most Chinese dishes contain meat or eggs, so this culinary desertion only further alienated me from my already-distant culture. My grasp on the language had been rapidly eroding since I quit Chinese School, and our celebrations of Chinese holidays had been dwindling since the family began to dissolve. Now, that last tether of cuisine had been severed.

My mom and brother started going out to dinner without me, because the menu of Sichuan Gourmet probably had nothing for me to eat, because they didn’t do that white people shit. My mom also stopped cooking for me at home. Throughout all of high school, I would have to spend hours on my mom’s weekends chopping vegetables and cooking massive pots of chickpea stew or lentil pasta or kidney bean chili. I would then freeze the food in batches, eating the same thing every day for two weeks straight, because on weekdays I was too busy running clubs and studying for tests and reading textbooks. My mom also stopped letting me sit at the dining table, so I ate alone and ashamed at my desk, downcast head always buried in homework. There would be no more family dinners, ever again.

My mother wielded an impressive array of arguments to dissuade me from veganism: you will drive people away and forever be perceived as stubborn, difficult to work with, inflexible, and extreme; you will never find a partner who loves you, because any decent man would never tolerate a vegan diet; you will ruin your future family and sacrifice the enjoyment of everyone around you; you are ruining your current family and preventing everyone from enjoying life; you are giving your mother grief and making her depressed. 

I was supposedly giving my mother grief and making her depressed because she was vehemently convinced that I was forsaking my health by deliberately malnourishing myself, which enraged her, because the universe had revoked the health of her perfect son, and now her defective daughter was choosing to revoke her own.

 It became a symbol – she found in veganism a convenient scapegoat toward which to direct her incendiary rage. It became a symbol for me, too – it was identity and autonomy and resistance. The stronger she opposed my choice to be vegan, the stronger I clung onto it. It was a battle of wills. She wanted to control me; I wanted to control myself. She wanted me to be her appendage; I wanted to fortify the borders of individuality.

 

“You can choose to be vegan, or you can choose to be my daughter,” my mother proclaimed in the kitchen one October afternoon. “If you want to be a vegan, then emancipate and go live with your father. Give me your answer by midnight.”

My throat constricted into a thin straw. “Why are you doing this?” I pleaded. “Why can’t you just let me live according to my beliefs?”

“Your beliefs are destroying the family,” she spat bitterly, like she had just tasted a rancid almond. “If you choose your beliefs, then you clearly don’t love me enough. How can you be so selfish – putting the environment and some animals over your own family.”

“You’re the one who’s letting it destroy the family,” I protested in a hoarse whisper. “I feel like you just…refuse to let me be happy.”

“This is for your own sake. It’s my job as a parent to sacrifice your happiness for your health.”

“But you have no evidence this is harming my health! And I’ve told you so many times – I physically feel so much better. I have so much more energy, I basically don’t get sick anymore –”

“Where’s your period? Huh?”

“I literally lost it before I went vegan!” I drew in a big breath, working up my courage. Talking back might be a stupid move, but I had to say my piece. “You lose literally nothing if you let me be vegan, but if I give up my values, I’ll be giving up my independence, my sanity, my sense of self – and also, it would basically affirm that your method of threatening to disown me is an effective way to get what you want in the future. And it’s not like this is going to be a cure for our family! I know you’ll just find more things to pick apart!” I was frantic now. “This is just about your ideology and you getting what you want!” 

She burst into laughter, a maniacal Disney villain cackle, shrinking me down to less than nothing. “The choice is yours. Be vegan or be my daughter. You have a few hours to decide.” 

I stormed into my room, snatched the little brown hardcover journal from my bookshelf, and began scribbling furiously with my Z-Grip ballpoint pen. I channeled all my hurt and anger into the ultramarine ink that clumped and pooled and smeared. I wrote:

I don’t want to choose. I’m contemplating simply never eating again, or just slitting my wrists in the bathtub. (Death is a good way to eschew responsibility lol.) I’m so angry that I even have to choose – it’s her choice as much as it’s mine. She’s the one choosing to hate me for it; she’s the one letting it tear the family apart. We could be a family again if she just let us. 

All I want is her love. Her unconditional love. I’m not sure why I’m so desperate for it, given that it’s unattainable. I will never be what she wants. I will never make her proud. I feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong with me as a human being for not being able to get my mother to at least like me.

I want Mom back, and I want her to want me. And I really do want her to be happy. Though it’s still ridiculous that she attributes the state of her mental sanity to be within my power to determine, I want to do all I can to alleviate her suffering. I hope that at least my action of giving in will make her cognizant of all this, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll start to soften. 

 

I decided to wave the white flag.

“Okay,” I relented, as I reentered the kitchen. “I’ll start incorporating eggs back into my diet.”

“One egg, every day.” Her voice was granite, hard and cool. “I’ll accept it.”

“O–okay.”

She threw her arms around me and peppered my forehead with kisses. “Thank you for giving up,” she sang, jubilant. “I knew I shouldn’t have let go.”

Giving up, letting go. The words grated against my eardrums. This was about winners besting losers, not mothers nurturing daughters. I chewed my lip, blinking back tears. “Could I at least, like, stop being blamed for all our family’s problems? And stop being constantly attacked whenever I try to eat with you guys?”

She scoffed. “You’re asking for too much.”

“I just –” I stared at the ground intensely. “I just don’t understand why you won’t just let me live my life. You didn’t have to react this way. You’re the one who’s choosing it.”

Her jaw stiffened, ferocity glinting in her irises. “You have no right to disrespect my authority,” she snarled. “You know, in most other families, you would’ve been beaten to death for this kind of disobedience.”

I studied the cracks and divots of the tile floor like I was aiming to sketch them from memory.

“You should be grateful you weren’t born into a family that sells off their children, or forces them into prostitution.” She shook her head, sighing. “I’ve been too lenient. I should’ve been more authoritarian – either physically punishing you for not eating what was on the table, or refusing to buy you any food at all, so you would literally be forced to give in. Or starve.”

My neck remained limp, my mouth remained closed. 

“You know, in fifty years you’ll be grateful to me,” she declared, chin tilted upward in righteousness. “You should document all of this in a journal.”

Oh, I did.

Every day for the next few months, I ate my obligatory egg, scrambled in our tiny nonstick pan, and it tasted like rubbery resignation. It would settle deep in my gut, fermenting into a pungent, roiling mass of resentment.