STORIES
Tri Nghia, Ana Chen
Tri Nghia, Ana Chen
Words I Wish I Knew You Needed
by Tri Nghia
Last week I lost my 30-year-old cousin to suicide. I have been struggling to process his death because I want to understand it. I found myself reading old text messages and looking at old photos to see signs, analyzing his smiles and words just to make sense of it all; Was he depressed for a long time? Was he depressed at all? Did he reach out for help and I miss it? As I talked to my family and his friends, I found that most were just as surprised as I was. My cousin and I joked around a lot, we were similar in our happy go lucky personalities and also shared a sense of adventure for the outdoors. You would have never known he was suffering to this degree. I am learning that not everyone presents how we expect someone that is suicidal to present — some people are really good at hiding it. He was. I wish I could have supported him. I wish I had the chance to say these words to him. I wish I knew he needed to hear these words. I write them now for anyone who is reading this and may need to hear them.
by Tri Nghia
Last week I lost my 30-year-old cousin to suicide. I have been struggling to process his death because I want to understand it. I found myself reading old text messages and looking at old photos to see signs, analyzing his smiles and words just to make sense of it all; Was he depressed for a long time? Was he depressed at all? Did he reach out for help and I miss it? As I talked to my family and his friends, I found that most were just as surprised as I was. My cousin and I joked around a lot, we were similar in our happy go lucky personalities and also shared a sense of adventure for the outdoors. You would have never known he was suffering to this degree. I am learning that not everyone presents how we expect someone that is suicidal to present — some people are really good at hiding it. He was. I wish I could have supported him. I wish I had the chance to say these words to him. I wish I knew he needed to hear these words. I write them now for anyone who is reading this and may need to hear them.
- Helpers need help too. I heard you once told someone that if they are sad and hurting, they should not go through their pain alone and that they should call you. You deserve this too. You do not need to feel what you are feeling alone. That is a large weight to carry. I am here to help carry a portion of that with you.
- You are not a burden. I am in your life and you are in my life. We are family (or friends) and I want to lighten the load for you if I can. I choose to, I want to, you are not a burden to me.
- Sharing is hard, but carrying pain and suffering alone is harder. I know there is a lot of shame placed in admitting your suffering and pain, but I love you more than that. I will listen without judgment — even if that is all you need from me.
- Nothing is too big or too little. Pain is pain and suffering is suffering. If it is real for you, I will see it as real for you. I will do my best to support you through your reality.
- Our relationship is deeper than just joy. We have a lot of fun together, but that does not mean we cannot be sad, angry, or disappointed together. If I have any type of relationship with you, I welcome it all.
Explanation of "menu."
by Ana Chen
Growing up in America, my brother and I would always laugh at the funny menu translations in Chinese restaurants: “supreme pleasure in beef broth,” “dumpling turtle duck tongue exploding,” or “vegetable swim drown.”
But recently, I realized that this laughter was not purely out of mirth. It also came from a vindictive cruelty – neither of us knew how to read Mandarin, and laughing at the menus’ English was simultaneously an assertion our superiority (after all, English was the most important tongue of America – I really want to write something about how Asian Americans enforce eurocentrism by mocking their native cultures/languages out of insecurity and a desire to assimilate) and to suppress our insecurity towards the labyrinths of Chinese characters.
But what if it were the other way around? What if I wrote a menu in English and translated it poorly into Chinese? I initially smiled at the thought, but as I toyed around with the idea, I realized how these faltering translations could capture so much of the displacement and distance I felt from my homeland. My values didn’t always overlap with my family’s; I’d been exposed to widely different media and experiences.
One of these experiences – my middle/high-school eating disorder, rose to the forefront of this piece. Although my anorexia originated from ballet, it also has several cultural ramifications. In America, people avoid talking about body shape and image; in China, the body is not yours, but the tongues of your relatives. “She’s too skinny – no, her hips have gotten wider – why haven’t her breasts grown yet? – are you eating fine? Your thighs are small – ” Anxiety always coils in my lungs whenever I go back to Taiping and Taiyuan, my parents’ hometowns. This year, as I recovered from my eating disorder and gained back everything I’d lost, my grandparents marveled at my body: “Look, she’s gotten fatter! – Hips haven’t grown much, but her thighs definitely have – Her waistline has thickened, that’s for sure – Look, she has breasts!”
It’s just part of our culture; it’s a sign of love and caring. Plus, as my grandparents grew up with an enormous scarcity of food, they want all their grandchildren to have flesh on their bones.
But, stepping away from the rural towns and into China’s infinitely more modernized financial centers, I couldn’t help but feel as if having a skeletal/slender body was the key to fitting into my motherland. All the businesswomen in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Xi’an were at least three sizes smaller than me.
Straddling the expectations between the various subcultures within two very different cultures is exhausting. However, this piece isn’t meant to attack either culture (as highlighted by how I flip the translations), but to simply point out how both can be extremely draining and damaging. I tried to convey the raw, relentless tirade of an eating disorder while balancing the conciseness of a menu – this was very challenging, as I’m used to purple-prosing. Choosing which foods to include here was also difficult: America was slightly easier (I just took some of the foods I allowed myself to eat) than China, which has a plethora of sugary/oily/generally unhealthier foods that I always felt guilty eating while struggling with self-image. I ended up choosing some foods from my childhood visits (grass pancakes and fried squirrel fish), along with three from Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing, the economic centers I mentioned previously.
This poem was cathartic. Did it bring some sort of closure? No - although recent years have taught me not to chase after absolutes. It is in the space between: the space between absolutes, between languages, between realities and expectations, that art is born.
by Ana Chen
Growing up in America, my brother and I would always laugh at the funny menu translations in Chinese restaurants: “supreme pleasure in beef broth,” “dumpling turtle duck tongue exploding,” or “vegetable swim drown.”
But recently, I realized that this laughter was not purely out of mirth. It also came from a vindictive cruelty – neither of us knew how to read Mandarin, and laughing at the menus’ English was simultaneously an assertion our superiority (after all, English was the most important tongue of America – I really want to write something about how Asian Americans enforce eurocentrism by mocking their native cultures/languages out of insecurity and a desire to assimilate) and to suppress our insecurity towards the labyrinths of Chinese characters.
But what if it were the other way around? What if I wrote a menu in English and translated it poorly into Chinese? I initially smiled at the thought, but as I toyed around with the idea, I realized how these faltering translations could capture so much of the displacement and distance I felt from my homeland. My values didn’t always overlap with my family’s; I’d been exposed to widely different media and experiences.
One of these experiences – my middle/high-school eating disorder, rose to the forefront of this piece. Although my anorexia originated from ballet, it also has several cultural ramifications. In America, people avoid talking about body shape and image; in China, the body is not yours, but the tongues of your relatives. “She’s too skinny – no, her hips have gotten wider – why haven’t her breasts grown yet? – are you eating fine? Your thighs are small – ” Anxiety always coils in my lungs whenever I go back to Taiping and Taiyuan, my parents’ hometowns. This year, as I recovered from my eating disorder and gained back everything I’d lost, my grandparents marveled at my body: “Look, she’s gotten fatter! – Hips haven’t grown much, but her thighs definitely have – Her waistline has thickened, that’s for sure – Look, she has breasts!”
It’s just part of our culture; it’s a sign of love and caring. Plus, as my grandparents grew up with an enormous scarcity of food, they want all their grandchildren to have flesh on their bones.
But, stepping away from the rural towns and into China’s infinitely more modernized financial centers, I couldn’t help but feel as if having a skeletal/slender body was the key to fitting into my motherland. All the businesswomen in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Xi’an were at least three sizes smaller than me.
Straddling the expectations between the various subcultures within two very different cultures is exhausting. However, this piece isn’t meant to attack either culture (as highlighted by how I flip the translations), but to simply point out how both can be extremely draining and damaging. I tried to convey the raw, relentless tirade of an eating disorder while balancing the conciseness of a menu – this was very challenging, as I’m used to purple-prosing. Choosing which foods to include here was also difficult: America was slightly easier (I just took some of the foods I allowed myself to eat) than China, which has a plethora of sugary/oily/generally unhealthier foods that I always felt guilty eating while struggling with self-image. I ended up choosing some foods from my childhood visits (grass pancakes and fried squirrel fish), along with three from Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing, the economic centers I mentioned previously.
This poem was cathartic. Did it bring some sort of closure? No - although recent years have taught me not to chase after absolutes. It is in the space between: the space between absolutes, between languages, between realities and expectations, that art is born.