STORIES
Angela Ming Yang, Lian Sun
Angela Ming Yang, Lian Sun
A Brief History of Apologies
Angela Ming Yang
“What is this?”
My father circled the table my mother had lugged home from a yard sale.
“It’s not square and it’s not round.”
The glass tabletop, the curved metal legs, the softened suggestion of edges and corners. They were not so soft. Over the years I would collect countless bruises from walking into this table, stubbing my toe on its base, hitting my head after picking something up.
“I like it,” my mother said. “It’s simple. It makes the room look more spacious.”
_____
Despite everything, the word silence had grown obsolete. SafetyWave was the term taught in schools, flashed across billboards, pasted onto subway train walls alongside the emergency exit instructions.
The mechanism, known for short as the Wave, worked like this: a network of satellites, which surrounded the planet, would detect the production of sound waves. The satellites would immediately produce opposite waves that cancelled out all noise on Earth.
_____
Each evening we fell into place around the table, as did our reflections upon its glass. I watched the reflections like daily installments of a TV show: a family of three eating leftovers heated and reheated, conversations winding and rewinding — weekday politics and weekend reminiscences — pool of light in a dusky house, a ritual and a comeuppance.
The first time my best friend stayed for dinner, she watched the machinery of us setting the table and heating dishes and doling food onto each other’s plates, unable to interject. After several years and countless dinners, she grew familiar enough that my parents stopped treating her as a guest and left us to wash dishes as they went to separate rooms to read the evening news.
“You always eat dinner together?” she asked. The kitchen tap ran, drowning her voice.
____
An international poll had found the citizens of the world overwhelmingly in favor of the Wave. In recent years, noise levels had surged as the world metastasized in entropy. Of course, one had to speak louder to drown out the next. The megaphones and sirens, the alarms triggering alarms, drones and motors, raw voices pitted against their own machinery.
Hospitals reported exponential increases in migraines and stress-related mental illnesses. Infinite flocks of birds, believing in a quieter land, migrated until their wings warped and gave. Rodents tunneled until they starved.
____
“You disgust me.”
And then the table was a war zone, the tomatoes nothing short of scarlet massacre and the chicken a mound of corpses. Warm. Our reflections translucent overlords of the battlefields on our plates.
So this was how politics turned into violence.
My father finished his food, one item at a time swallowing the entire battlefield. His chopsticks tinkled against the bottom of his bowl as he scooped up the last grains of rice, an inane, misfitting sound. He stood, chair shrieking against the floor, and gathered his dishes. On the table, his reflection grew smaller as he walked into the kitchen and placed the dishes in the sink, washed them, and walked outside to meet the rain.
The table shuddered as my mother slammed her hand on it. Our reflections wavered on the glass. I imagined it shattering, drawing real blood. I imagined having drawn real blood with three words.
“Why are you sitting there? Go apologize!”
He hadn’t walked far. I stood on the porch in my slippers and chose my apology with care. I’m sorry alluded to a personal regret, but in Chinese, dui bu qi simply acknowledged a disconnection. Literally, I am unable to match up with you.
“Dui bu qi,” I muttered.
Through the window, my mother motioned for me to walk up to him, to say it louder. If I were sorry, I would at least brave the rain. When my father and I returned inside, he was drenched and I was spotless. We sat back down at the table, where he began to chastise me, but stopped mid-sentence to heap cold chicken onto my plate.
“Did you have enough to eat?”
“Yeah.” I slid the plate toward him. “You have it.”
And then the table was an alter.
____
By the time the Wave shored, sign language had taken root in both schools and compulsory community classes. Grade school children learned the fastest. They molded their parents’ hands, young fingers shaping old clay, nails on skin, lips shaping phantoms.
Some sued for infringement of free speech, but no courthouses echoed back. Many avenues remained for communication and, if anything, the Wave leveled the playing field — or flattened the sand, so to say — exterminating shouting matches once and for all.
Grains of sand. Silent beach. The vacuums of rising tides.
____
“You waited.”
The mangled noodles, boated, swelling from their bowls after soaking up soup for too long.
I’d spent the afternoon with friends and eaten dinner with them when it had gotten late.
“Eat.” On the glass, my parents’ skin and eyes and voices had receded into a bitter monochrome. How long of sitting and waiting would it have taken for their reflections to disappear altogether? For them to waste into corpses, and for their corpses to waste into dust?
I wanted to rail at them, that they hadn’t needed to wait, that they could have eaten, that I would have returned anyway. My glowing reflection, breathing reflection, full-bellied, waxy, obtuse reflection.
Despite having just eaten, I ate. The noodles writhed down my throat, continued swelling in my stomach. I ate until I felt nauseous, and continued eating. Repentance at the altar, the punishment of the privileged. I ate until I grew winded and dizzy, explosive.
____
Even with the Wave, it wasn’t as though sound had became inaccessible. They brought back the speakeasies. Some served alcohol, but most served voices. Underground and heavily insulated, they were impenetrable by the satellites. Admission started expensive but lowered with competition.
Few people really went to talk. Most listened, if not to the familiar embrace of ambient conversation, then to those songs they used to hum to, or the escape of their own breaths from their lungs.
____
“Your favorites.”
The final evening before the Wave, my father made what he thought were my favorite dishes. We hovered at the table long after we’d finished eating.
“Let’s not talk politics,” I’d said, but nevertheless the conversation curdled. We yelled to make ourselves audible over the cacophony of the entire world asserting its last utterances — though it was not really the end of speech, but the end of hearing.
By then l’d long stopped arguing my father on his opinions. When I felt a spark of disagreement, I lowered my eyes from his face and forced them instead to his vigorous soundless reflection. Let him speak. Let him spend a final dinner hearing himself.
My mother noticed. “Any final words from you?” she asked.
“Uh… no.” I’d wanted to save my final words for the solitude of my room, the minutes before midnight. I was still deciding what they would be when I realized all of a sudden that I hadn’t made a single sincere apology in my entire life. The words stung like tears in my throat.
Somebody had placed the last shrimp on my plate — scrawny and a cooked-through shade of orange, eyes bulging as though it had missed its final breath of air.
It was getting too late and too loud. We stood, and the plates rattled on the table for the last time.
____
After comprehensive research, we conclude that SafetyWave has proven a success. It has eradicated millions of migraines, restored peace to our neighborhoods, and preserved global communication through our sophisticated, high technology system.
Indeed, people found new ways to speak: in the delicate, ambiguous waters of their eyes, in various levels of vehemence as they signed, in pushes and shoves on rush-hour sidewalks. In the crystals of shattered windows falling like snow. In poetry and curses blooming on pavement. In banners at silent marches shown on silent screens. In the abandonment of words altogether. In slow days spent alone. In quiet exits.
____
You’re home.
My mother brought her fingers together like a beak and touched her own face, first close to the mouth, then near her ear. The sign for home looked like two kisses on the cheek.
When I’d returned for break after my first quarter of college, I was surprised to find that the show still ran. The glass was scratched, chipped in places. And often the set was missing its third plate. But the actors remained — thinning hair, clouding eyes, hands that had learned their scripts well. What loyal actors who remained.
Angela Ming Yang
“What is this?”
My father circled the table my mother had lugged home from a yard sale.
“It’s not square and it’s not round.”
The glass tabletop, the curved metal legs, the softened suggestion of edges and corners. They were not so soft. Over the years I would collect countless bruises from walking into this table, stubbing my toe on its base, hitting my head after picking something up.
“I like it,” my mother said. “It’s simple. It makes the room look more spacious.”
_____
Despite everything, the word silence had grown obsolete. SafetyWave was the term taught in schools, flashed across billboards, pasted onto subway train walls alongside the emergency exit instructions.
The mechanism, known for short as the Wave, worked like this: a network of satellites, which surrounded the planet, would detect the production of sound waves. The satellites would immediately produce opposite waves that cancelled out all noise on Earth.
_____
Each evening we fell into place around the table, as did our reflections upon its glass. I watched the reflections like daily installments of a TV show: a family of three eating leftovers heated and reheated, conversations winding and rewinding — weekday politics and weekend reminiscences — pool of light in a dusky house, a ritual and a comeuppance.
The first time my best friend stayed for dinner, she watched the machinery of us setting the table and heating dishes and doling food onto each other’s plates, unable to interject. After several years and countless dinners, she grew familiar enough that my parents stopped treating her as a guest and left us to wash dishes as they went to separate rooms to read the evening news.
“You always eat dinner together?” she asked. The kitchen tap ran, drowning her voice.
____
An international poll had found the citizens of the world overwhelmingly in favor of the Wave. In recent years, noise levels had surged as the world metastasized in entropy. Of course, one had to speak louder to drown out the next. The megaphones and sirens, the alarms triggering alarms, drones and motors, raw voices pitted against their own machinery.
Hospitals reported exponential increases in migraines and stress-related mental illnesses. Infinite flocks of birds, believing in a quieter land, migrated until their wings warped and gave. Rodents tunneled until they starved.
____
“You disgust me.”
And then the table was a war zone, the tomatoes nothing short of scarlet massacre and the chicken a mound of corpses. Warm. Our reflections translucent overlords of the battlefields on our plates.
So this was how politics turned into violence.
My father finished his food, one item at a time swallowing the entire battlefield. His chopsticks tinkled against the bottom of his bowl as he scooped up the last grains of rice, an inane, misfitting sound. He stood, chair shrieking against the floor, and gathered his dishes. On the table, his reflection grew smaller as he walked into the kitchen and placed the dishes in the sink, washed them, and walked outside to meet the rain.
The table shuddered as my mother slammed her hand on it. Our reflections wavered on the glass. I imagined it shattering, drawing real blood. I imagined having drawn real blood with three words.
“Why are you sitting there? Go apologize!”
He hadn’t walked far. I stood on the porch in my slippers and chose my apology with care. I’m sorry alluded to a personal regret, but in Chinese, dui bu qi simply acknowledged a disconnection. Literally, I am unable to match up with you.
“Dui bu qi,” I muttered.
Through the window, my mother motioned for me to walk up to him, to say it louder. If I were sorry, I would at least brave the rain. When my father and I returned inside, he was drenched and I was spotless. We sat back down at the table, where he began to chastise me, but stopped mid-sentence to heap cold chicken onto my plate.
“Did you have enough to eat?”
“Yeah.” I slid the plate toward him. “You have it.”
And then the table was an alter.
____
By the time the Wave shored, sign language had taken root in both schools and compulsory community classes. Grade school children learned the fastest. They molded their parents’ hands, young fingers shaping old clay, nails on skin, lips shaping phantoms.
Some sued for infringement of free speech, but no courthouses echoed back. Many avenues remained for communication and, if anything, the Wave leveled the playing field — or flattened the sand, so to say — exterminating shouting matches once and for all.
Grains of sand. Silent beach. The vacuums of rising tides.
____
“You waited.”
The mangled noodles, boated, swelling from their bowls after soaking up soup for too long.
I’d spent the afternoon with friends and eaten dinner with them when it had gotten late.
“Eat.” On the glass, my parents’ skin and eyes and voices had receded into a bitter monochrome. How long of sitting and waiting would it have taken for their reflections to disappear altogether? For them to waste into corpses, and for their corpses to waste into dust?
I wanted to rail at them, that they hadn’t needed to wait, that they could have eaten, that I would have returned anyway. My glowing reflection, breathing reflection, full-bellied, waxy, obtuse reflection.
Despite having just eaten, I ate. The noodles writhed down my throat, continued swelling in my stomach. I ate until I felt nauseous, and continued eating. Repentance at the altar, the punishment of the privileged. I ate until I grew winded and dizzy, explosive.
____
Even with the Wave, it wasn’t as though sound had became inaccessible. They brought back the speakeasies. Some served alcohol, but most served voices. Underground and heavily insulated, they were impenetrable by the satellites. Admission started expensive but lowered with competition.
Few people really went to talk. Most listened, if not to the familiar embrace of ambient conversation, then to those songs they used to hum to, or the escape of their own breaths from their lungs.
____
“Your favorites.”
The final evening before the Wave, my father made what he thought were my favorite dishes. We hovered at the table long after we’d finished eating.
“Let’s not talk politics,” I’d said, but nevertheless the conversation curdled. We yelled to make ourselves audible over the cacophony of the entire world asserting its last utterances — though it was not really the end of speech, but the end of hearing.
By then l’d long stopped arguing my father on his opinions. When I felt a spark of disagreement, I lowered my eyes from his face and forced them instead to his vigorous soundless reflection. Let him speak. Let him spend a final dinner hearing himself.
My mother noticed. “Any final words from you?” she asked.
“Uh… no.” I’d wanted to save my final words for the solitude of my room, the minutes before midnight. I was still deciding what they would be when I realized all of a sudden that I hadn’t made a single sincere apology in my entire life. The words stung like tears in my throat.
Somebody had placed the last shrimp on my plate — scrawny and a cooked-through shade of orange, eyes bulging as though it had missed its final breath of air.
It was getting too late and too loud. We stood, and the plates rattled on the table for the last time.
____
After comprehensive research, we conclude that SafetyWave has proven a success. It has eradicated millions of migraines, restored peace to our neighborhoods, and preserved global communication through our sophisticated, high technology system.
Indeed, people found new ways to speak: in the delicate, ambiguous waters of their eyes, in various levels of vehemence as they signed, in pushes and shoves on rush-hour sidewalks. In the crystals of shattered windows falling like snow. In poetry and curses blooming on pavement. In banners at silent marches shown on silent screens. In the abandonment of words altogether. In slow days spent alone. In quiet exits.
____
You’re home.
My mother brought her fingers together like a beak and touched her own face, first close to the mouth, then near her ear. The sign for home looked like two kisses on the cheek.
When I’d returned for break after my first quarter of college, I was surprised to find that the show still ran. The glass was scratched, chipped in places. And often the set was missing its third plate. But the actors remained — thinning hair, clouding eyes, hands that had learned their scripts well. What loyal actors who remained.
Isolation (isolation)
Lian Sun
The last time I wrote down something honest was five months ago.
In the past 144 days, I have been stewing in an ocean of lies — empty words piling into hollow phrases, twisting into pages filled with phony, saccharine emotions, oozing with the type of fictitious plasticity that characterizes distorted memories. It didn’t take long for these words to stitch together a powdery mask over my rapidly deteriorating thoughts. And despite being well aware of the rotting that was spreading inside my chest, I grew increasingly unwilling to take off that mask for fear of revealing what’s left of my putrefied flesh. I was torn between my disgust for its fraudulent nature and my appreciation for the protection it offered.
Yet it wasn’t the shame of seeking help that chained me to this disintegrating shell. It was the fear of seeing myself in a shattered mirror and feeling, with vivid intensity, the pain that accompanies my very image. I dreaded the suffocating journey of tearing open unhealed scars to expose the raw wounds that were, by now, so intricately connected with my writing. My words grew to become daggers. Sharpened by time, they cut through fragile sutures with a harrowing elegance that sends me back to relive, in painstakingly detailed colors, the moment of my death.
Perhaps it’s my fervent need to re-experience every ordeal for the sake of producing something real that should be held culpable. And perhaps, in pursuance of authenticity, I have committed a suicidal act.
I have no doubt that behind every traumatic story is a writer brave enough to tear open their own scars as the world bears witness. I am far from being one of them. I have dug a thousand graves but am too terrified to call any of them my own. I remain the coward who, despite the desperate itch, only picks around the scabs.
It follows that the isolation as a result of this pandemic offered a perfect stage for my self torment to peak. After the panic and chaos of a twenty hour flight, I settled in for fourteen days of quarantine in a dimly-lit hotel room. Apart from a fully masked medic who took my daily temperature, the narrow door to my room was never opened. All I had was a dusty twenty-first floor window that overlooked a city of lights. By nightfall, the LED signs of my adjacent buildings would flash brilliant colors into a grayscale sky. For twelve of my fourteen days, I sat and watched those lights until dawn.
Day after day, I approached dawn with bloody eyes of exhaustion. Then, as the first rays of sunlight broke through the horizon, I would drift into the hazy, purgatoric zone between the lines of sleep and wake. Walking through the systematic routines of eating and showering in a dream-like state of confusion, I returned to consciousness only after the last glimmer of dusk had made its full retreat.
As day merged with night, time seemed to have melted into an irretrievable heap. What remained was a haunting void of loneliness that served to magnify my memories until they became blended with delusions. For hours on end, I would stare into a blank screen with a blinking cursor and wait aimlessly for a spark of ignition. I believed, for one reason or another, that a switch would magically click on inside my body. I waited for the moment when my fingers would be liberated from their catatonic states, and imagined the crushing wave of rage that would accompany the spill of boiling blood.
I was a pathetic prisoner who stood behind the bars of an unlocked cell, waiting for someone to tell me I was free to leave — because I was too afraid to open that door for myself.
And so nothing resulted from those two disastrous weeks. I tortured my mind until I felt so unproductive and useless that I could not allow myself to sleep until I passed out. I guess this has been a long-standing habit of mine — sleep deprivation is always the first punishment my brain turns to. It developed in high school and during a time when I had to wake up at five each morning for training. I was well aware that I should be resting before midnight, and yet I chose to watch the clock tic until two or three every morning. It was a haunting guilt that prevented me from closing my eyes, despite the fatigue of a full day of double practice and school. I drowned in the miserable belief that I could accomplish something more in those extra two or three hours, that I could complete just one more assignment, that I could be and should be working more… But in reality, I always ended up spending the last of my shredded energy on keeping my eyelids open, and nothing productive ever resulted from those tormenting hours.
So don’t doubt me when I say: I am that coward who tries to hide until there remains nowhere to hide. The sheep in wolf skin only runs so far before being discovered.
As you can see, I have wasted 144 days only to write such a tedious piece of unorganized thoughts. And even writing this now… I have wasted 882 words before coming to my intended purpose.
Grandma passed away in the last hour of my math final.
It was the last of all my finals. After a week full of brain-frying testing, I was more than ready to throw my hands up and tell the world that I have completed my first round of college finals. I was proud, after all, for my first ten weeks at Stanford.
My flight home was booked for four days after this last exam. I looked forward, with considerable excitement, to the four stress-free days of partying I would get to enjoy with friends. It never occurred to me that, while I bathed under a sunny California sky and biked through perfectly-trimmed palm trees, my whole family would be clustered in the narrow hallways of a hospital, waiting for the inevitable end.
For all the frequent big and small visits that my grandma has made to that hospital in recent years, it never occurred to me that this one would be the last.
In announcing the news of grandma’s hospitalization three days before that last exam, my mother’s words seemed to be miles away from disaster. But maybe it was because that was day one of finals week, maybe it was because I was so caught up in studying, and maybe it was me who chose not to register the quiver in her voice. After all, I responded with such a cruel nod.
In that last video call two days before my grandma’s death, my mother handed the phone over to her. She was wearing the typical striped clothes of hospital patients and had a plastic tube running under her nose. I remember being somewhat startled by how frail she appeared, but my brain seemed to have discarded that piece of information without ever processing it. I told grandma that I just had one exam left, and she said to me, in an urgent tone: “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine, I’m fine. Do well on your exam. Don’t worry about me.”
I never said goodbye.
On the morning of my last exam, I woke up to two missed calls from my mother and a Wechat message that reads: Would you like to change your flight to tomorrow?
At first, I was bewildered by the question. I knew it would cost an unnecessary amount to change a flight by three days, yet… Then it dawned on me. Maybe something bad had happened. Maybe...could it be...something with grandma?
I returned the call but no one answered. I tried two more times throughout that morning. The fear was somewhat fading as the time of my exam neared. She would have returned the call by now if it really was some pressing issue, I thought to myself as I opened my math notes and began studying.
I was already standing outside the lecture room when mother finally called back. I had the phone held up between my ear and shoulder as I locked my bike in place. I was annoyed, frustrated, and nervous all at once. “Why did you call me at four in the morning? Why didn’t you pick up my calls? I’m literally outside my exam room right now and you finally call me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then go and take your exam. Call me once you’re done.”
“What? No, just tell me. What did you mean by changing my flight?”
“I meant exactly what the words mean. Now go and take your exam.” She was practically yelling at me.
I felt irritated. Why was she the one yelling at me? Why is she so suddenly so agitated? I hung up and walked into my exam.
It was an easy test. I finished in less than an hour and a half. And yet I stayed for the full three hours. Out of what, I don’t, and never will know.
I sat down in Tresidder before returning the call — I was thinking of what I should buy for dinner as a treat for completing my first quarter. This time, I clearly heard the quiver in my mother’s voice.
I remember having a difficult time breathing as I biked back towards my dorm. I had my hood over my head and my arms were shaking uncontrollably.
It has always been part of that pathetic nature of mine — the inability to cry in front of others. As I went to drop off my backpack in my room, I bumped into people.
“How was your last exam?”
“Oh it was actually pretty chill! I finished like way before time was up and...omg I’m so glad to be finally free.”
Someone was playing with the gears in my brain. Someone was clogging up the tear ducts.
I had walked all the way to the far side of Lake Lagunita until I was finally able to cry. Sitting by the twisting roots of some thick tree trunk, I stared into a sky with beautiful clouds and sobbed in silence. I started playing a movie of memories inside my head.
They were so excruciatingly detailed yet hazy, so close yet untouchable all at the same time.
The months of homeschooling, the food we made together, the sewing we did...her taking me to the market to buy my first wallet, her teaching me my first Chinese characters, her bringing me a bag full of snacks when I couldn’t sleep at night...there was too much I remembered and too much I couldn’t remember.
Perhaps it’s because I promised her I will publish a book and I never did. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always prayed for her to see me go to a good university and stopped praying after that wish was fulfilled. Perhaps it’s because I should have known, as someone interested in a medical career, that when my mother told me “it’s a tear in her artery”, it was bound to become fatal.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have always been in a rush to go off to work while I was visiting her that past summer. Perhaps I should have finished all the food she prepared for me. Perhaps I should have hugged her tighter when I left.
Perhaps I should have questioned my mother with more patience and paid better attention to her clues. Perhaps I should have walked out of that exam right after I was done instead of waiting for one more hour. Perhaps I would have had a chance to say farewell.
It angered me that every person in my family knew the fatality of her situation from the first day of her hospitalization except for me. It angered me that they all thought a math exam was worth more than my goodbye, and that it was enough to deprive me of my rights to know. It angered me that I was so close to going home, and yet she couldn’t wait for me.
The funeral happened without my presence — I wouldn’t make it in time even with a flight change. And so those four days became a tortuous journey of counting seconds. I knew the rest of my family were busy preparing for the funeral and so I didn’t bother my parents with phone calls. The extreme loneliness that filled me had nowhere to be spilled.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone around me. I was in so much pain and yet I remained so incompetent at expressing my anguish. I detested the sort of pity I would receive in exchange. It never helped to hear people tell me “It’s okay”, because it really is not. Not in the moment of things. But then, some things are not okay and they never will be, and I will learn to live with that. I knew, of course, that my friends were more than willing to listen to me and help share the burden. But I just could not do it — not until months later.
I remember calling my sister on the day of the funeral. I was at a breaking point by then.
I sat in a corner of Flomo’s stairway and blurted out all the guilt that was consuming me. I knew my sister had an even closer relationship with grandma, and yet she sounded so calm and reassuring.
I remember bumping into a friend after that call. I had my hood on again and was frantically wiping my face clear of tears.
It really isn’t that I try to hide it when I am surrounded by friends. I genuinely am happy when I am with them. It’s returning to an empty room to be left alone that tears my world into pieces.
It was this way during high school as well. I would be laughing my head off during practice and at school, but returning to my bed at home would bring a terrifying sense of sadness. During those years, I cut through skin to calm myself because that seemed like the only way to let loose the poison in my blood. I needed the physical pain to take me away from the crushing emotional torment, and I relied on the sight of spilled blood like a sedative drug. I grew increasingly addicted to the drops of crimson flowing down my wrist and to the rusty blade hidden in my drawer.
But then I went to school with sports tape wrapped around and acted like I twisted my wrist by accident. There were people who, in entirely unintentional and joking ways, asked if I had cut myself. Those were the only moments where I would, for a split second, fall back into my despairing reality.
I later turned the blade towards my legs because I found that I had developed a need for deeper cutting. But I was not suicidal. In fact, it was only because I was afraid of cutting too deep on my wrists.
I never called it depression. I begged my mother to take me to our family doctor but never got the nerve to open up and confess my actions. The doctor was always in such a rush and...just didn’t seem like someone who would appreciate my unnecessarily long stories.
My sadness came in unpredictable waves. To leave out excessive details, it eventually calmed towards the end of junior year. I remember being extremely happy in the summer of 2018.
This phase of self-harm went through virtually the same exact process as my prior eating disorder. I was fourteen then, and on the peak of my athletic career. I don’t know exactly why I started being concerned with food, just like how I never knew why I was engulfed by sadness two years later. But all of a sudden, I stopped eating.
The purging came a while later. By then, I have already lost my period and was drifting through school in a chronically fatigued state. I would attend practice but developed extremely painful cramps that caused me to lose control of my legs. And on the most miserable days, I was binge eating.
Then there was a phase where I could not eat without purging. I would stuff cake down my throat only to find myself staring down the toilet moments later. It almost seemed like I was obsessed with making myself vomit.
These actions, of course, happened in secret. I told my coaches that I had an iron deficiency, I told my mother that I don’t feel hungry, and I told myself that I was healthy.
There used to be people who would bewilderingly ask my teammates: “What happened to her? Didn’t she used to be like...really fast?” My teammates would explain that I suffered from some type of injury. But no one could really say what sort of “injury” it was that suddenly knocked me down from all those podium tops, and neither could I.
Those questions used to hurt me quite a bit. But as time went by, I started missing them. After all, they proved that people still remembered me for my accomplishments.
I guess I never really returned to anywhere near the height I was at before. I felt like a warrior who, after winning countless battles, suddenly lost all ability and passion to fight. For the two years that followed my near 30lb weight drop, I was unable to step into competitions without being accompanied by a crushing dread.
I never quite know when exactly these phases start, and I never keep track of when they end. So when my best friend from high school texted to ask how I “walked out of it” just a few months ago, I had no idea what to say. Did I really walk out of all that? What does it even mean to “walk out”? Maybe it just happens so that in this moment I am not under the water, but who knows when something might just pull me down again. It’s a timed bomb that I carry with me.
That friend was sent to the hospital later that day for a suicide related anxiety attack. Once again, I was consumed by anger and guilt.
I was on the verge of a fever that day and just happened to be in Vaden myself for some medication. The very act of biking there had taken away all my energy. Her text hit me with a wave of exhaustion, bringing back unwanted memories during this particularly tiring time.
Despite being available, I made an excuse for being in class and told her I would call later that night. When I did get around to calling, no one picked up.
Later, I learned from another friend that she had been taken to the hospital. The fact that I was probably the last person she turned to in the peak of her despair...the fact that I, of all people, should know and understand the agony she must have felt...the fact that she may have burnt that last straw of hope in reaching out to me...and the fact that I brushed her off with an excuse haunted me to the core.
My freshman year is so far from being ideal. My grandma’s passing and my best friend’s suicide attempt were just two of the events that happened outside of my jolly Stanford bubble.
In November, my great aunt passed away due to surgical complications. She was the closest distant relative I had while growing up because our families were neighbors for twenty years.
Approaching the end of January and my nineteenth birthday, my grandpa was once again diagnosed with cancer. And it just so happens that his surgery coincided with the outbreak of COVID-19.
I felt so powerless in all these situations. Being across the globe, I could not even summon the courage to make necessary phone calls. Hearing my family members’ voices was enough to send me through a tunnel of sadness.
I have been meaning to write all these things down for a long time now, but every previous attempt has ended with a rollercoaster of emotions that had me curled up in pain. So believe me when I say: I have tears running down my face. I don’t really know the purpose of this long and depressing rant, and I don’t mean to conclude it with anything insightful or uplifting. This is, truly and most honestly, how I feel about these past months of my life.
And it was not easy. A couple of sentences here cannot come close to covering the endless amount of emotional grief and pain I have experienced. Describing what once appeared to me like a whole world as a simple “phase” of my life does not mean I have forgotten how it once felt. Writing is powerful, but it is never enough.
Call me a pessimist, whatever. Call me stubborn, dramatic, stupid, delusional… Call me what you like. But know that, while there surely are mental health battles that end with beautiful conclusions about life and love, there are also many that don’t.
It doesn’t always have to. And I don’t want to write down lies just so my story can carry some warmhearted moral message. I wouldn’t go so far as calling it false hope, but I know there are people who will read those lines and ask: but how come I never got better?
For some people, winning is the ability to surround themselves with happiness and joy. But for others, resisting the agonizing urge to pick up a blade already demands a backbreaking amount of courage and determination. One person’s starting point may be the finishing line of another, and that’s just how life turns out to be.
In a world where only successful battles are praised, there seems to be a need to remain happy, okay, sane, confident… I am writing this today to tell myself and whoever reading this, if any at all: I am not okay. But that is okay.
It is okay because I can finally tear off the mask that has been suffocating me for all this time; it is okay because I have endured the pain and clawed through my scars to write these words down; and it is okay because despite all my right and wrongs opinions, at least I will be able to look back at these words and know that it was really me — and not some counterfeit puppet version of me — who wrote them down.
Lian Sun
The last time I wrote down something honest was five months ago.
In the past 144 days, I have been stewing in an ocean of lies — empty words piling into hollow phrases, twisting into pages filled with phony, saccharine emotions, oozing with the type of fictitious plasticity that characterizes distorted memories. It didn’t take long for these words to stitch together a powdery mask over my rapidly deteriorating thoughts. And despite being well aware of the rotting that was spreading inside my chest, I grew increasingly unwilling to take off that mask for fear of revealing what’s left of my putrefied flesh. I was torn between my disgust for its fraudulent nature and my appreciation for the protection it offered.
Yet it wasn’t the shame of seeking help that chained me to this disintegrating shell. It was the fear of seeing myself in a shattered mirror and feeling, with vivid intensity, the pain that accompanies my very image. I dreaded the suffocating journey of tearing open unhealed scars to expose the raw wounds that were, by now, so intricately connected with my writing. My words grew to become daggers. Sharpened by time, they cut through fragile sutures with a harrowing elegance that sends me back to relive, in painstakingly detailed colors, the moment of my death.
Perhaps it’s my fervent need to re-experience every ordeal for the sake of producing something real that should be held culpable. And perhaps, in pursuance of authenticity, I have committed a suicidal act.
I have no doubt that behind every traumatic story is a writer brave enough to tear open their own scars as the world bears witness. I am far from being one of them. I have dug a thousand graves but am too terrified to call any of them my own. I remain the coward who, despite the desperate itch, only picks around the scabs.
It follows that the isolation as a result of this pandemic offered a perfect stage for my self torment to peak. After the panic and chaos of a twenty hour flight, I settled in for fourteen days of quarantine in a dimly-lit hotel room. Apart from a fully masked medic who took my daily temperature, the narrow door to my room was never opened. All I had was a dusty twenty-first floor window that overlooked a city of lights. By nightfall, the LED signs of my adjacent buildings would flash brilliant colors into a grayscale sky. For twelve of my fourteen days, I sat and watched those lights until dawn.
Day after day, I approached dawn with bloody eyes of exhaustion. Then, as the first rays of sunlight broke through the horizon, I would drift into the hazy, purgatoric zone between the lines of sleep and wake. Walking through the systematic routines of eating and showering in a dream-like state of confusion, I returned to consciousness only after the last glimmer of dusk had made its full retreat.
As day merged with night, time seemed to have melted into an irretrievable heap. What remained was a haunting void of loneliness that served to magnify my memories until they became blended with delusions. For hours on end, I would stare into a blank screen with a blinking cursor and wait aimlessly for a spark of ignition. I believed, for one reason or another, that a switch would magically click on inside my body. I waited for the moment when my fingers would be liberated from their catatonic states, and imagined the crushing wave of rage that would accompany the spill of boiling blood.
I was a pathetic prisoner who stood behind the bars of an unlocked cell, waiting for someone to tell me I was free to leave — because I was too afraid to open that door for myself.
And so nothing resulted from those two disastrous weeks. I tortured my mind until I felt so unproductive and useless that I could not allow myself to sleep until I passed out. I guess this has been a long-standing habit of mine — sleep deprivation is always the first punishment my brain turns to. It developed in high school and during a time when I had to wake up at five each morning for training. I was well aware that I should be resting before midnight, and yet I chose to watch the clock tic until two or three every morning. It was a haunting guilt that prevented me from closing my eyes, despite the fatigue of a full day of double practice and school. I drowned in the miserable belief that I could accomplish something more in those extra two or three hours, that I could complete just one more assignment, that I could be and should be working more… But in reality, I always ended up spending the last of my shredded energy on keeping my eyelids open, and nothing productive ever resulted from those tormenting hours.
So don’t doubt me when I say: I am that coward who tries to hide until there remains nowhere to hide. The sheep in wolf skin only runs so far before being discovered.
As you can see, I have wasted 144 days only to write such a tedious piece of unorganized thoughts. And even writing this now… I have wasted 882 words before coming to my intended purpose.
Grandma passed away in the last hour of my math final.
It was the last of all my finals. After a week full of brain-frying testing, I was more than ready to throw my hands up and tell the world that I have completed my first round of college finals. I was proud, after all, for my first ten weeks at Stanford.
My flight home was booked for four days after this last exam. I looked forward, with considerable excitement, to the four stress-free days of partying I would get to enjoy with friends. It never occurred to me that, while I bathed under a sunny California sky and biked through perfectly-trimmed palm trees, my whole family would be clustered in the narrow hallways of a hospital, waiting for the inevitable end.
For all the frequent big and small visits that my grandma has made to that hospital in recent years, it never occurred to me that this one would be the last.
In announcing the news of grandma’s hospitalization three days before that last exam, my mother’s words seemed to be miles away from disaster. But maybe it was because that was day one of finals week, maybe it was because I was so caught up in studying, and maybe it was me who chose not to register the quiver in her voice. After all, I responded with such a cruel nod.
In that last video call two days before my grandma’s death, my mother handed the phone over to her. She was wearing the typical striped clothes of hospital patients and had a plastic tube running under her nose. I remember being somewhat startled by how frail she appeared, but my brain seemed to have discarded that piece of information without ever processing it. I told grandma that I just had one exam left, and she said to me, in an urgent tone: “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine, I’m fine. Do well on your exam. Don’t worry about me.”
I never said goodbye.
On the morning of my last exam, I woke up to two missed calls from my mother and a Wechat message that reads: Would you like to change your flight to tomorrow?
At first, I was bewildered by the question. I knew it would cost an unnecessary amount to change a flight by three days, yet… Then it dawned on me. Maybe something bad had happened. Maybe...could it be...something with grandma?
I returned the call but no one answered. I tried two more times throughout that morning. The fear was somewhat fading as the time of my exam neared. She would have returned the call by now if it really was some pressing issue, I thought to myself as I opened my math notes and began studying.
I was already standing outside the lecture room when mother finally called back. I had the phone held up between my ear and shoulder as I locked my bike in place. I was annoyed, frustrated, and nervous all at once. “Why did you call me at four in the morning? Why didn’t you pick up my calls? I’m literally outside my exam room right now and you finally call me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then go and take your exam. Call me once you’re done.”
“What? No, just tell me. What did you mean by changing my flight?”
“I meant exactly what the words mean. Now go and take your exam.” She was practically yelling at me.
I felt irritated. Why was she the one yelling at me? Why is she so suddenly so agitated? I hung up and walked into my exam.
It was an easy test. I finished in less than an hour and a half. And yet I stayed for the full three hours. Out of what, I don’t, and never will know.
I sat down in Tresidder before returning the call — I was thinking of what I should buy for dinner as a treat for completing my first quarter. This time, I clearly heard the quiver in my mother’s voice.
I remember having a difficult time breathing as I biked back towards my dorm. I had my hood over my head and my arms were shaking uncontrollably.
It has always been part of that pathetic nature of mine — the inability to cry in front of others. As I went to drop off my backpack in my room, I bumped into people.
“How was your last exam?”
“Oh it was actually pretty chill! I finished like way before time was up and...omg I’m so glad to be finally free.”
Someone was playing with the gears in my brain. Someone was clogging up the tear ducts.
I had walked all the way to the far side of Lake Lagunita until I was finally able to cry. Sitting by the twisting roots of some thick tree trunk, I stared into a sky with beautiful clouds and sobbed in silence. I started playing a movie of memories inside my head.
They were so excruciatingly detailed yet hazy, so close yet untouchable all at the same time.
The months of homeschooling, the food we made together, the sewing we did...her taking me to the market to buy my first wallet, her teaching me my first Chinese characters, her bringing me a bag full of snacks when I couldn’t sleep at night...there was too much I remembered and too much I couldn’t remember.
Perhaps it’s because I promised her I will publish a book and I never did. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always prayed for her to see me go to a good university and stopped praying after that wish was fulfilled. Perhaps it’s because I should have known, as someone interested in a medical career, that when my mother told me “it’s a tear in her artery”, it was bound to become fatal.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have always been in a rush to go off to work while I was visiting her that past summer. Perhaps I should have finished all the food she prepared for me. Perhaps I should have hugged her tighter when I left.
Perhaps I should have questioned my mother with more patience and paid better attention to her clues. Perhaps I should have walked out of that exam right after I was done instead of waiting for one more hour. Perhaps I would have had a chance to say farewell.
It angered me that every person in my family knew the fatality of her situation from the first day of her hospitalization except for me. It angered me that they all thought a math exam was worth more than my goodbye, and that it was enough to deprive me of my rights to know. It angered me that I was so close to going home, and yet she couldn’t wait for me.
The funeral happened without my presence — I wouldn’t make it in time even with a flight change. And so those four days became a tortuous journey of counting seconds. I knew the rest of my family were busy preparing for the funeral and so I didn’t bother my parents with phone calls. The extreme loneliness that filled me had nowhere to be spilled.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone around me. I was in so much pain and yet I remained so incompetent at expressing my anguish. I detested the sort of pity I would receive in exchange. It never helped to hear people tell me “It’s okay”, because it really is not. Not in the moment of things. But then, some things are not okay and they never will be, and I will learn to live with that. I knew, of course, that my friends were more than willing to listen to me and help share the burden. But I just could not do it — not until months later.
I remember calling my sister on the day of the funeral. I was at a breaking point by then.
I sat in a corner of Flomo’s stairway and blurted out all the guilt that was consuming me. I knew my sister had an even closer relationship with grandma, and yet she sounded so calm and reassuring.
I remember bumping into a friend after that call. I had my hood on again and was frantically wiping my face clear of tears.
It really isn’t that I try to hide it when I am surrounded by friends. I genuinely am happy when I am with them. It’s returning to an empty room to be left alone that tears my world into pieces.
It was this way during high school as well. I would be laughing my head off during practice and at school, but returning to my bed at home would bring a terrifying sense of sadness. During those years, I cut through skin to calm myself because that seemed like the only way to let loose the poison in my blood. I needed the physical pain to take me away from the crushing emotional torment, and I relied on the sight of spilled blood like a sedative drug. I grew increasingly addicted to the drops of crimson flowing down my wrist and to the rusty blade hidden in my drawer.
But then I went to school with sports tape wrapped around and acted like I twisted my wrist by accident. There were people who, in entirely unintentional and joking ways, asked if I had cut myself. Those were the only moments where I would, for a split second, fall back into my despairing reality.
I later turned the blade towards my legs because I found that I had developed a need for deeper cutting. But I was not suicidal. In fact, it was only because I was afraid of cutting too deep on my wrists.
I never called it depression. I begged my mother to take me to our family doctor but never got the nerve to open up and confess my actions. The doctor was always in such a rush and...just didn’t seem like someone who would appreciate my unnecessarily long stories.
My sadness came in unpredictable waves. To leave out excessive details, it eventually calmed towards the end of junior year. I remember being extremely happy in the summer of 2018.
This phase of self-harm went through virtually the same exact process as my prior eating disorder. I was fourteen then, and on the peak of my athletic career. I don’t know exactly why I started being concerned with food, just like how I never knew why I was engulfed by sadness two years later. But all of a sudden, I stopped eating.
The purging came a while later. By then, I have already lost my period and was drifting through school in a chronically fatigued state. I would attend practice but developed extremely painful cramps that caused me to lose control of my legs. And on the most miserable days, I was binge eating.
Then there was a phase where I could not eat without purging. I would stuff cake down my throat only to find myself staring down the toilet moments later. It almost seemed like I was obsessed with making myself vomit.
These actions, of course, happened in secret. I told my coaches that I had an iron deficiency, I told my mother that I don’t feel hungry, and I told myself that I was healthy.
There used to be people who would bewilderingly ask my teammates: “What happened to her? Didn’t she used to be like...really fast?” My teammates would explain that I suffered from some type of injury. But no one could really say what sort of “injury” it was that suddenly knocked me down from all those podium tops, and neither could I.
Those questions used to hurt me quite a bit. But as time went by, I started missing them. After all, they proved that people still remembered me for my accomplishments.
I guess I never really returned to anywhere near the height I was at before. I felt like a warrior who, after winning countless battles, suddenly lost all ability and passion to fight. For the two years that followed my near 30lb weight drop, I was unable to step into competitions without being accompanied by a crushing dread.
I never quite know when exactly these phases start, and I never keep track of when they end. So when my best friend from high school texted to ask how I “walked out of it” just a few months ago, I had no idea what to say. Did I really walk out of all that? What does it even mean to “walk out”? Maybe it just happens so that in this moment I am not under the water, but who knows when something might just pull me down again. It’s a timed bomb that I carry with me.
That friend was sent to the hospital later that day for a suicide related anxiety attack. Once again, I was consumed by anger and guilt.
I was on the verge of a fever that day and just happened to be in Vaden myself for some medication. The very act of biking there had taken away all my energy. Her text hit me with a wave of exhaustion, bringing back unwanted memories during this particularly tiring time.
Despite being available, I made an excuse for being in class and told her I would call later that night. When I did get around to calling, no one picked up.
Later, I learned from another friend that she had been taken to the hospital. The fact that I was probably the last person she turned to in the peak of her despair...the fact that I, of all people, should know and understand the agony she must have felt...the fact that she may have burnt that last straw of hope in reaching out to me...and the fact that I brushed her off with an excuse haunted me to the core.
My freshman year is so far from being ideal. My grandma’s passing and my best friend’s suicide attempt were just two of the events that happened outside of my jolly Stanford bubble.
In November, my great aunt passed away due to surgical complications. She was the closest distant relative I had while growing up because our families were neighbors for twenty years.
Approaching the end of January and my nineteenth birthday, my grandpa was once again diagnosed with cancer. And it just so happens that his surgery coincided with the outbreak of COVID-19.
I felt so powerless in all these situations. Being across the globe, I could not even summon the courage to make necessary phone calls. Hearing my family members’ voices was enough to send me through a tunnel of sadness.
I have been meaning to write all these things down for a long time now, but every previous attempt has ended with a rollercoaster of emotions that had me curled up in pain. So believe me when I say: I have tears running down my face. I don’t really know the purpose of this long and depressing rant, and I don’t mean to conclude it with anything insightful or uplifting. This is, truly and most honestly, how I feel about these past months of my life.
And it was not easy. A couple of sentences here cannot come close to covering the endless amount of emotional grief and pain I have experienced. Describing what once appeared to me like a whole world as a simple “phase” of my life does not mean I have forgotten how it once felt. Writing is powerful, but it is never enough.
Call me a pessimist, whatever. Call me stubborn, dramatic, stupid, delusional… Call me what you like. But know that, while there surely are mental health battles that end with beautiful conclusions about life and love, there are also many that don’t.
It doesn’t always have to. And I don’t want to write down lies just so my story can carry some warmhearted moral message. I wouldn’t go so far as calling it false hope, but I know there are people who will read those lines and ask: but how come I never got better?
For some people, winning is the ability to surround themselves with happiness and joy. But for others, resisting the agonizing urge to pick up a blade already demands a backbreaking amount of courage and determination. One person’s starting point may be the finishing line of another, and that’s just how life turns out to be.
In a world where only successful battles are praised, there seems to be a need to remain happy, okay, sane, confident… I am writing this today to tell myself and whoever reading this, if any at all: I am not okay. But that is okay.
It is okay because I can finally tear off the mask that has been suffocating me for all this time; it is okay because I have endured the pain and clawed through my scars to write these words down; and it is okay because despite all my right and wrongs opinions, at least I will be able to look back at these words and know that it was really me — and not some counterfeit puppet version of me — who wrote them down.