Dolly
When Dolly was born, her name was inspired by her porcelain skin and round doe eyes. Relatives gasped in awe when they saw her, exclaiming about how large her eyes were and how pale her skin was for an Asian baby.
“She will surely turn heads with her beauty when she grows up,” her grandma proclaimed.
Her looks were further accentuated by her personality. She wasn’t a fussy baby and was excited to meet anyone and everyone. When she laughed, family and friends cooed at the dimples that indented her cheeks and her gummy smile.
“As cute as a doll,” her mother cooed. She had set aside the English book of names that she’d been looking through as soon as her gaze caught that one. “Dolly.”
In her mother’s eyes, it was perfect, a testament to her child’s good fortune.
“Dolly, what’s your favorite color?” Dolly’s kindergarten teacher asked brightly. Dolly could only stare back at her, hearing her own name but not yet understanding enough English to respond. Her name sounds rather stiff in her teacher’s voice, as opposed to her family’s affectionate nickname of Lìlì.
The teacher was holding up a chart of colors in front of her. Each splash of color was meticulously labeled in her neat handwriting, the letters big and bold. The words looked familiar, but Dolly couldn’t read them yet.
“Dolly’s so cute, she must like pink, right?” the girl next to her whispered too loudly to be secretive, but their teacher let it go.
Like an automatic reaction to hearing her name, Dolly swung her head towards her, her short bob flying with the movement.
Dolly had her legs folded on the rug in the criss-cross their teacher had shown them, but this girl held her knees to her chest and leaned into Dolly’s space. They were so close together that Dolly had no choice but to study the girl’s blue eyes. They were a strange color, darker than the sky on clear days yet lighter than crashing ocean waves. From some angles, they almost looked gray.
What was her name again?
“Right?” the girl repeated. Dolly tilted her head slightly, which the girl took as a nod. “Dolly likes pink!”
“Alright! That’s one for pink!” As their teacher wrote her name on the board in pink marker, Dolly noticed that there were no names in pink yet.
“What about you, Jill?”
“Mine is blue!”
And the girl with blue eyes joined the ever growing list of children written in blue.
Later on in elementary school, Dolly developed into a stereotypical bookworm. The reputation pinned on her was cute yet quiet, the girl who would always be found in the library.
it was more out of necessity than anything. Dolly would have been exhilarated to play with her classmates, but the barrage of English as they decided the rules of their games was overwhelming. And so she holed herself up in the library, eyes scanning over new vocabulary, determined to catch up. The language and cultural struggles she faced in real life all melted away between the pages of her favorite fantasy novels, where the characters’ problems were more along the lines of having to save the world.
With her constant reading, she was the top of her English literature and language classes throughout middle and high school. Her essays won prizes, and her poetry invoked such emotion that others were shocked that such a naive looking girl was behind them. At the time, it was her proudest accomplishment. What had originally been her weakness as a result of growing up in a Chinese-speaking family had become her strength. To her, it was a sign that she had overcome the language barrier and her need for silence. Had she finally made it?
“Is English your first language?” the editor asked pleasantly. Her blond hair was neatly curled, her smile a bit too large, her foot tapping the ground rapidly.
Dolly didn’t even know how many interviews she had had before this one. Many of her friends were surprised that she hadn’t received a single job offer yet, despite her excellent credentials. Dolly could pretty much call herself an expert at interviews now, but she was taken aback by this sudden question, not even a few minutes in.
She blinked, at a loss for words, and watched as the woman before her scribbled something down on her notepad before she even had a chance to answer. Dolly hurried to respond, explaining that while no, English was not her first language, she had learned it at a very young age. Maybe a bit later than her peers, but she definitely considered herself to be a native speaker.
The editor hummed. “Hmm, alright. It’s nothing, just that fluency is important with this position.”
Dolly didn’t receive a call back from this editor either, and she slowly began to realize that her silence did not stem just from her language.
Was it even a problem she could fix, a barrier she could overcome? Or was it ingrained in her DNA, her sleek dark hair, her “exotic” eyes?
In the corner of her childhood closet, collecting dust, is a stack of notebooks. Some are almost full, and some are half empty. Her mother has kept each one she scribbled in since she was young, believing that any with even a single blank page could still be used again.
The content of the ones on the very bottom of the pile start off basic: the alphabet copied over and over again, the result of Dolly trying to keep up with her classmates who didn’t grow up in bilingual households. These move on to messy diary entries, something that every kid has tried, enticed by the idea of creating fond memories and keepsakes to look back on when they grow older. Going up the pile, as her handwriting becomes neater and her vocabulary more complex, so does the narrative embedded in the pages: page after page of short stories inspired by the pain derived from her most moments of alienation, poetry written in her most eloquent phases, novels born from the dream lives she could have led.
Dolly, an Asian woman silenced by the world, picks up the top notebook. Opening it up to the first fresh page, and undeterred by the unfinished sentence on the previous one, she touches her pen to the paper.
And finally, when she writes—she speaks.