B

cw: abuse (emotional, kind of sexual), mental illness, suicidal intentions

Here I am, doing the corniest thing for someone like me, crying over a grade for a class, a grade that I had no control over because my professor corrected one of my assignment’s to be graded worse. Academics, academics, I hate talking about my relationship with academics, because it’s like what everyone thinks of when they look at me, I bet this girl’s mom abused her to get As, because of my chink little eyes and the way I’ll never pass as anything except Asian with the capital A like I’m instantly the best in my classes. When I say I did ten APs it’s not an I’m sorry or wow that’s cool but nothing, nothing at all because of course you did, fuck you, you readers who are thinking yes of course you did, do you know how hard I worked? I got fives on all of those tests, I had a 3.96 and I bet you’re saying that it’s not a 4.0 but look, do you know why I have those? Because I worked, not because I’m smart, but because I carefully outlined every subject topic phrase word that would be important and drew graphs until I couldn’t read or look at lines anymore. Then I’d go to sleep because that was the only break I would get because more than anything, I was propelled by fear of doing worse. And beyond that, in the end, I didn’t want it at all.

But do I have to say that last sentence because I bet you thought that too, the tiger mom, really? Isn’t that fucking corny? Can’t you wait before you put those images and ideas in my head and in my mouth. I need to get this entire story out to you before you start filling yourself with those stupid stereotypes that I’ll never beat in speed because they are automatic firings of your stupid neurons that don’t know me, that don’t know anything.

In high school I didn’t have the space to be anything, I was too tired, I was run through with classes. My mom grew this hysterical fear into me because she needed to check that I wasn’t fucking up and there’s a million ways to fuck up. At one point, early on, I realized that there was no point lying to her because she would find out and the pain I’d go through then would be much more severe than the pain I’d go through now. 

The million ways to fuck up included: getting a B on an exam (did you not understand it or something, not said but implied, you stupid fucking idiot you should have prepared more), getting a B in a class (maybe you need a tutor since you can’t do it on your own and this will blow up your chances for college), leaving a condom in the trash can in my room (she said this to me, you are so stupid (for what, liking physicality?), she made me buy a plan b with my own money and take it), having too much white discharge on my underwear (it’s dirty and you’ll bleach your underwear this way), not letting her hug me, not saying I love you and meaning it enough, disagreeing with too much meanness, getting a yeast infection (were you putting your dirty fingers down there), taking a day off of school because I felt sick (what if police come by and see you at home alone as a child), having a boyfriend she didn’t like, hiding what my brother was out doing, going downstairs too late at night (she’d wake up and ask what I was doing, escaping was never an option), being too loud online, not studying enough, wanting to go to a rally, wanting to go to a party. She walked into my room and the bathroom without knocking and my computer was always downstairs because she’d be lonely if I was upstairs. 

I’d go to sleep and escape and then I’d have to go to school and all I could think about were the infinite grades that would make up my fate for the next couple hours. I didn’t ever think about escaping because that seemed worse. Where would I go, anyway? Teachers stared straight into my soul and saw nothing of value there, nothing they could relate to, that my eyes were too dark and full of nothing for anything of color to exist, just a muted reflection of their image that had no originality, not seeing me sobbing and crying in front of them begging for directions on what to do when I wanted to kill myself because I knew that it wouldn’t be possible for them to actually care about me, I just needed directions to hold onto the stair railings so I wouldn’t fling myself down into the chasm below but no they sent me to the school counselor who looked at me in my puffy eyes red from crying and asked me if I was actively trying to commit suicide. I said no, it was more like an idea, and he said in that case it was fine and I was out the door and I didn’t commit suicide because what should I have done in that case? I went home and my mom asked me why I had cried (she saw that my eyes were puffy) and I could feel her fingers in my skin in my eyes in my brain the way an informer might turn you inside out so your guts hurt in the air.

I was a little talent. Even in our community I was a little talent, maybe because I wasn’t considered pretty or elegant or cute, but especially because my father was such a little talent. He was a Seoul National University alum and even though Korean heritage usually comes through the first born men, I guess the fact that my brother was too pretty and dressed up too nice to be the representative of intelligence in our family, so other Korean mothers looked at me in my middle schooler dress code of a Minecraft shirt and yoga pants and rectangle rimmed glasses and thought, this is the first-born girl (if you can call her that) that my son needs to beat. Paranoia? No, I could feel the pressure of the eyes of mothers when I was in my gifted and talented elementary school, then middle school, then high school. Then college applications. One mother called my mom and told her rather cheerily that while she was happy that I got into Carnegie Mellon, her son had gotten into U. Penn, so while not said, she was really asking who really won? 

I wonder if her son ever tried to kill himself with how unhappy he was and if his teachers ever looked at him with the pure apathy that my teachers did. I hope he didn’t, because I knew him, and he was always nice to me, especially knowing now that his mom was probably always comparing us two. We went to the same afterschool math sessions, where he told me to sit up straighter because otherwise I’d get a permanently crooked back. I went to the taekwondo studio that his dad started and ran, that was a new-school studio where you would earn belts by being there long enough until you could ostensibly pass the test. I didn’t know of anyone who had failed a belt test. Most classes were just calisthenics with a gimmick thrown in once in a while, whatever the instructors felt like doing that day, I suppose. Sometimes it felt like his dad would favor my brother, but because of what exactly I can’t say accurately, but maybe it was his way of dealing with the fact that his son had to compete with me, taking it out on me because I really wasn’t much good at athletic feats.

But that mom’s son would poke fun at the guy who was a year older than us, Sean, by pretending to be a grumpy, old man who just needed his morning coffee and wished that these stupid kids (us) would just leave him alone and me and my brother would start giggling in line inadvertently, it was so funny, that the instructors wouldn’t yell at us and make us do push-ups (it was a new-school studio after all) but look at us and we’d get quiet until that mom’s son started up that joke again and we’d laugh and Sean would huff saying that that was nothing like him. But it kind of was. 

In junior year of college I tried to give up for real but my anxiety has always prevented me from killing myself because I hate blood and heights and pills and knives but all I would do is go to bed and get up and go to class and go to bed, so my therapist at the time said go to inpatient, even though all of the therapy work she had insisted up to this point was that I should just think more positively. I came home and sobbed and screamed into pillows and it hurt so bad to feel nothing at all and when I went outside with my mom later our old landlord who rented the house next door to us now back then was there, that bitch who would always be testing me, how would I know how your water-filled fucking ice cream scooper works and even if I did know why should I have to answer to you, is my degree so intimidating to you because I’m a girl, why don’t you ever do this to my brother, he looked at me like he saw that I could actually hurt, that someone could pierce through me and render me into a million pieces, and he almost looked sorry, for once.