I woke up one morning and my slanted eyes had turned round, which was nothing to be alarmed about. It happened to my rich cousin Sunny, whose mother thought that she was too ugly to capture a rich Chinese American prince; she was gagged, sedated and abducted—then zoomed to Japan in a private airplane to a famous round-eye plastic surgeon. Well—Sunny woke up with huge, round “Madonna” eyes. They fixed her flat nose into a perky “Little Orphan Annie” one, and while she was still deep under, they gave her new mammoth “Pamela Anderson” breasts for half price.
So when I woke up with round eyes, I was not particularly surprised. But then, I thought, hey, wait a minute, my family’s not rich. We don’t have any money to be vain. We’re immigrants who toiled in sweatshop after sweatshop. We’re the poor relations that everybody spat on. Sunny’s family gave us hand-me-downs and scraps that their Cairn Terriers didn’t want. In the fifties, they bought my father’s papers, shipped him here, and he worked as a slave cook for them in their chain of chop-suey joints for most of his life.
Of course, we were supposed to be eternally grateful. I remember one steamy episode in which my father banged his head on their giant butcher block and said, “You want grateful! You want thanks! Here, kowtow, kowtow, ten thousand years kowtow!” He banged his head so hard that he opened a gash three inches wide, and the blood streaked down his face. Such histrionics continued until he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1989.
Sometimes I look in the mirror and expect to see my father’s bloody face. But on this particularly succulent spring morning, the birds were cheeping and the dogs were barking, and in our old cracked bathroom mirror—you know, the kind that is so old that the beveled edges are yellowing—I saw the monster of my own making. This morning some Greater Mother Power had transformed me into a bona fide white girl with big round eyes. My single-creased eyelid turned double, which forced the corners that originally slanted upward to slope downward. My eyes were now as round as orbs and appeared twice as large as before. My eyeballs that were once deep brown, almost black, had suddenly lightened into a golden amber. Even my eyelashes, which were once straight and spare, became fuller and curled up against my new double lids.
I immediately felt guilty. My conscience said, “Serves you right for hating your kind, for wanting to be white. Remember that old Chinese saying, don’t wish for something too hard, you might just get it—and then, what?” There were no tell-tale signs of expensive surgery—no gauze, no swelling, no pus, no nothing. When the good lord makes a miracle, she does it seamlessly. After surgery Sunny looked like Frankenstein for about two months. She was black and blue and had huge ghastly stitches. Three months later, she was a completely new person cut out from Vogue. She had totally reinvented herself—new clothes, new friends, new attitude. She even lost her Hong Kong accent. And there she was hanging out with the in-crowd, smoking and swearing up a storm like a rich white person, like she had a piece of the American dream in her pocket. “What did you do?” I said. “Pay for your face with your soul?”
The terrible truth is that I was desperately jealous of Sunny’s new popularity. She said once, while buffing her fake nails, “We’re Americans now, we have to climb that ladder of success, keep up with the Joneses…always one up ourselves.” Well, this has become our new motto—isn’t it quaint?—“Improve ourselves Wongs.” Sunny’s family started this trickle-down effect. In the eighties, the fierce Reaganite competition and struggle for status in Sunny’s family infected ours like the plague. Every day, after my father’s death, my mother would come home from her long day’s work at the factory and scowl blankly at us. My sister and I—we were never good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. My mother was the sacrificial tree on which the next crop was supposed to flourish and bear beautiful fruit—only the present harvest was not quite ready. We were an anemic batch, or one too hard, or green and small to bring a good barter at the market. My mother would scrutinize us in her sleepy sadness and sob, then fold herself up in bed and not come out again until it was already the next morning and time for her to go to work at the factory. There was no end to her misery.
My father used to say that only in America could you reinvent yourself. Morons become presidents, fools become princes, bandits become CEOs, whores become first ladies. Of course, what he was really getting at was that my uncle, the “immoral two-bit,” four-legged thug sodomist” became a millionaire restauranteur overnight. The “golden mountain dream” had eluded my father. The great lories of gold had passed him by, and all he had left in his wretched soul was rage and envy.
My father loved to bitch and mutter and spit his venom into the giant wok of chop suey—into that great noxious swill they called Suburban Chinese American food. He would spit and swear, “Your Mother’s cunt! Your turtle’s eggs. Your dead bag of dead girl bones!” He would shovel and toss unidentified chunks of flesh and veggies into his giant sizzling wok. An unfiltered Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, rivers of sweat pouring from his greasy hair. I can still see him now, bless his dead soul, red-faced, shoveling and wokking in the great cauldron of hell, hacking and coughing up bile from his black lungs.
So on that fine, succulent spring morning in 1985, I stood in front of the mirror of my own enlightenment. After my initial shock and strange shiver of delight, I noticed that the extra epicanthic folds had made deep creases around the sockets. My eyes felt dry, I supposed, because more surface was now exposed to light. Suddenly, it occurred to me that my new eyes were not beautiful. They looked like they were in a persistent state of alarm. If my cousin had purchased the subtle “Madonna” job at the premium price, I must have had the bargain-basement “Betty Boop.”
Finally, I managed to pull myself away from the mirror to go downstairs—to ask my wise sister, Moonie, for her opinion. She said, barely looking up from her cereal, “Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s the process of assimilation. Happens to the best of us.” To me, my sister was God. Like my grandmother, she always had this “Buddhistic” attitude, like, “So what, you turned into a donkey, you’ll get over it.” She was never a team player. In fact, as a child she was always relegated to the sidelines to warm the bench. The white kids never chose her to play in their team sports. They used to tease her for being a four-eyed geek, and she didn’t give a damn. “Dodgeball, what kind a game is that? Who wants to be a moving target and get brain-damaged?”
Moonie was one of those Chinese wise-women who could climb to the apex of a mountain and see everything. Someday she will become a famous biologist or anthropologist, and the people will pay two hundred bucks a plate to hear her talk about neo-genetic theory. And she will get back at those white folks for all those years of humiliation and bench-warming by saying something utterly inane, like, “Caucasoids have more hair on their bodies because they are less evolved,” and everybody will applaud, buy her book and stand in a long line for her autograph. Afterward, they will go home and say, “I have touched the sleeve of genius.”
But I was not as self-assured as Moonie. I was a shallow nobody. I was a teenager, for God’s sake; I didn’t have any depth. It was not my station in life to see beyond my petty, personal predicament. I was always falling through the cracks, always afraid of being different. In this way, I was more like Sunny than Moonie. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be conventional. I wanted the sublime, banal package made in the mall. I wanted to be the perfect, stupid blonde girl who married the perfect stupid, blond boy next door. It was no secret that I wanted to be white, to be “accepted” by the in-crowd, to look as white as a magazine cover—I confess, in sixth grade, in the shameful privacy of my own bathroom, I used to tape my eyelids up with strong Scotch mailing tape and pretend that I was Madonna, with big round cow eyes.
Don’t worry. This is no Kafkaesque tale in which I turn into a giant cockroach and my family, the Philistines, beat me up and kill me. I had no fear of my present transformation. We know that anything can happen during adolescence: nipples turn into breasts, breasts turn into beards. Look, there is no mystery to this—at fifteen, the entire female population of the species is mired in self-hatred and most girls despise their own face and body. We all wanted to be cookie-cutter Barbies. If the dominant race had green skin and purple genitals, I would’ve wanted that too. It was not until I turned thirty-five that I finally realized that I was a beautiful Chinese woman and that my ancient features were hand-painted on the elegant Sung Dynasty scrolls. But so what, my enlightenment came too late; my self-esteem was already irreversibly damaged.
Finally, on that fateful day, Moonie suggested that I tell an adult. Mind you, this was the last resort. In my household, my father was already dead. My mother and grandmother were my guardians now. My mother was doing double shifts at an electronics firm, putting tiny chips into “motherboards.” She had just returned to work after spending three days in the hospital recovering from carpal tunnel surgery. And she was asleep, which was her favorite thing to do on Saturdays. I dared not disturb her dreams. She smiled in her sleep. I knew that it was only in her dreams that she could be happy.
So, I had to tell my grandmother, the Great Matriarch. She was the one who raised us while my parents spent most of their lives grueling at their respective sweatshops. She was, as all Chinese grandmothers are, the self-appointed keeper of our Chinese identity. She thought that we were still sojourners, that sooner or later we would improve our Cantonese and pack up our belongings, and that the Chinese from ten thousand diasporas would fly back to China like a pack of homeward geese, back to the Middle Kingdom. And there we would start over in a new Utopian village, marry yellow husbands, produce yellow children and live in eternal golden harmony.
Indeed, my grandmother would be the one to offer me a profound explanation. She was the one who knew about the transmogrification of the soul. She used to tell us stories about all kinds of magical transformations—women turned into foxes, foxes into spirits. Don’t be a jerk in this life, for you would be punished in the next by being transformed into a water-rat. She showed us pictures of a Buddhist hell where the punishment always fit the crime. If you were a liar, an ox-headed hatchet man would cut off your tongue. If you were a thief, he would cut off your hands. If you were an adulterer, he would cut off your “you know what.” What, then, would be the appropriate punishment for a girlchild who wished so hard to be accepted by white people that her beautiful slanted eyes turned round?
Right then Grandmother was asleep, snoring in her favorite armchair. See that squished gnat on her dress—that was her characteristic signature. The Great Matriarch did not believe in frivolity. I never approached her with the various hormonal problems of prepubescent girls. When I found a spot of blood on my panties, it was Moonie who bought me a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and said, “Damn, sorry, sis, but you’ve entered the world of womanhood.”
When two bullies at school beat me up and stole my lunch money, I was too ashamed to tell my grandmother. Instead, I worked an extra shift at my uncle’s restaurant and peeled shrimp to pay for the missing money, and I had to work extra hours to pay for my own lunch. I peeled so much shrimp that my allergic fingers blew up like pink pork sausages. Finally, I told my pugilistic father. He immediately took time off from work and drove me to the hospital to get my fingers drained. They also gave me adrenaline shots that made me dizzy. My father then went to school and grabbed my vice principal, Mr. Comely, by his lapels and loudly urged in broken English that those boys be suspended. “Moogoogaipan, you want Moogoogaipan? You get Moogoogaipan.” For some reason, my father just happened to have a giant spatula in his pocket that day. He pulled it out and started slapping Mr. Comely with it, making tiny red marks the size of chop-suey chunks all over his face. And there I was, a typical stupid teenager, not proud that my father was trying to defend me, but embarrassed that my geek-father would actually use a spatula as a deadly weapon. It would be a different story had he brandished a machete or a sawed-off assault rifle. What a sight, my father waving his spatula and Mr. Comely backing up, defending himself with a wooden chair and his gold Cross pen.
The boys were never suspended. But suddenly, I was given a reprieve. After all, it’s not divine intervention but fate that is the catalyst for change. Within the next few months, everybody sort of—poof—disappeared. My father died shortly after that episode; my mother finally gave up on the American dream and bought a one-way ticket back to Hong Kong. Mr. Comely was transferred because of his alcoholism; one bully went to prison; the other moved to Pittsburgh with his divorced mother. (And who could’ve predicted that I would someday end up graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School to become a Yuppie trial attorney for the Small Business Administration? Or that after several failed marriages, I would marry a Filipino activist I met at a coffee shop, a man whose radical ideas would transform my whole life? Or that I would end up devoting my life’s work to writing poetry and defending the wives of assassinated guerrillas in Luzon? Of course, this is another story.)
Well, anyway, in my terrible childhood, life was humiliation after humiliation and tiptoeing around that sleeping mother and grandmother. My grandmother had survived a series of natural and man-made disasters: the Sino-Japanese War, famine, drought, flood, torrential rain, bloodthirsty warlords, the Nationalist debacle, Communist tyranny, even a long bout of the cholera epidemic. Now that she was eighty-five and had survived everything and reached the shores of safety, it was the ripe time for her to finally enjoy peace, her grandchildren and napping in her favorite armchair. I was worried that she would have a heart attack upon seeing me. I climbed up onto her lofty lap and said, “Granny, look what happened to my eyes, they’ve turned round, I am sorry for having been remiss, for being a bad child. For wishing the unthinkable. For dreaming the unmentionable.”
She looked at me with her complacent Buddha smile. “So, girlchild, now you are a round-eye. When you were born you were such a beautiful princess, more beautiful than Yang Kuei Fei. You had skin of jade and slanted moon-like eyes. Our ancestors were proud to behold such a plum blossom. Now, look what has happened to you, my little snake-in-the-grass, my little damselfly, how you have changed.”
Her compassionate words touched me deeply and I began to cry from my little round eyes. The tears were especially bulbous and fat. She caressed me all night long, telling me ancient revenge tales and fables, where the tiniest girl always ended up victorious. We munched on baggies of glazed ginger and dried plums. No mention was made of my transformation. Deep in her heart, she knew that each step backward would only mean regret—the vector goes in only one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest, the ten thousand diasporas will never coagulate—there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom.