I AM 10. After my family, I love books the most. I can read anywhere, anytime, ignoring noise and people. I dive, swim, almost drown in words.
My favorite books are the Anne of Green Gables set, the Sweet Valley Twins, and The Baby-Sitters Club. Their world is so sweet. I also love dystopian stories, like This Perfect Day, The Giver, 1984, and anything by Ursula Le Guin. I’ve read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” so many times, I’ve memorized it. The story of an idyllic town where the people hide a specific child. Keeping him hidden allows them their beauty and peace. The ones who dare to light the secret are banished.
The magic of books is they awaken empathy. They teach you how to feel for strangers, imaginary and real. I forget myself and live for this not-so-other person, care when they care, hurt when they hurt, love when they love.
One book I really want to read is one that feels like my life. I haven’t found it yet, a book that fits me perfectly. There are so many out there. There must be a book made for me.
Papa works very hard. He has to travel often and is always tired and anxious. He reads a lot for work. I wish he had the time to read about people as humans, though, and not as numbers. It would help him feel better and become better at feeling.
I have a journal now. I write in it almost every day. I love that this is but one day, one page, and there is always another to come. I write the way I talk to you. I write about us, Momma, Papa, my brother, about things I see. It helps me settle the hummingbirds in my mind. The more I write, the clearer I speak. I’m not pretty, so I can at least be smart. Sometimes I write fiction. Not all my stories are good; some feel like music while others like static. I carefully tear out the ones that sing to turn into books, stapled and hole-punched. Momma shows me how to braid yarn through the holes and tie bows to hold my words together. They have to be perfect.
“They don’t, Reemani.”
“Yes they do, Momma.”
She smiles, disagreeing, and you do, too, but we all know it’s futile. I’ll always want to be better. If I stay up late to write or do homework, Momma sits on our chair with a book and a cup of tea until she falls asleep. The Darjeeling turns bitter and cold. Sometimes I stay up through the night to make sure every sentence and margin is just right. In the morning, sometimes Momma is back in their room. Sometimes she’s still in our chair. Her tea will have a thin layer of dust on the surface.
Sometimes, grown-ups ask me what I write about.
“Life.”
They laugh. “What do you know about living? You’re a kid.”
I AM 11. I have four best friends now. I have a sister! Born ten years, eleven months, and two days after me, and like both her siblings, nine days before her due date. While mine is a face of frank plainness, one that will never warrant a second glance, she is born perfect, with cheeks full and pink and eyes to incite riots. I hold her, overwhelmed with love and love’s partner: the fierce resolve to keep her safe and pure for as long as possible.
On her we lavish every toy and luxury imaginable. Our lives are very different now from when I was born. Dhaka, Oahu, Bangkok, third-, first-, second-world. When my parents take her for doctor’s appointments, it’s in the glistening white Mercedes, not in a rickshaw painted with Bollywood scenes. We give her only the good emotions, like saving the last, most delicious bite for a favored friend.
My brother and I attend the same school now. It’s extremely expensive, half the tuition paid for by the UN. A few months in, right after my sister is born, I have my first period. Momma gives me a card. Written inside is “Congratulations! I love you so much and am so proud of everything you are. You’re a young lady now!”
According to the school nurse, I’m the first girl in my grade to get her period. Yay for me. I haven’t a clue what the fanfare is about. It’s absolutely awful, and it doesn’t help my already abysmal social standing. Aside from you, I have very few friends. You’re the only one I can talk to. The other kids think I’m weird. They don’t speak or think like me.
All the other girls are grouped in cliques, tightly contained and guarded. And the boys are so mean. There is nothing a boy hates as much as an ugly smart girl. The other day, one of the popular boys snatched my glasses and threw them to a waiting friend. He and his friends quickly formed a circle around me, lobbing my glasses back and forth. I spun in the middle, the world a blur.
When things like that happen—and they happen often—I don’t tell Momma or Papa. They’re too busy in each other.
It’s fine. You’re here.
Momma is sweet. She asks me often if I have made friends. I smile and reply, “I have the voice in my head.” She smiles, too, whenever I say this. She marvels every day how mature and lovely I am, even though my body and face are exploding. In Bangkok, all the women are tiny. I’m grosser and bigger by the second. I can see myself grow. It’s disgusting. I’m not chubby. I’m fatfatfat.
Regardless, I love Bangkok. The sun is always bright, except during the monsoon season. Even then, the rain is fun. Songkran is the festival of water, to wash away the past and welcome a clean future. Everyone streams into the streets like confetti to dance for days. Thai culture weaves gratitude into every festival, ritual, and holiday. It’s the beautiful, calm lightness of Buddhism mixed with a mentality of abundance. There’s a saying: “Mai pen rai.” It means Never mind, just go with the flow.
The one thing I don’t enjoy is the nightlife. It doesn’t stay confined to a time or place. Prostitutes and call girls are everywhere. Papa says, “Where there is a demand, human beings will supply.” Being an economist, it’s one of his favorite lines.
This summer, like every summer, we visit our family in Dhaka. While I love seeing our family, I hate hearing them say, “That’s not allowed.” That’s not allowed because I am a girl. In the public parks, boys and men jog, run, ride bikes, and play soccer, while girls and women attract stares and catcalls if we try. I can’t wear the same clothes I can in Bangkok, although my brother can. I have to cover my chest with a veil, although I don’t have anything that can qualify as breasts. At the market, Momma and I meet a woman whose face was melted from acid thrown by her fiancé because she wanted to continue going to college after they got engaged.
I can still talk as much as I want when around Momma’s family. But I can tell, by the way my older female relatives behave, that soon I’ll have to quiet down. In a mixed group, out of respect, decorum, and habit, men talk more, while women stay quiet, smile, nod, serve tea, and corral children. I love Bangladesh. But I hate being a girl in Bangladesh.
The second we land at Dhaka airport, I start to feel different, though it’s not the kind of foreignness I feel in Bangkok, or felt in Oahu. While I don’t look Hawaiian, Caucasian, or Thai, I don’t look Bangladeshi either. Papa’s family has Mongolian and Persian blood, while Momma’s side has Indian and Afghan. In every country, we’re ambiguous and foreign. Simply being a girl guarantees I’ll be stared at. Add in my appearance, and the staring rises in pitch.
As the car pulls away from the airport, it’s sucked into the traffic that traps the entire city in smog. Then, we meet the beggars.
Amputees. Polio survivors. Children.
Children. Children. Children. Babies on their mothers’ hips, sucking deflated breasts, clutching at their sari and hair with hands so thin and dry they look like claws. Their skeletal heads, swollen bellies, shrunken limbs, sapped of life, sear into my heart.
“Why is it like this, Papa?”
He and Momma explain it’s a cycle. Our lack of resources and education gives way to unemployment and poor family planning. Poor family planning leads to overpopulation. Overpopulation makes for poverty. Poverty births beggar children. Beggar children grow to be uneducated teenagers. Uneducated teenagers succumb to unemployment and poor family planning. It’s a relentless nightmare that feeds and breeds itself.
“That’s why education is freedom, amanjee,” says Papa.
I nod. “Thank you, Papa.”
The beggar children call us Ama, Aba, Apa, Bhaya. Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. “Eektu poisha thaan?” Spare a few coins?
The car moves in miniscule spits because of the crowds. A ten-mile drive takes four hours. During that time, choking on the stench of overrun sewers, we hear everyone’s story. They come to the window, pressing their hands, faces, bodies, hearts, hope, hunger, thirst against the pane. We hear how he was orphaned by his parents because he was the youngest of too many children. We hear how she was sold to a brothel and ran away to live in the streets. She sells jasmine garlands now, will you please buy one for two cents? We hear how her husband died in a garment factory fire; now she and her children are homeless. The baby on her hip is the youngest of seven. His belly is taut with parasites, and his head looks enormous on his withered, sunburnt, naked body. His head bobs on his neck as he nods off from the fatigue of trying to stay alive. Each one of these stories lands like a gash. But what is just as painful is that each one is unsurprising.
“Momma, what can we do? Can we give them money? Food? Who do we call to—”
“I’m sorry, jaan. It’s just how it is.” Her face is etched with sorrow.
It’s just how it is. The sentiment I hate most after that’s not allowed.
I love Bangladesh more with each year. We simply refuse to die. We survive despite an exhaustion that never ebbs, heat that never lifts, poverty as stubborn as tar, and floods more faithful than our leaders. When I ask Momma, “Why are some people poor while others aren’t?”, although she tries, she can’t give me an answer that makes sense enough to silence my mind. So I lay every bit of information, memory, feeling, and thought on paper, like clues to an end, trying to connect them into a constellation leading home.
Every year, we visit for at least a month, which sometimes stretches to two. Both Momma and Papa’s families live in Dhaka. We stay with Papa’s older brother and sister-in-law for a few days, but the rest is spent with Momma’s family. Naan, Nana Bhai, and my uncle and aunt. I rush to Nana Bhai like a baby turtle to the sea. Sometimes, he reads me his short stories. He has written one with me in mind, called “Shadhina.” Shadhina is my name in the story, meaning she who leads, taken from shadhinota, Bengali for independence. The tale takes place on a train. An older man tries to charm Shadhina but she holds her ground by debating every point he throws. When Nana Bhai reads, his voice curls around me like a blanket.
I love Momma’s family. Everyone is vibrant, kind, and so caring. We live the way that’s traditional in Bangladesh. All in the same apartment building. Each floor houses a different grandparent, aunt, uncle, and many cousins. It is happy, organized disorder. We snack, nap, and play on every floor, and eat guavas and mangos from our trees in the courtyard.
Traditionally, men and women live separate lives in Bangladeshi culture. At gatherings, except for the very young children, we sit split by gender. Like in the mosque. We’re separated so we don’t think about sex or get tempted to do something. It’s nonsensical; being divided by gender emphasizes the exact things that are forbidden. And it makes you think sex, flirting, and marriage are the only ways girls and boys can interact. Thankfully, Momma’s family is progressive, so we don’t sit by gender in Nana Bhai’s home.
Nana Bhai and Momma’s uncle are the two patriarchs. They have little money but are wealthy with love. Nana Bhai is so effusive with hugs and affection, for all of us. Momma’s brother, my uncle, is the same. Being near this love is the best part of our summers. Like holding my cheek to a lamp when I’m cold, to remind my skin what warmth feels like.
I love, too, that during these visits with her family, Momma gets a break. In Bangkok, Momma receives the full brunt of Papa’s moods. I hear the thunder behind doors. I see the glares searing the air. She’s always scared, always quiet. She looks tightly pinched, like an eyelash caught between forefinger and thumb before it’s allowed to become a wish.
No one knows how things are back in Bangkok. Momma doesn’t want her parents to feel afraid, sad, or like they have to do something. Divorce is utterly shameful in our culture. Besides, if she left Papa, where would we go? She’s on a spousal visa in Bangkok, doesn’t have an income, and my grandparents wouldn’t be able to take us in.
Hopefully, my sister will soften things. Papa loves her so much. We all do. Babies are easy to love. They aren’t complicated or willful.
I know Papa loves me. But he rarely hugs me anymore, and never in public. He pats, on the shoulder or head. It’s his conditioning. Still, I feel dirty, in a way that can’t be cleaned, for my mud comes from being a girl.
I have started to look more like Momma. I’m fat, she’s thin, but if I turn my head the right way in the mirror, I can see her sometimes. And my voice sounds like hers, we walk the same, we like the same things. Lately, on the days he’s happy with Momma, Papa’s happy with me. On the days he doesn’t like Momma, he doesn’t like me.
I wish there was a book that could explain Papa to me. I read authors from every country, every age, dead and alive. I’m reading A Wrinkle in Time right now, by Madeleine L’Engle. I love it madly. But I still want that one book that could hold, hear, and answer my whole heart.
When we stay with Papa’s family, I feel alien to my uncles, aunts, and cousins on this side. I can sense our mutual longing to travel the space between us and our frustration that we don’t know how. While Momma’s family is cheerful, Papa’s is very somber.
There is one cousin who makes me wary, like an approaching group of boys. He’s exactly twenty years older. A few female cousins warned me about him. “Stay away from him,” they say. They tell me what he does and has done for years. He has an eerie singsong voice and always says the same thing.
“Hello Reema, how are you-oo? What a pretty girl you are.”
I don’t know if he’s teasing, taunting, or flirting. Maybe they’re one and the same. I’ve known to stay away from him for years, to leave any room he enters, to shift away when he sits close, to break his hold when he hugs, ever since I was little, long before my other cousins told me to. You and I, we sense this. We know from whom to hide, the way farmers know to cover their crops even before storm clouds enter their sightlines. Every year I tell Momma, “Please, I don’t want to visit them. I hate it there.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Because. There’s loud silence and something else without a name.”
I’m not afraid. I’m angry. I must tell Papa what this cousin has done to others. He has to say something. I share what I know.
“Did you know he does this? He has for years.”
Papa’s upper lip curls in revulsion. Good. He will do something.
“Arey, chup,” he says. Hey, be quiet. “Boys will be boys. It happens, especially between cousins.”
I swallow something that tastes like a piece of me.
We return to Bangkok.
I DON’T TELL MOMMA. She has enough sorrow. She is silent with sorrow.
When I was younger, I’d ask, “Why can’t we leave?” I’ve stopped. My questions leach lifeblood. Each word saps energy she desperately needs.
Papa seems even angrier these days. Stressed from work, the pressure ever building as he rises higher in his field. During his moods, he leaves himself. His pupils dilate. He slips into them.
Where did you go? Where do you go? Where have you gone? Come back. I watch him, my mind howling like a trapped wind.
He moves from kindness to rage to silence with the swiftness of monsoon rains. During rare stasis, we know to remain alert. Never mistake the tiger’s stillness for calm. It is steeled concentration, taut and ready.
I have learned not to cry. It makes her sad. Furthermore, crying makes me groggy, forgetful, slow. That I can’t allow.
Papa won’t speak. Momma can’t. So I will. I must grow up to be a voice for the souls and stories silenced.
I keep reminding myself, This is one page.
I AM 12. Puberty has chewed me up, spit me out. Chubby, pimply, with glasses and frizzy hair. My birthday present is contacts. Still, I’m hardly tolerable. A South Asian nerd, I’m a leper in a school where white kids are the reigning monarchs.
My plainness has nosedived into ugly. I’m beyond hope, with the social skills of a piece of lint. At school, everyone else is pairing off. Everyone has a girlfriend or boyfriend, and of course, a best friend. I’m the only one without a person. I have you, and you know how much that means. But there’s something about touch that we all seem to need. To lean against someone, to share secrets behind cupped hands, to giggle and swap accessories and a hug. Even with you nearby, there are days I get so lonely my skin tingles. I keep telling myself, it’s okay. When I grow up, I’ll find my person.
We move into our third home in Thailand, in an elite, expat community called Nichada Thani. We boast white picket fences, imported trees, McMansions, actual mansions, and pools attached to every home. Our private school sits in the middle, the sparkling nucleus in our neighborhood. Our country club flaunts tennis courts, a golf course, horse stables, a machine-forged lake, beauty salons, a massage parlor, restaurants, and of course, a Starbucks. Sleek soccer moms, blonde and thin, preening on a diet of platitudes and pills, seem to be the mascots. We baffled brown-folk stick out like Troll Dolls airdropped into Barbie and Ken’s Dreamtopia.
We are a gated community, obstinately private. Armed guards at frequent check points demand neighborhood ID before entry. The manufactured, controlled, contained perfection feels less a paradise, more a human experiment. I look around, and I can feel the secrets. Instantly, I remember the Goldilocked Girls in kindergarten, so confident in their superiority, already expert bullies despite their age. I remember their exalted beauty, their prized music boxes bearing ballerinas, the four-note song. Spin, spin, tiny dancer.
Spin. We are dystopia breathing, trying desperately to emulate American suburbia. Most of Asia is obsessed with America because America means freedom and freedom is a universal longing. We think if we look and live like America, we draw closer to Lady Liberty.
I AM 13. Bangkok has its own palette of color and feeling. Our sunshine is a special shade of heaven. Our people are incredibly friendly. Our beaches are glorious—if you choose the good ones. The good ones hold pristine water, clean sands, humble resorts, gracious hosts. The bad beaches are pockmarked with American, Australian, and European tourists, mostly men, parading oiled bellies, speedos, and hired girlfriends and boyfriends. Like beached whales, they loll on the sand, scratching their crotches while their Thai lovers feed them fresh cut fruit off a satay stick.
The phrase coined by the ever-skilled tourism ministry is “Amazing Thailand.” She most certainly is.
My family and I walk through a sprawling mall. As always, I feel you nearby. It’s December so the music over the speakers are American Christmas songs. Twinkly lights and gorgeous decorations cloak the halls. The world’s been kissed with glitter.
We live inside an unwavering summer. The temperature will dip slightly in the “winter” months, turning the air simply perfect. Now is the peak season for tourists to taste our splendors. Peppered through the mall, the streets, the beaches, and, I imagine, all the clubs and hotels are couples following an unabating cliché. An older white man with a young Thai woman or a very pretty Thai man.
A huge, rotund white man in a soccer jersey leers my way. His nose is red from beer and a vicious sunburn. His clammy paw holds his temporary Thai girlfriend’s hand.
Instinctively, I move closer to Papa. I try to loop my arm through his. He recoils as if stung and puts his hand in his pocket. Frowning, he says, “Don’t do that. People will think you’re my girlfriend.”
I blink back hot, furious tears, feeling scolded but clueless to what I did to deserve rebuke. My mouth floods with something bitter. The taste lingers like a bloodstain I can’t scrub invisible.