THE NIGHT I TURN 17, I decide it’s time I have a boyfriend. Thus far, dating has been prohibited by Papa. My friends and I are at a club to celebrate my birthday. I’m wearing a black tank top and jeans that feel like skin, with gold glitter down the legs. On the stairs up to the club, I turn to my closest guy friend, walking behind me. I kiss him. He is a cosmos away from Captain von Trapp, but he’ll do for now. The kiss isn’t as thrilling as the fact that I initiated it.
Four months later, I decide it’s time we have sex. I go to his house wearing a light blue, flowing sundress. With honey, I’ve traced a map on my body that I’d like him to follow. It all goes very well. We date for nine months. After him, I date a few other boys in rapid succession. I move through them, they through me. The same boys who grabbed my glasses, held me in a circle, taunting and laughing as my world blurred—one by one, I date them. One by one, they love me.
I AM 17. The women hang on their poles as if held by fishing line. Men border the raised stage, their heads coming up to the women’s calves, reaching to tuck fistfuls of twenty-baht bills into spandex thongs. The audience’s eyes fall below the eyeline of the strippers, but the balance of power is solidly opposite. There is no question who works for whom, who exists according to the other’s presence, who eats according to the other’s appetite.
You and I are inside a strip club in Silom, the tangle of streets adjacent to Patpong, Bangkok’s famous red-light district, where tourists, expats, and teenage clubbers rub elbows. I’m in a black tube top and jeans, with my hair now lavender and spiked. My hair has gone through black, bleached, gold, cherry, violet, and now, violet’s sweeter sibling. The bright lights glint off my ears; I have four piercings in each. Much to Papa’s consternation, in addition to my piercings, I now have a tattoo.
The streets are littered with Thai men and women holding crude handmade signs advertising the clubs they represent, the laminate peeling at the edges of each worn poster. There are three kinds of clubs: strip clubs, brothels, and nightclubs. In this claustrophobic net of streets, all pastimes are sated. My parents know I go out with my friends, but they don’t know I slip into the darker clubs.
The strip clubs boast a variety of shows. The reps sing their glories: “Pussy show, pussy show! Come see ping-pong come out of girl vagina!”
Sometimes, while my friends are at a nightclub down the alley, I’ll duck into a show. The club next door to the one I’m in now has a circus theme. In the cast of performers, there is a little person who dresses like a monkey and has sex onstage with a woman of full height, dressed like Jane from Tarzan. After the duo is Pandora, a girl famous for exhuming all sorts of things from her vagina. The classic ping-pong ball, a plastic egg that hatches a live chick, a spinning top, a wind-up car, and finally, a balloon she blows up using her anatomy. The audience howls with laughter as she stretches her face in campy shock.
Tonight I sit inside a regular strip club, “normal” compared to its neighbors. I come to watch the audience. I stay to talk to the dancers. I ask where they’re from, why they do this, what it’s like, if they have kids, and what that is like. I ask, How long have you been in the industry? Did you ever try another vocation? Were you forced into this by a lack of opportunity and resources, or a relative who sold you?
Did you grow up thinking this was your inevitable fate, the one choice in an otherwise choiceless world?
Can a choice be considered a “choice” if it is the sole option?
This project, of asking the strippers and prostitutes for their stories, began casually, a chance conversation sparked by curiosity. Who are these men and women I have grown up around, both sensitive and desensitized to their presence? But, as the stories stack, my curiosity rises in temperature. My heart now throbs with high fever.
Some of the women and men I approach meet my questions with cold or outright anger, honed from a lifetime of being attacked by others. But most of them speak with hunger, ready and desperate to give their stories to someone they sense will receive them without judgment, and only love.
Some of the men and women were lured in by dazzling promises, lines and hooks conjured by smooth-talking fleshmongers. But the majority found this path through despair; the total absence of hope. One woman began stripping and hooking to pay a gambling debt her ex-husband accrued. He left her after she paid off his debt. Another man started prostituting at 14 because his parents evicted him for being gay. Another woman echoes fears most of them harbor: What will my children do? They were born into this life. Does that mean this, too, is their destiny?
“What would you do if you could break out of this cycle?” I ask each of them.
“I’d own a small café.”
“I’d go to college.”
“I’d run a noodle cart. I’d make pad Thai and chicken satay using my mother’s recipes.”
They detail their dreams, their faces glowing with imagined happiness. Some poeticize the gory ways they’d seek revenge on those who have subjugated them for decades. The scars they’d cut unto those who scarred them. The burns they’d brand unto those who seared them.
Dear one, there must be a reason I’m living around all this. I brim not only with enraged questions but with the urgent need to do something. Thus, I collect stories. I’ll learn my way out of these feelings, using information as my ladder to climb out of fury and helplessness. I don’t know yet how to help, but I know I’m being built by these moments.
It takes everything inside me to not condemn the jeering men who jam money into the girls’ and boys’ G-strings, studded with rhinestones and plastic pearls. Aside from myself, there are a few women in the audience, tourists who came to marvel and laugh at the display, hoarding this experience for show-and-tell back home. I despise these women with a different texture of hatred than I feel for the men.
While the audience laughs and hoots, the women and men onstage are voiceless. The stage lights paint their skin in a kaleidoscope of eerie hues. The artificial colors are the ones you find when the sun hits gasoline spilled on a street. A manmade rainbow, its gold venomous; you know not to touch it.
MOMMA AND MY BROTHER come to all my shows. After West Side Story is Into the Woods, then Hamlet, then Medea.
We perform Medea outside of school as well, all through Thailand, then in Taipei for an arts conference. I win awards. Medea is the story of a woman wooed by a foreign, visiting warrior, Jason. He terrorizes her country. He takes her, leaving destruction in his wake. Her home country disowns her. She marries Jason and births two sons.
Years later, Jason betrays her by marrying the princess of his own land. Medea is robbed of her home, identity, and dignity, and is banished from her adoptive country. Effectively orphaned, she incites her revenge: She murders the land’s king, the princess, and finally, her own two sons. She wounds and betrays Jason in the ultimate ways, although she does the same to herself simultaneously.
Medea will stop at nothing to direct and determine her fate, even if the resolution she forges is psychological suicide. While her decisions are horrifying, I marvel at her deathly conviction.
I play her for months, thrilled by the challenges of the harrowing script. Two days after my final performance I collapse during Calculus. An ambulance rushes me to the hospital. They needle and poke my arms, searching for a pulse they say is too weak to find. My mind screams, My heart is a winged thing that beats furiously. What do you mean you cannot find it?
The doctor says I’m showing signs of physical and psychological duress. I’m hospitalized for a week. It is pure sunshine. Papa didn’t watch Medea, but he does make sure I’m given the largest suite in the VIP wing.
Terrified that I might gain weight from the hospital fare, I sneak my senna tea nightly, to flush every meal. I always carry a stash in my backpack.
For this week, what I do gorge on are books. In my enormous hospital bed, I get to read books solely for myself, not as assigned for school. Nowadays, I find myself choosing books more for their authors than their characters. Each author becomes a surrogate parent. I love magical realism written by Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. This week, I read Of Love and Shadows, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera. They are all gorgeous. Both voices are full of wisdom and compassion. But ultimately, they aren’t what I’m looking for.
I am so tired. Sometimes, I feel insane; my best friend is a voice in my head. My best friend is an invisible form by the window. I nestle in the cloudlike bed, encased in wires. I raise my arm, taking in its sallow yellow. My skin is unusually thin compared to others’ and always has been. Now, brighter than ever, turquoise veins web my entire body.
Where has my heart gone? They say they cannot hear it. So I search still for that one thing, one book, one guardian that can. Like you but different, to hear and answer this and other questions. A voice that mirrors my mangled world of needles, wires, love, and loud silence, and paints it poetic. It will pull my heart from hiding. I will beat steady.
I turn my palm under the fluorescent glare. This is one page, I tell myself. The next one arrives only when this one finishes. It’ll all make sense.
I sleep, sleep, sleep.
I HAVE EMERGED from my hospital room and into one far worse.
The room is an open sore. A wet, hot, bubbling crater, with a sourness instinct screams is of illness and rot.
This room holds cancer, and cancer holds my Nana Bhai in its unforgiving jaws, refusing to loosen, let alone unclench.
He and Naan moved here for his chemotherapy for bone and lung cancer. It has been four months now. Bangkok’s hospitals are a world beyond Bangladesh’s.
This room used to be my brother’s. He moved into the fourth bedroom, previously my sister’s. She sleeps with me or my parents, depending on the evening’s mood. The room holds a queen-sized bed, a vanity, a few closets lining a wall. Adjacent to them are French windows that open onto a slim balcony, the curtains billowing meekly, humidity tiring the wind.
Nana Bhai lies on his left, facing the windows, inhaling whatever light comes in. His six-foot frame has grown cancer-thin. The late afternoon silhouettes his body, the line of his right thigh interrupted by a sharp plunge, where cancer has eaten him. A sudden valley where there shouldn’t be one, as though colossal talons have dug out a piece of him, scavenging bone and flesh.
Braided through the scent of slow decay is sweat and Prickly Heat powder, popular in hot Asian countries. It soothes the skin during extreme heat. It comes in a white tin jar with a red and green trim and silver text. You turn the top, the little holes align, the jar coughs, and wherever the powder settles, your skin tingles, instantly cooled. The powder smells of eucalyptus and mint but not the harsh medicinal mint of Tiger Balm or Vicks. The aroma is gentle. Nana Bhai has always been fond of Prickly Heat powder because of his eczema. Now, it brings small comfort for the pain, a fury-march of fire ants ripping their way through him.
Nana Bhai, my beloved wordsmith. He is too tired to write these days. He continues to hum, though, all day, a habit I’ve known as long and find as comforting as Momma’s voice. He sings “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and “The Sound of Silence.” Like his daughter, he is an unwavering romantic and optimist. The house pulses with solemnity and the nearness of death, but Nana Bhai continues to hum, smile, and speak kindly with everyone. He continues to make jokes between spasms that leave him heaving for breath, eyes rolling backward from pain. To pass the hours and distract his mind, Nana Bhai tells stories of his childhood and his time as a freedom fighter in the war. These memories are my inheritance.
Sometimes, cancer leaves Nana Bhai the Wordsmith speechless. He emits moans and whimpers when he thinks we’re out of range. Naan alternates between caring for him and resenting him, projecting onto him her rage toward the unseen forces responsible for his pain. An unfortunate but reasonable anger, her logic being love.
He is our most magnificent and gentle of giants. Some days, I can give Nana Bhai hours, reading to him, swapping tales, making him laugh. Then there are days I avoid him, in my pathetic attempt to evade the omnipresence of death and the sorrow he embodies. I hatehatehate myself on these days.
A friend asked me the other day whether or not I believe in God. Time in this family moves so painfully, I don’t have the space to consider faith. Perhaps I will once I’ve left these rooms. I trust and believe in art, myself, and you, my invisible friend, a presence sturdier than any other guardian.
I hoped the gravity of illness would soften Papa. It hasn’t. Relentless fingers pick old scabs, declaring them forever fresh with infection. Their arguments crescendo, while Nana Bhai lies dying and humming the days.
Finally, Momma confesses the truth to Nana Bhai. He looks at her, his eyes ringed with incurable grief.
“Why didn’t you tell me all these years? I’m dying now. There isn’t anything I can do.”
“I didn’t tell you, for it would hurt you to know.”
“Please take care of your behavior,” he pleads to Papa. Papa promises he will.
To Naan, Papa says, “You’ve come here to break my marriage, haven’t you?”
Through tears she replies, “I’m here because your father-in-law is dying. You are breaking this on your own.”
I AM 18. The letters are handwritten in red ink, on lined paper. Every letter of every word is capitalized, the handwriting slanting to a hard right, so uniformly erect it resembles font. I turn the pages over. The writing is double-sided, each letter three to five pages long. Precariously, they balance in my hands. The paper is thin, light peers through, but the pages sit heavy, sticky, warm like blood. A cool bitterness floods my mouth and spreads through my torso.
The letters are from my IB Psychology teacher. He writes that I’m a manipulative little girl too smart for her own good. Somehow, he’s gained access to my schedule and calls me on classroom phones while I’m in English, Calculus, Biology. He times it so that the phone rings just as I enter the room.
“I’m recording these calls,” he says.
During class he cracks lewd sexual jokes, regaling us with stories about himself gallivanting around town, with his numerous female partners, some hired, some “kept.” An avid patron of Patpong and its red-lit buffet, he has long salt-and-pepper hair down to his shoulders and a handlebar mustache he strokes often, lovingly, like a soft, furry pet. He tells us “(he) enjoys (his) women young.”
He flirts with female students. Some flirt back, feeling chosen and special, perhaps too, fearing if they didn’t respond to his flirtation, he’d penalize them with poor grades. Most of the male students idolize him, as the epitome of “cool.” They frequently request his advice on women.
I’m the only student who doesn’t laugh along, who never responds to flirtation, who refuses to pander to his ego. Occasionally, I raise my voice above the chatter to say, “That was inappropriate. You’re an authority figure. You’re abusing your power.”
In his letters and calls he doesn’t commit an overt sexual advance. He is shrewd. He repeats, “You have misbehaved. You’re an insolent girl. How dare you disrespect me. It pains me that we don’t connect. You deserve to be punished.”
The innuendo is identical to the language he quotes using with his many girlfriends.
In one letter he writes, “You think you are so perfect. That face. That body. Perfect grades, too. Well, then, you need to make me happy.”
I read the words and fill with chills. He’s alluding to an annual contest held by the school newspaper. At the end of every school year, students vote to elect one another for different “awards.” Since freshman year, I’ve won “Best Body,” “Best Smile,” “Most Likely to be Famous,” and “Most Artistic.”
He has been tracking me. For years.
Therefore, although nothing explicit, this is entirely sexual. Control. Hunting. Intimidation. Power.
I report the letters and calls to the high school principal. My legs swing on the office chair, unable to touch the floor. The plastic back of the chair is cold and hard against my jutting shoulder blades, backbone, tailbone. I fiddle with an earring, pat my hair in place. It’s dark brown now, no longer spiked, but still cropped short. The principal listens intently. A large man with thinning auburn hair who also coaches our rugby team, he seems kind. I do know, though, that he is chummy with the predator. Part of a “boys club” of male colleagues, my friends and I see them sometimes in Silom, laughing over Singha beers.
I finish listing and explaining the best I can, making sure to keep my voice clinical, flat, emotionless, lest emotion be held against the veracity of my words.
“Thank you. Would you like to involve your parents?”
I reply with the plainest truth: “No. They are unavailable.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he says. We schedule another meeting for the following day. He requests I bring all the letters. I’ve stored them at home.
That evening, I approach Papa.
“The principal may call. A teacher is stalking me. He calls and sends letters.”
Papa looks at me, frowning. “Kano? Thumi kee korso?” Why? What did you do?
“I didn’t do anything, Papa. I swear.”
I hold out the letters. He looks. His upper lip curls in disdain. He shakes his head and returns to his newspaper.
I feel tiny, devastated. Stupid girl. Seek not a father you won’t find. When Momma asks for details, I give her everything. She replies with silence. I respond, “I’m handling it.”
The next day, the principal asks, “Can you think of anything that may have provoked this behavior?”
I blink, surprised. Why do any of us do anything? Because we want to.
“Maybe this makes him feel important.”
The principal nods slowly. He scribbles on his notepad. He skims the letters. He places them in a locked drawer.
Then I remember: The predator gained access to my schedule, meant to remain confidential.
“We’ll take care of this discreetly,” says the principal, leaning back in his chair, braiding his fingers over his gut. “Thank you for being quiet. You may return to class.”
I flush with horror and outrage. The architecture of this dungeon is elaborate. Systemic. The principal hasn’t taken the letters for safekeeping; he has confiscated evidence. Now, I’m to return to the monster. I leave the office. I feel like a stain. Not an ink stain from a split pen. Not a grease mark from food or the indigo left by blueberries. I’m the brown, scourged but still-visible stain of blood on a panty when you have your period and it leaks through a tampon. I feel like a stain only girls know.
I return to class, repulsed, furious. He smirks, stands a bit taller. He shakes his gray mane and touches his mustache adoringly like a penis.
When I arrive home, I go to Nana Bhai and lie down carefully on his bed. He is sleeping, his breathing a wheeze, sour, stale, like bread slowly hardening, the yeast growing wild. I watch the sun set behind the crater in his thigh, created by cancer’s wrath.
How I wish I could decide who to live, who to die.
Power only responds to power. I have none. The predator is protected. I am a stain, initially irksome, ultimately forgotten. He will spend the rest of the school year mocking me to the other students, saying I fabricated the whole story due to a girlish crush. At the end of the year, he announces he’ll take a leave of absence. He’s honored with a glowing article in the school paper celebrating his years of gracious service.
Although enraged, I’m not surprised.
Last year, I visited Egypt on a school trip, during Week Without Walls. Every minute, I could feel something perched on the periphery of my senses. I sought words, like trying to recall evasive lyrics.
The thing was absence. The ominous absence of women. Their presence, their voices, their imprint. Droves of men unspooled through the city. Rolling coils of heat. My vision was thick with men. But try as I did, I failed to see a woman. When I finally caught sight of a few, like rare, endangered birds, they were frantic, hurrying, dodging groping hands and wolfish voices. It was a population forcibly halved, one half free to walk, the other living their days behind firmly closed doors.
It is similar in Bangladesh. In both places, I felt—I feel—powerless. Were I to act or speak back to any catcaller or grabber, I’d incur harm. The only choice is to layer clothing, keep quiet, tuck down my head, and walk as quickly as possible.
In Thailand, the air throbs with the promise and easy procurement of sex. I walk holding my limbs close to myself. Here, there is a coming-of-age ritual performed by fathers and sons. When it is time, the father buys his son his first prostitute. A passage into manhood, this tradition is upheld by select men in every social class and has continued for generations.
Shock. Horror. Gasp.
But.
It is not far from home. Anyone’s home. From the red-light district to the red carpet, from pageantry to pimpdom, we have a tried-and-true pattern. A young girl, garishly visible yet rendered invisible, speaking, dancing, waving to the orders of male authority. Her voice usurped, her body itemized, her skin tattooed by the male gaze, her story written by the hands of others.
Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, being female means varying degrees of powerlessness.
It won’t be until I am half a planet and a dozen years forward that I’ll feel the full bloom of dissonant chords. For now, the days race and my riotous outcry burns my tongue. I can’t find anyone on whom to confer my unrest. So, hour after hour, I talk to you. Journal after journal, I transcribe my howl. I read, nourishing myself with the comfort of others. I scour every shelf I come across, in every home, bookstore, library, searching still for that singular book I’ve longed for since I was a child.
MOMMA GATHERS MOMENTUM. She lays out steps, preparing to leave. But then.
“I can’t be pregnant. I’m taking my 18-year-old to college soon.”
She’s alone with the doctor. He lets her two sentiments hang in the air like sibling feathers deciding where to land. Momma repeats the truer of the two reasons.
“I can’t be pregnant.”
The doctor speaks slowly. “We don’t do that here. But I have a colleague I can refer you to. Let’s run a few more tests. You have a history of ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages. One step at a time.”
Momma had two miscarriages between myself and my brother, then another between him and my sister. The doctor runs another test. The results will take a few days. She leaves reciting her gruesome prayer a third time. “I can’t be pregnant.”
The results arrive. The doctor fans them out on the desk between them, looks thoughtfully at Momma, and chooses his words carefully, letters in a game of hangman. How many have beseeched him for help, confessing their story through a handful of words?
“You aren’t pregnant,” he decides. “It’s an ectopic pregnancy. Unfortunately, we must do a laparoscopy. Would you like to tie your tubes while we’re at it?”
“Yes. Please.”
The procedures are long and excruciating. Papa drops her off in the morning, goes to work. Momma plans to take a taxi home. The ordeal proves too brutal. The doctors call the school office, the office calls my Physics class, I hail down a cab and berate the poor driver as though traffic is his fault.
I walk up and wait for the sliding doors to recognize my weight on the sensory pad. At hospitals, supermarkets, drugstores, these pads always take a few seconds to realize I’m here. I hope heaven doesn’t have one of these pads. A surprising scent of vanilla arrives just then, softening the sharp, medicinal air.
The sweet culprit is the coffee shop and bakery 20 feet away. Over the years, after every doctor’s appointment, Momma, my brother, and I would visit the café. It’s attached to the lobby and isn’t your average hospital culinary affair. Our ritual was dear. Momma would have a coffee, my brother would have a chocolate éclair, and I’d have a vanilla éclair. The chocolate éclairs were traditionally shaped. The vanilla ones, though, were the shape of a swan. The pastry for the body and wings were baked in special molds, as were the necks and heads. Tiny dips carved a delicate pattern of feathers, eyes, beak, tuft of tail. The sections were artfully pieced together, held by a cloud of vanilla custard, luscious yet light as a dream. I contemplate getting a swan for Momma, but she never ate one and I no longer do.
The doors finally open. I walk briskly to the elevator, reciting her room number like a feverish jingle.
The numbers climb in the elevator, beep, beep, beep, toward the ding. My entire life, my alarm clock has been Momma. I’ve never had or needed an actual clock. Her heartbeat is the tick-tock I knew before any other sound. Since birth, I’ve slept and woken to the sound of her voice. As a baby I’d wake from deep slumber the moment she left the room. Papa says it’s because I couldn’t hear or smell her anymore. When he tells these stories, he turns pink with joy, and I love him so much I feel dizzy. Most moms would roll their eyes, grumbling at the task of waking up teenage children. Most moms wouldn’t even bother. Not Momma though. Every morning, she says, “Reemani, Reemani, wake up.” Pulling me back from wherever I’ve been.
At night, if I fall asleep doing homework without taking out my contacts, she brings over their case and solution, lifts my head, jostles me lightly, and holds me up while I pry off my contacts.
Without her, how would I wake up every morning? How would I see? For whom would I speak?
The elevator opens to the Women’s Wing. I sprint to her room. Her door opens with a soft click and there she is, my Momma, caught for a moment without her queenly composure, looking childlike and colorless without makeup, miniscule and deflated from trauma.
“Hi, Mommani!” I feign cheer and strength.
“Hi, jaan.”
She smiles thinly, pale-lipped. The times I’ve seen her without lipstick can’t fill a hand. The sound of her voice and the Bengali word for “soul” tears me at the seams. I start crying. Our roles swiftly switch, balance returning to its known place. She retrieves her regal bearing like an ermine cape, opens her arms, and I pour into them. I gather her few things, we distribute her weight onto her legs and mine, and bid farewell the hospital. From her room to the elevator to the lobby to the taxi, her legs buckle with every step. She folds in half from the pain coursing through her, keeping determined pace with her pulse.
She grits her teeth, I grit mine. She from pain, I from fury at how little we control in life. My anger lives in an open casket tucked behind my lungs. From there it growls. When I breathe, we battle for space.
When Papa arrives home from work, she is in bed, exhausted. He says not a word. The maid makes him tea, delivered on a tray painted with roses. Biscuits, jam, the paper. He sips, eats, reads.
ASIDE FROM MY Parents’ Daughter, my other job is My Siblings’ Older Sister. This responsibility feels heavy and sweet. It curdles and clears me like lemon and its effects. Naked on the tongue, lemon awakens, the zing pleasing. Applied to milk, it sours without forgiveness.
I take my sister on girl-dates, usually to the movies and ice cream afterwards (chocolate for her, none for me). She is 7 now and so lovely. She takes ballet. Like all little girls with the chance to dance, after her lesson, she stays in her pink tutu and leotard, her hair in a pert, darling bun, spinning pirouettes and pretending to fly. And while I would invent tales and perform plays as a child, and my brother would build LEGO space stations and play with dinosaurs, she plays “Office.”
“What are you doing?” I’ll ask, seeing she has cleared her pink play-table of any teacup or crayon.
“Office,” she replies, like it’s the most obvious answer in the world. She tosses aside her dolls with open-faced scorn, and organizes and reorganizes her office supplies for hours, until they are “just right.” Pencils, erasers, notebooks, binders, and a stapler. I smile. She, our brother, and I, we all adore order.
My brother is turning 15 this year. I throw him a surprise birthday party. The cake I make is heart-shaped, double-layered, with brownie batter on the bottom, red velvet on the top. Chocolate frosting covered entirely with Twix bars and Maltesers. I don’t have a proper heart-shaped pan, but it’s easy to makeshift a heart. Bake two cakes, one in a square pan, the other in a round one. Place the square like a diamond. Cut the round one in half and place the halves like ears on the diamond. One day I’ll track down actual heart-shaped pans, but this works well for now. There is something nice about puzzling together a heart.
I love being their sister. I clutch these smuggled moments like glittery jewels, family treasures by far the most precious.
At school, I am Little Miss Perfect. Our school is one of the most prestigious in Asia. Our grounds are an architectural masterpiece. Our facilities are state of the art, each sponsored by a Fortune 500. Unocal. Nike. Coca-Cola. Our tuition is as high as some colleges’. The UN subsidizes half my brother’s and my tuition. But most of the students are the sons and daughters of tycoons, sheiks, royalty, and the nouveau riche. Cream skimmed off every nation. Dressed immaculately, many come to school in chauffeur-driven Mercedes and BMWs, or drive the cars themselves.
We are told daily that we are the promise of the future. We walk pristine hallways, clean of any errant leaf or smudge. Sparkling fountains dot the curated gardens. Each student is shinier, splashier, prettier, smarter, richer than the previous. Each is being groomed to inherit his father’s company, become a world-renowned mind, or follow in her mother’s footsteps, continuing the assembly line of flawless socialites and politicians’ wives.
More is our school’s religion. More, more, more chants this generation’s mascot, believing “More is Powerful.” We are encouraged to dream “big” and aspire toward a “rich life.”
More is the religion, and speed is the drug of choice. There are thousands of motorcycle-taxis in Bangkok and most of the drivers deal—usually pot and speed. Getting high in our town is as easy as getting a ride.
We are a city of wanton procurement, whatever one fancies. I’ve never tried speed, having seen the damage wreaked on close friends. And I haven’t tried it because I know my personality is ideal for addiction. Speed is a perfectionist’s dream drug. It enhances confidence and focus, and a person can stay awake for days. Of course it is loved. Our prestigious school breeds perfectionism.
Prestige is an illusion. Prestige comes from the Latin praestigum, meaning delusion or trick.
Parents pay a king’s ransom, and we children, the promised prestige, perform dutifully, aided by various shadowy elixirs. All part of the magician’s sleight of hand, our American-founded school hires Thai female secretaries and teaching assistants to meet Thai business and tax regulations, paying them a pittance compared to the teachers, most of whom are American and white. Very rarely, a Black teacher is hired. They stay a year, perhaps two. To maintain our impeccable reputation, through the sexism, racism, predators, and toxins, parents, teachers, and kids tend to hush things we’ve been taught are best kept silent. The quieter we become, the tighter we clutch our illusion of choice.
Mine is beauty. In a world devoted to denying me all other strongholds, beauty is the one privilege I’m permitted, thus the prestige I chase, wield, and grip for dear life. Beauty feels like lightning in my body. I surge with power. As Momma and I hobbled out of the hospital after her surgeries, she felt my ribcage knock against her torso, my collarbone hard under her hand.
“You really need to eat more. You’re killing yourself.”
She says this and I think, In this vile planet of abuse, cancer, predators, and accomplices, why would anyone willingly surrender anything that makes them protected, special, safe, and most daring of all, happy? When Momma says, “You need to treat yourself better,” I think, Like you?
In a few months, I’ll fly to America for college. In the land of the alleged free, I wonder what it is like for women.