I AM 23. My hand pulls at the plastic ring attaching me to the subway rail. My wrist grows sore with each tug as the train lurches, burping noisily without rhythm or apology. It couldn’t be more disinterested in us, this mass of bodies, compacted and caught, willingly. My palm and fingers slide along the grimy ring, the plastic soiled by countless hands, each leaving their oily imprint. I curse myself for forgetting my gloves, necessary not only for warmth but for cleanliness and peace of mind. As much as I loathe the cold, the layered protection of winter attire is much welcomed.
The man standing behind me pushes his crotch against my lower back. I’m grateful for my thick coat. Among all the clubs, predators have the most inclusive membership. They come in all forms: politicians, businessmen, lawyers, teachers, students, electricians, construction workers, old, young, white, black, brown, and everything in between. This one burrows his hard nub into me. The pressure makes me recede as far as possible, which is scant given our cramped quarters. He knows this. He revels in this, sucking it like juice spilt from a ripe bite. I turn to glare at him. He feigns nonchalance.
The doors open. A mouthful of us spit onto the platform. We scurry, spread, each person in a different stage of gritty swift. It’s rare to find a born-and-raised New Yorker. Most of us have come here with a fervent purpose, arriving on the wings of a wish. We plunge into the flow, weaving our narratives with one another’s, moving as one pulsing organism.
I emerge from underground. The crisp evening envelops me in a gulp. I don’t need to check my bearings. My pace matches the quickest foot. A few loiter, drag their feet, second-guess their direction. Not us, the urgent ones.
I make it home, now in my fifth sublet, and on the good nights (like tonight, as the man on the subway decided not to follow me home and has slipped into the past), I exhale with relief. Another day closed, and thankfully, safely. I hang my coat.
The months rifle through me like mismatched fruit in a slot machine, failing to land in line. Then, one mundane Monday, I stumble into an old colleague. An actor like myself. A friend.
“What a great surprise!” he says. “We have so much to catch up on. Dinner? Friday?”
“Sure,” I reply.
We met a few years ago in the summer between my sophomore and junior year, while working at Williamstown, the most renowned theater festival in the nation. He was a bit older than me, in graduate school at Brown. We became quick, close friends the way everyone does in a community of artists.
In the performance arts, we cultivate closeness through specific practices. For weeks or months, we do exercises crafted to foster trust and loyalty. We divulge achingly personal stories. We spend long hours rehearsing, suspended from reality, in the studio, onstage, and on the road. Therefore, by the time we perform, the audience believes we are family, siblings, lovers, or best friends. It’s our job to communicate intimacy. Thus, once two artists have worked together, we are allied for life. We are part of a larger, loving tribe, generations deep. It is understood that we don’t dishonor this.
Now, years later, he and I have run into each other in the City, the way most of us do and will. We catch sight of each other in the waiting room of a studio, the way most of us do and will. We hug with the easy affection all actors who have worked together do and will.
Dinner is wonderful. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and jeans. I’m wearing a short sundress and ballet flats. We share stories and laugh. My apartment is around the corner. I invite him up for tea. We talk and feel the attraction. He kisses me. I kiss him back. It’s all delightfully harmless.
It’s getting late. I walk him to the front door, adjacent to my bedroom.
“Good night. Thanks for a great time.”
He wants more.
He kisses me again, harder. He pushes me against the wall, my 5’4”, 105-pound frame feeling pitiful to his 5’11”, 180 pounds.
“You have to leave now.” I keep my voice light but persuasive. He tries to push me onto the bed, forcefully, not remotely playfully. I hold my ground.
“No. You have to go.”
“No,” he says, grinning, his teeth glowing in the darkness. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The air has thickened like blood clotting. Dread curls around the edges of the room, like the scent of rain before the sky slits open. He comes toward me. I back away. I breathe slowly through my nose to calm my lungs and pace my heart. My mind sifts through every case study and self-defense lesson I’ve memorized over the years. I bolster myself with tactics, ready to use them: Place one hand on each side of his head, poke hard into his eyes with my thumbs. Knee him in the groin. Bite, kick, scream. Urinate. The shock and disgust might unsettle him, letting me run.
He grabs me. I steel my body against his. I try to take his hands off me, twisting my arms and torso the way I was taught to do with assaulters. My teeth and hands tingle, eager to bite, to claw, to obey my orders.
But.
The vile truth, as bitter as bile: He is much too strong.
Somewhere nearby, I feel your heart clench, mimicking mine.
I fight with all my might, flaying like a fish caught on a hook. He keeps his hold on me, and the tussle flings us onto the bed. My left cheek is pressed against his shoulder and turned toward the wall.
My room is pink. I painted it this way, pink with a daisy-yellow trim. Growing up, I always wanted a pink room. There’s a Benjamin Moore a block down from my agent’s office. The day I signed with him, I gave myself a pink room. I’ve been trying to create something soft for myself, within the black and gray bruise that is New York.
Life is surprising. Just as crayons fail to taste like their names, paint on a wall will be much brighter than paint in a can. I envisioned a light, blush pink but ended up with pink as vivid as flesh sliced open.
Now, I’m inside a mouth.
Lining the flesh-pink walls are stacks of books, arranged in a way I think is pretty. My bedframe is lovely too, black wrought-iron in a delicate pattern of leaves and flowers, much like my tattoo on my ribcage, tucked into the small spot between my breasts. I chose that area for its sweet privacy, believing no one would see it unless invited. I found the bedframe on Craigslist. It didn’t come with a bedspring so I balance it on plywood boards.
I haven’t stopped fighting. I am still trying to wiggle out from beneath him. He’s pinned my wrists above my head, first with both his hands and then with only one hand to hold my wrists down. With the other hand he’s undone his jeans and hiked up my dress. Now, he knees apart my legs, and enters. As he jams in, I order myself to imagine that what I’m feeling is an inanimate instrument, like those found in a gynecologist’s office, which given my age, I’ve been to only thrice. Now, he grunts and grunts, his upper lip, forehead, palms, and torso growing clammy with sweat, saturating the room with his scent, musky, male, yet acutely his own. Cracking like lightning, the wooden boards break from our combined weight and exertion. The mattress tilts down like a split bone. It juts into the air at an awkward angle, shaking with each thrust. The broken boards scratch my flesh-pink walls.
“You’re just too beautiful,” he hisses between groans. Astonishing, the power of the human word. Through a meager handful of sound and suggestion, I feel guilt for being myself and fury for having it used against me. I wish to be anyone but myself, to be anything but attractive, to disappear and remain hidden, indefinitely. I wish these things and I hate him for it.
I’ve looked left, right, down, so now, I look into him. His sounds, scent, and desire have filled the room full of him, yet he has completely left. His pupils have dilated so deeply his entire eyes look black, dulled of light, dead of any humanity. I’m still repeating, “You have to go, you have to go, you have to go,” although I don’t know whom I’m referring to anymore, him or myself. I’d be grateful for either one of us to vanish. I switch to saying loudly, “No, no, no!” spitting the words like seeds that won’t take.
Here we are. This. Is. Happening.
The horrifying certainty hits me like raw steak slamming a chopping board. Perhaps because he, too, believes this is an assured acquisition, suddenly, his hold on my wrists slackens. His moment of sloth is all I need. I slip my wrists out from his hand, press the heels of my palms on his shoulders and push with all my might.
“NO,” I yell. The sudden volume and physical force are enough to shock him backward. He comes at the same time he falls. If this weren’t rape, if I weren’t terrified, if my voice weren’t hoarse from being ignored, I’d be embarrassed for him.
I scoot back until I’m against the headboard, hugging my legs to my chest. My throat is chapped. I taste blood. I must’ve bitten my tongue. It’ll hurt tomorrow. He puts on his clothes, swiftly, silently. I say it once more:
“LEAVE.”
He does. After his sentence, “You’re just too beautiful,” he hasn’t said a word.
I don’t call anyone for help. I sit in the dark for fifteen minutes, listing my options and weighing the costs of each. Speaking of this to my family would hurt me further and dishonor them. To negotiate any legal retribution for rape is a brutal ordeal. I’m here on my OPT visa, my agents will sponsor my next visa, and if I accrue enough professional credits, I can obtain a green card. Every minute and penny is devoted toward the next meal, audition, job, and rent check.
I am working so hard to live here. In addition to the grueling interrogation I can expect from most medical, police, and legal staff, and loved ones, I’m wary that if I press charges against my rapist, the legal process will cause me further injury given my Bangladeshi citizenship. The fine print of my immigrant status claims I’m entitled to the same justice as an American woman, but often, the promise of justice fails to influence the reality of justice. All the more if you are brown. All the more if you were born in a Muslim country. Similarly, the minutiae behind immigration include nothing to suggest that pressing charges against a rapist would compromise my status here, or when I file for a green card. But all it would take to endanger my life is for my case to land in the hands of that one male immigration officer who believes women should be shamed and punished for the crimes inflicted upon our bodies.
Momma’s face flashes in my mind, my storyline reflecting hers in a unforeseen way: why is it that more often than not, a woman wishing to live, work, speak, and succeed must first consider the imprint, response, and threat of the men around her, caught as we all are in architecture built and run by men?
A question that answers itself: it is the way it is because of the way and by whom it was created.
I fill with a soundless anger so complete and piercing it feels like a scream.
I cannot jeopardize my chances at staying in America. I love this country beyond words. Here I’m allowed to be who I am. I don’t have a place in Thailand. Nor in Bangladesh. I’m profoundly American. I’m independence, grit, and freedom of speech, personified. Staying here is crucial for the life I want, to be a voice for those without one. The irony is acutely painful. I won’t press charges. I have to be quiet now to be a voice for others later. The hardest fact to reconcile is that my silence allows him the liberty to do this to other women. This thought of hypothetical others brands me with guilt.
What now?
In unison, you and I answer: Get him off you.
I take a shower. Scrolling down and along the walls like the stock exchange are statistics and stories I’ve learned and lived as a girl and student. What a twisted joke. I feel the rise of tears build and with them, my heartbeat, sounding like the decisive march of soldiers, resolute and approaching. So immense grows my panic that it drowns the sound of water and sucks in my breath. I begin to choke.
Stop.
Breathe.
I breathe. This is rage and self-pity, two faces of fear. Fear, like justice, is another luxury I cannot afford.
This is my story. He is but one page. One character. I refuse to feel small, dirty, or somehow damaged. This wasn’t sex; this was assault. He is neither a man nor all men combined; he is one predator. He is a scab, and Momma taught me not to pick scabs. Especially if they are human.
Under my makeshift waterfall, I speak these words. They bloom then distill into one sentence: Only I author my life.
I step out of the water. In the mirror, I find my reflection. As it tends to, your invisible form mingles with my lines.
You are always here.
“Hello, you,” I say aloud. I tilt my head, birdlike. Our reflection follows.
I smile ruefully. I’ve been trained to smile like a movie star. Not an aspiring star but a star. A smile big, bright, and symmetrical. However, left to my own devices and late at night, my smile is wry and lopsided. You don’t seem to mind.
Now the wrecked bed. I return the wooden slats to their precarious balance, angling them on the thin lip of metal, making sure they don’t succumb to the Earth’s pull. I lift the mattress. So recently overpowered, I now smile, not from the strength in my arms, but the lack of trembling in my hands.
I sleep.
The next day I have an audition for Gossip Girl. Gossip Girl is presently the most coveted job for girls my age. More often than not, I’m asked to read for the exotic vixen. I don the requisite tight black dress, five-inch heels, and maneuver my mouth around the vapid script. No one in their right mind will believe me in these roles.
“Try a giggle,” says the casting director. “Tone down the intelligence.”
The producers nod in unison.
“We need you to be a little less.” The casting director’s hands gesture as though tamping down gravity.
I’m certain there are brilliant actresses who can achieve such feats. But I’m a mediocre pretender. Some things I cannot act.
I subway to my hostessing job and clock in a few hours. I mute my brain, play pretty, let everyone believe what they need to believe. Afterwards, I babysit for a family I met a few weeks ago. The mama is a Broadway star and daddy a tennis icon. He is as steadfast in person as he is on court. She sears through life, blazing with the audacious confidence of an enduring flame. Their firstborn is nearly 1 and will be joined soon by two other daughters, all three golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. The family resembles characters I’ve read about, never believing they might actually exist. They are that idyllic. Their apartment is the same. The first time I enter, a wondrous warmth spreads through me like hot tea renewing a body. So this is what it feels like. Home.
I balance the baby on my hip and look into her eyes, blue as the skies in sonnets. We are safe in each other. All she wants is for me to be present. I fill with a love so authentic it arrests my breath.
Mama and Daddy return home, I to my pink room. Another day arrives, followed by another, the days form into months, months into years. I don’t hear from him but I will run into him. I will run into him over the years because we are both actors, our world is tiny, and life has a harsh, wise way of doing what she does. She will give us things as provocation to die sooner, or to grow. I will read about him in the Times. I will see him at auditions. One time, I will sit across from him on the subway.
“How are you?” I will ask, looking him in the eye. In response, he will move through every shade of pale and burn. He will sputter and shake. I will refuse to break eye contact. I will smile. I will think, Have you become more than your past self?
Over time, I will meet an uncanny number of men like him. With each person, I grow better at sensing the volatility beneath the sheen. I feel it like incoming rain: he holds the dormant capability to inflict pain. Tally the encounters, and I run out of fingers and toes.
The idiom everything happens for a reason has never sat well with me. One cannot blurt “everything happens for a reason” to a person who has just lost a loved one, been raped, or been diagnosed with cancer. “Everything happens for a reason” sounds passive, as though all the power in one’s narrative has been surrendered into the hands of others, or, to life’s harsh whims and winds, to decide one’s path, destiny, identity, and sense of self.
The truth I prefer is only I assign my experiences their reasons.
I choose to believe the reason this fateful evening intercepted my path was not to destroy my faith in men, life, or my instincts. The reason this night arrived was to prove and nourish my resilience. My beauty and youth will fade. People and money will come and go. But my formidable will to live is mine evermore.
Startling. Realizing this lights something within me. For the first time in my life, I like myself.
Papa visits during a UN conference. Time and loss have softened him like butter left on a countertop. He says the City terrifies him. The pace, scale, crowds, remarks. A terrain dotted with magic unlike anywhere else, but otherwise cacophonic, putrid, and obstinately gray.
“Don’t you get scared?” he asks.
“Sometimes.”
Life is masterful at being fearsome. But dear one, you are my loyal witness. You have stayed although life has grown painful. You haven’t put me aside. You haven’t disowned me. You haven’t said, “Enough.”
For that and more, I love you.
I AM 24. It is a Saturday afternoon at the restaurant. I am alone in the office, printing menus. We are closed until dinner. It is quiet. The celebrity chef and sommelier come in. They lob a few sophomoric jokes. I make polite small talk. They take a joke too far and suddenly, I’m pinned against a wall by the chef, his mouth on mine. The sommelier laughs.
When I share the story with the guy I’m presently dating, he says, “Well, you’re just so cute and sweet.” As though that exonerates the behavior.
I report the event to the manager, who is appalled.
“What would you like to do?” he asks, fearing a lawsuit. As if I have the energy, time, and money for one.
I want the chef to publicly own his behavior and apologize. To me and the other women I know he has harassed as well. Surprisingly, he obeys. A rare win.
Sad, though, that something so little as a man apologizing is considered a win.
My love, to remain and thrive in this city, I will need to fortify my spirit.
I leave the restaurant industry to work strictly in childcare. I start practicing Buddhism. I say goodbye to any friend who leeches my lifeblood. I begin studying nutrition, and cut out gluten, dairy, and alcohol. I have never enjoyed drinking. I hate anything that compromises my mind.
I spend more hours journaling. I run longer and harder. I write “Love” on the back of my left hand, a daily reminder and medicine. I start meditating and logging gratitude lists, writing every morning the names of loved ones and the qualities I admire in myself. I write my first screenplay, about a group of wrongfully incarcerated women in a Thai prison. I use the public library to research justice systems around the world. I don’t share my writing. It feels like practice toward something else.
I read as much as I can, filling myself with the lives of others, drawing solace and strength. I search still, though, for that one author, one book, that will feel like my personal lifeline of love. More than purely love, I find myself craving kinship. As the years pass, the likelihood of ever finding that in a book grows dimmer. As the events of my strange life tally, finding a voice who may closely empathize feels increasingly impossible.
I leave the pink room and move into the next sublet, the sixth in what will be fourteen. I join a nondenominational church in Chelsea where most of the congregation is gay. The minister is a vibrant, witty lesbian. Her electric intelligence sizzles the room. There is much joy, togetherness, support, and quick and easy friendship. There’s holding of hands, praying, singing in unison. After years of not crying, here I do, holding the hands of strangers. I’m seized by sobs I cannot place, coming from a wash of years. The tears sat on the ocean floor, submerged with creatures in various stages of decay and birth. Now, they rise to the surface and break to breathe.
I weep and weep. The woman holding my left hand gives it a squeeze and turns to smile at me. She’s in her 50s, deliciously round and soft. From her billows a delicate hippy breeze of rosewood and incense, her bangles and charms tinkling as she dances to our collective song. The tall, Black man to my right pulls me to his bosom.
“There, there, sugar bean. Cry. You are okay.” His Southern drawl curls around me like caramel hugs a tart green apple.
Slowly, I feel stronger. My day is an eccentric mix of jobs. I run from auditions to babysitting to acting class to rehearsals, performing endlessly. Occasionally I’ll model, but it’s not something I actively pursue. By the time I return to my sublet, tiny and bare, the sun has long bidden the world adieu. Within these walls I shed the roles I’m hired to play and resume the work of understanding who I am. When a month is particularly grueling, I’ll remind myself, This is one chapter. It is vital. Hold steady your flame.
Auditioning is a marvelous, beastly enterprise. Every audition is a mix of a first interview with a dream boss, and a first date with a dream partner. The stakes are staggering, the investment deep. Acting is an exercise in vulnerability. I’m measured not only on experience, skill, training, and talent, but personality and soul. My ability (or inability) to impress and endear in a memorable, unique, authentic way is paramount. The better I know myself, fill into myself, and express that truth, the stronger my art.
They film me. They observe the way I walk into, command, and read the room—or fail to. They study the way I perform, sound, laugh, and hold myself. They scrutinize my body, height, weight, skin color, hair, smile, and degree and type of attractiveness.
“You’re beautiful but not too beautiful or intimidating, so you’ll appeal to a wide range of markets.”
Great. I’m easily digestible.
“But.”
There is always a clause.
“How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Okay. So you’re not short-short but you’re not tall, and you’re thin and definitely not curvy, but not skinny-thin either. You’re just . . .” the casting director trails off, waves a hand. “And you don’t look like anything particular. Where are you from? Asia? But you’re not Asian Asian. Bangladesh? Is that India? No? Bangladesh is Bangladesh? I thought you guys were darker. I mean, yeah, you’re exotic enough, but you don’t fit with the look we need.” Then, a long sigh, for the egregious faux pas I have committed by, ultimately, being too much myself to prove palatable.
They then ask, “So, who are you? Tell us something about yourself.” They’re still filming. I make sure to answer eloquently, and be humble yet impressive, earnest yet charming. They give direction, ask that I perform the audition sides a different way. They ask I do them once, twice, thrice, differently, to test how adaptable, egoless, and quick I am. They’ll wave me away without eye contact or praise me extravagantly. I thank them, leave the room, button up my heart, run to the next appointment. Every day, I have three to six auditions. I’ll open and close the valves of my heart three to six times.
Countless variables are beyond my power: the production company’s agenda, market statistics, a director, casting director, writer, or producer’s personal biases, prejudices, and backstage politics. In the occasion I’m rejected, I won’t be given straightforward closure. We don’t receive automated or personalized rejection emails or calls. It feels like a string of passionate love affairs, each followed by complete heartbreak, silence, and abandonment.
I’m perversely adept at handling this industry. And lifestyle. There’s nothing romantic about being a struggling or working artist, and to think it will be is the first step toward disappointment. One evening, after a seemingly endless day of auditions and babysitting, I’m greeted home by a toilet overflowing with feces and vomit. My druggie roommates are nowhere to be found. I kick off my heels, pin up my hair, glance at the contrast between the moment and my immaculately painted face, and clean up the everyday mess of being human.
Occasionally, I’ll date. Men know how to find me, I fall into them. The more pieces of myself I lose, the more men I attract. As far as I can tell, falling in love feels the same as forfeiting contact with my voice. No one lasts beyond a few months, though. Thankfully, the families I babysit for become my source of constancy. The mom I met a few months ago, the Broadway star, connects me to other families.
She and I met through acting. We kept running into each other at auditions, first at ABC then CBS. She asked me where I’m from. I told her, “I’m not entirely sure.”
She immediately declared, “I’m adopting you.”
She is my Warrior Mama. She is exuberance, audacity, and fire, embodied. I watch how she mothers these qualities in her three daughters.
I have always made sense with kids. My hummingbird heart matches theirs. They make me feel the way you do—safe, accepted, and known. They keep me soft. They don’t care about pedigree, intelligence, attractiveness, failings, successes, or how much I weigh, earn, will produce or be recognized for. All they measure is the quality of my love. They sense when I’m distracted or halfheartedly reciting words and pantomiming motions. They’ll tug at me to pull me from my ego, toward what is true.
I fall in love with each child I babysit. They squeal with delight when they greet me after an audition or a photo shoot. I’m their real-life fairy princess. My hair is braided by little hands sticky from apple juice and childhood.
Children are always watching. They’ll wear their parents on their skin. If the parents are unhappy, the child wears the sorrow like a rash. She’ll draw pictures of people without mouths or with huge red mouths, devouring the entire face. The face she won’t draw is one that is smiling. Smiling hasn’t a place in the portrait of her life.
I can sense familial tension the moment I arrive for a first interview. It’s like walking into a section of a forest where there is a nest of hornets nearby. It is out of sight but the air is thick with warning.
Faintly trills the little pink music box. The ballerina spins. Although I know I have vowed to protect myself and develop boundaries, the call of a family in need is still something I cannot ignore. They find me, I find them, I stitch my heart to theirs, to help however I can.
The days fall into a pattern of acting, auditioning, and kids. I swim a fantastical ocean, the water heavy with carnivorous adults, and life-buoyed by sweet children.