“Bitch.” Her neck snaps backwards, and she sees stars.
His knuckles are stained indigo, flecked with red. The red is a sharp contrast to his pressed, collared black shirt. Dimly, she registers the throbbing of her cracked nose. He’s screaming at her, but she can’t hear him. Everything is muted underneath a milky film of silence. She’s floating above him, staring at the way the walls of their two-bedroom apartment breathe. There’s a life to the walls. She can see the skin covering the pulsing arteries of the wall. She tries to suck in the air but he isn’t giving her permission to. She notes that his right arm is pressed against her throat, his left knee is digging into her ribs. She just hopes he won’t break them this time. She’s tired of performing for the hospital staff. She’s tired of lying. She’s fluent in lying, understands its special intonations. Not everyone is good at lying, not like she is. But lying is a kind of language in itself. And isn’t that the point of language? Do you need to be good at it? Or is the attempt at it enough? A way of reaching out into the world and feeling out for a connection no matter how untrue it may be?
Sparks of blue and gold explode on her left cheek. She feels like drowning but sucks in the air as best as she can, trying desperately to float. He’s accusing her of an endless litany of charges. She’s a whore for smiling at the barista. Bright red blossoms across her right cheek. She’s a cock-tease for not having sex with him. Orange rips through her stomach. She’s just another dumb bitch. Just like the rest. At least Liz is a better fuck. Purple tears through her shoulder. She’s a Pollock painting: exploding in a smattering of abstract color. Is she still 23-year-old artist Grace Li? Can a painting be an artist too? Can the art ever be separated from the artist?
He’s yelling and yelling and yelling and suddenly he’s barreling into her childhood room where she lies on her bed on her stomach. He lashes at her with her Chinese name “李向红! I told you to focus on your Chinese homework! Lazy! LAZY!”. Then, he’s tearing her room apart, spit flying in highlighted sunlight, ripping through the dancing dust particles. He’s in a white wife-beater and gray crocs. He’s pulling the Barbie from her hand and rips the head off the body. Then he rips the left arm off. Then the right. Then the legs. Grace’s mouth is in a silent “O” because there’s not enough air in the room to scream.
He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t seem to notice. He turns to the shelf of dolls above her childhood bed. He rips them all apart: barbies and Chinese dolls dressed in the clothes of the Qing Dynasty alike.
It’s not James breaking the dolls, but her grandfather.
He leaves a carnage of broken limbs, headless torsos, and misshapen plastic and foam heads behind. He leaves a 12-year-old girl scrambling on her hands and knees, trying to jam the pieces of the dolls back together, using roll after roll of Scotch-tape. He leaves a 12-year-old girl to choke back tears and suck in the air as she prays for the first time, prays the way her Christian friends at school have shown her how to. She prays for the doll to go back to what it was. But it doesn’t go back to what it was. Broken things rarely do.
She’s still floating. She’s a thread between space and time. No matter how hard he shakes her, she knows there’s power in floating: a power in the existence sandwiched between space and time. Here is a place where neither James nor her grandfather could touch her. Here is a place where the walls grow skin and can breathe and there’s endless air in the room.
She’s still floating when bruises blossom across her cheekbones like a wine-stained highlighter. She’s still floating when James leaves, slamming the door. She’s floating when he returns to feather kisses along ether temple. She’s still floating when he stitches her wounds up again just so he can rip them open again.
She thinks of all her grandfather’s lessons, all the poems he made her memorize, and she thinks that the most important ones he has taught her are the ones he has never voiced, the lessons he will lose first to Alzhemiers. (She doesn’t know if he’s lost them yet. It’s been three years since his diagnosis. She’s been too busy exploring what Grace Li the art is to figure out what it means to be a Li.) She thinks about how he taught her how to shrink back and make herself small when he came back from a game of Mahjong, his breath smelling of Mijiu and barely restrained anger. She thinks about how he taught her that a woman’s place was to shrink. How he taught her that to be loud was to be ungrateful. How he taught her that love was a series of nested for-loops; love was to be earned upon fulfillment of if-conditions. She thinks this is the second greatest lesson her grandfather has ever taught her, second only to the lesson of floating.
Her lips tip up in a hazy smile. She never wants to stop floating.
Thank you for reading part 4 of Becoming Woman by our columnist Amanda Chen! Stay tuned for more works by Amanda in the future and read more about her here. The fifth part of Becoming Woman is scheduled to be published next Monday, August 15th, 2022.