One afternoon in fifth grade, my mom told me that she’d made a decision. She was taking me to a psychologist to figure out why I couldn’t control my emotions.

Back then, I was reading critical theory, and I filled spiral-bound notebooks with the realization that everything was a construct. In my English class, I had written a series of essays decrying my teacher’s pedagogical method, which led to a deeply embarrassing parent-teacher conference. This was the final straw for my mom. Likely, it was also the reason why I had an appointment booked with the gruff, bushy-eyebrowed Dr. Rosenberg. After answering a series of questions I no longer remember, I was told to step out of the room so he and my mom could speak privately.

Through the door, I heard something to the effect of, “Your daughter needs a more appropriate relationship to authority… kids appreciate limits being set for them and having someone in charge.”

How dare he? I thought. What part of his psychology manual makes him think that he understands my mind?

I knew my mom would use his words as ammunition in our near-daily fights. When we moved from China to the U.S., I was jealous of my new peers, who seemed so witty and charming, so alive. As I saw it, my mom wanted a quiet, deferential daughter—she was the reason nothing came naturally to me, and yet she criticized my handwriting, my work ethic, the way I refused to smile in photos. Often, the memory of a previous fight was enough to start a new one. I talked to myself for hours in my room after our screaming matches, laying out every retort that I hadn’t thought of in the heat of the moment: I have the best grades of anyone in my class. My classmates skim the surface of life, and they are happy. Their parents don’t treat them like this, so they are happy. I won’t work to meet your unthinking, manufactured expectations. 

The evening after my intake appointment, I shuffled into the kitchen while my mom was washing the dishes.

“Mom,” I mumbled.

“What?” she asked, continuing to noisily rearrange dishes, though they already seemed to be in perfect order.

“I’m not going back to the psychiatrist.”

She didn’t respond. I paced back and forth, incredulous at how she could just ignore me. I could already imagine Dr. Rosenberg telling her, Your daughter just wants attention. If you give in, her behavior will only get worse.

“别摸你摸索了,” my mom said after a while. Stop fumbling around. 

“Why don’t you care about how I feel?” I asked. “You’re the one making me upset, and you just want a doctor to tell you that you’re right and shut me up!”

I knew she was at her breaking point. I wondered what she could possibly say to disprove me.

“Don’t go near the dishes,” she said instead. “Your hands are dirty.”

Both of us were standing next to the kitchen counter. A stack of dishes was between us. I pushed them to the side. “All you care about are the stupid dishes!” I yelled.

“I told you not to touch them!” my mom screamed back. I was already taking my hands off the dishes when my mom caught my hands to wrest them away. Her fingers felt small and cold. For a moment, I was unsure what to do. Then, my mom continued, “Your sister is only three, and she behaves better than you. How are you going to live in the adult world if you never learn to control yourself?”

In anger, I swept my arm across the counter, slamming the dishes into the sink. “I hate you!” I screamed.

My mom grabbed me by the shoulders and began dragging me to the center of the kitchen. I barely heard what she was saying. You’re never going to learn. There are no children who act like this. 

I glanced quickly at the sink to see whether any of the dishes were broken, and couldn’t tell. Now, it was my turn to be inarticulate. “I hate you! I hate you!” I cried.

I clawed against my mom’s forearms. She did the same, digging her nails into my skin. She could not understand me. We struggled in silence, pushing each other back and forth as if we were playing tug-of-war. If I hadn’t been so angry, it would have been hilarious. Against my will, I started to laugh through my tears. My mom even joined in a little. For a moment, it felt like our fight was over.

Then, I felt the sting of my mom’s palm against the back of my legs. For a split second, we both stood still, looking at each other. I was confused. Neither of my parents had ever hit me. We had just wrestled each other to the far side of the kitchen, and we were up against the door that led to the garage. I considered hitting my mom back, but I’d never hit anyone either. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t conceptualize how. I didn’t know where to put my hands.

My mom wrenched the door open and tried pushing me into the garage.

“Get in,” she said hastily. She looked as if she were pacifying an angry animal. I realized it had been a mistake to show my desperation, that it didn’t matter what I said. The thought filled me with helpless rage. All I could think to do was scream.

“Why do you hate me so much?” I cried, trying to forget about her unpersuasive attempt to hit me—was that even what it was? I thought back to a conversation, weeks before, where my dad mentioned how my friend’s parents once locked her in the garage for hours, in the middle of the night.

That’s a ridiculous thing for a parent to do, my mom had replied. I wondered whether she was now trying to copy that scene. I barely heard my own screaming anymore. Our whole fight seemed somehow unreal, unconvincing.

“Get in right now,” my mom ordered. My feet were planted firmly on the kitchen floor. She tried kicking them, so that I would lose my balance and fall backward into the garage. The last thing I wanted was to be in the house with her, yet I couldn’t give in. We struggled until we were both exhausted. Then, without thinking about what I was doing, I stepped into the garage, pushing my mom away with all the strength I had left. I slammed the door on her.

The second I was alone in the garage, I stopped crying. I never heard my mom lock the door that led back into the house. I did not try to open it. Instead, I clicked the button to open the overhead garage door and walked out into the driveway and the street beyond. The sky was an unreal shade of blue. At some point, it must have gotten dark, and my parents must have gotten worried. Yet I don’t remember coming back to the house, or seeing them that night, or being yelled at about the dangers of walking alone. I only remember tearing a dry leaf off the maple tree in our yard and ripping it apart along its veins, so that only a pale, delicate skeleton was left.

 

In time, I realized that there were better ways to fight, ones where I wouldn’t end up the fool. I vowed to weather my mom’s insults with dignity, only to spurn her at some pivotal moment, years later, after I’d achieved some great success. No matter the weather, I began taking hours-long walks through my neighborhood, not wanting to go back home.

When I was sixteen, my family moved to our modern farmhouse that had just been built on the other side of town.

“Who do you think we are?” I’d asked. “We’re not one of those effortless white families, and this house isn’t going to make us feel like one. It’s just going to rub it in, every day, that we aren’t.”

I imagined myself arguing with my parents by the grand entrance, or struggling to find any passable outfits in my walk-in closet, or stalking my classmates while lying in a room that looked just like theirs. It didn’t feel right. The first night we moved, I snuck out and walked three miles to our old house in the dark. I still had my key, and I spent a sleepless night on the empty floor.

By then, I rarely spoke with my family. I buried myself in work during the week, and spent my weekends stalking my mostly-rich, always-white classmates online and buying copies of their going-out tops that I would never wear. In my periphery, they asked each other: What do all these academic sweats do in college anyway? Do they even party? Do they even know how? Each time I went near them, it felt like my world was becoming blurry with too much heat. Maybe they half-expected a response to their mocking questions. But I couldn’t get myself to say anything.

Instead, I wrote about the awful effects of their beauty. Day after day, poem after poem, I amplified my experiences through my words, laying bare my most selfish moments and arranging my desires on the page until they took a new form. When I had nothing else to write, I read. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, I watched a starving boy talk about delectable food to a tiger while stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I understood, then, that stories, far from being luxuries, were integral toward survival. Turning my thoughts into something beautiful for others– and consuming the beauty that others created–  was the deepest form of care I’d ever felt.

But writing was also a kind of revenge. Between marveling at my classmates’ put-together Instagram photographs, I carefully arranged the names of my publications on a website. At dinner with my family, I would scroll through my own website, to see how nicely the titles aligned with each other, or choose a new profile picture. No matter what happened, there would be a better version of me close by, someone who could hold infinite stories behind her gaze, someone who was compelling, beyond hurt.

When I was finally invited to parties, I’d say things like, “God, I was such a menace as a 10-year old.” I would laugh at the expense of my younger self: she wrote lengthy responses to Quora posts on existential philosophy and filled spiral-bound notebooks with the realization that everything was a construct. I felt sociable and palatably rebellious. At a spoken-word event that I won with a piece on my relationship with my mom, an organizer came up to me and said, “Wow, I loved that!” I smiled in a self-abashed way, balancing a plate of hors d’oeuvres in one hand, my plastic trophy in the other.

 

*

 

It was 5 p.m. and I had showered, put on makeup and tried on four different outfits to sit in my college health center for a psychological intake appointment.

“Have you ever considered harming yourself?” the therapist asked.

Sometimes when I was in love, or when I felt moved by language, I would bite my arm until it bled. I was not biting through to anything: there was no way through, only deeper into a feeling. 

“So you don’t feel distressed when this happens?”

There weren’t many feelings that I would choose not to have. On days where my mind was suddenly clear, I would begin to sob while walking to class, so hard my stomach kept the rhythm longer than the sound. It was as if I’d stuck my hand in snow and lifted it out: I felt sharper and eager to know the warmth of everything.

“Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?”

Since last evening, I’d lain in bed awake, my unwashed skin sticking to the sheets. In twenty hours, I used the bathroom only once, ignoring the pain in my bladder until it receded to a dull ache. At my lowest, I felt as if I was already a corpse, or a monster, within my own body. I was too scared of dying to do anything about it. 

“Has your schoolwork suffered?”

No. 

“Do you ever feel badly about yourself?”

If she meant whether I hated myself, no. 

By the end, the psychiatrist told me, “There’s no obvious diagnosis for something like what you’re experiencing. So long as you’re still able to go about your day-to-day life, let’s check back in after two weeks?”

For a moment, I imagined screaming into the therapist’s blank, kindly face. Instead, I thanked her, shook her hand, and returned to my room. Back in bed, I watched my body from afar, zooming in and out on myself as though I were operating a camera lens. In the haze between sleeping and waking, I dreamt that I was dwarfed by an endless set of tubes, yarn, and inscrutable shapes, all tied to each other. I knew that I had to untangle the strange apparatus. I tentatively seized on a loose strand. I held two red cylinders, one in each hand. Something was watching me, so I pretended to make progress. But after a few tentative beginnings, the pieces rearranged themselves, recoiling from my touch. Every time I untied one knot, the puzzle clenched deeper into itself elsewhere– perhaps whole universes away. I realized that the space around me was condensing to a dense, dead point: soon, there would be nothing left to walk through. By morning, I made up flimsy metaphors for what had happened. I was running in a field of daisies before an asteroid hit. Someone told me I had to recite every word of an infinite book from memory, or be killed. The book slammed shut. I stared at my palms and realized, with horror, that I was completely alone.

For months, it became nearly impossible for me to make it through the day. Even as I behaved palpably to friends and professors, I felt as though I were trapped in a world of ghastly, metaphysical visions. I tried to track when my sickness began, but each attempt led further and further back in time, until cause and effect were so diffuse that they seemed basically illusory.

One event, however, distorted every timeline, separating the before from the after without linking them: In my freshman spring at Princeton, I read War and Peace and started believing in God.

The novel began as my favorite character, Andrei, was leaving home in pursuit of military glory. I was constantly trying to recount every detail about Andrei: his arrogance, his thoughts unknown to the world, his gentle words to his sister, the sky seen through his eyes as he lay wounded. At once I was mimicking his gaze and trying to picture him in my mind. As the book went on, each word became heavier and more laden with meaning, until even the air above my bed seemed to be tugging itself apart with beauty.

The first time he falls in battle, Andrei watches as violence and chaos dissolve into a lofty, infinite sky:

Yes! Everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence. 

Andrei returned from war to see his wife dying in childbirth. For years, he lived a kind of living death, regretting the coldness of his marriage with Lise, before finally opening his heart to the young, passionate Natasha. But the moment Andrei becomes Natasha’s fiancé, the “poetic and mysterious delight of desire” is gone, replaced by a realization of Natasha’s weakness, and a feeling of pity. When Andrei postpones his marriage to go abroad, Natasha is seduced by another man.

Only on his deathbed, suffering from a fatal battle injury, does Andrei find forgiveness:

Is it possible that the truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what am I to do if I love her?’

Andrei’s struggle to remember the essence of life and death seemed intertwined with the hazy shapes in my nightmare, which repeated itself nightly. He was not a gentle person, but I felt an indescribable gentleness and curiosity in his forever struggle to enter the world of others. For a moment, I thought I saw the infinite in his unrealized potential, in his doomed need for pure connection, which could be consummated only in death. Andrei thinks:

Love? What is love? Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

“These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, there was something one-sidedly personal, cerebral—there was no evidence. And there was the same uneasiness and vagueness. He fell asleep.”

Andrei dreamt of the agonizing fear of death as a door straining to open. Even as he held the door closed, he was engulfed in vapid conversation with anonymous voices. He heard himself utter empty witticisms, before, at last, both halves of the door noiselessly gave way. I read through the scene over and over, sobbing.  I imagined walls split into their constituent atoms. I was one year into writing a winding, impossible poem, and I, too, wanted to be infinitely split. That way, I could shed my pain and meld atoms with any wall, walking straight through. I prayed for my heart to always be so open, to love everybody truly, to have my falsehoods and fears peeled away for good.

But Andrei’s perfect, transcendent love was inhuman: he could not feel it and live. The door opened in his mind closed him off to the world, until his deep gaze seemed to look not outwards, but inwards. He becomes cold and aloof. When his sister mentions his young son, Andrei can only muster a mocking smile for this last reminder of earthly love. I wanted my life to change, but I also knew that the role of death was not to change my life. Death was only itself, and life would go on pitifully, imperfectly.

By summer, I was working an internship in Hawaii, reading Tolstoy’s final pages at the beach between hours-long writing sprees, speaking to no one. My copy of the book was so old that, each time I flipped a page, it would fall out. I used the brown, sun-worn paperback to shield my face from the sun and went rock scrambling on trails that scraped and bruised my limbs. During the day, I floated in the ocean, feeling lost and mellow, like a jellyfish. I wrote in my journal: Does art need to have people in it to be beautiful? At night, I would scratch at my cut and bite my arms to watch the colors bruise to the surface. Then, I would go outside to watch the sky bruise at sunset, between the barren, eroded mountains. By the time I finished my book, the book was gone. I cried when I finished my impossible poem, and Tolstoy’s sense of everywhere came to me, stronger than ever before.

The next day, I fell sick with a fever. My heart was pounding out of my chest. Nausea, vertigo, lightheadedness– there wasn’t a word to describe how I was feeling. Trees are beautiful, I thought, and humans are beautiful. But a human becoming a tree is disgusting. Though my fever eventually broke, the sense of sickness never left me. I saw dozens of doctors and got my blood drawn so frequently that I joked that my arms made me look like a heroin addict. Even back at school, I felt that a part of my mind was stranded alone, in the middle of the Pacific.

 

During the worst months of my sickness, I started calling my mom every day because it was all I could do.

Once, over FaceTime, she told me, “You always work too hard. Why can’t you just come home? Take a break?”

I didn’t respond.

“Tell me what I can do to make you feel better,” my mom said. “You tell me, and I’ll do it.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Is it my fault?” she asked. “Is it something I did?” 

Years ago, I would have revelled in her helplessness—how she suffered for me, yet couldn’t do anything about it. Our anger had once formed a shared reality, a kind of implicit agreement that there was something worth fighting for. Now, what was there?

Looking into my mom’s questioning face, I replied, “No, you’re fine. This doesn’t have to do with you.”

Up close, in my most caring relationships, I had found no secret, no clear sign of beauty at all. I tried meditation, antidepressants, therapy, exercise, alcohol, sleeping pills—nothing was helping. My hormone levels plummeted. I began using a bulletin board to track the few true encounters in my life, so I wouldn’t forget them in the haze of my sickness: Pi Patel’s encounter with a blind cook in the middle of the Pacific was pinned up next to Andrei’s deathbed realization of heavenly love.

While reading Chang Rae-Lee’s A Gesture Life, I thought I’d found another rare glimpse of reality. The main character Jiro, a Japanese medic of Korean descent, was sitting outside the military barracks with Kkutaeh, a Korean comfort woman, during the last days of the Second World War. Jiro brought her food and fantasized about a life together after the war:

If he could simply be near to her, near to her voice and to her body if never even touching her, near…to her sleeping mind, he might somehow be found.

I tore out the scene and made a space for it on my board. As I kept reading, it felt like the muddle of my life had aligned itself into an open corridor. I held my breath, wondering if my own love could always only be asymptotic, aghast at how anyone could feel whole, or seen, in a world such as this.

A few pages later, Jiro raped Kkutaeh, who feigned sleep as her only defense. Her posture unchanged, her skin cool and colorless, she lay as if she were the sculpture of a recumbent girl and not a real girl at all.

After the war, Jiro would lead a shell of a life in the United States, playing the role of a good neighbor without ever being able to love another. Even here, I thought, beauty reaches for Jiro; it will never touch him again

I bookmarked the book with its own torn-out page, scared of how easily I’d been touched by Jiro’s aestheticized loneliness. I started believing there was something deeply violent about me. Instead of entering the world, I was swallowing it up, making it disappear. And I was disappearing with it.

Between arguments with my doctors and excruciating calls to my insurance company, I catalogued thousands of pages of journal entries and fantasized about being discovered posthumously. I knew, then, as much as I claimed to love formlessness, my words were agents of their own strange order. Just like the professor I despised, I was excavating language and taking people apart. It felt like the depth and the shallows had become indistinguishable: rather than feeling lost in beauty and horror, I was lost, truly nowhere.  I felt the world as a cancerous body within my body, something tropical and constantly in bloom. The day that I published my poem from Hawaii, I couldn’t look at my own writing without wanting to throw up.

 

*

 

At the end of Life of Pi, a boy washes ashore in Japan to tell a story about drifting at sea for seven months with a 450-pound Bengal tiger. He also tells a story without animals, where his final companion is a cannibalistic, murderous cook whom he kills and eats.

The officials prefer the first story.

“So it goes with God,” Pi says.

Like him, I could draw so many narrative lines through my suffering without finding an untainted, original truth. A practicing Muslim, Christian, and Hindu, Pi believed that all religions are true. It is scary to think that the beauty and sadness within us are so overwhelming, it makes no difference whether they come from within or without.

All of spring semester, I wondered if I would ever watch the sunset thoughtlessly again, or be able to enjoy a shared meal after a long day. After months of panic attacks, even the thought of fear felt paralyzing. I prayed to nothing in particular: How much more of this? Two years? Five? Countless people had spent entire lifetimes in worse pain. Every time I wrote felt like it will be the last time, like I’d created a suitable enough home and I’m about to lie forever in my peace, or dread, or hunger. But my poems always ended, and I always needed another narrative to hold me.

I started reading War and Peace a second time. Since I had already watched Andrei die once, his life took on a peculiar warmth that I didn’t remember feeling the first time around. But what other way of feeling could there have been? I found no more solace in Andrei’s revelation that love is life– in fact, I claimed no part of love for my days spent in bed in the dark, my feeling of infestedness. But what was the alternative? A beauty that danced freely, apart from my mind, in an endless empty movement? Perhaps I cared so much for Andrei’s death because I loved him, not the spiritual infinitude of his final moments? Something was lacking in these thoughts, some vague uneasiness.

A friend sobbed at an early draft of this essay while I stared down the table between us, thinking hard about what was at my own core. Was it a solid, fractal-like beauty? Or dense, large, somehow meaty? More likely, could it be a brief flicking movement, like a flame rebounding after being cut in half?

“Do you think you are in control of your life?” she eventually asked.

“I guess not?” I said.

“No,” she affirmed. “You’re not. Which means someone else is in charge. Okay? What you’re missing is faith.”

“Okay,” I repeated, angry at myself for feeling persecuted.

“No, don’t say okay like that,” she said, obviously frustrated. “Just—” she motioned for me to be silent.

“Okay, well if you don’t want me to say anything, I’ll just leave,” I responded.

“Girl, you always do this,” she said.

I tried to force a smile. As I write this essay, it is summer again. I am studying biology in the Kenyan savanna, where individual life feels irrelevant amidst an endless, violent web of ecological relationships. I am reminded of Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow: “There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live. In order to live they grow when they can, and go into dormancy if needed. They live until they die—and either they die as destined by nature or are cut down by other elements in nature.”

My joys, when they come, are mostly inarticulate. But the joy of others gives me belief: a friend with a great cocktail menu, an opera devotee who sends essay-length texts. I call my family every day– our conversations are magical but not strange, like swimming in a pool without edges. We speak for hours on end as a means, and then a means again, with no ends in sight. I do not know if my words are evidence of love: language can create escape, or salvation, or beauty, but life creates only itself. Each time I try to pinpoint how I’ve changed, I circle the same ideas from years before, as though in a recurring dream. In some ways, writing is the opposite of emptiness– it is the bullet lodged in a wound, mediating and distorting touch, impossible to wedge out. I am trying to live with no center, without even the lack of one.

 

*

 

Last winter, as my mom drove me home from Princeton, I wondered how long it would be until I returned. Medical leave seemed like my only option, but I was scared to leave and never come back.

The trees were bare that afternoon, and light penetrated to the ground all around us on the interstate. The hood of the car shimmered as I pressed my cheeks against the cold windows and fell asleep.

When I woke, we were already pulling into the garage.

For a moment, I remembered sitting in the car in another garage, after my second childhood visit to the psychiatrist. I knew I couldn’t fight my mom a second time on whether to leave the house. Instead, I decided that day that I would refuse to come home. My mom and dad took turns coming to the car to cajole and threaten me, but it was no use.

When I arrived home from Princeton, my mom and I entered quietly through the garage. We made sure that the garage door closed completely before entering the house, so that our cat, Wànwàn, wouldn’t escape. She had arrived at our house shortly after I first left for college—I often joked that she was my alter ego, my replacement. As I walked into the living room, she eyed me warily from her spot on the carpet.

I slowly walked toward her while my mom stood near the kitchen island, watching me. But the second I extended my hand, Wànwàn swayed her tail and padded softly away. It was as though she hadn’t seen me at all and simply wanted a better spot in the sun. The last time I’d seen her, she was a baby.

“万万, 你认识我吗?” I whispered, as if we were the only two living things in the world. Wànwàn, do you recognize me?

Back in China, my relatives would tell the story of my infancy as if I ought to remember it: I couldn’t nurse, and though I bit my mom until she bled, the milk would not come. My grandma had insisted on using baby formula, but my mom would not give up trying.

“我爱你,” I said. I love you. 

万万 slinked away softly, not looking in my direction, as if to reassure or taunt me.

“She knows who you are,” my mom said. “It might just take her a while.”

But I wanted her to know me then and there. I want so badly for this moment of softness not to be taken away from me. Just days before, I had laid on the floor of my dorm room, not knowing where to put my tongue inside my mouth, dreading the feeling of living in my own body for the rest of my life. I could still feel my heartbeat in my fingers. I did not know if I would ever get better. I sat on the floor near 万万, sobbing quietly so I wouldn’t scare her.

“Let 万万 sniff your hand first,” my mom suggested.

万万 stretched her head ever-so-slightly closer to me. I laughed through my tears at the cold air from her nostrils. When I first touched her fur, she was so soft I did not know I was touching her at all. I dragged my fingers across her back, gathering her fur between my fingers, then letting it fall limp again. I thought of all the promises I’d left unfulfilled. I had vowed never to sleep in our new house. I had thought that if only I stayed out longer, worked harder, screamed louder, someone would finally know how it felt to be inside my mind. And then maybe they, too, would feel palpable.

I felt the contour of 万万’s ribs beneath her fur, and it scared me.

During some of our worst fights, my mom was already pregnant with my sister. After three months, the doctors couldn’t detect a heartbeat. They told my mom that she’d likely experienced a silent miscarriage, that she needed surgery soon to prevent an infection. But, for two weeks, my mom retreated to her room, ignoring the doctors’ advice and not speaking to me, waiting for a heartbeat. I didn’t know what was happening then. I thought she had finally had enough of me, that she’d given up. After the second week, my sister’s heartbeat finally appeared on ultrasound.

I stared at the ceiling that could be any ceiling. From afar, I heard my dad’s car pulling into the garage. I heard my sister’s voice.

Without malice, 万万 rolled off her stomach and onto her back. She was all movement, pure surface. I was lying in a house I did not choose, near a cat I did not buy. Twenty years ago, my parents could barely pay the rent in their Beijing apartment. For a moment, I thought I saw air tugging itself apart in our living room—every breeze an impossible convergence point. And then I didn’t see it anymore—I could merely breathe. Soon, all four of us will be sharing in this wasteful life. Then, I will finally have entered the room.