Illustration by Dora O’Neill
Trigger warning for domestic abuse.
I went running by the Charles late at night, under the dim street lights. The outside was a few shades too dark, as it always is at night in Massachusetts. I had grown used to it. When my mother flew from Nanjing to Boston for my graduation, after more than 24 hours of being in and between airports, she called me on the taxi ride to her hotel, “Are all the street lights broken? I can’t see anything.” Broken street lights later became our inside joke—we would laugh about how the suburbs blinded people. They can’t see!
Yet that night, caught up in the frenzy of broken nostalgia, everything had looked frantically crisp, both more and less real at the same time. I had wanted to see my mother so badly, to see her lug around an inappropriately large suitcase for only a week’s stay, to hear her sing-song Chinese again. There had been far too much English these past years—I was sick of it.
Before my parents separated, back in LA, my father would come home from work and I would take a running start and jump fully onto my dad, wrapping my tiny, milky white arms and legs around his enormous torso. He would fake-stumble a little, pretending to crumble under my weight, but then walk over to sink into our time-kneaded red leather couch (“Real leather!” My dad would say to guests). “No English,” he would proclaim in Chinese to no one in particular, “I’ve had enough at work.” When I spoke English to him, he would turn to my mother and say, “Is someone talking? What’s that sound?” before I would switch to Mandarin and he would acknowledge me. It was not the prettiest of couches.
When you’re Chinese, especially if you are young and female, what you really want to be is white. Not the race, just the hue of your skin. There’s a word in Chinese—嫩 (Nen) that’s used to describe meat as being tender, or maybe leaves when it has just rained, but also to describe skin. My skin was peak tender as a child—my cup runneth over with compliments from my mom’s Chinese friends. These days, my mother scrolls through old photos on the hard drive we dared not lose, remarking mournfully on how my skin looked beautiful in the photos. Preserving skin is an obsession of ours—we use umbrellas in the sun and wear dark-tinted visors and put on dozens of creams and masks. Dark skin meant you were probably of lowbrow birth, living in the countryside and blending in with the soil. Tanning is literally a foreign concept.
Skin. My dermatologist once told me that the condition of my skin is always a good indicator of how I’m doing in life: my mood, my health, how much sleep I’m getting. And in those father-jumping days, my skin was perfectly unblemished and innocent, like a glistening top of a freshly steamed mantou—before the almost-comically horrendous onset of cystic acne, leaving scars for decades. My father is still in LA.
Now, as my feet hit the ground again and again, the air did not seem as crisp, just brittle, and a bit mushy—Red Delicious not Fuji. College was over; my mother was back in Nanjing. I ran past the Hyatt overlooking the river where she stayed for my graduation and thought again about that night when we stayed up until sunrise—her on jet lag and me on caffeine. My mother could never stop gossiping about Maxwell or Alicia or Kevin or Megan or Alex or Charlotte or Zoey or James, the people from my childhood. There is something terribly lonely about moving forward in life and leaving behind the people you once knew intimately. I wanted to shake the clock on the wall and then smash and stomp on it until the hands stop moving.
I didn’t want to stop running. I didn’t ever want to stop running. I didn’t want to go to the next thing, or the one after that.
Runner’s high is a myth. There is no euphoria. No clarity of post-coital intensity. Running is terrible. You run for ten miles and feel shitty for all of it. Except maybe for half of mile 8, when you feel almost bearable for a minute, but then go right back to feeling terrible. Runner’s high is a myth, or maybe just for people who haven’t done real drugs before.
My parents grew up in rural Nanjing. They went to high school together. My mother was a beautiful girl with big eyes—the biggest eyes, everyone said. People said I had big eyes. You still do, Mama.
At 14, my father works in the fields. His skin is dark. He blends in with the soil. He lives in a too-small house with no glass windows—one bedroom with all three of his siblings. Sometimes, out in the fields, he cuts his hands with his rice-sickle, and his blood splatters onto the crop, but he dares not tell anyone for fear of being reprimanded. So, he continues with the harvest. Food is carefully rationed among the household. Some days, he eats only white rice with black vinegar. On special occasions, the fermented bean curd is brought out. If you imagine laboriously, the tofu almost tastes like meat, he is told. At night and at dawn, when he doesn’t have to be in the field, he studies. He studies like his life depends on it. Which it did.
He is the classic immigrant story. First in the family to graduate college. First in the family to leave China. First in the family to graduate grad school. First in the family to go to America. Whenever my grandmother calls me, she says, your father is a miracle. Nobody works as hard as your father.
What was I to do, then? There is no place better than America to go to. I must colonize Mars.
He is perfect. They are perfect.
But then come the arguments.
How dare you judge me. What hardships have you endured? He asks my mother. To endure hardships in Chinese is to “eat bitter.”
You want a divorce? She screams at him. Fine.
My father takes the glass bowl from the kitchen counter containing two baby turtles and smashes it into the ground. Glass and water and pebbles and two very small, very cute turtles splatter outward from the epicenter. The turtles swim hopelessly against the dark hardwood floors. What happened to them? I never saw them again. I hope they became big turtles.
My mother does not scream at him anymore. She moves to rush upstairs, but before she does, she pauses at the foot of the stairs, and says to my father, softly, break everything in this house, see if I care.
My father tips over the table, which is also made of glass. There is not a square of the floor not covered in broken shards.
I run towards him and punch him in the stomach.
It’s the first punch I’ve ever thrown.
He slaps me in the face.
I don’t come out of my room for a month.
My run ends. I am panting and sweating like a child, full-faced and without reserve. I come back to the apartment that I share with my roommate, Hannah. We are not that close. We are only temporarily subletting. I can’t find her, even though it is late at night.
My father once told me: Einstein calculated that the faster we go, the more time slows down. In my bed, in my dreams, I am still running.
Renny Gong (he/him) is a freshman at Columbia College and having a difficult time figuring out what he wants to study. Renny lives in Boston but will take any opportunity to inform you that he is from Los Angeles. In his spare time, Renny enjoys long, arduous bike rides and discussing the nuances of the movie Parasite.