Though I Get Home
Page 18
“I didn’t say anything,” her mother said, stroking Isa’s hair, except it was terribly tangled and it seemed like a punishment, after all, as Isa knew it would be, when her mother jerked her fingers free.
“You’ve lost so much weight . . . You’re like a bird, all bones.”
Isa sniffled, saying nothing. Her body was doing all the talking now.
At home, her mother spread a mini banquet in front of Isa. A jolly red cloth had been thrown over the rickety dining table. The centerpiece was a whole chicken, freshly killed that very afternoon. Its head curved back upon its neck, eyes slits, beak very slightly parted. The beginnings of a comb sprouted along the ridge of its crown, a tumorous mohawk.
This was a day of celebration.
The kitchen was the same, yellow square tiles on the floor and one corner of a ceiling panel loose, there, near where the geckos loved to hang out, a triangular yawn hinting at darkness and decay.
“Did you know that American girl who pretended to be you and wrote those . . . poems?”
Isa’s mother meant well. She had absolutely planned on holding her tongue until after poor Isabella had had time to enjoy a good meal, digest, and relax. But Isa was already glumming, eyelids heavy as lace curtains on a hot afternoon. Furrows deepened on her face, grimacing, and it was plain she would be unhappy the whole night.
“She didn’t pretend to be me. She didn’t even know I existed,” Isa replied.
“How do you know!”
“I read the newspaper.” Blank stare at her blank dinner plate.
“If she hadn’t come forward . . . you would still be rotting in there! Stupid girl . . .” Isa’s mother stabbed her chopsticks eastward. “Why, Isabella? Why did you want everyone to think you wrote those poems? Don’t you know how worried I’ve been? I lost weight, my blood pressure went up, the doctors say I’ve taken ten years off my life . . .”
Isa’s body spoke up again and answered, an upturned waiter’s hand swiveling outward with grace, arm pivoting swift and smooth on the sharp point of an elbow. I was nothing. What I did, my sacrifice, mattered only when I had a national stage, a stage conjured up by those who supported my selflessness. A stage given fleshly weight by those, even more numerous, who hated the poems’ shocking outspokenness.
Now that I have been restored to a no one, it does not count, none of it. I cannot claim the defiant act, but it also cannot be held against me because I am, once more, nothing.
Her mother shook her head, eyes downcast, tears swilling about, marinating sockets.
Isa scraped a hand forward along the dinner table, as if making to sneak off food from her mother’s plate. The hand touched nothing. Isa parted her lips and whispered, “Mama. Don’t cry. I’m home.”
It had the effect she wanted, but she felt indescribably foolish. Since she had been released, every phrase out of her mouth rang hollow as a rice hull to her.
She lingered as long as she could, resorting even to eating rice grain by grain. When her mother tired of watching her eat, she stood up, hand pressing down on the tabletop for leverage. A few minutes later, she came back with a newspaper clipping, clutched almost shyly to her stomach. Isa looked at the reverse side of what her mother had yet to show her: half a headline made meaningless by being incomplete; a weight-loss ad model with legs lopped off; part of a write-up about two toddlers, siblings, who had been locked away and starved. There are always two sides to every story, her brain transmitted.
“What?” Isa asked. “What is that?” She grimaced at the snow bank of rice she had made on one side of her plate, remembering the reporters, thick camera straps lashed with sweat. They’d been waiting outside Kamunting when she walked out from the detention center. Had there been sun-vying flashes aimed at her face, or had she imagined it?
Her mother set the clipping down. Right side up, the paper’s boundaries made sense, neatly marking off a single editorial about Isa. No, not about her—about Miss Sodomy the Poet. There she was, a pretty foreign woman smiling down, sunlight exploding her head from behind, obscuring chunks of hair and crown in whiteness. Next to her, Isa looked gaunt in her own picture, the monochrome newspaper shade making it resemble headshots placed at the feet of coffins.
Ah, Isa, she chided herself. Why was the first instinct to compare her looks against the other woman’s? They weren’t feuding over a man or something. Instead, the winnings had been an identity, a role. And she, the real Isabella, the fake poet, had lost.
She read the clipping too fast and had to start over, forcing herself to register every word. Her eyes kept drifting back to the two photos, slotted side by side. It seemed the columnist could not make up his mind about who was demon and who angel. The foreign woman, real name “Sarah,” was praised for speaking out as an ally of Malaysia, but lampooned for using an Asian pseudonym. Isa was given credit for not being an apathetic young woman, having attended protests and even suffered detention for a cause, but it was obviously irresponsible of her to claim authorship for what she had not written. Even the poems were first written off as an immature joke, then lauded for the effect they had brought by pissing off the government so much it had locked Isa away, which had in turn sparked street protests and ultimately raised international awareness of Malaysia’s plight. The theme was murky: unintended good was the best kind of good. Writers and other artists could not help but be bad, weak, selfish, and “thinking only of small pictures.” But a people—a nation—could appropriate the egoists’ flawed creations and transform them into powerful tools.
Sarah had consented to an interview, where Isa had not. Sarah was now artist-in-residence at an elite private kindergarten in New Mexico. In the clipping, she explained that she had chosen the pseudonym “Isa” because the acronym ISA was short for Internal Security Act, the subject of the poem’s rage and fire. “What had you hoped to achieve by writing those poems under a pseudonym?” the columnist asked Sarah. The poet replied that art was its own means and ends, an answer the asker particularly scorned. “They are not your poems anymore,” he informed her in his column. “They belong to Malaysians now, angry and ready for change, and we will not thank you.”
Long after Isa had finished taking in the words of the editorial, she sat there, staring at the piece of paper, believing that she was fooling her mother into thinking she was still reading, not knowing that time was passing much faster for her than for her mother. Eventually, her mother stood up. Isa sighed.
She left her mother, saying she needed a bath. When she reached the bathroom, she pressed a button in the middle of the doorknob. It sank down easily under her thumb. The door was supposedly locked now, but who knew? It didn’t have throw latches or slide bolts, those visual affirmations available on the door of her cell.
She averted her eyes from the huge mirror and stripped, tugging fast and rough. Somewhere in the cicadas’ kingdom under the moon, a car engine rumbled deep, the dark night’s own hunger pangs.
In the bathtub, she stood, hesitating. The hot shower dial was pointed to number three. She had forgotten what that meant. She shivered, a whole-body kind of violent vibration. A gust of night air pushed through the small barred window right next to the showerhead. There was a covering for the window, thick opaque glass that fit over the square like an airtight lid, but tonight, the glass lid was propped wide open. Maybe someone had been wiping down the frames, to prevent rusting.
Isa peered out at the smooth black sky marred by acne stars, wondering if anyone could see her. If anyone was watching. Maybe up there on the waist of the hill, where the mound nipped in as if corseted. Maybe on the top floor of the house two doors down, with binoculars adjusting.
She turned on the shower. A stream shattered itself against her body, fragments scattering off. The window stayed open, funneling in breezes, counteracting water that was too hot. Let them watch. Here she was, shallow scabs and mottled bruises. She was utterly alone, even if they were out there keeping tabs on her. Like a fish launched up higher than it had ever be
en before, by the tallest wave it had ever seen, then stranded on the beach, no wave strong enough now to go that far again and bring it back home.
Here she was, Isabella Sin, poet and revolutionary. They had given her those titles, and she had accepted them. Now she simply had to become who she was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A deep bow of respect to Louise Meriwether, who is a great force and an inspiration. I will strive to always tell the truth, as you so bravely do. And a deep bow to Shirley Geok-lin Lim, for inspiring me when I was first fumbling my way to becoming a writer. Much gratitude to:
Jennifer Baumgardner, Melissa R. Sipin, Jamia Wilson and the Feminist Press, and TAYO Literary Magazine for creating the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize to support the work of women and nonbinary writers of color. Ana Castillo and Tayari Jones for their generosity and kind words. Lauren Rosemary Hook, Suki Boynton, Jisu Kim, Drew Stevens, Lucia Brown, and everyone at the Feminist Press for giving this book shape, form, and presence.
Kassim Ahmad, Saari Sungib, and all who have written with painful clarity about their detentions under the Internal Security Act. Universiti Kedua and Sengsara Kem Kamunting: Kisah Hidup dalam Penjara ISA are brave accounts confronting injustice.
Father. Mother. Brother. For cheer and support, no matter where I am (and perhaps despite my life decisions). Teachers and poetry folks from the Northwestern undergraduate writing program, for welcoming with open arms a nonnative English speaker and engineering major to boot. Anna Keesey, Averill Curdy Murr, Brian Bouldrey, Reginald Gibbons, Robyn Schiff, Sheila Donohue. Ellen Cantrell. Jan Clausen. It’s been a while, but I remember what I learned from all of you.
And boundless love to David Joseph, for crouching patiently by me when I am temporarily defeated, down in the dust.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YZ CHIN was born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia, and now lives in New York. She works as a software engineer by day and a writer by night, and is the premier winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize.
ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS
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Shahrnush Parsipur
Preface by Shirin Neshat
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Born in Iran in 1946, SHAHRNUSH PARSIPUR began her career as a fiction writer and producer at Iranian National Television and Radio. She was imprisoned for nearly five years by the Islamist government without being formally charged. Shortly after her release, she published Women Without Men and was arrested and jailed again, this time for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. While still banned in Iran, the novel became an underground bestseller there, and has been translated into many languages around the world. She is also the author of Touba and the Meaning of Night, among many other books, and now lives in exile in Northern California.
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Translated by Jennifer Croft
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A keen portrait of a young generation stagnating in an increasingly globalized Argentina, August considers the banality of life against the sudden changes that accompany death.
ROMINA PAULA is one of the most interesting figures under forty currently active on the Argentine literary scene: a playwright, novelist, director, and actor. Her two novels to date (¿Vos me querés a mí? and Agosto) have enjoyed extraordinary popularity and critical acclaim. The plays she has written and directed (including El tiempo todo entero, based on The Glass Menagerie, and Fauna) have been positively reviewed in every major publication in Argentina. As an actress, Paula appeared in Santiago Mitre’s 2011 The Student, Gustavo Taretto’s 2011 Sidewalls, Matías Piñeiro’s 2009 They All Lie, as well as his 2014 The Princess of France, which played at the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival.
JENNIFER CROFT is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize. Her translations from Polish, Spanish, and Ukrainian have appeared in the New York Times, n+1, Electric Literature, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review.
AMONG THE WHITE MOON FACES: AN ASIAN AMERICAN MEMOIR OF HOMELAND
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s memoir is a courageously frank and deeply affecting account of a Malaysian girlhood and of the making of an Asian-American woman, writer, and teacher.
With insight, candor, and grace, Lim reveals the material poverty and violence of her childhood in colonized and then war-torn Malaysia after her father’s business fails and her mother abandons the family, leaving Shirley to travel the road toward womanhood alone. Lim’s decision in 1968 to leave Malaysia and the man she loves for a Fulbright Scholarship at Brandeis University marks a crucial turning point in her life. Grappling to secure a place for herself in the United States, Lim is often caught between the stifling traditions of the old world and the harsh challenges of the new. But throughout her journey, she is sustained by her “warrior” spirit. Very gradually, and often painfully, she moves from a numbing alienation as a dislocated Asian woman to a new sense of identity as an Asian American woman: professor, wife, mother of a son she determines to raise as an American, and, above all, an impassioned writer.
SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM is the author of Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands, winner of an American Book Award, as well as Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, and several other books. She is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS
The Feminist Press is a nonprofit educational organization founded to amplify feminist voices. FP publishes classic and new writing from around the world, creates cutting-edge programs, and elevates silenced and marginalized voices in order to support personal transformation and social justice for all people.
See our complete list of books at feministpress.org
Founded in 2016, The Louise Meriwether First Book Prize is awarded to a debut work by a woman or nonbinary author of color in celebration of the legacy of Louise Meriwether. Presented by the Feminist Press in partnership with TAYO Literary Magazine, the prize seeks to uplift much-needed stories that shift culture and inspire a new generation of writers.