张家界: naming the monster, as i turn 22
I’m in Zhangjiajie, I write. I’m here to understand how to live. I’m here to understand how to grieve. Research question: how may I continue living?
I close my journal. I look up. It is the morning of my first day in Hunan, and the sky is a dark brooding blue. I am sitting in the roots of a big tree. It is Tombsweeping Weekend, and everyone has journeyed home to tend to their dead. When I return to Beijing, I will listen to my friends’ stories of communing with deceased grandparents and parents, of how they wept as they cleaned their families’ graves. But right now, I am more alone than I have been in a year. There is no dead to tend to, but there is something to be grieved.
What do I have to grieve? I’m not sure. Everything, seems to be the answer, one I have a particularly difficult time vocalizing. I don’t want to admit to how existential my grief has become, how I’ve spent the past year realizing that I’m always partially in grief, even if I can’t put my finger on what exactly I’m grieving. I’ve also realized that every form of grief is to be welcomed, and that grief may eventually show its true form, if I am patient and curious enough. That after I grieve, things become lighter.
How did I end up here? I walk myself through the facts. Things had reached a head in March, when I’d gone alone to Shanghai for a research trip. I’d ended up crying on the train back to Beijing. Something awful was coming loose in me, and while I may have named the causes for its unraveling (I finally finished A Little Life, I met an uncanny number of ex-ballerinas in the galleries, I saw pictures of myself at age fourteen and had been repulsed at the sight of myself, my friends asked me to tell my life story and I ended up omitting my entire childhood), I’m also aware that the why of my grief is less important than the how. My body knows that it is time to grieve. I must do it, even if I don’t wish to, even if I don’t know why.
The last week had been the hardest of them all. Things had worsened when I’d returned to Beijing. My chest ached, as if filled with water. I passed my days in a stupor, reluctant to eat or talk, snapping at those who tried to pry conversation out of me. I cried erratically: in the yoga room at midnight. In my bedroom before breakfast. In the dining hall, between lunch and dinner, when I was sure no one would intrude. I chased my grief with the furtive delight of one who keeps pressing their bruises, watching my flesh bloom into odd bloody colors. I chased it all the way to its beginnings: all the way back through college, high school, childhood. I unearthed pictures of myself from that time—ages fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen—and I made myself sit with my horror. There was something terribly, fascinatingly wrong with that girl. What about her was so wrong, such that the sight of her body filled me with nausea? Why couldn’t I bear to meet her eyes?
I need to know the truth of what happened, I wrote in my journal. I’d begun journaling obsessively after returning from Shanghai, filling at least twenty pages every time I sat down at my desk. I need to know why I left home. I’ve been grieving home for a long time. My lack of home. My longing for home. My distrust of the homes that offer themselves to me. But there is a home I chose to leave, when I was sixteen, and I don’t think I can understand my grief without understanding that home, that first departure. It’s strange. I’m almost twenty-two. Why has it never occurred to me to look back at Bellevue? To ask myself, why did I leave? No—really—why did I leave? I might’ve brushed up against some answers. But I’ve never had the courage to look them in the eye, to accept them as truth.
So, I chase my grief to my last year in Bellevue. I begin again with the facts. They are simple: I began my undergraduate degree at age sixteen. I had enrolled in Stanford’s summer quarter as a high school sophomore, where I’d taken three entry-level courses in International Relations and English. I’d worked as a research assistant for a postgraduate fellow in the political science department. And it’d been the end of that summer—when I was sixteen, sitting in my dorm room—that I’d realized that this was the happiest I’d felt in years. That this might be a way out. I could go to college, I’d thought. And I could do it now.
In September of 2018, I wrote two-hundred pages of college application essays. I submitted them to forty-one colleges. Though I’d secretly hoped for a Stanford acceptance—it was my only reference point for what college might be—I would’ve accepted any offer. But when I tried to tell my best friends that I was graduating early, I found myself at a loss for words. I would spend that entire year keeping my applications a secret, refusing to confide in my friends. My choices had made perfect sense to me. Why bother telling anyone? Why burden someone else with such a secret? I imagined myself explaining to my friends why I needed to leave, detailing everything that was wrong with my situation, and I was filled with such panic that I’d immediately banished the thought from my mind. It was enough that I knew it was bad, even if I hadn’t yet grasped the full picture. What was important was that I had a way out: that after this year, I would never need to think about Bellevue again.
But my departure didn’t happen very cleanly. Over the next few months, I asked the same questions to each of my friends—Will you be okay without me? Do you think you’d still be the same person if we’d never met? What is my importance to you?—until one of my friends got scared and demanded to know whether I was suicidal. And I hadn’t known how to tell her that no, I was the exact opposite of suicidal: I wanted my life so badly, I wanted the life I knew I could have—and I would’ve given up anything for it. I would’ve ripped it from the earth with my own bloody hands. Even if I couldn’t articulate it then, I knew I was going to live. I would not stop until I finally lived.
Now, the sheer horror of it—the sheer wrongness of it—threatens to drown me. A sixteen-year-old girl had cut off her entire support system in a harebrained plan to leave home. She had signed away her senior year—agreeing not to come back to the Bellevue School District, forfeiting any second chance at the college application process—because she’d thought her only option was to leave, and to leave now. She had lied to everyone she loved for a year. Why would a child do that? No—what would make a child do that?
I am not a child anymore. I haven’t been a child in a while. And my adulthood is marked by an increasing horror towards my younger self, who now feels so alien to me. I can no longer understand sixteen-year-old Ana. Her circumstances and her choices are utterly incomprehensible to me—and while this may be a good sign (I have moved on! I live in a healthy environment! I’ve become a well-adjusted adult! Yay!), it also comes with a nauseating dissonance. I’ve spent so much of my time in college defining a self opposite to my younger self. She is the one was hurt. I am the one who is whole, and normal, and good. She is the one who was alone. I am the one who is surrounded by friends, with parties to host and cool outfits to wear and academic conferences to attend.
Sometime after I turned nineteen, I started speaking of sixteen-year-old-Ana in the third-person, as if she were indeed an entirely different person. Those things happened to a different body, I tell an invisible audience, pleading my case to a faceless judge. No—really—it was an entirely different body. Look at the facts: this body has tattoos. That body underwent six hours of training every day. This body has a long wolf cut and cool outfits. That body had lost two-thirds of her hair, and had no control over what she wore. This body has a period—finally, she started bleeding normally when she was twenty-one. That body had no period. She’d been ordered to starve it away when she was thirteen. This body knows how to laugh with friends. That body never spent time with her friends. This body will never, ever be hit or struck again—I vowed it. That body had been beaten, and she did not know how to fight back. This body has just learned how to rest. That body only knew how to run.
But this dissonance can’t last. Now, fresh out of college, my future once again uncertain, I am closer to my teenage selves than I’ve ever been. I think about Bellevue, and for the first time in my life, I’m filled with a longing so powerful that I can hardly breathe. And I find myself doubting—regretting—my choice to leave. Why, why, why in the world had I run? Why couldn’t I have stayed? Once, I imagined myself as a girl who had done just that: a girl who had stayed, smiling on the day of her senior prom, dressed in a black gown. A boyfriend on her arm. She would’ve attended the University of Washington, barely half an hour away from her parents’ house. She would’ve never left the United States, except to visit her family in China. In the week before college, she would’ve kept her long hair, instead of hacking it off with a pair of scissors. And she would’ve been a straight woman—because I could not bear to imagine her queer, a girl who had had the chance to learn about her queerness when she was in high school, who had found happiness in her queer identities and communities years before I had. A girl who had embraced herself so wholeheartedly that she’d never thought to think herself a monster.
The first time I imagined this girl, a day after I’d returned from Shanghai, I was so overwhelmed that I’d burst into tears. I curled onto my side on the floor, where I cried and cried, my sobs breaking from me like the keening of a wounded animal. I would give it all up to be her, I begged. Please, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give. Moscow. Shenzhen. Oxford. Berlin. Beijing. Stanford. San Francisco. My writing. Ballet. Chinatown. My friends. My accolades. Everyone who loves me. Everyone I love. My reputation as a hometown legend, whatever that is supposed to mean. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it. Give this life to someone else, and give me her life instead. I deserve her happiness. I deserve her innocence. I deserve at least that much. I’ve tried so, so hard to deserve that much.
Why did I leave home? The answer is breathtakingly simple: I was hurt.
Occasionally, a high school student emails me, asking how they might replicate what I did. I never know how to respond. Why, why, why in the world would you want this? I’d scream silently at them: students from Texas, California, New Jersey, who already have LinkedIns and CV’s. Don’t you know what this cost me? Don’t you know how monstrous I feel for what I’ve done? Stay in high school. Stay with your friends. Go get boba with them after school. Go to all your school dances. Go to your football games, even if your team sucks. Have a normal first romance—learn how to fall in love, learn how to have your heart broken. Waste time after school. Cultivate an edgy music taste and an edgier wardrobe. Try on makeup. Try on personalities. Rebel against your parents. Eat whatever you want. Complain about your period. Drive around your hometown, and learn to love it. Drive around with your friends, and learn to love them. Graduate. Graduate with your friends. Celebrate your graduation. Learn how to say goodbye to your hometown. I never got to have these things. I will never, ever have these things.
But it always amazes me: the drive for what we think is better. The fight in us. It had burned in me throughout my childhood, when I’d naively thought that happiness and safety would come with a new school, a new state, and a new set of friends. That there would always be a way out—and more importantly, a way up. The only time I’d been suicidal—had actively wanted to and sought out ways to end my life—was when I was twenty, when I realized that this might not be true. I’d gone to therapy for the first time, and I’d walked away feeling so mangled and hopeless that I’d snuck a razor into the shower. My therapist had asked me about my childhood. To my great embarrassment, I’d only been able to respond with a stuttering series of I don’t know’s, rocking back and forth on the couch, as my chest had threatened to split in two. Isn’t it supposed to be over by now? I’d later raged, weeping with the humiliation of it. This pain. This grief. I went to college. I went to China. I went to Europe. How much further do I need to go? Haven’t I done enough? At what point does my life become mine? Why do I still have to spend my years—my free years, my good years, my own years—processing and unpacking and unlearning, reliving and reliving and reliving? How is this fair?! How much longer will this take?! What is the worth of surviving—of running—if this is all my life will be from now on?
It was the first time I’d confronted it: the awful, choking realization that my acceptance of a trauma would be a thousand times harder than my survival of it. That the act of healing might be the thing that broke me. I would have to relive everything that had happened, again and again, this time with the horrible knowledge of its wrongness. I would have to relive it, again and again, this time with the wearied, doglike terror of someone who had already endured it once. I would have to relive it, again and again, this time knowing that there would be no simple way out: no year-early college application, no study abroad, no research grants to foreign places. Just me, rocking back and forth on a therapist’s couch, or lying alone in my bedroom. I knew I would have to spend the next few years—and perhaps the rest of my life—doing this.
Do you see a future for yourself? my therapist had asked me. Tell me one where you are happy. Just a single one.
I’d burst into tears.
/
Zhangjiajie is the land of exiles. Two-thousand years ago, during the reign of Qin Shihuang, scholars had come here to hide their books. Dynasties’ worth of disgraced politicians have come here to hide, or else to die. Countless poets have made the mountains their muse, and countless more have come here for a glimpse of the clouds, imploring them for some wisdom. Now, the forests have been made into a national park. Search up Hunan, and you’ll find thousands of pictures of its sandstone pillars.
The forests are cold and quiet in the morning. The clouds have descended over the summits, and I imagine that they have gathered here to watch me. I do not return their gaze, but walk deeper into the woods, listening for a river. I know there is one nearby, and once I will find it, I will follow it until I no longer can—I didn’t bring a very big water bottle, and I’d read somewhere that the water here is drinkable.
The day I’d left for Zhangjiajie, I’d been so drained that I could barely leave my bed. “I’m at a dead-end,” I’d told one of my friends, who had come to my room to check on me. I’d been unable to meet her eyes. “I don’t know if there’s anything more I can do. Like, I’ve just been stuck in this loop of thinking, trying to make a narrative out of my past—I’m trying to relive all of it, which has been awful—and I’m trying to—I don’t know, do whatever therapists tell you to do—write letters to my younger self—all of that stuff. Trying to meditate. But it feels like bullshit. Honestly, I feel like I’m going insane.”
She’d pulled me to her side, her eyes full of concern. “Do you think you should leave Beijing?” she’d said, as she ran her hands through my hair. “Maybe a change of scenery would be good.”
“Wouldn’t that be running away?” I’d whispered. I’d felt so wretched, exhausted with all the new grief I’d accumulated, with all the old grief that still refused to go. “Wouldn’t that just be—I don’t know—giving in to my old coping mechanisms? I’m trying not to do that stuff.”
“I don’t think it’d be running away,” she’d said. “It’s only running away if you refuse to continue thinking about it, and if you’re using the excitement of a new place to numb yourself—which would honestly be fair, because I can’t imagine how much it hurts to be reliving the worst moments of your life. But if you’re traveling for the sake of reflection—to see things with more clarity—I don’t think it counts as running. You’re just going to an environment more suitable for your healing.”
“Okay,” I’d said. She’d left, and I’d booked tickets for Zhangjiajie. I’d texted a few friends to let them know that I would be gone. And that night, I’d flown alone to Hunan.
I hear a river, and I walk towards it. As I walk, I start again with the facts. There are four versions of myself I can’t confront. Fourteen-year-old me, who had gone to Russia to train, and who had returned with a pit of fury in her stomach. Fifteen-year-old me, who had endured the most brutal treatment of them all, and who had once pulled off her own toenails in a fit of pain and anger. Sixteen-year-old me, who had applied to colleges in secret, and who would become infamous for it. Seventeen-year-old me, who had started her freshman year with short hair, and who had refused to admit to her terror of her new life. When I look back at my adolescence, all these girls blur together: a dark thrashing entity. I would only begin to pick them apart after I turned twenty, narrating my childhood in halting, uncertain measures. The first time I’d confided in a friend: a rooftop in Berlin. The second time: a hotpot restaurant in Boston. The third time: beneath my bed in Kairos, curled up in a den of pillows and blankets. Only three times, I realize now. Only three times in my life have I tried to make sense of things—have felt safe enough to try and piece together a narrative—have spoken childhood into truth. And each time, it has been incomplete. I could only process a part of the whole: six months, or a year, or a single moment of hurt. I could never answer the question at the core of it: why did I leave home?
That is the compromise I have made with my life, and with my past: I don’t think about it too much. We leave each other alone. I treasure—and trust—the happiness that comes to me now. I build a life that is colorful and directionless and full of wonder. I gain weight, and I cut my hair, and I get tattoos. In return, my younger selves spare me of their judgement. They had been proud and angry. They had been taught to take pride in their self-destruction, to scorn people who did not do the same—people who were not bone-thin from exhaustion, people who had tattoos and unruly bodies, people who were joyful and lazy and who dared to rest. They would hate my pity towards them, but they would revel in my horror of them, because they loved knowing that they were exceptional enough to be the object of horror and fascination. They’d thought themselves above the understanding of mere mortals—and what have I become in the last few years, if not mortal? My younger selves would refuse the truth that I’ve come to know and grieve: not that they were in pain, because they’d always known themselves to be in pain, but that they shouldn’t have been in pain. And over the last few weeks, as I’ve forced myself closer and closer to my younger selves, I’ve lost myself in their loathing. Your tattoos are disgusting, my younger selves had sneered. Look at you, the shape of your arms and thighs. Your need to sleep and eat so much. Your need for friends, for company, for other people to hold you as you cry. Look at what you’ve become. Soft, and weak, and disgusting. They are a pack of beasts guarding their young: the closer I come, the longer I dare to look, the fiercer they bite and scratch. I ward them off, but it’s useless: my skin is soft. My hands no longer know how to fight. Look away, the beasts snarl. Go back to your life. There is nothing here for you to see.
I reach the river. The water is clear and blue. I crouch down at the riverbank and fill my bottle.
How may I continue living? I think emptily, staring at the river. How may I continue living, when half of me knows the wrongness, and the other half refuses to see it for what it is? When accepting the wrongness means deconstructing everything my younger self had held dear, means rewriting the narrative she had built up in her head? Wouldn’t that mean destroying her? What gives me the right to destroy her? But—am I framing this in the wrong way? There must be more to her: I see her as something to be feared, a four-headed creature bent on self-destruction. But that can’t be all she was—right? She must have held other narratives. She must have, at the very least, been confused. She is the beast guarding the young—but she is also the young being guarded. What—who—is being guarded so fiercely? And why do they see me as a threat? Is it because I see myself as a threat—a destroyer—because I believe there must be an enemy and a hero, a thing to be destroyed?
/
Ana—
I recognize that there has been a lot of pain. I have spent the last six years recognizing it, and that’s strange to say, because I’m not sure whether that number is meant to feel large or small. I am about to turn 22. Even now, it feels impossible. Every year, on my birthday, I feel furtive, like I’m stealing time, and I wonder what you would think of me now. Every year, the conclusion is the same: you wouldn’t really like me, me who has conquered neither myself nor the world by adulthood. I’ve become your antithesis—I’ve betrayed you. Look—everyone has betrayed you, even your older self. She has tattoos and falls in love with women. She hasn’t danced for over a year. She’s muscular, and has a period, and has breasts, despite all your attempts to stop these things from happening. Did you know that the first time I grew out my toenails—let them spill out over the edge of my toes—I panicked? I hadn’t realized my body could do that. My feet had looked so weird to me—so alien—that I’d immediately pared it all down, then had refused to look at my feet for three days. Imagine how I felt about getting my period back. Growing breasts. Seeing new muscle.
So—I’ve betrayed you in many ways. And in perhaps the worst betrayal of them all, I’m scared of you. I saw a video of you—me—myself—walking down the hallways of the Bolshoi, neck so long and thin, dressed in a camisole leotard. Body barely bones and so, so small—so childlike—and I could not accept that that body had been mine. Was still mine. I could not accept that you—me—had lived through it all. I had a panic attack. I thought I was going to throw up from my repulsion. That video kept looping, you walking endlessly down the hallway. Why, why, why on earth did a child go through that? Were you even a child? I can’t think of you as a child, because the wrongness of you being a child is overwhelming. Those things don’t happen to children. Those things shouldn’t happen to children. But you were not an adult, either, so what were you? Monster, is the immediate answer. That girl is a monster. You were vicious. You were vicious to the entire world, and to yourself.
Now, I’m bitter, and I’m angry. All that viciousness, and for what? So you could end up alone? So you could cut everyone off at sixteen? I keep returning to that memory now—I couldn’t bring myself to think about it in the last six years. I never really thought twice about my choice to leave, after I went to college. I thought it was a right and natural thing to do—an obvious thing to do—because no one had expressed their horror to me. No one had told me, stop! Why are you doing this? Why do you think this is your only choice? But what you did was not normal, wasn’t it? No normal, well-adjusted girl would do that. I know what a therapist would say—that you kept me alive, whatever—but I can’t even bring myself to appreciate that, because my mind is blank with horror. Because I am filled with rage, and grief, and I am sick and tired of it, and I wish more than anything that circumstances had been different. That I wouldn’t be left writing angsty autofictions—each one discussing how I coped with the mess without touching upon the mess itself, because I can never fictionalize your suffering, I can only write my way around your pain, and what use are my words if I am—you are—still hurting through it all? There is so much rage in me. I am so, so angry: at what happened to you. At how I’d never thought to grieve until now, when it is far too late. I didn’t even remember much of what happened until this year. Isn’t that wrong? That’s so, so wrong. You will never have a normal childhood. You will always be, in part, the girl who ran away from her hometown. You are damaged irreversibly. And there is nothing I can do to save you, except to rage silently from years away, and to try not to fear you.
And god, I’m scared of you. I am scared of your sheer destructiveness. I am scared of your judgement. I am scared of becoming like you again, should the world be cruel to me in the same way. In this fear of you, I can’t accept you. The very thought of touching you—of embracing you—repulses me. I can’t touch your bruised skin and bone-thin body. I can’t touch you, dressed in ballet clothes and reeking of hairspray. I can’t even look at you. I deleted that video from my laptop. I am sorry. I am trying. I really am.
—Ana
/
When I was seventeen, my body would freeze for several minutes at a time, and I would lie paralyzed in bed while my roommate did her homework. The terror of it—of a body that refused all commands—was so overwhelming that my mind would go blank.
Everything had fallen apart in my freshman year, a reality I’d tried to navigate by writing cheery blog post after cheery blog post. The escape I’d fantasized about had not come to pass—Stanford was brutal, and nothing I did ever seemed quite enough. I couldn’t bring myself to finish my essays, or to continue my research job. I couldn’t bring myself to engage in small talk, even with the people and professors who were nice to me. I couldn’t go to parties without panicking at the smell of alcohol. And I could barely sleep without waking up in a cold sweat, having dreamt of strange dark figures with knives for fingers, of being chased through endless ballet studios and backstage corridors, my entire world alight with the blue glow of a bathroom scale.
I would receive my PTSD and C-PTSD diagnoses when I was twenty. It was September, and Stanford was sticky with heat. I was about to start my senior year. Calmly, I’d torn up my therapist’s letter. I’d tossed the shreds into the trash. Then I sat very still, not daring to breathe, grief quivering in my chest. It was quiet. I’d moved to campus early to begin my honors theses, and my dorm room was bare. There was no one else in the building.
At this point, I was twenty. It’d been four years since I’d been sixteen. I had outlived every single force that had shaped me in childhood. And somehow, I was still alone.
Now I am almost twenty-two, I think wearily. I stop and peer at the mountainside. There seems to be a set of stairs carved into the stone, half-hidden with moss. I’m alone again. Will I always be alone?
Angsty questions aren’t very useful, I admonish myself. I peer up through the canopy, squinting against the darkness. I can’t see the end of the stairs, but I begin to climb. My body, blessedly, becomes warmer. I breathe heavier. Let’s come back to the facts. What are the facts of your thought patterns? Here is one: I think I am monstrous. I think I am monstrous for being alone, even though I enjoy being alone. I turn my observations inwards. What, exactly, is monstrosity? What is my monstrosity? Why have I chosen to use that word, the word of childhood and nightmares and fantasy? I arrive at some conclusions: monstrosity is existential. No—it feels existential. It’s not a monster—a living, breathing creature who might be touched and tamed and talked to—it’s the essence of a monster, a horribly unalive and immutable thing. It is something that stands beyond words—it is the mess I write around, the years of my life that my fiction can never touch. It is the belief that I am corrupted, that there is a dark poisonous substance lining the inside of my skin, corrosive to all who come too close. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel monstrous—so perhaps this existentialism is a matter of time, and will therefore fade with time. Time I cannot control. I can control the unspeakability of it, though: I can choose to name the monstrosity, to approach it with curiosity instead of fear. To see the beasts, and to see what they are protecting, too.
Do you want to talk about this? my therapist had asked me, when I’d been twenty. And I’d looked away, because I did not want to talk about it. Don’t you know that there is power in naming things? I’d wanted to say. That there is a terrible magic in a name? Names give things teeth and claws. Names give them life and will. What if I name the monstrosity, and I realize it is far bigger than what I thought it’d be, far bigger than what I can control? I can’t name it. I can hardly look at it. At twenty, I was becoming aware of my limitations. My body tired much more easily. I needed to sleep longer and eat more than most of my classmates. I couldn’t even write as quickly as I had in high school—my brain felt slower, stripped of its sharp edges. Privately, I didn’t think I was in any state to fight or name a monstrosity—that even looking at it would be too much. I thought of my arsenal of unhinged inner children: fourteen- and fifteen- and sixteen- and seventeen-year-old me, who were all very big haters and believed themselves invincible, and I thought that they would be much better equipped to handle this.
Now, two years later, I think it is time to name the monstrosity. I think I might look it in the eye. So I stop—halfway up a flight of stairs, the trees still dark and dense above me—and I close my eyes. I look. For the first time in my life, the site of my trauma comes to me: an endless cavern, with a high endless roof. Waters murmuring beneath me, black and viscous. I do not see a way out. I can barely see. The lake is very deep, and there are creatures inside. If I fell in, I would not come out. I am standing on a small rowboat, which shudders and moans. I dip my fingers beneath the surface, and I pull something monstrous up from the depths: the thrashing limbs of a beast, its teethed organs convulsing in my bloodied hands. Is this the monstrosity? I wonder, clutching the monster even as it struggles against me. The creatures? The water? The cavern, which is somewhere in my body—which might be my body itself?
The rowboat does not go anywhere. The sails are limp, for there is no wind. I try to imagine a tunnel somewhere in the cavern—a source of light—but I feel so silly that I laugh. A light at the end of the tunnel? What kind of cliche is that? It is impossible to imagine a light, or a tunnel, or even a shore—but it may be possible to imagine a wind. To imagine my sails filling—to imagine the rowboat being pushed somewhere, anywhere. That is reasonable. That I can do. The boat creaks wearily. It trudges through the darkness, and I am glad, even if it is only heading towards more darkness. I stand up, and I continue walking.
There are fewer trees at this altitude. There are fewer monkeys. There are fewer living beings whom might offer me advice. I turn to the clouds instead, which snake moodily around the sandstone pillars. I’m named for you, I think. I am you. Tell me, how may I continue living?
On Tumblr, user @minotaurmutual posted, “forever and always insane about the fact that haunting means ‘heimsuchen’ in german which literally translates to ‘homeseeking.’ a haunting is a search for a home you can never return to.’ I think about this now, and I squint against the sun. “Are you a haunting?” I ask the clouds. “What do you haunt? Do you haunt the mountains?” My calligraphy master had told me that clouds come from the mountains—a statement I had not understood until I’d seen the clouds of Zhangjiajie, had witnessed their terrifying weight and majesty. Do we always haunt the thing we come from? Do I haunt my hometown? I certainly think I am haunting it now, hovering over a version of me who had stayed. I am a ghost bent on stealing her body and her life.
Hike Zhangjiajie on a cloudy day, someone had told me—I can’t remember who. Zhangjiajie is only itself when it has its clouds. In late afternoon, when the clouds clear, I will recognize the truth in their words: Zhangjiajie’s beauty lies in its own obstruction. I may only see so much of the mountains at one time, leaving the rest for guesswork. For the first few hours of my hike, an instinctive fear had arisen in me whenever I faced these clouds: what couldn’t I see? What if the clouds were hiding something awful, something monstrous? Sometimes, I could only see a few steps in front of me, whenever a cloud chose to descend over my path. I’d found myself at the mercy of the clouds, inching along a cliffside that they had made milky-white.
But clouds mark the transition between humidities, I would later realize, journaling beneath a cliff on Huangshizhai. Between mountain and sky, between sea and shore. They find homes in morph and in transition. They are morph and transition. They might be a haunting thing, a monstrous thing, but they are comfortable in the seams, and why should it be otherwise? Why must they be other? Why must they be an obstruction to sight—to the real thing to see, the mountains? Aren’t they real, too? I am still seeing—I am seeing them. Perhaps my refusal to name the monstrous is in itself a name. By refusing to look at the monstrous, I can begin to understand what I can’t look at. I have labeled it as unspeakable, and so I know that speaking would be the way to approach it. I have called it un-seeable, and so I know that seeing would be the way forward. There is sight in no-sight.
“Huh,” I say aloud. I bow to the clouds. “I did not know that. Thank you for teaching me.”
/
That night, when I return to my hostel, I write down everything: the sorrowful and profound, yes, but also the mundane and joyful. I got to see monkeys. Briefly—there were only two of them, swinging overhead—but I still got to see them. I didn’t get to see any colorful birds, though, which is disappointing—perhaps I will tomorrow. And I did get to see the peaks of Yuanjiajie, after climbing all day. I got lost twice, because I kept following random stairs which led nowhere, and I was getting increasingly frustrated and angry (with myself and the mountains and how foolish I felt for coming here on a whim)—until all of a sudden, I reached the top. And I’d begun to cry, because it’d felt like such an impossibility, and because I was just so tired. I’d felt kinda childish, crying on the summit, but I couldn’t help it. And I think I was crying out of awe, too. Yuanjiajie was completely, utterly beautiful: I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beauty in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such true, sorrowful blue: I can’t even describe that color, the color of the waters here. The trees themselves are a bit bluish, a bit ghostly. This blue feels like an older blue, one that comes from a before, one that is the color of exiles and ghosts and forest. I think it is the oldest blue I have ever seen. I think it is the oldest color I have ever seen. And the clouds—I’ve never seen clouds like that. I’ve never been scared of clouds before—but I was scared of these clouds. I was scared of it all—perhaps because I was alone, lost in old forests and older waters. But it was a good fear. And it was beautiful: in the end, yes, but along the way, too. I learned some things from the clouds. I hope I will learn more tomorrow.
The next day, I awaken at dawn. I don on a new set of clothes and braid my hair in silence. I pack my bag: journal, pen, water bottle, a knitted poncho that I’d bought from an auntie. Downstairs, the innkeeper has prepared a bowl of rice noodles, hot with peppers and sour with pickled vegetables. Two duck eggs on the side. I eat it all. I take some steamed buns for the road. Then I head back into the forest. There is a faint golden hue in the sandstone—the clouds are gone. The sun is here.
/
Does writing help you process stuff? one of my friends had asked me when we were nineteen. It that why you write so much?
Yes, I’d told him. Well, kinda. I’ve romanticized much of my college experience via autofiction: namely, my junior and senior years, when I first began to explore my queerness. It’s no secret that my autofiction is my attempt to build a self through fiction, to set a narrative in stone. I’m far more concerned with how I’ve made a life for myself after I’d emerged from the mess, after I’d begun to ask myself what I wanted and to act on the answers, because those years are as precious as they are still-uncertain. But I’ve written relatively little about my life before age 19: my freshman year, interrupted by COVID, and my sophomore year, spent in Shenzhen. And I’ve written nothing about my life before college. Try as I might, I can’t bring myself to make fiction out of my childhood.
There are very real reasons for this. The first time I went into therapy, I realized that swaths of my memory were simply missing: I couldn’t recall much of what happened between ages fourteen and seventeen. I’d only started keeping a journal after I’d gone to college. Dread and disgust coil up my throat whenever I try to write from the perspective of my teenage self. This dread doesn’t change when I’m alone. I think—someone might see. Someone might be peering over my shoulder, staring in horror at my laptop—and my hands can’t move.
My writing has sometimes led me astray, amplifying the dissonance in my mind, making me grieve things that weren’t mine to grieve. I’m very scornful of the teen writing and college admission complexes: complexes which encourage teenagers from marginalized backgrounds to sell their pain as trauma porn, and which relegate us to specific narratives of suffering. When I started my sophomore year at Stanford, I began a frenzied round of unpublishing: emailing magazines and awards to take down what I’d written in high school, because it had been disingenuous to who I was then and now, and because it’d felt like a betrayal of my communities. In the years that followed, I’ve stopped trying to write angsty literary fiction about my adolescence—the kind expected from college writers—and have turned towards fantasy. It’s a genre in which I can explore questions of many different scales, with a great degree of flexibility and comfort.
But my adolescence still worked its way into my more recent work. In August of 2022, when I submitted a draft of Prototype One for evaluation, I’d been surprised by my mentor’s response. “This book of how we may recover after surviving great pain,” she’d said. “It’s brave of you to write this. I’m excited to see where it goes.”
What in the world are you talking about? I remembered thinking, frowning at her comments. No—this book is about the dangers of tech-driven modernity. It’s about necropolitics and geopolitics and everything-politics. Where does ‘surviving great pain’ come into the equation?
Of course, there were passages like this:
Kya stopped. She barely had time to turn before Yuxia reached forward and pulled her into a hug. For a moment, Kya failed to register the warmth of Yuxia’s arms—she was frozen, her body screaming against the alienness of her touch—and then she crumpled against Yuxia. Yuxia caught her, and Kya burst into tears. She had not cried like this in years, with sobs that heaved from her chest, with a grief that broke from her like rain. How had she not yet died, with all the grief that festered in her? It was so ancient. She was so tired. “Why me?” she choked out. “Why me?” Her voice rose into a scream. “What did I do to deserve this?! This isn’t fair—I just want it to stop, I just want to stop hurting—it just hurts so much—why won’t it stop hurting—I want it to stop—when will it stop?!”
and this:
Perhaps this was all she would ever be: a leftover girl, a broken body. She knew already that there was no sense to her scars. Her past had simply happened to her, and nothing could ever turn her pain into something meaningful. She was twisted, wrong, an irredeemable collection of wounds small and large. Why did it matter where she would go and what she would do, when all that really mattered had already happened to her?
and this:
She wanted to tell her everything, then: how the girl she loved didn’t love her back. How she didn’t know what to do with this mess of a heart, now that it had been dragged into the light. How half of her still wanted to leap out of the car and run far away—to the end of the world, or maybe even further, because part of her knew that no place would ever be far enough. How she wanted to love—I want a first love, I want a first love so badly—why couldn’t I have a first love? How she suspected it was too late for her to find magic and love and all that silly stuff—how she really didn’t need it, not logically—but she wanted it anyways, she wanted it so badly, she would do anything for it—bloody her hands and tear apart the entire world for a love where she could rest without fear—a love where she would never ever again be hurt—a love that was good and hers—but maybe she didn’t want love, she just wanted redemption, even though she didn’t really need that, either—maybe all she wanted was to rest—to just rest—god, I am so tired—I am so, so tired—
that I’d written before I’d planned any of the major plot beats of the book, and which I now recognize as the manifestation of things I’d been unable to confront in real life. That is what fantasy and fiction are to me: Medusa in a bronze mirror. A safe holding pattern, a repository of things I cannot process now, but will bring myself to face later. And as I’ve gotten better at confronting myself, I’ve leaned less on fictionalization. I haven’t touched Prototype One in half a year, and have instead been journaling my way back through my adolescence, chronicling the things that happened in Bellevue. It is bitter work. Sometimes, I think I should’ve chosen—or been born with—a different medium of art, a less cutting means of reflection. Words aren’t very abstract. There’s not a lot of room to maneuver. I write—I was hurt. I was hurt so badly that I ran away from home—and the condemnation is final. The horror is absolute.
/
Today, the mountains are friendlier to me. I follow my trail to Huangshizhai—this one has guideposts and maps—and climb up until I reach the Star-Picking Summit. There are tourists here: a Korean tour group, and a Chinese one. I weave my way around them and come to an empty observation platform, where I take off my backpack to use as a pillow. I lie down, curled on my side so that I may see the valley. Below me is forest. Birds circle their way around the cliffs. Trees grow at impossible angles from the mountainsides. Some of them are in bloom: red and pink and white amidst the green. How do you continue to live? I wonder, marveling at the flowers. How have you continued living, despite everything? Why did you decide to live, a seed facing an impossible cliff? I wait for a response—but there is nothing. Maybe I am listening in the wrong language, I think. If the trees know and speak in a language, if they even have a language, it is certainly none of the ones I know. Any attempt to learn from them, and then to convey what I have learned, would be an act of translation. I start thinking of translation theory. I think of my friends who work in translation. I wonder what they’d say.
And all of a sudden, my longing spills into grief, and then into anger. Stop, I snap at myself. Stop thinking of translation theories, and languages, and useless philosophies. Why are you always escaping into the abstract? You came here to grieve, not to wax poetic. The trees aren’t trying to teach you abstractions. They don’t run—they can’t. You want to learn from them? Sit down. Stay. Face your wound. Your pretty words won’t make it any easier. Your words have already failed you: you left Beijing for Zhangjiajie because you had written yourself into a dead-end. Because you panicked, once you realized that language is only an approximation—that it is neither the pain nor the relief, but a road that curves around them both. Let go of your words, your dearest and most familiar weapons. Hear them clatter like knives as they fall from your hands. You are in search of something greater than yourself and your words, something that may bring you back to a truer self. What have you found? Clouds. Old blue. Tired feet. No words. Let them go.
I take a breath, I empty my mind. Wind comes to me. Birdsong. Finally, when I am ready, I face my wound. Take each memory, one by one. Hold each one in silence. Refuse adornment or explanation. Refuse all logic. See it for what it was: something that came without reason. Something that cannot be altered, not even by words. Live it again. Live it all again.
It comes back to me: colors, sounds, smells. Alcohol. Palm stinging against my cheek. Blood on the floor, toenails in the sink. A razor in the trash, as I forced myself out of the shower, ran to my roommate, shook her awake. Wake up. Wake up, please, I was going to kill myself. WAKE UP! PLEASE! Reek of hairspray. Glow of a bathroom scale. Greek yogurt. Alcohol again. Spine slamming against a wall, bright blistering agony, wetness of unwanted lips on mine. Stop please stop stop stop STOP! Blood again—my period has returned. I rock back and forth, terrified. Hair coming loose: one tug, and it falls free from my scalp. A doctor’s voice: you’ve damaged your body. Perhaps irrevocably. Cold hands. Switchblade in my foot.
The rowboat shatters beneath me. Dark waters rise up, coiling warm and viscous in my lungs. I drown in silence.
/
That night, I write: I finally saw the monkeys. I think I saw a family, or maybe several. I saw them after I fell asleep on Star-Picking Summit—I was exhausted from the hike, and from my meditation, during which I relived many things for the first time, without romanticization or justification. It was grotesque work. I can’t really write about it. I’ll write about the monkeys instead. When I woke up, there were seven or eight monkeys around me. I watched them for hours while they groomed each other. I was too numb and tired to move. I was pinned in place. I might’ve been crying, but I can’t really remember. And it was really calming to watch the monkeys. Their instinct for care: when they find themselves doing nothing, they walk towards each other and begin to groom. They do it with a care and insistence that feels like human fussiness. I saw a mother swoop down and scoop a baby to her chest—faster than the blink of an eye—and that instinct to protect was so beautiful, I almost cried.
I felt like an intruder. I think I’ve spent much of my adolescence feeling that way—an outsider watching monkeys groom each other. I could not understand it, the concept of hanging out with friends after school, the idea that we could spend time around each other simply because we wanted to. Even in college, that was the strangest thing to me: friends. The time that you are expected to spend with them. I never hung out with my friends in high school. I was always alone, running from school to studio, and I recognize the toll that had on me now. I scorned everyone else because I’d refused to accept that maybe, the adults in my life were wrong—that maybe, I was lonely. I did need friends. I did need people. It’s funny that those adults made me into someone who was SO capable of being alone that I eventually orchestrated my own escape: that my hyperindependence became a bit of a saving grace, the reason why I was able to cut everyone off, including them. It’s actually kinda funny. Karmic.
Back to friends, and the issue of friendship—honestly, it’s still hard for me to socialize. I can be friendly, but it’s very hard for me to trust someone—to maintain a relationship without constantly looking for a way out, without impulsively keeping parts of myself secret. I’ve gotten better at it, though. I’ve gotten so, so much better. So—friendship was strange to me. What else was strange to me, when I first got to college? Eating both sides of a bagel. Eating simply because you want to, and then enjoying the food you eat. Eating after 6 PM (I couldn’t believe dining halls opened AT 6 PM). Wearing t-shirts and tank tops—stuff that showed off my arms. It’s kinda funny and sad at the same time: I had no idea how to live. I had no idea how to live as a normal kid. And I did not learn how to live by myself. I had friends who showed me how. They modeled it all for me. I was a strange girl, and they un-stranged me.
I ask, how may we continue living? And I think the question is wrong. Maybe it should be, how may we continue living? There was no way for me to live without other people. I see this in the trees, and the monkeys, and the birds. The care, the mutual love. It is so unquestioning. I want to be like that. To care—and to accept care—unquestioningly. Honestly, when I think about it—who among my friends has ever turned away from me, when I decided to open up to them? Everyone has trusted me. Everyone has offered me kindness. Everyone has said something like, “I’m so sorry/I love you/you are a good brave strong person etc.” I am the last person to accept myself. I am the only person to call myself monstrous. Even now, it lingers like disease. Maybe I’ll learn to let go of it tomorrow—I do have one day left in Zhangjiajie.
Before I go to bed—I want to talk about this tree I saw. It grew at such a strange angle out of the cliffside, bent at a bunch of ninety-degree angles. All of the trees here grow at such angles, under such impossible conditions. It’s almost ridiculous, how impossible it is. Do you think they know how impossible it is? Do you think they know how much of a miracle they are to me? Or do they just grow?
I set down my pen and close my eyes. I’m in a different hostel, this one closer to Tianmen Mountain. I’ve left the forest for the town of Wulingyuan, and so the night is filled with the honking of car horns and the shouting of pedestrians. The innkeeper had made me duck eggs and bamboo shoots for dinner, and a pot of apple tea for altitude sickness. I’d had a nice conversation with her—about where our families are from, about what I’m doing alone in Zhangjiajie—and we’d shared a laugh over the monkeys. I’m only here for one night. Tomorrow, I leave for Beijing. But there is still more to learn, I think. More peace to find. I need more time—more time to see myself—more time to see past my monstrosity. I know I can. “Monstrosity” is just a word, after all, the first one I assigned to myself when I began to think. But my past happened without words. The narration only came later. The monstrosity came later, a product of my narration. So there must be a way to live without thinking myself monstrous—I just don’t know how. I need more time.
But I do not have more time. The morning comes. And, for the last time, I head to the mountains. It’s a slow and painful hike: my feet hurt, and my lungs ache. Years ago, a friend had told me that altitude sickness will affect me more than most people. You’re an athlete, he’d said, so you have a higher concentration of oxygen in your blood. It’ll be more difficult for you to adjust to environments with thinner air. You can’t be overconfident in your athletic abilities. I’d brushed off his words when I’d first heard them. But by early afternoon, I am so dizzy that I have to give up on my mission of circling the mountaintop. I lie down beneath the trees, shielding my face from the sun, and try my hardest to breathe as birds flutter and squawk overhead. You can leave, I tell myself. You can return to the hostel, and go straight to the airport. No one is making you stay. You’ve already learned so much. You’ve already found some peace. You have the rest of your life to heal.
But a stronger, fiercer voice: no! You’ve come all this way! Why leave, when you know you are still dissatisfied, when there is still something tattered and aching inside you? You haven’t answered your question. Why would you leave without answering your question? You have been given this moment to grieve. Who knows when you will next be able to undertake something like this? The next time your heart will be so open?
I count down from one-hundred, count down again. The dizziness passes. When I’m steady enough to sit up, I make myself drink and eat something. Then I trace a path to the temple of Guanyin Bodhisettva, the goddess of compassion—if I can’t go anywhere else, I’ll go to her. The temple is half an hour of hiking, mostly on flat ground. I begin to walk, one hand gripping the railing. My left foot hurts: an old wound. I taste blood. I’m weak, I think—not with derision, nor with surprise. I’m weaker than I’ve been in weeks, months, maybe even years. I can’t be firm with myself when I am tired, so images slip through the cracks of my mind, images I’d scolded myself for holding, because they were not useful to me. I see the girl who had stayed in Bellevue. Black prom dress, boyfriend, long straight hair. Friends. Boba after school. Bright pretty smile. I’d been overwhelmed with grief when I’d first conjured her. But now, I am too weary to muster anything beyond a nod of acknowledgement. Hello, I think. Hello, not-me. You are not me. I know there is beauty in your life. I know I was jealous of it. But look: there has been beauty in my life, too. I stop, gazing out over Tianmen Mountain. I am standing in a sea of clouds. The sky is a brilliant, blinding blue. I can’t see the ground. Like pain, the beauty has come without reason or precedence. But it has come. It has come in the last two years, when I was in Europe and San Francisco and Beijing, when I could begin to call my life my own. Yes, two years are brief. They are tragically brief, next to the rest of my life. But they still matter. They matter, right?
That is what I have learned to tell myself—all my selves—when I sink into grief, and wish to pull myself out. I say, the last two years do matter. The last two years do matter. I repeat it like a mantra: the last two years do matter. The last two years do matter. I recite the names of everyone I love (the last two years do matter), of all the places I’ve called home (the last two years do matter). I summon the joy of it: the wind and hills of San Francisco (the last two years do matter), the hutongs of Beijing (the last two years do matter), the lush greenness of Stanford’s campus (the last two years do matter), the blue mountains of Shenzhen (the last two years do matter), the graffiti and street art of Berlin (the last two years do matter), the golden glow of Oxford’s cobblestones (the last two years do matter). The laughter of my friends. Their forgiveness and compassion, when I could not give it to myself. Eight courses made for a house of fifty. A thrift shop in Berkeley. The weight of a girl’s hand in mine, her palm like a bird about to take flight—I hold onto her because I love her, and for no other reason. There has been so much beauty in my life. Has there been as much beauty as there has been sorrow? Is the beauty an apology for the pain—and is it an adequate one? I’m not sure. I don’t think I can bear to know.
At sunset, I arrive at the Buddhist temple on Tianmen Mountain. Save for a few monks, I am the only one there. I stop outside the main gates, take a deep breath, ready myself for prayer. These days, before I enter a space of worship, I ask myself, why am I here? Almost always, the answer is the same: I wish to remind myself of my compassion. I wish to recommit myself to it.
Inside the temple, I find a statue of Guanyin, light incense, and bow three times. I ask her to protect everyone I love, going through a list of names so long that I can’t make heads or tails of its order. I ask her to help me keep my heart open—in the days before I left for Zhangjiajie, I’d begun to snap at those closest to me, too filled with resentment to hold an open conversation. And then I ask her the same question I’ve asked everyone else: how may I continue living? I have some answers, but would it be selfish to ask for more? Please tell me, Guanyin. I have climbed for days and days. I have climbed for years and years. I am tired. I can no longer deny my exhaustion.
Guanyin is silent. I open my eyes. My heart does not feel lighter, and I’m surprised. It is the first time in over a year that prayer has not been able to clear my mind. Saddened, I wander outside. I explore the rest of the temples. I bow to each of the Buddhas. The sky is a clear, rich blue: soon, before it gets too dark, I will need to head down the mountain. I will need to leave Zhangjiajie. Is this it? I wonder. Perhaps this is all I will carry back: lessons that are invaluable, but still incomplete. Perhaps I must wait to learn more. Perhaps I am not yet ready to learn more. Perhaps I will need to grieve a little longer, as unbearable as it seems.
Finally, when there is nowhere else to go, I stop beneath a magnolia tree. My legs crumple beneath me, and I collapse against the trunk. I stare at the sky. I watch the birds. And then I begin to cry: first in small weeping stutters, and then in big ugly wails, my chest heaving with exhaustion and grief. I am too tired to put words to my sadness, to pose a question to the trees. I cry without abandon, barely able to breathe for the force of it. I cry like a child. I cry for the child I might’ve been, the child I will never be. I cry for the child I am trying so desperately to be right now. I cry for the life I’ve assembled for myself, a life that still feels shaky and unsound, like a building made of spare parts. I cry for the horror of it, for the dark waters and their creatures, which I could only just begin to look at, six years after I left home, a decade after I first stepped onto that rowboat in the dark. I cry for the beasts that have no choice but to fight, and for the young that they guard. I cry for the sheer unfairness of it, for all my failed, useless bargaining. I cry for my loneliness, my awful aching loneliness. I cry for how weak I have become, stripped of even my words, a final sacrifice on some strange god’s altar. I cry for the irrevocability of my life, for choices that had never been mine, for how it is too late, too late, too late. I cry until the sun dips down the horizon, until the taste of blood floods my mouth. I cry until I’m immobile, my face pressed against the dirt-filled crevices of the tree’s trunk. There I lay, too stunned to move.
I was hurt. I left home because I was hurt. Nothing will ever change that.
The realization—the finality of it—clears the breath from my lungs. Evening bells toll above me. Their echoes are tidal in the empty temple. Birds take flight. I realize I am staring at a cut in the trunk. I can see four or five rings in the wood. When I’m steady enough to move, I raise a hand to the cut. Slowly, I trace each ring. How old are you? I ask the tree. My thoughts feel hollow. How do you live, and how do you grieve? How have you continued living despite it all?
The tree does not respond. I keep tracing the rings, as if there is a prayer inside. And I imagine my younger selves: fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen. The scrawniness of their bodies, the wariness in their eyes. They circle me—but they do not attack. They know I’m no longer a threat, I think numbly. I’m not much of a threat to anyone. Not anymore. I raise my head, and I meet their gaze. My younger selves did not think too much about the trees. About flowers. About love. They would not be lying here now, on the summit of a strange mountain, their sunburned cheeks stinging from tears. They would not have run so far—alone for their entire journey—for the hope of something better.
Or, I think, would they?
I had lived alone in Russia when I was fourteen. I had applied and enrolled in college when I was sixteen. Am I not doing the exact same thing now, determinedly climbing the slopes of a foreign land, seeking for both the answers and the questions? I haven’t changed, I think, and I laugh unexpectedly. I have always been me.
I have grieved my younger selves as if they’d died. As if they had never gotten to grow up. But that is wrong, isn’t it?
You did get to grow up, I think. You grew up into me. I am the same as you. The shock of the realization is as seismic as cold water. This body is the same body that had lived through it all. This body had lived through it all. This body had lived despite it all. I am the future of my younger self—there had always, always been me in her future. But would your younger self have wanted this future? part of me still whispers. Would she have been happy? I know that she would scorn me: that we have spent years rejecting each other in equal measure, alien and unspeakable to the other. But that may change, I realize. I don’t dare breathe, for fear of disrupting my realization, which glows like an ember in my chest. I can choose to extend a hand to you. I can do it even if you can’t extend one to me. Even if you can’t imagine a future, I am here. And I will wait for you, as patient as this tree.
I continue tracing the rings of the magnolia. My tears sharpen my vision, so that I can see every crack, every seam, every insect that wanders over the wood. You are me, I think to my younger selves. But you are not all of me. You are a ring, but you are not the entirety of the trunk. I am the entirety of the trunk, and the branches, and the flowers too. And I begin, finally, to recognize the ways in which I am the same as her. The same dogged determination, guided by a more volatile idealism. The same stubborn conviction, the same competitiveness. The same short temper, the same desire to know, the same inclination towards the written word. The same bravery. Some of my friends have called me kind, and I like to think I was always like that, too, except I can’t be sure. But I am sure that I’ve always tried to live with grace and humor. That I have always tried, as hard as I could, to be good. Maybe I was never monstrous—or maybe, I was the same monster all along. And that might be enough.
I begin to cry again. These are different tears: euphoric with awe, with deep rapture and gratitude for my life. You survived, I think. In my head, my voice is a plea, a shout of joy, a cry for mercy. You survived, you survived, you survived. You came here, hauling all of us up this mountain—you have grown up messily, you have grown up in such odd aching ways—but you have grown up, and you are here. You are here, you are here, you are here, and you are safe. I close myself around you, a tree with its rings. I close myself around each of you, ring by ring by ring. I see you, all of you: I see images of you that only a week prior, I could not bear to hold in my mind. You in high school. You in a ballet studio. You in college. You with long hair. You with short hair. You with thin hair. You wearing only ballet clothes. You wearing sweatpants and sweatshirts. You trying on clothes that might be fashionable, building your own wardrobe for the first time as a college freshman. You, a child. You were a child. You were just a child. Your name was Ana. Your name is still Ana. I was never meant to destroy you. I was meant to see you, and to hold you. I can see you now, and I do not look away.
I hold myself, and I cry with gratitude. I thank everything, over and over again: the temple, Guanyin, the magnolia tree. My younger selves, each of them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I am sorry. I am sorry for the last six years, in which I was unable to look. I am looking now. I am looking as hard as I can. And I’ve found you. And I see you. And you are beautiful.
/
I head down the mountain, and my chest is peculiarly light. I am still weak, but my breathing has become easier. I take in big lungfuls of air, savoring the sweetness of each breath. I had come to Zhangjiajie with something: dark waters, a rowboat, things to be grieved. I do not think I have lost any of these things. I do think I have learned to carry them in new ways, such that they are easier on my back.
Finally, I come to the river. I am back among the trees, and I am filled with relief: that I am the smallest thing again, close to the roots. I did not like walking between the summits, so close to the sky and the sun. My lungs had ached with the height, and my skin had burned from exposure. Had I known the pain of it, I would not have climbed at all, not even for the view. I would’ve stayed with the river. I would’ve kept my head bowed to the trees. But it is too late to choose differently. And I am here now, am I not? That must count for something. That might count for everything.
When I dip my hands in the river and cleanse my sunburned face, the waters are clear and sweet. When I collapse in the roots of a great tree and curl up to sleep, the canopy murmurs like a mother. And I think, marveling, they have never asked for permission to live. The trees. The river. The monkeys, and the birds, and the flowers. The rocks around me and the cliffs above me. The clouds. Even my younger selves—my brave and raging selves—they did not wait for permission to live. I ask the world, how may I continue living? And it tells me, mu. Unask the question, for its very framework is incorrect: a Buddhist concept that I learned five years ago and am only now beginning to understand. We do not need permission to live. We never have. We grow like the trees: at odd angles, on impossible heights. We live, and we continue to live. The last two years were mine—and so were the rest. This was my life. This has always been my life.
I will rest at this river for an hour, until night falls. I will let the trees hold me. Then I will return to Beijing, and I will turn twenty-two.
All these years, I have never needed permission to live. I will not ask permission in the next year, either.
/
Ana—
Today I’m 22! I’m at the Summer Palace, where I’ve found a place between some rocks to journal. The lake is quite beautiful—the waters gold and blue, the willows bright babyish green, the flowers drooping like fruit from their branches. I am wearing a white dress and a black coat (I always wear white or black to the temples and on important days, because they seem to be colors of prayer—I don’t know why). I was here three years ago, in 2021, when I was 18. I’d been very determined to walk all the way around the lake, but I’d failed—I hadn’t realized that I needed to take a boat across part of the way, and my WeChat pay was malfunctioning. What was I doing in Beijing? One research project or another, most likely. Anyways—I didn’t make it all the way around the lake this time, either. I wasn’t trying to. I have prayed at Guanyin’s statue, though, which I did not do at 18. I thanked her for the lessons she gave me at Zhangjiajie, when I was last at a temple of hers. I’d been so altitude-sick and delirious then. I can say that it’s very poetic, a transformation of a mind coming with an upheaval of the body, but the real lesson to be learned is that I need to hike more carefully. I hope you are not so reckless anymore.
I have one page left in this journal. Before I go, I want to ask you: will we be okay? I looked at my journal entries from last year, from when I was about to turn 21, and I was a bit of a disaster. No time for self-reflection—much time for drinking and crying (I even went to rehearsals drunk)—though I remember I’d felt extremely sexy. Things have slowed down a bit since then. I am a calmer person. I am a softer person. I don’t drink, unless it is at the bar owned by my friend Eugene, who makes cocktails into art. I laugh very easily—at the world, at myself—because I am easily delighted. I have met kind teachers in the visual arts, though I’m still not very good—I’ve been embracing beginnership, though, and it’s been surprising and wonderful at every turn. I have found a compassion I did not know lived within me, and I have learned to see the trees and flowers with great gratitude. I walk much more slowly. And most recently, I’ve written pages upon pages upon pages—I’ve spent my entire birthday writing, in between the celebrations that my friends have organized for me—letters to my loved ones, letters to myself, a long rambling blog post (it’s becoming a bit insufferable), a bit of Prototype One. I’d promised myself I’d let myself write whatever I wanted to write on my birthday. No thesis or essays. It’s been a great gift. I think I’ll make it a tradition. If you are reading this on your birthday—remember to write whatever you want. That is my gift to you.
The question I asked—will we be okay?—I don’t want you to answer in terms of career, or money, or whatever success. I want you to tell me that you have continued holding me—that you have continued holding all of us. Our younger selves. I know I might seem strange to you. Monstrous, even. I am here to tell you that I am not a monster. Our younger selves are not. You are not, too, just in case you’ve slipped back into thinking that way. I’ve learned to hold all our selves very gently, as if they are younger sisters, or babies, or cats (sorry—maybe that’s not a good metaphor—I’ve just been thinking a lot about cats), and to tend to them as a mother does. I hope you will do the same. And that if you can’t, for whatever reason, you will come again to a point where you can. Things come and go, after all. I’m under no illusions that I’ll stay like this forever. That life will always be so good. That I will always feel so certain, and so happy. That I will always feel so beautiful—because I do feel beautiful right now, more beautiful than I have ever been. I’m not so foolish to think that these things are forever. But let me tell you—on this day, I am utterly at peace. I want for nothing, and so I love everything.
—Ana