Allison's Archives

I am eight and sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen swinging my legs just shy above green tiles, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand no thanks to the lack of air circulation on this fine afternoon. My fingers are sticky from chicken wings; the corners of my lips evidence of the crime. Ama affectionately shouts at me and my cousins to finish the rice in our bowls. 

“However many grains of rice are left in your bowl is how many pimples your future partner will have on their face!”

Then and there, I sighed of relief knowing that there are steps one could take to ensure one ends up with the perfect partner and that it all begins with this here rice bowl. Amid my prince charming daydream, however, ama circles behind me and nags at how I hold my chopsticks the ‘wrong’ way—the two halves of the utensil crossing in an X-marks-the-spot manner just as I am about to pick up rice from my bowl.

Ama wasn’t the only person to point out this flaw of mine in the coming years; despite finding comfort in the cross of my chopsticks, I have learned to pinch every grain of rice, cut of meat, and slice of vegetable with guilt. I am so embarrassed by this fault that I often eat silently—so not to draw attention—and quickly—so I can lay the chopsticks down to rest as soon as possible. 

But what does it mean to use chopsticks the ‘wrong’ way? Is it simply a testament to my lack of phalanx coordination? Is it that I do not fall into the majority way of using them? Is it that I am offending generations of tradition? Does this fault dictate who I am as a person—and if so, what does it say about me? 

When we bid 2023 goodbye, I had vowed to spend 2024 on self-discovery—to relearn who I am far removed from my roles and responsibilities. I had hoped to glean the answer to this question through consistent writing; though the method was obeyed, the goal was not achieved. At least not satisfactorily. My writing pieces this year can almost always be aptly categorized under the role of ‘daughter,’ ‘sister,’ ‘friend,’ or ‘lover,’ regretfully still tethering myself to those responsibilities. 

But I suppose the silver lining is that when all has been said and written about those four, distinct roles, the remains will be a beautiful revelation to my pondering.

candles in rearview mirrors

All at once, I am running and winning the three-legged race in primary school, tripping over a bump en route to the canteen on the first day of high school, parasailing with my mom in Florida during summer break, in Central Park with my friends celebrating our wins at a global tournament, sitting in the dentist’s chair getting my braces fixed on, wiping down the whiteboard laden with equations for the last time, hosting a charity car wash in the dingy college parking lot, scribbling across the marketing examination paper, laughing in a fast car to take my TOEFLs, packing my life into two suitcases, writing event proposals for flagships and regional events, brewing milk tea in a blue apron, crying in a London apartment, and doffing my cap at graduation. 

But in between, I am also listening to jazz on the cold walk home, hopping into thrift stores with high hopes, browsing aisles of books while listening to a true crime podcast, dancing poorly in the kitchen as dinner sizzles in the pan, reorganizing my Spotify playlists, painting my nails while watching Sex and the City, boarding flights I can barely afford, cutting flower stems at an angle before putting them in a vase, waiting for the fishballs in the hotpot to boil, and celebrating my Christmas-done-right away from home.

There are so many versions of myself from before, but who’s to say they won’t resurface? Experiences may be one of a kind in passing, yet feelings reemerge all the time. No two laughs are the same but the person you share them with could be; no two tears are the same but the weight of the sadness could be. 

All past versions of me hold a candle and flank the road that I am driving down. They are afraid I will forget. They are under this impression because I don’t look at them all too often. What they don’t know is that if I look too closely in the rearview, I will see more than my memories. I will see my regrets. 

This year, however, I’ve begun to look in the rearview mirror more and have come to realize that my fear of regrets is just that—fear—no more than a tiny voice in the back of my head. And so I focus on the candle flames instead. How each burn is passed onto the next, how they illuminate the paths, twists, and turns I have taken, and a short distance of what is ahead of me. Though dim, it is clear I will have more forks to decide between. 

I will never know what would have happened if I made a different choice. 

I will never know what would have happened if I made a different choice!

cross-ocean umbilical cords

Why did I ever think moving halfway across the world would relieve me of the role I was born into? It only tightened the strain of the umbilical cord that connects me to my mother and her mother and her mother and maybe one day my daughter. All doomed to recite the same kind of poetry in different wording; made of marble not clay so we can never wash ourselves away in the river.

I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of reinvention. The unending ways one can seemingly abandon the past and renew one’s license in life. Easier said than done, of course; there is a litany of steps to endure before one can truly be anew, and the more I ponder on the subject—on changing my name and picking a new country to grow roots—the more I am disgusted by the idea of it all. Who am I without my past? How do you go about building a life without first being born into one? 

Maybe I am who I am because my first love never treated me as his first love. Maybe it’s because my mother enrolled me in ballet class and made me wear tights and tutus when I hated tight-fitting clothes. Maybe it’s because my father would have me redo mathematical equations until I got all of them right. Maybe it’s because my brother doesn’t speak the same language as I do. Maybe it’s because my fourth-grade teacher told me I ought to talk a lot less before swatting the wooden ruler down on my palm. 

All the good and the bad led me to pen and paper and late-night ruminations in kitchen lights—and what a privilege it is to have been through a type of past that taught me the different words to describe different emotions, passions, and thoughts. To be able to distill childish water and elementary feelings into some form of mature ink and lay it down on paper through lines and curves. 

So maybe I’ve once thought about cutting ties and running away, too embarrassed of my past and too excited about my future. But somewhere in the middle of it all is a girl sitting at the dining table, just grateful to be eating warm rice. 

traitorous tongue of mine

My hair is long. I grow it out every year and only seek to chop off a few decent inches once a year. Every time I think about cutting it, it feels like some kind of betrayal—the act of cutting, not the thought—as if I’d be stripping away a part of my identity, something that had grown with me, on me.

I think about other parts of me that might be committing treasonous acts to the self, and my tongue comes to mind. I have learned to hold my tongue like I hold chopsticks—with error. Oftentimes, what should be said is held prisoner and what shouldn’t be said slips through the bars. On many occasions, accompanied by salty rivulets down my cheeks, I have been asked why I cannot be stronger, why I cannot communicate. And I want to say, dearly, darlingly, it’s because I know you don’t want me to communicate, you just want me to supply you with ammunition to shoot me down so you can claim some kind of measly victory. And I have enough energy in me to keep fighting but not enough to win. 

Whenever I burn my tongue with scalding liquids or foods, I think of it as punishment for dreaming not in my mother tongue but the language of my ancestors’ colonizers—by some measure, that feels like putting out biscuits and evening tea for doom. I think I dream this way so the ancestors who penetrate my dreamland do not become too ashamed of me for my thoughts as they will not understand. But one of them once whispered to me, Your mother tongue is the language in which your truth lies. 

I have gotten so used to mispronunciations of my birth name that I began anticipating them, gearing myself up for some futile explanation, the curling of tongues and emphasis of syllables, and the eventual throwing in the towel with a perfunctory, Yeah, you got it, that’s close enough. I am surprised when someone gets all the intonations right on the first try as if that is not the bare minimum of respect an individual is worthy of. My parents did not hunch over a study table guiding my hand to trace, in sequence, the characters of my birth name for me to squander away its sound. What is a name if not a sound that affirms your existence? 

I promise I am not a traitor to the hospital in which I was born or the tones that flutter around my ama’s house. I am just trying to decipher myself in a way only I can understand. 

tightrope dances

Exactly a year ago, I was bedbound with a torn ankle ligament crying over the fact that I wouldn’t be able to eat twelve grapes under a table at the stroke of the New Year. Ever since, I stopped trusting my feet to hold my weight and everything has been a tightrope dance. 

Allow me a tangent: That incident got me thinking about my body more than usual. I worked out more regularly and with more purpose this year, and it’s safe to say progress has been made. But I can’t appreciate the way I look now without remembering how I thought about losing weight for the first time when I was fourteen and never stopped since.

I am skinniest in the morning; before breakfast, before looking in the mirror, before a sip of water. For the longest time, I retained the same wishful thinking about my profile—hoping to wake up miraculously and effortlessly beautiful one day, the kind that would make me a commodity in today’s society. And oh, did I mention? I am the prettiest when I cry. Many would agree—especially the ones who have made me cry—though I think they find the act of wiping away my tears pretty, not me the individual. 

For some time, I was a loyal subscriber to the belief that if I could just make myself look prettier, I would be loved more. I could just finish the rice in the bowl and the perfect partner would manifest without my searching because he is just so drawn to my beauty. But how can I finish the rice in my bowl and be pretty? It matters not whether I can make myself any easier to love, for making something easier to do does not mean it is worth doing. Tangent concludes.

Many things were difficult but worth doing in my past twelve months. I had to learn to walk again—first with crutches, then with a stabilizing boot, then in my sturdy New Balances. I unlearned habits that were no longer serving any purpose. I graduated university losing the friends I started this chapter with. I let go of some legacies that were never quite mine to claim. I traveled the world to remind myself that I am inconsequential and that is a great truth to realize. I wrote love back from the dead and into existence. 

Maybe, just maybe, my ankle was meant to break instead of my spirit.

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If I am simply a girl from the equator who uses chopsticks the wrong way as she feeds rice grains into her traitorous tongue, so be it. Better than not knowing who I am at all.