Goodbye, Christina
Stepping into LAX in October of 1999, I cling to a box of Ritz Crackers finagled from my friend Susie, whose family has come with ours on the same Korean Air flight. Anxiety fills the air between the parents; we have come a long way.
Then, as ever in the In-Between, my memory falters. I recall the scent of the airport (dusty, it seemed), the coolness of my father’s red knit sweater as I lay with my head in his chest. I didn’t know it then, but the airport would soon become my home, the transiting middle ground my only source of familiarity.
I try to remember more. Blank. I reach into the abyss to grasp at least the semblance of a memory, or its fragments.
One. All I can muster up is the feeling of restlessness, a fleeting scene of the supermarket cashier smiling and handing me, again in my father’s arms, a Slim Jim.
Two. I am sitting in a classroom, all by myself, with the exception of my parents and a very tall white woman in a grey wool skirt and leather knee-high boots. The woman smiles and holds up a picture of an elephant. 코끼리, I say confidently. The woman frowns, then gathers herself and smiles again. We move onto the next question. My confidence suddenly wavers. This is the moment I decide it may be best to stay quiet.
Three. A classroom again. My seat is in the corner facing the door. I am told to draw a picture and write something onto a sheet of paper with three lines drawn on it. Two solid lines swathe a dotted line. These lines are different from the squares I am used to writing my letters in. I begin inscribing my limited knowledge of the English alphabet into the narrow space between the lines, outside of which lie worlds I cannot—and should not—reach. Between these lines is the space I have been allotted, permitted to squeeze my existence into. I don’t know many letters in this new alphabet yet, but I know that I love the letter Y, and I am proud to know how to write it. The lines of the letter meet at the dotted line in the middle.
Then, my eyes suddenly fill with tears. I can’t remember any more, but I also remember too much. Now I am the child crying at naptime for my mother, the tears blurring my eyes and the traces of the memory. No, I am in the closet of the bedroom I share with my college flatmates, contemplating death.
I blink to find myself kneeling before the Red Sea, its soft waves spitefully serene, still contemplating death.
—
Who do you think you are, the Congress of Selves asks me.
Give me an English name, Nine-Year-Old Me asks my parents in turn.
They say no, citing that people only need one name and that my current one is perfectly fine. They explain how carefully they chose my name: Chae採 means to dig deeply, Yeon衍 is to be wide and overflowing; I was named so that I might have a deep and wide heart. But on account of my name being so difficult to pronounce, I become “just” Chae. Left with one half of a name, I feel I am resigned to a fate of endless digging. My shovel punctures the ground and forms a hollow, an imprint of something that used to be.
Fine, Nine-Year-Old Me says, I’ll call myself Christina.
Christina, of course, is just a girl in my imagination, the upper-middle class white American I never could be. Christina is blond, and Christina is rich. Christina has many friends. She is the embodiment of the longing to be anything other than myself.
The Congress of Selves chimes in. Who are you fooling? There is no Christina here. Of all the identities in the world, you will never be her.
In fact, as time will tell, Christina never sticks, if only because I don’t believe in her myself, and she is also a lie. And in trying to erase myself to become Christina, she only becomes more elusive.
Later, the Congress of Selves convenes to debate the agenda item: Have I been living a lie?
Past versions of me are called forth to defend herselves. Naturally, Christina shows up, as does The Closet, Grief Embodied, and The Pastor’s Nice Daughter.
Holy shit, Grief Embodied says. Look who’s finally here, referring to both Christina and The Closet.
The Closet responds in kind: I couldn’t attend when I didn’t know of my own existence.
Christina cannot speak; she is not real.
The Pastor’s Nice Daughter sits in silence, glaring at all of them.
There is no defense, only contempt. The sinking feeling of despair envelops me as I think the words I am too afraid to say out loud: I don’t know who I am.
—
We often spent our summers shuttling back and forth between our new life in Southern California and the old one across the Pacific Ocean. Back on my mother’s island, my grandmother made seafood boil in the biggest pot known to womankind. We poured the contents out onto the table and ate to our hearts' content. When the weather was nice, my uncle took us out on his fishing boat to one of the small, uninhabited islands nearby, where we hunted for crabs and sea snails while he caught fish with his bare hands. I felt free in these moments: at my grandmother’s house, whose floors were a sticky yellow linoleum and always smelled of sweet rice and old cigarettes, and on the ocean, cutting through the sea on a small motorboat. No longer suffocating between worlds, I had no need for Christina.
But as the land remembered its bloody past, pride overrode pain. In a microbiology course I took many moons ago, I learned about epigenetics and was fascinated by the endless permutations through which our ancestors’ lives impact us, the way trauma, fear, and stress send certain genes into expression and muddle the existence of others. From the very beginning, I was shaped by that force of endless violence and anger, having no choice in the matter. It was never spoken into existence, but in its unspoken form, had already been passed down, forming a gaping hole without a reason to justify its existence.
I don’t want to talk about trauma; it is overdone, and I don’t want to be, shall we say, reductionist.
Maybe it was because we were always moving around, always uprooted, that I never learned how to settle in one place. Inevitably, we always boarded that plane back to LAX, crossing back to the other side, turning our backs on the pain, leaving but never arriving. I describe myself as uprooted even as it confuses me that identities are described in arborescent terms, the implied violence: roots ripped from the soil into unnatural states of being. But it would be a lie to say that I never felt the pangs of what I lost—rootedness and belonging and unconfused pasts and futures. It is unclear if the uprooted tree is ever replanted.
—
The world is sinking little by little, and no one notices but me.
The more I try to apply order into my world, the more the pieces fall apart, unwilling, and the Congress of Selves questions me, asking how dare you and what right do you have to define the parameters of our existence. I am the borderlander, my body my vehicle; uprooted, I bleed and scab until I no longer hold the tenderness of personhood.
Alone in a foreign country, things get hard. I pack my life back down into two suitcases to board another plane. Yet again, I am crushed in the middle seat between two large men, their entitlement the whetstone to my anger.
Another new country, a new beginning. In a new place I have no past, and no questions are asked. Being a foreigner is much like going back to childhood as an adult. It is the unfamiliar feeling of cutting your nails for the first time on your own.
But certain questions remain no matter how many oceans I cross. Could it be that I am scared to face the pain, the stories I could not rid myself of, no matter how far I run? I choose to ignore this feeling of unease, focusing on keeping my legs firmly at the edge of my seat so as to prevent an incursion of what is my rightful occupation of space, however small it may be. Immigrants are so fucking hung up on the past, I mutter to myself. Mulling over the past is a luxury. First, I have to survive.
—
I lay down on the sand and feel the coolness of the ground before me, reveling in the force of the earth that comes up to meet my body wherever it touches. Some days I hold onto this as my only comfort, that this force holds true for every point on this earth.
I have been hanging by a thread, feeling like I have lost something along the way. I cannot put a name to it, only that it has been forgotten. Up until now, the anger has sheltered my heart. Now, it constricts it; I cannot breathe. I get up and step into the Red Sea, whose waters sting my skin. I kneel at its shores instead.
In silent desperation, I send a prayer into the water. It returns with an offer to enter the In-Between. Entering it, I must face the lies—the ones that hold entire worlds, unfiltered, holding my most deeply seated fears. Memories swirl around me, just out of reach. My eyes blur. I don’t want to see.
I ask myself what it is I wish to speak into existence, is it the pain or the pride?
—
Somewhere between iterations three and four of my world-trotting adventures, I decide I need to write. Among the Congress of Selves, Reasonable Me—ever the polemicist—has finally made an appearance, with the proposal that writing through the pain may be a better alternative to death. To do this I need to return home, to remember, to revisit. Home is the In-Between, the three-letter codes for transit, the blood in the soil, everything I cannot remember, my father and my mother and my reflection in their memories. Home is where past regrets and future hopes come to meet in the middle.
I left home because I thought I had to find myself, away from complicated webs of stories hidden away in trinkets and drunken dreams. Maybe I had to leave in order to return, to first embark—
I am on an unfamiliar journey, which is to say I am on my way home.
It is unfamiliar because I am going home for the first time.
I stop briefly to consider whether it may be a cruel turn of fate that I, someone with a contentious relationship with language (which one will you choose?), have decided that writing is the vehicle through which I express myself. I decide, yes, it is cruel, because to write is to fully embody myself, to touch every distant corner of who I am and search for the concavities I have been afraid to explore, to then say it out loud.
To write with confidence but not assuredness is difficult in a world where I am taught to stay quiet and to doubt myself, to stay within firm delineations. This leads me to overcompensate by imbuing everything with a false sense of assuredness as an antidote to the insecurity that is imposed onto my existence, an insecurity I have come to impose onto myself.
Something inside me reminds me that fear is nothing if not a guiding light, as long as we don’t mistake it for pain, which is more ambiguous in shaping the inclination to run towards rather than from.
Identities, like languages, have been elusive. My identities are a crucible where oil, water, and heat come together, molecules entropically scattering throughout. They form aspects of myself that I don’t know how to reconcile. I cannot give them names unless I gain the ability to speak for myself.
I used to think there was a tension between the anger of Lorde and the love of hooks, but now I realize that I forgot to read the line about anger, peeled away to its core of love.¹ They are one and the same, and I hold both of them within me: anger and love, pain and pride. I make sure to feel them wholly, making sure not to leave out any uncomfortable parts. I let them propel me.
I return to the In-Between, this time with eyes open.
¹ From Audre Lorde’s poem, Black Mother Woman.
