They say if you acknowledge a problem, it becomes real
by Lucy Zhang
I.
According to my parents, there was no such thing as mental illness. Failed a geometry quiz? Why was I having a panic attack when they had to worry about raising a stupid, lazy child? I should be a wiz at math anyway, right? It came with the stereotype–even though I counted with “one, two, three”, not “一, 二, 三”, so all those native kids had a head start with their intuitive language scheme. My parents would go on about how they had nothing when they came to America and raised my older sister on free PB&J school meals and by the time I came around, they could afford a house and the two dollars of lunch money for me to get a carton of 2% milk, a side of over-steamed vegetables, and slice of square pizza. It was only natural that I hid things from them: I’d fake grades on exams they demanded to see; I’d sneak post-its scrawled with squiggly characters under my desk and judiciously copy them during our Saturday morning vocabulary quizzes at Chinese school.
II.
It was after bombing a bio test that I started cutting my arms in the school greenhouse, more of a storage room with one overgrown plant clinging to a PVC pipe-constructed hydroponics system. Glass covered one side of the greenhouse and you could see the entire parking lot and the swarms of seniors ditching school early. I cleared a table, pushing a lab manual and pipettes to the side, relocating a cracked beaker to the table behind me, where it stood like a glass castle fortified with shards and edges. You could find anything in the greenhouse, but rarely did people use it because it was too warm, too cluttered, so I gripped a pair of scissors between the two blades and sliced. Then I resumed reviewing the exam.
III.
Whenever I did well in something–won a math contest, aced a big exam–my parents cooked a fancy dinner. My mom made dumpling skins from scratch, although she cheated and used the bread machine to knead the dough. She folded the wrappers with a natural instinct that was all touch and no sight: the way she dipped her index finger in water and traced around the edge of the wrapper, folded it in half and pinched the midpoint as the first seal, pleating the rest of the edges by bringing the peel from bottom to top and pinching again, rounding out the finished dumpling in the form of a gouged-out waxing gibbous. When she could pull me along to help, when I wasn’t busy giving excuses to stay holed up in my head, she’d forego the bread machine and let me knead so I rolled up my sleeves and sank my fingers into the dough. When she asked where the cuts on my arm came from, I told her they were from a mishap while dissecting fetal pigs in lab. I described pinning the pig’s limbs to the pan so it lay splayed, inserting the scissors through one side of the umbilical cord until it was all flaps of skin, flaps of body, a pinned and peeled and opened abdominal cavity, dragging the scalpel across the sides of the mouth so its tiny jaw could devour my finger, and my arm got in the way. The same way long hair gets in your eyes the one time you forget your hair tie on the bathroom sink, and you slice through, cut the problem off at its root, leaving a stump unnoticeable from a distance.
Lucy Zhang is a writer, software engineer, and anime fan. Her work has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Cheap Pop, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Heavy Feather Review and assistant fiction editor for Pithead Chapel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “They say if you acknowledge a problem, it becomes real”? My dad grew up in a poor family in Shanghai, where he and his siblings fought over food and suffered harsh winters. I think, to him and many other Chinese people from his generation, mental illnesses are largely a first world problem. As soon as you’re no longer struggling to survive, you get introduced to new avenues of unhappiness. I wrote this piece in an attempt to contend with this generational and cultural gap in defining happiness and fulfillment.
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