The Mole arrived in the summer of 2020, the same summer I dropped out of film school and then went crazy (in that order, exactly). It appeared one day just above the inner edge of my left eyebrow, like it was jumping off the end of a furry pier. I thought it was a fleck of something at first, since it hadn’t been there the day before. I rubbed at it, even washed it. But it didn’t come off. The Mole, once hibernating beneath the surface of my skin for all twenty years of my existence, had suddenly decided to announce itself. It was here.
It is flat and dark brown. Hardly bigger than the head of a pin. According to WebMD, based on the size, texture, and shape, it is most likely non cancerous and benign. According to a shady website on Chinese face reading, it means that I am diligent, intelligent, and will be fortunate and prosperous. According to my mother, it is my overdue inheritance of my great-grandfather’s genes. My great-grandfather was from Jamaica. He came to the States in the 1930s with a face full of tiny moles that were passed down, diluted, to his daughter, and then to my mother and me. I have four moles in total, two sets framing my eyes like parentheses, or mirrored maps of Japan- the country where I was born. Those had always been there. But the Mole was different.
*******
In the spring of 2020, the pandemic punched everyone in the face and put a stop to all senses of normalcy. I was in film school in North Carolina, planning to become the next Issa Rae or Ava DuVernay (our names rhymed, so I figured it was fate). But when Spring Break never ended, my parents recommended I move to Hong Kong, where my father, a pilot for FedEx, was stationed. I moved to the city in March of 2020, suddenly surrounded by giant, majestic hills crowned in fog, every building glinting with glass and silver, every face hidden by blue or white masks. I realized not too long after the plane landed that it had been twenty years since I had left Asia as a baby in my young parents’ arms.
I planned to only be in Hong Kong for a month. I planned to continue studying film and keep up with my courses online, never mind the time difference between Lantau Island and Winston-Salem. I planned to get accepted into the screenwriting program and continue my prodigious work as an aspiring artist. I had a feature film drafted in post-it notes, about a girl under a family curse that forces every member to meet their future selves when they turn eighteen. I would write it in Hong Kong and bring it back to North Carolina, my own baby conceived, created and carried back from overseas.
*******
Monsoon season in Hong Kong turns the apartment windows into a car wash, closes the stores twenty-four hours early, cancels classes and exams, bends the will of the palm trees, chases away the bats and monkeys, makes the whole world hot and wet for weeks. But inside the apartment, where we were supposed to be safe, the air itself was dangerous. Too many things went on at once—I’ll give the SparkNotes for all of our sakes.
My sister dresses in black, talks back, smokes with her friends. She comes out as gay. My mother disagrees.
My sister runs away. My mother agrees.
My father intervenes. My sister comes back.
My grandfather, mother’s father, goes to the hospital. My mother goes to visit him, leaving me to watch my sisters. He dies of septic shock. I am indifferent that he is dead. I never liked him. His ghost flickers on the TV screen two minutes before my mother calls to say he is gone.
My mother comes back to Hong Kong. She threatens to divorce my father. She says he is not supportive in her disciplining his daughters.
My sister nearly commits suicide. My mother calls her selfish and ungrateful.
My father tells me to talk to my sister. It doesn’t work out.
My mother and sister argue every day. One day, I take my youngest sister into the bathroom and tell her stories so she can’t hear things being thrown.
I drop out of film school.
My father tells me I am a disappointment.
We all have a talk at the table one day. My father mediates. We tell our mother how she is always overanalyzing us, abusing us, manipulating us, how she only cares about being right. We just want things to go back to normal, where she hides her contempt for us instead of announcing it in passive-aggressive excessiveness. She makes herself the victim.
I realize, finally, there is no point.
The Mole appears.
******
Congratulations! You have been accepted into the screenwriting program. Your hard work, dedication and talent make you an excellent candidate for our program, and we believe you will succeed here if you do not succumb to despair and depression. We can’t wait to see you on campus!
What is it about achieving your dreams that makes you lose all hope? This was what I had been working for since freshman year—months of informational interviews with my screenwriting professors, coffees with upperclassmen, camping out on film sets late into the night, writing stories until my fingers cramped and my mind reeled from exhaustion. When I saw the email, the joy and exhilaration that I should have felt never arrived. Instead I felt a deadness within me, something numb and empty that knew this was not what I wanted, or needed, anymore. It all felt pointless.
It wasn’t just because of what was happening at home. It wasn’t even because I was doubting my talent. It was a deep, raw knowledge, something I had been denying, something I had been lying to myself about since I first applied to film school. Now it was fully awake, stirred up by the chaos of the indoor monsoon, rearing its head up from my gut and forcing me to look at it straight-on. It spoke:
You’re not going to graduate from here.
It wasn’t like the other times, where I could easily push the truth back down. Instead, numb from the pain of the past few months, I accepted it.
I told my parents I was leaving the film school they had paid for.
I filled out the form to withdraw. It asked me if I was sure. I said yes.
I didn’t tell my professors, or my friends. I laid in bed for the rest of the day.
Another monsoon swelled up.
******
I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time in Hong Kong. It was something else that had always been within my orbit of awareness for most of my life, but I never picked it up. It was just as amazing as my friends had hyped it up to be. But what surprised me the most was the character of Azula. Because I related to her, almost too much.
Always one step ahead. Always sure of herself. Talented without even trying, smart enough to conquer the city of Ba Sing Se and effectively prime the Earth Kingdom for her father’s invasion. Has to put her own sibling down to look better in their father’s eyes. Doesn’t believe her mother loves her. In fact, doesn’t believe anyone loves her.
The Final Agni Kai, for anyone who has seen the show, is a masterpiece. It’s exactly what cinematic storytelling should be. There are probably a thousand online analyses of the music, the colors, the lighting. But the striking part for me was Azula’s actions throughout the scene. Azula is always precise, always calculated, and never wastes any energy to firebend if she doesn’t need to. Infamously known as the part of the show where Azula finally loses her mind, her hair flies in and about her face as she directs wild, wicked strikes of lighting, cackling as she electrocutes her brother Zuko and nearly blasts the head off of Katara before she’s finally taken down. Katara chains her to a sewer grate, and runs to help Zuko. Azula’s sanity breaks. She screams, sobs, heaving in pain, anguish and anger, as blue flames fan from her agonized mouth and Zuko and Katara watch silently.
But here’s what got me.
Azula doesn’t start crying when she is defeated. What breaks her is the image of her brother, the one she was always said to be better than, the one that she believed her mother loved more, being treated affectionately, comforted, and cared for. She can’t understand why it’s so easy for one person to receive love without any effort. Zuko doesn’t have to threaten anyone, or even be a useful weapon of war to be loved. He just exists, and that seems to be enough for people to care about him.
I realized that I was like Azula. Of course, I can’t firebend, but I was talented in other ways. As a kid I won awards for spelling bees, writing, and chess tournaments. I was a Black girl who was bullied for being quiet and “acting white,” last picked and left out. I had friends, but my general school experience wasn’t very welcoming. I came home frustrated and angry. I was always commended by my parents for being smart, and criticized by my mother for everything else. My skin, my weight, my attitude, my hair. Being smart was enough for my father, who just wanted us to do well, but not for my mother. To her, I am always fat, a slob, a disappointment—and she told me so. My mom used to tell me, “Your teachers all love you. Imagine if they knew what you were like at home.” To all of my innocent, pubescent questions like, “Why don’t boys like me” or “Why don’t I like myself,” she pointed to me as the answer. I figured, if I could do well enough in school and become somebody, maybe she would see she was wrong.
I got into every University I applied to. I went to film school, determined to become a famous screenwriter and be worthy of my parents’ investment. I prayed for God to make me an Oscar winner and worked to back it up. I won grants for short films, awards for best screenplay, even got featured at a film festival. That numb, empty, dead feeling was always there, and I sought to fill it by reading books about history or politics, all in the name of adding nuance to my films. But something was still missing. All around me I saw my classmates in love with film, doing just as much as I was, or even more, to make it in the industry. They made films on their iPhones, worked as production assistants on outside films, shopped scripts to other students, formed film crews on Facebook to shoot on the weekends or over breaks. It wasn’t that they were more or less talented or successful. It was that loving film was so easy for them. My classmates truly loved film. For me, film was really just a means to get people to love me. I thought…
When I’m famous, those kids will regret bullying me.
When I’m a cinematic genius, people will remember me.
When I’m in Vogue magazine for my new show, guys will like me.
When I’m important, no one will walk over me again.
When I make it, Mom won’t hate me so much.
When I make it, I won’t be unlovable anymore.
I realized, finally, painfully, gradually, that I couldn’t make anyone love me.
In the summer of 2020, stuck in Hong Kong with nowhere to go, that emptiness finally cracked open, and I wailed blue fire.
*******
What defines madness? Is it red eyes and fingers bloody from scratching your own face off? Is it screaming back at the whispering phantoms in the corner? Is it laughing at jokes only you can hear?
To me, madness, outside of the medical definition, is doing whatever you can to rebel against your duty to reality, to acknowledge it or even respect it. I stopped caring, because caring so much for so long had gotten me nowhere. My family was falling apart. My mother would never apologize for the things she had done and said to me and my sisters. My father would never fight for us. My friends surely would never forgive me for the toxic traits I had inherited from her and implemented on them. And being a genius wouldn’t excuse it. I was never a genius. I was eighteen, with ideas that were mediocre at best, and no life experience to draw from for a magnum opus. My films would never rescue me from the pit of self-hate I had always been buried in. It was a waste of my father’s money, who had saved a college fund for me since I was that small, full-of-potential baby in Japan. How could he ever forgive me? I could never make up for it, and I didn’t deserve it. I never really liked myself anyway. How could I expect anyone else to? That was what my mother had been saying all along. The only way to fix things was her death or mine.
During the day, I would drink if I could. I neglected my duties as the oldest sister, assigned to take my youngest sister to school or pack her lunch if mom and dad were gone. I stayed out late at night, wandering the streets of Hong Kong. I scrolled Hong Kong Tinder to find sketchy dates, but only went on one. The guy was touchy, and when I came home crying, my mother said I deserved it and that I needed Jesus.
I began to pray, every night, that I would wake up as someone else. Anyone else, please, I begged, I just don’t want to be me anymore. Nobody wants me, or likes me. I don’t even like me.
Every day I woke up, and God had not answered my prayer. Even God didn’t like me.
******
In January 2021, Amanda Gorman read her poem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Beautiful, stunning, Black woman. She had overcome a speech impediment as a child, and now was reading poetry for the President of the United States. We had both won an award from the National YoungArts Foundation for Writing. We were about the same age. Everyone on the internet was raving about her power, her beauty, her charm and grace. Her talent.
I had transferred to online courses at the University of Central Florida by then. My new degree was in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations. It satisfied the hunger I had always had for history and politics, but I still wasn’t okay. In the back of my mind, I was still strangely desperate to become a screenwriter. Like someone who knows they’ve left a toxic relationship but misses the familiarity of it, screenwriting for me still felt like the ideal. Seeing Amanda Gorman on that platform, succeeding so well as a writer where I had failed, pushed me to tears.
I knew that she had overcome her own troubles. But that doesn’t seem to matter when you’re in the middle of yours.
I went, that day, for no real reason, to the Hong Kong International Airport. From Lantau Island, it takes two buses to get there. I rode those buses, holding back tears, trying to focus on the directions on my phone and not look at any more news about Amanda. I made it to the airport and walked the rest of the way to a viewing area adjacent to the runway. From there, I could see huge airliners, 747s and A380s, taking off or landing over the South China Sea. I stood there and watched these planes, these giant machines that moved and rumbled like majestic animals, slide so easily into the air with hardly a grunt of effort. They flew, wings solid and sure, their metal skins glinting goodbye in the sun as they turned over the ocean.
I stayed there for another few hours, listening to music and watching the planes. A strange peace overcame me.
Planes, no matter their shape or size or cargo, didn’t worry about impressing anybody. They just flew.
********
Whenever I wanted to scream and cry, I went to watch planes.
Whenever I couldn’t stand the sight of my mother, I went to watch planes.
Whenever I thought of drinking, or going on another date to forget myself, I bought a box of mango juice and some Doritos, got on the bus, and went to watch planes.
I didn’t stop hating myself. But it was harder to think about how much I hated myself when I watched the planes soar into the sky or land on the runway. I remember being eagerly curious about where the departures were going, or just plain happy that the arrivals had made it safely.
*******
“Where have you been going?” My dad asked me one day as I headed to the door. Things at home had calmed down a bit. I was nearly done with my first year at UCF. I was on the Dean’s List for Spring 2021, and was working a paid, virtual internship with a women’s non-profit in Washington, DC. I was starting to forget about being a screenwriter, although I was leaning toward writing books. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an author. It was weird to suddenly remember that.
“Planespotting.”
“Planespotting?” His eyebrows raised. As a pilot, my father is usually in the cockpit. He’d never seen the view from an observer’s perspective, and I could tell he was curious. “Are you going alone?”
He invited himself, but I didn’t mind. As we were about to leave, my mom came out of her room.
“Where are y’all going?”
“Planespotting.”
“Without me?” She grinned, in the way she always did when she was in a good mood. I am an expert meteorologist when it comes to reading the weather of my mother’s emotions, especially her storms. It looked like a sunny day.
My mom invited herself along, and she insisted we take my sisters.
I became the walking GPS for my family, taking them across Lantau Island to reach the airport. My mother complained about the sun. My sister, dressed in all black with platform boots that weren’t ideal for the hike, kept to herself. My dad pointed out the planes coming in over the ocean, and explained that they change runways depending on where the wind comes from. My family, still scarred from the monsoon, peacefully watched planes fly for about an hour. We went out to lunch afterward, ate crab curry and pork dumplings, and laughed and joked just like we used to.
I knew that things were only fine for now. Soon enough, my mother’s face would change. She would find another flaw to pick at, another reason to scream, another scrap of evidence to prove that her life was horrible, her husband was an idiot and her children were ungrateful. But who cares?
*********
I am numb in a good way now. I don’t respond when my mother gripes at me. I don’t expect or wish for my father to stop her. They are moving to another house in Florida soon with my youngest sister, where they’ll retire together in ten years. My other sister is planning to become a tattoo artist, and her designs are amazing.
I paid my way through UCF with internships and a part-time job at a fast food restaurant. In May 2022, I graduated with honors in the Political Science major. My parents were very proud. I am now in graduate school at the George Washington University in DC, studying for my master’s in International Affairs. DC is a city of nerds, and I fit right in. Everything that I was interested in as a kid has resurfaced—my interest in Russia, my fascination with governments, my curiosity about human space exploration… and especially my love for reading and writing books. My friends from film school ask me why the drastic change. It is weird to explain that really, I was always this way. It was buried beneath the surface, but it showed itself in my scripts. References to history, the vast expanse of space, the complexity of politics. I have always loved how complicated people are, the impact they can have on the universe and our place in it. That part of me was always there, but it had become a strange memory, distant from my intense focus on filmmaking.
I have always felt split across different places, that there are parts of myself that were left behind as I grew up in Germany and Tennessee. Maybe that is why I have a hard time concentrating in class or telling my mentors who exactly I want to be. Maybe it all makes sense back in Japan, the place of my birth that I have no blood claim to, its only real permanence in bold black print on my passport. Maybe there’s a wholeness that exists in Jamaica, where my great-grandfather hailed from to bring his bounty of moles to me and my mother. But I don’t envision a prophecy for me in Japan, or Jamaica, or Germany. I don’t completely love myself yet either.
But I am studying something I love. I am with friends that I love. I read books that I love to share, watch movies that I love to talk about, make plans that I can’t wait to see come into fruition, and I know I won’t collapse if they don’t come to pass. Maybe, at twenty-two, I still don’t know exactly what I am meant to do, or if I will ever believe that people love me. But I like to think, for now, the Mole came with a truth that was overdue but not unkind, one that needed to be seen and felt to be appreciated. It wanted to be a part of me.
When something wants to be a part of you, it fights for you, every ugly, awful step of the way.
And isn’t that love?
************
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