[Tiny Essay] What Is the Shape of Your Body?
When my mother looks at me, I wonder where her reflection ends and I begin
I originally shared this story on Instagram as part of an ongoing experiment inspired by the short-form storytelling of zines, prose poetry, and the Japanese form zuihitsu (plus the urge to just stop overthinking and say something with the words I have right now). This one is directly inspired by a question from Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and Cathy Park Hong’s Kundiman class on documentary hybrid forms. I’m sharing it here to make it accessible to people who aren’t on Instagram, but you can check it out in its original form here.
I didn’t like the way the sweaters I knit fit my body. In photos, I saw someone I didn’t expect, who had taken on the shape my mother’s body had when she walked naked from the shower to her bedroom, shouting, “Close your eyes! Your mom is so ugly.” One day, we ran into my best friend at Rite Aid, her makeup and hair done, looking glamorous, almost like a stranger. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?” my mother said later. “I didn’t raise a beauty, but that’s okay.”
When my mother looks at me, I wonder where her reflection ends and I begin. “Can you believe I’m your mother?” she said, looking at a photo of us, wearing striped shirts in similar colors, accidentally matching. Our foreheads are wide, our lips the same color. Her hair is dark and mine is lighter. Or people know she’s Asian and don’t always know that about me. At one yarn shop, a woman who had been sitting across from us for an hour as we knitted finally asked, “Is she your mother?” What else would we be?
At another yarn shop, when we took classes together, the older ladies told her, “Your daughter is beautiful.” She looked proud, I think. “Thank you,” she said. “Nobody is going to say that about me so I like to hear it about my daughter.” Words that in writing look dejected sound confident, silly, charismatic when she says them aloud. She barrels through awkwardness, noticing everything.
I want her to think we look alike. My nose is like hers at the bottom, on a different bridge. We’re dotted with moles, or beauty marks? Our features make a similar shape when we smile, in a way I can’t describe even while staring at a photo. Am I making it up? I’m still trying to fight things she says she has accepted, and as I do it I wonder how much of her I’m losing. I make the kinds of sweaters she calls “mendokusai,” covered in cables or seamed in lace panels up the arms. I’ve seen the projects she made when she was younger, a crocheted doily made with a tiny hook, cross stitch on fine-weave linen. How many shapes has her body taken?