Knives (A Chinese Story) in other words you are ugly on the outside and uglier inside

Mother said: The Chinese say, do not give your knives away.

So I gave the boy I loved a picture of him holding a gun.

The Chinese I knew from my mother’s admonitions were a wary, self-preserving sort.

We offer candies, before all else; to strangers, to sweeten their commerce with us,

Keeping back the sour, the biting taste; lest our guests’ teeth turn on us.

Mother, so quick to warn against knives and teeth, why did you never tell what words could do? At your bidding, I never spoke aloud of evil things, for fear my voice would make them real.

And perhaps, the words I recognized as insults I deflected, but what have the compliments of twenty-some years made of me?

“This is my beautiful daughter” said my mother’s friend, introducing her daughter comely to my mother at church. Mother then, turning to me, “here is the math wizard.”

At that time, the words stung so, and even now, when I am grateful for them, seeing them more unjust to my brother than to myself, sometimes, sleep-disheveled, I look at the mirror on mornings, and they sting still.

“Will you marry me?” a callow boy once said to me. I wept to hear him say it and even today, still desired not to send him away, weeping with joy that I should be so prized, flattered-foolishly, fearing I would never be valuable again.

“Ya sui – pretty girl” was his pet name for me. The first few months we were in love. When that endearment passed; replaced by others, I missed it sorely, and chided him.

Too fleeting had I been “she is a beautiful creature” – I wanted to be so again.

“My eyes are yours only” was never enough. “I will always love you” he would often say.

He asked me, “why is it important that I tell you this all the time when you know it’s true?”

I knew then words had not done to him what they had done to me.

I see how I cut and scar myself

squeezing into forms too narrow for me:

too slim, too soft, too kind, too obliging,

too pale and huge-eyed;

and I tremble to note how many times

doggedly, I come back, bloodied,

and ask to be let in,

chambering to contort myself into their

confines again.

I see how I cut and scar myself,

squeezing into forms too narrow for me,

again and again, because I want to,

having only been warned, in my childhood,

against knives.