火气 (fire/breath)

by Leanne Su

i.

you are six years old. you can hear your father yelling over the phone in his native tongue, hurling poison-tipped insults you don’t understand. he walks past your room and sees that you are still awake. he shouts at you too, and you hide under the covers so you don’t have to see the anger in his eyes.

 

ii.

your mother tells you that your father doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t hit her or you or anyone else that she can remember, and that makes him a good man.

 

iii.

you are nine years old. a blue-eyed, blonde-haired cherub on the playground makes fun of you for the way you pronounce your own name. you feel something ugly curling inside your chest, but you push it down because your parents told you to be better than that, to do as they told and not as they did. you glare at him, but you don’t say anything.

 

iv.

you are thirteen years old. you hate your father. you don’t understand hate, but you know you hate him. you can feel his rage enter a room before he does. he doesn’t hate you back, but he hates everything about you, from the american friends you have to the american sports you play to the american toys you want. your mother insists that he is a good man.

 

v.

you are sixteen years old and in the passenger seat of your best friend’s car. he is driving and he is pulled over for expired tabs. the police officer speaks to him like he’s a criminal and you see red. you want to say something, but your friend gives you a look, and you know that you cannot. you stay silent. your friend in the backseat mutters something in annoyance, and the officer shoots him a look but doesn’t say anything. you wish that your friend driving was offered the same privilege. the three of you are let off with a warning, as if that were something to be grateful for.

 

vi.

you are eighteen years old. your college roommate stumbles back from a party at three in the morning, makeup streaked and legs trembling, startling you out of your own drunken daze. you ask her what’s wrong and she can’t tell you, but she flinches when you touch her and she has bruises on her wrist. you ask her who did this and she shakes her head, voice trapped in her throat. you feel fury like you’ve never felt before tightening around your lungs. it takes every shred of will to not yell at her to tell you exactly who the fuck did this. it takes every bit of your patience to support her when she chooses not to tell anyone.

 

vii.

you go out to coffee with her, months later, when she’s okay to leave the house but her smile still doesn’t reach her eyes. you see a boy in line who looks vaguely familiar; he looks over at her with his group of friends, elbows them, and nods in her direction. you seethe. you set your mug down on the table too hard and you crack the coaster. your friend flinches at the sound, and you turn your attention back to her, guilt now rising in your throat. you gently knock your knee into hers and ask how her classes were, and she smiles a little weakly but tells you a funny story about the professor being a boomer and trying to switch the audio output for twenty minutes before giving up and just letting the sound play over his tinny laptop speakers. you laugh and don’t let her take her attention off of you until the boys leave.

 

viii.

you are twenty years old. you start going to a boxing class, and your instructor is someone who looks like you but a better, hotter, cooler version of you. she is encouraging and funny and badass. you worship her and the ground she walks on. she has her last name, the character for “kindling” in the language you share, tattooed on her lower back, and you can’t help but envy it even though your own last name translates to fucking “radish.” one of the students whistles at the two of you while she’s showing you how to stretch out a muscle in your thigh. you make eye contact with her and for once, you see past the idol. she looks sad, and bone-tired, and you know that she’s been experiencing shit like this for her entire life and she’s resigned to it by now. you thank her extra profusely at the end of your class, and you stammer out a compliment about how inspiring you find her. she smiles at you, a small true thing, and you feel a little better.

 

ix.

you are twenty-two years old. your friends from your cohort drag you out to a rave and you feel too old for it, even though just last year you were right there with them throwing back shots smuggled in via your bra and taking drugs from strangers in the bathroom. instead you volunteer to be the sober one and try to have a good time anyway, dancing next to their sweaty sticky bodies crushed in the throng of all the other sweaty sticky bodies. some guy comes up and tries to start dancing with you. you’re not into it and you squirm out of his clammy hands. he follows you, and this time, he grabs you by the waist and slurs something with sour breath into your ear. you turn around and punch him in the face hard enough that he staggers back into the crowd behind you, and then you knee him in the groin for good measure.

 

x.

your friends aren’t mad at you, exactly, but they’re not thrilled either. security shows up but they can’t find who’d done it, and the guy bleeding from his nose can’t tell you and your friends apart. they wouldn’t have believed him anyway. there’s an awkward lull in the dancing while security shines flashlights in everyone’s faces, looking for the culprit, bass still thrumming loud and heavy in the background. eventually they’re distracted by a puff of smoke coming from the other side of the crowd, and they push their way out from your little corner, taking the guy with them since he’s become belligerently drunk throughout the encounter and also kind of getting blood everywhere. your roommate from freshman year is there with you—you’re so fucking proud of her for how far she’s come—and she squeezes your arm and smiles at you, even as the rest of your friends start back in on their pacifiers and turn back to the stage. thank you, she says, and you don’t ask what for because you think you know.

 

xi.

you keep thinking about it, even after you all go home and wash off the glitter and the makeup and the reek of other people’s sweat. you think about how satisfying it was to feel something crumple. there’s the smallest smear of dried blood on your knuckles, and you stare at it for a long time in the shower before rubbing it off. you try not to think about the sickening crack of his nose, or how much you enjoyed it. you are only partially unsuccessful.

 

xii.

you are twenty-five years old. you moved to a big city where you live with some friends from work. your mother is proud of you for the stability and security of your office job, which makes you feel okay enough about it to tell yourself you’ll stay for at least another year even though you kind of hate it. she calls you one day and you expect to hear another drawn-out story about the neighbors and how they keep overwatering her hydrangeas. instead her voice is uncertain and wavering.

 

xiii.

your father is sick. actually sick this time, not just complaining about every minor ache in his body from decades of holding himself tense. you fly back home, fingers tapping anxiously against your thigh the entire time. the guy next to you on the plane is cute, and he smiles at you at the beginning of your flight and you smile back, but he watches one of those austin powers movies on the tiny airplane screen and laughs at a scene where two Asian women with pigtails and schoolgirl outfits show up and it makes you uncomfortable, so you look out the window at the clouds instead.

 

xiv.

your father is very sick. it is a strange, discordant feeling to see him lying in a hospital bed. you have seen him as many things throughout your life, but weak has never been one of them. your mother’s eyes are puffy, and a small, vicious part of you wants to ask why she’s even sad about this fucker dying, and you immediately feel like the monster you think you are. you sit by his bedside awkwardly and both of you say nothing. you leave at the end of visiting hours and drive in your rental car to your parents’ house while your mom stays through the night. she texts you and says that your dad was very happy to see you. you don’t know how that’s possible, but you visit him every day for the last two weeks of his life anyway, sitting in silence each time.

 

xv.

you are twenty-six years old. your father’s funeral is back on the mainland because all of his friends in the states had either fallen out of touch or never existed to begin with. it is a very long flight, and your mother takes ambien to help her sleep through it while you stay up, trying to catch up with your work with the overpriced in-flight wi-fi. you haven’t visited the motherland since you were a child. it’s strange to be in a foreign land and feel less foreign than you do at home. his family is kind but weirdly distant, and you don’t know if it’s because of your father or because of you. you see a photo of him when he was younger, standing on a raft with an enormous straw hat and a big goofy smile on his face. you cannot reconcile this image with the man who once threw half your closet in the fireplace for being too slutty and berated you for whoring yourself out. they tell a few stories about him during the memorial service that you can barely understand, and you don’t know when the man from their tall tales of adventure turned bitter and angry and old. you wonder if it was your fault.

 

xvi.

your mother sends you a box three weeks after you return home. you had offered to stay with her for longer, or even to move in with her despite the hair on the back of your neck rising at the very thought, but she waves you off and says she has plenty of friends around. the neighbors are still overwatering her hydrangeas, but she knows they mean well. you know that she’ll be okay. in the box is a series of documents from when your father first moved to the states. there are job postings, advertisements for neighborhoods open to “orientals,” newspaper clippings about the cold war, a few manila folders, and a photo album. as you thumb open one of the manila folders, you realize with a cold shock that they are declassified fbi documents investigating your father as a potential communist spy. you put the envelope down with shaky hands, only the header of the page visible. instead you leaf through the photo album, seeing a sparse collection of pictures from when your father first moved to the states—bright-eyed, same big grin from the photo on the boat, standing with what must have been friends in front of tourist attractions—through when he met your mother and up until just a few years ago. you could be imagining things or even just projecting, but you feel like you can watch the light dimming in your father’s eyes. you set the album down and realize with distant surprise that you have been crying.

 

xvii.

you think you maybe understand when your dad became the person he was as your dad. you think about the white-hot rage you felt as a kid, as a teenager, now, forever and always. you worry that the same thing will happen to you.

 

xviii.

you meet a girl. you don’t mean to, but you do. she’s beautiful and witty and interesting and you absolutely don’t deserve her. your mother isn’t sure about the whole thing at first, and you don’t know if it’s because she’s a woman or because she’s Black, and you desperately hope it’s the first. but then she finds out that your girlfriend is somehow both a doctor and a lawyer, and that she studied abroad in your mom’s hometown, and then she absolutely adores her. you’re pretty sure your girlfriend is also bribing her with homemade pastries when you’re not looking, but you’ll let it slide. sometimes you wonder what your dad would’ve thought about her and then decide that it’s best not to know.

 

xix.

you are twenty-eight years old. you go to therapy for the first time because your girlfriend has been gently suggesting it for over a year now, and you love and trust her more than you do yourself. you find a therapist who reminds you of your boxing instructor. she doesn’t smile when she meets you but she does when you crack a joke about how stereotypical your childhood was. you like her.

 

xx.

your full-time job is still boring as shit, but it gives you the time and money to start what your girlfriend and therapist both call “channeling your anger productively.” you attend rallies and protests. you try painting, although that one doesn’t really work out because you are incredibly bad at it and you stain the carpet on your first try so your girlfriend forbids you from trying again, at least inside the house. you teach self-defense classes. you buy a punching bag and work out while listening to rage against the machine and megan thee stallion. you organize a group to walk students at the local university home at night. you’re still angry, but it no longer feels suffocating. it no longer chokes your voice and fills your lungs. instead it feels liberating.

 

xxi.

you are thirty-two years old. your college has a reunion and you figure why not, and you go with your girlfriend. you reconnect with your roommate from freshman year—neither of you have been great at staying in touch with anyone—and are immensely pleased to see that she’s doing great and only slightly taken aback that she has a husband and two kids already. she adores your girlfriend, and your girlfriend adores her back. you find out that they’re moving for his job to the same city that you are in, and you are more excited than you expected to be.

 

xxii.

you get to be a Cool Auntie, which is something you never knew you wanted. your friend’s kids love you, especially because you convince their parents that no, five and seven isn’t too young to enroll in martial arts classes—it’ll be good for them! they relent under the condition that you pick them up from class on the days that they work late, and you happily agree. one day when you go to get them, you find their teacher standing outside with a long-suffering look on his face. he tells you that the eldest had pushed someone over for saying something mean about her little brother, and you can’t help but feel a glimmer of pride when you see the unapologetic look on her face and the proud jut of her chin. still, you promise the teacher that you’ll talk to them and let their parents know, and you can tell he’s sympathetic by the way he pats both of them on the shoulder when he turns them over to you. once you’re in the car you reassure them both that no, of course you won’t tell their parents, what kind of Cool Auntie would that make you? but you do have a heart-to-heart with them on the drive home about how the world is sometimes just an unfair place and it’s always good to stand up for what’s right, but we still have to control our emotions and make good decisions, and you’re not sure how much of it gets through to them but you hear from their parents a month later than they still love going and that the youngest is getting his yellow belt soon, so you figure at least some of it sticks.

 

xxiii.

you are thirty-five years old. someone somewhere decides that you are an “inspirational figure,” and you are asked to speak at a rally at the university you used to organize night walks for. you talk about activism and community and outreach with a confidence you don’t recognize as your own, and your partner beams at you from the front of the crowd as you finish, her applause audible even above the rest of the crowd’s. a girl comes up to you after, fiddling with her hair and scuffing her shoes. she quietly, nervously tells you that she really liked your talk, and she thinks what you do is really great, and you feel your heart swell with pride. she hesitates before she leaves, and then turns back to face you. how are you not angry? she asks. all the time, at everything? how do you look at everything wrong with the world and not get mad?

you think about this for a moment.

“I am angry,” you eventually respond. “all the time. at everything. and I am mad at everything wrong with the world. but anger by itself doesn’t do anything. it doesn’t make things better unless you direct it somewhere. and when you direct it somewhere, things get better, even if only a little, and then you get a little less angry, or at least feel better about the fact that you’re so angry. don’t let go of your anger, but don’t let it take you over, either. does that—does that make sense?”

she thinks about this for a moment.

yeah, she finally says, and smiles at you, a little bolder than she was before. thank you.

you smile back and you can feel your rage smiling with you, purring with satisfaction, wrapping itself around your legs and curling up next to you. you take a deep breath in. you let it out. and you stay angry another day.

Leanne Su is a second-generation Chinese American woman from Seattle, WA. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, researching high-power electric propulsion. When she’s not breaking or fixing thrusters, she’s usually embroidering, writing, or taking cursed pictures of her cat Pudge. You can find her on Instagram @its.lean or on the world wide web at leanne.space/.