Natural Beauty

Beauty has always been one of the only ways women have been able to access power, and I can’t fault any of them for wanting more of it.

Society wants us to look for the approval of men in everything we do. Self-care is the radical act of dressing and living for ourselves.

I had always assumed love carried itself easily through various permutations and disintegrations. Now I find myself disassociating them from the people I had known my parents to be. I can't decide which is worse, coming up against the limitations of their souls or the limitations of my love.

In the classical music field, it’s still more permissible for women to be mediocre than it is for them to be fat.

I study her the way an overeager student studies a poem, committing it to memory because comprehension is out of reach.

I can’t decide which is worse, coming up against the limitations of their souls or the limitations of my love.

His whole business model privileges the already privileged. Those who can spend exorbitant amounts of time and money on self-care and making themselves beautiful.

Customers who are fully satisfied require no further satisfaction. They must be sold a version of themselves that is constantly just out of reach. I believe in the same approach for music. Too harmonious, and everyone falls asleep. It’s the sheer grip, that bit of nail, that has always made my playing what it is. That fine line between beauty and ugliness, ripeness and rot, is what keeps an audience listening with held breath.

I try not to laugh out loud. What could the girl in front of me possibly know about wanting to be beautiful?

At last, the land of opportunity has stretched an exclusive hand toward me. Is this how my parents felt, landing on the tarmac of a new and unfamiliar country, trying to twist their tongues in a new language? Afraid and lonely, yet powerful?

I feel a stab of resentment before reason kicks in. I work to rid myself of the envy I so often felt in grade school and at the Conservatory for those who are half Asian, reminding myself that it doesn’t necessarily guarantee more assimilation.

I enjoy the immense freedom that comes with being safe from desire. And it is a kind of power to embrace ugliness and its possibility of expression, so much more imaginative than beauty.

It took a long time for me to understand that only people who have had nothing feel the need to keep everything.

No woman escapes pregnancy unscathed. No matter how wonderful they are, offspring gorge on our perfect bodies and alter them forever. I had a husband and children. Did he look at me after I got pregnant? Of course not. He left me disfigured and impoverished. If I hadn’t met Victor then, I would have killed myself.

Even though they had so little money, my parents always managed to provide me with not only necessities but even luxuries. It hurts that I am failing them now when they need me.

Only people who have nothing feel the need to keep everything.

It was the first time I learned that to love is to go hungry

it is still more permitted for women to be mediocre than for them to be fat

Looking back, it seems like I had instinctively known that the most effective place to prune myself was at the roots.

It’s unfortunate that I can undermine months of parental reassurance in just a few seconds, but it’s probably better for kids to learn early on that yes, monsters are real.

Victor was still keeping tabs on you, and with your parents more or less out of the way, it became very convenient to consider you as an option. All of our girls are somewhat isolated from any family or social circles for precisely this purpose.

She isn’t just bloated. Buttery discolored skin has begun to puddle around her joints, not yet settling in. Even her feet have a layer of pudge on the top, each toe inflated, ending with a jagged broken-off nail. She focuses on me with bleary eyes. “You have to stop.

My lips steadily inflate, reminding me of the air mattress I sleep on every night.

Wait, do you not think eyeshadow in a bamboo case is going to save the world?” I pretend to be shocked. “Exactly! And does anyone really need new eyeshadow? It isn’t our fault, of course. Buying stuff is supposed to make us happy. It’s a Band-Aid slapped on top of structural issues that actually need to be addressed. My point is, there are real and serious needs, and businesses should be striving to serve those instead of trying to manufacture new ones.

They are homogeneously beautiful, as if airlifted from a movie set about popular high school girls. They are still in character, perhaps, since they don’t acknowledge or even notice me.

The unanswered questions because they were unasked. A kind of lethargy had settled on me at the Conservatory, turned into impotence by every additional place that relegated me an outsider. I had decided that everyone else knew best. Now I have lost not only my culture but my family as well.

I always had the same amount of food on my plate, but my parents went with considerably less. They continued to give me the few cubes of pork or fish we could afford while they ate only rice and the leaves of sweet potato plants. It was the first time I learned that to love is to go hungry.

Gone is any need for status or belonging. I don't know if she is more liberated or lost.

Man’s greatest invention, don’t you think? The potato with salt,” the woman said, licking a finger.