Derek Chen (15)
Excerpts from Several Romanticized Tragedies
I look out the window, and I can still see a reflection of myself in the mirror, just vaguely, behind a cold sheen of fog from my breath and a hot layer of smoke from my mouth.
The dots beside their Facebook messaging icons are always green, but they never respond to me anymore. They never really did respond to me, anyway. I don’t believe that it was something I did or said in particular; rather, it was just me, in general, in life.
I become a drunk after years of self-torment. I stop caring about my future, and I use my money—without the knowledge of my parents, who, like every generation of immigrants, have worked tirelessly hoping that their descendants could live with more hope than they had for themselves—not on my tuition, but on a distorted vision of the world that I want to live in.
I don’t quit school. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t sin at all, as far as I can tell. But I can see myself doing so, every morning when I wake up from a 2-hour sleep, my throat thick with excess mucus and my eyes popping with crust. I wash my face and brush my teeth, which are already clean because I haven’t had breakfast and don’t plan on having it ever. It isn’t exactly because I’m not hungry; I just don’t feel like having any of the food that privilege allows me to have, the same food that I have morning after morning. My grandfather eventually wakes up and convinces me to have an egg. The smell of egg almost always disgusts me, and the taste is the same old thing, but I don’t hate it. It’s something to eat, at the very least.
I’m sitting in the main office, waiting to be called to see the principal. I’m not crying; I have enough dignity within me to sit upright and hold it all in.
To be honest, I don’t know what to feel. The adrenaline is still pumping through my veins, but it’s beginning to dwindle, just a bit. My bones feel slightly hollow, but I could easily mistake that hollow feeling for that fear of failure so familiar to every high school student.
I don’t know what I was thinking, leaning over so obviously. I had calculated it, right when I knew—I thought—I wouldn’t be noticed. It hadn’t been the first time, either—I had done it before, when I was younger.
But this time, it mattered more, because this was a state test, and it counted.
It didn’t actually. I knew that. The test would never break my grade—I was an A+ student, I knew that I could do well, and even if I failed, math said that I would be alright. Besides, colleges probably wouldn’t even care.
But I did it anyway.
Why?
It defied logic, I knew.
But what if you DID fail? What about college? Where would your future have gone?
Your life would have been screwed if you had failed. You understood that, once upon a time. Think about everyone who would have seen that grade. Think about the disappointment.
And I listened to that voice.
“The principal will see you now.”
I look up, and I meet the eyes of the secretary, her tone betraying just a bit of coldness.
I still remember how I felt guilt every time I had cheated on those tests when I was younger. I remember promising to myself, once upon a time, that I would never do it again.
“Thank you,” I say, smiling, just a bit. I swallow, just a bit, and I can feel my eyes stinging, just a bit.
It’s OK, I tell myself. Between my future and my honor, I would much rather have my future. Self-preservation is a rule, and I don’t need their sympathy, or their judgement, I tell myself.
Even if I go down now, I’ll find a way to rise again, better than ever before. I’ll prove them wrong, I tell myself, even though a part of me tells me that the textbook stories involving success from failure were probably built on privilege and a vast emptiness containing the ones who didn’t make it.
I become a famous writer. It’s what I’ve always wanted to be, or, at least, one of the things I’ve always wanted to be.
It’s good to be doing what I love, I suppose, but it’s lonely. I don’t know who actually understands my work because I can only envision them dismissing it out of pride or not digging deep enough to find the world as I see it. I suppose this is the true price of greatness—being plagued by thought, but never being able to actually deliver it in its proper form to the people.
I once believed that subjective interpretation was what made literature beautiful. I can now see that, as enrapturing a beauty as it is, it is, like so many other beauties, fatally flawed.
I wonder if it would be significantly different as a “great” in any other field of life.
I beg from door to door in a neighborhood that I know is home to wealthy and sympathetic people. They’re all the same—kind out of obligation to society, with eyes full of pity, its own form of condescension. I don’t blame them—they’ve undoubtedly worked to be where they are, and I doubt that they’re aware of what I feel when they smile and comfort me, besides the gratitude that acts as a veil over my inner self.
I remind myself daily that that idea, in and of itself, is pretentious. I’m not hiding anything with this lifestyle of mine because there is nothing to hide; my superficiality and pretentiousness, lasting residues from when I called myself a writer, are who I am.
When I was young, I tried to build myself up on shoulders made of philosophy, trying to define myself and others based on principles that I believed existed fundamentally in humanity. All of my ideas were unfounded, and had already been taken by the people that I tried to emulate. Even so, I preached to those who would listen, and they built me up on their shoulders, too, even though they knew that I knew that they thought I was a cliché fake. When I finally made it to the real world, I became broke.
I look into their eyes, day by day, and wonder about what they think and feel.
I wonder if everything that I believe about them is simply me asserting my unfounded principles in a vain last attempt to validate my existence.
Someone looks into my eyes, the spitting image of privilege and excess, and feels disgust. Disgust, because I pretentiously exist, dripping in the same shallow, repetitive colors that plagues everyone’s days and nights. Disgust, which I can envision clearly in my mind, but can’t help, because I feel the colors as deeply as one who sees more vivid tones.
My mom has died. I only notice when my brother messages me over Facebook because I have a full day of work and I don’t bother to pick up unfamiliar numbers that call my phone.
I make it to the funeral out of obligation. I feel almost nothing about her death because I’ve been preparing for it since I was told about the sacrifices my parents made for me when I was young. I used to imagine my mom dying, so I could say that I had experienced it all—the pain of loss and grief. It got to a point where I would imagine her never coming back when she was off at work, thinking about how my family and I would react to her not being there.
The first few times my imagination took me to its morbid reaches, I was appalled. I wasn’t prepared to suddenly be without such an uplifting force in my life. But as I grew older and nothing happened, death became a normal part of my imagination, just another thing that happened to me in worlds that existed in the margins of my mind, ones that were not concurrent with my current life. As I grew older, I became a ghost, floating in and out of the sleep that I was so deprived of, close and loving to my parents, but only in body. I could feel the possibility and want of death floating close beneath my flesh, making its way, reluctantly and tentatively, into that space in my chest that I knew was my heart, which quivered from holding such darkness.
I said that I went to my mother’s funeral out of obligation. I also went out of fear.
I was brought up in a community that treated filial piety as an invaluable part of life. I was told about the sacrifices necessary to become a parent, about everything that my parents had to do in order to raise me, about everything that I should be grateful for and everything that I should give back to them. I saw this in practice between my own parents—my grandparents often lived with us, and if not with us, then with extended family in Taiwan. I only became aware that this wasn’t always the case with senior citizens when I became obligated to perform community service for them. I realized that, one day, this was what was expected of me or my siblings, even if my parents would never mention such a duty to our faces.
My brother was always the strong one. He grew up to be someone, got somewhere in life; he was the one who took care of our parents. He wasn’t like me—he never argued with them, he always did as he was told, and he was never yelled at. He did things out of an aloof kindness, and his kindness never stopped. I never saw him after I got a job and settled, partially because we were both busy, partially because I never wanted to see an image of a perfect life that I had failed to achieve. No one would say the word “disappointment” to my face—but, if anything, the guilt came from myself.
Ironically, not seeing my parents built on that. I had always been afraid of never having done enough for my parents, not when I was little, not when I had grown up. And so, I went to my mother’s funeral, out of fear that not going would prove me guilty of a crime that I had sworn never to commit, even though a part of me said that there was nothing holding me to morality.
I went to my mother’s funeral that day to face the warm but unfamiliar faces of my brother, his wife and kids, and my dad. I felt like I was bound to go to one of their funerals one day, too, out of the same obligation and fear.
In the blur of memories of that day, I don’t recall remorse ever crossing my path.
What I did feel? Fear, at first, because I was afraid that I wouldn’t feel grief when I saw my mom’s body at rest, and then guilt, when I actually didn’t.
Some might say that my fear and guilt was how I felt remorse at her funeral. What a lonely type of remorse that had been, then. If fear and guilt had been my way of grieving, then it hadn’t been her that I mourned that day; it had been my conscience.
I grow up, go to college, and graduate. I work as a science teacher now; it’s not the first job that I would have taken, but it was the only job left for me, a decent-but-not-brilliant science-oriented student. It’s an interesting job, if anything—I get nostalgic when I realize that some of the kids I’m teaching will go on to be like me, some will go on to be far greater than me, and some will go on to be like my brother, a drug addict.
We never expected it of him. He was such a great person, and then college hit him, and he snapped. I never expected to ever hear from him, my older brother, the person that I had once wanted to be, ever again, but one day, he had shown up on my doorstep and begged for a place to stay.
And I let him.
I let him, even when my wife said that he’d be a bad influence on the kids. I let him, even when he took our food without asking, even when he began to take the bills from my wallet and left traces of substances out in the open. The kids began to ask why Mom and Dad would argue so much into the night now that Uncle was here, would ask what the funny smell was that came out of his room at night. I had no good answers, but I couldn’t bear to kick him out, no matter what my wife said.
I was sitting on the bus this morning when I saw him run across the street, right in the path of the car beside us. The light turned green right as he was running, and his weak form didn’t stand a chance.
I saw him, saw his form ragdoll into oblivion. The car halted, and it seemed as if a scene was beginning, but the light was green, and the bus was moving along—and I wasn’t inclined to stop it.
The bell for dismissal rings, and I wonder what had gone through his mind that morning. I wonder if he had been high, or if he had overheard the arguments my wife and I had tried to cover up, or if he had simply seen a reflection of himself and couldn’t bear it anymore.
I’d like to imagine that, like me, my brother had wanted to be someone more than who he became. My wife never understood any of the passions I had, but I wonder about my kids, about the kids that I teach.
I wonder if they’ll feel as passionate about science as my brother once felt, and I wonder if any of those who do will turn out like him anyway.
Anyone who is willing to put themselves in the face of death intentionally must be braver than I ever could be.
I curl up in a corner and slowly freeze to death. No one notices me until after, and they wonder where I’ve gone, what they could’ve done better. I don’t look back, not in heaven, not in hell; and suddenly, everyone feels regret, everyone that I’ve known but not, everyone that I want to reach out to, but don’t.
And the most repulsive part of it all?
It’s what I want them to feel.
Derek Chen is currently a sophomore in high school. He spends his days eating, procrastinating, and sleeping.
Excerpts from Several Romanticized Tragedies
I look out the window, and I can still see a reflection of myself in the mirror, just vaguely, behind a cold sheen of fog from my breath and a hot layer of smoke from my mouth.
The dots beside their Facebook messaging icons are always green, but they never respond to me anymore. They never really did respond to me, anyway. I don’t believe that it was something I did or said in particular; rather, it was just me, in general, in life.
I become a drunk after years of self-torment. I stop caring about my future, and I use my money—without the knowledge of my parents, who, like every generation of immigrants, have worked tirelessly hoping that their descendants could live with more hope than they had for themselves—not on my tuition, but on a distorted vision of the world that I want to live in.
I don’t quit school. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t sin at all, as far as I can tell. But I can see myself doing so, every morning when I wake up from a 2-hour sleep, my throat thick with excess mucus and my eyes popping with crust. I wash my face and brush my teeth, which are already clean because I haven’t had breakfast and don’t plan on having it ever. It isn’t exactly because I’m not hungry; I just don’t feel like having any of the food that privilege allows me to have, the same food that I have morning after morning. My grandfather eventually wakes up and convinces me to have an egg. The smell of egg almost always disgusts me, and the taste is the same old thing, but I don’t hate it. It’s something to eat, at the very least.
I’m sitting in the main office, waiting to be called to see the principal. I’m not crying; I have enough dignity within me to sit upright and hold it all in.
To be honest, I don’t know what to feel. The adrenaline is still pumping through my veins, but it’s beginning to dwindle, just a bit. My bones feel slightly hollow, but I could easily mistake that hollow feeling for that fear of failure so familiar to every high school student.
I don’t know what I was thinking, leaning over so obviously. I had calculated it, right when I knew—I thought—I wouldn’t be noticed. It hadn’t been the first time, either—I had done it before, when I was younger.
But this time, it mattered more, because this was a state test, and it counted.
It didn’t actually. I knew that. The test would never break my grade—I was an A+ student, I knew that I could do well, and even if I failed, math said that I would be alright. Besides, colleges probably wouldn’t even care.
But I did it anyway.
Why?
It defied logic, I knew.
But what if you DID fail? What about college? Where would your future have gone?
Your life would have been screwed if you had failed. You understood that, once upon a time. Think about everyone who would have seen that grade. Think about the disappointment.
And I listened to that voice.
“The principal will see you now.”
I look up, and I meet the eyes of the secretary, her tone betraying just a bit of coldness.
I still remember how I felt guilt every time I had cheated on those tests when I was younger. I remember promising to myself, once upon a time, that I would never do it again.
“Thank you,” I say, smiling, just a bit. I swallow, just a bit, and I can feel my eyes stinging, just a bit.
It’s OK, I tell myself. Between my future and my honor, I would much rather have my future. Self-preservation is a rule, and I don’t need their sympathy, or their judgement, I tell myself.
Even if I go down now, I’ll find a way to rise again, better than ever before. I’ll prove them wrong, I tell myself, even though a part of me tells me that the textbook stories involving success from failure were probably built on privilege and a vast emptiness containing the ones who didn’t make it.
I become a famous writer. It’s what I’ve always wanted to be, or, at least, one of the things I’ve always wanted to be.
It’s good to be doing what I love, I suppose, but it’s lonely. I don’t know who actually understands my work because I can only envision them dismissing it out of pride or not digging deep enough to find the world as I see it. I suppose this is the true price of greatness—being plagued by thought, but never being able to actually deliver it in its proper form to the people.
I once believed that subjective interpretation was what made literature beautiful. I can now see that, as enrapturing a beauty as it is, it is, like so many other beauties, fatally flawed.
I wonder if it would be significantly different as a “great” in any other field of life.
I beg from door to door in a neighborhood that I know is home to wealthy and sympathetic people. They’re all the same—kind out of obligation to society, with eyes full of pity, its own form of condescension. I don’t blame them—they’ve undoubtedly worked to be where they are, and I doubt that they’re aware of what I feel when they smile and comfort me, besides the gratitude that acts as a veil over my inner self.
I remind myself daily that that idea, in and of itself, is pretentious. I’m not hiding anything with this lifestyle of mine because there is nothing to hide; my superficiality and pretentiousness, lasting residues from when I called myself a writer, are who I am.
When I was young, I tried to build myself up on shoulders made of philosophy, trying to define myself and others based on principles that I believed existed fundamentally in humanity. All of my ideas were unfounded, and had already been taken by the people that I tried to emulate. Even so, I preached to those who would listen, and they built me up on their shoulders, too, even though they knew that I knew that they thought I was a cliché fake. When I finally made it to the real world, I became broke.
I look into their eyes, day by day, and wonder about what they think and feel.
I wonder if everything that I believe about them is simply me asserting my unfounded principles in a vain last attempt to validate my existence.
Someone looks into my eyes, the spitting image of privilege and excess, and feels disgust. Disgust, because I pretentiously exist, dripping in the same shallow, repetitive colors that plagues everyone’s days and nights. Disgust, which I can envision clearly in my mind, but can’t help, because I feel the colors as deeply as one who sees more vivid tones.
My mom has died. I only notice when my brother messages me over Facebook because I have a full day of work and I don’t bother to pick up unfamiliar numbers that call my phone.
I make it to the funeral out of obligation. I feel almost nothing about her death because I’ve been preparing for it since I was told about the sacrifices my parents made for me when I was young. I used to imagine my mom dying, so I could say that I had experienced it all—the pain of loss and grief. It got to a point where I would imagine her never coming back when she was off at work, thinking about how my family and I would react to her not being there.
The first few times my imagination took me to its morbid reaches, I was appalled. I wasn’t prepared to suddenly be without such an uplifting force in my life. But as I grew older and nothing happened, death became a normal part of my imagination, just another thing that happened to me in worlds that existed in the margins of my mind, ones that were not concurrent with my current life. As I grew older, I became a ghost, floating in and out of the sleep that I was so deprived of, close and loving to my parents, but only in body. I could feel the possibility and want of death floating close beneath my flesh, making its way, reluctantly and tentatively, into that space in my chest that I knew was my heart, which quivered from holding such darkness.
I said that I went to my mother’s funeral out of obligation. I also went out of fear.
I was brought up in a community that treated filial piety as an invaluable part of life. I was told about the sacrifices necessary to become a parent, about everything that my parents had to do in order to raise me, about everything that I should be grateful for and everything that I should give back to them. I saw this in practice between my own parents—my grandparents often lived with us, and if not with us, then with extended family in Taiwan. I only became aware that this wasn’t always the case with senior citizens when I became obligated to perform community service for them. I realized that, one day, this was what was expected of me or my siblings, even if my parents would never mention such a duty to our faces.
My brother was always the strong one. He grew up to be someone, got somewhere in life; he was the one who took care of our parents. He wasn’t like me—he never argued with them, he always did as he was told, and he was never yelled at. He did things out of an aloof kindness, and his kindness never stopped. I never saw him after I got a job and settled, partially because we were both busy, partially because I never wanted to see an image of a perfect life that I had failed to achieve. No one would say the word “disappointment” to my face—but, if anything, the guilt came from myself.
Ironically, not seeing my parents built on that. I had always been afraid of never having done enough for my parents, not when I was little, not when I had grown up. And so, I went to my mother’s funeral, out of fear that not going would prove me guilty of a crime that I had sworn never to commit, even though a part of me said that there was nothing holding me to morality.
I went to my mother’s funeral that day to face the warm but unfamiliar faces of my brother, his wife and kids, and my dad. I felt like I was bound to go to one of their funerals one day, too, out of the same obligation and fear.
In the blur of memories of that day, I don’t recall remorse ever crossing my path.
What I did feel? Fear, at first, because I was afraid that I wouldn’t feel grief when I saw my mom’s body at rest, and then guilt, when I actually didn’t.
Some might say that my fear and guilt was how I felt remorse at her funeral. What a lonely type of remorse that had been, then. If fear and guilt had been my way of grieving, then it hadn’t been her that I mourned that day; it had been my conscience.
I grow up, go to college, and graduate. I work as a science teacher now; it’s not the first job that I would have taken, but it was the only job left for me, a decent-but-not-brilliant science-oriented student. It’s an interesting job, if anything—I get nostalgic when I realize that some of the kids I’m teaching will go on to be like me, some will go on to be far greater than me, and some will go on to be like my brother, a drug addict.
We never expected it of him. He was such a great person, and then college hit him, and he snapped. I never expected to ever hear from him, my older brother, the person that I had once wanted to be, ever again, but one day, he had shown up on my doorstep and begged for a place to stay.
And I let him.
I let him, even when my wife said that he’d be a bad influence on the kids. I let him, even when he took our food without asking, even when he began to take the bills from my wallet and left traces of substances out in the open. The kids began to ask why Mom and Dad would argue so much into the night now that Uncle was here, would ask what the funny smell was that came out of his room at night. I had no good answers, but I couldn’t bear to kick him out, no matter what my wife said.
I was sitting on the bus this morning when I saw him run across the street, right in the path of the car beside us. The light turned green right as he was running, and his weak form didn’t stand a chance.
I saw him, saw his form ragdoll into oblivion. The car halted, and it seemed as if a scene was beginning, but the light was green, and the bus was moving along—and I wasn’t inclined to stop it.
The bell for dismissal rings, and I wonder what had gone through his mind that morning. I wonder if he had been high, or if he had overheard the arguments my wife and I had tried to cover up, or if he had simply seen a reflection of himself and couldn’t bear it anymore.
I’d like to imagine that, like me, my brother had wanted to be someone more than who he became. My wife never understood any of the passions I had, but I wonder about my kids, about the kids that I teach.
I wonder if they’ll feel as passionate about science as my brother once felt, and I wonder if any of those who do will turn out like him anyway.
Anyone who is willing to put themselves in the face of death intentionally must be braver than I ever could be.
I curl up in a corner and slowly freeze to death. No one notices me until after, and they wonder where I’ve gone, what they could’ve done better. I don’t look back, not in heaven, not in hell; and suddenly, everyone feels regret, everyone that I’ve known but not, everyone that I want to reach out to, but don’t.
And the most repulsive part of it all?
It’s what I want them to feel.
Derek Chen is currently a sophomore in high school. He spends his days eating, procrastinating, and sleeping.