I wanted to escape because I just didn’t like being me when I was six. I was a pretty awkward kid, I had to wear leg braces that were clamped all the way to my hips, because I was bow-legged and some more. That meant countless humiliating "accidents" in the classrooms and at friends’ homes. At that age the world was very small, an "accident" was equal to the death of a beloved pet in the trauma scale. I also had this thing about repeating everything I said silently after saying it aloud, something that freaked out kids and adults alike. I made up excuses for these "special cases," I told people I repeated my sentences because I was learning a secret language. I told people I wore leg braces because I was gonna die soon, making even the most evil of children hush their cruel taunting.
Somehow those lies comforted me, and made me feel much better being in my skin, because I started to believe them, too. I wanted to be somewhere where I spoke a different language or die because of my leg braces.
I tried to find ways to find fortune and escape the banality of my leg-braced existence. I wanted to be a star or a millionaire and live like those people that my gay uncles chatted about. I wanted to be a Cushing sister or maybe Doris Duke (pre-butler). My aunt always said that glamour was always manufactured. All those movie stars were redneck hicks at heart.
So, I decided to find a way to manufacture glamour. First, I needed money. Like fate listening to my fervent prayers, an advertisement for a beauty soap came out saying that some bars had diamonds embedded in them. I made it my sole purpose in life to be the bearer of the soap diamond! That diamond would take me away from my grandfather’s house where my only real friends were the ceramic peacocks and gnomes that were scattered in our garden. I needed glamorous friends and some hustlers as well because they were the ones who always made glamorous people immortal. I saved my allowance to buy as much soap as possible, I would finagle my way on every grocery trip my mother’s and grandfather’s household would take so I could sneak a couple of bars in the cart. I asked aunts, uncles and more financially solvent cousins to bring home bars of soap for me.
Before I knew it, I had almost 40 bars of the beauty soap, I was so sure that I would get the diamond. I mean, who else had 40 bars of the specially labeled diamond beauty soap on that side of Forbes Park?
I melted them in laundry vats carefully sifting the water like gold miners did on TV. I did that over and over again, no diamond not even a fifth of a carat! I was so angry! My investment amounted to nothing. It would take another year of favors and allowances to make up for this monstrous deal. Time was running out on me. I needed to escape and go to a place where my doctor wouldn’t make me wear that stupid leg brace and I could be bow-legged, while wearing fur and drinking 100 percent California orange juice.
I watched TV and found out that some housewife with three kids had won the diamond. She said she only buys two bars of beauty soap a year and thought she chanced on a shard of glass when she found the diamond. Another thing to be envious about, she didn’t even want the diamond!
In hindsight, I realize my childhood tendencies ranked among serial killers and rapists. Was it just too hard to be someone else? I mean, I was doing something about it. It was not like I was waiting for puberty to hit and get married to the first available suitor.
I hated being six. I hated everything about me. I hated that I was Asian and named Celine. I wanted to be blond and named Ashley and be 12 and have braces on my teeth and not my legs. All my cool cousins had braces, it was sort of a status symbol, I guess. Equivalent to the Rolex on my uncles’ wrists and the Leonard dresses that my mother wore.
Without a diamond to liberate me from my current page in life, I started drinking. Soda, that is. My parents forbade me to drink soda for reasons I never understood since I was hardly more physically hyper or rather more imaginative. I just imagine they did it because other parents did it to torture their children. I just wanted to rebel. Life was going downhill, my soap scam had left me broke and my reputation with my family was put in question since it was sort of odd to ask for soap for one’s birthday.
My mother would always tell me to slap myself if I thought I was going crazy. I tried doing that and I still felt unsatisfied, so I figured I was not insane. I felt I had to answer to my true calling.
So, one time when my grandfather was sleeping, I went to his dresser and ripped out a check from his checkbook. This was it! I could now buy my freedom! I mulled on what would be a good amount to steal.
I just learned about prime numbers, so I decided it should be a prime number. So I carefully scrawled out the numbers 9,577. Those were the prime numbers that I could remember. I practiced it on an old newspaper so it would look like a grownup wrote the check. Problem was, I not a very good student in school, I was too consumed with the idea to escape to the other side of paradise. Plus, my handwriting, even to this day, resembles chicken scrawls. I finally made the check written out in crayon and left on my desk not really knowing what to do with it.
My mom often wrote checks and gave them to my dad who would then come home with a brown envelope filled with money. How did that happen? I didn’t want to ask because it might look suspicious, and there was no way I would hand my freedom check to my dad. He’d just tie me to my chair and tell me to come to my senses or something dramatic like that. Anyway, my grandfather woke up from his nap and being the wise man that he was he knew something was up. He realized a check had been stolen. He interrogated the nurses and even some of the other kids in the house. I felt something different that day – it was guilt. Suddenly the scales that tipped favorably to my escape had been outweighed by this new thing called my conscience. I handed the check to my grandfather and found out everyone knew I stole the check anyway. He chided them to test if I was growing into a monster. Right then and there my ambitions for superlative glamour were squashed.
At six, I realized I would never be a real blonde named Ashley and that I would have to wear the leg braces, so that I wouldn’t have to wear them when I was 12. I took drastic measures (well at that scale, at that time) to escape only to begin to understand myself for the very first time. Later on as I grew up I would encounter many people trying to escape from something. Making their dissatisfaction an excuse for their deeds. Cheating, scamming or its other illegitimate cousins: they all become excuses for not settling for the life you have been given to build on and escaping to another one as mythical as unicorn bacon.
Living with ourselves and owning up to what we have done is very boring. Reinvention made Madonna, after all, and Barbara Hutton did it her way and became a legend. She went from one marriage to another trying to fulfill one fantasy after another. Of course, she also died alone and super poor. I kinda don’t want that.
Instead of enjoying what my parents and grandfather gave me and enabled me to do, I wanted to be in someone else’s shoes. I went through so much just to be somebody else that I missed a year of just being myself without the disgusting envy I felt for the housewife and the greed that gnawed at me like a determined rat. And maybe it was also a year that would have helped me get better handwriting skills. The wasted year eventually became years of owning up to being who I am. Maybe unicorn bacon does exist.
My grandfather told me when I gave back the check, "If you never gave me back that check I would have always remembered you as the grandchild who stole a check from me, but now I’ll always remember you as the one who gave it back."
I still had to kneel on salt. While the lesson was indeed learned, penance is always still a bitch.