The Haircut Razor

When I was 14, mama told me writing is the most dangerous monster on this planet.

I could have been published. I wrote a romantic story between two men, set in Republican Era China, and hadn’t realised I could write romance and love between woman and woman. One day I will publicly write queer. (In English.)

The editor’s voice bombed this household, like how when humans step into a bush all birds will hold beaks, running away. I left the house telephone number in the submission – I had a xiaolingtong, a budget mobile, but was not allowed to bring it to school. I smuggled it. But I was too worried I would miss the editor’s call, so I had to leak the telephone number. Like I knew the editor would call me.

The message landed on our lunch. Mama and baba’s faces were lotus flowers drenched in the storm. Clear and dripping. The editor couldn’t believe I was only 14. (I don’t believe, either.) Mama picked up the call; baba kept annoying me, asking me to show him the manuscript. Of course I didn’t. Or I won’t. And I can’t. My head was buried in the rice bowl, like the whole me, my whole body was shrinking, sinking into the steaming swirl. Baba buzzed with hidden pride at my pen name. I used it from then on.

These are all daytime scenes. I am not entitled to be invited to the night. And the long exhale was so long that it would crawl out from mama and baba’s room, biting my overheard tippy-toe.

A few days later, I was leaving the lunch table, and mama’s voice tangled me: I am warning you. Writing is the most dangerous thing in this world. You are too little, so just remember my words.

I can remember that I couldn’t wait to talk back: A lot of people are making money with writing and writing is exactly their career! Otherwise, what are we reading? Where can we get books? Because someone is writing!

But you are not someone’s daughter. You are from an ordinary family and you are just an ordinary girl. Give up and grow up, you will know what I mean. And all you need to do now is to prep for your exams. Be a good girl, OK? Me and your baba are making a living with so much hustle. Everything we have done is all for you. Have a think about us when you want to write this messy clutter.

Ma forgot that it was her fault. She dragged me into writing, into this muddy, clumsy pond. It’s she who dumped me books, trimmed my essay. Most of my nursery stories were made by her.

If I could, I would say: Ma, you really no need to worry.

14-year-old me didn’t have any ambition. All my longing was an iPhone 4. I guess 14‑year‑old me had a bit of talent in writing. If my work gets selected, the money will allow me to buy it. That’s all my dream. And my secret.

I fell in love with a girl. She’s my first love. Maybe ‘love’, in my unwitting heart, was only sharing one pair of wired earphones and smuggling drumbeat from an MP3 player in maths class. But I knew I love her. Mama didn’t like her because her hair was too short and sharp.

It’s our last year in middle school. Her parents were planning to send her abroad. No reason could beat them – no need for National College Entrance Examination in this province with another 600,000 young faces. I would die for an iPhone 4 to replace my xiaolingtong, for keeping in touch with her in time. Sharing pictures of lunch from canteen, or maybe reading fan fiction of our favourite K-pop band together. Virtually. Yet together.

If I could have asked: Ma, do you think we are an ordinary family? Or we are just pretending nothing happened, merrily?

Living in London in my late 20s, ex-council houses are my closest kinship. Windows stacked with duck-egg-blue frosted film, crowded. Like my hometown, the small town in northern China, and another land I don’t know how to call.

In crisp winters, the window is more like a slice. 6am, pigeons blasted over our pillows and pecked glass. We joke: they are living alarms, alerting us; don’t be late.

I saw millions of birds in London. Not the rare finds who will knock birdwatchers’ heartbeats, just ordinary birds. Pigeons, seagulls, magpies, crows. Like migrants. They hover around the sky and sea of this island every day. Freely. On clouds, god might have to give a way to them – to birds. But you know what I meant.

But I never saw swallows in London. Or, I overlooked them.

Ma said swallows only build nests under a blessed household. They bring good luck and blessings into the family and if you treat them well these little migrants will come back next spring. Your home is their home too. They only ask to settle under a roof, with mud, broken branches, artificial waste, and families. They live merrily only if you don’t banish them.

There’s a prose poem in my primary school textbook: The Song of the Stormy Petrel by Maxim Gorky. In Chinese, the bird’s name is ‘haiyan’ – ‘sea swallow’. I was hopeless at eating metaphors. I just swallowed words. In a gulp. In raw. I’ve forgotten everything the teacher said. I was only hoping this little bird could survive in the screaming storm, make it back to its temporary shelter. My confusion stumbled over there: why did sea swallow hope for a stronger storm? Why would it fight, against a little bird’s nature, against its wish to live? Nonsense.

Ma dumped piles of Russian and Soviet literature on me. She used to force me to read – her laolao, my great-grandma, is from the Soviet. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Mikhail Sholokhov…limping between borderlines, devouring me from paper.

I read everything with a flying hunger in my lungs. But mama’s picks were in exile. Characters in the books teased me. I didn’t get why Алёша is short for Алексей; translated into Chinese, they are in three and six characters, and their translated names don’t even share the same first character. Reading them was slicing me apart: one end is god, church, alcoholic husbands, affairs, winter taking someone’s son; the other is factories, workers, revolutions, people shuttering the empire.

Mama taught me to pronounce the authors’ names in Russian. I can’t gloss my tongue with the alveolar trill precisely, so I used Mandarin to copy the phonetics with my pious, also false, attempt. Maybe mama taught me in Mandarin too. I can’t recall. But I controlled the tone. The trick is to imagine you are standing on the ocean tide, naked, and then allow your mouth to flow with the wave.

Ma doesn’t like my micro-resistance. She repeated her laolao’s exile, saying she fled to China in the flock of upheaval. Everyone died. She survived. Only her.

The newborn swallows were opening mouths wide. Waiting.

It’s strange enough to live in a small orthodox town when your face isn’t Chinese enough. In my childhood, laolao wore wigs all the time, and mama hated my curls. My hair was black, tough, curly. I haunted mama to braid my hair with colourful rubber bands all day, and then with a ten-minute nap my head would become a chaotic nightclub. Much tighter, much better. Please. Mama. I always begged. I didn’t know I made her so much labour. Mama lied to me and cut my hair. Tears dripped and seasoned the offcuts. Salon is an animal trap. Ambushing. Chemical liquid had trimmed my hair, straightened me again and again. Or maybe ma just wanted to decorate me to be a purely perfect Chinese girl. Neat, behaved. She worried that people would judge her not a good mother. I couldn’t know. Or both. Wasn’t born as a boy, I’ve made mama criminal enough already.

Rarely, I saw laolao’s wig on the hook. A dangling nest, watching me back from dark.

For a long time, I always looked forward to flying to laolao’s home. At the doorstep, the door still open, she kissed my cheeks. Right, left, right. She bent down and held my face, looking carefully through me. Our little foreigner is coming home! Her nose rubbed my nose. Don’t say that. She is a Chinese one! Ma was not happy. Then they started fighting. I am used to it. My body was stretched to a battlefield, a small exclave, a puppet doll; their hands fiercely, gently pulled me towards two different lands’ authorities. Tear me apart.

I only want kisses. Kiss on eyelids. Kiss on forehead. Kiss on cheeks. Much and more. Dripping me away and away. Just take me away.

So my tears frightened the rice, burping. I choked; laolao blamed ma again with this new excuse, causing her to throw the blame to me. While a ghost sat around the table with us.

Until I saw it. In London Pride, surrounded by progress flags, floats, and balloons sailing from Canary Wharf, I saw the ghost. The protest banners in Chinese bleached my pride. Drowning in laughter, my face looked happy, while in hometown and homeland, girls and women and queers were still on chains. When chains, cage, prison are both metaphor and reality. Now I know metaphors very well.

Writing in native and non-native language is guilt: no space for writing queer in mother tongue, writing in English is a betrayal, a risky honour. A bleached laurel leaf. Bumping into my education rooted in parents’ money.

The haircut razor on my neck never leaves.

The knife I have been looking for, to put under my pillow: at 14, writing was not my priority. On many nights, I was overthinking about a well-known conversion clinic, the one only a two-hour drive away. I was overthinking about how if any ‘therapists’ break into my bedroom at mama and baba’s instruction and rob me away, a razor is not enough. I needed a knife. At least, I need a knife. But I can’t steal any from the kitchen. I never doubt ma would find out in seconds. She can sniff every desire under this roof. I am betting too. Bid on they love me enough so the knife is optional.

Like I observed the swallows under our roof, the ghost was just standing aside, observing me. We call it intimately: politics.

But I don’t know, great-grandma, are you standing there too? Standing together with the ghost, watching me? Can you tell me how to distinguish fear-driven migration and freedom-hunger driven? And what if fear is seeded in my blood? Like the sea swallow: the writer praised its brave move and ambition, but what if the little bird only wants to flee? To its home. Or whatever shelter there is, home or not.

When I checked every fragment in Russian history in the twentieth century, were you looking at me? Which mouldy paper with your braids woven down? To ask mama and laolao about you, I have to deal with the innocent failure of my coming out and mama’s command about marriage. Have not been home for years and years. Am still that little girl. Don’t dare to take home a horrible maths exam paper.

So how can I trace back?

I ask, and I know you won’t answer, yet I believe, ridiculously, that you are the only one who can understand me in this family. With desperate hope. Hope on a dead, a void, a person who I don’t know’s name, face, voice, and won’t ever echo me.

Maybe the sea swallow knows nothing, because the only thing they can do is fly. Like us. I don’t know if we are born in diaspora so we are becoming migrants, or if just because we are migrants diaspora is our final flyway.

I know you can’t answer me.

I refused to see laolao for many years. Forgive me. The war between ma and laolao never pauses. Before I left home, ma ordered me to visit her.

Laolao is growing shorter. At the doorstep, her arms stretched, swaying, held my face, looked through me vigilantly. Time floods back. She already knew our parting would be long as winters in Siberia.

In her dried and bare arms, her nose rubbed my nose. My kiss was on her hair whorl. I am much taller than her. Her real hair – black, tough, just like mine. With a tipped toe, her face nestled into the hollow of my neck. Clicking into place. Tears dripped down through my neck, collar, sewing a river between torn lands. A borderline. A melting.

Something glided through clouds, monsoons and ocean currents. Her kiss. Right. Left. Right. Transformed to a swallow. Finally, rest on my cheeks.