I grip tightly onto the plastic grocery bag, dangling, dangling dangerously above the murky waters pooling by a clogged drain gutter. Yes I am carrying dinner home by myself, yes I am walking 7 blocks up and down the hills in San Francisco, but should you pity me? No. In my frail frail bones, weathered by 63 years of what I see as growing experience, wisdom, there is still strength. There is strength in the way that you see the veins bulge from the back of my hand, telling you “I still have life, I still grip this bag, I still hold onto this dignity that I have for years been gathering and hoarding and storing up for myself ever since I moved to this country. Do you see the bulge of this blue line? That is the bulge of muscle—of a powerful will, of one who will not let go of this life as an immigrant, so full of tragedy, so full of hardship, so full of suffering which I have chosen to ignore, to not acknowledge, because what I want you to see is my strength, my years of work that I swear to myself, I swear it, I SWEAR it, they have not been in vain.”
When I turned 49, and I saw my husband, now dead, glancing at the young twenty-somethings the same age as my daughter, glancing at them as we walked past small shops in Hong Kong looking for dinner, I decided to have my eyebrows tattooed onto my forehead. I decided to do it as a reminder to myself of the beauty I once was, how I used to be able to capture the hearts of 53 year old businessmen walking back to their sorry lives and sorry wives each day after work, capturing their fantasies with my coy smile. The tattooist etched permanently into my forehead this reminder—the dark tantalizing lines, the arch of a young eyebrow resting on young and still glowing skin. And, as with all my past disappointments, history was erased—shaved away actually. I watched as the tiny pieces of hair drifted down from my forehead to the floor, and I told myself “These tired, old woman eyebrows, these parts of my history—they’re gone. They never existed. Look in the mirror. Do you see the arch of your eyebrow made of ink? The way that black ink now pierced beneath your skin curves upward with a smooth seduction? That is the way your face always looked, and that is how it will always look.”
Look at me standing on this street corner. Look at my face—do you see that faded ink, still there? I am gripping tightly to my beauty, tightly tightly tightly, in the same way I gripped tightly to my children, to my son who only loved me out of duty, to my American daughter who complained to me but never knew the true hardship she never endured in the land where I was born. I am holding onto it all, and you will never know, you will never know my desperation in my grip, for all you see is my strength, my dignity, the power of my hold.
