prodigal daughter
You volunteer at a yoga studio that smells like aloe. In the staff room you fill a square bucket with mop water and wait for the hot room to empty out after class. Women and men in pink matching sets and knee-length shorts padding to the changerooms, the air easy around them. It is mostly white people but sometimes you see girls who look like you and wonder if they’re in uni. You’re aware that you’re age-ambiguous too.
The two ladies who played with your dog on another neighbour’s lawn tried guessing how old you are.
Definitely not a teenager yet, says one woman. Her voice is husky and she pencilled her eyebrows.
Maybe she’s 12, says the other woman. Her hair is white and you feel you relate to being her — acting aloof because you’re unsure how interested to seem, though you crave connection. Instead of looking at the ground or at your dog, you maintain eye contact with her.
I’m turning 19 next month, you reply to the first woman.
Congratulations. She says. At first you think it was for looking young. You hold yourself back from saying Asian don’t raisin.
Maybe it’s the clothes you wear when you step outside to walk Boru. When you hang out with friends you try to put together a simple + comfy + cute outfit. When you don’t have plans you wear random shorts and sweaters you find. Not in a cute way either, like the lazy outfits you see other girls walking in, their effortlessly cute oversized hoodies. You think about what you read online: people with good taste tend to have it in one or two areas but not in others. To white people you’re a 12 y/o who hasn’t started paying attention to fashion. To Asians you are 16 or a wife in her early 30s. It’s awkward.
Your parents were mistook for being overly young too. When you were a baby and your parents pushed you around in a stroller at Fairview Mall, people stared.
You had a dream, once, of being dropped onto a street in 2002. You looked up at a shiny blue apartment building. The streets seemed undistracted because you couldn’t carry around the insanity of the internet yet. What were the 2000s? You think y2k fashion and TV shows where Asians still played comedic fodder. Where the female side character fell for the male lead for no reason — you’re a man, I’m a woman, it was meant to be. Handheld Canon cameras. No ads about euthanasia pills on the TTC. No TikToks playing on the bus by the person behind you at 8 in the morning.
Two months into summer, you feel that the days offer you so much time that you don’t know what to do with. A suggests you get a job because you probably need routine. In senior year you felt untethered from the world. You barely showed up to school. You viewed friendship as a medium for self-enrichment and turned away from people. You were one hot pot dinner away from taking a totally useless gap year. It unsettles you how your life was redirected by a whim. Now all you think about is trying to be more and more functional. You hint at dad that since commute takes forever maybe you could live in a girls-only apartment near school starting second year.
What? Your auntie commutes to the hotel everyday and she lives even farther than us. He replies.
While crossing a wide, vacant parking lot to pick up food in the plaza, you share that you want to take your driver’s knowledge test soon. You already took 20 practice questions, over Lanzhou noodles with friends. They told you that there will be a hard question about snowmobiles.
Let me tell you why that’s a bad idea. He talks about how insurance goes up when you possess a second car. But you still want to learn to drive soon. It would give mom more me-time.
You look for ways to make your parents’ lives easier. Over the weekend you spent too much time online so you did chores to quiet your brain. Folded shirts and pants from last week. Unloaded and loaded the dishwasher. Wiped the white countertops in the kitchen with a paper towel. Evening sunlight shifted across the room. You think maybe you’ve finally become an adult.
You clean to access a personal space, a small room in your mind’s eye. And when people were in the kitchen you felt distracted, territorial. Some ceremonies have to be performed alone so that the experience belongs to you. The girl who trained you during your first shift at the studio said to you, after you mopped the hot room together, cleaning really lets me enter my zone. She wore a tie-dye sweatshirt and gold anklets. She stepped out to grab a snack from her car and when she came back the staff room smelled like weed.
You can now tell the difference between a space that is laidback and a space that is not. The staff don’t check on you to make sure you’re not slacking off. They don’t evaluate your performance. When you run out of tasks you read in the lounge until the class ends. Then students leave and you mop the floors. In the mirror your face is flushed from the heat. You like that you’re not being policed.
I’m interviewing this intern applicant, your uncle told you one day, maybe in the car. She’s the president of a Women in STEM club. You think she’ll give us a hard time?
What do you mean give you a hard time? You asked.
You know. Raise hell. Bring up problems that’ll just stall us.
Dunno. I mean, why would she. Probably not. You mumbled back.
You feel like you play a little charade with your family. Those scenes in coming-of-age films where the 17 y/o protagonist fights with their parents and articulates what they need from them. You would simply not do that. You would never “communicate your needs” or “have difficult conversations.” You prefer non-confrontation. You nod and keep quiet to placate them. You don’t bring it up again. When you feel bold you ask Socratic questions but not with big words. That way the family can just be your family and not a sociological subject.
The people you know can talk about their parents like they are side characters now. They live in a new city. Rent shared apartments near campus. Drive beautiful cars. You’ve flown to San Francisco by yourself and back. You go wherever you want and whenever you want in Toronto. But you’re a stay-at-home daughter. So you think about work-life balance and healthy aging and happy marriage dynamics because that’s what’s in front of you. You like the same things as your dad, which are mostly about showing off how little you spent. You listen attentively to your mom.
The eldest daughter complex is catching up to you. It’s natural law. You need friend groups and socials and small talk with strangers to assimilate you into a different frame. Until then, your self will be constructed mainly in relation to your family, either as an incarnation, or a contradiction.