At first, I loved the attention. Everyone at school had a sort of hushed concern that I had a serious health condition. The school was unusually permitting in their allowance of my absences for the doctors’ appointments. It was all of the spotlight and concern without the accompanying suffering since I didn’t actively feel anything wrong with me.
My doctor introduced my brace a few weeks later. It was an inch-thick corset of medical plastic with an enormous protruding hump and three velcro fastening straps, an utterly Victorian contraption. As I was slowly eased into full-time wear, I quickly became distressingly aware of its various discomforts: the swampy hotness for which the sporadic airholes were useless, the inability to bend over, or in any such direction, the sharp wheezing breaths stolen from lungs crushed in the confinement; the novelty of attention wore off as the pain set in, but the brace was settled to be necessary for the remaining years of my adolescence.
I made a futile attempt to crawl back to normalcy, only to find the small joys of teenhood dissipating already as I struggled to hide the distortion of my body. The brace had given me a lumbering barrel of a torso, and I would forgo trips to the mall with my then-friends to avoid the embarrassment of having to shop for clothing that was double my normal size and their accompanying comments. My winter attire became year-round as the brace’s size forbade anything more revealing than long pants and a tunic-like top, which was all the more painful as my friends were beginning to debut their swelling breasts from their tank tops and frayed shorts. In my constant humiliation, I learned to enjoy my own company the best I could, thrusting my energy into my schoolwork and music practice. At the same time, my friends had their pubescent, bikini-clad mirth beneath the bronzing heat of the summer sun.
While in my futile attempts to forget my private prison, others made their own efforts to expose the contraption beneath my school uniform for their own titillation. It began with the loving scrutiny of friends, who found benign fascination in the surprising stiffness between my blouse when poked or prodded. I laughed along with the irony and strangeness at first but soon lost my patience when my body became designated for public amusement; not only my close friends but distant acquaintances began grabbing my torso in the school hallways or knocking on me. One boy even begged me to allow him to throw tennis balls at my trunk to watch them ricochet off and decided to chuck them anyway after I had given him a definitive negative.
More embarrassing than even the deformed silhouette my body took with the brace was my public designation, a loss of my own belonging. I found myself grasping at dignity as I lost my humanity to blatant objectification; I was no longer my own body, but a body for everyone, a body universal, a body unlimited.
I am the subject of a famous piece of family lore: my great-grandmother clung to life in desperation to bestow upon me my Chinese name, dying halfway across the world in Hong Kong just two days after my birth. I have therefore always felt a close affinity to my name，简姬玲，for the identity that tethers me to the lineage of my Chinese family. I am myself, a self that my ancestor has vouchsafed as a precious gift of ipseity.
If that were not gift enough, I have been cherished as the only female grandchild of my grandparents. In my childhood, that meant blatant yet excusable favoritism: a showering of gifts at Christmas, constant reminders of how I was so very special to this family. Despite the reductive femininity that went along with it that began colliding gently with my vague androgyny of personality, I, of course, loved the role of importance I seemed to fill within my family and was proud of my unique identity, an instrumental component of my developing individuation.
It was Christmas, and per tradition, it was also a year I spent the holiday season in Hong Kong (odd years in Hong Kong, even years in the States). I was just shy of the expectations of adulthood, so it was still acceptable that I was sprawled out on the floor by the glass coffee table in the living room while my grandfather took his spot on the couch (which still gave me anxiety–I could only imagine the wrath of accidentally spilling or staining those pristine white couches. The floor became my spot of choice, especially once I started getting my period later in adolescence). My grandfather was often understated in his wisdom, usually yielding to my grandmother’s affectionately neurotic antics. Still, he always has a certain soft-spoken sageness to share when given the moment, and I still cherish his aphorisms and anecdotes. That particular year, we shared such a moment that grips at me with both fierce devotion and smoldering resentment.
“You are special,” he told me. “You are a 简，and the only 简 daughter and granddaughter. Even if your aunties had girls, they would not be 简 daughters. Your children will be the only children to be born from a 简 woman.”
I doubt he meant to endow me with this great responsibility to such discomfort–perhaps he assumed that motherhood was not a dilemma for me as it is nowadays for modern women. Yet as the years went by, doubt in my parental competence became even more problematic as physical and mental illness began to take their toll on me. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to let go of my body, to allow it to become a part of the cosmic structure that is family, a great network of generations tethered by name, bloodline, and lore–in a way, giving my body as an offering to the pedigree that gave me my identity. I confer the humble gift of my womb to the generations before me, bearing progeny that is not only mine. My body is unlimited–a body that incarnates the family 简 now and to come with the rich worth of my fertility.
Kaitlin Kan is a student at Yale University studying literature and psychology. Hailing from the suburbs of Philadelphia with Chinese ancestry, her writing draws from rich cultural ties, as well as from her extensive experiences with mental illness. She is currently working on a poetry chapbook exploring the intersections between storytelling and corporeality.