Passivity

I am such a wimp.

Insults pierce directly through my heart. Con­fronta­tion scares me. Even nee­dles make me queasy. Why can’t I just get it over with?

It stares at me, mock­ing me, dar­ing me to pick it up. You can’t touch me, it says, because you’re just a wimp.

I stare back. “Shut up,” I say as I reach toward it. It catches the light; its reflec­tion is blind­ing. I pull away my hand quickly. I am such a wimp.

This wasn’t the first time I had gone through this process. Many times before, I have reached for and retracted from it. Each time, I would come an inch closer to becom­ing what I’ve envisioned.

I walk away from it, hop­ing it will not fol­low me out of the room. I look back at the table where it sits, daunt­ingly close yet unimag­in­able. The only way I could stop this mad­ness was to reen­ter the room and come face to face with fate.

I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always afraid of every­thing that pre­sented itself. I used to be nor­mal; I used to be the def­i­n­i­tion of the aver­age Amer­i­can teenager. I had good friends, I had car­ing par­ents, and I had a fun social life.

I won­der every day: what changed?

I was an ambi­tious child, always chas­ing after my dreams and goals. As soon as my par­ents caught on to my dri­ven atti­tude, they har­nessed it and flew. I wanted to be a lawyer and even­tu­ally start my own law firm. I wanted to help peo­ple as help­less as I was to get a chance to prove every­one wrong. Prov­ing peo­ple wrong, I found out, was my brand of heroine.

My par­ents, no mat­ter what I wanted to do, always sup­ported me. Now, parental sup­port of any form is usu­ally help­ful, but my par­ents were an excep­tion. They pushed and prod­ded me to do what I had already wanted to do. They enrolled me in count­less pro­grams: com­mu­nity youth lead­er­ship coun­cils, law and advo­cacy sum­mer camps, youth lead­er­ship train­ing ses­sions, Mock Trial Club, Mock United Nations, Model United Nations Embassy, Ambas­sadors of Amer­ica, and other var­i­ous sum­mer camps and clubs. My father took off two weeks of work and school to take me on a road trip to Har­vard Law School, Yale, Prince­ton, Colum­bia, and the other Ivy League Schools in the area. “You are des­tined to be here,” he would always say to me in the car ride between col­leges. “Keep work­ing at it, and one day, you’ll be here.”

My par­ents immi­grated to Amer­ica when I was one year old. My dad was going to school for his Ph. D. We lived on cam­pus in his minis­cule apart­ment. He would go to school, work on his the­sis, and tried to pro­vide for my mom and me. He would never let my mom get a job. He thought that since I was still young and needed an adult around me at all times, it was best for my mother to be there just in case of an emer­gency. He never trusted any­one out­side of our fam­ily. We had grown as a unit, a sin­gle, liv­ing, breath­ing unit. He taught me to never let out­siders try to invade our fam­ily lifestyle.

They believed that they could pro­vide a bet­ter life for me, a bet­ter life than any of them had ever lived. They pushed me to achieve my best; they always wanted me to reach just a lit­tle bit fur­ther. I knew they wanted the best for me. I knew they wanted to see me go places they never got to go. But I had my goals and dreams first; I wanted this before they real­ized I had dreams and goals. By the time they started push­ing me to achieve the goals that I set for myself, I decided that it was too much.

My house used to be filled with laugh­ter and love. Now, it’s stuffed to capac­ity with the sounds of scream­ing and cry­ing. Every­where I turned, every­thing thing I did, met oppo­si­tion with my par­ents. They began crit­i­ciz­ing the way I han­dled my school­work, my stan­dard­ized test­ing strate­gies, my mil­lions of extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties, my time man­age­ment, even my social life. I was shut out from the out­side world; I hardly ever saw my friends out­side of school. I began wak­ing up at six in the morn­ing on week­ends and vaca­tions to study and prac­tice test-taking skills. My eyes began to have dark rings per­ma­nently sten­ciled under them. My life was being taken over by the peo­ple that gave it to me.

Within two years, I decided I was fin­ished. I decided that if achiev­ing my dreams meant that I had to be ruled by two dic­ta­tors, then I would stop hav­ing dreams. My ambi­tion of open­ing my own law firm evap­o­rated in mid-air. The only rem­nants left of this dream was the Ivy League col­lege and schol­ar­ship appli­ca­tions in the mail.

I stare at the table. My eyes swell with tears as I hastily brush them away. Now was not the time to be sad. This was in my con­trol, not my par­ents’. This was some­thing only I could com­plete. I picked it up.

The blade was ice cold on my wrist. A sting­ing sen­sa­tion trav­eled up my arm. I shiv­ered. Tak­ing in a deep breath, I dug it in fur­ther. Blood flowed from my veins like a river into the ocean. I stared at the dark crim­son color slowly trick­ling down my hand. A drop landed on the car­pet. My mom is going to kill me, I thought bit­terly to myself.

The blood con­tin­ued to drip, slowly and steadily, from my hand onto the car­pet. I con­tin­ued to slice my skin open. Ha, I thought, I’m not scared of you any­more. You have no more licenses to mock me. I win.

My par­ents were due home any minute.

When her par­ents got home, they found her passed out on the floor of her room, sur­rounded by drops of blood on the ground. They rushed her to a hos­pi­tal, where the doc­tor pro­claimed her dead from loss of blood.

She was buried two days after that.

Two months after her death, a let­ter from Har­vard Law School arrived in the mail. They had accepted her because of her extreme inter­est in the sub­ject of law and advo­cacy. They had offered her a full scholarship.

Her par­ents still do not for­give them­selves for her death.

• Photo by Lâm Hua / Used with Per­mis­sion

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