Beaut

by Michelle Chen

Beaut by Michelle Chen is a poignant coming-of-age story exploring identity, friendship, assimilation, and the quiet violence of social exclusion within Asian American adolescence. Through richly textured prose and layered emotional insight, Chen examines belonging, class, loyalty, and cultural perception as childhood bonds fracture under societal pressures. The story’s intimate narration and haunting imagery make it a compelling literary meditation on beauty, shame, and the fragile ties that shape us into adulthood. 

You don’t like it when people make friends with people just because of how they look so you keep quiet when Sharon Lee sidles up to you in sixth grade social studies class and asks if you have something to write with. I’m biracial too, she tells you while you hand over your box of jelly pens. I’m not, you say. 

Every day after that she smiles and waves at you from across the room even when Ms. Crock is watching. You let her keep the purple pen and her notes to you are glittery lavender all month. You find out she loves books just as much as you do and the reading chart is the greatest event all year because neither of you ever knows who will win. Every twenty books you log for class you get a toy from the class jar, and by December your bedroom in northern Queens is clogged with little foam puzzles and squeeze balls and mood-change pencils that spill out into the living room hallway sometimes and vanish when your foggy gray cat without a name chases them into the dark at night. 

At the annual middle school dance you dart in between uptight girls in tank tops smelling of sweet tea who refuse to dance and groove like fireworks (Katy is the confident older sister you never had) and boys who you refuse to talk to due to still being scared of their size and loudness and badness in class. The skeptical Korean and studious black boys have snuck into the cafeteria and hooked up a small TV and Wii system to play Mario Kart. 

The Italian boys are goofing off in the playground with a bag of water balloons that they fill from the fountain that Sharon once poured an entire thermos of old soup into from a two-day-old lunch. You watched each ball puff up from the second floor homeroom window that afternoon, like the throat of a bird from a nature documentary that you saw on PBS during the one hour it is on TV, even though PBS Kids has become really tempting with their new episodes of Curious George which you still love and hate so much you swear your heart split in two. One for the mature you and one for the you who wants to be taken care of for infinity. 

Across the room you spot Sharon in a jean jacket near a table heaving with cheese balls, fruit gummy packets, and soda bottles, loading her teeny paper plate with food. She turns around and you are struck by her polish: the swirl of a black choker around her throat, illuminated (new SHSAT word!) brown eyes, new daubs of navy on her nails that dig through the bounty. 

You are glad both of you are still scared of makeup and tweezing. She shows you a photo of her cat on her Blackberry phone, and you burn with unexpected happiness at how it could be mistaken for your own cat’s sibling: same moody gray fur, eyes like someone poured a tall glass of lemon juice and peppered it with a mug of brown sugar before anyone thought of stirring it. 

You want to show her a picture of yours but your parents haven’t given you a phone yet, and it doesn’t matter because Cotton Eye Joe starts blaring from the speakers. Ms. Crock had rapped her desk to bring the class to attention one day early spring, and declared that learning the dance together would be a life skill for living in America, “like speaking English, or paying taxes once you get old enough,” so you follow each other onto the dance floor and intertwine your steps with each other. Both of you are laughing by the time the room forms a conga line, especially at the few skeptical Korean and studious black boys who grab onto the snake and make exaggerated arm gestures -- one’s clammy hand sinks into your back and he waves the other like he is in a rodeo as you clutch the ends of Sharon’s jean jacket and dream of summer.

Next fall a new group forms -- Sharon, Angela, Rachelle, and you. None of you ever really think of visiting each others’ houses after visiting Rachelle’s mansion. It becomes the place where everything seems to begin and end. Her home makes your bedroom in northern Queens seem not north at all, fifteen minutes on the MTA bus before it bumps onto a street parallel to the ocean. 

It is the place where you meet to go to crowded birthday parties at Chuck E.Cheese’s, skiing on winter break, bowling on vacation Friday nights, and movies at AMC theaters. Except after a couple of trips, either you and Sharon get bored and go back to your books, or your families stop taking you. Angela and Rachelle are the type who roll their eyes at Shakespeare and know exactly what kind of life they want. You still all hang out at school, though. 

“Don’t think about all that, it doesn’t matter what other people have,” your mother says sharply. “Now, come help me take this bed apart.” You are embarrassed that neighbors and passersby can see you, two Chinese women kneeling on a mattress base in a tiny weed-ridden yard ringed by rusted wire fencing. But that changes when your mother gets out the steel tools - you want people to see you two at work, dazzlingly capable, muscles swelling behind your oversized shirts.

You will always remember this, the first time you feel truly useful. Together you cut through layers of plastic wrap and tape that have protected it from rain and mold, then into the veneer fabric, buds of yellow foam opening up in unexpected places. Prying apart the wooden frame piece by piece, puzzling out where you could use the hammer and pliers, and stacking them together to tear out nails from tail to stern. You are surprised at how easy and hard it is to break it down.

Through a silver fog of dust your mother tells you to hammer in every single nail so they lie flat along every block and beam.

“Are you just making more work for me?”

“If you’re gonna do something, always do it right. These nails are a hazard to everyone -- delivery workers, garbage truckers, us! If you’re careful, and patient, we can all live in harmony.”

That was how she raised you. 

One day at lunchtime you see Sharon picking at her lunchbox at a wide white cafeteria table, alone. Another day when chorus is over and you are walking past double doors you see a flicker through the reinforced window -- Sharon, crouching at the base of the stairs and shaking her head. You watch it wobble back and forth and the longer it goes on the more you feel like you need to go, get a snack from the vending machine or ask a teacher about homework, anything but watching a girl seizing up alone in a half-lit stairwell.

Remember what your mother told you. When you see her pale face next, you run to catch up with her. “Hey, I’m with you,” you manage to murmur as the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades spill through the stucco hallway after fifth period. She doesn’t say anything but looks relieved. Her illuminated eyes are still, even now, illuminated.

Someone, Angela or Rachelle or one of their more distant friends, has seen you talking to her, and that is your undoing. In the crowded hallway you feel a sharp flick on your shoulder, a warning made physical. An arm turns you around, and as you meet the girl’s eyes your stomach drops at the harshness of her frown, aimed at Sharon who fades away into the crowd. 

Over the next couple of days, you linger at the edge of Angela and Rachelle’s group, picking up bits and pieces about Sharon at their full lunch table, while waiting for classes to begin, or lining up at the gym. It all comes to you like alien radio chatter.

“She yelled at a teacher -”

“She never paid me back after the Scholastic book fair -”

In your mind, you can hear their thoughts even when they never say them out loud after that, feel scowls radiating in corners, like you’ve suddenly gained x-ray vision and hearing out of nothing but your fear of them. When you retreat into your books their voices follow you too.

“She’s too nice -”

“She’s hard to influence -”

A group of sharks parting around the hull of a sunken ship. Two sunken ships.

You fend off glares the rest of the year, until the next invitation to Rachelle’s mansion.

While playing Uno over winter break, you watch Rachelle stroke Sharon’s cat, which she brought over to entertain everyone before Rachelle’s dad is supposed to drive you to see Frozen. He feels guilty, you think, that her mother is away so often in Taiwan drafting up packaging designs. You and Sharon trade school library books, vowing to return them for each other. Both of you watch Rachelle, Angela, and five other girls throw cards around the circle and yell and laugh, but you feel like she is your tether, and your eyes graze each others like passing ships, which comforts you.

Snow petals down across the windshield as the minivan hurtles into the night. When you hand your tickets to the usher with greasy blonde hair, he looks at you, blinking wetly, and keeps looking at you when you walk down the hallway. You even turn around a little to see if he is watching, and he watches back and smiles like your motion is nothing to him, that it holds no shame of suspicion.

Inside the theater, the soft black darkness soothes you as Rachelle’s dad passes around Ziploc bags of M&Ms, popcorn, and jelly beans. Snow bursts across the screen as you lean back, filling your belly like an empty cave, and when Anna is racing through terrible cracking ice to look for her sister it takes a while for you to realize that there is no one in the seat beside you. 

It’s only when the clouds part and each moment becomes a bright castle scene that you manage to get up, empty bag slipping in the grease of your hands. You slink out of the dark and into the rosy light of the hallway, and, turning the corner, you see Sharon standing beyond the concession stand with a man in a brown jacket. Behind them both, through the glass doors, is a silent police car, rivulets of red and blue leaking between their bodies. 

Even the concession stand worker has looked up from her phone, wiping down crumbs of popcorn to hide her sneaky glances. The man talks and talks to her, but Sharon doesn’t move, doesn’t seem to even breathe. Finally, she walks down the carpet towards the car and from here you think you see a dark flash of pity on the man’s face, the edges of his mouth turning into little prongs, before he opens the car’s backseat door for her and she gets in.

“Sharon’s a liar. She means bicultural not biracial,” Angela says, bringing out a platter of foamy-to-the-touch shrimp crackers from the kitchen on Rachelle’s sixteenth birthday. “She grew up on Long Island out on Montauk in a Catholic school until fifth grade. At least that’s what I saw in the poem she wrote that won the city festival prize. I can’t believe it won when it literally says she’s embarrassed. Can you believe that? Embarrassed about badly dressed Asians? Like, the fuck?” 

She talks in a quick light voice that lands these insults like parachutes instead of rockets.

Your stomach twinges as you shake your head along with them as Rachelle brings out her own cake from the freezer. Peals of cold whipped cream curl around a constellation of strawberries and a hard base of matcha ice cream—specially customized by Taipan Bakery. 

It’s only years later that you realize that you and the others became her family, against loneliness. None of you four have any siblings, so you nurture each other, even though you’ve been feeling out of the loop lately from turning down study sessions for AP Chem and last break’s skiing trip. You still want to write poems and articles and stories, but you have Googled variations of “Sharon Lee,” “Sharon Lee writing,” and “Sharon Lee high school poetry” enough to know that she has become even more intimidating to you than some of the white girls who had English majors for fathers or whose mothers worked as a newspaper’s editor-in-chief.

After dinner, when people are packing up, you notice the gray cloud hovering around your ankles for the first time that night, and you throw it chunks of mayonnaise tuna left over from sandwiches. Rachelle’s been keeping it safe all this time - the cat has plenty of room to roam here and she’s always wanted another pet ever since she killed her tropical fish from overfeeding in middle school. 

Fur stands on end between your fingers. The moment Rachelle approaches you with a couple boxes of leftover lo mein for the journey home, the cloud flickers and vanishes down the basement stairs.

John is nice enough to you, and mean enough to you at the right times, that when he fastens the corsage around your wrist it seems like prophecy, the ribbon closing above your hand and feeling like a bite of warm chicken rice. 

By prom night you face each other like boxers in a ring, across the tilting downtown subway car. Rachelle’s sick of sparring with her father, Angela is bubbling over with excitement out of fear that after her acceptances people will think she’s a stuck-up bitch if she acts any other way, and you are content just being there as always, like a listener tuning into two radios while their dates gaze out the subway door windows into the darkness.

On the dance floor you realize you are sitting smack in the middle of a long beautiful web, stemma radiating out toward each individual, so that if you collapse someday they would hold you tight, a noose of social interactions and excellent hugs, messages in all caps saying “GUESS WHO I JUST RAN INTO” and “text me when you get home.” 

Later, when you are looking at each other in the bar bathroom mirror, fixing hair and chatting about how a date looks so bad trying to grow a mustache, you see your friends’ presence glowing like polished quartz, hair consuming light like swatches of backstage curtain. A cloud wafts through your mind for the rest of the night, and you turn down a waiter offering you sparkling water. A flicker of gladness in John’s eyes when you hold him close, looking over his shoulder for Cotton Eye Joe instead.

After Angela gets into Yale, you return to her Instagram which has the link to her Tumblr called Golden Ratio, which has 2,000 followers, one for nearly each year all of Western civilization has been around. But it’s still less than half of all Chinese years. 

On goldenratio.tumblr.com, after scrolling past photos of meticulously arranged stationery, morning coffee and croissants, and wooded scenes, you find her most popular quote:

If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving back.

That night you have a nightmare you don’t remember but that leaves you parched. You search up an old Instagram that confirms what you think you already know-—Sharon with a big group of girls in paint splattered shirts, holding a photo booth picture at a Mets game, a caption saying, “Thank you to every member of City Squad for teaching me so much about life.” 

In college, some of the other students startle you with their behaviour—throwing candy wrappers on the ground, stuffing them inside desks, and later in the depths of night, leaving behind spilled beer cans in the parking lot after tailgates. The cans are left for cars to dodge around as the sun rises, and crunch underneath their wheels as campus parking spaces fill up in the morning. 

You remember what your mother told you and are tired of this thoughtlessness, so you move to Brooklyn, attracted to the clean rows of brownstones that look like the setting sun on fall leaves just about to crisp. Halloween has become cold and damp as an adult, and there is a chill inside your little brownstone rental, which you split with a roommate, so you make a trip home, taking the long route by subway into Manhattan and Flushing. 

Half your high school friends have turned into acquaintances, all your acquaintances have turned into strangers, and John has turned into men who talk too excitedly to you on your undergrad dorm floor, who have a hard shine in their eyes while taking your morning bodega coffee, a shard of light that you are also privileged to see when taking the subway back past nine p.m. after overtime in the library. 

You maneuver yourself in line on Main Street for pork buns and emerge with a warm white plastic bag knitted between your fingers. Something-—the sunlight, or the enormous afternoon crowd crisscrossing the intersection—steers your eyes toward the propped-open door of a shop, which you look through like a one-way mirror.

A slice of face emerges: it’s Sharon, trying to steal the miniature red-eared turtles in Mr. Ling’s shop. She is a shadow ducking to the linoleum floor the moment Mr. Ling and his assistant are in the back restocking the new shipment of potted plants. 

The black face mask and her long dark hair, streaming out like the tail of a wild mule, mean she could pass for any new immigrant in the heart of Flushing. You want to beg at the soles of her Adidas-encased feet, to grab her arm so that it pulls out of her socket with a nasty crunch, in a bitter motion like snapping a joint off a Harbin ice sculpture, upon which the cold air of her soul would pour down onto your cheap shoes, as per convection current rules in Biology 332, the highest class you took before you quit because, fuck, you really don’t want to work that hard. 

You want to plead, “Don’t make us look bad in front of the blonde woman and toddler boy out front fondling the miniature bamboo plants.” 

Your own roommate in Brooklyn is a white girl from Ohio wearing a jade bracelet who already called you a thief and a slob on a yellow Post-it note on the bathroom mirror when you weren’t as tidy as Marie Kondo in her Netflix subscription, nor made eye contact as much as she wanted you to when she upended the apartment looking for her cherry-lime-flavored vape. 

It turned out to be tucked inside her boyfriend’s backpack when he commuted to Columbia Law School that morning, but not before she upended your laundry hamper and let out an “argh” that could have been a scream except good girls don’t scream at Asian women unless they’re thieves and slobs. 

You step into the shop as she flees with her face down, dropping your bag on the ground behind you to cover the noise and moving into Mr. Ling’s line of sight.

“I’m really sorry,” you say, and pass over six dollars – three for the broken succulent pot on the counter and three for a large cup of tofu pudding with sugar syrup.

It’s been a while since you stepped foot into the Li family home, but you’re happy to accept their Friendsgiving dinner message.

“I’ve found her,” you tell them.

Faces look up from plates of roast duck, cranberry salad, and sushi. 

“Really? How is she? What’s she doing? Is she still writing? I heard she went to a community high school in Harlem or something.”

And for a moment you are refreshed by their sense of community, thinking about how you were startled by lunch groups with women who talked a lot more harshly and out loud: “I worry about her because she’s not making good choices,” someone says viciously. “He’s a jerk,” a brunette adds to her friend in front of the cashier. “You have anything to add?” Andrea, the kindest, speaks to you and smiles, secure in her kindness before moving on. You don’t know which is more hurtful, their public sharpness or the Li group’s private abandonment. Sharon has always been quiet, though not as much as you, and you wonder if that made it easy for her to vanish, so that the whole of her is now remembered as rumors and Google searches.

“She wants her back. The cat.” You listen carefully for any resentment.

“Where’s she living?”

“She just told me to meet at the Starbucks, she didn’t tell me where she lives.”

“I’m taking her home to her.”

“Yeah, I’m taking her home.”

You think that the basement of a mansion would be different from your own small house plastered with weather-blackened panels, but you spy a moth lingering around the corner bathroom. It reminds you of your own undergrad basement days, living with your mother to save money -- moths in the summer, beetles in the spring, heater in the winter, centipedes in the fall. 

Out of the shadows, a cat leaps, like a blown plastic bag, out from underneath a ping pong table. You spring back and crash into a defunct tank, which topples over spectacularly, black machinery and dead fish ghosts pouring out of its hollowed out insides. When you turn and lift everything back to its old position, like your mother taught you, the cat is already nipping at your ankles.

You gather up the cat, who looks like your cat’s sibling, in your arms and walk upstairs. There’s not much you and Rachelle and Angela can talk about anymore, with them breezing through MCAT textbooks and your own applications to a state college’s graduate school of social work languishing online. But you don’t really need to talk, do you?

“Do you want more food? You can get the Nanjing salted duck from the refrigerator.”

“Take all you need. Do you want some fruit?”

You’re grateful, until the cat lets out a meow in her decade-old carrier.

“We’ll miss you.” Rachelle pinches gray cloud cheeks. “Say hi to Sharon for me.” 

You get exactly where you need to go. Your mother is sleeping in a room perfumed with clementines, so you put the food in the fridge. The videos on the bus ride flicker through your mind—cats smelling each others’ blankets, pacing around a door underneath which they can see another’s shadow, staring at each other through cracks and crevices and hard wire.

What would you have to talk about? You want to call out to Sharon, about books and clothes, but you are afraid these topics are too childish, too useless for a thief in foster care stealing wild animals. You want her to find her way back to the mansion that was never yours or hers, but only out of her own want. You want to shoot over a Facebook message that her cat misses her even though that’s a lie, the cat had eventually warmed to Rachelle, as if any one of the Li group could be interchangeable with one another. You even type out, “lost cat”, into the message bar, and then close the app entirely. Really, what is she to you but gossip and a name on the internet?

But tonight the cat lives here, in the dark, where no one comments on her beauty, her yellow eyes like cross sections of tossed beach crystal. She yowls, and from down the hall behind your closed bedroom door you hear your own cry back. Her cat’s the unstable one, you think, growing up with Sharon in a harsh environment like that, then moving into a stranger’s house where people came and went at strange times, strange people petting her while studying, shouting over cards and games with little neon pieces to bat under the sofa, cutting spare ribs and cake and neck of goose.

So when you lift the carrier door the next morning, hand calm as an ice skating lake next to a sweet little backwoods cabin on one of Ms. Crock’s reading reward American postcards, the extra prizes no one knew about unless they were there to see them in her desk while asking for more reading recommendations, you flinch when it’s your cat who lunges forward with a wrinkled snarl, causing both their backs to curl like commas, as if, for all the world, wanting to tear each other apart.

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Michelle Chen was born in Singapore and lives in New York City. She has attended

multiple writing retreats, including the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Her awards include the Best Masters Essay Prize, PhD Works Awards for Career Exploration, and the AAPI Mentorship Network Travel Grant, and thoroughly enjoys observing in high-need schools, making literary criticism exciting, adventuring across time and space with chill professors, and getting less ice and less sugar in her winter melon milk tea. Follow at https://silkwormreading.blogspot.com and on Instagram @michmashedpotatoes.