RINA OLSEN
cw – anti-Asian racism, sexual harassment
Another Encounter
You see him approaching from out of the corner of your eye. Your eye, the eye that belongs to you, one set of the pair that a classmate said he liked because it makes you look chinky. You pretend not to see this man that is approaching you—everyone already asks whether you can see out of those slits, anyway, so it’s nothing unusual—and continue scrolling through the playlist on your phone. The wall of the bus stop is firm against your back, and your earbuds are comfortably nestled in your ears. You angle your head downwards even more and your long black hair flutters in the evening breeze, an exotic silk curtain masking your porcelain face.
He’s sort of tubby, this guy. White shirt with sweat stains blooming at the armpits and a dot of ketchup just above the belt buckle that keeps his jeans fastened loosely about the waist. There are bags under his eyes, his wide gray eyes that are fixed on you. Sizing you up. Calculating your price. Estimating your durability. You look down at your phone, scrolling through your playlist without stopping to read the titles. Your thumb moves mechanically. Your heart slams against your chest to the beat of the electric music pounding in your ears.
You pretend not to notice him until he’s right in front of you. Your thumb keeps swiping the screen. You don’t remove your earbuds, you just shake your head as you’re pinned against the wall by his bloodshot gaze, feeling his hot tobacco-scented breath on your face. You see his mouth moving. See it form the word China doll. Those fat lips form other words, too, but you don’t bother to read them. In that moment, you can’t read lips. You can’t read English. The names and titles flying upwards on your phone are just gibberish. You can’t hear English, can’t understand English. The electric music is just a flood of noise and the lyrics wash past your brain before they can catch meaning. In that moment, all you can understand are the distances that form your surroundings: the lack of distance between your back and the bus stop, the minimal distance between his body and yours. You make the calculations automatically, like the people of the place you’re supposed to be from. You learned, early on in school from your classmates, that the people of the place you’re supposed to be from do not understand English. They only understand math. Calculations, they profess, come easier to the people of the place you’re supposed to be from, than do words spoken by the people of the place you’re actually from.
In that moment, you become your mother. You become your aunt. You become the neighbor, the grocer’s sister, the dentist’s wife. You become the woman you saw when walking home with your friends one humid summer night. You become the girl who ran up to you, eyes wet and breath coming fast, as she asked you to pretend the two of you were friends. You become the many other Asian women that share your homeland, this place that everyone refuses to believe they are from because its language is English. You become those other China dolls manufactured by men like him, and follow the wind-up mechanism these men gave you.
You say me no speak Eng-rish. He says something, but you shake your head again because you can’t understand. You shake your head so hard your hair swishes around your shoulders. That catches his eye. Me no speak Eng-rish. So solly. So solly. The fake accent chafes against your throat, twists your jaw into an uncomfortable position. But porcelain China dolls show no pain, so you can’t either. You see his eyebrows furrow, a crimson flush blossoming in his sweaty face. He reaches his stubby fingers to grab one earbud. You dodge, escaping the prison formed between his body and the bus stop. So solly!
You run. You run faster than you ever have before, the wind stinging your face, the pavement slapping your shoes hard. Even though the music is still blasting you can hear him yelling but you can’t understand. They tell you that you can’t understand, and it is so. You can’t understand why it’s so, why you’ve got to be a China doll, why you must be of porcelain, why you must be of silk instead of denim, why your language must be math instead of English, but it’s so. And you run. You run like you can outrun them all, outrun what they say in a language they claim as theirs, outrun the calculations that determine the proportioned China doll that you are in their large eyes, and even though you know that wherever you run to will only be the same place as the one you ran to yesterday, you keep running in the hopes that it won’t be.
Rina Olsen, a rising high school junior from Guam, is the author of the novel Third Moon Passing (Atmosphere Press, June 2023). Her writing has been awarded by Guam History Day, the Sejong Cultural Society, and the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, and she has been published in or is forthcoming in places such as Jellyfish Review, Okay Donkey, Mobius: A Journal of Social Change, Unfortunately, Literary Magazine, The Hopper, Emerge Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She is an editor for the teen literary magazines Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, Polyphony Lit, and Blue Flame Review. Visit her at her website: https://rinaolsen.com.