Arabesque
October 30, 2025

Maisie Corl, Rosa Sittig-Bell, Christopher Gambino, Yao Mou In, Paula Mclean

For two long winters, I lived with my parents in some small town in New England. I watched a lot of television and picked up my American accent around the age of five. We’ll go to Walmart, and I’ll throw a tantrum by the toy aisle every chance I get. A peculiar parenting tendency with dad, his firstborn is an extension of himself. A peculiar sexual awakening in me, I was an exhibitionist before I even knew how to spell the word public. Shiny lip balms, plastic jewelry sets, and the smell of Play-Doh (still almost a drug scent for me) are not simply juvenile wants, but crass reflections of his needs and mannerisms. I assumed most was due to his reluctance to partake in his grad school peers’ lifestyle, as they were all significantly younger, the idea of responsibility, and me picking up the American accent. Before humility installs and becomes a form of pride, my left shoulder has already dislocated four times after dad's countless desperate attempts to drag me out of my own scenes. Or senses? Satisfaction never came. Lollipops from Doctor Lee always do after he pops my shoulder back. Mom would put me in the middle of the backseat of our Toyota and practice driving in circles in the silent woods, her screaming sounds like Debussy’s La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, because by then the only girl I would hang out with had pale yellow colored hair. Neither of us invited the other for playtime.


Like every romcom, inevitably, I become the only one in the family who speaks dad’s language. Vanity and derision. One night all this must stop, so I didn’t cry. I found my mark and left with a joyous right pocket. It was prime time television, then cut to commercials, then cut to mom whispering to dad’s ear. Everyone was calling my name, full name. I wonder if that was the real reason for such a common first name in comparison to my siblings. Just so I will never feel alone in this world.


Everything that follows is in Mandarin.


I was told to kneel on the floor. Mom walked away.


No question asked. I kneeled. Head’s down, that was my first mistake. I was thinking about my stomach. Television’s still playing, melodramatic tonight. What are the differences between shame and embarrassment? I’m closing all my airholes, first the gap between my teeth then the waterline between my lips then my nostrils, trying not to let any squeaking noise leak. The protagonist is wearing thick makeup. Sapphire. The foundation of the city, the body of heaven. I deserved this. Princess treatment.


At this point, I can tell the difference between stomach and bladder. Both easily filled up, one I can slowly trace the silhouette and illustrate the fluffy texture if I hold my breathe long enough, the other through the pumping heartbeat with its dreading weight. Learning to play with silence, especially when I first noticed the pumping heartbeat was coming from my lower abdomen instead of my chest. These bubbling organs. On the floor, in the back of the car, on my tiny bed with bright moonlight while mom and dad played other games in the room next door.


He asked if I stole. I said no.


You’ve read somewhere else about


A. rare encounters. First kiss, UFO sighting, courage and

B. mundane routines locking yourself in the bathroom to catch air. Between the oppositions stands the third type of experience,

C. incidents in life that are inflicted upon you by chance. A familiarity that demands attention: your mind, your gun, your salivary glands, your ear lobes, your forehead, the thong that is clearly twisted, your index finger that only aches in certain temperatures. You knew that it won’t be the first time.


He asked again. I moved my glance up. For a second, I thought maybe the 2008 recession happened not because of the mortgage crisis but of one’s decision to steal princess blue eyeshadow palette from Walmart, taking revenge in my own terms. A period of easy credit, an abuse of emotions in the name of aid and discipline, and the lack of general regulation. Self-aggrandizing is the same as self-deprecating. Both annoying. Before our eyes met, before I said anything more subconsciously sinister to the moralist.


Then a strike to the face.


Yes. Still kneeling. Now organs are all bursting. One after the other. Burning.

I didn’t want to go there anymore, but I managed to hold myself together a little longer than I thought I would have. The question of sincerity becomes a quest for jargon. My first philosophy teacher in high school dated Asian men and learned Mandarin through drinking beer with the local villagers on the weekends, while I fuck school guards to get out without a leave notice from my guardians. In class, he taught me Tao Te Ching in English. I read it in Chinese months after generating pages of English thoughts about it. Tao Te in Mandarin operates under the same characters as morality and the same tonality as ethics. Not wrong, but untrue. Who would have thought translation could be so acutely distracting that it points to another?  Through it. Over it. Subversion of knowledge. Through it. Over it.



In public school, the academic eccentricity is not associated with personality but with a discipline. The bud of Confucian-based moral codes, pollinated by socialist culture, carefully delineated performative roles and a structure in which certain behaviors are anticipated as though predetermined.  Academic = politics = aesthetics = morality = sex, the exterior and interior unified. I took my first nude when I was 14 and sent it to my then-boyfriend. I refused to swear with friends; insults were never verbal. Improvisation and unpredictability are prohibited dangers. The golden boys and golden girls hold hands, walk on tracks while I practice sprinting, date for years until they get into the same regional high school, same university, into the system, into the cadmium red. Exodus. The foundation of the city. The body of heaven.



Oh, the debauchery of boarding school, everyone has the capacity to terminate anyone. Yellow fever or white savior complex can get a faculty crucified for a good year. After reading my essay on Hegel, or functionalism, or nihilism, or the chariot analogy — does it even matter — the philosophy teacher told me that I should consult for ESL lessons. I felt the palm and the fingerprints on my face again. A fraud and a writer are the same thing until one is proven to be false. Dad thinks a lot of things are tacky, including his creation. I reckoned if I hid my neurosis well enough in plain sight, admit to mediocracy, then maybe I’d be fortunate enough to escape the common fate.



To avoid being cheated on once and for all is to cheat before everyone else. This is not our language, but a language for harsh, brittle beings. Power in the given hand. Power offered with alacrity. Power that correlates with anguish. I was made to believe that history is comprised of tidy epochs - that the end of an administration equates to, as it were, the nailed coffin. Dad, sex, and school are vampires that stalk through the night. In traditional Chinese medicine, ulcers are caused by excessive internal heat, a gaping hole in the back of one’s mind. The flickering flames cast long, cursive shadows of objections.



My teenage years of foreign beds were haunted by ulcers in the back of my tonsils. The rebel inside of me came undone. Could it be the exam papers I forgot to submit, the heads I gave in the laundry room, bathrooms, balcony, classrooms, full asphyxiated, or the pathological lies my best friends circulate?



I wanted to return the recursive guilt, so I held secrets from both of my parents. Mom’s anger and dad’s infidelity. I am the decoy, now the illusion can finally be everlasting with my siblings. Is it still jargon if it’s all intuitive smothering? Dad tried to find his way to build a character out of fate by never calling or texting. The last time we talked was about something fascist. The guilt context of the living binds us within the realm of necessity and punishments.



Did you give everything you have?



Last week, I got caught slipping red polka dot underwear into my shopping bags. No gap between time, simply a hiatus, between burnt marks to fade away and laceration to heal through tattoo inks. Touched by a thousand hands, perfectly stained with white juice. I’m now grown enough to view this kind of territory mark as inferior. Until actual occupation, none of this determines its nature. Satisfaction never came. I glanced through the whole room and made sure there were enough eye contacts before letting the piece of cotton slip down between my thighs. I paid for my other clothes and even started a conversation with the girls behind the counter, who had scarecrow hair. I wonder if their stomach burn, by grief or by imagination. Nobody watches television anymore. Leaving home for school means my only exposure to screens has been the neon lights from my computer. For a quick moment, I was walking out of the store, then cut to the security talk on the mic, then cut to him checking my bag, then cut to me kneeling on the ground.  Saying no but apologizing for saying no.



The underwear was $16.  It was impossible for me to be alone.



I don’t blame the store girls for not understanding my white lies, nor do I give them credit for my insides slipping away with excitement. My organs started chiming when I begged her to blacklist me. La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin. You don’t understand. I would've cut out my organs and glued them to his door to ward off other women years ago.



No one is saying that stealing, cheating, and lying were right. No one is even saying that these memories are acts out of sanity, yet they prevailed.



It’s just history and nature, turning objects into people, and people into obsessions, obsessions into opportunities, everybody is anybody.

But not now, you've really done it now. You paralyzed me with the pain and my apologies were there to take it all away from myself.



Excerpt from Sapphire by Sharon Xinran Zhang