This is my first short story, which has been incubating for ages in my google docs :). Any feedback is welcome!

Adults, Hair, and Arbitrariness

Mother used to think I was dim-witted. Too dim-witted, to be exact. The kind of daughter that thought the fourth prize in any school contest was the limit. If only I could be her mom, her longing eyes fixed at the champion’s direction seemed to say as I, amidst the lukewarm applause for my lukewarm speech, made my way back toward the audience. So she made me compensate through my looks. Alas, the face and body she bequeathed me weren’t exactly up to her standards, so she waged war against what she could: Body hair.

Mother’s first victim was eyebrows. She said mine looked like rectangular worms. Or Tu Hai’s eyebrows. Tu Hai is a military general in the Tale of Kieu. But he’s a man, she said, so that’s acceptable. Having recruited my sister to pin down my fidgety arms, she began meticulously shaving off the upper half of each eyebrow’s ends. “Done,” she finally said, “more like Kieu, more like crescent moons now.” In the story, Kieu was to be rescued by Tu Hai.  

Armpits were next on the shaving block. This time, I liked it more. Mother would sneak up on me, pointing the razor as if it was a gun, shouting, “Put your hands up!” Thrilled but confused, I would dutifully follow, only to be surprised to find the tiny, black stubs underneath. I hadn’t even noticed them before. Arms to the sky, I imagined myself the robber, or murderer, or some other exceedingly felonious douchebag, while the cop diligently shaved the hair on my armpits. 

Legs were the most tiresome. Mother was dead scared of sketchy local beauty parlors, which could give me what she called ingrowns. The puzzlement written on my face must have made her describe in detail, which then scared me witless. Eventually she dragged me to some famed parlor in Saigon, making me lie down, bored to death, while a white-coat lady operated on the hair. A round trip to Saigon took 13 hours, once every three weeks. I missed a total of six Courage the Cowardly Dog episodes due to the journeys – a trade-off Mother’s pained explanations and threats never merited. 

But by then, I had already learned the lesson: What men have, women can’t. Eyebrows, armpit hair, leg hair. Even what men may or may not choose to have, women still can’t. Mustache, for example. I took the lesson to heart, ridiculously arbitrary as it sounded. Adults are like that. Always like that. 

So imagine my surprise when one day, Mother gave a blood-curdling scream when she saw me in front of the bathroom’s mirror, hard at work. She seemed on the verge of passing out, but then again, I was at work, so I just blithely continued. Adults know best, and nothing beats a docile kid. She kept whimpering and whimpering and whimpering from the floor. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Why? Blasphemous as it was, I couldn’t help thinking, Now who is the dim-witted one? Didn’t I ask her the exact same question countless times before? As I finished running the hair shaver over the last clumps of hair just above the temples, as she, paler than a ghost, kept whimpering, I replied with her stock answer, verbatim: 

“To be more attractive, of course.”

Featured image: Abstraction IX by Georgia O’Keeffe