BLUE SHIRT

Blue Shirt

Content warning: body image

I did not believe my mother knew me. At age nine, a newcomer to Pennsylvania—this state where whiteness grew like banyan roots anchored deep into soil—I knew only one thing, that there was no path forward for me. Not because of the sheer white plant mass; rather, my disaffection, my anger were functions of my distance from that mass, the loss of my white Californian friends, the loss of my casual integration into the drought-stricken lands where faces like mine were unsubtly everywhere. We went to a Gap Kids at the Lehigh Valley Mall in search of clothes. Something new to cover up with.

All mall interiors look more or less the same. Having been to a number of malls in my life, I can attest to this sameness and the way it leads me from place to place, room to room like I live here, like this is my home, a place of origin, conception, definition, familiarity. If I were blindfolded and released into any Macy’s, and I took off the blindfold to witness the rows upon rows of half-formal blouses and the little cardboard kiosks of makeup and perfume in the middle of the first floor, I would immediately know where I was. I can picture the deep inside of a Victoria’s Secret, the black shelves and the dismembered mannequins with their neatly stitched cleavage and polyester lace thongs. A Hot Topic, with its Boruto and Naruto and HunterxHunter and One Piece T-shirts lining the wall next to checkered miniskirts and wallet chains.

Gap Kids was no different. Nearly everything in here was made of cotton fabric with that filmy, translucent texture, the kind that wind could pass through with ease. I was at the age when running off to look at things on my own was still not permitted. But I did those things despite myself, forgetting, for a second, to mind the invisible leash that should have kept me tethered to my mother’s hip, and disappearing behind a rack of marshmallowy parkas to feel their protruding hoods with my fingertips. Then I’d feel a tug on the invisible leash and turn around to find my mother, with an angry look on her face. Why did you leave me? It’s not safe to run off like that. What are you looking at? She dug around inside the depths of the children’s large-sized parka—it wasn’t until later that I was allowed to buy clothes that weren’t two sizes too big for me—and pulled out the price tags with her free fist. Hmm. It’s on sale, 30 percent off. San, qi, ershiyi. With the same hand, she reached under the parka to find the fabric tag. Aiya, it’s polyester. No polyester for you. When I tried to protest, she said the same thing again. You cannot wear polyester. It makes you too hot and itchy.

So every shopping trip was about devastation. Never mind that Pennsylvania, which was basically an ice age waiting to happen, had the perfect winter to justify hot and itchy. I lowered my head and resigned myself to ugly clothes that were neither uniquely fluffy nor perfectly sized. You still need space to grow into your clothes, my mother said.

Dutifully, I followed my mom around the store, letting the leash tug me through aisles, under fluorescents, and past shelves of dark denim and striped sweaters. A stray hanger or two littered the floor, their accompanying garments lost in the Gap maze. Then I noticed another magical clothing item that with all likelihood contained a forbidden synthetic material, and scurried toward it. A floral skort, just above knee-length, modesty-proofed by the set of white shorts hidden underneath the crown of loose cotton, was the only clothing item I picked out that made its way into the try-on pile. It was white with pink and orange roses, and looking back, I cannot help but be both embarrassed by my lack of taste and jealous of my boldness. If I had a skirt like that today, I think. Everyone would be obsessed with me.

My mother brought a good rack of clothes into the fitting room, half of the bevy assembled from other articles with the same oversized fit but in different colors. She hung them up on the assorted hooks that dotted the stall door, gave me an impatient look in the mirror, and pointed at the hanging collection. Now strip. Undressing in front of my mother was always an ordeal, not least because when I turned eight and began to notice how my thighs puddled when I sat down, I knew she was right about how I needed to start eating less. Two weeks before, she pinched the side of my stomach and murmured to herself, something in Mandarin about laoma wei ta tai duo le. I bristled, felt that monster of vexation claw its way up my throat, a monster which was quickly beaten down by another mouthful of rice, always with the rice or the chicken or the broccoli. My grandmother and my mother fed me in turns, like it was a competition to see who could fill the receptacle faster. There were piles of leftovers—of the most delicious dishes that would otherwise become cold and congealed, wasted in the refrigerator—that I schwoomed up, me, the vacuum. Eat more of this, my mother said, spooning beans onto my plate. More of this, my grandmother said. You have no self control, my mother said. I sat on my hands and rocked forward, out of the reach of them both, resenting how good it all tasted.

I hated undressing in front of her, but in a fitting room as small as this, in a store, in my pre-adolescence, when I wasn’t allowed to be left alone with my thoughts for even a minute—I had no other choice.

The pants came off first and were quickly replaced with my chosen rosy skirt. At least I could pick the order in which I tried things on. I swirled my hips around, watching the pleats flare out like dresses in the movies. I liked the way that the skirt covered the tops of my thighs, the thickest parts, making the rest of my legs look reasonably skinny. I couldn’t tell if my mother agreed, but she was in the practice of letting me have something in order to keep me quiet. Otherwise, when I became fixated on one special item that I was convinced could be a cure-all for my malaise, I would posit a poorly constructed argument that escalated, albeit unintentionally, into a tantrum, which the entire occupancy of Gap Kids would be able to hear through the thin walls of our stall. So we put it onto the ‘yes’ hook.

We moved through the collection quickly—a sweater dotted with clouds here, a shirt adorned with horses there. I was becoming more irritable by the second, tired of scratchy clothes coming on and off, mussing my hair, making my arms and chest and back tingle until I wanted to scream, to tear my skin into tiny miserable strips like through a shredder. The inside buttons of my adjustable jeans rubbed too hard on my hip bones, leaving indents, and these were feelings I could not explain, feelings that I look at now, turning them over in my hands, noting how they surge, then lay flat, then swirl around, meander, peter out. The feelings are trying to burrow beneath the skin of my palms to get under cover. They don’t like how I hold them under a beam of sunlight. Now, as then, they draw glances when I wrest them to the surface, and then they shy away, they hate drawing attention to themselves, but they also want to take up space, to expand—

I don’t want to do this anymore. Are we done yet? My mother looked down at me, disappointed for some reason I couldn’t discern. Weren’t these clothes for me? What right did she have to look disappointed, like I was robbing her of the kind of person she wanted to be? She looked at the ‘yes’ hook and the ‘no’ hook, the former jammed substantially fuller. My mother always got what she wanted, even if I fought her with childlike vehemence. She flipped through the remaining items and settled on one, careful as she teased its hanger out of the stack so that the rest didn’t come toppling down. Okay, she said. Just try this one.

I chewed on my lip and nodded. I let her hold the hanger and slipped the electric blue shirt off of it, trying to reign in the raging tide that boiled in my chest, to fold it under more layers of clothing. A glance at the shirt in my hands told me that it was not really unique in any way, except that it was a better, stiffer kind of cotton. Why did you want me to try this one? I asked as I slipped it over my head, hissing at the sensation, again, of new fabric scraping against my shoulders. Well, my mother said, I thought you might like this one.

Why would I like this one? I tried to keep my voice level, but I was awash in irritability, struggling to communicate with words against this current tugging me backward into the deepest, most primitive and antagonistic parts of my brain that encouraged me to stomp on her foot and run away, screaming. My mother shrugged and looked at me in the mirror. Because blue is your favorite color?

I blinked, the shirt only half on. What? How could she possibly know that blue was my favorite color? It wasn’t a secret that I kept, but even as I floundered in a mental pool, trying to process this previously undemonstrated intimate knowledge she had of my preferences, she simply reached into her purse to answer a few texts on her work phone. The clacking on her BlackBerry stopped after some minutes, and she looked up at me through the mirror, seeing that I still hadn’t put the shirt on all the way. She tucked her phone back into her purse and then seized the ends of the shirt, dragging it down so it covered my torso properly. What? she asked.

How did you know my favorite color is blue? I felt dizzy all of a sudden, and grasped at my mother’s hand for balance. I had never told her this before. So who snitched, this thing that she could now wield against me, like she wielded my love for food against me, and my love for beauty, and my desperation to be loved? I didn’t recognize the look on her face.

You think I don’t know you? she finally said. I’m your mother. Of course I know your favorite color is blue. How…I…

She looked at her phone, then looked back at me. I’m your mother. I know everything about you.

I’m your mother. I’m your mother.

JANE WANG B’24 knows the favorite color of her mother.