White Hair
BY JANE WONG
Excerpted from Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong, forthcoming from Tin House. Used with permission from Tin House. Copyright (c) 2023 by Jane Wong.
When I ended my engagement, my mother flew out to see me. We went over to my aunt’s house in Renton, near Seattle. My family fed me avocados like a baby, scooping the ripe green middles like soft serve ice cream. Pau Pau gets free groceries from a local non-profit supporting Asian elders. That week, there were fifteen avocados to eat, little dinosaur eggs piled high in a brown paper bag. Pau Pau had never seen this fruit before and gave them to us. They also gave her ten bags of pasta she doesn’t know how to cook, so I signed up to eat miniature elbow macaroni exclusively for the next year.
“I want to dye my hair.”
There’s a cat meme I recently saw on softcore_trauma’s Instagram: “the traumatized urge to change your aesthetic instead of feeling your feelings.” The cat wore round yellow sunglasses and had a sheet mask on. That. I wanted that.
In the bathroom, my mother sat me down and clipped my hair into four equal parts. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t have any white hair,” she shrugged. But then she lifted a chunk and declared with an archeologist’s glee: “Oh, I found them!” She started to paint my hair with the dark brown dye, rubbing it in until my nose stung with a chemical reminder that I was indeed, awake.
“I’m gonna get you,” she laughed, massaging the dye into my whites. My mother dyed my hair with such slow tenderness, section by section, that it calmed my entire nervous system down. I felt my wires flop over, flattening soda. Somehow (I didn’t know how), it was going to be okay.
At my aunt’s house, after I’d let the dye sit for an hour and washed it out, they all came over. The women moved into the light, inspecting my new hair.
“Huh, weird,” Angela said, her head tilted. “It didn’t work.” She was right. Nothing had happened at all. The whites remained, peeking through the black like silkworms. My white hair had refused the dye.
“It’s a sign,” my mother said, holding a single white strand out like a tightrope. “Don’t pull them out. Something in you is stronger than you are.” And with that, she let the strand go.
Jane Wong is the author of a memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), and two collections of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is an associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University and lives in Seattle.
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