​​I paint a ceiling that never hangs over me,
concealing my nude from the rude neighbors just above.
I paint a ceiling that sits pretty for me to gaze at and wonder what if.
What if the roles were switched?

     In the red-cheeked, red-lanterned month of February, she used to run through C-Mart’s crowded aisles, a row of cardboard boxes labeled LONELY GOD a blur to the right of her feet and a shelf stocked with dark soy sauce and pickled garlic and vacuum-sealed anchovies a colorful stripe to the left of her ear.

          After the Lunar New Year, I take the plane from Beijing to New York City to Phoenix, where the gingery dialect of cordialities is sloughed, like chili pepper, from my tongue. Here in the stretch of uncharted Arizona canyon, there is an astounding dust-filled silence: wind whistling across undulating tiers of limestone, and the soft footsteps of my solo pilgrimage.

The last time I knew him as my daddy I was seven years old. We went to a pawn shop. The owner had a lip piercing and colored tattoos. He bought me a skeletal raccoon jaw because that's the kind of thing my daddy found cool in pawn shops, so I did too. I thanked his hazel eyes, the same ones the mirror always plays for me, because my momma always taught me to be polite. Don't worry about it baby. When he got angry he would throw his wallet across the room. Coins would fall out spattering across the rented hardwood floors. Once he was in his room with the door shut it was time for my favorite game. I grabbed a ziploc bag and tiptoed across the floor, collecting the quarters that had fallen. I was rich. When my bag was full, I grabbed his wallet off the ground and placed it on the coffee table. The wallet and I anxiously waited for my daddy to come back out. It was nice that my daddy let me keep them. I pretended I didn’t mind the crick in my neck, from having growing pains while sleeping on a pullout couch. ​

That’s what you are and will always be, a girl, they tell me.
It was the summer going into my seventh grade year.
The first day I bled. I didn’t run to my relatives like I would when I fell and cut my knee.
I hid crying thinking that I was being punished and everyone but me knew why.

Background: Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill:
          I can still vividly recall the first Women’s March I ever went to on a balmy January morning in Downtown Los Angeles. I was 6 years old. I remember staring up in awe at the breathtaking women looming over me, armed with megaphones and leather jackets and glittering posters and the pain that we as women have harbored for centuries. Most of the day was a blur, just snapshots here and there of screaming crowds and tears and splotches of color. But the feeling? Now that’s something I’ll have forever. Togetherness. Power. Love. That was the day that I officially declared myself a feminist.
          So what is a feminist? Nine years later, I think I can safely say that feminism is something simple at its core that has blossomed into something so multifaceted and complex: the desire for everyone to have equal rights, regardless of their gender. A feminist is someone that uplifts everyone and tells women in particular that yes, you can! You will! You have! And why am I a bad one? Because as much as I preach self love and empowerment to other women, I can’t seem to reciprocate it when it comes to myself.​