nonfic by jade hidle

The Root

As I’m writing this to you, I’m thinking of something else. I always am. 

If I wasn’t always indexing my hair’s different colors and textures, I would be clear-headed enough to think of more beautiful sentences. If my fingers weren’t magnetically drawn to the coarsest hairs and later, the whitest hairs, then my hands would be typing more words for you to read, to understand. Then maybe you wouldn’t ask, “What are you?” and then wonder “What happened to your hair?” as you stare at my patchy scalp while I struggle to answer your first question with percentages and hyphens. If I wasn’t chronically compelled to self-inflict the pain of ripping my hair roots from scalp–the wet popping of release–then, maybe, like Jo March’s words that punctured my heart, “I could have been a great many things.”

What scientist or traveler I wish I could have been if I were a free body, not trussed by twine of sadness and daily suicidal thoughts and the minute-to-minute intrusive, obsessive thoughts about my hair. Tug. Pluck. Hide. Grow. Sort. Divide. Isolate. Pull. Rip. Save and save and loose and remember and want and grieve. The compulsion is relentless. It is the mental version of my mother’s clothespin pinch choking my nose, suffocating all those other rivulets of blood and potential, shriveling in and picking at itself—lash after lash, root after root from this skin without a chance—like a shore in fast forward erosion, like an incessant making of death. 

When they found the mummy of mother and child in Lemon Grove, scientists and spectators exclaimed that the preserved strands of dried hair make her look so alive. But when the wind blows my remaining combed-over strands and reveals the bald patches that my calloused plucking fingers fly quickly to cover, you will worry and wonder about how close to dead I look. 

Is it cancer? Alopecia? “Did you get that postpartum hair loss?” a woman in the pediatrician’s waiting room asked. “No,” I said. “What is your worst health problem?” 

The tangling of life and death is not so foreign to me. Bụi đời, “dust of life,” was the term for mixed-race Vietnamese kids like me who were assumed products of GI-prostitute sex. No one ever said that so directly, but I could see in their faces cringing around their words that they were channeling its spirit. To learn that my mother was Vietnamese and my father a white American, assumptions were made, and their eyes waned with the association of my life with a history of war overflowing with so much death. Just as the wind scatters the seeds in diaspora, wind also blows the dust of life, bụi đời—the mixed children of shame, of life and death muddled–these are the scattered words that fall into some story of me, a Mỹ lai girl first in her family born in the states, but who carried things with her, who rips out the lashes meant to keep dust out of the eyes, and who writes words about it. 

The doctors’ word for it is trichotillomania. The Greek etymology stems from Aristotle’s writing about hair pulling. Before that, pulling out a body’s hair was part of the intricate funeral rituals in Egypt. Across the Atlantic, the indigenous Amazonian tribe of the Ticunas performed pelazon in which girls are ushered into adolescence with a communal pulling of all her hair—a death of girlhood and regrowth into womanhood.  When the Prophet Nehemiah pulled his hair out in response to one of the many tragedies in the Bible, idioms about “tearing my hair out” mushroomed across geography, cultures, and languages. I can’t count how many times my body has tensed up when a stressed coworker or annoyed friend casually uses the phrase, only to realize they haven’t yet noticed that I am an actual, chronic hair puller.

Growing up, I did not hear a Vietnamese word for trichotillomania. When I search for “hair pulling” in Vietnamese all of the results are advertisements for spas. Typical. 

But I have absorbed a lexicon of judgment for being all varieties of words that throat-scraping spit of the Klingon-like aspirated “k”—“khùng,” “kỳ,” “khó ưa,” “khó chịu,”—and, of course, incessant critiques of my body, including my hair. From birth, I was “so bald” until I was two. Given that the OBGYN was apparently playing it loose and casual during my mother’s ultrasound appointments when my back was turned to the sonographer, I was predicted to be a boy. The piles of blue and yellow clothes gifted at my baby shower led people to read my prolonged baby baldness as male gender identity. Following suit, I was a kid “so big” or “fat,” “too dark,” with a trán dô and nose that was “bự quá!”—all excess. When puberty hit early and fast, the Vietnamese women who raised me coveted yet critiqued my height, breasts, and my heavy dark eyelashes and chestnut hair. My mother often showed her love for me, as well as her hatred for herself, by saying, “I want to pull off your hair and wear it.” 

Vietnamese hair, I think, is admired: straight, black, smooth. But, that, like every fetish, is an incomplete picture. My mom complained about the natural darkness and coarseness of her hair that many people in the world paid top dollar for, and she held up to my hair boxes of chestnut-mahogany-mushroom-medium-rich-other-marketing-terms-for-brown hair dye, coveting a perfect match. The jealousy, the competition, was built into our DNA. Everything that I was pained her for what she was not. I was guilty. I was guilty of hurting her just by being alive. If my living body inflicted pain upon her, I would destroy it. In this way, hair pulling was my manifestation of attempting to remove this competition, this deep-seeded pain, from our relationship–to rip it from its roots. 

Words I do know in Vietnamese are the words for “to write” (viết) and “to kill” (giết). Their sonic similarity, though, hinges upon a Southern accent. In the Vietnamese classes I’ve taken, it seems a consensus that those from the Southern part of Viet Nam, where my family is from, speak fast and loose, a little dirty. While it’s true that the mother tongue I grew up hearing and speaking is the muddy boondocks “may-tao” roll, colonialism’s reach is far. Someone told my mom who told me to use “Mẹ” instead of “Má” and to pronounce “viết” (to write) with a “v” instead of the “g” that sounds like “y.” All of these substitutions. 

I made the mistake of pronouncing the “v” in front of some first-generation South Vietnamese boys from the San Gabriel Valley. “Oooohhh weee, điệu quá! You some kind of sympathizer, em ơi?”

I mumbled an excuse about my mẹ going to French Catholic school and laughed it off. At home, I recited all the “v” words I knew—“vội,” “vớ,” “vàng,” “vui”—and practiced pronouncing them in an “authentic” Southern Vietnamese dialect. I hoped that bringing “viết” and “giết” together would mean writing about it could kill the hair pulling problem. Maybe it would finally release the urge to pull and blink out like a black hole the inheritance to which my body responded louder than words.  Maybe it would be as described by the writer in whom I found a mother I needed, Virginia Woolf, about my favorite of her novels (its multiple references to “little Chinese eyes” attests to how racism is inescapable, even in the things we love) To the Lighthouse: “in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.” Yet I worry that doing so will also end up killing my mother and all that she is to my identity. I worry that I am killing myself. “I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her,” Woolf wrote.

From womb to womb of multiple generations of women, I inherited the sugared blood that makes me unquenchably thirsty, a liver hot and hard with the incurable “-itis,” and a heart like the ones who loved me first that palpitates until I choke on my own breath. Perhaps, too, I inherited the hair pulling. My mother once said she did the same as a girl and that was why her lashes became so short and thin. “Like me,” she said and laughed. She tended to claim every struggle and wound as her own, so I resisted believing it, mostly because I was hurt that she continued to look at herself instead of me. (The only other time she addressed my hair pulling directly was when she offered to beat my hands with chopsticks every time she noticed me plucking. “No, thank you,” I said, surely hurting her again with this rejection of painful love.)

A generation back, my bà ngoại, tuned into another time, slept in small spurts throughout the day and night. Oftentimes, she floated in some liminal zone between sleeping and waking. Either she lay on her back with her feet planted so her knees windshield-wipered to the same rhythm that her palm or forearm rubbed her forehead—xoa, xoa—as if to smooth away the memories that furrowed her brow. Or, she sat on the couch, arms limp palms up on her thighs as she swayed an endless circle. An insomniac myself, I peered from behind doorframes or chairs to watch her. The swaying and her indecipherable mumbling were hypnotic. The rhythm was only broken by her hand slapping a peeling Salon Pas back into place on her forehead, neck, or shoulders. 

Just as deeply as she was in it, she would break from it quickly and urgently. She rustled in her plastic bags of drugstore perfume and her Tamogochi-like glucometer with pinprick needles for prescription pills rattling in their sick urine-orange bottles. Once she found what she was swallowing into her next nap, she groomed.  From her permed crisp hair, like Top Ramen pre-boil, she removed the intricate system of cross-hatched bobby pins and scattered them on the table with her labyrinth of used toothpicks. She then took an afro pick to rake her peeking scalp and puff the remnants of what, in the ‘60s, used to be a silken upward cascade of beehive that rivaled Ronnie Spector and The Shangri-Las sisters. “Make bigger,” she’d say at once to herself and to me. 

In its many iterations, my bà ngoại’s hair was resistance too. She was doing different than her mother. My great-grandmother grew her hair to her knees but you never would have known it because she wore it in a bun–that is, until the day she shaved it off in mourning her husband who would become company for the ghost of her twin that she talked to and fought with a kitchen knife. 

Maybe my bà ngoại knew from her travels on other timelines that I, with my flat hair, would need to be reminded to resist shrinking, to take up space by believing I deserved it. To “make bigger” my self. 

But this will not be the story of the traumas suffered and survived by my mother and grandmother and great grandmother and all the ancestors preceding her on our matrilineal branches. This is not one of the epic stories that wins prizes. In the stacks of handwritten letters that my mother has slipped under my door throughout my childhood, I have been reminded, warned, threatened that her stories–stories of Viet Nam–are not mine because I am not not not. Her line-packing scrawl hinged upon my lack and deficiency, tumbled out of me being an absence, and every word reminded me of that. Accordingly, she slipped these punitive letters under my door and relied on my silence. She never brought up the issues in her letter once she had delivered it; doing so would have offered me the opportunity to respond. Her letter was meant to be the final word. 

She was the one who coached me to remain strategically silent and to lie about my ethnicity (French), my age (discounts), her age (youth), the year she came to the U.S. (the Viet Cong are always watching), how much money she had or didn’t have (shoeboxes), what she did or didn’t say about my dad (everything), and so many other things that I grew anxious about keeping them straight. Paralyzed, I opted to stay quiet. 

Quiet didn’t help. I embarrassed her. Are you dumb? Retarded? Or just rude? Why can’t you bow? Say something, anything better than sitting silent like you hate being here? What is so bad about your life that your face is always một đóng? 

I was the pendulum swinging between not enough and too much. 

Her words echo in my head daily. I cannot remember a time when her words were not the language with which I conceived of and spoke to myself: Liar. Traitor. Disappointment. Look at yourself. Look. 

I have always defended and excused my mother, even to myself, in hopes of being accepted by her. I now understand that acceptance is not possible. There is only the practice of writing, of keeping the keys clicking louder to edge out her creeping voice that puppeteers my plucking hands. The writing is my attempt to kill it. You must understand that this will be my symbolic murder. This is the way I stay alive for you. 

All bones look similar, but it’s the muscles that tell the story. I shrink and pull and knot to contort like a shrimp caving from within, boiled tighter and paler, that shit line darkening through my skin that bears the pull and punch of cycling memory, that lifts in laughter but falls harder. The doctors agree that the pain is pain–not just me–and it is chronic. Every morning the right side of my body aches as if I was beaten throughout the night. The nausea and stabs send my stomach into unpredictable yet certain tides of diarrhea and constipation, of hunger and revulsion. Migraines sear from eye sockets shooting to the back of my head and pinching along my neck all the way down to my fingertips that buzz then numb. My throat constricts because a shrimp cannot swallow so much ocean. 

“The sea was more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wae’ a gull riding on another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone” (Woolf 191). 

All of it, blood or epigenetic, is what neuroscientists chalk up to the Vagus nerve, which when over-activated by trauma results in chronic health problems and pain, as well as cognitive emergency states such as hyper-vigilance. The Terminator’s point-of-view captured how my mind works: infrared radars constantly scanning and assessing, tracking every detail as a potential threat. When it came to my hair, I was Series 800, Model 101, in distinguishing hairs, mentally cataloging them based on their color, level of sun bleaching, texture, length, and the promise of pain that I felt as I lightly tugged near the root. Isolating that pain to the pinprick of a hair root numbed all the rest. I was paralyzed by plucking, and sometimes hours passed in a haze and pile of hair sticky with wet roots. 

The silence, and staring, and slouching made others, not just my mother, assume I was dumb or indifferent or just a straight-up bitch, but these dissociative periods are actually when I am deep in a very alive body that has not been abused by others and myself. I am somewhere else—Santorini or Cork—where I am unthinking all the things I overthink, especially my hair. The sun is warm on my skin and patchy eyelids and scalp, regenerating the hair with ancient magic like Anne Rice’s mummies. I can see them, like a reverse x-ray, darkening through the tapestry of vessels in my eyelids when I close my eyes. I fantasize about my body melding with nature so that my mind is not thinking of my hair because my body is not just my own but part of a larger system that grows and heals faster than it destroys. 

As much as I was addicted to the pulling, I was hooked on the healing too. When I pulled lashes, I iced puffy eyelids and swabbed warm water and, desperately, milk on bloody, itchy lash lines. I scraped salmon skin with my teeth to swallow all of the fatty gray chunks whose Omega 3s offered a natural promise of beating depression and regrowing hair. When I moved to pulling the hair on my head because of the promise of more hair that wouldn’t be as noticeable if I plucked, I was disappointed to witness that I simply just pulled more, and I attempted to console myself I by applying series of minty shampoos, burning sprays, and tingling creams to my the exposed patches of my waxen scalp. When I’ve wanted nothing more than to die because I looked and felt that way anyway, what kept me alive is this insistence to heal. 

I’ve clung to possibility. After decades of sloppily and shamefully cutting my own hair, I crave the sensation of a hairstylist washing my scalp or my husband stroking my hair without my whole body tensing over the fear that my hair would make them more uncomfortable than it already makes me. I crave the touch and tingle that would assure me that this is my body and that my body is me. As a người lai Mỹ, people are always telling me I’m not who I look like or they don’t even know what I look like–a reminder that I will never belong in the body that I’m in. Despite this lack of control of my body that rips itself harder than everyone else, there is an eclipse-thin ring of light that promises some somatic healing, even if just a step or two in my body without the glare of acute awareness that I bear visual evidence of my defenselessness against my inheritance. The ties come undone momentarily when you reach for me or press against my chest. The momentary loosening is warm and I can feel it tingle from scalp to shins.

I am slowly learning how to rest from harming myself, envisioning a prawn supine and twisting and unfurling antennae and claws, flinging the deceptive weight of water skyward. The drips, all these crystalline memories of the shrimp I’ve been, cling to the ceiling. And wait. But falling water is clean. It becomes nourishment. You are chạo tôm, formed on sugar cane, then sliced free.

Jade Hidle (she/her) is a Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian writer, teacher, and co-host of the This Makes Me Uncomfortable podcast. You can find her written work in her memoir, The Return to Viet Nam, as well as Michigan Quarterly Review:  Mixtape, Poetry Northwest, Craft Literary, and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s diacritics.org. You can follow her work at jadehidle.com or on Instagram @jadethidle.