I Am Not Jessica Chen

by Ann Liang

I’ve always had this theory that if I want something badly enough, the universe will make sure to keep it just out of my reach—either out of boredom or cruelty, like an invisible hand dangling stars on a string.

I’m simply not that good. Not in academics. Not in extracurriculars. Not as a student, or a daughter, or a human. It doesn’t matter if I crammed my brain to the point of breaking with formulas and dates, threw myself into my classes, painted until the skin on my hands blistered and split open. Here is incontrovertible proof. Something in me is missing. Lacking.

It’s such a suffocating thought—that everything I will ever feel and know and accomplish must begin and end with my own mind.

When you’re so widely known and loved, so soaked in glory you’re swimming in it, all you have to worry about is maintenance, not metamorphosis.

Zhen mei chuxi. The familiar phrase of disdain echoes inside my head.

Sometimes—and I know it’s awful—I almost wish she were a terrible person. Someone undeserving of her success. Someone I could hate without feeling like the villain.

The sudden pressure in the atmosphere. The weight of their expectations thrust onto my shoulders. I lick my dry lips, stare at my chopsticks, and feel a kind of crushing inferiority that’s like being buried under stone. I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t speak.

It’s cruel, really, how the world tends to present its most beautiful parts to you when you’re so profoundly sad. Like a crush who comes up to you in the moonlight and smiles at you each time you insist on moving on—just enough to keep you lingering, to make you wonder how good things could be. If only, if only.

I cringe slightly at the obvious attempt to boost her social standing, but I can’t blame her. There’s something about this school, these people, that brings out an almost animal-like desperation in you, a hunger for validation.

What theory could possibly begin to explain this? And even more importantly, if I’m inhabiting Jessica Chen’s body, living her life . . . Then who’s living mine?

It’s so easy to be generous when you lack nothing. To be nice when you’re not in pain. It doesn’t matter if people are cheering for someone else, because they’re already cheering for me.

I can’t help wondering if the entries would piece together the Jessica I know: the model daughter, everyone’s favorite darling, success incarnate. Or if they’re anything like the comment on her test paper: bitter, brutal, brimming with rage.

It’s all a performance of relatability, without having to experience any of the actual struggles of the true working class.

Imperialism is a justifiable means of spreading knowledge and new technologies to weaker nations.

You have to prove yourself over and over, and when the glory for your most recent achievement expires, as it must, as it always will, you have to start again, but with more eyes trained on you, more people waiting for the day when your talent withers, and your discipline weakens, and your charm wears away. Success is only meant to be rented out, borrowed in small doses at a time, never to be owned completely, no matter what price you’re willing to pay for it.

Because Jessica must have learned at some point that at the first sign of anything less than perfect, her mother would react like this.

Sometimes I forget that in the bigger scheme of things, it’s okay to not be the best at everything. To be surrounded by people who can solve problems you can’t, who are talented in different ways, who will go on to change the world.

Sure, there are people I can tell, like I’ve told my relatives—in the form of an announcement, an opportunity for my parents to brag about me. But who is there I can truly celebrate with? Who else will feel genuinely happy for me?

And me learning over time that potential was in itself such an abstract term, tossed around recklessly, that more often than not it simply meant you didn’t live up to the idea somebody else had of you.

My life has never been like that. The only discernible pattern, really, is inconsistency: the second I improve in certain areas, I regress in others.

That’s what we do, isn’t it? We turn pain into a story, because then it has a purpose. Then, we reason, there was a point to it all along. But sometimes pain is just pain, and there’s nothing particularly noble about clinging to it.

It’s the mantra we’ve all been fed since we were kids: study hard, get into a good school, be better than everyone else, and you’ll have a better life.

We’re so invested in each other’s successes and failures, so insecure that we need to repeatedly compile and update all the evidence we can find that we’re doing well in comparison to everyone else.