Searching for Sylvie Lee

by Jean Kwok

As long as they maintain their distance, the vagueness of my vision is as comforting as a cocoon. When I’m practically blind, I can pretend I’m deaf too.

He was sprawled in his chair—legs spread wide, jeans so torn I could see bits of hairy leg through the holes. I could never take up space like that, as if I had been born unfettered, as if this world were my birthright.

Jim wanted to do things that would never have occurred to me, like scoring beer even though we were underage. Neither of us liked the taste but we drank it because it was the sort of thing normal college kids did in the movies—and that was what we wanted to be.

She has pepper in her butt, the Dutch kids had said. In a society that graded you down if you wrote extra pages for an exercise because you had not followed the rules of the assignment, I had always wanted too much, tried too hard. Just do normal, the Dutch said, and I was many things but never that.

in these modern times, the distinction between hero and villain was often in the eye of the beholder.

Intellectually, some of the kids in college were far beyond me—as far as the stars were from the frog at the bottom of a well, as Ma would say. My freshman-year roommate, Valerie, had debated the importance of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill with her Yale professor parents.

“The first time I heard the cello, I felt recognized. Like the music was greeting something inside of me, something no one else could see.”

“I always try so hard and yet, it all goes wrong. No one really likes me. Not after they know me, anyway.