Piercing

I spent the summer of 2022 in Philadelphia for my first internship away from home. Life was pared down to its bare elements. I woke up when it was not yet light. I read. I went to work. I returned to my hotel room. I ate a Trader Joe’s microwaved meal. I slept when it was not yet dark.

Sometimes, I rock climbed at a gym in Chinatown then called The Cliffs. I’d walk the twenty minutes there, climb, and walk the twenty minutes back with my AirPods droningly drilling some techbro podcast into my definitely-not-a-techbro (I swear!) skull.

I usually climbed after work, before my romp with the microwave. One day there was a group of three boys and one girl, young, Asian. Two of them pretty. The pretty boy strong to boot.

His earrings flashed as he flashed boulder after boulder. He reminded me of the boys I’d seen at work. I had seen not a few pretty Asian interns, they of the permed hair and glossy skin and athletic smiles, they of the rings or chains or studs or hoops. They of the ticky-tacky five-million-dollar ranchhouse in Palo Alto, the risk-taking, poker-playing, Berkeley econ/math/CS/raving quadruple major.

I saw them again a week or a month later. It was early August by then. My birthday had passed, which I had kept a secret, to nip the secret hope of even a sensible amount of magic in the world that day; I had gone to work, had done no work, had spoken to no one, had gone home, had played Kerbal Space Program, had slept at nine. I used my real ID for the first time a few days later with some other interns at a restaurant and the waiter said Happy belated and I pretended like I didn’t hear.

And so maybe I was tired of stuffing my ears that day, with the opinions of a podcaster or the batting of self-pity, and I climbed in a silence eventually broken. I happened (by chance!) to be climbing near them, and the girl (pretty, young, Asian) said to me, “You climb gracefully.” This compliment touched a secret point of embarrassing pride, as when you catch in the mirror, but only at a glance (though ineluctably extended) and but only askance (though invariably directed), a part (that part) of your body rendered bluely in the shadow and light of the chiaroscuro dawn, and allow yourself to admire it, not quite without meaning to.

But always in secret and only in the private morning. It takes something to own a body, more, for some of us, than what it takes to own a soul; to see yourself, moreover, as an object of admiration, of desire; to see yourself as a sexual subject. As a full adult human. It takes a certain confidence to be able to place yourself there, to have the fool’s gall to believe that someone could see you, yes you. It takes also the opposite of whatever that feeling is that made me shrink, in high school, to be for the first time in New York City, that made me walk ten steps ahead of my family, painfully aware that we were yet another Asian tourist family, jabbering in Korean, using this domestic language feeling like being in pajamas on the street, and lost in the subway and blocking the way (with our material bodies, which you would think impossible, we having but immaterial subjectivities) to the important places to which the important people were importantly rushing.

We climbed together that day. They were students at Drexel, a year younger than me. I noticed one of them wearing a cross, and I noticed their biblical names, and I asked if they were Christians, and they were. Korean Christians, like me. The strong boy was talkative and playful; the girl was bubbly and had a voice like an anime character, which I found less attractive than fascinating.

In making conversation with them I complimented the strong boy’s earrings, and said I was thinking about getting my own. I had been. In that heavy Philadelphia summer air which had birthed many grand and small ideas, in this internship, ten weeks out of time, it’s like a spinoff of your life heretofore. If you think yours plain, quotidian, continuing merely on momentum, misaligned now with whom you’d like to think you’ve become, you can try on another, for ten weeks, a limited series that need not hew to the strictures of canon. I idly toyed with co-opting the expression of the boys I observed — I do not say admire, though maybe I did — did I think I could attain to their beauty, no, their pretty, the way they moved with verve, that confident ease, that beachy kind of ambition; in my vanity, didn’t I think I had the raw material for it?

I wondered aloud how much it cost. “My sister has needles,” the girl said, “I’m sure she’d pierce your ears for you. Want me to ask? Wait, I think she’s here now. There she is! Hey, C—” and her younger sister, a girl as dark and shy as the first was bright and friendly, and as pretty as well, appeared.

It was nearing the end of my time in Philly. I’d leave to study abroad in Paris in about twenty days. I felt the powerful gradient that a character in a story must feel at the beginning of the end. Not with any real hesitation and not with any real choice I said yes. Yes, I wanted to get my ears pierced. This was the way it needed to be done: by a dark girl with a sharp needle in a brick home, not by a bored teen with a plastic gun in a glassy store.

I have always been alive to path functions. One must take money and the communion bread with respect: with two hands, not one. One must climb to defy gravity, to wend like quickened water up a narrow valley in the landscape of potential energy defined by the interaction between your particular body and this particular boulder. Otherwise, your silk purse might be a few grams heavier, you might be a morsel fuller, and you might get to the top, but you will not have done saebae, or communion, or climbed. And so because this was the way it needed to be done, it therefore needed to be done.

The next day I went to the Fashion District mall, a dingy place. I was the only one there, it seemed. There’s something strange about shopping alone, particularly when you know what you’ll buy and where you’ll buy it. It feels like you, apart from society, intrude on it. You’ve gone there with a purpose: you accomplish that purpose quickly, matter-of-factly, like washing your hands: your claim on that public space, if you ever had one, is spent.

My mom had called me a few days before, and in making conversation, I mentioned that I was going to pierce my ears. Oh, she said. Where? At a friend’s place, I said. Are they like, a professional? she asked. No, I said, they have some needles. From Amazon, I think.

What the hell! my mom yelled. Absolutely not. Are you crazy. Do not get your ears pierced by some random. They’re gonna get infected, do you even know how annoying it is to heal a pierced ear, you’re going to be bleeding red and yellow and green for weeks if it’s not done right, go to a place. Are you demented. Go to a mall, if you’re going to pierce your ears.

I thought back to this conversation, at the mall, passing a Claire’s. It wasn’t surprising to me that my mom did not have a problem with the piercing itself. She and my dad have always held a long leash: letting me melt crayons in the basement, build an aluminum smelter on the concrete slab we called a backyard, grind lock picks from saw blades with a Dremel. My parents, like everyone, had become adults through the influence, push and pull, of their own parents. My dad’s mom was named something that can be translated “First Daughter”, or simply “Girl”. You can guess why. She hates her name, to this day, and one of the normative refrains of my childhood from my dad was Never ever make fun of someone’s name. My mom’s dad was the youngest of his family, and chafed at the fact that he and his sisters and his mother ate at a different table, meatless; he therefore specifically ignored primogeniture in his own family, teaching my mom to drive and sending her to college. My mom’s brother was a bit of a loose cannon, and often butted heads with my grandma. (For good reason: he did break his leg jumping off a building with an umbrella, having seen it done in a manhwa.) My mom tells me that once, in college, he came home with earrings, and my grandma promptly exiled him for three days.

So that’s probably why my mom was okay with the idea of earrings, per se, for me: in minor part, a reaction against the gender expectations of two generations before, and in major part, an admiration of her independently-minded brother, a desire to allow her own children an American freedom. And in her own way, she was also alive to the path function. She was okay with the end, and not with the route.

I ceded. Automatically, dutifully, verbally. Okay, I said, they won’t pierce my ears. I am a filial child, and I respect, to the very letter, each dot and tittle, the law of my parents. I fear them still, the fear of God. At twenty-one and two weeks, they retained the right, the contractual power, to bring me to tears, of one kind or another. They revert me to a child — one who lacks a capability — one who cannot be seen for a full person, an object of beauty, of desire, of desirability.

It’s not their fault. It’s my telos, or at least has been, with respect to them; it’s their telos, or at least has been, with respect to me. But nevertheless I knew in my heart that my ears would be pierced. Would have to be. When I hung up the phone, the solution came to me fully formed, as Athena prying open the head of Zeus: that is, with great pain to the latter, and none — or even a perverse pleasure — to the former. My mom had said I couldn’t get my ears pierced by a random, by a stranger. I was no stranger to myself: or surely would no longer be. I would pierce my ears.

This was automatic and dutiful too. For this felt even more beautiful and even more right and even more necessary. I have always liked getting my blood drawn. I have always wished to do it myself. To do it to myself. I ask the nurse to not cover the insertion with the gauze. I like to watch how my flesh tautens, the potential of it, like a drum, then suddenly breaks open to engulf the stick of steel like my mouth around the Host. I like to feel the PVC tube warm with my lifeblood and tremble with my heartbeat.

The next week, on a Friday, my last night in Philadelphia, I went over to their apartment in West Philly: the strong boy, whom I liked well, was also there, and the sisters lived in a three-bed with the older one’s boyfriend. It was dark, and the apartment smelled of Maillard goldening. The younger sister — who was a CIA student, I learned — was cooking for everyone, and had specially prepared tofu steaks for me, vegan as I was, and it was hard to accept, stranger to them as I was. The imposition. After ten weeks of Trader Joe’s microwave meals and cereal with oat milk, though, this beautiful dinner compelled me.

After dinner, there were cookies, pastries being her specialization. After the cookies, the sense of things rumbling to a conclusion, the strength to force the moment to its crisis. She brought out the needle and alcohol and cotton and mirror on a platter. She sterilized the needle with the alcohol and pad. The needle flashed like an épée in the dark.

While she was doing this, I explained my situation. How I had to pierce my ears myself. I expected confusion, but she just shrugged. She said Let me mark your ear then. She took a Micron pen and took my earlobes in her hands and dotted them, one, then the other, the heat of her fingers, the cool of the ink, and, impassive, stepped back to judge her handiwork, and I had the feeling, perhaps, that her Savarins might have, and it was pleasant.

Then I took the needle, and she held the mirror. There’s a moment in climbing when you commit to a move. You have released the hold and you are in the air and your hand is reaching for the next one, and you catch it, precisely at the top of your parabola, or you fall. The moment is short and this one was something like that. I know I held the needle between my middle finger and thumb, that my index finger supported the end, that my other hand stretched my earlobe down, taut, like a drum. I know that I brought the needle to the small dot on my ear and I felt its chill and then its heat and that it felt good, to be alive. And then I was on the other side of something.

After both studs were in, I gazed in the mirror, aware of having put two holes in my head with a needle, aware of being seen seeing myself, aware that in situations like this (the straitness of a new jacket, the bristle of a new haircut, the chafe of a new bracelet) I shrank before my shrinking before the gaze of the Other, even these, whom I knew I’d never see again. Every expression is one of vanity; it says, I chose this, I wanted this, I wanted you to see this; look, it says, I believe myself worth looking at. Look, look, not you strangers, not only, but you in the mirror, you stranger, til now, look at these two stars of light in my head, these holes I made, these wounds I intend to keep open.