Mirabel wants to learn to swim but she’s been told her whole life she’d just sink to the bottom and that swimming is not only a risk to her, but to the lifeguards who might have to retrieve her extra-large body from the deep end of a pool. At six feet, eight inches and two-hundred and fifty pounds, Mirabel has always been self-conscious, but as the newest partner at the country’s largest forensic accounting firm, she learned success comes with hard work and determination. She’s tired of being told she can’t do something.

In my village of Beiji, in the coldest, whitest corner of Heilongjiang Province, my harelip has always been fierce and unapologetic, my eyes like misshapen mouse turds. My long, uneven braids dangle like parasites; my mouth pinched like a rotted lotus flower. I have been crowned with the dried leaves of red Manchurian ash trees twice— the dishonour of being one of my village’s ugliest girls. My mother and her midwife screamed in astonishment after she birthed me, and my father attempted to snap my newborn neck in the blue Daxing’anling woods. 

My mother’s hands are silver. They seem to shine, the streaks on her brown knuckles so startling. Almost alien.

I remember the first time I laid eyes on them, my first morning waking up in Canada. They glowed like the sea under a half-moon.

Pretty, right? You ever seen skin hold light like that? That’s how her hands looked to me—palm planted on her hip as she surveyed a clean room, knuckles brushing the edge of a table before she placed a dish down.

I couldn’t stop looking.

“Wake up, Seenu. You must go to work today."

He heard Narsamma speak as if from a far away world. He moved his limbs and opened his eyes. Seenu felt so weak he wanted to sink back into sleep.