Friday, March 18, 2005 @9:39 PM
a story from the seventeen magazine worth sharing{Simple Plan - Welcome to my Life}It always took my mother two doctors, and a shot of anesthesia to calm me down. My mother would stand silently by my bedside while the doctors administered the drug. Resignition and despair would mist her pretty features like a cold, lifeless mask. She looked still and rigid like a tin soldier. I couldn't exactly blame her. This wasn't the first time she'd found me tangled in my sheets in the wee hours of the morning, retching and shrieking uncontrollably at the same time.
"Julia. Would you like something to eat?" Dr Werner would ask gently for the umpteenth time, laying a gentle finger on my bony, chalk-white wrist. Frankly, I was surprised she even bothered to ask. She knew what my response would be - a vehement refusal.
My nightmare lasted for over a fornight, after which I would simply lie curled in a fetal position under my quilt, my fingernails scratching absently at my flimsy cotton pillowcase, my eyes large and wary. I was too terrified to fall asleep. I feared that an unknown force would seize me by the neck, pry my mouth open, and start emptying vast quantities of McDonald's down my unwilling throat.
The morning after, I was always startled to discover that I had clawed my sheets to threads.
My father, a well-to-do corporate lawyer, was transferred to his firm's American branch in central Los Angeles shortly after my sixteenth birthday. Our family was to remain there for at least a year. I was ecstatic. I was eager to leave this no-name place- or so I assumed - and really accomplish a name for myself, preferably in some Hollywood blockbuster or long-running soap opera, like so many others my age.
I was a teenage girl, a naive idealist
Back home in Singapore, I was a fairly major celebrity. I'd enrolled in my first drama class in a kindergarten and was a regular on various television sitcoms and commercials by age eight. My real big break came when I turned thirteen - a casting agent had viewed my performance in a modest community theatre production and insisted I try out for a supporting role in an up-and-coming movie. Four months later, a nationally-distributed newspaper raved over my work, branding me a "rising child starlet whose ingenious delivery of the character was outstanding and worthy of praise of the highest degree." This review soon sparked off many others, and dozens of modelling contracts and endorsement offers began streaming in. The low-budget film never made it off local shores, but it was my mould for pre-pubescent success.
The week before my departure, my father ducked into my room and handed me a pair of glossy pamphlets. I had two educational options in LA - either a diploma at the exclusive Beverly Hills High, or a place at San Angelo Academy of Performing Arts, one of the most prestigious institutes on the West Coast. I chose the latter without hesitation, not knowing the ruin it would bring me.
Our new home in San Angelo was a large, elaborately furnished Victorian mansion with a lush green courtyard and sparkling backyard pool. My bedroom window overlooked the picturesque Hollywood Hills, stark white letters against a dark velvet backdrop. I traced the impressive alphabets against the glass until the words etched permanently in my mind. I longed to belong there.
One evening, my mother stood in the door of my room and watched me brush my hair. Hollywood Hills was at its splendour. Shafts of blinding white light beamed majestically from each alternate structure - H, L, Y, O, and D. I counted them off as I drew the comb through my ebony mane. My mother approached me and set her hand lightly on my shoulder. It smelt faintly of Ulay, not Jergen's, which was what most residents here used.
I could tell the move had affected her emotionally. She was more reticent, more withdrawn. After all, she had to abandon her friends, her job, her all-Asian life. My dad was an ambitious workaholic and I was ambitious in my own way, so we were ready to embrace new and better opportunities. My mother was the only one who did not welcome her chance. She calculated risks, a characteristic that anchored her to routine and to a lack of spontaneity.