Bedtime Stories
2020 Scholastics Art & Writing Awards
National Gold Medal
Illustration by Julia Cheng
Vignettes
- 月 yuè, moon.
- craters
- 天 tiān, sky
- typhoon
- 倒影 dào yǐng, reflection
- Shapeshifter
- 日 rì, sun
- supernova
- 生 shèng, life
- bedtime stories
6 | shapeshifter
It’s always fun, pretending not to be yourself. Maybe this is why I spent the better part of my childhood in someone else’s skin.
Jun would sweep me up on his shoulders and I’d transform into a great beast-tamer, riding a magnificent silver dragon across the sky. With a roar, he’d take off, hurtling through the hallways as I squeezed my eyes shut and shrieked with laughter—till one day he tripped and we both tumbled down the stairs with a deafening crash. When we scampered back to Ma, our knees scraped and me bawling bloody murder, she was livid.
Jun didn’t play with me much after that, and the memories soon faded with the star-shaped scabs on my legs.
Some days I sprouted the feathers of a phoenix and jumped from my bed in a valiant attempt to fly. On others I bared the teeth of a fearless golden lion, prowling the alleys of our small neighbourhood. But time passed, as it always does, and the scarlet feathers receded back into my hairline, silver scales falling off and revealing bumpy teenaged flesh.
In fourth grade I met Liz, who called me over every weekend (like best friends should, she said) and we’d rifle through her stacks of magazines, cutting out the parts of supermodels we liked best and pasting them beside her mirror. Liz was taller—with the kind of legs you saw in shaving commercials. She had brown hair and grey eyes, but she certainly looked closer to the posters than I ever did.
I had never wished so badly to be someone else.
I tried to imagine all the fat melting away, the strange curves righting themselves, scars sinking back into my skin; I tried to imagine my eyes turning blue, my hair brightening, just like how I’d once conjured up dragon’s wings and a tiger’s tail—but when I opened my eyes, the same reflection blinked back, if only more disappointed.
“What d’you mean? Lots of guys are into Asian girls,” Liz’s older brother had remarked one night, freckled hands ghosting mine. “You’re all so small. We like it when we can, you know, protect you.” Maybe he was joking, but in the dark corridor his grin looked more like a leer.
Humans, I soon learned, could shape-shift, too: down dark alleyways, behind locked doors.
On the walk home, I tried several times to puff out my chest, imagining that I was Yu, that huge, scaled wings were emerging from my bones and dragon’s talons shot forth from my fingers—but I didn’t feel like a dragon. I felt like a scrawny Chinese girl, clamping house keys between her white knuckles.