Mirrors
By Natasha Lupien
Mirrors only show what’s on the outside.
They show a distorted version of reality; they portray but a morsel of your quintessence. We meet no ordinary people over the course of our lives; and yet if we relied on mirrors to extrapolate the essence of a person, to single out what makes them them, we would most likely believe the opposite.
However, the pensive six-year-old peering at the cold glass surface, taking note of her reflection for the very first time, did not know this. The only thing Natasha knew was that the face staring back at her in the mirror, the one tinted with indecisiveness, worry, and insecurity, was… different. It didn’t look the same as anyones’ she had known; and in this moment it seemed to hit her for the first time: in a sudden flash of clarity in which innocence, or blissful ignorance, was lost irreversibly.
It happened after the treehouse meeting with her neighborhood ‘friends’. Friends? She wasn’t sure she could call them that anymore. They had been sitting in Gianna’s treehouse, drawing on the whiteboard her father had installed there. Out of the corner of Evie’s eye, she caught a glimpse of a few words scrawled on the bottom of the whiteboard. Written in a bold dark green expo marker, “Frasians stink”.
“Frasians?” Evie cautiously asked.
She had never heard the word before.
“What’s that?”
Instantly, Gianna seemed uncomfortable. Evie could see a reflection of the green expo glinting in Gianna’s pupils as they flashed uneasily from side to side.
She licked her lips before speaking.
“Well, Emma was in the treehouse earlier, with her brother and one of their friends. They talked about you and called you a Frasian... You know, because you’re…”
Gianna instantly flashed her eyes downward, pursing her lips and falling into a deep silence.
“...different.”
That was the word Gianna had been searching for. Evie had always known she was ‘mixed’, or rather, of both Asian and French-Canadian descent, and yet this was the first time it had seemed problematic to anyone, including herself.
And now, only a half hour later, peering into the mirror at her mix of Caucasian and Asian traits, Evie could only think of one word: ‘Frasian’. She could hear Emma repeat the word over and over in her head, she could hear the word rolling off of Gianna’s tongue, as if it were a subject of pity, and above all, she could see the word scrawled across her reflection in a bold green expo marker.
“Frasian”, she repeated tentatively to the mirror. Eventually, the green dry-erase words were erased from the board, but never from her mind; this awakening; this sense of self-awareness; this sudden feeling of realization… it remained.
It remained for a long time. In fact, it never truly left. In some ways, Evie became a walking mystery; guessing her ethnicity became a sort of game that no one ever played right – Caucasian people always assumed she was of Asian descent, and Asian people always assumed she was of Caucasian descent.
Soon, Evie learned a fundamental lesson on human nature: people like to put you into boxes, categories, labels, to define your identity for you, and they seem to do this according to what makes you different from them, instead of what makes you similar.
Family reunions were always fun. They were extremely different from one side of her family to the other, and the diversity was always both exhilarating and somewhat jolting. It was a reminder of how, having been given a lens by means of birth on the world that was much wider and more diverse than the norm, it permitted her siblings and herself to fit into a much wider array of cultures and social situations. And yet, situations commonly arose where Evie was given a fork instead of chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant, or she was asked, “So… where are you really from?”, or was asked to speak Chinese, or Japanese, or any other Asian language because “You’re Asian, right?”. She was constantly reminded by society that even though she fit in everywhere… she didn’t truly fit anywhere.
She remembered one day when she was around 12 or 13, walking back home from the library and watching her feet carefully so as to not step on the cracks. “No one ever wants to step on the cracks,” she remembered thinking. “They are avoided at all costs…” At the intersection of two slabs of concrete that were always close, yet never quite touching, Evie imagined one of the slabs to be her French-Canadian side, and the other, her Cantonese side. She imagined herself splayed on the sidewalk, the two conflicting cultures within her, always seeking to mingle and interact and occupy an equal space inside of her, and yet never quite touching, never quite understanding each other, and at the intersection of both of them, at the area where they were just out of reach… there she remained.
Intent on scrutinizing the pavement with its many lines and cracks, Evie didn’t notice herself almost tripping over her mother’s heels, who was walking right in front of her. Her mother caught her just in time and noticed her disgruntled expression.
“What’s wrong?” her mother asked. Slowly, Evie recounted everything about the sidewalk and pavement, about her uncertainties and insecurities. Her mom, leaning over and tucking a strand of Evie’s brown hair behind her ear, said,
“Evie, listen to me. Think about… think about sunsets. Sunsets, well… They’re only as beautiful as you let them be. There are no two sunsets that are quite the same; sometimes they’ll come in soft hues of blue and gold, and other times it’ll be bold tones of boisterous orange and red. And yet, never once do we try to control the sunset; to paint it in the way we would like. We simply watch as it unfolds, in complete awe of the phenomenon. Well, Evie, people are a little bit like sunsets. We meet no ordinary people in our lives. These people can be as beautiful as sunsets if you let them be. If we don’t find ourselves trying to control the colours of the sky, then the complexity of hues and tones that make you you should not either be questioned.”
And with that, Evie peered at the sky, which had just started to soften along the horizon in a deep shade of purple. As she gazed, she thought she saw words of green expo etching themselves here and there in the sky, right where the blue met the purple. She gulped and shook the images away. Those images were reflections of her own fears, her worries. Reflections, reflections… they were only reflections. And reflections rarely told the truth. Erasing words of green expo from her mind and from memory, Evie squared her shoulders and her chin. Putting one foot forward and stepping directly onto one of the cracks in the sidewalk that separated the two slabs of concrete, as if reconciling both sides of her family into one, as if accepting and embracing the intersection of both, where she stood. Evie squared her shoulders and chin, and breathed.
“We meet no ordinary people in our lives…”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natasha Lupien is a high school student in Quebec, Canada. She is of French-Canadian and Chinese descent.
