Bad Feng Shui
by Ren O. Yama (蓮山)
I left home with just two changes of clothes and a body-length mirror. I remember whenever my dad got angry at my mom, he’d place the mirror right in front of her bedroom door so bad spirits would enter and haunt her sleep. Once, she said she had a dream of a baby drowning in a creek. How she saw two bloody fists displacing the water; and only when she looked closer did she realize the fists were just fruit trying to grow into a tree.
While my mom did my hair in the mornings, extending the brush so my hair rose like smoke, we’d always sit in front of the window. In the frame, barely holding our faces against the sun, we looked like ghosts. I remember I used to pretend I was a haunting, plucking lemons off my neighbor’s tree, or crushing cars with the front-side of my thumbs. After she’d finish, I’d usually ask her why we had to sit in front of the window instead of the mirror. That mirror is bad Feng shui. We need to get rid of it. My mom’s natural reaction to bad omens in the house was either burning or throwing away the source. That’s why one day she told my dad the same thing about me: That girl. We need to get rid of it.
Ren O. Yama (蓮山) takes to writing as a creative space to re-imagine and re-locate self-hood, community, and radical modes of collective care. She currently writes myths— passed down from her mother(s)— as a way of speaking from and for her intergenerational, matriarchal lineage. As of now, she considers herself an [emerging] writer; one that’s slowly coming to be.
