Where Are You Really From

Carrot Legs

In America, I was not beautiful, but in Taiwan, I was ugly. I understood this before I even set foot in Taipei. On the way from the airport, I passed advertisements for skin-whitening creams, double-eyelid surgery, circle contact lenses. I hadn't been aware of all the variations of myself that lay dormant inside me, waiting to be enhanced. Growing up, wishing for naturally blue eyes or blond hair was pointless, so I never did. But in Taipei, the standard for attainable beauty had shifted and I alone was responsible for my ugliness.

The summer I turned thirteen, my parents decided I was old enough to visit my grandparents by myself. They had arranged a welcome dinner at a noisy seafood restaurant with all my aunts, uncles and cousins. They'd even rented a private dining room, with dark-paneled walls and ornate red carpet. I was seated next to my cousin LaLa. She was sixteen.

I had first seen her standing alone outside the restaurant, checking her appearance in a compact mirror. She was pale and thin, with strawberry-tinted lips like the women in the ads. When she wandered into our private room, I thought she'd come in by accident, a beautiful stranger who'd gotten lost. But then she was calling me "mei" and clasping my shoulders while my grandparents scolded her for being late. I had wanted to hate her, but I loved her automatically, as if she were an expensive gift.

"LaLa will take care of you while you're here," Grandpa said.

"Biao-jie and biao-mei," Grandma smiled. "Together at last."

"But have you ever seen cousins who look so unlike one another!" Third Aunt exclaimed.

My family proceeded to catalogue the breadth of our difference. How much whiter LaLa was than me. How her nose bridge was high and mine was flat. How she was so thin, they could count the bones in her neck. How I was so fat, I was stirring their appetite.

Second Uncle squeezed my arm. "What are they feeding her in America?" he crowed. Everyone laughed merrily, as though LaLa and I weren't in the room.

LaLa leaned over to whisper in my ear, "Maybe we should kill them all."

I felt so grateful, I wanted to kiss her.


I was to share LaLa’s bedroom at my grandparents’ apartment. LaLa had lived with them since she was just a few months old. Her father, my mother’s younger brother Kun, suffered from a drinking and gambling addiction and my grandparents had decided he couldn’t be trusted to raise a child. When I met him at the restaurant, I could only stare at his pockmarked skin and blackened teeth, stained from chewing betel nuts. Throughout dinner, LaLa spoke little to her father and the times she did, her embarrassment betrayed itself in her lowered gaze. As for LaLa’s mother, I had no idea what she was like because everyone, including LaLa, pretended as though she didn’t exist.

We took a taxi back to my grandparents' apartment. By the front door stood a glowing fish tank, swirling with orange-white patterns. I noticed every sofa was covered in lace embroidery, every table in a thick pane of glass. Even with all the lamps switched on, darkness clung to the apartment's surfaces. LaLa showed me her bedroom, which looked like it belonged to a middle-aged man, not a teenage girl. The walls were lined in green felt and the wicker furniture felt both dusty and oily. A high window overlooked the metal box patio of the neighboring apartment, strung with laundry and faded plastic buckets. As in every room of the apartment, a wooden crucifix was nailed above the door.

I began to unpack when our grandma came in holding two glasses of papaya milk. I took a sip: the thick sweetness was nauseating.

"Why do we have to drink this?" I whined.

Grandma flapped her hand in exasperation and shuffled to her bedroom.

LaLa turned to me and squeezed her breasts underneath her nightdress. "To make them grow," she whispered.

That night, my cousin taught me her "beauty strength" exercises. First, we massaged the space beneath our armpits-that fragile tuck of skin-until it ached, which LaLa said would boost the papaya milk's benefits. Then we lay on our backs on the bed and shot our legs straight at the ceiling until they turned numb. "So fat doesn't drain down your legs and get stuck there," LaLa explained matter-of-factly. Finally, we ran our index fingers and thumbs down the length of our noses over and over, ending with a hard pinch at the tip for a "high nose." Afterwards, we looked as though we'd been sneezing all night.

"How long have you been doing this?" I wanted to know.

LaLa cocked her head. "Since I was ten, maybe younger." When she was a baby, she said, our grandma used to tug her hands down each of her legs each night before bed so she'd grow up tall and thin. I felt resentful I had not started the exercises sooner. Perhaps I would've looked like LaLa, too, if I had known the body was a moldable thing.


In the daytime, LaLa took me to fashionable Ximending or the congested Fuxing boulevards. We wandered past glassy buildings stamped with mismatched signs, down narrow alleys beneath a canopy of awnings where we poked at rows of clothes, phone accessories, cheap jewelry. I couldn’t buy any of the clothes because they were only available in two sizes: S and M.

On my third day in Taipei, we passed a pastel photo booth. When LaLa saw me looking at it, she pulled me inside. I copied her poses: framing her face with her hand, lowering her chin and pretending to pout, bending at the waist and blowing a kiss. Afterwards, a screen displayed the photos, which had transformed our faces like magic: my skin was fairer and clearer, my eyes, larger and brighter. How awful and wonderful, I thought, to witness my idealized form when I had lived in ignorance of it. By contrast, LaLa-who already fit the photo booth's algorithm of beauty-looked more or less the same.

In the evenings, we went to Shilin night market and ate chewy green onion pancakes and oyster noodles swimming in gluey sauce. For dessert, hot custard pancakes and brown sugar boba tea swinging in plastic bags. The air was fat with smoke and the stink of fermented tofu. Underneath the pillars of neon light, we spit on napkins to wipe the stickiness from our fingers and linked our arms.

I liked looking at LaLa. The way she walked, as if she couldn't tolerate touching the ground. The way she closed her eyes in happiness whenever she bit into one of her favorite foods. When she ate a greasy meal during the day, she only consumed boiled water at night. When the sun was out, even partially, she carried an umbrella lined with UV protectant. She never drank anything with ice because it caused period cramps. She told me I had to stop this bad habit of mine, but I explained that I hadn't gotten my period yet.

In a clinically bright store near our grandparents' apartment, we browsed fat-burning lotions, vitamin C whitening masks and funny-looking massagers designed to shrink your face. They were a reminder that in Taiwan, beauty was a choice.

After the first time LaLa brought me to the store, I returned alone one afternoon. I brought a pack of eyelid tape to the register, then at the last minute, left without purchasing anything. The decision to try for beauty meant I could also fall short of it, which would be more painful than not trying at all.


Each night before we fell asleep, we lay in bed and stared at the ceiling as we talked. LaLa asked me about my life back home. I told her that my American friends were cruel, that they made me steal the teacher’s test answers and lift my skirt up in front of a group of boys in the bathroom. That once, they had locked me in a classroom overnight.

None of this was true. At school, the boys were afraid of me and the girls ignored me. I had only one friend, Minnie, who was a grade below me and did almost anything I said. I often made her cry just to see if I could. I hated her easy devotions, including to me. Just before summer break started, I hit a boy in the face after he said something disgusting and untrue about Minnie and me. He'd even made up a song about us. On the flight over, the lyrics kept looping in my head, so loudly I worried the song would follow me all the way to Taiwan.

Instead of telling LaLa any of this, I preferred to let her believe I was a helpless victim. I liked when she turned to me with wide eyes and asked, "Zhen jia?" as though the cruelty of my classmates was so vast, she could not comprehend the size of it. I nearly clapped my hands in joy when she said she hoped they would die-that if she were there, they would never harm me again. She even made me write down their names in red ink on a sheet of paper. "John-A-Than," she sounded out. "Jen-Ni-Fer." All these American names possessed an evil energy, she declared, and I laughed until my stomach cramped.

LaLa adopted my heartache as her own, without question or hesitation. I lacked the words to tell her how much this meant to me, so I just squeezed her hand across the bed in a silent alphabet of thanks. But when I asked LaLa about her friends, she said very little. She let me spread out the altered pieces of my life all over the dark-green-felt room and kept her own packed away inside her.


My grandparents owned three dumpling shops across Taipei, the original one located in the alleyway just below their apartment. The shop became our second home whenever we grew restless indoors and were unwilling to wade through the humid heat outside. LaLa said she didn’t mind hanging out at the shop because of the constant air-conditioning and because, away from our grandparents’ nagging, she could watch the TV shows they wouldn’t allow.

The shop was narrow and dingy, with scratched laminate tables and maroon vinyl-backed chairs. The walls were bare except for an outdated calendar: Year of the Horse. At the front of the shop was a wide, flat metal surface where the dumplings were fried. Behind it was a glass-door fridge stocked with premade dishes: thousand-year egg on a bed of silken tofu, sliced bean curd, pickled cucumbers bathed in chili oil. Above the fridge sat a small TV, tuned to a soap opera set in the Ming dynasty. The women on the show wore blue eyeshadow. I asked LaLa how they got ahold of it back then and she told me I think too much.

At the rear of the shop, down a dim hallway, was a studio where the manager lived with his wife, separated from the kitchen only by a curtain of wooden beads. They had worked for my grandparents for as long as LaLa could remember. I was introduced to them the way we were to all adults: "ShuShu" for men and "Ayi" for women. I never knew their real names. ShuShu was a silent man with evil-looking eyebrows and wiry muscles. Ayi looked at least fifteen years younger than him. She was chubby and seemed slow, which aggravated me on such a visceral level, I didn't even pause to wonder why.

In the hours between lunch and dinner, Ayi offered to teach me how to make dumplings, but LaLa said she could show me herself. While Ayi watched, LaLa dipped a middle finger into a bowl of clear water and traced it around the circumference of the dough. Then she dropped a bundle of pork, garlic and cabbage into its center. Her long fingers stitched the dough into gentle folds, pinching lightly each time until eight pleats were embroidered into a fan. I liked that LaLa was good at making dumplings and that I failed at it, all my attempts lopsided or stretched too thin. As with other little incidents, it confirmed the hopelessness in comparing myself to her. This let me love her, I believed, selflessly.

When Ayi went to the kitchen for more dough, LaLa asked if I noticed her luobo tui.

"Her what?"

"Carrot legs! When legs look like carrots," she said, her voice tight with impatience. Whenever certain phrases went missing from my Mandarin, LaLa would stare at me as if she had only just remembered we were different in some ways and always would be.

Upstairs in our grandparents' kitchen, she yanked two daikon radishes from the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and placed them in front of her calves. "White carrots. See?"

Our grandma cooked the stocky vegetable in a cloudy soup with pork bones until the daikon turned translucent and white streaks pinwheeled out from its center. I thought the soup tasted delicious, both light and savory, while LaLa found it underwhelming.

From her tone, I understood carrot legs were undesirable.

"What about me?" I asked. "Do I have carrot legs?"

LaLa studied my legs carefully.

"No," she said at last, "they're healthy legs. All girls in America play sports, don't they?"

"Yes," I lied. I didn't tell her that P.E. was my most dreaded class, a fact I didn't hide from the teacher, who seemed to punish me by always clapping his hands after me, yelling at me to pick up the pace.

LaLa's legs were straight and thin, just as our grandma had hoped they'd be. When I tried to imagine the equivalent for legs like hers, I could only think of bean sprouts or some other vegetable I could easily snap in half.


The next time we went to the dumpling shop, I paid special attention to Ayi’s legs. I couldn’t see them at first because she was either sitting down or abruptly appearing beside me to ask if I needed anything. Up close, her eyes were deep-set, her mouth a pink peony pucker, her cheeks high and round as apples dewy with sweat. Her attractive features came as a sudden shock to me. I didn’t think Ayi had the right to a pretty face.

When she went outside to empty buckets of water, I finally saw she was bowlegged, her legs like two parentheses hugging each other. Her thighs met her calves without transition and a pale set of indentations was the only indication she had knees. I had never seen legs like that before, but I would begin to notice them everywhere in Taipei: waiting in line at the lunchbox restaurant across the street, gliding up the escalators as I exited the MRT station.