Nonfiction by Xinyi (Mel) Song
Julie was clumsily unwrapping a pack of Kent No.4
… in the back alley outside a 7-11 in Shinjuku, Tokyo, when I saw a man with long, dark hair in a black cardigan unwrap his adeptly under the streetlight. He knocked the box on his palm, and one cigarette fell accurately between his fingers.
Julie’s fingers were slender, pale. She delicately held the cigarette, took a drag, and coughed into the air. I laughed at the way her nose wrinkled up when she tried to spit out the bitterness in her mouth.
“Why do people torture themselves with this?” She asked with her eyes squinted.
I didn’t have an answer. People torture themselves in various ways. As I traced the shifting grey line on her face – half of it dipped into the darkness, the other half looked tender under the moonlight – I felt a glare from behind. As soon as I turned around, it dissolved in the street’s yellow, fluorescent light.
My friend Chrissy was busted smoking
… in the girls’ bathroom in a Chinese high school, but we all knew she wasn’t a smoker. It was during class time when the principal walked in unexpectedly and found Chrissy and another girl whispering, giggling, and bantering in the stall near the windows.
The principal dragged them outside. Without much hesitation, that girl took out a box of cigarettes. They received detention for a week for smoking. No one ever asked why the box’s plastic wrap was still intact, or questioned why the girls didn’t smell like tobacco but like peach gloss. That was the story they decided to tell, a story less threatening to the school.
Chrissy offered me a cigarette
… outside the airport, two years after graduating from high school. We were flying back to college. She was going to Vancouver, and I was flying to New York. She offered me a cigarette, and I took out my lighter. She laughed at me, saying,
“I thought you hated smokers.”
I did. I couldn’t breathe in the clouds of smoke in the room where my father and uncles used to play mahjong. I was told it was a nasty habit for girls but a rite of passage for boys. But there wasn’t much I could hold on to growing up, so I was beginning to fidget with a cigarette in my hands. A habit might be bad in the eyes of onlookers, but it doesn’t betray you; it doesn’t ask you to change. I was moving from city to city, country to country. Trying to hide the Chinese accent, trying to love who I was supposed to love, trying not to be so different. Smoking is like a safe but moldy blanket for grown-ups.
Julie took her last drag
… while the cackling sound of the burning cigarette echoed in the alley. There was no one around us anymore. I could hear the stub rolling towards the direction of that long-haired man’s silhouette.
She took a deep breath, exhaled, and mumbled,
“I don’t understand the appeal of smoking.”
“It’s ok,” I said, taking over the cig from her, finishing the rest. It tasted like honey peach.
We walked back to our hotel in silence. Our shadows lost in the lights that were like a bright mist. It was 1:00 a.m., but the city was shrouded in a halo. I wanted to tell Julie how I felt, when I smelled the soft scent of tobacco radiating from her icy earlobes. In my hesitation, she threw away that pack of Kent No.4 and swore to never touch it.
She probably wouldn’t have known then how many cigarettes we’d gone through the night, in a few years, when she told her mother about the girl she was in love with; I probably wouldn’t have known then how much I wished that night in Tokyo was longer, when I learned that the girl wasn’t me.
Xinyi (Mel) Song is a bilingual writer. Born and raised in Sichuan, China, she moved to the United States for college and is now based in Boston. Her writing explores family, womanhood, and identity. Her essay, “Everything Is in the Meatball Soup,” is forthcoming in a Pangyrus food anthology.
