Carrot Legs

Illustration: Gabriella Svenningsen.

In America, I was not beautiful, but in Taiwan, I was ugly. I knew it before I even set foot in Taipei. On the way from the airport, in the MRT and taxi, I saw advertisements for skin-whitening creams, double-eyelid surgery, circle contact lenses. I hadn’t known I could look like that. Growing up, it had been pointless to wish for blue eyes or blond hair, so I never did. But in Taipei, the standard for attainable beauty had shifted, and I was responsible for my ugliness.

This was made clear the night I arrived. My grandparents had arranged a welcome dinner at a large seafood restaurant with all my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I had not seen any of them for eight years, since I was five years old, but my parents had decided I was finally old enough to go to Taipei by myself. I was seated next to my cousin, who was two years older than me.

I had first seen her standing outside the restaurant, talking on her cell phone and checking her appearance in a compact mirror. She was thin and pale, and her lips looked stained with strawberries, like the women in the advertisements. When she walked into the private dining room my grandparents had rented, I thought her a stranger who had come in by accident. But then she was calling me “mei” and clasping my shoulders, and my grandparents were scolding her for being late.

I had wanted to hate her, but I loved her immediately, like she was something expensive that had been given to me.

“LaLa will take care of you while you’re here this summer,” Grandpa said.

“Biao-jei and biao-mei,” Grandma smiled. “Together at last.”

“But have you ever seen cousins who looked so unlike one another!” Third Aunt exclaimed.

Everyone nodded in agreement and proceeded to catalogue the ways in which LaLa and I were different.

How much whiter she was than me.

How her nose bridge was high and mine was flat.

How she was so thin, you could see the bones in her neck.

How I was so fat, it was making them hungry.

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

LaLa leaned over to me and whispered, “Maybe we should kill all of them.”

I felt so grateful to her that I wanted to kiss her.

I was to share LaLa’s bedroom at my grandparents’ apartment. She had lived with them since she was a baby, after her mother left. Her father, my mother’s younger brother Kun, had a drinking and gambling addiction, and my grandparents said he couldn’t be trusted to take care of her. When I saw him at the restaurant, I could only stare at his teeth, blackened from chewing betel nuts. As for her mother, I had no idea what she was like because everyone, including LaLa, pretended as though she had never existed.

LaLa’s bedroom didn’t seem to belong to a teenage girl. The walls were covered in dark-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 bright plastic buckets. As in every room of the apartment, a large crucifix was