Growing Up Without My Mother, I Found Strength in Olympic Skating Heroes
I lost my mother when I was young. So women like Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski, and Sasha Cohen taught me about femininity and fierceness.
I lost my mother when I was young. So women like Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski, and Sasha Cohen taught me about femininity and fierceness.
I felt humiliated singing a song about honor when I could only feel shame. As I stood in yellowface, I had finally fulfilled my quest to become white.
Skating was for graceful girls, pretty girls. Girls with money. Not a girl like me.
“He traced my spine. It turned out to be curvy, a little snake made of bones.”
The day-to-day negotiation I faced as a mixed-race woman made me resist the idea that classifying myself and my body was the only way to get my music heard.
“The first set of clubs arrived when I was seven, cotton candy-colored in pink and blue.”
On inherited traumas and joys in an immigrant family, and swimming as an antidote to despair.
“I run to silence the voices that haunted my brother and sister.”
“Flying into Putin’s Russia on a tourist visa with my soccer gear hadn’t seemed utterly daft.”
“I am here to learn the language, to learn how it feels in the body to dance.”
My ascent matched my mother’s descent.
“Basketball, the game I loved, legitimized a transformation I didn’t welcome.”
“You have to require an effort of your muscles that pushes them to the edges of their power.”
“It wasn’t fair, that his brute force dominated everything.”
Getting diagnosed—and treated—for chronic Lyme disease was an exhausting and endless ordeal. Only one thing helped.
“I never found a replacement for running; I know I never will.”