by Huina Zheng
Lin SongBai is a girl, but her name always makes people think she’s a boy. Lin means forest, Song is pine, and Bai is cypress. A fortune teller once said she lacked the wood element, so her parents named her this. She didn’t like it. Her parents tried to comfort her: pine and cypress stand for resilience and strength—just like her. But she said, “I’m not a tree. I’m a flower.” No one believed her. Her classmates called her “Tree.” The nickname stuck from elementary school through high school. They said she looked like one—broad shoulders, long legs, always standing straight. When she stayed still, she looked like a banyan. She corrected them countless times: “I’m not Tree. I’m Lily.” For her seventh-grade English class, she wrote in her self-introduction: “My name is Lily. Like the flower. Not like the forest.”
When she wasn’t studying, she liked embroidery—cross-stitching, the kind with printed patterns. Stitch by stitch, she’d make lilies, roses, camellias. She said flowers embroidered on fabric never wilted. But her nearsightedness was bad. She couldn’t work long before having to look up. Her mother would come in and say she’d go blind if she kept doing that. Sometimes she thought blindness wouldn’t be so bad—at least then she wouldn’t have to see the darkening fuzz on her upper lip. The more she plucked it, the coarser it grew, like a man’s beard.
She envied girls with smooth skin. She had always been hairy. In third grade, she started using tweezers to pluck the hair on her fingers and toes—one by one. Later, it was her calves, her armpits, her eyebrows. Her brows were so thick they looked like shrubs. Her mom was hairy too, and gave her rose-scented hair removal cream. But the hair only grew back faster, like wild grass. She went back to tweezers, pruning herself strand by strand like a tree. Her dad didn’t have this problem. He went bald before thirty, and his legs were smooth like a little girl’s. She often wondered—people said daughters take after their fathers. So why not in this way?
Huina Zheng, a Distinction M.A. in English Studies holder, works as a college essay coach. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and others. Her work has received nominations three times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.
January House Literary Journal 
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