This is what it feels like to die.

Seven minutes ago, I ended my life. The last moments of my life were supposed to be the best ones. The
most memorable ones. The most peaceful ones. But when I ended my life, I ended it with hatred and anger and injustice. I ended it trying to satisfy my insatiable pride. Most of all, I ended it clawing at my mother’s life.

—

My father used to hit me. My mother was his accomplice.
When I was three, I shit my diapers all the time. According to my mother, she could not comprehend why a Chinese girl like me didn’t know how to shit properly. I was born dark-skinned, she recalled, “so it must have been because you were like those people at first.”
That’s racist, mom.

She hung me over the toilet, clutching the hem of my shirt with a singular hand, wrung with purulent blisters from the years of demanding work on the rice farms.
“The hand of a laborer,” she said, flexing her right hand through a crumpled sleeve.
With the other hand she pulled down my pants and left my father to do the spanking with a silvery meter stick that is now lost somewhere in the garage, serving as a tribute to my pain and their power.
“From then on, you never shit your diapers again!” she concluded.
How fortunate for me.

My mother was a soft woman before she met my father. But when my father told her to harden, she hardened like that steel and hard-backed meter stick. I was a victim of that steel meter stick many times after.
“You’ll be fine,” my mother would say if she noticed me crying after a particularly violent beating, her futile attempts at consolation, “Your skin is as tough as that stick.”

As I began puberty, my father stopped hitting me because there are complications if a man hits a girl as she enters womanhood. My mother, thinking he’d grown soft, tried to raise a hand of her own. But she quickly realized I was now stronger than her when I stopped her hand mid-air and shoved it back to her side.

I hated my mother, but I never dared to hit her back. Though I did raise a stool above my head once, as if I were to slam it in her face. The leg of the stool would break her yellowing, sunken skin that would then lapse into scarlet. The impact would send her flying into the horrid, floral carpets that suffocated our floors. And she’d lay there until her sight was littered with stars and I would never have to deal with that ugly, wretched, hurtful woman ever again!
But she was the only person I had. She was the only mother I had, and I could not bear to hurt her. The cowardly daughter within me could not even bear to slam the stool beside her, but gently set it down like delicate glass.
Except no one ever considered that I too was like delicate glass, and that I too was so easily broken and scarred.

But I don’t remember the pain of my mother’s hand as much as I do her words.
Truthfully, as I grew older, I barely remembered any instances of violence inflicted on me besides when my mother brought them up to remind me of what she could do.
It was the words that pierced through me instead. Though I was strong with my words, my mother was stronger.

去死去死去死去死去死去死去死 my mother said, which means just die except for seven times. She screamed it at me so much that at some point I started screaming it at her, hoping it would slice her the same way it sliced me. You are the biggest regret I’ve ever had made me jump out the window on a Saturday night.

But a police officer told me that it was a normal teenage thing for parents to yell, so I tried to convince myself that it was normal up until now when I ended my life.

—

After a person dies, their brain stays alive for exactly seven minutes as homage to the most significant moment of their life.
In those seven minutes, I was determined to prove to myself my hatred for my mother. That every time I wanted to give up on myself was because of her. That when all the brilliance seeped out of my world it was because of her. That she was the reason I’d died. After all, there must have been a reason for me to die.
But I couldn’t.

In those seven minutes, I was brought back to the simplest, most stupid, most irrelevant memory of my
life: the day my mother and I went to the zoo.

Minute 1:

Behind the enclosure is a white tigress so close to us that I can hear the baring of her yellowing teeth and see the flare of her icy eyes. Her brown stripes adorn her face like indecipherable Chinese calligraphy my mother used to write. I back away in fear, but my mother is as calm as the white tigress when she basks by the balmy sun, stretching her great paws so that we see a sliver of her white belly, yearning with the hunger for meat, then rolling over so that her belly meets the sun-kissed ground as soft as the underbellies of leaves.

Why am I remembering this out of all things?

Minute 2:

“Don’t be scared,” my mother laughs, “She has a daughter too.”
“Where?” I ask.
My mother points to two piles of grass I hadn’t even noticed before. The first is larger, about the size of the white tigress, but the other is smaller, about the size of a baby cub. A mother always knows.

“How do you know it’s a daughter?”
“I don’t,” my mother sighs, “but a daughter always sticks to her mother.” The way I stick to you.
“Where is she now, the daughter?” I ask.
“She must be somewhere safe,” my mother says, glancing around the enclosure. “See, the mother lioness is outside because she’s sacrificing herself to protect her daughter.”

When she says this, I notice the way the mother lioness whips her head back to peer at something as she senses the danger of tourists approaching behind. And I also notice the way my mother shields her hand in front of my body to keep the lioness away from me.

I hate her I hate her I hate her so why in the last moments of my life, why does my mother have to be nice to me?

Minute 3:

“I’m hungry,” I say. My mother takes out a container of strawberries from her bag. Likewise, the zookeeper enters the enclosure to feed the lioness her meat. She purrs gently and the baby cub comes scampering out, responding to her mother’s cry. She does seem like a daughter. The mother lioness waits for her cub to eat her fill until she eats the rest herself. When the cub finishes, there’s barely any meat left for the lioness. This memory hurts a little inside.

“Won’t the lioness be hungry?” I ask my mother.
“Of course she will,” my mother says, “but she makes sure her child is fed first.”
“She doesn’t have to do that, right?”
“She doesn’t have to, but she wants to,” my mother explains, “It’s her duty.”

I look down, noticing how my mother gives me all the ripe, plump strawberries and eats the greenish ones
herself.

Oh, this is —
Oh god.
I don’t actually hate my mother, do I?
I’m remembering the way she loved me, aren’t I?
Oh god.

I died for nothing, didn’t I?

Minute 4:

No.
No I didn’t.
I couldn’t have.
I hate my mother.
Why can’t I hate my mother?
How come I never realized?

I don’t want to die.
     I don’t want to die.
          I don’t want to die.

Minute 5:

It’s too late. I’m really going to die.

As the mother lioness and her cub settle onto the grass for an afternoon nap, the baby cub purrs and wraps herself within her mother’s bosom. And as the two animals rest into dawn, my mother and I walk away too.

That’s where the memory ends.
That was the most significant moment of my life.
My good-for-nothing life.

Minute 6:

Before the face of the lioness plays in my head for the final time, I suddenly hear the sound of my mother’s voice through the wingless back of an angel. It’s a little far away, but I can still make out the brittle, broken voice, the frantic sobs, and the awful Chinese accent that never fails to piss me off.

“I’m so sorry, Min,” the voice sobs. “It’s all my fault.”
Oh. It really is my mother. My mother, the angelic voice.
“I’m so, so sorry. Forgive me. Please forgive me.”

If all it took was dying to hear my mother apologize, I would’ve died a hundred times. The voice dies into erratic whimpers, and against all laws of physics and all laws of life, I feel her hands on my face. Touching my face with scorching motherhood.

“I love you, Min.” The voice becomes hoarse and withered. “I love you so much.”
Oh, don’t cry, mama. I love you too, mama.
I’m sorry I ever thought I hated you.
There are so many words I’m trying to say.

And I hope she can somehow hear me the way I somehow felt her touch on my face.

—

There’s a bitterness in knowing that I never hated my mother.
That she wasn’t the reason I died.
But I think I can die alright, now that we were able to give each other a lifetime of love in this last minute of my life.

And because of that, I think I can say that I died satisfied.

Minute 7:

So this is a eulogy to my mother, who died when I died.