by Featured Writer

A.B. Lim

Everyday Apocalypses

A.B. Lim | OcT 2024 | Issue 38

I have been asked What are you? more times than I have been asked my name. My body is expected to represent much more than merely its flesh.

I am asked if I speak English. I am asked where I’m really from. Where I was born. I’m asked what kind of food I eat. Where my parents are from. I’m asked which parent is which. I’m asked why I don’t speak Spanish, and why I don’t speak Chinese. Why I don’t know my own culture. When I insist that I’m American, that my parents are American, and that they’ve never spoken any other language except English, my words are chewed up, contorted in their mouths; spit back at me like insults.

I am interrogated so relentlessly that I sometimes doubt what I know about myself or if I am speaking at all. As if some parasite inside me consumes all language before it has a chance to escape my mouth. As if it feasts on what hangs at the top of my throat, hungry for all the words I try so hard to push through my lips.

On the street, my body is deformed, formed anew in the eyes of each person I pass. I am a threat, a contamination, a ruin with a human face. I’m spat on. Told to go eat dog meat. Told to go back to where I came from. My body a release valve for cruelty. As if their fear has no way to escape their bodies except through mine.

Men bow at me on street corners. They say “Ni Hao” and “Konichiwa” as they dip their heads in my direction, sweaty palms pressed together in front of rib cages. They call to me out of car windows, follow me into the subway, whistle at me like a dog. These men tell me what they want to do to different parts of my body like discussing how to butcher a cow. How they will work the flanks of the carcass to help expel all of the blood. How to hoist the body up to cut more easily through hide and bone. How to maneuver the animal onto its back to expose the full extent of its belly, to gut it. They discuss which parts need to be discarded, what to cut out—like the tongue.

My body is a language in itself; speaking to these men about what it has let other men do to it. I seem to be all body, wounded. They can smell the blood.

These men recognize that I’ve already been turned into animal remains. My father was the first to disarticulate my body, processing parts into meat. These men merely pick up the thread where he left off—cutting my body into relevant and irrelevant parts. It’s said I am more valuable that way: for the use of my parts.

A.B. Lim is an artist, writer, labor organizer, and unapologetic introvert based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work delves into embodied memory and intergenerational trauma, exploring the body as an archive and unraveling the ruinous mythology of the nuclear family. Currently, she is creating artwork that combines ceramics and textiles while writing about the connections between memory and soil.