by Lucy Zhang

I am annoyed, of course, by my mother asking if my appetite has returned, if it has increased, if I’m ingesting enough watermelon because Asian pseudoscience dictates the fruit is good for the baby’s skin, not that I care terribly much about my son’s skin glistening pale and clean straight from my vagina. Boys can get away with being a bit uglier, right? Not like girls. A girl who isn’t beautiful has to carry that weight like a shackle until she’s old and at the point when all women fall off into oblivion.

There’s also the question “Is your stomach larger?” to which I wish to retort “Am I pregnant or not?” and “I’ll let you know if I miscarry in which case my stomach should be deflating a bit sooner.” My mother-in-law likes to ask this too: how much do you weigh now? Like she is privy to my weight both pre-pregnancy and now, but maybe that’s cultural. She claims this is natural information to share, to which I’m sure it is also natural to share your salary and bonus and stock grants in China so that everyone can flaunt their cards or wallow in the mutual misery of materialism. At least almost no one has asked for baby bump photos. No photographs now, nor during the third trimester, nor during delivery—not until at least five months postpartum and only if the swelling is gone and my breasts have returned to normal.

To address the Happy Dragon Boat Festival, I heard the exciting news that you two are expecting… texted to me from a distant relation on my husband’s side of the family whom I met only once in Shenyang for dinner—this girl is studying to be a teacher-artist-whatever in Australia, so even the English she’s learned is tinted Australian even though her Chinese is accent-free. She has her hair in a stylish boy cut, and she loves animals in a way that must make living in Australia possible. She’s the type I can never see getting married, but what do I know after meeting her only once? I’m wondering how she knows I’m pregnant, or more precisely, why my in-laws have already told these relatives. My husband says, “没办法” or “There’s no helping it,” because this is what in-laws do, even when they’re an ocean apart from us. I’ll leave it to them, then, to break it to all the people they’ve told if this pregnancy ends in disaster and we end up with negative life (or lives) instead of positive.

I am annoyed that these external annoyances exist like mosquitoes hovering around me for a drop, leaving me no room to properly examine this body I’ve inhabited. The inflated breasts that now touch my stomach skin and get slick with sweat if I don’t wear a bra. The outie belly button and gradually inflating stomach that has begun to show through some of my sweaters. The black maternity dress my mother gave me, that still makes me look frumpy because my chest feels like it’s full of water balloons. Please return my chest and stomach to a flat, preferably slightly concave washboard with a few ribs I can count. I am annoyed by the fact I am annoyed by this body, by every reflection I catch in a mirror or glass window, by how my husband offhandedly mentions my large breasts or the bump that has become more prominent, by how I still try to suck in my stomach even though there’s nowhere for those contents to disappear. Can I temporarily stuff my son into a wormhole that exits outside of my physical mass?

My husband isn’t a dunce. He senses my mood is off. He asks: “Is it work?” No. “Is it writing?” No. “Is it me?” Not really. “Is it our dog?” No. And then he’s out of ideas, which annoys me too.

Since I was a teen, I had imagined what it would be like to be pregnant, a thought that spawned dread and a colorful imagination of all things parasitic. Now, I’m wondering when the hormones will pull their weight and make me think of my baby as a baby instead of calling it “东西“ or “it” or “that thing” to my mom to spite her whenever she nags about how I exercise or eat. But I suppose the switch doesn’t flip so easily, and things tend to unfold as self-fulfilling prophecies foretell: I don’t want to see anyone; I don’t want to talk to anyone; I don’t want my husband to touch me; I don’t want to feel my body; I don’t want to feel my clothes on my body; I don’t want to see my face or neck or shoulders over Webex video conferencing; everything is ugly both dressed and bare.

Photo by Derek Arguello on Unsplash