by Annabel Li
- You remember exactly how it starts, that first kiss with a cigarette, your fake damn it, this lighter is shit because you are too scared to click down, worried that you might burn your hand. Awkward cough. Then the imaginary, condescending chuckle from the burning lip of the cigarette.
- Under daze-eyed streetlight, you squat by a curb abandoned by the now fast-asleep populace in Shanghai. The heels of your friend’s battered Converse stir a puddle glazed by grease from a barbeque shop. She goes out of her way to tutor you. Don’t spit it out, not yet. Swallow into your lungs. Yes, you’re doing it right if it’s coming back out through your nose.
- You will never forget that first buzz, the first three hits worth the rest of your life crawling back to. Your butt is touching the muddy ground, but your head is wrapped in cloud nine.
- You feel closer to your mother. You often think back to the afternoon that smelled like sun, when you caught her smoking. You were twelve or thirteen. You were looking for her, and your father told you she had gone out to the grocery store. You wandered off in disappointed steps, only to find her sunk in the armchair on the balcony, pale smoke rising from between her fingers, still like a painting. She must not smoke, precisely because she was your mother. Or you wished that such a causal relationship should be justified.
- Your mother used to laugh, her face blooming into a sunflower as you stomped off and brought back a bucket of water to your uncle’s cigarettes, after you coughed until you could taste blood on your tongue, tears damping the lashes. She cupped your cheeks and told her brother to go out. Now you weep. You feel betrayed. Why on earth, out of all the smokers, my mother, too?
- But you can forgive her betrayal now.
- Your new friends offer you a free crash course on smoking: go to Lawson, a 24/7 convenience store that sprinkles every block, for the cheapest and best lighter in town; buy the fancy French Raisons—They taste like yogurt; they might cure Covid, you know? (when you google the brand two years later, you will realize Raison is a Korean brand). Here, let me show you how to do smoke rings—mouth a tight O like a startled octopus, he puffs out a surge of lychee shisha rings. You poke your finger through, and all of you start to sing Put A Ring on It. The song blends with the soccer game on TV behind the bar counter, the rings melting into warm yellow air.
- You will join your American friends on their smoke break, too; your 5’0 Chinese body towered over by theirs. Cigarettes are passed around as tokens of friendship. Their hardcore American Marlboros, and your yogurt-flavored Raisons smuggled from China. You don’t talk much. You listen to them gossip about people you don’t know, about the plan for tonight that doesn’t include you. You look down at your Docs and their Docs, black dots on the snow-covered Chicago ground joining into a circle, and pretend you are not lonely.
- You never dreamed of your mother being your smoking buddy, but on the dusty balcony that used to be her territory, she is lighting your mint-burst Marlboro crumpled in your school bag. Cigarette ashes pile thick like burned bones, the butts spiking out of the white porcelain bowl. The bowl used to hold your porridge when you were a kid. It’s her ashtray now, your ashtray now.
- A skinny Esse hangs between her darkened knuckles, and you listen to her preach. If she were your age, you would never talk to her— She would be the kind of girl who brags about the boys she gets and gossips about other girls all day. But she is your mother, a mother who urges you to have sex with your abusive boyfriend with a knowing grin on her face. You guys are two months into the relationship. I had sex with my first boyfriend when I was sixteen, says the woman who grew up in the late 70s in rural China.
- You invest in a vape and bring it all the way to America. Sleep with the vape under the pillow. Wake up with a morning prayer to Dionysus as a good Hedonist should: Please, one buzz from the first hit of the day.
- You hoard vape pods in a Nordstrom Rack box in your dorm— Your self-prescribed antidepressants. Your DIY mental health kit reminds you of how similar you are to your mother, who told you with an embarrassed smile that she started smoking to combat constipation. Grappling for keywords to search, you google nicotine bowel movement. Scientists warn you against Crohn’s disease, Colon polyps, Gallstones, and the only disease you recognize is cancer, while smokers on Reddit chant in harmony smoking helps me poop.
- Before you fly off to America for college, your mother offers to jam Chinese sachets and moon-shaped fans into your suitcase. Greeting gifts for your new American friends, she smiles. You shake your head like a cat twirling her body after an unwanted shower. You have watched enough Euphoria to realize no Americans living in the twenty-first century will care about the five thousand years of history that breathes within you.
- Your divine Chinese vape does earn you friends. You are nothing like your mother, a natural socializer, who once befriended a white woman ten years older than her while waiting in line for the bathroom at the MFA in Boston. You, however, have grown up shuffling your feet, pinching your palms tucked in pockets around strangers. But you have changed. You take out that tiny metallic machine that contains more human-interaction magic than addictive chemicals in the chicken-smelling dining hall when your friends introduce you to their friends. You wait for them to ask, can I hit it? And every time you beam back with a smile, glad that it works, for sure.
- Now you always have something to talk about, about how flavored vapes are not banned in China—matcha, iced tea, guava, popsicle, mojito—I’ll bring a different one next time; about how the smoking age being eighteen, but literally, no one gives a shit, you can be five and drop by the minimart and still get a pack even if you’re shorter than the counter.
- The first weekend in college, your roommate convinces you to swing by a birthday party hosted by a birthday girl you don’t know. You stiffen in the doorway, an uneasy statue facing a crowd posing for Instagram in the mirror. You walk up to an Asian boy sipping from a solo cup by the kitchen counter. He brightens at your coke-flavored vape, silver and flat like a flint stone, and you take over his honeydew disposable, a thick, green rod. You watch him exhale, sweet air rising above you both, tangling into coils almost tangible like arms under the red light, then dissipating into nothing.
- You fuck him, or he fucks you and makes you less lonely for a week. Your Chinese dealer does not have honeydew flavored vapes. So two months later, when you go to New York where you won’t need a fake, you get a honeydew disposable from a smoke shop right around the corner of your hotel on Sixth Avenue. The speaker blasts hip-hop so loud that the angry beats leak through the glass door and shake the street. The guy behind the counter takes your card and hands over the vape without sparing one glance at you. He looks just like Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad.
- You rip open the packaging while crossing some busy street in Manhattan, and take a long, hungry drag out of your own disposable. The sweetness overwhelms your throat and sends you into violent coughs till your face creases. This is not the same as what he used to have. You feel like you have been lied to, but you can’t figure out who has lied to you about what. You look at the sky bleeding away under sunset, at the swarm of people speaking languages you don’t know.
- Cigarettes imprint stink on your hair, in your sweater, in every pore of your skin, just like how you noticed it had crept into your mother’s body when you hugged her. Now, it’s claiming yours too. You watch smoke drift out of your half-open lips. Do I look sexy like the women smoking in movies? Or do I look like a suffocating fish that misses the last tide back to the ocean, dangling lips begging for oxygen? You like being, or imagining to be, a woman like your mother, who sits still, one leg over the other, in a spiral of smoke.
Born and raised in Shanghai, Annabel Li loves writing and surfing.