Recently, on a flight from Chicago to Seattle, I watched a young girl in the next row vomit into her father’s hands. Chunks of partially digested food—pink and beige—stuck to her mouth and chin. The father sat there, hands cupped almost as if in prayer, holding his daughter’s perpetually spilling vomit. The smell shot through the recycled air and everyone pinched their noses. Her father kept murmuring it’s OK, it’s OK, holding this stuff that was once inside her. I stared. I did not offer to help, but I didn’t look away either. I felt awful. I wish I had a father who would hold my vomit like it was still a part of me to be loved.
How did vomit lead me to my estranged father? At forty-one, I feel disgusted by my desire to be daughtered by a father who wants nothing to do with me. Disgust swims somewhere in the gurgling pit of shame and desire.
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I think of this startlingly beautiful description of vomit in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: “The puke swaddles down the pillow onto the sheet—green-gray, with flecks of orange. It moves like the insides of an uncooked egg. Stubbornly clinging to its own mass, refusing to break up and be removed. How, I wonder, can it be so neat and nasty at the same time?”
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I grew up in a strip mall on the Jersey shore, in a takeout restaurant next to a pizzeria, a liquor store, and a beauty salon. Most kids at school got dropped off in their neighborhood; I got dropped off in the Shrewsbury Plaza parking lot, full of squawking seagulls and loose gravel. Someone once scrawled meat is murder on the side of our building, red paint dripping onto thistle weeds. I scrubbed that off, dirt and sweat and paint pooling down my seagull legs. I grew up knowing I was dirty, an abject body before I was even born. My parents immigrated from southern China in the early eighties, fleeing a history of hunger after the Great Leap Forward, when an egg was a rare planet of protein. I grew up eating rotten meat because we simply couldn’t afford to waste it. I worried my house had a smell, that poor Chinese smell—musty towels, old cooking oil, fermenting herbs. I grew up smelling my menstrual blood and watched it gloss my legs, metallic and feral. My debased smell lingers in my armpits, my pussy, my mouth and its cavities, my not knowing which fork to use at a gala I’m invited to as a poet. Who deemed me disgusting? Who deemed me debased?
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Disgust is not just a feeling. It’s a reflex that lives in the gut. It can make you throw up. In Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion, the psychologist Susan B. Miller writes about disgust as a kind of border control—it draws a line, a boundary, around what we deem repulsive. Miller notes that disgust is deeply tied to smell, taste, and touch. It can also be wielded over you, making strangers decide you are too disgusting to exist. With the history of Yellow Peril and Asian abjection in mind, the scholar Monica Chiu’s Filthy Fictions engages ideas of filth through Asian American feminist literature. She positions dirt as “a national fiction about Others that conflates connotations of worthlessness and rubbish” alongside “the moral defilement in the term ‘filth.’” I like to think I’m among a lineage of Asian American feminist writers upholding disgust as a means of active resistance and radical repulsion.
Kim Hyesoon is one of my most beloved disgusting writers. In an interview with Guernica, the South Korean poet says she “came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship.” Under the conditions of the patriarchy’s demand for cleanliness and beauty arises the need to be as disgusting as possible. In “Nest: Day Fourteen,” from Autobiography of Death, she writes: “Eyebrows: Two maggots trace strands of rain as they move.” These are not neat, even, plucked eyebrows. These are maggots moving in wet rain. Their thick, pus-like bodies writhe on your face. I revel in this tender horror, this romantic disturbance.
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I have been estranged from my father for so long that I’ve stopped counting the years. Twenty-five? Twenty-six? I’m now around the age my father was when he left our family. When I was little, about nine, I picked up a glass of what I thought was apple juice. When my father saw me drinking his whiskey, he couldn’t stop laughing. I kept drinking that glass of whiskey even though I was disgusted by its gasoline spit. It was worth making my father laugh. After finishing the glass, I laughed with him, our syrupy voices burning with liquor. Disgusting, isn’t it, how much we want to be loved?
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In my dream of reconciliation, my dream of the impossible, I want my father to cradle my vomit. I want him to see the speckled galaxies within it, to love it so much he would slurp it back up, ingesting all the years we’ve missed. I am reminded of Chen Chen’s poem “Winter,” which begins: “Big smelly bowel movements this blue January morning.” Those “b” sounds in big, bowel, blue, a bilabial stop consonant. How we have to bring the lips together to produce this B vibration, like those roiling bowel movements. This love poem—and it is a love poem—plays with what we should and shouldn’t write about: “years ago, a teacher said never to use the word ‘poop’ in a poem.” What does it mean to love someone even when they disgust you? What does it mean to say: I will let that touch me, I will let that contaminate me? To not just write about it as a means of resistance, but to relish the visceral sensation of it all?
I think about what disgusts me and how to love its coagulating parts. And how hard it is to separate interior and exterior disgust; does your disgust of me make me despicable to myself? I am disgusted by my desperate desire to be loved, even in abusive relationships. How I’ve slinked back to vile things, vodka breath and unwashed sheets. I am disgusted by month-old moldy leftovers in my fridge, my fear of opening the containers and smelling the ripe hideousness of my wastefulness and inability to throw away such waste. How this comes from my family’s struggle with hoarding—the fruit flies’ sloshing murmuration in my grandmother’s apartment full of collapsed apples and oranges. Her fear of scarcity is my mother’s fear of scarcity is my fear of scarcity.
Yet, something glows in my grandmother’s crates of bad eggs and their urine smell. Something delicious, something pungently unashamed, something transformed into orbs of promised usefulness. The thing is: something always grows in filth. Kim’s maggots will burst into winged things. My menstrual blood can fertilize plants. I come from where I come from, at once a place of leaking trauma and radical love. How dare I be disgusted by what runs through my guts. It is a fertile terror, a teeming custard of poetic possibility. I want to flaunt and flourish in the gagging. To refuse clean language, to swim in the steaming specks of vomit and poop and rot that can offer something transformative and uncontainable.
