I met Mia for the first time at my tennis club. A small Chinese woman with dark brown eyes and short-cropped black hair, she greeted me with a heavy Chinese accent."Are you Ken?" she asked.To my ... [+]
Originally published in Creative Nonfiction's Sunday Short Reads series
We have to wear blank black clothes to mask class so our selves don't intrude. People with hair in their face must pin their hair off their face. When you're wearing black and have your face covered, moving in front of people, it's easy for those watching to see your idiosyncrasies. A hunch of the shoulders, a loping walk. A tendency to tense up the little finger and stick it out. We are identifying our idiosyncrasies in order to eliminate them, in order to become essential, that we may then transform.***We do not speak about the centuries of molding that have made what we now consider essenti