Strong heartbeat. That was the first thing my mother knew about me. Well, perhaps not the first thing, but the first thing she held onto. After suffering many miscarriages, she had within her grasp a healthy baby, perhaps a boy as doctors speculated.
My poor mother. That possible boy of hers became me, a sickly girl with eczema speckled cheeks, a speech delay disorder, and asthma-ridden lungs. "Alicia presented as a quiet, shy, cooperative kid during the evaluation," the report started. The girl described was nothing like the gurgling baby with the easy smile.
But my mother was no fool. When the doctors finished prodding me, she was determined to teach me how to conquer anything, including my traitorous body. She believed in the baby with the strong heart, her daughter with the contagious laugh. She put socks on my hands to prevent me from scratching my cheeks. She brought me to all my speech therapist sessions and had the entire family switch from speaking Chinese to English. She believed that I had the strength to overcome asthma if I tried--so she signed me up for swimming lessons.
When I first met my sergeant-like, grim-faced swimming coach Charlie, however, I thought she had signed me up for torture. "Forty laps kickboard!" he barked. Forty continuous laps? I barely knew how to swim! 1000 yards may as well have been 1000 miles. I sputtered as the experienced kids, who finished in a few minutes, kicked water in my face as I struggled to keep my head out of the water. My stomach gurgled with the half gallon of chlorine water I had swallowed.
"Dad!" a fellow new student in red trunks screamed while flailing, also hanging onto his kickboard for dear life. His father quickly lifted him out of the water. Charlie only glanced at the kid before looking back at us in scorn. I glanced at my mother desperately. Would she pull me out of the water? Instead, she stayed on the bleachers, walking with me as I inched forward in the pool. "Keep going! Fight on! Only nineteen more laps!"
After those forty laps, I thought surely I was done. I set my kickboard on the ledge and prepared to push myself out of my pool, but to my horror, Charlie commanded that everyone set up for the ritual end-of-practice-race. "Ready, Set, Go!'
While everyone else moved swiftly and gracefully into the water, I thrashed and gulped anything, water or air. My head became sore as I bumped into the lane divides multiple times. When I finally finished, I slumped like a corpse upon the pool's slippery edge. I could see the headlines: "Seven-year-old Succumbs to Swimming Torture by her Mother who Believed it was a Cure for Asthma."
When I staggered out of the pool, Charlie gave only a slight nod, before barking at everyone to come back in two days.
I don't remember if the car ride home whether I cried or simply fell asleep from exhaustion.
The next lesson, I reluctantly went to the pool. This time, Charlie pulled me out of the water several times, barking me in his broken English. "Your leg, no bend!" He smacked my knee, making me jump.
The kid in red swim trunks cried again, and clung to his father as he was taken out of the pool again. That was the last time I saw him, watching him through my steamy googles before I got yelled at for resting at the end of the lane.
I tried to get a similar fate. "I don't want to go," I complained to my mother.
Her lips tightened. "Remember what I told you about my neighbor?"
I shrank in my car seat. She had told me that in the house I was born in, we used to have a neighbor who also had asthma. One day, when her kids were at school and her husband was at work, she had an asthma attack. She tried crawling to the door, trying to breathe, only to collapse. Her body was found when her husband returned in the evening.
"Swimming is hard, but it may cure you of your asthma. Time is crucial, either you beat it before you're ten, or you beat if before you're eighteen. You will continue."
Once I knew there was no alternative, I stopped trying to fight against my fate, and instead fight against my limits. At future lessons, I started to scheme in order to ignore my pain. Today, I wanted to decrease the distance between me and the person before me by one lap. Perhaps I could receive less criticism from Charlie, and avoid the heat of embarrassment. Only five more strokes, I convinced myself when my lungs complained. Five more minutes, if it gets exponentially worse, I'll stop, when my body screamed of pain invasion. Often with that declaration, pain would stop advancing as my stubbornness built up walls of defense until endorphin reinforcements arrived to the scene. Strategy kept me distracted.
Ironically, distraction tactics have become my modus operandi. Although I no longer swim competitively, people still know me as the girl who rises. When I was eliminated in the preliminary round during a band audition, I refused the pain of rejection by becoming best friends with my flute. I came back the next year to become the first flutist from my high school in five years to make All-State. In my first game of manhunt, I ran barefoot for hours, expecting to be tagged by my seasoned cross-country friends, but I never looked back. Instead, I scared everyone by emerging from my hiding place long after the game had ended: "Guys? Are we still playing??" In both fun and serious situations, with any kind of odds, I focus and obstacles disappear, unable to resist against my will.
I finally saw that slight nod from Charlie again three months later, when my hand was the first to touch those brown tiles; my head, the first to pop up at the end of the race. My mother was unable to help me cure my asthma, but I gained a warrior's heart and spirit. Even when I start from the bottom, I never give up my fight. I have learned to believe in myself even there was no reason to.
I put my hand over my heart, and feel it pulse like ripples of the chlorinated pool waters, the vibrato of the flute, the panting of my lungs when I run. Strong heartbeat. My battle cry.
