Lỗi - Error 404 - ENGLISH TRANSLATION - Plaaastic

Part 28

Whatever that's meant to happen will eventually has to come, so on one beautiful sunny day i cut off contact with my family.

After i was discharged from hospital, i returned to Viet Nam with a feeling of being defeated. I shouted to everyone, i said that i want to drop out from school, i can't stand it anymore, i don't know how long i will live anymore, so what's that degree going to be for anyway? I need to be healed, i need to be left alone, the tension is killing me. I don't want to go back to school where i hated it so much that for four years i identified my classmates by their nape, being in the class first and leaving last so i didn't have to talk to anyone. If i were to talk with someone, i was scared that i would beat him up, all day i only imagined ways to kill myself or people around me.My mother said: „I alrady lost a lot of money, finish your studies."

I called Thao, Thuy, Nam, Duong to come to our house to cry with them and my mother kicked them out with the following reason: „You're not worth enough to be friends with my child"For many, many years, not even one thing changed. Simply it went from a damned story to another damned story. So i bought a ticket to go back to Singapore on that day, cut all my contact with my family which meant living a well-supported life, i ended empty-handed. Everything changed quickly like a domino, things crashed down continuously and steadily as if i arranged them my whole life only to flick it.

On one beautiful day in year 2013 i decided to start a treatment on bulimia. For a few years straight with many pains, many times thinking that i won't overcome it, i ignored it like a ghost wandering in the corner of my eye. However, it was truly a drop of water that spilled my glass, the story of me being hospitalized started very simply: In one of my outings going for iced tea with Thao, Thuy, Nam and Duong i couldn't sit on a small plastic chair because my butt hurt. My bones not being covered with anything were bumping onto that hard plastic chair, i wiggled, turned in every way and that uncomfortable feeling made me realize that i don't even have the ability to do something so simple like going out for iced tea. So the first day that i went back to Singapore i bit my teeth and took all my savings to go meet a doctor.

The hospitalization room for curing bulimia looks like a set for a comedy skit. Full of young girls, so thin that just looking at them will make you understand their pain and majority of them being admitted in because of their family, parents. They sat in that room, drinking tons of water, hiding heavy stones inside the bag to being weighed. The treatment consisted of prescription for depression, visiting psychologist and weighing weekly and they had to reach their weight gain target every week as their doctor requires. I went in to get checked, the doctor took out a plate and put it on the table and asked if i knew how a normal portion of food for a person looked like? I shook my head. The doctor shook his head. The doctor took out all the food made from plastic for kids and put them all onto a plate: „Here, this amount of meat, this amount of vegetables, this amount of rice." I looked and thought that it looked like an amount of food that i had in one week.

Like that i abided everything and never questioned anything the doctor said. Regularly, every week i gained half kilo, every week wanting to die twice more than before. Every meal was a torture, i was too used to eat baby food, only drinking smoothies all week and a little bit of sugar or starch would make my stomach hurt everytime. Taking a bath was a torture: I cried everytime i saw a piece of fat on my body gradually getting bigger and bigger so i closed my eyes everytime i was inside a bathroom fearful not to caught a sight of myself in the mirror. I had no nope, i didn't know what was right and what was wrong for me anymore, so that's probably why i had to listen to someone who most likely knew the most. Biggest pain here, thing that i was the most worried about wasn't that i gained weight but a medical bill, it gained on like my weight with the same pain.

I started working overtime to pay for living expenses after never having to worry about money once in a lifetime. Students in Singapore are not allowed to have a part time job and once it was discovered they would get kicked back to their country right away without way back. Because of that reason the only jobs that i could do were so bad that nobody even checked papers and age. Selling Tao Pho in Chinese street, cleaning apartments, releasing news on Craglist, washing dishes and serving for weddings etc. From a person who was eating lying down having the tv control falling on the floor and still had to call a maid to pick it up because didn't want to get my entitled ass up, i turned into a machine table, every night holding a large tray three times my size walking around for V.I.P guests, little things on a toothpick, picking up leftover cups and cleaning up vomits. Maybe because my english was acceptable and i was „easy to tame" i stayed the longest, working as a waitress for all kinds of parties in a four-star hotel, ten dollars an hour. Going to school and then going to work, i started from half past three afternoon and ended at four in the morning then getting up at half past seven to go to chool.

At that time i could not expect that i was the one standing on the sideline, in the darkness, watching „the rich ones" hugging and dancing after the tiring auctions. I asked myself, was somebody standing at a same place as me before and looking at me from the old days with eyes exactly like this? Every meal on the yacht was priced 10.000, 20.000, 30.000 dollars, one old wheel was more expensive than a car from 2015, special fishes on weddings costed more than one semester tuition, maybe the price of one of their dresses would be enough to buy textbooks, all the party costs were enough to build an entire property for any ill-fated person this charity auction was donating to. I was sad but thinking that i also understood that i was jealous, i could still think like the way i had money before and i knew for sure that if i were to sit on the other side of the room raising the price list i would never even glanced over here. Pity, you still dream on about being someone when in reality they just call you a „hey, waitress".

I learned twenty names for different kind of cheese for every buffet for media companies, almost fluent in french, japanese, korean in the way to show the guest to the toilet. Sometimes i saw a small kid carrying a Miu Miu bag sitting on a chair, legs still not touching the ground and i would ask myself if they will have to wear seven inch high heels and put on a lipstick when they grow up to scrub the toilet floor or not?