I Apologize If I Disgust You
Sometimes I enjoy brushing my fingertips against the grain of my mustache. Unconsciously, while thinking particularly hard about nothing or while reaching for some comfort of texture, I bring the bend between the first two joints of my index finger, the middle third of the digit, to the space between my lip and my nose, and gently brush upward. There is some pleasure there, briefly, before the pause of regained consciousness and sudden anxiety, and I recall exactly the length where the prickle ends, and my finger begins. Then, I retrieve my hand, return it to its quiet position, and try to remember that I am a woman and forget that I am a woman with a mustache.
I believe I have ripped the hair from my upper lip about 456 times in my life, once per week since the precipice of sixth grade. The introduction of pit stains, body odor, and blood-soaked underwear did me no service beyond a budding acquisition of disgust towards myself. Such is the tween experience.
However, I learned of the hair growing above my upper lip far before middle school, before the appropriate time of puberty when every girl suddenly sprouted dark tweeds between their folds and creases. I sat in Ms. Levine’s second grade class, still unaware of the otherhood that rose from Indian skin and Indian hair. Ms. Levine is a white woman with a strong jawline, tender voice, and detached kindness. She never remembered me in the succeeding years I visited her; I believe my only standout quality was my vehement and frequent obtrusion to my desk-mates that Santa Claus was not real. I had not yet met my best friend, I was far too quiet, and I spent most days at recess weighing my jacket pockets with muddy stones I’d dug out from beneath the six-foot-tall basketball hoops. So I suppose I did not mind the inattention.
I had one acquaintance. Chloe Wong. I met her in kindergarten; I do not believe she liked me very much then or now. Chloe pointed at my lips one afternoon, right before read-aloud time on the checkered sitting carpet, and asked me, Why Do You Have A Mustache.
I was puzzled. I did not have a mustache to my knowledge, so I lifted my fingertips to the space below my nostrils and brushed upward. Oh. There is my mustache, fine and present. I Don’t Know Chloe, I Didn’t Know I Had a Mustache, I said. The hair then felt softer, a hybrid between peach fuzz and guinea pig fur. This was before I began ripping it out, traumatizing the follicle so many times that the hair began to grow back in coarse patches. But at seven years old, extracting my hair was a foreign concept, and in my naked confusion I held my breath while tears wormed down my cheeks, and dripping snot, as I wiped, gathered my mustache hair into slicked waves above my lips, all during read-aloud time of Charlotte’s Web in Ms. Levine’s second grade class.
One night, with the first boy I loved, between at least seventy-seven dewy kisses I pulled back, reckoning a sudden possibility: he could feel the rough of my mustache against his.
So, I asked him, while he stared at me, bewildered as to why I’d pulled away, if he had:
“I have a funny question for you.”
He paused, suddenly worried, the necks of his eyebrows pressed together: “Yeah?”
“Have you ever noticed my mustache?” I giggled.
Once again, he paused. “I don’t like this question.”
“Okay well I want to know!”
“Okay. Well yes, I have.”
“Why haven’t you said anything about it? I would rather you point it out.”
“No. I don’t think you would rather I point it out. Why are you asking me this?” He was deeply uncomfortable by my bald confrontation. He thought he was being kind. I asked him the question, though it presented an answer I already expected, because I needed (although perhaps did not want) to know: how easily did my insecurity bleed through color corrector and concealer, through tweezers and hot wax, through kisses and questions? My deliberate, sudden interrogation was unabashed, yes, but I thought briefly that if I acknowledged that I knew of this deficiency, to the boy I loved obsessively, that he would not hold this defect against me. I know I am blemished, I thought, I know I am unfeminine, I know you see through me, but you might still like the rest of me. I was wrong. He still broke up with me a week later. And I still, just a little, blame that fucking mustache.
In eighth grade, when I wore pilly Costco leggings and the same staticky Adidas sweaters every other day, I had a violent crush on a five-foot-tall Korean boy named Darren Park. He and I spoke on and off for two years, unfruitfully and awkwardly; he did not speak to me in person although we texted and called for anywhere between three to six hours a day after 2:50 P.M. on weekdays. I do not really think that Darren Park liked me. He enjoyed my company because I offered him pre-algebra homework answers and wrote his essays for him. In return, he allowed me to briefly confess how deeply I hated myself, in all my thirteen-year-old dramatism. What a funny relationship, a boy just shorter than me treating my body dysmorphia while I treated his academic inadequacies in the eighth grade. There was one time, despite his sheepish “hello”s in the linoleum middle school hallways, though, when he gathered the courage to offer me this compliment:
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“You’re cute. I like your face. No offense though, your hair’s not very good.”
Oh, joy! How I blushed when I received this comment! I had taken no offense, I merely smiled, swallowed a knot in my throat and remembered that I do in fact not have very good hair. It was thick and frizzy though also greasy, the South Asian girl norm when we did not yet know the names Curly Hair Routine or Silk Bonnet or Shea Moisture Conditioner. So again, I despised my hair, the compliment was well-received, and I learned another shade of disgust.
Tyler Okui and I used to chew up Goldfish on the school bus and spit it out through the windows at passerby on the sidewalk. I don’t think our saliva-cheese balls ever landed on an unknowing victim, but we did also duck down, giggling, often before we could watch the projectile land. I also don’t think our lips generated much forceful output, given that we were five years old. Tyler was my second friend, after Chloe Wong.
In kindergarten, Tyler, Chloe and I made a daily habit of terrifying our barely English-speaking Guyanese bus driver. My name, by his lips, was Abigaily.
Our bus driver was obligated to check the bus for every present child before leaving the school, and during this process, if a single child wasn’t present, he’d frantically scour the bus before concluding that they were absent. Calculating a pattern, us three girls contrived a plan to shove one of us, a different each day, beneath the cramped mini-bus seat, reveling in the panic that ensued with repeated hollering for Abigaily. The shock factor lasted a grand total of two weeks, as he’d often pass by our giggling bundle of bodies, one below, and sigh. Still though, Tyler and Chloe found some joy in pushing my body behind their feet, after they’d ceased participation the act, and I easily relented despite the suffocating fetal position, often in a too-small winter coat while the Velcro straps bit into my neck. Our bus driver no longer bothered with us three, but still I crouched with flushed cheeks pressed to my knees most weekdays because I loved hearing my two friends laugh.
The three of us remained bus buddies until early elementary school. One afternoon, Tyler refused to let me sit beside her and Chloe, as she had caught a glimpse of something on my side. I was wearing a deep red tank top with frills all along the frontside; I remember how my stomach rounded in that skintight shirt. It was Flag Day, so everyone wore red, white or blue, and this was the only red top I owned, so I wore it, even though I did not ever wear tank tops. At once, when Tyler noticed something beneath my lifted arm, which I quickly brought back down, she insisted I raise my arm once more.
“You can only sit with us if you lift your arm up. Just once.”
I knew exactly why she demanded this. I had, in this moment, become acutely aware of the seventeen or so hairs sprouting from my armpit, and so when Tyler demanded that I raise my arm, which remained glued to my hip, some fear that had never before gripped me settled within my stomach. Chloe, unknowing, attempted to raise her arm for me, but Tyler did not relent. I stared out the window for the duration of the ride and decided, finally, to never sit beside the two again.
I find no joy analyzing the empathetic inadequacies of children. But that behavior, the behavior that sprouts from some curious inclination to weed out difference, buried in me an unshakable need to tear out parts of myself as I saw fit. There is something we find terribly disgusting about ourselves, especially our undetachable unlikeness. We share roughly 99.5% to 99.9% of the same DNA, but that 0.5% to 0.1% makes the difference between wars and waxing. How dull. The basis of our flesh’s value determined by what separates us rather than what binds us.
Rosemary Greenwood, a woman featured in a 2024 New York Times article on facial hair, supposedly spent two hours before her 1984 wedding plucking hairs off her face. I do not believe these efforts amounted to a worthy mention in a New York Times article. By thirteen, in two hours I could pluck hundreds of hairs from my mustache, shave the entirety of my short legs, wax my eyebrows, complete a full face of makeup, grab my purse, and leave my home. I do not believe Rosemary Greenwood was apt enough to understand the technique of hair removal; I think quite honestly, she seems idiotic to have saved it for her wedding day. I do not believe for a moment, as she claims in the article, that she struggled with a lifetime of facial hair, given the banal stupidity of spending two hours on virtually nothing. If she suffered, she would have to look like me.
My sister briefly taught me how to wax. Plug in the Gigi wax machine, don’t mind the buildup cemented to its body, pour the blue wax beads into the mouth, wait twenty minutes, grab a popsicle stick, check the heat, make sure it isn’t too sticky or liquid, scoop a dollop of wax onto the stick, blow on it to reduce the heat, apply to the skin with the grain, wait two minutes, pick at the bottom end, count down from three, and tear off the strip against the grain. I have waxed my face once a week, on my own, since I was eleven years old.
I began at the mustache. If the hair wasn’t fully grown, the wax wouldn’t tug at the skin from the root, only snagging the hair halfway the same way shaving does. The middle strip stung the worst, from the skin between my nostrils to the base of the cupid’s bow, and still often not all the hair would be removed. This was when I learned how to tweeze every hiding hair. I own a 10x magnification mirror that allows me to view virtually every pore on my face in excruciating detail. There, I examine each fiber I extract, one end with a jutted hook and a bulbous nub at the very tip; sometimes if I wipe it against my fingers the pigment stains my skin.
My ritual knows little variation, if I stray from the schedule, I cannot enter any public space without a full face of makeup or I simply reject any notion of abandoning my room. I have yet to tame this obsession. This is how I sand my skin to obedience.
I wax my mustache and chin and the space between the eyebrows once a week. Pluck my eyebrows twice a week. Use a thin dermaplane blade to shave my facial peach fuzz and sideburns and ear lobe hair once every three weeks, make sure not to wipe with a towel to avoid breakouts. Shave my legs once a month, scrub with a loofah in the shower to remove ingrown hairs, remember to shave the stomach, lower back, and chest as well. Go to Nasreem’s house once every month and half, where she’ll wax the arms and upper back and neck and fingers for forty-five dollars in twenty minutes. This will hurt. Haircut every six months, make sure to ask for thin layers so that the hair does not appear bushy or thick or like whatever Darren Park suggested it looked like. Pluck the hairs on the toes every now and then, just when they suddenly seem too long. Repeat until around menopausal age; by then the skin will have given up. But until then. Tear it out.
Are you tired yet? I am. But my hair refuses to cease growing. By the end of my life, if I continue at the current rate of waxing, plucking, shaving, and trimming until I am dead, I will have spent 15,600 hours on hair removal. That is 1.78 years of my life. I will have spent months tearing out the stubborn fibers at the root that continue to push their heads through skin after a meager, fickle few weeks. I will have spent nearly two years removing a part of myself that I can never quite remove, rejecting a piece I refuse to accept. Because Chloe Wong asked Why Do You Have A Mustache that day, that day that I began to despise this body as though it were not my own.
Rosemary Greenwood pisses me off because it seems to me that my more efficient hair removal solicits a mention in a New York Times article, not Rosemary Greenwood’s severe lack of preparation for her wedding day. I hate myself more, so give me the reward. My shame far outweighs yours; you are terribly unlike me; your difference disgusts me.
Now I am nearly 20 years old waiting for my body to fit into the mold I demand it to huddle. I told the first boy I loved to acknowledge my mustache because I had to confirm that he saw what I saw. Still I attempt to rid myself of me. My body knows no rest, I tear away its offerings to me as soon as they sprout, like paper from a typewriter. Most of the time it is never enough. But still, I camouflage my difference.
