The Lucky Ones
Art by Jia Sung. Read more of our new series on American mythology, Rewriting the West.
The first stories we can correct are the ones we tell ourselves. My story, the one I have hung onto since I was a little girl, is that I got lucky. Luck made sense because luck can happen to anyone. Even me. Luck fit into the parts of my story I wasn’t ready to explain, the parts that I surrendered to half-memories. I made it to this country because of luck. I grew up a janitor, but then my parents got lucky and bought the business, and I ended up a journalist. My citizenship came after I was undocumented for almost a decade, when I got lucky.
What I ignored in my memories, what luck papered over, found its way back. The gaps in my story came looking for me, making themselves known. And when they did, I began to tell the story on my body. My tattoos, inked over the last sixteen years, were supposed to be disparate, pieces of memory that would not speak to each other. But that’s not how tattoos work.
My younger brother, Beto, a tattoo artist who inked most of them, calls tattoos “art wounds.”
“Tattoos are the art of pain in exchange for meaning,” Beto told me. “Tattoos start as open wounds that heal to reveal permanence. Growth requires healing—the only other person we let cut us open to bleed, to fix something, to live, is a doctor.” My tattoos now tell my story in a way that I couldn’t capture in words.
the Garbage Can
On my left arm is a garbage can with a few peonies and a calla lily tossed inside. When I shut my eyes and think about my childhood, I see my mother pushing a loud, circular, plastic gray trash can on wheels. Our family business took on anything. From factories to the
