The Break

“The mind without the brain will finally have to learn to forgive the body.” –EJ Koh

I broke my right foot in June 2015 at a conference in Perth, Australia called “Mobilities, Media and Resilience.”

I had just presented a hastily put together PowerPoint on the growing online visibility of Asian diasporic celebrities. I was walking to the local Italian restaurant for the post-conference dinner with a nice young Anglo Australian woman, and we were talking about race and racism.

 

She had the usual blank and slightly terrified look on her face as I ranted about microaggressions, invisibility and hypervisibility – how my Asian American anger did not translate in the hopelessly vague well-meaning Australian context. I was angry at what she represented, the privileged cluelessness I dealt with all the time in the Anglo-Celtic world of sandstone academia.

 

I was also dreading having to grade a mountain of essays that would trigger me with their accounts of racial trauma growing up in predominantly white suburbs, or navigating the in-between spaces of diaspora and queerness, or lamenting the tribulations of interracial dating, or discovering white privilege as a “woke” volunteer tourist witnessing the miserable lives of Third World women in Timor Leste (or Papua New Guinea or Ecuador or …)

 

I felt trapped in my body, in academia, in my alternately dramatic and banal relationship with the unemployed artist boyfriend at home, who hopefully was watering the plants.

 

The sun was setting. I was pissed off at everything and in my grey cloud of discontent failed to see a particularly high curb. My right foot got caught, bent forward in a swift, grotesque mimicry of Chinese foot binding.

 

I heard a loud crack.

 

I thought at the time it was just a sprain and sprouting self-deprecatory jokes, drank three glasses of pinot noir at the restaurant to numb myself. A few hours later, with the help of kind, tipsy colleagues I limp-hopped to my hotel room.

 

I woke up at 3 am in awful pain -- pain like the pain I would experience a few months later from the cracked tooth I would have to get my first root canal for -- cracked from failing to wear my mouthpiece for the constant grinding I did in my sleep probably dreaming about grading and fake smiling through meetings and reading endless thesis drafts summarizing Foucault badly.

 

Pain like the tooth pain my mom said was like the pain of childbirth that comes and goes in undulating waves like little knives piercing you then going dull again, giving you a false sense of respite, of closure.

 

The next morning I am taken to the ER, and the blond female doctor says I have a Lisfranc fracture – common among ballerinas, football players, and extreme athletes – named after French surgeon and gynaecologist Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin who noticed this fracture pattern among cavalry men during the Napoleonic Wars.

 

Their feet got caught in the stirrups when the horse bolted. Either you would be dragged along in excruciating agony until you died, or your foot would break in half and you would lie there in the grass, in excruciating agony, waiting to die.

 

I got this extremely rare fracture – not on the battlefield, not parachuting out of an airplane or doing hard core pirouettes or trying to score a touchdown – but crossing the street, to eat pasta with professors.

I was angry, bored, tired. I was not present in that precise moment.  

 

I was not present in my life.

 

I spent the next year as a “tourist in the land of disability” as my sometimes very funny boyfriend put it.

 

I learned to go up and down stairs in crutches. I showered sitting on a dotted plastic Ikea stool. I navigated cobblestone sidewalks in moon boots. I blazed through three physical therapists – all of whom gave me conflicting advice.

 

With resigned sadness and some relief, I threw out my heels for multiple pairs of Mizuno Wave and Asics tennis shoes and transformed my wardrobe into minimalist athletic wear accordingly. I wondered if I would ever walk normally again and steeled myself for the inevitable onset of arthritis.

 

Still I got out of grading and a semester of teaching which, perhaps, was the break I needed.

 

The break my body gave me.

© Jane Park