How to be a man

Style: Creative Nonfiction

Statement: I wanted to write a piece about my journey of grief and numbness, my struggles to get out of this masculinity armor to experience vulnerability. This was actually an essay for the English 11 Honors second semester assignment, Inspired by Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a Single Story.” It is a very introspective piece about my struggle to get rid of the armor and become emotionally vulnerable.

A real man does not cry. 

In the “true manly” story, the armor holds. The plates do not crack, the chainmail does not tear. As a kid raised in an authoritarian household and a strict private school system—I learned early that bravery looked a very specific way: talking back to parents and teachers. This is how boys test out their armor of masculinity for the first time. But teachers are teachers, a few feet taller than me and experienced in dealing with little rebels — they had heavier shields and sharper blades. Every time I challenged them, they launched a more penetrating round of attack on my self-esteem, and my face stung as I tried to hold back tears. With each round of discipline, at home or at school, I practiced to stop my emotions from flooding out, to force myself not to cry, to not be vulnerable in front of others, especially my authoritarian premiers. I trained myself to keep the visor down and my guard on. Through determined practice of suppressing my feelings, I developed defense mechanisms. One of them was to imagine the enemy ridiculous: You look away from the stare-down, start counting the number of pimples on the fat face, and switch the channel in your brain to something stupid or funny. That was how I forged, and sustained, my armor. 

This armor of masculinity has become thicker over the years. The first half of high school has welded the most layers. My mother was diagnosed with acute leukemia. With my father confined to her hospital bedside, I navigated most of my first year in high school, and in the US, independently. I remember the evenings under the glare of hospital fluorescent lights, I spread out my textbooks and did my homeworks, listening to the quiet beeping of machines. Countless hours also went into settling my grumpy six-year-old brother. Still, I kept things moving, holding myself together. There was no space for tears, just the duty. I tried to be resilient, a lone warrior, a man. 

Last October, I was outside my mother’s hospital room in Shanghai. Her first transplant and clinical trial in the U.S. had failed, and she sought a final gamble in China. I overheard that my blood, “young and vibrant, a perfect match,” could be her last chance. This would be my act of love: physical, practical, and silent. I volunteered without hesitation. You offer what’s inside your bones, and nothing can get more manly than that. 

You spend weeks with your body on a schedule set by injections, hormones that make your muscles ache and your sleep run away. Your family clings to you with hope. Six hours — arms outstretched, blood running out, stem cells filtered out, the rest pumped back in — a circuit looping through the body. Even a slight twitch stings, so you lie motionless and let my post-punk playlist loop until you feel the drum-beats of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” pound through your bones. Some stoic music for a stoic man. 

After the transplant, I flew back to America. I became busy watching over my little brother and taking finals. I felt heroic and masculine. Some drug crept up my head and numbed it into thinking that the results were splendid. I finished my finals and even went to San Francisco for a shoegaze concert. 

On Christmas Eve, Dad called, “Can you come to China tomorrow?” 

“Why?” 

“Do you want to see your mother one last time, or remember her as she was?” 

My third solo flight that month. Fifteen hours on the plane, listening to the most melancholic songs I could imagine. Sew the sorrow into a song, as soft as a gambeson. Layer it beneath the chainmail. My father met me, silent, at the hospital gates. We went up the corridors into her room, and the image burned into me. My mother’s face was pale as snow; it was also yellow as the autumn leaves; it was also grey as ash. Her bald head was fragile like an eggshell. Eyes closed, breath shallow and rasping, tubes everywhere. My dad had been trying to wake her, pressing the needles into her hands to draw a response. He called her name, and those calls were unashamed and raw. He could shatter out in the open., throw away armor. He didn’t need to be strong and manly here. And I envied him. When my mom entered hospice back last August, I wanted so badly to ask her all the questions I’d carried with me—about her life, her secrets, her expectations of me. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Just the thought of sitting there, vulnerable, opening up that dam inside—I felt paralyzed. So instead, I scribbled my questions down on paper and gave them to my younger brother. I asked him to ask her, pretending the questions were from him and not from me. Even at the edge of goodbye, I hid behind the armor. 

And then my dad spoke to me. 

“Wake up! Your son’s here to see you! Son, call your mom’s name! She might still hear.” I tried to join the calling. But the very moment the syllable “Ma—” rose in my throat, tears started filling up my eyes, struggling to break free. 

So I halted my calling. Or rather, the automatic self-protection mechanism of my armor activated and pulled me out of this fragile moment. My mind, almost instinctively, stuffed itself with absurd distractions: solving chemistry problems, replaying soccer highlights, anything to divert my attention. This armor of invulnerability forbade me to let the tears spill. I could not break open, even as my mother slipped away. 

A true manly story is a contradiction. You try to be strong on the outside, but sometimes the strongest act is to let yourself shatter. So, how to be a man? Not the old, fragile armor of masculinity. It appears to be hard on the outside, but feelings permeate that membrane straight into your inner intestines, where they are trapped. 

I wish I had shown more emotions at that moment. 

Eventually, I bolstered up the courage to call “Mama, I’m here” again. Twenty hard minutes later, her hand twitched, and she half-opened her eyes. She whispered my name faintly. At that moment, I wish I could choose to let the manly armor break. 

And in the many moments that followed—during the funeral, eavesdropping on my father crying, opening the birthday letter my mother wrote 7 months in advance, returning to school, even now—I wish I could let loose of the armor. 

The numbness lingers. Sometimes it feels like the armor has become a part of me, welded to the bone, making it impossible to grief.

One day I’ll find the strength to tear apart the chainmail with my own hands. Maybe then, I will finally cry—and wake from this numbness. Hopefully before I open my 18th birthday letter.