Breaking the Curse

The first time someone showed me my astrological birth chart, I burst into tears. I didn’t know what the little symbols meant. (Later, I learned astrologers referred to them as “glyphs.”) It had to be explained to me that the cluster of blue curlicue script, of what looked like a capital M with a little upward arrow at the end, meant I had a “stellium” in the fixed water sign of Scorpio. Scorpio ruled really intense subjects like death and rebirth, as well as really disgusting subjects like bowels and toilets… and it was in my house of family and lineage. Another cluster of little diagonal red arrows with a horizontal line across was for the mutable fire sign of Sagittarius, that optimistic, (over)zealous, wandering centaur. Not knowing any of that at the time—what the glyphs were, or what the planets signified, or the meaning of the twelve houses that ancient astrologers had sectioned off the sky into, each “house” ruling over a variety of topics ranging from the self to others, romantic partners to open enemies, children, creativity, romance, pets, short and long-distance journeys, neighbors, spirituality, siblings, debts, inheritances, hidden sorrows, daily routines, servitude, career, friendships, associations, insane asylums, prisons, labor, and finances—still, I was convinced what I was looking at was tragic.

The panoply of human experience—not just from life till death, but even events and occurrences that transpired before the moment of my existence and would continue after my death—all of it was contained in this document. Before me was a diagram of a circle with all kinds of lines, squiggles, numbers, colors and symbols that was meant to represent a snapshot of the sky at the moment my body was ejected out of my mother’s womb and into the world. I had no entry into deciphering what I was being shown, but I did know one thing: I was cursed.

Finally, I had what I was looking for. This was visual proof of my rotten fate. It was written in the stars, wasn’t it? That I was destined to be forever lonely. That I would die buried in regret. That love was unachievable for me. That no matter how hard I tried, I would continue to suffer endlessly. That it was too late for forgiveness, sanity, and acceptance… to say absolutely nothing about happiness, stability, or fulfillment. I had gone looking for proof—it was the not knowing, the bouncing between wild hope and crushing disappointment that was unbearable. I just wanted to know. I just wanted someone to say: It’s not you, it’s your fate. There was something comforting about not being responsible for my own misery. If it had been decided for me by forces unfathomably larger than me, if it had all been determined before I even developed consciousness, then at least I wasn’t completely to blame.

Astrology makes a small but memorable cameo at the end of Mia Chung’s Catch as Catch Can. Two childhood friends Tim Phelan and Robbie Lavecchia study Tim’s birth chart. Robbie knows a little more than Tim about what the symbols and lines and numbers mean, but not much more. Tim finds his birth chart immensely interesting. Robbie thinks Tim is putting too much stock into it. I watched with recognition at how eagerly Tim wants someone to interpret his fate, to tell him exactly what he was working with. After a harrowing series of scenes where we find out that something is very, very wrong with Tim, that, in fact, something is very, very wrong with everyone, this moment stuck out to me. Maybe it meant nothing and maybe it meant absolutely everything, but I remember thinking this about my own birth chart: that analyzing and interpreting the zigzagging aspects between planets and the planetary movements was a fun reprieve from analyzing and interpreting the endless zigzagging that goes on in my own brain.

In Catch as Catch Can, three Asian American actors play Irish and Italian Americans, inhabiting both the role of the parent and the grown-up child. The actor who plays Tim Phelan also plays his mother Theresa. The actor who plays Robbie also plays his mother Roberta. The actor who plays Roberta’s husband Lon also plays his daughter Daniela. We are treated to a kaleidoscope of identities. Children become their parents, and parents become their children, sometimes in the same breath as the actors switch from son to mother, daughter to father, glib to serious, drunk to sober, cheerful to morbid, racist to curious, energetic to muted. What the audience gets is everything. At one point, as the Lavecchia family is getting ready for a major pre-Christmas holiday dinner celebration, things get tense, ancient family conflicts are stirred up, and Theresa Phelan, obliviously, or maybe not so obliviously, cuts through the tension by blithely dropping in a nugget about herself that no one asked for: “I love Swedish fish, but I have to be in the mood.” I laughed in deep recognition. Too often the realest thing anyone is willing to say among people they’ve known for years is a frivolous comment about candy preferences. Another reason why something like astrology can come as such a relief. It provides a structure that permits and even encourages questions like: “Do you struggle with love?” or “As a child, did you have to parent yourself?” 

Like Tim, who confesses to Robbie, “Something broke, Rob. A long time ago. And it’s not getting fixed,” I had also confessed to a cherished friend about how broken I was, how there was no hope for me. Was it a confession or a challenge? I’m not sure anymore. My friend responded something to the effect of: If only real life were so simple. It would be nice if that was actually the whole story. Wow, I thought. She was right. It would be so much simpler if I were actually cursed.

There was a version of me that understood that and there was a version of me that refused and clung onto the belief that I was, in fact, broken, and there a version of me that stood on the shoulders of my ancestors and the people who raised me, and there was a version of me six feet under the ground, dragged down by everyone who came before me, and there was a version of me that wanted to be part of the world, and there was a version of me that was too weary to try, and there was a version of me that had so much still to live for, and there was a version of me that couldn’t do it again, and there was a version of me that believed in generational curses and who the fuck was I to think, that of all people, that I would be the first to do things differently, to finally placate the ghosts and heal what my ancestors could not? There was a version of me that could go on and be a functioning member of society and a version of me that could not, and there was a version of me that clung to my ego and could not admit to what I did not know, good or bad, and there was a version of me that was humbled by the universe and could accept small and large kindnesses, that did not live in fear of the future nor in pain from the past. All these versions of me also contained echoes of my mother and my father and all the mothers and fathers before them… it was all in me, refracted and reflected and overlapping and subsuming and voided and crowding for space. And it’s the same for everyone. Which version will it be at any given moment? It’s hard to predict. But I know I have to be in the mood.

Jenny Zhang is the author of the story collection Sour Heart and the poetry collection My Baby First Birthday. She also writes for TV and film.