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Constellations Made of Shame

Constellations Made of Shame

Clementine Hei-man Cheung



There was a time when her couple-month-old nephew looked into a mirror and smiled at the reflection of his very own self. He grinned with so much joy. She was left in awe as she had never been able to do the same equivalent thing herself. Countless blemishes, as if they were stars in a constellation. She grew up loathing her moles on the face, “why on earth do I have so many moles while others seem to have none?” These so-called “beauty marks” and spots once made her feel ashamed of herself when she was younger in age; fortune-tellers assign meaning to each mole based on its location on the face. Moles on the face are often associated with personality traits, fortune, or even destiny in her culture. There’s nothing much she can do about them.

Now, approaching her 30s, she is less affected by these irreversible birthmarks and recalls how the younger self ever imagined joining the moles by drawing straight lines across them—as if these moles could actually form a proper constellation, as if it were an astrological sign that you could look up in the sky and discover. She speaks quietly yet boldly to herself: “Live with it. Live through it. Up through and out.”