Due to a confluence of factors, Room Magazine is posting this 2025 Pride Month feature later than planned.
What does it mean to inhabit a body that others may not understand?
We’re revisiting an excerpt of Addie Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures first published in Room 44.1 Growing Room.
Excerpt from Unwieldy Creatures
by Addie Tsai
All I ever knew was that this man who took care of me was named Pine. He lived in the forests, not far from where I would later learn I was born. Pine didn’t really know how to be among people anymore, so he flitted from forest to forest, so long as he felt safe from harm and exposure. When I was young, he told me great tales of his many adventures and the many trees under which he sought refuge—from as far west as California and Washington to as far north as Vermont and Canada.
He hadn’t been living in the forests where you abandoned me as a newborn for long, maybe half a year. He had travelled to the south months earlier to find a warmer climate than the harsher winters up north. But he’d been living in the woods for many years at that point, and he knew how to make do: how to scavenge for food, clothes, and other necessities. Since I had been left in the wild at only a few days old, I would never know the difference between living in the outdoors and living in the cozy comforts of a house.
When I got older, Pine told me the story of how we came to be together, how he became both my mother and my father, the only protector I would ever know. Late one night, he came out from his hiding place deep in the woods as he did every night—to search the nearby dumpsters for leftover food or gather loose change that had fallen from someone’s pockets. As he neared the lot, he heard a baby cry in the dark.
At first, Pine worried he would be found, that the cry would signal other people nearby. He was concerned someone would see him and call the cops. After all, he’d been through this many times before. But his curiosity got the best of him. He crawled on all fours like the animals he shared the woods with, following the infrequent sound of human life. To his surprise, Pine came upon a little bundle nestled against the knot at the base of the tree trunk that shared his own name, wrapped tight in a white sheet.
The man from the woods looked to his left and right and then out into the dark before him, squinting his eyes to catch the blurry shape of shadows that meant other human figures were nearby. But Pine saw no one—not an adult running from the scene of this young child’s abandonment, nor one coming toward the child in relief and wanting. The baby was on its own.
Pine’s hunger would have to wait. Taking in this small child, he felt something like kinship with this little babe left in the forest, having no one or nothing but the woods for comfort. Convinced that the two of them were completely alone and that Pine was safe from being found out, he gingerly lifted the little crying creature from the hard, flat ground. At first, the baby cried even more, so hard that its voice hiccupped in its wailing. Its face turned a bright red from the effort it took to expel the fear and longing it felt to be in contact with a parent, but none was to be found. When Pine brought the baby to his chest, he was taken aback at first by how weighted the child already felt in his arms, how large its head, how unusual its appearance. But Pine knew a thing or two about what it meant to be shunned and shamed from the world.
If Pine allowed others to witness him, what would they think? With his ratty hair adorned with twigs and the carcasses of dead insects, the shifting wild gaze caught in his hazel eyes. Perhaps this defenceless, young creature is just what Pine had always needed, a companion in the woods who could help be a lookout when they got older, or who Pine could teach the ways of the forest. Maybe they could understand and love one another.
Pine thought the longing to be in communion with another person had passed long ago. And yet, there was part of him that felt excited at the idea of having a child to love and belong to, to teach and cradle, as he had always hoped to have been loved and comforted.
And so it came to be that I was saved. Pine became my guardian and protector, and for many years we were inseparable. He taught me how to read, write, and speak from an early age, and he always told me the truth about any question for which I sought an answer.
It was always a treat when Pine had the opportunity to forage in supermarket dumpsters for thrown-out jars of baby food, and it helped me through the rocky terrain of growing up among the elements and without substantial shelter. Otherwise, Pine would, like the mother of an animal, chew up berries and nuts mixed with his spit to feed me in my early years, ensuring that I wouldn’t choke and enabling me to get the nutrition I needed. Somehow he was able to get milk for me often enough, but given the rate at which I inevitably grew, I wonder if it would have been better for us both if he had not been so resourceful. As I got older, I learned, through Pine’s example and teachings, how to be scrappy and adaptable. Later, I would find I would need to fend for myself with or without his help; I would not be able to rely on him for as long as I had initially hoped.
Because Pine and I banded together against the world, I did not come of age in the gender binary world that you and all other welcome bodies are accustomed to. As Pine taught me to read and write, he also gave me what neither you nor my father, if father he could be called, could give—a name that befits my particular way of being. The name he gave me came out of his understanding and love for all that I was. But the occasion that caused me to finally possess my own name was born out of a torment that you will never experience.
On this particular afternoon, Pine had gone to scavenge for supplies and soup when I began feeling feverish from a cold after a few days of hard rain. The rain had let up at this point, so, bored and curious as young children can often be, I began to explore the woods a bit more than I tended to when Pine was watching over me. I took a stick with me and a handful of small pebbles so that I could trace a line in the dirt and drop the pebbles where I wandered so that I could easily find my way back to our makeshift camp. I discovered a small stream that cuts through the woods I had never seen before, as I had never travelled this far since Pine had found me.
I leaned over the cold stream to run my hands through the water, excited at a new sensation. I was, perhaps, seven years old at this point, and although I had some innate sense that I was growing larger quicker than expected—Pine had to frequently find ways to replace my torn and tattered clothes and figure out different strategies to keep my feet protected—this was the first time that I was faced with my own reflection. It’s no understatement to say the face that stared back at me in the folds of blue absolutely terrorized and frightened me.
At first, I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. The monstrous figure, shadowy but clear enough to discern its hideousness, couldn’t possibly be my own reflection! I whipped my head around, hoping I would see another figure behind me, one that could account for what I confronted, but I was alone. I didn’t interact enough with others to understand what beauty was exactly, but I knew enough that I was not filled with any sense of peace or comfort at finally glimpsing my own lopsided face, the grotesque proportions of my body, or the strange copper hair that covered every inch of my skin.
I fixated on the image that stared back at me for so long that I lost track of time, my tears falling down my threadbare clothes and dropping into the water below, the substance responsible for the sight of ugliness. Finally, Pine found me—I suppose he followed the line I cut into the dirt. It did not take him long to figure out what had happened, and the depths of pain I felt at how wretched I imagined I looked. He held me for a long time, saying nothing at all, and for this, I will always be grateful. For he knew there were no words he could say to console me.
After I had cried all the tears left in me, at least on that day, he sat me down and told me what he had been able to find out about where I came from. It was then I learned who you were. That you, a reproductive scientist by the name of Dr. Frank, had made me from stem cells in a lab. It was my hideously large form that had been responsible for your partner’s (and my mother’s) death when I was born. I also learned about your refusal to marry Ezra, your adopted brother. Scorned and unable to cope with rejection, he took it out on me, leaving me repugnant, abandoned, and left to die alone.
But we also talked about what it meant to be man and woman and how Pine had learned long ago to reject the constraints of societally imposed ideas of gender. Pine offered me a name to hold onto, like a kind of home where none could be found. Not for someone like me. Not for someone like Pine. He asked how I felt about the name Ash. Pine explained how the word signified both the body of a tree and also the absence of it. He’d also read once that ash trees were both male and female, flower and tree.
It was perfect. Not only did I feel it connected to my split and liminal nature, but I loved it for its connection to the only person who had ever loved me. It would always remind me of Pine, the only family I’d ever hoped to find. From that point on, I had a name to call my own, a name to remind me of where I came to live in the middle of the woods and where I first found love. I hoped that I could live with Pine forever, but I would soon discover that my mutant body would keep me from that consistency, too.
–
Pine and I would spend a few more years together before the peculiar circumstances and development of my monstrosity would cause my only companion and guardian, the only love I had ever known, to be forced to leave me as well. Before that point, however, Pine would give me the gift I would soon realize I needed most in this world as a shield for survival: knowledge and insight.
Each week Pine would sneak into the city library closest to whatever forest was our current home and bring back books he thought would help me with my idiosyncratic nature. I didn’t know it at the time, but now I realize he was also giving me the tools to live apart from him and to manage on my own in this dark and cruel world. Pine taught me how to read and write when I was young so that by the time I was an adolescent, I was reading classic and contemporary texts far advanced for my age.
Sometimes we would read the texts together, but as I became more intellectually curious and reading became an elixir I could drink on my own, he would leave me to read books while he went about finding food or while he took care of some other necessary chore. When I would reach a stopping point, we would come back together, and he would discuss the text’s important concepts with me, asking me guiding questions for as long as I needed them. By the end of our scholarly journey, I would synthesize the ideas and integrate them into how I viewed myself and the world, and he would merely watch me, listening with enraptured attention and a kind of affectionate gaze upon me.
He taught me Dubois’s notion of double consciousness, making sure I understood the Black American context from which it was fashioned and how it could provide insight into my many layers of identity. We read Black Boy and Invisible Man, the works of Frederick Douglass and Huey Newton. The long agonizing journey of Black men in America was a hard pill to swallow.
We read Angela Davis, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, and James Baldwin. I laboured through Nell Painter’s The History of White People and was inexplicably drawn to Claudia Rankine. We read so many other texts about racism and the history of segregation, and when the histories and ideologies framing those books became too heavy for my mind, we would switch to Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, and Genderqueer and Queer: A History that would teach me more about the kind of body in which I lived and hoped would be accepted by society one day.
After I read all that Pine could find on what it meant to live between he and she, girl and boy, I began to ask for language guidebooks on Indonesian and Malay, knowing their relationship to my heritage and legacy. I learned that there was a singular pronoun that wasn’t gendered—dia—and I liked the sound of it. I thought, if I ever became part of the world, that’s the pronoun I’d like to be called. It felt perfect given my dual-gendered self, my thinginess. I told Pine this immediately. He only smiled and said if there was ever a need for him to refer to me in the third person, he would make sure to address me in the way I desired.
Books were a world where I could depart the demonic nature of my body, even as it grew exponentially with every word I read. We wouldn’t only read serious books, though. Pine also introduced me to the most exquisite storytellers and poets, and it was these I would turn to again and again for solace and for a way out of the confining life I had never asked to be given.
What a wretch I was—the only way that I could feel happy was to consume words that made me feel as if I had left the world completely! I felt tremendous guilt and ambivalence about this, but I took what pleasure I could from reading because it helped me forget that, with each passing day, I became larger and larger, taller and taller, and further from Pine. With each inch that I swelled in any direction, Pine was growing more anxious and agitated from its results: it was becoming increasingly difficult to clothe me, and our privacy and protection were becoming harder to hold on to. I was becoming more and more visible, my body exploding far beyond the broad expanse of even the largest trees that cloaked us.
It hadn’t quite struck me yet, however, that there was ever going to be a world in which Pine and I weren’t eternally connected to one another as we always had been. I could feel the stress that my horrid countenance was causing him who I held most dear, but it never occurred to me that Pine would ever feel that he would have to take his leave of me. He had given me so much nurturing and support, so much love and understanding that I believed so fully in his ability to conquer any obstacle. I felt tremendous guilt and shame at the difficulties I was causing, but it was happening of its own accord, and there was nothing I could really do to stop it or even to slow its acceleration.
One day Pine brought me a book on Andre the Giant, the only person I had ever read about that seemed to have an existence and body even remotely like mine, but he had support as a man, and profitable athlete that I couldn’t imagine would ever grace my bizarre physiognomy.
And besides, I was made in such an illegal and complex manner that I couldn’t imagine being able to convince anyone to hear my story long enough in order to help me. I assumed, like Frankenstein, the novel you based your actual research on, that they would just attack me with hatred in their hearts for how ugly I appeared to them. Who would believe me over my maker, anyway? You were vetted and successful and did not look like me.
If you couldn’t even keep me as an infant, how could anyone else take me as I was now?
Check out our Indigenous History Month Statement and Reading List, or revisit Room 43.2 Devour
