The short jacket thrives1 in the type of yellow that you won’t add any adjective word in front of, and you could always find it at your first glance2, regardless of where you tossed this outerwear the night before, regardless of who3 and what4 made you toss it. The main color of yellow has been interrupted by the dark-brown stretchy-materialled collars and cuffs. The brown, well-sewn thread goes along the route as intended5 like a negotiator between each part of this gorgeous piece. Four pockets in total: two real6 ones, the others are fake7, but all are sealed by the real solid brown buttons, which are engraved with the founding year of the brand. The cuffs would tightly hug the lower arms as proof of security8. After your upper body finds the best fit spot in this jacket, you can zip it up, then push all the buttons into their own small round pits to cover this small zipper’s moving path9. Or, you can leave the buttons and the zipper open, which could lead to another style.
1. It’s not me. It’s the Yellow Jacket that I have carried from Beijing to Bemidji, 56601, then to Chicago, to Aurora – not the one in Colorado, to 56601 again, and now to another metro. It is a beautiful thing. I am so obsessed that I couldn’t stop rubbing my thumb on the small rip near the border between the soft cuff and the hard left sleeve, as it was the evidence of suffering.
2. I am now blaming myself for not taking good care of the jacket and making it suffer. We shouldn’t make beautiful things suffer, should we? My parents bought the jacket for me two decades ago after I got all A’s in my second-to-last year in elementary school. I was a medium, but my parents picked an extra large. You’ll grow in it, they said.
3. Elementary, the A’s, and the prize: the story I have told people who showed their interest in this jacket was simple. I suppose when something has already formed as routine in my life, the story would be simple, but the day-to-day life that I live in my Yellow Jacket would be the complicated one.
4. I’m trying to recall the time when I packed the jacket in the same tote box with those tools I rarely used but were nice to be kept around. Did one of them break the old news wrap, find the Yellow Jacket at its first glance, roll closer to it, then hurt it by creating a small rip with its sharp head? Which city was I moving to? Which city was I leaving? Mom and Dad would remind me to take good care of it whenever they saw me wearing the jacket, and I always remembered their reminder.
5. I have never gotten another Yellow Jacket. But I enjoyed the compliments brought by it. Like, the lady who rented a small space by the chaotic street, selling me her oddities, was reading the word on the buttons as if it were the real oddity. Or, like the person from another team sitting by me at the company-wide annual meeting said she loved the jacket so much while clipping our hands for the recipient of an award. Her comment saved my mind from sinking into the question: When will I be the one on the stage holding the memorial gift and smiling?
6. I didn’t enjoy the question asking me to use three or four, or maybe five words to describe my work ethic. I had to empty the drawers to find a piece of paper titled Annual Review, signed by my previous supervisor and department director, to look for the words. With the piece of paper held in one hand, I was using the other hand to select and deselect the vocabulary options. It became the key my high school chemistry teacher gave to us to correct the answers in my homework: how many of the answers did I get right? How many of them did I get wrong? I would tell myself to put this annual review somewhere easier for me to access, but it would eventually get hidden by other stuff piled on top of it.
7. “How do people who highly (if not entirely) rely on other people’s words regarding who they are define themselves?”
8. Do you remember why you got that jacket? was the question my parents had for me in my junior year after they came back from the teacher and parents conference, and quoted the words that were used by my high school teachers to describe my academic performance. I had my head down to avoid looking at the thing they were asking about. I’m wondering if the small rip has been there since then.
9. On an ordinary Saturday, I took a bus to the coffee shop in the neighborhood that was far away from where I was living in my Yellow Jacket as a way of celebration. I picked a window seat as I always did, but I didn’t lean on the window – I was so afraid of the sharp edges of the window frame that I assumed; I was so afraid of the loose screws that I imagined. Now I can’t remember what I celebrated. But one thing I remember was a couple of stops before my destination, a kid grabbed the seat next to mine after his mom told him to sit by that Yellow Jacket.
