For every character analysis, I set a word count and time limit when drafting. This helps me focus my writing and ideas.
Because of these constraints, I have to leave so much historical and social context – and nuance – of each character behind. It makes me think about the cutting floor and the stories we all leave behind.
For example, in Ali Wong’s stand up Baby Cobra, she talks about a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. The audience is silent while the tension builds.
Where is the punchline?
Eventually, Wong gives the audience the relief they are waiting for, revealing that her miscarriage was a blessing in disguise because they were twins.
She extends the joke further–talking about how she used it as leverage for a Beyoncé concert. And how she got a “miscarriage bike” out of it, that she loves very much. With that final punchline and laughter from the audience, she moves onto the next joke.
The first time I watched Wong’s Netflix special, I moved on as well, not thinking much. It wasn't until I read her memoir, Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life, that I understood there was more to her story.
So much more that she chose not to reveal.
In the book, Ali Wong talks about shame and the societal questioning of her body's ability to do what women are biologically programmed to do. She shares how she took edibles on the weekends to cope with her grief. On stage, she chose to omit the intense grief, leaving those details abandoned on the cutting room floor as an editorial decision. Because Ali Wong also had a constraint: she had to fit every ounce of comedy into a 60-minute show.
I wish she shared more about this experience in her standup.
I would have learned so much.
I would have known what to expect.
Like Ali Wong, I've left part of my pregnancy experience on the cutting room floor too. How many women have done the same? Most people in my circles don't know about my multiple miscarriages, one after another resulting in failure — the worst kind of pass/fail test imaginable.
To this day, I’m not sure why I didn’t share further. Like Ali Wong’s story would have benefitted me, I’m sure the details of my experience would have benefitted others. Instead, I could only leave it, like Ali, on my own cutting room floor.
Strewn on the cutting room floor: the mess of blankets and towels by the bathroom floor with my dogs curled beside me as I ejected everything from my body, shaking and shivering as my pups whimpered and huddled beside me, refusing to leave my side. The slow drip of blood trickling down my legs.
On the cutting room floor: the weight of the blood-soaked pad in my underwear, with what I assumed was a huge blood clot. And the horror in that cold, cold, bathroom when I discovered what exactly was mixed in along with the blood in my underwear, and the reason why behind the immense pain that left me doubled over, like someone was turning a ninja star over and over inside my stomach, cutting the edges of my organs as I bled.
Cast away on the cutting room floor, the tears blurring my vision as we biked around the city eating all the things forbidden in a pregnancy: the sushi, the deli meats, the cheese, the steak tartare, after realizing the precious cargo I carried contained no heartbeat.
Muted on the cutting room floor: the animalistic sound I’ve never heard myself make, nor thought humans were capable of emitting upon realizing I had passed the fetus mid-subway transfer — that it was already too late. On the cutting room floor will remain that weight I carried in between my legs.
How heavy it was. How heavy it still is.
Even now as I draft this, there is more I choose to leave on the cutting room floor: Hopes and disappointments and heartbeats and ER visits and anguish and loss — so much loss — that I’ve decided to withhold from my pregnancy experiences…all part of my own cutting room floor editorial decisions.
In Chinese, miscarriage is translated as 流产 (liúchǎn).
流 (liú) means “flow” or “stream.” The “氵” on the left symbolizes water, like three drips of trickling water.
产 (chǎn) means to give birth, to reproduce, broken down into the following:
“亠” as the lid cover
“丷” as the archaic version of the Chinese character eight; “八” (bā), and
"厂” meaning “factory” or “workshop,” pronounced “chǎng”
After all, pregnancy can seem like a factory — there are so many parts to assemble — more than just eight pieces. A tiny eyelash. A little thumb. A small but mighty heart, beating 160 beats per minute.
I never knew what the term miscarriage was in Chinese. It had never been applicable to me growing up.
I’d heard the word “miscarriage” thrown around in English as an adult, but I’d never stopped to question what it meant. What happens anatomically in your body. After learning about the Chinese characters, I realized that it would have been easier to understand what was happening in my body – to understand that miscarriage was the watery flow of life leaving my body in a bloody trickle.
And it is clear to me, now, why so many of us leave the experience of miscarriages on our own cutting room floors. There is so much that is unsaid: in Ali Wong’s standup, in this essay collection, in our pregnancy journeys, in our entire lives — we make editorial decisions to omit certain stories for reasons only we know. And sometimes, for reasons we don’t.
These pregnancy losses never made it into the meaning behind Amara’s name. I’ve stayed silent too, about the painful experiences I’ve had from gritting my teeth too hard. The breakdowns, the burn outs, the self destruction.
In my breakdown of the word 仁 (rén), the tense relationship with my father never made it into the story. Nor the fight that resulted afterwards in that conversation we had, when I made some snarky retort, angry that he wished I had more kindness in me.
And so it makes me wonder:
What untold stories have been left on the cutting room floor?
What happens when we pick up some of the pieces, and weave them back into our story?
Hi all, yina here — wasn't sure where to put this but needed to voice this somewhere. Figured this would be the least intrusive.
This was an incredibly hard piece to write — I debated back and forth with my editor @Allie Rigby on how and what to share. I had a hard time talking about the memories related to these experiences and the painful emotions that came with them, nor did I want it to come off as trauma porn when I was overly visual or graphic.
In the end, we decided to capture this struggle onto paper. The fact that you can still share and also leave some things private — that is the privilege of discretion you have as the writer.
I wanted to let you know about the editorial decisions we made here, and why, in case you ever struggle with something like this.
hi Yina, thank you for writing even if it was difficult. I hope it gave you some solace. I too sometimes cut something so much I just abandoned the writing and shelved it in my folders for me alone to discover maybe in years to come. It is also an art to reveal just enough to satisfy both the reader and the writer.