AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Prologue
Alicia Loi Chen which loosely meansGreat Noble Thunder… or some such crap like that.
That’s me. That’smyname. Pretty fucking great, yeah? At least my mum thought so given the amount of times she tried to convince me it was.
In her more lucid moments over the years, when she wasn’t messed up on some drug or other, she’d loved to weave magical tales about far away countries filled with dragons and other mythical creatures. For a long time, she had me convinced that she’d been a concubine to the Emperor of China, and I was their lovechild spirited off to England for safekeeping, my name chosen because I was born to some great Chinese dynasty.
Of course, I realised pretty soon that she was full of shit.
My empty stomach, threadbare clothes and dirty, flea-ridden flat we called home had proven that. Our true story, the one she tried to hide from, has only ever been a tale of woe… and it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
Born on December 26, 1998 during one of the worst hurricanes to hit the UK for years, my fucked-up, drugged-up, heroin addict mother actually named me after the storm that raged beyond the single glazed windows of our shitty rundown council flat in Hackney. Her wails of pain from pushing me out of her ravaged, undernourished body matched those of the hurricane that wound its way through the feeble mould-ridden walls of our home. Tracy Carter, mum’s best friend and my surrogate mum growing up, had cradled my head as I slipped into the world wailing, my lungs bursting with rage at being born, my tiny little body already addicted to heroin. An angry baby junky, courtesy of my messed-up junky mum. Born with thunder inside me, thunder rolling outside, my name was fitting back then, I suppose. Except now I’ve shredded that name like a dirty threadbare jumper. I don’t live a fairy tale life and I’m not some emperor’s daughter, real or imagined.
I’m justAsia. A nameIchose for myself, not because of my heritage. And certainly not because of my mother’s addiction for the opium produced in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia that finally killed her on my fourteenth birthday.
Nope.
I’m called Asia because the chip on my shoulder is as large as a fucking continent, and with good reason. I started my life fighting to live, and I’ve spent every day since doing the same damn thing… Fighting to survive.
Every. Fucking. Day.
I live in a permanent state of fight or flight, except I’m not a bird and Ineverrun. I’ve got claws as sharp as the best of them, and a left hook to match. Truth is, this state of living is as unhealthy as the addiction I was born with. I’ve bounced from one foster home to another, interspersed with a few months in my mum’s care when she’d ‘got herself clean’, only to fall back into bad habits the second shit got hard. Heroin is a dirty drug that strips a human of their ability to function let alone bring up a kid. My mum was the worst kind of addict; weak, selfish and unable to fight for her children, herself even. I’ve pretty much brought myself up, and along the way have tried to get my younger brothers through this screwed up life we live. I’ve had to grow up fast.
Now that I’m sixteen going on twenty-six, I’ve taken life by the proverbial balls andI’mdeciding how to live it. I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t tempted to pick up a needle and shoot up just to get away from my crappy existence for a few short moments. But I refuse to be a junky like my mum.I refuse. She’d forced that on me as a newborn but I sure as fuck won’t make the same mistakes she made. I’m grateful that I don’t remember those long months being weaned off the drug, no more than a pitiful howling creature full of pain and anger.
Years later, Tracy had told me that I screamed blue bloody murder those first few months of my life. My tiny little fists bunched up, ready to hit anyone who got too close. That was the first time my mum tried to give up heroin. She’d seen how I’d fought from the second I was born, and she did the same. Alongside me she got clean and for three years my mum managed to steer clear of the drug.
But it didn’t last.
The day after my third birthday mum left me in the care of Tracy with one goal in mind, to get well and truly off her face. She didn’t return for a month. When she did, she was unrecognisable.
That was the first time I was taken into care.
But unlike her, I will not allow myself to be weak. I won’t give in to the lingering need that still plagues me even though I don’t remember the feeling of being an addict, a state that was forced onto me without any choice or say in the matter.
Growing up hasn’t been easy, I can assure you.
These days the only source of joy in an endless line of disappointment and disillusion is my art, because not only is Asia my name now, it’s also mytag. You can see it spray painted in bright colours across the whole of Hackney. A piece of me brightening the stark and dirty streets of this inner-city London borough where I live.
But like everything else in my life, that too has been taken away from me because some asshats deem it a crime to make something ugly into something beautiful.
Truth be known, there’s never going to be a happily ever after for me. I was born during a storm after all, and we all know that storms only ever leave devastation in their wake.
