MULAN (1998)
For my sixth birthday I got a Mulan backpack, Mulan lunchbox, Mulan PJs, Mulan Halloween
costume, and three Mulan dolls, each in different outfits, and with varying lengths of black hair.
Sometimes when I played with the dolls in my bed, I would notice a stray hair on my pillow, and
I liked that I didn’t know whose it was. One day when hanging up my Mulan backpack in the
cubby, a classmate said, “You just like her because you look like her.” I was embarrassed, but I
didn’t know why. I wore a plain backpack for the rest of the year.
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INTIMATES
After finishing Boardwalk Empire, I bought my first and only slip. The woman at the lingerie
store said “he’ll love it,” but I love it even more. It is burgundy, the same hue as my mum’s knit
hat, my prom dress, my favourite and only tube of lipstick, but with gold trim. It makes my
breasts bumpy with lace, my belly cool and smooth.
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MOTHERLODE
Sarah and I always played The Sims with versions of us, our sk8er boi crushes, our celeb crushes
(Brad Pitt and Edward Norton circa Fight Club), and our enemies. My older sister helped us
download cool mods: makeup from My Chemical Romance’s music videos, tattoos and dermal
piercings, BDSM outfits before we knew what the letters stood for, and Cloud from Final
Fantasy VII’s hair. We made our sk8er boi crushes fall in love with us in minutes. We took turns
woohoo-ing in the hot tub with Brad and Edward and giggled at the pixels. We made our
enemies pee themselves and die by fire. We accidentally fell in love with each other and had to
Google how to undo it. We cheated so we were never hungry, broke, or tired. We forgot that the
sk8er bois never talked to us, that Brad and Edward didn’t look like that anymore, that we kind
of felt sorry for our enemies.
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Sennah Yee is from Toronto, where she did her thesis on gendered robot design. She wrote two chapbooks, THE AQUARIUM (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and THE GL.A.DE (DGP, forthcoming). The pieces above are excerpts from her first book, CRITERIA FOR CRAZY (Metatron, 2017). Though named after a racecar driver, she has yet to get behind the wheel. Find her @sennahaha and www.sennahyee.com
