Inner Beautiful Wellness Center

In her short story “Inner Beautiful Wellness Center” on the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Natalie Yap takes the reader into a world of self-help, enlightenment, and spiritual rejuvenation with refreshingly sardonic and honest narration.

At the center, you cleansed the totality of your life, sloughing off skin with bamboo loofahs imported from Guatemala, drinking black tea sourced from a farm on the outskirts of Nepal. You scrubbed from your social sphere people who brought you to the center in the first place. For Angela, that meant her two friends from work, her dog who was persistently disobedient, her best friend since childhood, her sister, her mother, her ex who dumped her even though he promised they would get engaged.

Sometimes, the treatment was challenging. That meant you were on the right track, said Miss Jia Hui, the cohort guru. Miss Jia Hui looked like a pilates instructor who went through a divorce but came out the other end stronger than before and who now adhered to a keto diet. Angela felt a special kinship with Miss Jia Hui through this imagined backstory. 

There were six other women in Angela’s cohort, who all seemed to have much worse issues to deal with than Angela, which made her feel less of a freak. They were all older, too, with expensive dye-jobs and cuticle-free nails. Chinese tai-tais who had everything yet somehow found a reason to be miserable; they seemed to flippantly regard the center as a retreat instead of the life-altering opportunity that it was. Angela recognized one of them, the wife of some Tan Sri businessman. All this time she’d seen pictures of her in the Tatler, she had assumed the wife was a well-adjusted woman. Here though, the wife could barely finish writing an entry in her one-minute journal without being carted off to the Quiet Chamber.  

Everyone’s progress moved at a different pace. No one was supposed to make comparisons, but Angela was the first to adapt to the mantras. You have to be open and receptive to change, Miss Jia Hui said, but you also need to learn restraint. Temptation veers you off the path, but fidelity can be a prison. It was difficult grasping the nuances at first, but Miss Jia Hui said with the right guidance and the right haircut, you, too, would be able to make these choices perfectly.  

No haircut could save them from their own hot messes. Sure, progress was not a competition, but these other women were already losing.