911: What Led to My Bipolar Diagnosis

An except from Michelle Yang's memoir 'Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love'

Michelle Yang, author of memoir Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love

2001, Age 20 - Beijing, China

I arrive in Beijing in late August. The massive city is hard to wrap my head around. The students in my program are transported by a small bus from the airport to the international student dorm. To my surprise, my home for the next several months is more like a duo-occupancy hotel room with daily cleaning service than the actual dorms where local students stay, packed seven to a room.

My new classmates are mostly from Stanford, Vanderbilt, and other fancy private liberal arts schools. Only a few are from giant public universities like mine—a nice, freckled hapa boy from University of New Mexico and a spunky girl from University of Washington. No one cares what a Flinn scholar is and I don’t mention it, so most of my new peers assume I’m an unremarkable, “State School” student.

Because my Mandarin is good enough to pass for a native speaker in Beijing, whenever I ask for directions, no matter how polite or deferential my manners, I am always met with open hostility instead of the kind patience offered my white or even Korean-American classmates. Like stereotypical New Yorkers, Beijing locals have no moment to spare for me. I look and sound Chinese enough—I should know how to figure out my own way instead of interrupting their day.

Mere weeks after our arrival, local students trample through our international dorm hallways late at night, pounding on each door. “Turn on your TVs!” they shout, echoing down the hall.

I am startled by the interruption in what had been a quiet night. “What’s going on?” I ask. We all ask the same question. Somehow, I wander into a classmate’s dorm room where several students are gathered around a small television. We huddle together on the edge of the two beds and watch in shock as replays of planes crashing into the Twin Towers is displayed on the screen. Is this real?

In the coming days, we’re told that the home we’d left behind would never be the same again. America would never be the same. What does this mean? How can such a big change happen while I am away? What will it be like to go back home?

Michelle Yang in Inner Mongolia during her 2001 trip to China

The hostility from locals, the cold shoulder from many of the program-mates, and the stress wears me down. Homesickness for Arizona sinks in too. I miss having people I can relax around. I struggle to close the distance with other students in the program and I don’t know why. Are people spreading rumors about me? They all hate me, don’t they?

I become hypervigilant.

Luckily, David is studying abroad in Thailand this same semester. He sends me dozens of sweet handwritten letters, which help me feel less alone. I respond to each one on delicate stationery I scour for in street markets and crowded shops. In his neat script, he writes of his hilarious mispronunciations that land him in hot water, making me laugh out loud. David tells me of the vibrant countries he visits and the hospitality of the people he encounters. His postcards of floating markets, ornate temples, and lush scenery fill me with longing as well as nostalgia for the creosote-infused breezes of home. Pinning each of his letters above my bed, I dream of being by David’s side, exploring the world together. Each envelope glows, spinning yarns of yearning, tugging at me. Other girls in my program comment with envy that even their boyfriends do not write as often.

“Are you sure he’s just a friend?” one asks.

I blush, beaming inside. Even on the other side of the world, David’s friendship is a life raft.

For our semester-end final writing assignment, students could choose any topic they want but it required approval from the program director. Fascinated by portraits of Chairman Mao which hang inside taxis and restaurants in place of a Buddha or a Christian cross, for protection and prosperity, I decide to research the deification of the political leader for the assignment.

I am proud to have thought of such a clever topic. I can’t wait to interview people about it and get started, but I’m surprised when our normally kind and sweet program director asks to meet with me in her small office.

“You can’t write about this,” she says with an ashen face and darkened eyes.

“Why, Director Hwang? It could be so interesting. I can’t wait to talk to people about their beliefs.”

Her eyes begin to water. The lines of fatigue, frustration, and age on her face, which I hadn’t noticed before, emerge. “The people are not ready,” she says. She does not want to fight any longer.

I feel ashamed and I don’t know why. The rejection burns. My American privilege, the naïve assumption that I could pursue any intellectual curiosity, is one I long take for granted. My privilege and foreignness are on full display and I never feel more American.

I procrastinate on selecting another topic as long as I can. When I can’t put it off anymore, I choose what I think is a safe, easy, and crowd-pleasing topic—Yeh-Yeh.

I write the paper on my family history, about how my grandfather is a self-made man who left Northern China penniless and illiterate to start anew in Korea. This tale of his entrepreneurial spirit and perseverance, of how he worked tirelessly to build a small empire, never failed to garner positive reactions in the US. I had won the Flinn scholarship in part thanks to a similar essay in English.

When my designated Chinese language partner, a local Ph.D. student in political science at the university who until then, I believe to be my friend, reviews my work, she grimaces. “Your Yeh-Yeh,” she spits with a sneer. “He was a landlord!”

Landlords are a class of people systematically executed during the Communist Revolution.

She laughs to show me how unimpressed she is with my Yeh-Yeh. In her eyes, Yeh-Yeh was a traitor, a deserter.

Blindsided, I recoil. I failed again, even after a drastic change in subject, trying to write something uncontroversial. I’m colliding headfirst into a China that does not celebrate my thinking, does not understand or embrace me. No more than I could celebrate, understand, or embrace it without reservations. The rejection from my ancestral land ruptures my already murky identity—not Korean, not quite Taiwanese, not this kind of Chinese.

As an ethnic Chinese person who had always lived outside the country, I had hoped to reclaim a piece of my heritage here. Instead, I lose my tenuous grasp, more alienated than ever. My indelible Asian American identity reinforces itself. I ache for my adopted home country of immigrants.

As the winter turns more bitter, I venture outside less and less. My sleep wanes and mood darkens. The negative spiraling vultures that haunt my nights are back, returning to feed on my brain, convincing me that everyone hates me. Many students in the program are homesick, on top of the usual college drama of fights among roommates, hook-ups and breakups, and idle gossip. I imagine conversations halting when I enter rooms and hushed whispers as I walk down hallways. How am I going to survive until the end of the program?

Skipping meals, I live off the Costco box of Hershey’s chocolate bars I brought to give out as gifts. Save for the cleaning ladies, I have no one to give them to. I hadn’t made any local friends like I thought I would. Our program is very isolated from the rest of the campus.

I fall into the familiar, dreaded state again, too nervous to sleep. I don’t deserve food. My thoughts race. Too much work… not a minute to spare… I must study, study, study. But I sit, useless, reading the same passage over and over, retaining nothing. My mind refuses to be tamed into focus. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why am I so worthless? I am a fraud. Maybe this time, I will be found out.

Days slip past and my final project and exam dates near. Night after night, I fight for sleep that never comes. Paranoid thoughts race in furious circles through my brain. I am accused of being a spy. Am I a spy? Exhausted but unable to stop the racing dark thoughts, I am certain everyone loathes me and is plotting against me to expose me.

When the phone rings, it jolts me from a zombie-like state. “Beautiful Jade,” Baba’s urgent voice meets my hesitant greeting into the receiver.

A semester of my life needs to be packed up for transport back home, but I haven’t organized anything. I am grossly inadequate for the simplest of tasks. I feel like a trampled worm—body flattened, trying to lift my head or tail, not knowing which end is which. Writhing.

Baba is still working on his Chinese medicine degree and is trying to become more expert at acupuncture. He learns of a university in Shandong Province that produces instructional DVDs on acupuncture techniques. Baba is determined to get his hands on those and asks me to travel to the other province by train to buy them for him.

“Baba… I can’t,” my feeble voice quakes like tiny, coarse grains straining through a sieve. Turning my neck to peer outside necessitates Herculean effort. Grey and black slush covers the sidewalks—my skin constricts at the thought of the biting cold. How am I supposed to do what Baba asks when the program ends in a week? How am I to fit it in with my exams, final projects, and packing?

“You must. Ni Yi Ding Yao,” Baba booms on the telephone. His outrage at my hesitance multiplies each mile it crosses from Arizona. “Go to Shandong and buy me those DVDs. You must do this. You must!”

His determination to have a doctor in the family, no matter the cost, obliterates any reason. I am already unfilial for rejecting his first command to become a doctor, I could not reject this simple request too.

“Yi Ding Yao,” Baba doubles down, commanding again, in his toughest, scariest voice. He breaks through my fog. “No one else can do this. It must be you.” My father’s authoritarian roar, a constant in my twenty years of existence, possesses unmatched power over me. His bellowing mauls me like a grizzly bear.

My hairs stand on ends in salute.

“I must.”

Pushing, willing myself. I rock myself for hours, back and forth, trying to work up the courage. I may be worthless, but this task I must do, even if it kills me. My life is worthless anyway. The end will be here soon.

Putting on my coat and shoes, I stuff all of my emergency cash in my small shoulder bag and run into the darkness at two in the morning. I sprint into the icy mid-December night, severing my remaining ties to reality.

Excerpted with permission from the memoir, Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love by Michelle Yang, (Fifth Avenue Press, 2025).

Michelle Yang is an advocate whose writings on the intersection of Asian American identity, body image, and mental health have been published in NBC News, CNN, InStyle, and Reader's Digest. Michelle has also been featured on NPR, Washington Post, and The Seattle Times for her advocacy. She loves exploring new parts of her new home state of Michigan with her family and smoking up the kitchen with spicy recipes. You can find her on michelleyangwriter.com or on Instagram @michelleyangwriter.