Story · Personal Essay
What the
bathroom
already knew.
On the design of spaces that work — until the body they were built for is no longer yours.
Kaohsiung · Los Angeles · Amsterdam
Ongoing
Three days after I came home from the hospital, I needed to take a shower. I was alone. My right leg had nerve damage from the typhoon, and the wound reopened whenever I moved it, so I wrapped it in plastic wrap first, pressing carefully around the edges until the bleeding slowed to a seep rather than a flow. Then I got down on the floor and crawled to the bathroom.
I had not thought about the door threshold until I reached it.
I had not thought about the wet floor, or the fact that there was no dry zone to sit in, or that the only surface at the right height for someone who could not stand was a toilet I could not easily reach from the shower. I had not thought about any of this because I had never needed to. The bathroom had always worked. It was, in fact, the room in my apartment I loved most.
My family has always been particular about cleanliness. We are the kind of people who wash down the bathroom after every shower, who would not leave water on the floor for someone else to find. The layout I had always loved was precisely because it made this easy: no partition between shower and toilet, one continuous space that could be rinsed clean from end to end in a single pass. Efficient. Satisfying. Mine.
That afternoon, I understood for the first time that this room had been designed for a specific body, and that body had always been mine, and now it was not.
Invisible Conditions
Amblyopia — since age 9
When I am tired, the three-dimensional world flattens. At night, or when exhausted, I cannot leave home without navigation assistance. Road signs become unreliable. The anxiety of not being sure where I am makes movement feel unsafe.
Neither condition is visible. Nothing about me looks different to anyone passing by.
Nerve damage — Typhoon Krathon, Oct 2024
I sustained permanent nerve damage in my right lower leg. During rehabilitation, I could not lift my foot high enough to board the light rail at my nearest station. I stopped every five minutes on streets I had walked hundreds of times before.
I walk and run. I have learned, through habit and conscious reconstruction, to simulate what I can no longer feel.
This question did not begin with my own body.
It began with my mother.
She was illiterate and fiercely independent. During her cancer treatment, the hospitals and transport systems she needed to navigate were structured around an assumed literacy she did not have. I filmed her entire public transport route so she could memorize it without reading.
It was not enough. What worked was a taxi.
She died without ever traveling independently beyond the radius she had mapped on foot. Not because she lacked capability, but because the designed environments she entered had no entry point for her reality. What I witnessed in those corridors was not a failure of access. It was a slow, designed erosion of dignity.
Three Cities
Kaohsiung
organized around motorcycles
The city I grew up in, and returned to after the typhoon. The city I want to bring what I learn back to.
Los Angeles
assumes a car
Without a car, I found myself quietly shrinking my expectations, learning to want only what was already within reach, telling myself that was enough. That is not inconvenience. That is a city extracting a slow cost from the people it was not designed for.
Amsterdam
organized around bicycles
There is something that only distance can give you: the ability to see the place you came from as a designed system, rather than just as home. Amsterdam will give me that distance again, and this time I know what I want to do with it.
I am aware that my experience is a temporary and relatively mild version of something that many people navigate every day without relief and without the knowledge that it will end. I carry the memory not as a hardship but as a research question I could not have formulated before I had a body that made it necessary.