The back of her head, the way she is holding herself, the way her hair is tied—I can tell that this isn’t the mum I grew up with, not the vampire who made me. She inhabits her body like a human, one who doesn’t hate herself and deny herself luxuries, but the opposite. She is pulling at her cheeks, stretching out her few wrinkles, and widening her eyes. I stand on one foot and kind of kick the floor with the other, letting my leg swing. I feel irritable. “Julie,” I eventually say, and then I sigh.

My mum looks up, but not into my face. She looks at my reflection in the mirror. “Hello,” she says in a voice she never used while I was growing up but that she has been speaking in often since she had her dentures fitted. It was as if a new personality with its own voice came with those teeth. It’s different from the voice that surfaces during episodes in which my mum relives moments from her past, the voice that slips into Malay sometimes. It’s the voice of the human she wishes she were, I think. It’s very gentle, and her accent is quite posh, and very British.

“Hello,” I say. We’re side by side in the mirror. I suppose we look like each other. Usually, I only think about myself as having taken on the physical traits of my dad, not my mum—my body human, my insides vampire. I see myself just as half Japanese, half monster, as though the monster side has consumed everything to do with my mum’s identity. But, right now, the divisions in me feel less clear.

“You’re very beautiful,” my mum says. “Where are you from?” she asks, looking at the skin on my neck and then my face, and then looking at my large, wild hair.

“I don’t know what to say to that, Mum.”

She frowns at me.

“Well, Dad was Japanese, wasn’t he?” I say. Her frown doesn’t go away, but it changes—she looks at me as though she is trying to pick out the Japanese in me, so she can turn it over and over like an object and work out what she feels about it. Sometimes, I’ve wondered whether my mum chose to be with a Japanese human so she could control him and consume him—so she could essentially colonize his body, in the way that Japan had briefly colonized Malaysia. I look around the room, paid for by Dad’s paintings, wondering if she’d also always planned to use his works—which have always sold well enough to keep us afloat—in this way. To sustain herself, to essentially feed her life and keep it going. “You know he was,” I whisper. “And, Mum, look at you. Look at your skin. Come on, Mum.”