Volume 1: Issue 00
EDITOR’S NOTE 1
NON-FICTION 2-24
FICTION 25-33
CREDITS 34-35
Volume 1: Issue 00
EDITOR’S NOTE I’ve been thinking a lot about how to open the inaugural issue of A Side of Rice. This has been a few months in the making––between stressing over content to stressing over layout to stressing over branding to stressing over biweekly meetings with the literal best team of coordinators in the whole wide world. So it’s important to me that I get this right. Should I be light and funny, or aspire to the heights of pretension and seriousness? Should I act like a friend? Should I remove myself from the picture? How much should I emphasise my wish for greater diversity in the identification of Asian American? In this zine? But I think I’ll start like this: welcome. Hi, hello there. Bienvenue to the inaugural issue of A Side of Rice, a culture and crit zine by and for Asian Americans. Our goal is to establish a platform to celebrate radical Asiam creativity and create a space within diaspora that is as valid as any identity that is not treated as liminal and therefore marginal, or lesser than. We are not frauds, not fakes, not cheap imitations of “True Asians™” –– we have our own identities and experiences that are just as valid, just as formative, just as Asian, and we deserve a space to see that celebrated for our own edification, rather than performed for the white gaze. Hence, A Side of Rice. There’s not much that ties the Asiam community (if it can be called that) together. Our foundational act of transnational, transethnic solidarity happened over thirty years ago, and since then the moniker of Asian American has been used inaccurately as a cultural, rather than a political statement. But in reality, there is very little that ties Asian Americans together save for our ethnic origins in the continent of Asia. We have widely varying interests, widely varying settlement histories, widely varying dynamics with the society we live in. But our one commonality––the reason I set the theme for our first ever issue as travel––is displacement. Someone, somewhere along the line decided to move across an ocean. It could be you, your parent, or your great great great grandparent six generations back. But this is the thing that we hold in common. Our relationships with “The Motherland” (so essentialist a phrase) are complicated because of this. Our relationships to ourselves are complicated because of this. Our relationships with North America are complicated because of this. I grew up in a community where travel back to the ancestral land––China, in my case––was expected. While other kids went to Paris and Yosemite, to the Bahamas and the Maldives, for me, travel was not an exercise in my American wealth or power, no neo-imperialist scheme. It was always a homecoming, and yet an alienation as well. I’ve always been lucky in the sense that I speak Mandarin without an accent, and so I blend in almost anywhere in China, so the difference between myself and the Chinese people who grew up in China proper was both erased and emphasised, and it became extremely clear how differently people saw me before and after they realised that I was a Chinese American. Yet while the topic of travel brings up a myriad issues both painful and pleasurable, I had an ulterior motive for my choice. “Oh the Places You’ll Go”––the Dr. Seuss book that is about as cliche a graduation gift as can be. My parents are Chinese––my graduation always felt like a given, not a gift, and I got no such present, but it does also mean that I am, at the best of times, superstitious. I wanted something auspicious, something that signified our aspirations for this zine. I wanted the strength of my belief to carry this venture through, and I believe in beginning with hope. So go forth, and dare to hope. -Alyza Liu
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NON-FICTION
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Volume 1: Issue 00
hours are as great a distance as miles by Alyza Liu
fifteen years between myself and beijing and the willow trees i thought i’d remembered but maybe that’s nothing more than the rising mist coming to cloud my thoughts with touches of ash and things you can never really get back fifteen years before i learned the blue sky of my memory was really the blue sky of jersey and the people, and the building, and the moments are gone, captured, scattered only in the two dimensions of paper, when photo becomes memory becomes illusion, and illusion turns to dust when the sea begins to rust and time is as great a separator as distance, except that distance is broachable but water carrying falling petals doesn’t backwards flow fifteen years away from the child i was then, and i’m a woman now, but i thought a woman could be more sure of who she is, but if i can’t even trust my portrait not to lie then how do i believe the words i tell myself? i thought my name was an expanding sky but really, it’s the night, closing in and full of northern wolves seeking southern suns and maybe that was only a song i heard once on the radio, when the lights were low and the sky was full of tears and i was lulled by a lullaby of my lucid years, long buried in the long ago fifteen years further, and did i dream up the house and my grandfather’s yard or were those high walls blurred by dust of broken tears that trailed down a face too long for beauty, too sad for solace, of the girl who didn’t know how tall the sky was, how solid the earth, and was convinced she could dig herself to gravity too grave to be buried in long messy ropes of a banyan tree that stretches itself deep across the howl of my memories, and how lonesome is it to be awake in your own mind fifteen years and the fifteen hour plane ride is nowhere near long enough to bridge the waters that separate me from a place i neither belong to nor am divorced from and would i have known how deep the blood of my great grandfather ran through the plains if my mother hadn’t told me, and did she tell me the truth, and when did her truth became my truth, when did my truth become the truth as it’s known and if i take the train that carves itself through the interior of a place that no longer knows me will i deliver myself into the memory of the floating flowers of spring when my tongue curls around the shape of a sovereign self does the language that hollows out my mouth belong to me? fifteen years and the minutes carry me away from the river of my dreams and my words vanish from the shores of the place that’s moved forward without me 过了十五年，我所不知道的事已能垒成城墙 你能想象出的自己和现实的真理无法融合一体 蓝色的天空压着黄土的大地 而我只能站在无能和为力之间学会如何呼吸 幻想着如何把自己掏空，磨练成夜晚里勇敢闪亮的星星 再过十五年连这个都会变成记忆
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Jessica Man: November 2014 - Glencoe, Scotland
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Preface: A Night in a capsule hotel in Narita Airport after being lost and missing a flight. By Eunbi C. Kim June 16, 2015 As I lay here In a plastic cage Hearing plastic sounds Feeling plastic sounds Seeking human sounds And touch I gradually see What a different world I have signed up for See, it’s not a different world But different cultural norms Yet, I am lost In this world I seemingly knew I am supposed to be familiar with My inner-self and Outer self abscond New/conflicting - Perceptions/ Realities Maybe this plastic haven, will find the human in me
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Jessica Man: June 2013 - Murray Building, Hong Kong
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Jessica Man: June 2013 - Gardens by the Bay, Singapore
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the sheer drop of memory by Jessica Man
I remember sitting on the mountain and looking back over the city as people passed by. I remember distinctly the clouds with curls like lambswool passing over to a horizon behind me, pushed on their way by a vigorous easterly wind; the sky blue and purple, the sun glowing like an ember set in the crown of the earth, the gentle dark silhouetted hills in the distance rising like neighboring houses on a country road. I remember lights turning on in the buildings below, yellow and white. I remember the thorny spire of the Scott Monument rising against the fire of sunset, the swell and sweeping walls of the castle. I remember the cold and biting wind, and how fragile everything seemed from the cliff - a pretty model town flanked by dark and ancient ramparts. I miss the winding streets, the low walls hung with ivy. The closes, hidden drops, slow descents; Waverly Station, hidden in a narrow concrete ravine, and Waverly Bridge, a thin and elderly arch. Tall and narrow apartments, shops squeezed next to each other for this or that charity: a Tesco, a hardware store, a locksmith, a café, a Kurdish grocer, a bank. I remember carrying two bags of groceries, one in each hand, walking back home from handing in an exam, when flurries of snow blocked out the sun and heaped themselves onto on my black coat, soaking my canvas shoes. I squinted at the mountain, which seemed to rise up from a canyon of townhouses, and was pleased to see that its bald head was capped in white. Almost every night, clouds came to hide the moon. Not to say that the nights were moonless, but rather that the moonlight was diffused, as if a curtain had been drawn in front of the sky so that the stars could discuss private matters amongst themselves. Nonetheless, it watched over me like a patrolman. I crossed from the Cowgate to the Meadows and proceeded down Newington back to the quiet enclosure where I lived on the second floor. A light was always on. Sometimes it was mine. I remember the cold, as well. Seeing my breath as I left the shower. Letting the windows steam up as I worked
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in the kitchen. I didn’t turn the heater on for a month. When I got back from London after three days, I curled up under my blanket and waited for hours until it warmed up again. Always cold and always damp, but not unpleasantly so. Every day was a day after the rain. I climbed the hills on an afternoon like that, shoes squelching in the mud, staring back at flocks of sheep, following an uncertain trail that wound through pastures and pastures and pastures, between groves of leafless trees encrusted with green lichens. Walking, walking, walking. Sitting on the top deck of the bus, alone, watching the city sputter out into a quiet countryside. I spent a lot of time inside my own head. In October, the nights became longer and the days shortened considerably. Nothing to do, but stay home, think, play some video games. I thought – you’re going to regret not going out more. But I don’t. I understand. I wish I had known that I would understand. I barely remember the nights I spent beside my window. I remember walking alone under the giant arches along the Cowgate, up and down the Royal Mile, down to Orrok Park, drifting in and out of the shops on Princes Street. I remember walking all around the mountain before sunset. I did not say a word. There was no one with me. Everyone was gone by mid-December, and I was the only one left in the house. R---- said goodbye and I could hear tears in her voice as we hugged. I was touched to think I had made an impression on someone here, when it had been so easy to think that I was the only person left on the whole earth. B---- kept odd hours and I never saw him; one day he was simply gone. M---- and D---vanished, too. The last time I saw T---- was the day before he left, and something had happened to make me poke my head out of my door, some strange noise, and we shrugged and grinned at each other, not knowing what to do about it. I’d made him promise me that he’d say goodbye before he left. I went to a church service for two hours, and when I came home, the house was silent. I waited for him to knock, but he was already gone, and he’s the only one I’ll never see again. People were kind, very kind, the cashiers and the waiters and the reverends and the tour guides and the
Volume 1: Issue 00 professors. The Chinese exchange students would always try to buddy up with me at social events – I guess when we’re all foreigners, the fact that I’m foreign-born doesn’t really matter anymore. ABC, CBC, straight from the mainland, who cares? We’re all alone and looking for someone to talk to. And in the city, it was hard not to be alone. If I spoke to anyone, it was a forcibly gentle bout of British small-talk. If I saw anyone, it was seemingly through a veil. Church was a lifesaver; the Methodist church was ten minutes away by foot, and the reverend was a woman, and all the older ladies asked how I was doing after service. And I met with some of them on Wednesday nights too, mostly white English transplants, grad students, older folks with storied careers. Thank God for them. They made me feel like a human being again. What’s it like to be a ghost? In the city, no one looks at you twice. We are all apparitions, moving silently in and out of each others’ lives.
a lake. At peace – knowing that there is a stillness and quietness you can return to whenever you need it. I remember squinting against the sun with aching feet, turning the corner at the opposite end of the park. I remember ducking into grocery stores and buying glass bottles of soda that clinked against each other all the way home. I remember the basil plant on the sidewalk, wilting in the damp cold. Who else remembers? Who else knows what it was like to stand in that field, to look over the grove of trees, down from the slope of the hills, to see the glimmer of houses against the green cloak of the land? To think: my God, I am alone, and no one else can know?
I felt most at home in the mountains, but that brought the ache of loneliness too. People lived here once, baptized their children in the river, made their homes on the red earth, felt their way through the same gray fog, saw the same rivers of golden light pour down into the valley from the occasional break in the clouds, craned their necks up to try to see the tops of the hills through the endless rolling mists. But here, now, the Scots are almost all moved away, pushed aside by the hand of a colonizer, so that the majesty of the sun breaking through the clouds greets different faces every day, glints off of chrome chassis, shines down on the flat and treeless and empty land. It was as if I had gotten lost in a dream of endless red hills a thousand feet tall, where the clouds were close and unrelenting and rain fell down over me like a curtain of glass. I thought about sleeping there, resting my head against the mountains like the shoulders of old friends, sleeping in the cradle of the valley, or walking on and on until I was made new.
I remember landing at Dulles and suddenly waking up in a way I hadn’t done for months. I wasn’t a ghost anymore. I’d been in these terminal shuttles many times before. I was at home, among friends, and I knew what to expect, I knew what to say. I talked myself hoarse. People saw me. I was, for once, very real. It was as if I had awakened from a dream. I am the only one who remembers, because I was alone, and nothing else has felt like that dream. I have very clear and vivid memories of standing here or there, eating this or that, burning my hand on the stove, clutching the change in my pocket. But they are only memories. Except for scattered debris, here and there, I am sometimes unsure if those months were real.
What kind of peace did I learn? The kind of peace that looking out over the sea brings. The kind of peace that makes your heart lift but grounds your body; the kind of peace you clutch to your chest when you say world without end, amen. The gray peace that lies underneath everything, like the clay in a riverbed; that lies over everything, like smooth ice across the surface of
And yet when I left, it was like leaving an old friend. I walked to the bus stop, dragging my suitcase, dodging bar hoppers on my way across the bridge, and I got on the bus, and I went to the airport, and I flew home. I felt like I’d left something behind.
Let me paint the view from that cliff over and over again for you. Let it be for me what Sainte-Victoire was for Cézanne. Maybe then I can find the points where every memory aligns, at the lens of a telescope that looks into the red-shifted past, and tell you to look – and maybe then I can share with you exactly what I saw: the city, the hills, the sunset, the endless sky.
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when all is said and done by Jessica Man
Speak to me – in faith! Speak by the light of the moon, which shines like a dime in the velvet-showcase night. We’ll set up our nylon tents on foreign ground, build our homes in postcolonial exercise with foreign stones. Then say to me, “Be true!” We’ll walk up and down the river in the green alleyway, watching the clouds pass over the Cherry River, strolling down the green and stolen avenues. Who have we forced out? Who has no home? Tell me, “Go – that way!” Tell me the names of your cities; intone the list where the dome of the sky can swallow it up and spit out an oracle in an accident of stars. Are we dust that the temporal wind scatters over the sea? Are we ashes pushed out of the earth, to fall and make a false and starving winter? We’ll be home today and forever. We will live within our hearts. The tools forged for battle will be used to till the soil. The ploughshare from the shotgun, and horseshoes from rubber bullets. I belong in myself; I settle myself and no other settles me. We’ll speak a scarce language in the plaza; we will give our spoils up. And when we have given them up, we’ll walk together; we’ll walk hand-in-hand through the lost gardens and climb the palisades cloaked in roses; we’ll walk on the empty highways picked out with stars and lit with silver sand.
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Jessica Man: December 2014 - Loch Ness, Scotland
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Volume 1: Issue 00
stranger in a stranger’s land by Alyza Liu
The danger first begins when you see not people, but pictures. Not lives, but compositions. When you see yourself as the hand of God. When three dimensional bodies and their complicated lives are rendered into flat images, into aesthetics. It isn’t a problem for me in Beijing, or Datong, or even Hunyuan, because these are places full of my people, places I once called home. Usually, the images were of family – no matter how carefully composed, I was their context. They would always leap out of the frame and into reality once the shutter snapped and I captured the light. It was a little more difficult in Florence, because it was also my first time being a tourist in the truest sense of the word. Florentine art of the Renaissance was an especial love of mine, and so I’d looked forward to the beauty – and in a shocking twist of events, the exoticism, even, of simply matching my perceived foreignness with my actual foreignness. My perceived lack of fluency with my actual lack of fluency. A place, in essence, where perception and reality would align and I would be not a perpetual foreigner, but a real foreigner. Doing real foreigner things. It was exciting, but I was wary. It turned out that I would only take pictures of buildings and art in Florence, because I didn’t know how else to orient myself. Was I an American, with all the political baggage that entailed? Was I one in a large number of NYU students who had, from the local gossip I’d picked up, run amok in the city to the great displeasure of literally the entirety of the native population? Or was I Chinese, part of the nation Italy had invaded as part of the Eight Nation Alliance that raped and looted their way across Beijing and the Northern Chinese countryside? If, for once, I am not the spectacle, am I subjecting other people to becoming it? I read a Sontag essay a while back which contended that the taking of photographs cheapens the experience of a place – photographs cannot capture the experience of the Grand Canyon, for example, and they only encourage you to seek and reproduce the experiences you expect from other people’s photographs. I didn’t – still don’t – necessarily agree with this line of thinking. As an immigrant kid whose only vacations constituted of
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flights to and from China, and, twice in my life, a road trip, family photographs were not only ways of preserving memories, but ways of affixing experience within space and time. But it did get me thinking – what are our end goals in taking photographs? Is it to recall these things for ourselves, to provide portals into a past that may otherwise slip away? And what does that mean in a time when social media has the capacity to make even the most private of our experiences public property? To be clear – this is not an invective against social media, nor is this one of a thousand and one thinkpieces criticising millennials for our supposed self-absorption and inability to function without our cellphones, because I am fully a millennial, helpless without my own smartphone. Millennials are not better or worse than any previous or following generations – humans will be humans all the world over, and since the beginning of history, we have never fundamentally changed in character. The rise of paper led one 19th century schoolteacher to lament that students nowadays no longer know how to properly use their chalkboards. 15th century monarchs commissioned artists to draw fanart and selfies on their behalfs. We’ve found new ways to do the same things over and over and over again. What I do want to think more critically about is the way the sharing and spreading of images proliferates certain images – and thus certain narratives – about certain places. I’m an artist by spirit, if not by trade – I’d gotten into prestigious art schools, but some combination of lack of courage and immigrant guilt pushed me into humanities at NYU instead (which, for my parents, was the better option of the two; all immigrant guilt is relative, guys) – and I deal in images. More than anything, I know that images are not innocent. They always have a perspective, a story, a gaze. If I upload 132 pictures of Florence onto my Facebook feed – which I haven’t, but that’s a decision I’ll come to later – what am I trying to say? When I upload any image onto any social media platform, be in Facebook or Insta or Snapchat (which I use much more liberally, perhaps because the images disappear), what am I trying to do? Because I think we can all admit that no matter how unfiltered the content on our feeds (and I have no filter...), they are still curated versions of our lives, not representative of the whole.
Volume 1: Issue 00 So for me, when I batch upload pictures of Exotic Locales™ onto Facebook, it feels like a performance of culturedness and a display of spectacle. That is to say, I feel like I am turning the places I visited into a spectacle to be gawked at, cementing a dominant narrative about it. For example, when I was in Florence, I was a tourist going to tourist-y places, doing tourist-y things. Florence is not a city that’s been frozen in time since 1500. Modernity is a condition of existing in the modern world, not any social or material condition. Yet the dominant narrative of Florence revolves around the Renaissance so that that becomes the totality of the narrative about it. And as an American, contributing to that narrative of Florence that revolves solely around the Medici and the Uffizi, the Duomo and the Ponte Vecchio – it didn’t feel right. This isn’t a matter of ethics, though I think it could be. For me, it’s more a matter of how I want to relate to a place. In the end, I decided not to upload those pictures. I keep them in my Google Drive, and on occasion, when I want to remember the friends I made there, or the food I had, or the sheer beauty of Tuscany – because it is beautiful – I revisit it. But as long as I have those memories, what does it matter that other people do not have access to them? It was something I thought a lot about in the aftermath of my visit, when all the people from my cohort were uploading Facebook albums full of beautiful pictures and getting hundreds of likes. I admit - I’m human too, and Facebook likes and Insta likes are all extremely validating things. But now that the immediacy of the experience is past, I feel like I get to savour it more both by being comfortable in my choices and in having kept it to myself.
write.) The 20,000 poems written about 黄山 are part of my cultural heritage. The narratives associated with those places, in some form or another, have informed who I am, who I’m becoming, though they are still very often complicated by urban encroachment and questions of who is benefiting materially from the tourism. Because we live in a world where images - often contextless images, or images taken deliberately out of context - are proliferated at a rapid pace, I don’t think it’s cynical to say that we have to be very careful about using them. We have to be careful of the narratives that we are crafting through our lenses. This economy of images is not an innocent one. I’m arguing here not for the large-scale removal of vacation photos from social media platforms – that’s not realistic and I don’t even think it’s particularly useful, and my uploading or not uploading pictures were largely contingent on my own circumstances. (After all, how else will your parents torture your partners at awkward family dinners?) What I am arguing for, however, is a more critical consciousness of the way we relate to the places in which we are visitors; more critical consciousness of the ways we create and support certain narratives; how we turn people and histories into spectacle; the ways images are proliferated and the stories they tell. Most importantly, I’m arguing for responsibility. I’m arguing for respect.
It doesn’t mean that the friends who uploaded pictures of Florence are awful, awful people, and by no means is this meant as some sort of judgement on them. This was a personal decision, and one I make different choices about in the different places I visit. I have albums’ worth of pictures of Guilin and Anhui and 江南, because my relationship with those narratives, those images (though still complex and complicated by my status as an upper middle class Han Chinese from a first-tier city who now lives in America) are different. Those images are part of the shared cultural space and imagination of my culture. When 杜甫 wrote “正是江南好风景/落花时节又逢 君,” I was his audience. (Not me, specifically. I’m from a farming family. I wouldn’t have known how to read or
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Volume 1: Issue 00
Alyza Liu: January 2014 - Florence, Italy
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Alyza Liu: January 2014 - Florence, Italy
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《付家坡的刘小姐》 by Alyza Liu
人家都跟我说我老爸是付家坡的骄傲。我每次回老家看 望老人的时候，村儿里个个老人家都叫我“刘海的女 儿” “刘家的闺女”。付家坡人不多，就那么几十个居 民，十几个家。但他们都认识我老爸。 我老爸不仅是付家坡唯一去了市外大学的学生，他也是 付家坡唯一出来的研究生，出来的博士，也是海外唯一 能说是付家坡的人。在我爸爸获得博士的那一天，我爷 爷奶奶把一个金金的牌子挂在老宅的门儿上：博士之 家。 是的，付家村的每个乡亲们都知道我爸的名儿。可付家 坡应该没有人知道我的原名我不是在付家坡出生的，不 是在付家坡长大的，也真的算不上付家坡的人。因为父 母都在北京上的学，他们也自然在北京成了家，而我最 早的记忆，照片，故事，都属于北京。父母去美国留学 后，他们也就把我托付给了我了姥姥姥爷，让它们在大 同市内把我养大，所以我跟爷爷奶奶接触的也不多。我 对爷爷奶奶最早的回忆就是我三岁那年被他们养的大黑 犬吓的半死不活。 出国后，我们相见的机会就越来越少了。我家世世代代 都是农民，是乡下人，而因此，爷爷奶奶都没有护照， 说的也是一口让我很难听懂的晋腔。除了春节偶尔会拜 访拜访外，爷爷和奶奶从我生命里就像消失了一样。那 时候比较天真的我不懂的什么叫做珍惜吧，也可能觉得 老人会活到永远。 我对付家坡最深刻的影响就是我十五岁那年跟着爸爸妈 妈和六岁的弟弟一起回去的那种感觉。我们是坐火车坐 到大同，然后我二舅的一位朋友开着车把我们送到了老 家。那应该是一个七月份吧。盛夏已经离我们而去，可 天气还是那么的闷热。我们开过很多曲折的山路，看见 很多其他的村落。他们那种简朴的生活也深深的打动了 我。（在另外一个宇宙里，我会跟他们有同一样的生活 吗？） 我们拐进付家坡的时候，面对的是一个绿绿的沧海。车 像船一样飞过那一片片的葵花和玉米。我还记得有一对 自行车在花田边被哪对情侣轻轻地立在那儿，童话故事 一般的那种场景。我闭着眼睛，抬着头像风仰。不过一 会儿，水泥路变成了纯泥的路，而爸爸把那位叔叔指挥 到他从前住过的家。 我爸爸老是爱说我们是刘邦的后人。可要是这是真的的 话，那么只能说现在的刘家老宅大不如从前的了！我们 那儿没啥，就是有黄土，因此爷爷奶奶的房子是用黄泥 巴做的。房子前有个不过八平米大的小院儿，院儿里种 了些西红柿，葵花，茄子，豆角什么的。房子本身跟院 子差不多大，里面有三间屋子 — 一个堂屋，两个卧室。 每个卧室里只有一个炕。那时的我被惊呆了。我爸可是
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有五个兄弟姐妹呀！加上爷爷奶奶就是八个人，是四个 人一张床的。 记得奶奶和各位姑姑们为我和弟弟做了一顿我吃过最丰 盛的午餐 — 在外面的小厨房里，她们给我们炒了花生， 用了自家种的西红柿，茄子，宰了自家养的猪，摆了一 桌亲手做的山西卣面。那是我吃过最有“家”味儿的一 道菜。 那是四年前的一个夏天。两年前的一个冬天夜晚，家里 来了电话：我爷爷突然去世了。三个月后，奶奶也跟着 他一起走了。我的爷爷奶奶是民国初年出生的，说真的 也是一大把年纪了。可不知道为什么，我从小就一直以 为我会跟他们在不确定的未来里有很多很多的时间。虽 然现在学会了珍惜，但也来不及了。 我偶尔会想到爷爷和奶奶和他们的那个土阶茅茨的小寮 房。虽然已经多年没见，但我依然把它的模样记得清清 楚楚。在深蓝色的天空下，被一道倾斜而灿烂的微光照 耀着，它永远在那片草坡守候着我与家人的记忆。我也 对那个破旧的草屋有很多疑问；他毕竟是陪着我父亲长 大的一个地方，看见过我叔叔们和姑姑们的很多时光， 是一片值得记住的历史。它现在里面住着谁呢？会是我 大爷吗？或是我大哥，二哥？还是是一个跟我毫无关系 的陌生人呢？或是一个更风雨如晦的情况—我爸爸和他 的兄弟姐妹成长的那个家现在已经没人住了，以前热闹 的堂屋现在只有回忆和欲望敢出入。外面曾经瓜熟蒂落 的庄稼会不会枯萎了？ 我有的时候想回付家坡找这些问题的答案，但我同时不 知道自己有没有勇气去面对现在的现实。小时候，我跟 爷爷奶奶不熟，因此跟他们在一起的交往也不亲密。应 该也不是谁的错吧，就是时间和距离的交叉使我们像陌 生人似的。我不想知道自己对他们老人家有多么无知， 但在同时，我对爷爷奶奶有一定的好奇。 我爸爸是付家坡的骄傲，但我的感觉是我对付家坡毕竟 什么都不是。每次想到下一年的春节我听不见爷爷奶奶 用那厚厚的浑源口音跟着我一起跨年时我也会特别伤 心。但经过了这一切我学会了坚强，珍惜。我不会让付 家坡的乡亲们失望的。我也不会让爷爷奶奶经过的一切 被黄土覆盖着。虽然我不是在付家坡长大，但我是付家 坡的子孙，也要当付家坡的骄傲。
Volume 1: Issue 00
Jessica Man: December 2014 - Edinburgh, Scotland
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Volume 1: Issue 00
make yourself at home by Jessica Man
of late, i have locked my doors to poets. my god, is every writer an inquisitor? must every tongue pierce? i won’t thank you for a fistful of wildflowers - for bread on the point of a knife. don’t ask me to fast-and-pray anymore. don’t ask me for discipline. not for this. my god, let me be free! may the motherland never call for me again, because i know now that there is no longer any place from which i can be exiled. shake the dust from your feet, offload ten generations: say, “may that which has changed never return to what it was before!” may my children go out across the seas and stars and become a new people, for my tongue is only my own, and in a thousand years i will lose them anyway. send us out with blessings - with the last brave incense of the previous age. tell me before i am born this time that each new spring begets a new beauty. count one year jasmine, one year lavender; count orange, apple, chrysanthemum, clove. we are waiting in the wings to show you how we have become. we are here, we are here, a new shore carved by an old river, the change swift rainfall brings in deep summer. we are here in the strange city, in every skyline assemblage of sharp silhouettes, briefly blooming, like smoke, yearning upwards against the sunset.
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Volume 1: Issue 00
Jessica Man: December 2014 - Loch Ness, Scotland
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Volume 1: Issue 00
Telugu Hospitality in Addis Ababa by Rajani Gudlavalleti
Sitting alone on the white pleather couch of the Uncle’s home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I am eating a plate of mind-warming charu, chole, and lemon rice. The three children also sit silently in their individual single-seater armchairs facing the giant HD television, stuffing their faces with these delicious Hyderabadi dishes and ignoring my presence. The Telugu film about a 20-something man with intense sexual intimacy issues is far more entertaining than a strange dark-skinned woman with a shaved head visiting their home on a weekday afternoon. My “American” accent and obvious inability to fully understand Telugu also give away that I don’t belong there and will likely not be staying long. I wish these children would interact with me, if only to distract from the barrage of opinions happening at me from their overbearing father. Once again in my life, I am forced into a quiet rage by an Indian man. I often don’t find myself quiet for long under such circumstances, for the desire to keep the veins in my eyeballs intact is a bit more pressing than cultural respectability politics. However, I am a stranger in a strange land, and these are my people. Three days prior, I was in another home of strangers, eating food cooked by a woman with whom I could not directly communicate, trying to modify my body posturing to ease the brown masculinity of others. That, however, was a more welcoming environment that filled my heart with warmth instead of a boil. On that day in Lalibela in Northern Ethiopia, I had met two teenage boys, Thomas and John. Thomas and John travel a day’s walk once a week from their family’s small farm in the countryside to attend school in Lalibela. I met them as I was walking back to my hostel from a two-day tour of magnificent churches built into mountains in the 12th century. The boys walked along with me to practice their English skills. They were fascinated by my skin color and curious about which country I call home. They guessed Kenya. I explained that I am Indian-American, with a hyphen, a concept that may have been a bit nuanced for this particular conversation. We chatted about India and the U.S., and their perceptions about Indians valuing education. I politely nodded to keep the conversation moving, avoiding my usual diatribe about the model minority myth. They told me they wanted to go to
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university in Addis but their father would rather they stay and work on the farm. The Ethiopian boys then invited me to a traditional coffee ceremony at the home they rent in Lalibela, which led to a modest home-cooked meal of ingera bread and berbere. In that 200-square-foot home in a neighborhood of aluminum-siding structures atop a rocky mountain range, I felt more at ease than in the household of Telugu Pride in Addis Ababa. Sitting alone on the white pleather couch of the Uncle’s home in Addis Ababa, I am now learning that he is apparently a staunch advocate for raising children with a traditional Telugu upbringing. The Uncle sends his children to Hyderabad every year for continued education in the summer. He finds the ways in which first and second generation Indian-Americans live in the United States to be abhorrent, which he only describes to me as generalized statements of fact, so proud that he never took a job in the United States. At no point does he directly acknowledge that I, the woman sitting before him, am a second generation Indian-American. As the anger swells in this body (born and raised in the United States), I think back to the moment three days ago, sitting on a pillow in Thomas and John’s modest home. I felt so well-received by them – a “wanted” guest. I was not put in the position to defend my identity or my upbringing. Yet, in both circumstances, I was challenged by being seen as an American. While the Uncle placed assumptions of American-ness onto me, Thomas and John were fascinated by the mere fact that I even exist. Over the course of the three days between Lalibela and Addis Ababa, I traveled by minibus with over a dozen local commuters who took little notice of me. I managed to blend in amongst the Amharic-speaking peoples by covering myself with a scarf and playing to my seemingly ethnically ambiguous features. I found this covert operation to be very comforting because I was not asked to explain myself to anyone. No one asked me where I was from or verbally stated their assumptions about me to me. It was only when I opened my mouth to speak English to Bimels, a young bilingual Ethiopian man who noticed me writing in my notebook, did our fellow passengers realize I was not family. At our overnight stop in the town of Dessie, I was suddenly terrified by an overwhelming sense of feeling out of place. I may share some features with the local folk, but my sense of being is deeply rooted outside of that place. Everyone I came across spoke Amharic to me and was confused at my inability to respond. If it were not for my new friend, Bimels, I cannot say for sure if I would
Volume 1: Issue 00 have found my footing in that bustling transit town. He directed me to the same budget motel he always uses when he travels to Addis Ababa. I paid my 75 cents for the dingy room next door to my new friend and cried myself to sleep, homesick and wishing for something familiar. Little did I realize that by agreeing to meet with my Babai’s old friend, the Uncle in Addis Ababa, I was to find a strongly familiar feeling. Not the familiarity I hoped for, but a feeling that is inherent to my upbringing. Inherent and obligatory. Sitting alone on the white pleather couch of the Uncle’s home in Addis Ababa, I try to focus my attention to the sexually-troubled momma’s boy singing on the television in order to drown out the Uncle’s ramblings about the American Ego. In this moment, I regret putting myself through this pain. Again. Throughout my life, I have experienced multiple levels of shame, guilt, and internalized oppression as a result of interactions with Indian Uncles. Telling me what is wrong with my parents for the choices they have had to make in the United States. Expounding opinions about the politics of the nation I call home. Forcing me to dig deep for some semblance of American Pride, of which there is little but I fake it out of stubbornness. Feeling a right to comment upon, and even touch my body without my permission. Ignoring my presence and directing all questions and conversation to my brother instead of to me. If I had taken this trip with my brother, older and more appropriately sensitive to the obligations of Indian-ness, we would have planned a portion of our time in Ethiopia around visiting family friends who had made their homes in this country. If my brother had to sit and listen to the Uncle’s judgments, we would have cut this visit pretty short due to an uproar of brown men demanding respect. I wished my brother was with me. Then, I remembered that this situation I had found myself in was pretty spectacular and that I am a remarkable woman. Not in a million years would I have ever expected myself to be taking my dream trip to eastern Africa – a solo woman-of-color backpacker, doing the damn thing. On top of that, I am allowing myself to endure Uncle-isms all alone in a country where anyone else I knew I had met only that week. When I began my trip to Ethiopia one week ago, the Uncle got ahold of my local cell phone number from my Babai. The Uncle called me incessantly while I was laying around a bamboo hut on stilts over-looking Lake Babogaya about an hour from Addis Ababa. As I listened to his voicemails, I methodically considered my next
steps regarding this stranger. Do I respond and shut him down? Do I say, I don’t know you but I imagine that this will be more stressful than I would prefer…so thanks but no thanks? Do I say, yes I will meet with you under the conditions that you respect all of my intersecting identities and the choices that my family and I have made to survive and thrive in this world? Or do I let him keep calling…? As the phone continued to vibrate, I pondered my options to the melodic sounds of native bird life and the warm glow of the sun reflecting off the glistening water. I answered. Not quite sure why or how I answered. Maybe it was muscle memory. Upon accepting the call, I was ambushed by a blare of Telugu at my head. I had to ask him to speak in English. It began from there. The polite shaming mixed with a demand that I accept his many complimentary offerings. I was ready to decline. I looked upon the water and thought, I took this trip for me. Not my Babai or to make the Uncle feel good about himself. The Uncle owns a hotel in Addis Ababa that caters mostly to Indian businessmen, at which he insisted I stay for the night at no cost. Being that I was an unemployed backpacker with months ahead in a trip around eastern Africa, I strongly considered this free stay in a hotel with a hot shower… but if not monetary, what price would I have to pay? I could not decide if I should accept his offers. Then the Uncle shared that my father’s childhood friend was also living in Addis Ababa, working as a professor at the university. The Uncle told me that he is close with the Professor, and could connect me with this man who was so eager to meet me. My heart fell as swiftly as it rose. A connection to my father’s childhood so close to me. I was immediately filled with anxiety, curiosity, and apprehension, all at the same time. A familiar combination of feelings in my life. The sense of obligation kicked in; my father would be disappointed if I chose my preferred route of avoidance. I agreed to take the Uncle’s offers for a hotel room, dinner, and car rides. Less than 30 minutes later, I received a call from the Professor. A pleasant man, he was thrilled to hear my voice and welcome me to Ethiopia. While he also expressed slight judgment at my limited ability to communicate in Telugu, the Professor was extremely excited to meet up and hear about my father’s life since they both left the motherland decades ago. A personal connection was made outside of just Telugu obligations, and I had to lean into it.
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Volume 1: Issue 00 Four days later, when I got in to Addis Ababa from my two-day minibus adventure from Lalibela by way of Dessie, I met up with the Professor for dinner. Warm and nostalgic, he was satisfied with quiet time in each other’s presence, much like my dad. Just the two of us, we enjoyed a Hyderabadi buffet dinner overlooking a view of downtown Addis Ababa from atop the Sai Baba Hotel – another complimentary offer from the Uncle. We laughed as the Professor affectionately shared anecdotes about their childhood days. He commented that their circle of friends thought of my dad as a quirky fellow, always preferring book discussions to playing cricket. Rather quickly, the Professor asked me about the severe arthritis that my Bamma told him my father was battling. I was taken aback—almost to the point of laughter—and clarified that it is not arthritis, but that my father lives with mental illness. The Professor was not very surprised by the truth. I shared stories of my father’s growth, my mother’s strength, my brother’s accomplishments, and my own preference for book discussions over playing sports. The Professor beamed with joy. He was thrilled to hear directly from me that, contrary to the gossip he heard back in Hyderabad, my father was living his life and continues to be a charmingly quirky man. The Professor also expressed pride in the fact that my father and mother had raised such a strong young woman who had the audacity to travel alone just because she knew she could. I would not have been able to make this bridge across lands and time if I hadn’t answered that phone call in my bamboo hut by Lake Babogaya. Sitting alone on the white pleather couch of the Uncle’s home in Addis Ababa, I struggle to hold my tongue as he spouts vitriolic anti-black prejudice about Ethiopian businessmen and makes racialized comparisons to violence in African American communities. Much like my desire to understand and speak Telugu in these circumstances, I also crave the ability to articulate powerful anti-racist demands at the level of Angela Davis. Instead, I inform him that I do not share his perspective and change the subject. Suddenly, I am overcome with the contentment that, although I must endure this terrible interaction with the Uncle, it is because of him that I was able to meet the Professor. In this moment, I finally recognize the price I had to pay. Not just for accepting the single hotel room on the ninth floor. Or for the mouth-watering Hyderabadi cooking by his wife (although that meal did take me to a new flavor high). I paid the price for being a Telugu
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person visiting a city where few Telugu people exist. This is the nature of my people and our relationship to migration, forced or otherwise. We are everywhere. We are connected. We have strong opinions about the places in which we have each decided to call home. We must make some form of contact with each other if we are to maintain a link to our ancestral land. The Uncle, children and I finish up our meals. Auntie finally appears from the kitchen with her own plate of food ready to sit and watch the finale song of the Telugu film from a faraway corner of the room. I speak up to be heard across the house, thanking her profusely for the delicious food. Uncle looks at me sternly, motioning to not speak to her, let alone thank her, and especially so loudly. I ignore his motions and say it again. Even louder. She smiles coyly and nods her head. I look to my watch, thrilled to see that it is about time I wrap up this trip through Little Hyderabad. Only one week ago, I had arrived in Ethiopia from Baltimore, about to embark on a two-month solo trip around eastern Africa, with no plans to dissect my relationship to “the Telugu Uncle.” The week in this beautiful country caused me to push the constrained ways in which I and others perceive me. Thanks to Thomas, John, Bimels, the Professor, my family, and myself, I found the strength to endure the vulnerability of these moments on this white pleather couch. The Uncle sends me with his driver, who will take me to the airport. I say goodbye to his children who continue to ignore my presence, thank the Uncle for all of the hospitality, lace up my hiking boots, carefully strap into my backpack, and head out for the next leg of my journey—the Kenyan coast.
Volume 1: Issue 00
Alyza Liu: June 2016 - Jiufen, Taiwan
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Volume 1: Issue 00
coming back from l’enfant plaza, 5:45 pm by Jessica Man it’s you and me, and the downturned faces row on row. we are all the tired women - the slumped shoulders, the bags between our feet and the bags beneath our eyes, the flyaway hairs jostled from position by the increase of the day. it’s you and me, and her - our absent stares and aching backs, our slow blinks and homeboundedness stretching door to door. it’s you and me, and the space between our seats. it’s you in the mirror of the glass, and me with the dust of accumulated hours on my feet. our commuter’s pact of silence and seating assignment is bought with change in stray newspapers and lost bottle caps. I want freedom to be a train hurtling through the night towards paradise, filled with the quick exchange of smiles and our little mutual accommodations. I want freedom to be a travelling meditation, loud with the rejoicing of turning wheels and the steady static of tannoy announcements marking our diligent progress. freedom is you and me and all the tired women, and home at the end of the line.
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FICTION
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Volume 1: Issue 00 Jessica Man: June 2013 - Hong Kong
Jessica Man: June 2013 - Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong
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Volume 1: Issue 00
this is a peace treaty by CaL
i. nobody hears a tragedy In China, the midnight sun is pale and waning in the sky when you look down to see your shadow sprint away from you. You’re all of four years with a tattered brownblack dress, but your father is deader than the muddy soil between your bare toes. Where your shadow is supposed to be, razor-sharp on the ground, your tiny fists are instead, beating sadness into the earth as it gives away reluctantly. You hear the ever-present ocean in your ears, clinging onto you as the past often likes to do to people. The cool night air smells like fresh, overturned earth, and maybe the sharp metallic scent of blood doesn’t come from wedges of red in your hands. It doesn’t hurt. ii. leave the bones of the dead at the door Twenty years later, on your last day in your motherland, you freeze time and begin to settle your luggage. From your mother, you take kindness and soft wrinkled skin, chipping it off in small layers with the tips of your fingernails, and wrap it around yourself like a winter coat. From your sister’s tears, you take the smell of the unbounded ocean, the roaring waves that can shatter boulders, and you let it sink into your bones. From your husband, you brush the bangs away from his eyes and take the lights in them, his intelligence and quiet dignity beating through his veins. From your family’s din of voices, you take their will to succeed and those careful days of unstrained smiles and laughter. From your shadow you take your past, and then it flees from you once more like a particularly slippery fish, dashing towards the ocean. You walk into the airport without a silhouette. No one notices. For the first time in your life, you don’t feel water under your feet.
you can feel sneaking up the soles of your feet to the tips of your fingers. The smell of the ocean is to your left. You walk right. You have to run away. iv. a scenic study of scenes Twenty years pass like sand slipping through your fingers. In your noisy home, there is a window to your left, half-open, and your grandson is fingering the piano keys delicately behind you. It’s raining, a blue-grey rain, and it falls softly down to earth. You think that if you reach out, fingers cupped together, white with pressure and the soothing coolness of water, you can fill your hands with rain. It’s the same rain that ruined your brown-black dresses when you were four, the same rain that is falling into your hands as you reach out the window and for the sky. When you shut the window, your grandson is striking the keys repeatedly, the same D flat minor resounding throughout the rooms. v. nail in the coffin Sixty years old, you sit on a log at Coney Island. It juts out from the sand, half buried and mostly forgotten. Your shadow sits with you, and then quietly reaches out for your legs. You struggle at first, feet kicking up sprays of sand into graceful arcs in the air, but then your shadow sews itself into place and you move together. The ocean purrs under your feet, says hello dear missed you so where did you go? You blink once, twice, and your sister’s tears are on wet on your cheeks, trailing into the arcs of your lips. I never left, you say, voice full of wonder and longing. Somehow, it physically hurts. There is an artificial ache in your middle, but as your hands close over the hole inside of you, the ocean sighs, sluicing over the bumps of your spine. You look down. Hello self, you say, and it is quiet at last. The waves rush onto the shore.
iii. let sleeping dragons lie The sun is an undercooked yolk in New York, spilling yellow rays between crevices in the sky. A month after you walk out of JFK International Airport, the city still sits in the oven, stirring restlessly with a thrumming beat
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Volume 1: Issue 00
Alyza Liu: January 2016 - Jiufen, Taiwan
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Volume 1: Issue 00
Alyza Liu: January 2016 - Jiufen, Taiwan
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Volume 1: Issue 00
this is how you win a war (this is how you end a revolution) by CaL
This is for me, really, and not for you; or that girl over there, copying someone’s homework in neat, meticulous strokes; or that boy trying to figure out a way to plagiarize SparkNotes without getting caught. This is for me because I like it when the words come alive, when they pat mebfondly on the head like an overgrown human pet, or when they timidly trace tear tracks down my cheeks before curling their nails into the bony ridges of my throat. My friend is peering over my shoulder as I type. “That’s, uh, kind of morbid,” he says. “But, like, yeah, whatever, man. Cool. It’s cool.” Hey, it’s a way to start. I could have started with something like, “When I was nine, I wanted to kill my brother with a spoon.” That’s true, but my brother’s still alive. Maybe I should’ve used a knife. When my brother started to wobble around on his tummy like some sort of overweight snake, my parents installed a jumping device for him between the doorframes of my room. There were these thin clasps that stuck to the top of the doorframe and ugly stretchy strings attached to a baby swing. I spent most the spring of that year watching him bounce around, working up a sweat with his eyes wide, trusting, and brown. By that time, I had already switched three schools and got accepted into several gifted programs. My middle school science teacher proclaimed that I was destined for great things. My brother will have that teacher in a year or so. I wonder if he’ll say the same to my brother. I hope not. My grandmother wanted my mother to abort me. That grandmother is the mother of my father. My father had been in the United States, sticking needles into people. My mother had been in China, pulling blood out of women. I don’t think they met until they were engaged. So, like any other good story, they met, got engaged, started to discover the flaws in each other, and then somehow received a little family in the new world. Sex is such a wonderful motivator. Before that idyllic family though, they lived in the
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Brooklyn Chinatown near Sunset Park, in this beat-up little box of a room - the kind that poor, aspiring writers from small, scattered towns, who dream of making it big like to complain about. It was small, had white-washed walls that turned gray every time someone breezed by, and no running water. They managed. They survived. My mother got pregnant, my grandmother freaked, and my father got the hell out of there. Looking back, I wish she aborted me. But then again, I guess she got tired of aborting so many female fetuses in China. My brother is six years younger than me. He likes to go around the house in threadbare pajamas depicting a famous cartoon sheep and sing, “I’m sexy and I know it!” He likes Italian cheesecake and milk tea with tapioca. He likes to play Facebook games and Angry Birds. I know these things, not because I like to pay attention to dates or the way joy sprints across his face, but because I just do. I know this, because he also likes to run into my room and fly face-first into my bed. I know this, because he messes up my sheets and gets his grimy hands all over my stuffed animals. I know this, because his feet are on the back of my chair and he’s giving me a smelly massage using his toes. Sometimes I can’t imagine life without him, but sometimes I think about ending his life. My grandmother is wheelchair bound. She’s had several strokes, but when I was five, she just had a limp. She would walk with me to the annual street fair, only the street fair spanned almost ten streets. In 1999, we won a little blue budgerigar by betting on a number. I thought it was a parrot and I locked it up in a rusty old cage that my dad found on the streets. It would chirp and sing despite the small space and the despicable life it had. Sometimes I’d let it out after I closed the doors and locked the windows, but I only did that three times. I think it liked the cage better. It died in the middle of my last year in middle school, when I was still searching for a high school to go to. My parents were renovating and I forgot to change the water, and it died from diarrhea. It had crawled around on thin pieces of calendar paper until it finally stopped moving, stopped crying, stopped breathing with its eyes open. I cried over it and then asked my mom to pull out its tail feathers because I was slightly obsessed with Harry Potter and I wanted a quill.
Volume 1: Issue 00 My mom gave me a look. She didn’t pull anything out. So I dug a hole using my hands and placed my friend in a plastic bag and covered it with fresh brown dirt. The funny thing is that almost all my pets died from diarrhea. In China, I had a pet bunny and I overfed it with lettuce and carrots, until it had so much diarrhea that my grandma told me the entire apartment smelled for a week. I don’t remember any of that. But that’s okay. The lesson that I learned from this is that life is full of shit. “Do you even listen to some of the shit that comes out of your mouth?” my best friend asks. Sometimes, she reads over my shoulder when we’re in need of the computers. “Do you ever think before you say something?” “No,” I lie. “I never do.” I used to hate her the same way humans hated cockroaches. We still don’t get along very well, but we’ve reached that plateau where mutual distaste merges with grudging respect. She thinks me naive and I think her ignorant. Neither of us has breached the demilitarized zone between our silences. So when people say you know you love someone when you’re willing to die for that person, I call bullshit. I’m willing to die for a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean I love them. I just think they deserve better. My best friend falls under that category. Maybe my memory’s going early, but I remember that the grandmother who won my bird had hugged me only once. It was one of those times when you’re supposed to take someone in and pick apart the scents in your lungs. I think I was supposed to smell something like apple pie or freshly baked cookies, something that reminds me of home and safety, but all I inhaled was the nose-wrinkling stink of unwashed hair. She said, “I love you so much.” And I said, “I love you too.” Someone was lying there. Someone is always lying. On a cruise, my brother kicks at the dining table and declares, “My life sucks.” Already seasick and worn out by my brother’s incessant howling, I jump at the opportunity to knock him down a few notches. I take apart his life and when I’m done, my family shift uncomfortably in their seats, the cutlery clinking loudly on decorated ceramic plates. The edges are all decorated with flowers that I don’t know the names
of. They’re not very pretty. My father nudges me. His eyes flicker over my face before returning back to the life-sized paintings of the House of Romanov. I remember watching movies about the Grand Duchess Anastasia and her supposed survival. She didn’t survive though. She’s as tragic and dead as the rest of her family. “I’m proud of you,” he says with a nod. I don’t throw up because I’m stronger than that. I can map out the battlegrounds, I can determine the battlefields. I can be the hero and pick up verbal swords and spar with pointed broken bottles, but I’m now fluent in the once foreign language of despair. There are quiet footsteps outside my door, swaying back and forth the way the frills of my dress do when I walk. I don’t really know why I still remember how the fabric of a dress moves since I haven’t worn a dress in a while. My mother’s lips have gone thin and white since the last time I walked down the stairs with the brush of silk nipping at my ankles. I do like to wear dresses. The times I was afraid for my life, running from people who drag their knuckles across my face and who push me down so I can rake my fingernails across their cheeks, I wore jeans and T-shirts. Or jeans and a hoodie. Or jeans and a heavy down coat. Sometimes, I think I like dresses because I feel empowered. Other times, I just like looking at other people’s legs. Most of the time, I like pretending to be someone I’m not, someone with elegance and grace. Someone who won’t curse worse than a sailor on any given day. Someone who didn’t do what I had to do. Someone who doesn’t have to. I’m never having children. My cousin went to Stony Brook for college. Undergraduate. His mother pulls me aside and whispers, “You can do better than that. You can be a doctor. You can make lots of money.” I look at my cousin. He’s lovely on the eyes, tall and beautiful, big eyes and gentle smile. He wants to be a dentist. I look at my hands. The nails are long. I haven’t played piano in ages. He used to listen to me play Chopin’s sonatas even though I still had trouble with the D minor, and say things like, “Wow, I wish I learned.” He has a new haircut and a new phone number, but this is the kid that moved over to make room for me on the seat so we could play Sonic the Hedgehog together. This is the kid that bought me Pokémon movies and bought me ice cream from the trucks while I waited
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Volume 1: Issue 00 under the shade. This is the kid that helped me define words from the Little House Series and covered my hands as I delicately fingered black-and-white keys. He looks up from his phone, catches my eye, and smiles at me. I grin back helplessly. “Call me if you ever need anything,” he tells me, nudging me with his shoulder. “Of course,” I say, knocking my elbow into his ribs. “I’ll see you later?” “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be around.” He isn’t. My father goes over the speed limit and blows a tire in the middle of the freeway. We swerve into the next lane, then the opposite lane, then into a truck and we’re blown sky high. That’s what I’ll tell people when I write a story about my life. It’ll be all true, except we have conflicting views on what’s a truth, don’t we? This is what actually happened: My father goes over the speed limit and blows a tire in the middle of the freeway. We swerve into the next lane, then the opposite lane, then into a truck and we go up a hill. The car doesn’t flip over. Thank the Powers That Be for that because if the car did flip, I would’ve been brained by my father’s heavy computer equipment and I would have never reached my aunt’s place in Toronto, and then I’ll never play with some kids who teach me how to build a model log cabin. They teach me how to burn bags of fallen leaves and I watch the flames lick up the curling edges of crackled brown debris. If my life had ended then, with an explosion of fire and I was incinerated at the tender age of eight, it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go. Sometimes, lives start with a whimper and end with a bang. I’m eleven and I’m going home from the dentist’s office with my grandma. My grandma wants to see my new braces. I stretch my lips over my teeth. There’s a man in front of me, asking for my phone number. I’m eleven and my grandma doesn’t know English and this man is sweating and his hands are clenched and I think he’s going to hurt me because why else would anyone want my phone number? Maybe he’ll call and when no one picks up, he’ll break into my home and take my brother and my science homework and my math trophies and I’ll never see any of them again. Maybe he’ll call and when someone answers, he’ll breathe out and hang up and will never again come into the periphery of my life. It’ll be like two lines that intersect once and that will never
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touch again. I want it to be like two parallel lines that never touch and go on forever never touching, because he’s still blocking the way and he’s waiting for me to answer. And I keep asking why and refusing to give it because my grandma’s nails are digging into the back of my hand. “What did he want?” my grandma asks. I’m on the bus and my forehead is leaving disgusting smears on the glass. I’m on my way home. Back in the apartment, my grandpa’s lips are twisting to try and capture the nuances of the English language. He’s far from home, from the land he tilled with his own hands and the country he lived in for most of his life. He used to work on water, always trying to stay above the waves. Once, he tried to teach me how to float in the sea. But now there’s water all around me and I don’t feel like swimming anymore. I feel like letting the current drag me down to the bottom of the river. My grandma asks again. “Oh,” I say. “He was just lost.” I never really had an imaginary friend before. I like to talk out loud to myself, but I never pretended that someone was there to listen. I think that if I had someone like that, my imaginary friend would turn to me one day and say, “You do know that I’m the one imagining you, right?” My brother is reading a dystopian novel and he asks me how someone can win a war. “You can’t,” I tell him, hands clenching fistfuls of hair. My calculus homework isn’t making sense. “No one wins in a war.” “Someone has to win, though,” he argues. He folds into himself a little. I go back to figuring out the limit of some ridiculous antiderivative of some ridiculous cotangent of some ridiculous square root of some ridiculous variable. When his voice comes out, it’s a hushed whisper and I don’t think I’m supposed to hear it. “Someone always wins.”
Volume 1: Issue 00 Jessica Man: March 2012 - Plane over Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C.
Jessica Man: March 2012 - Tidal Basin, Washington, D.C.
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CREDITS
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Volume 1: Issue 00
Alyza Liu - Editor in Chief
Alyza is a Chinese American, first-gen immigrant, bilingual, artist/writer (aren’t we all) and a proud aficionado of 狗血剧 and 武侠剧. Her current five year plan includes: crying, drinking tea, adopting a cat, writing a novel, and hopefully breaking into the publishing industry via her [obviously superb] #editorialskills.
Jessica Man - Submissions Coordinator
Jessica is an American-born Chinese hurtling at terrifying speed towards the graduate program in Asian American Studies at UCLA. She writes lots of things and hopes that some of them will be good. SDG
Mnrupe Virk - Editor
Mnrupe is an Indian-Canadian proposal writer and pretending to be an adult. Hobbies include: drawing, reading (anything and everything), making playlists, and crying over her bachelor’s degree.
Tangmo Cecchini - Visual Director
Tangmo is an illustrator and owner of the fluffiest bunny. She dabbles in sewing, divination, jewelry making, and baking as well. You can find her artwork over at www.artoftangmo.com.
Rajani Gudlavalleti - Contributor
Rajani is an Indian-American, queer woman, and atheist humanist who has made a home in Baltimore. A “hyphen” (i.e. a person who is active in more than one occupation or sphere), Rajani works as a racial equity trainer, community partnership specialist, and freelance writer. She is driven to amplify POC-driven strategies to dismantle systems of oppression by any means necessary. Rajani grew up in Santa Clara, California, raised by her parents and older brother who had emigrated from Hyderabad, India. Her writing can be found on Charmingly Hyphenated, where Rajani explores issues that impact our multiple intersecting identities.
Eunbi C Kim - Contributor
Eunbi C Kim is a genderqueer Korean-American musician from Baltimore, born and raised in Los Angeles, California. They are pursuing music as a career whether the model minority myth lets them or not. Check their sounds at soundcloud.com/EunB1.
CaL - Contributor
CaL is a Chinese American writer currently residing in New York City. Studying for a graduate degree while drinking copious amounts of milk tea, they hope to someday publish a series that will reach out to younger audiences.
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