Issue 2 · Spring 2019
Letter From the Editor Careless is a work of love, a magazine that depends on many people for it to happen. Our editors discuss each piece with a certain rigor that ensures stones get turned, and the managing board does a good job keeping things going and finding new things to do. This semester, we’ve expanded in two ways: working with the library, we launched a Claremont Scholarship library site; and reaching out to the writers around us, we’ve begun to publish interviews. As before, we received a lot of submissions and had to be very selective. Some excellent pieces didn’t make it in, some authors who certainly deserve exposure somewhere, and we’re sorry that it wasn’t here. Careless has been my principal fixation in my senior year, and it’s been hard to let go. I’m confident our new team will take it to new places we didn’t, and excited to see where it’ll go from here. Blake Plante, Pomona ‘19 Editor-In-Chief
About Careless was conceived on a dark and stormy night in the winter of 1814. Marooned by the inclement weather, three young ingénues— Alessandra Yu, Nama Rosas, and Blake Plante—sought shelter in a gloomy old mansion in the mountains surrounding Geneva. Being deprived of cell service and other forms of remote human contact, the three decided to hold a writing competition. Alessandra emerged after three days with one of the most iconic Gothic horror novels ever written. It has since fallen into obscurity. In its place emerged the squarmy, half-baked prototype of what would—over two hundred years later—become Careless. The submission deadline for our third edition is November 1, 2019. Please direct submissions and inquiries to carelessmagazine@gmail. com, and visit www.carelessmagazine.com/submit to view our submission guidelines. Our newly-released Claremont Scholarship site, https://scholarship.claremont.edu/carelessmagazine/, contains a downloadable archive of works we’ve published. Careless is a Claremont Colleges literary magazine that publishes enmasse twice a year, and electronically throughout the year. Careless is a branch of 5C Wordsmiths, which aims to be the home base for the creative writing community at the Claremont Colleges. To learn more, please visit www.5CWordsmiths.com.
Staff Editor-in-Chief Blake Plante, Pomona College ‘19
Managing Editor Suh Won Chang, Claremont McKenna ‘21 Treasurer & Layout Editor Megan Marshall, Pomona ‘20 Outreach Coordinator Selena Spier, Pitzer ‘19 Interview Coordinator Becky Zhang, Pomona ‘22 Artist Chloe Frelinghuysen, Pitzer ‘21 5C Wordsmiths Consultant Alessandra Yu, Pomona ‘19 Editorial Board Aditya Gandhi, Pomona ‘22 Becky Zhang, Pomona ‘22 Kerry Taylor, Scripps ‘21 Cameron Tipton, Pomona ‘20 Rhiannon Schaub, Scripps ‘20 Lily Ross, Pomona ‘22 Maria Heeter, Scripps ‘22 Megan Marshall, Pitzer ‘20 Namaste Rosas, Claremont McKenna ‘20 Selena Spier, Pitzer ‘19
Contents Signpost
TIFFANY MI
8
MOLLY ANTELL
10
Christina’s World
AYA BURTON
11
There Is No Other
SELENA SPIER
12
HANNAH ORRAHOOD
19
Tender
NINA POTISCHMAN
20
I Would
TALIA IVRY
21
Reclaimed Witch
ADDISON KAY
22
Event
J.J. SHANKAR
23
4:59 PM on a Wednesday
JEANNE RASMUSSEN
24
The Moon
ALEXANDRA FISCHER
25
Rain
NINA POTISCHMAN
26
sally and the drugs
CAMERON TIPTON
27
Agave
CHLOE WANASELJA
29
SELENA SPIER
30
Allie
AMANDA OWENS
32
(an) on (ymo) us
CHAELEE DALTON
33
Lemon Tree
CHAELEE DALTON
35
There Will Come A Time
EMILY DIAMOND
36
ALEXANDRA FISCHER
38
COLIN ADAMS
39
AMANDA OWENS
40
Farmhouse
2/23 Haiku
Gut Flora
The View Noise Figures 1 & 2
Papa in his element
ALESSANDRA YU
41
WORK MAN SHIP
CHAELEE DALTON
42
ZACH MILLER
43
CHLOE WANASELJA
44
Brain Waves
NATALIE ANN BAUER
45
the airplane didnt crash but she landed in a graveyard anyway
MIRANDA SHERIDAN
46
CHARLOTTE MORRISSEY
47
COLIN ADAMS
48
ALEXI BUTTS
54
ELENA DYPIANGCO
55
AYA BURTON
56
BECKY ZHANG
58
ADITYA GHANDI
66
Anxiety, the girl Lauryn
On Re-tethering Routine Contemplation Bookmarking the Hate Objects in Mirror Sally Wen Mao Interview Hua Hsu Interview
Signpost TIFFANY MI
My face is a rickety signpost on which a man paints :
WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
Each letter of industrial varnish drips over, then smothers, the green lichen blooms around my ears. When folks drive past they read, COUNTY LINE. Sometimes they read, CITY LIMIT. Other times, KEEP OUT. He steps back, shifts his weight and waits. “Where are you from?” He repeats. He has slathered the letters across my eyes – I blink through the sting. “I am from an old oak tree,” I think aloud. “There is no oak around here.” “I am from the driftwood,” I specify, “of an old oak tree.” He frowns, “There is no ocean here.” I protest, But he stops me: “Wood cannot speak.” He had painted over my lips,
8 • Spring 2019
?
WHERE
Half smile, half frown, dimple on top— a permanent expression to a permanent question inked in splintered flesh.
Careless Magazine • 9
Farmhouse MOLLY ANTELL
10 • Spring 2019
Christina’s World AYA BURTON
What makes a body this tired, this removed more the land’s than her own possession – she never learned how to govern it, how to bind it or love it. She lends herself to the earth and leans into it now to smell the soil for a second time as if she’s forgotten the sweet burn of dry hay and September’s thick wood smoke. Summer’s green gone, she could stay here awhile; today the grass is so loving, the farmhouse so far worlds away, at the top of the hill.
Careless Magazine • 11
There Is No Other SELENA SPIER
The lighter sparked, but didn’t catch. He cupped his hand against the wind and tried again. This time it spat forth a little shower of sparks and a flame, singeing the pad of his thumb, but as soon as he lifted it to the cigarette between his lips, it sputtered out. The man swore. Even on the back deck, shielded by the cabin, the wind and spray made it near-impossible to smoke. He tried once more, then pocketed the cigarettes and lighter. The ragged silhouette of the island was already visible on the horizon. He could make it half an hour more. A familiar heaviness had settled in his gut. He leaned his elbows on the cold iron railing and peered down at the water below. It was a windy day, no worse than usual, but windy enough to make the boat plunge from side to side amidst the oncoming waves. The sky overhead was a pale, anemic gray. Briefly, the man imagined vaulting over the rail into the seething white-capped foam. He could do it. He wouldn’t, but he could. No one would notice his absence until it was far too late. The boat lurched, kicking up a spurt of water. He wiped his face with his sleeve and went back inside. It was warm in the cabin, radiant heat, all those bodies swarming around. He picked his way through the rows of booths, past the snack bar. There was a strange odor hanging in the air ¾ wet dog, yes, and vomit, and salt, and something else, ferry-smell, nothing else like it. He managed to reach the booth without falling. His wife, Sharon, was lying down on the slatted bench with her jacket bunched up beneath her head. She leaned up on her elbow as he settled down opposite her. She was a small woman, and all he could see over the edge of the table was the upper half of her face, crowned by a mop of tangled hair. Her eyes were blue and sinking. “How was your cigarette?” she asked, well-meaning. He shook his head. She looked at him for a second, then laid down and went back to inspecting the clumps of chewing gum stuck to the underside of the table. She was close enough to reach out and touch his terry-cloth knees, which rose up slightly as he leaned forward in his seat. He picked up his newspaper and found the place where he’d left off. Oil rig in the works just off the south side of the island. Tourists were complaining about the obstructed view of the skyline. Some version of the story had appeared in every issue since the summer of 2015. His attention drifted past it to the two girls occupying the 12 • Spring 2019
adjacent booth. “No such thing,” said the one facing him. She had long stringy hair and a white bandage wrapped around her face, the kind you wear after you’ve gotten your wisdom teeth out. Her right cheek was swollen and bruised, but both her eyes were painstakingly made-up. “You’re crazy.” “I’m serious! The whole island is haunted.” The girl across from her, facing away from him, was just freckled shoulders and a tumble of dark brown curls. “Even the ferry.” “This one?” Wisdom Teeth looked dubious. “You want to hear the story?” The brunette turned sideways on her bench and he saw her profile, bird-like, and the curve of her heart-shaped mouth. She had a gold locket, also heart-shaped, on a chain around her neck. She kept fidgeting with it, opening and closing the catch as she spoke. “Fine. Hit me.” “Alright. So, this all happened a long time ago. Or, not that long, really—like, maybe the sixties. They still did the thing they do now, where they run a whole bunch of ferries during the summer and only one per day during the winter. So in the summer they’ve got tons of ferry captains, but in the winter there’s only one, right? And the winter captain, he’s kind of eccentric, kind of a creepy dude, but he keeps out of everyone’s way so they all just let him do his job. And his wife’s great. Everyone loves his wife.” Sharon took deep breaths beneath the table. The ferry always made her nauseous. It wasn’t just the pitching and swaying, it was all the voices mingling together, talking over one another, children screaming, and that smell in the air, that stale-ocean smell, it made her stomach turn. She tried to zero in on the closest conversation. “But eventually, a rumor starts going round that his wife’s fucking one of the dockhands—“ “Is she?” interjected Wisdom Teeth. “Oh, I don’t know. Probably. Either way, he catches wind of it, and one day she’s out on the top deck, they’re both out on the top deck, and the captain just grabs her and throws her off, and then he flags down all the dockhands, screaming that she’s fallen, and he puts the boat in reverse and “accidentally” mows her down. Like, blood everywhere, chunks of wife-meat floating around. And everybody’s kind of suspicious, ‘cause they all knew about the dockhand and nobody liked the captain in the first place. But they can’t prove that it wasn’t an accident, so he gets off scot-free and keeps his job and now the wife’s ghost haunts the ferry, just wanders around Careless Magazine • 13
messing with people and knotting up the ropes.” The boat rolled to the side. A moon-faced toddler several booths down started gurgling excitedly, and Locket’s coffee cup tipped over. Both girls grabbed their cell phones off the table and slid away from the spill, laughing. “That was her!” said Locket. “She heard us talking about her!” “You’re crazy,” Wisdom Teeth repeated. “You’re so weird. I love you. I love you so much. You don’t even know.” Locket smiled and glanced at her phone and it was evident to everyone that she loved Wisdom Teeth a little less than Wisdom Teeth loved her, but it was alright and they were happy and nothing really bad would happen between them. “I’m going to see if they’ll give me another coffee,” she said, getting up. “Can I get you anything? Soup? Yogurt?” “No, I’m okay.” “Suit yourself.” Locket got up and went to the snack bar. The man behind it was making his way through a bag of Sun Chips. He popped them into his mouth one at a time and chewed slowly, carefully, grinding each chip to a fine pulp between his molars. He swallowed quickly when she approached, stashed the bag beneath the counter. “What can I get for you?” he asked. “I accidentally summoned a ghost and she knocked my coffee over. Is there any way I could get a new one?” “Ah, yes, the captain’s wife,” said the man. “She got me earlier, too. Coming right up. There’s napkins right there, if you need them.” He gestured to the plastic dispenser and turned around to pour another coffee. “Thanks,” said Locket, pulling out a few. “What’s your name?” “Stephen,” he replied. “Room for cream?” “No, that’s alright.” She worked her fingernail into the crease of the little heart, pried it open, clicked it shut, pried it open again. “That’s pretty,” he said. “Thank you,” said Locket. “It used to be my mom’s.” She made her way back to Wisdom Teeth. She was tall, willowy. Her thighs didn’t brush together when she walked. Stephen poured himself a plastic cup of gingerale, then changed his mind, dumped it out, and filled the cup with water. He’d had a Cinnabon for breakfast that morning. He could feel it clinging to the inside of his stomach. Over the rim of the cup he looked at the girl in the far 14 • Spring 2019
left corner booth, the booth that everyone avoided because it was the only one you couldn’t see the TV from. She had a green ribbon in her hair and she was holding a paperback novel. Her lips moved, like she was reading aloud, but she wasn’t looking at the book and her words were drowned in the racket of strident voices, untethered from their origins, competing against each other to be heard. Every conversation was more important than the next. Someone’s little boy ran up and down the aisle, shrieking in delight every time a sudden jolt knocked him off course. The girl watched him for a second, then slid out of the booth, still carrying her book, and picked her way up to the foredeck for a breath of fresh air. Stephen watched her go, watched her push open the door and stand on the threshold for a moment, steadying herself, before she let it close behind her. Through the water-beaded window her figure receded toward the edge. A young woman came up to the snack bar with a toddler in her arms and looked at him expectantly. He signaled for her to wait. Outside, the girl leaned over the railing, staring down at the white foam churned up by the movement of the boat. She thought maybe she might vomit. The toddler started whimpering. All of a sudden, the boat pitched violently to the side. The young mother shrieked and grabbed the edge of the snack bar to steady herself. Stephen stumbled and slipped on the coffee he’d spilled earlier. When he pulled himself back up, the girl in the green ribbon was gone. “Holy shit!” he choked. “What?” asked the young mother. “What happened?” What happened was this: the girl had been wrenched loose from the railing and flung over the side of the boat, and now she was falling and as she fell, time slowed down to a trickle of brackish water, and she saw the great white hull of the ferry looming towards her, and was afraid, but before it could make contact the sea rose up to meet her. There was a sinking feeling. There was the feeling that she might go on sinking, just drop to the ocean floor like a stone. It was dark underwater and she closed her eyes and for a moment, everything was quiet. She could’ve stayed there for a long time, in the darkness and the quiet. But then her body shot upwards and she was in the air again, gasping, and all around her was noise and chaos and what sounded like wind rushing in her ears and the water was icecold around her, the coldest thing she’d ever felt. She realized that she was still clutching her book. The ferry towered over her, heaving,
Careless Magazine • 15
coming closer. She tried to swim away, but she could hardly move amidst the battering waves. It took all of her strength just to stay where she was. She couldn’t tell if the boat was moving closer or not; it tipped far, impossibly far away, then in the space of a moment came towering over her again. She tried to lift her head. There was the stern, it was moving past her, they were leaving her behind. She coughed up a mouthful of salt. She might’ve been sobbing. “Hey!” A voice, small and reedy, emerged from the tumult. It was so faint that she could hardly distinguish it from the howling of the wind. It came again. “Hey! Miss!” She turned her head toward the source of the sound, but she couldn’t see anything. Just whitefoam waves and the ferry’s hull surging past. Then a head emerged from the waves, head, shoulders, approaching, and he grabbed her in his arms. It was the concessions man, the chubby friendly one. “Hold on!” he shouted. “They’re about to throw us a rope!” A wave rose up behind him; she started to shout a warning, but before she could get the words out it was upon them, salt water filled her mouth. They surfaced, spluttering. He was still holding her. She was still clinging to the book, waterlogged now, probably unreadable. “They’re going to throw us a rope!” he said again, and she saw it slap against the water behind him. She gestured and he released one arm to grab it. She gasped at the cold water that rose up in its place. He held her by the waist and hung onto the rope with his other hand as the dockhands hauled them back up to the stern. It felt like hours. The girl kicked her legs in a half-hearted effort to help. And then, finally, it was over. The dockhands grabbed their arms and dragged them onto the lower deck and they let go of one another and hunched over on the fiberglass, hacking up salt water. “Wow,” said Stephen. “Wow. Wow. Oh my god. Wow. That was—wow.” The girl didn’t respond. She looked pitifully small crouched there on the rolling deck, dark hair plastered to her neck. She’d lost her green ribbon but she was clutching the book against her chest. “You alright?” he asked. “Hey, hey. Come here. It’s alright.” He scooted over and enfolded the girl in his arms. “Come on. Let’s get you back to your stuff. We’re almost there.” He looped an arm beneath her knees and picked her up, started carrying her back inside. A cluster of dockhands trailed behind them. Everyone murmured as the waterlogged procession made its way through the cabin, back up 16 • Spring 2019
to the corner booth, where the girl’s things were still untouched atop her table. “I thought I was going to get sucked up by the motor,” the girl mumbled into his shoulder. “Come again?” “I thought I was going to get sucked up by the motor. I thought that’s what happened when you fall off the side of the boat. When I was little my mom told me she once saw a guy get chopped up into a thousand tiny little pieces by the ferry.” Stephen laughed. She could feel his stomach quake against her side. “The propellers don’t work like that,” he said. “They push water outward, they’re not a vacuum. Your mom was pulling your leg.” “Oh,” the girl said. “Alright, here we are.” With exquisite gentleness, he deposited her sodden body on the seat. One of the dockhands had produced a wool blanket from the hold, and he handed it to her. She wrapped it around her shoulders. “Can I—do you need anything else?” asked Stephen. He looked a little awkward, now that they weren’t touching anymore. “No.” She smiled. “I’m okay.” “Okay,” he said. “Alright. I’ll, uh, I’ll be—” He gestured toward the snack bar. There was a line of people waiting, murmuring impatiently to one another. “I’ll let you know,” said the girl. She ducked her head and he hurried back to the snack bar. Every few minutes he glanced over at her. The boat had turned, and a thick mote of sunlight streamed through the window onto her booth. She put the wet book on the sill with its pages splayed out so that it would dry before the ink bled any more. Then she laid her forehead on the table and spread her hair out all around it. As soon as they passed the breakwall, the waves subsided. The boat stopped pitching and people started surging onto the upper deck to see what they’d come to see: the big loading dock, long rows of fishing boats, and beyond them the town, looking just a little lonely with its street signs and big white clapboard buildings. The air was filled with the cries of seagulls. It smelled like fish and salt and wind. “Look, baby,” said the young mother, holding the toddler up to see. “We’re home!”
Careless Magazine • 17
The little girl’s coin-purse lips opened and closed. “Home,” she warbled finally, with visible effort. The mother gasped and turned her around so that the two were face-to-face. “Say it again! Baby, we’re home! Home!” But baby just looked at her. In the convex glass of her mother’s corneas, she could see another little girl, a little girl with big eyes and a big nose and a big round head on top of that tiny little body. When she smiled, a trickle of drool seeped out from the corner of her mouth.
18 • Spring 2019
2/23 Haiku
HANNAH ORRAHOOD
Today I am clothed In conversation starters And a bit of hope
Careless Magazine • 19
Tender
NINA POTISCHMAN 20 • Spring 2019
I Would
TALIA IVRY
If I could reach inside my chest and part the pinkish pulp within, I’d crack pale arcs and toss aside my ribs like old wishbones. If I could cup my heart, I would and gently shake: why do you hurt? Unravel the lines and little veins that cling, like dormant loves. In hand, the pain is a little thing I tip it over, blood run out and drink the pulp and suck the bone til all that’s left is dry. That noxious scent of smoke, and you, would eddy from my blood to air. I’m all undone now, gasping hole the only red leftover. Then, sighing like a door unlatched, I’d pick up my heart, and put it back.
Careless Magazine • 21
Reclaimed Witch ADDISON KAY
When she talks to plants, cottonwoods to succulents, their fibrous stereocilia relax. She is known for giving gifts of water and offering words of affirmation; love languages which form green. She has read my fortune. I sat cross-legged on her floor, the crystals cast between her chemistry notes, as she divined meaning: communing. I do not believe in higher power; she is magic. Perhaps this is what being agnostic means. When you flip a quarter there is a chance that upon landing its grooved edges will occupy the space between heads and tails – perpendicular to the earth it lands on. Coin still cast, tumbling between its sides, I am flip with G-d/god. The mule deer lie in her lap as she builds a nest, gathering broom strands, twigs, her quilt of forget fabrics. Citrine talisman her back pocket, says she’ll take down big pharma one day. The coven centennial approaches and the iron-jawed moon waxes, big in the Albuquerque sky.
22 • Spring 2019
Event
J.J. SHANKAR
The pigeon ate the candle. The candles tipped over and caused the tip jar to hit the floor. It cracked into 117 crystal shards. The cat was out for his evening walk and one of these shards pierced his paw. He howled in pain to the still moon Which shimmered through the ripples Of the starry sky. Satellites sailing past, weather reports, nuclear fallouts waltzing in the ballroom of the cosmos, shining, gliding onwards to a darker patch of night.
Careless Magazine • 23
4:59 on a Wednesday in November 24 • Spring 2019
JEANNE RASMUSSEN
The Moon
ALEXANDRA FISCHER
You and Earth have been best friends for billions of years. You have seen life crawl from the ocean and claim the land. You watched as the dinosaurs roamed the Earth and called it home. What do you think of us? With our urban jungles that crowd the Earth, always hungry, always searching for more. Turning the green to gray. You have seen so much, yet all of your knowledge you hide behind the perfect poker face A crescent smile.
Careless Magazine • 25
Rain
NINA POTISCHMAN
26 • Spring 2019
sally and the drugs CAMERON TIPTON
The year was 1973. If ever there was a liberation for drugs, now was that time. And even more liberated, or so it seemed, was the mind of Sally Windheim, for she went about “expanding” it at least three times a week, and this was nonnegotiable. Coke came and went, smack had its ups and its downs, but acid was forever. Simply put, she loved Lucy. On the occasion of one particularly enlightening psychedelic experience, Sally Windheim found herself on fire. Not literally, of course, but rather by means of some twisted metaphor of sexual and personal oppression. Determined to extinguish these agonizing flames that consumed her, she calmly but determinedly threw herself from the top of a thirteen-story apartment building, thus putting an end to both her fiery consumption and her inhabitance of a mortal body. But what did that matter? Sally always saw her body as a vessel to house her consciousness, which found its way there through waves that streamed overhead and keyed into her mind intermittently. I say “intermittently” because Sally had made quite a habit of leaving this vessel and riding these waves. She’d never been much of a surfer, but it was in these moments that she felt she knew how to do anything: she could surf, she could fly, she could simply be. Have you ever heard of anything more beautiful than that? Well, all that aside, flames extinguished and mortal body destroyed (for she landed not lightly upon a rough concrete surface), the consciousness of Sally Windheim found itself making its final excursion to the Waveland, where she would remain forever. Or so she thought. She gladly slipped and slid through the wonderful wonders of Waveland, believing entirely that this would comprise the remainder of her existence, that she would forevermore occupy her days in precisely this manner. And so, one can imagine, it came as quite a surprise to Sally when she found herself falling (though at not quite the speed her mortal body had fallen from the building earlier that day), gaining speed, then losing it, then gaining it again, as if gravity couldn’t make up its fucking mind, when, ultimately, she felt her essence being squeezed into a thin string, a dental floss of consciousness, and before she knew it she was entering another man’s body through his left ear.
Careless Magazine • 27
Why the left ear? I’m always right. Traveling through the auditory canal, playing a soul-churning piece on the eardrum, then finally emerging from the tunnel of darkness into the meadow of pink decisions, Sally finally began to understand what was going on. Or, at least, she told herself that she did. She had learned early on that one should never ask too many questions, for they serve only to further confuse the inquirer. And then dental floss expanded, as if made of cotton and submerged in fluid, until Sally’s consciousness was about the size of a piece of popcorn. From there it exploded, and Sally was mist. She quite enjoyed this feeling, for she now felt freer than she had ever felt before. Though living in another man’s head, she had never felt more in touch with herself. It was at this point that Sally produced a small bag of cocaine (consciousness is a powerful thing), and in the moment it was created it was simultaneously absorbed into her, such that it became her. Sally was cocaine. And she hadn’t the slightest objection to this fact. But what Cocaine Cloud Sally didn’t realize was that she now had full dominion over the Pink Meadow. It was her queendom, and she the queen. No doubt exhausted from the incessant transmutations (and probably also the comedown from the cocaine), Sally focused her energy and condensed into a thin gelatinous layer that now rested softly upon the pink pillow beneath. GRAB THE TURKEY BY THE UDDERS! What? Where? Soft clouds and enchanting snapshots of memories? Glimpses into a fragmented and desolate past? “What?” Sally immediately jolted up. Mortal vessel and all. “How long was I out?” “Almost forty-five minutes,” he replied. And with that, Sally buried her face in the palms of her hands, and cried. “Never again,” she repeated to herself over and over again, wiping the blood and crust of residual ketamine from her right nostril. “Never again. Never again.” For it was in this moment that Sally realized he was a man.
28 • Spring 2019
Agave
CHLOE WANASELJA
Careless Magazine • 29
Gut Flora
SELENA SPIER
Stars in their bedsheets struggle to breathe. My dreams have been keeping me awake. Down the stairs and through the hall I creep; as my countrymen sleep I’ll feast, like a king, on apricot jam and soft cold bread full of air. But as I stand before the fridge an uninvited grief steals in, descends to the crawlspace beneath my skin and unfolds, pressing hard against my guts. They writhe beneath its deadweight, pink and shining. I feel this because I am alive. I am. I am. I am. I am. This grief made a kingdom of me: broad fields flecked with asphodel. She refuses to let me leave; I try but she clings onto my pant-leg, and cries, and threatens to pull out all her teeth and plant them in the earth to be harvested in autumn with the corn. ` In the depths of my body she moves. Sea-foam blossoms on the cheese. Something is growing in there, expanding; my skin soaked with grease, hanging in folds. And then, at once, the sadness leaves with a soft hissing sound as it goes, and once again I find myself alone. Alone in the warm-milk moonlight. Alone in my castle with its ivory halls. The night air seeps in through the windowscreen, carrying crickets, rustling leaves, distant sounds of the highway, and I
30 • Spring 2019
feast, like a king, on apricot jam and soft cold bread full of air.
Careless Magazine • 31
Allie
AMANDA OWENS 32 • Spring 2019
(an) on (ymo) us CHAELEE DALTON
“if you could write to any historical figure who would you write to?” “I would rather write to someone who has been removed from history than someone glorified or romanticized by it.” . re:
her
move
self in to some body to get her in can descent be longing or bits a round good bye
“How do you write to a person who there is no memory of?” “Give them space. It holds the memory of those forgotten more powerfully than any language.” re: any
here
im
day break back how weight
perfect bodies for get
member
up
on
bone ever less is land
Careless Magazine • 33
“But how do you relate to someone subtracted from identity?” “The person who reads this doesn’t know our names.”
re:
late rain check
back spacing to night to wards of fences here after name less time shares no thing
34 • Spring 2019
Lemon Tree
CHAELEE DALTON for Alfred Kwok
Out behind your house there is a lemon tree. It sags with yellow bulbs. I think of the tree as a source of natural light. When the tree becomes tired of holding it lets them fall slowly, like rain, slipping out of one’s grasp. You catch the lightning and the wetness bring them in cardboard boxes to share a small beauty with the rest of us. All the lemons have fallen this season. In their absence, I can taste the storm. It slides down my face, replenishing softly in spite of the bitterness on my tongue in spite of the tempest all around us.
Careless Magazine • 35
there will come a time EMILY DIAMOND
sometimes there is nothing you can do to stop it it stands there in the doorway feet apart arms outstretched barricading the entryway you will make do with the new presence taking up space in your already cramped apartment it is a home nonetheless just now a bit swollen the walls give way to the pain hunch over in fatigue you will live with the curves as you live with yourself gently patiently there will come a time maybe as you walk up the front steps arms full of groceries maybe as you awaken from a hazy dream or maybe in the midst of it all the moment will come wherever you are 36 • Spring 2019
let it hang in the humid air give it time to breathe after all grief is only so strong
Careless Magazine • 37
The View
ALEXANDRA FISCHER
38 • Spring 2019
Noise
COLIN ADAMS
Restaurants are funny places. Soon-to-be lovers are on a date—their wine-lubricated laughter fills the room. Only a table away, a marriage of thirty-two years formally ends, the papers audibly scratched by a green-and-gold fountain pen; she says, “I’ll still love you. You know that, right?” He replies, “Yes, I know. Me too.” As food gets sheared, forks and knives scrape ceramic plates. Pint glasses clink for a colleague’s toast. Bussers clear tables; dirtied plates clash randomly on chromed trays. The purest sound: shattered glass reverberates silence into the dimly-lit room. For just the briefest moment, the restaurant is still: the lovers’ conversation halts, the divorce papers sit still, plates now safe from the onslaught of silverware. A young busser looks down at crystal fragments on the walnut floor. Then, the noise starts up again. Lives come together and fall apart: what a strange place.
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Figures 1 & 2
AMANDA OWENS
40 • Spring 2019
Papa in his Element ALESSANDRA YU
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WORK MAN SHIP CHAELEE DALTON
WORK
MAN
SHIP
bits become
your reality
removed and
rows become
all details of muse
moved by
arrays become
a city too close to
the sun
our honeyed grave
both green and gold
a revolution
embedded in
a two-faced
today mourning
our lack of ability to
die
and this evening
recall
rolling over
six feet under
nature gave us
not this quiet cemetery but
this land
everything but
the chance of reaching heaven
six miles above
music
and our longing to touch
the sea floor
and the waste we’ve made of
each other
we scrape at
our bodies
like this
sacred sky
42 • Spring 2019
Anxiety, the girl ZACH MILLER
“Who in their right mind names their daughter ‘Anxiety’?” they asked. “At first we thought it was going to be a boy,” said the man who named his daughter Anxiety. “What?” “I’m just kidding,” he said, “we knew she was a girl.” He watched the girl play with the other children on the playground. She was normal, and her name was Anxiety. “I don’t get it,” one of them said. “What is there to ‘get’? You don’t ‘get’ when someone names their son Will. It’s a name.” “But why would you call her that?” Another one of them asked, “Do you resent her? Hate her? Want her to have a miserable life of tearing herself apart for something out of her control?” “Oh, none of those--I love her, very much. I love her just like any parent loves their child. Her name is Anxiety, and I love her.” Some of them scrunched their faces in disgust or disbelief, others nodded as if they understood, but they were nodding too fast so it was clear that they were nodding as if they understood, not because they understood. They closed and tightened their shoulders as Anxiety’s hoarse call passed through the playground. The man smiled as he heard her voice. He watched as his daughter banged her head twice against a pole and ran over to give one of their kids a big hug. “I’m keeping my kid away from Anxiety,” the child’s parent said. “Ok,” replied the man.
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Lauryn
CHLOE WANASELJA 44 • Spring 2019
Brain Waves
NATALIE ANN BAUER
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the airplane didn’t crash but she landed in a graveyard anyway MIRANDA SHERIDAN
the air draws her in as she was born of it rather than a legacy of blood sacrifice family she has been afraid of the color yellow ever since she can remember her hips are shriveling in around curving in between without touching a bud which might’ve otherwise been subjected to infanticide who is to tell her where she buried two lilies in their prime the pale petals stay in her hair when she kisses her white mother on the cheek surely her veins give her away when she is angry no one falls asleep faster than she does the diaspora will pull her apart by her eyelids the fullness of her lips the plague in five tones of shame she has no home no place to cut her fingernails she has no womanhood perhaps it is why she loves the flowers 46 • Spring 2019
On re-tethering
CHARLOTTE MORRISSEY
Slaughterhouse in an earthquake, The threads grow too weak to cage the flesh. Carcasses come untethered, uncorked, And the blood spills, cherry wine on cement-smoothed floor. A custodian stands in the aftermath, Ankle-deep in the scent of fresh death. Snaking between towers of bones, buckets of bodies, Her eyes track only the mop.
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Routine
COLIN ADAMS
Kim was bored. As per her routine, she drove in the dark from her house, through the snow, to the parking garage. Her car hadn’t even warmed up when she arrived. She could still see her frosty breath fog up her window. She swiped her hospital ID, barely allowing enough room for the yellow and black bar to rise above her car before driving through. It was so familiar as to be unwelcoming. As usual, she parked her car in the staff-parking area behind the concrete pillar on the north-most side. Kim was bored. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since something interesting had happened at the hospital. Her ER shifts used to be fun and exciting. She used to enjoy when a gangbanger got stabbed and she would have to stitch him up, but even those cases got dull. When she wasn’t in the ER, Kim mostly sat around while she prepared for her next operation. But by this point, she had performed so many surgeries that the planning— and the operation itself—required little to no effort. Like many doctors, Kim was funneled to medical school by her parents. Although not explicitly told to do so, it was expected. After all, both of her parents were doctors. So, like a good, obedient child, she studied hard in high school, ended up at a well-respected university (Rice), did well on her MCATs, and went straight into medical school at the University of California at San Francisco. She liked San Francisco—she fit in there more than in Texas. In medical school, she chose to specialize in heart surgery, thinking that it would be both challenging and rewarding. She would have to solve life and death problems on the fly, and she would get to work with her hands. There was also a strange feeling holding someone’s heart in your hand. After the first time she had done this, Kim became hooked. Kim controlled their life in the operating room; for all intents and purposes, she was their god. But like all things, playing god got old too. She never really questioned this path, telling herself that this is what she wanted, until after the thousands and thou- sands of dollars the bank gave her had been signed for and not yet paid. And after that, her life was essentially fixed with little room to deviate. So, she stepped through life in intervals of how many stents she put in FAPPs (fat and pathetic persons) to keep their almost-useless hearts beating. But FAPPs usually had insurance, and insurance paid the 48 • Spring 2019
bills around here, so she tolerated their existence. Even so, their existence still made her depressed. Maybe that’s why she started drinking before work. Or, maybe it was to make the boredom a little less boring. Either way, she opened her glove box and pulled out a bottle of gin and took a drink that would make André the Giant cringe. Then she poured the gin until it filled her half-empty Gatorade bottle until it reached the brim. She sipped the top so it wouldn’t spill, returned the gin, grabbed her backpack, her lunch (an apple), and got out of the car. As Kim walked to work, hands deep in pockets, her chest still warm from the gin, she briefly considered going to a meeting for alcoholics. She knew she was one, she was at least that honest with herself. She wasn’t a sloppy drunk who dragged down society. She was still a valuable member in her community. Yet, Kim didn’t like the term “high- functioning alcoholic.” It’s not that she denied being one—she knew that she hit most of the red flags—but rather she didn’t think any alcoholic could be high-functioning; those terms fundamentally clashed with one another. Instead, she described herself as a ‘professionally presentable alcoholic’ (PPA). Some of her hospital friends—men and women—were PPAs, too. Kim would rotate between them, but the routine was the same: after work, they would go out to eat and drink a few bottles of wine at the table. Usually, they would then go back to Kim’s place and drink some more. They’d almost always fuck too. But, by this point, even the fucking tended to be an anti-climactic routine for Kim; she used the sex more so her fellow PPAs would keep drinking with her regularly. As she entered the hospital, she nodded to Jim the security guard (she had fucked him a few times before: he was sloppy, boorish, and boring) and she decided not to start attending any AA meetings this week. She never had gone and never really planned on going. The meetings that were closest to her apartment met on Mondays which is when she got dinner with Barbara—her most reliable drinking buddy— and Barbara could only drink on Mondays because that’s when her husband, a nurse, worked the graveyard shift. So, the AA meetings weren’t practical for Kim. Maybe she’d buy a self-help book instead. Satisfied with this, she pushed alcoholism out from her head and decided to focus on the surgeries that she had on her plate. She knew she had to perform an angioplasty or an atherectomy today. Or was it a stent placement? Shit. She couldn’t remember. She’d just play it by ear. It’ll be fine, she thought. It always was.
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After going up the stairs, Kim finally reached her office. She closed the door, set down her backpack and lunch, sat down, and exhaled loudly. She reached under her desk, searching for a secret shelf on the backside of one of her drawers. She felt around until she found the leather flask with a British flag pressed into it (her father’s). She grabbed it. It felt almost empty. She’d have to buy more soon. The flask was for her bad days. She decided to finish it off. Tequila. God, how she hated tequila. But it did what it needed to: she felt a little more awake. She put the flask back on the secret shelf. She didn’t want anyone to smell the alcohol on her breath, so she pulled out a fresh bag of salt and vinegar chips from her backpack. She usually ate this for her post-drink breakfast, and she hated herself for what this habit was probably doing to her own pulmonary artery— and her liver. She compared herself to a FAPP. She shuddered and shrugged off the thought. *** Knocks stirred Kim from her sleep. A small puddle of drool had formed on her fore- arm and a little pooled on the desk. Louder knocks. How long had she slept? It didn’t matter. She briskly walked over to the door and opened it. “Yes?” she said. Two doctors were impatiently waiting at her door. One was an old, gray-haired colleague named Greg Peck who mostly did knee surgeries; he was good too. Unfortunately, he was so damn whiny. The other was some blondhaired kid fresh out of medical school, with his tie too tight and hair too neat. Kim couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered making a bet with one of the PPAs on whether or not he was a Mormon and/or believed in gay conversion therapy. The bet was ongoing. “Dr. Joh? Where have you been? We’ve been trying reach you.” Kim looked down at her belt and saw her pager was dead. “Apparently, it’s out of battery. What’s the problem, Dr. Peck? What do you need? I was about to eat lunch.” She still felt buzzed from breakfast but was far from drunk. She knew it probably didn’t show. She had been doing this for long enough to know when she was sloppy. She was not even close to that point. If anything, she wasn’t drunk enough. The headache would hit soon unless she got another drink. Kim hated the fucking headaches. Dr. Peck was speaking fast in his characteristically shrill (and fucking annoying) voice, “We just got a patient who had a massive cardiac arrest. Luckily, someone nearby knew CPR and they had a defibrillator in the building. He’s very lucky to be alive. But the cardi50
ologist who looked at him after found that he also has heart disease. It’s bad too. The cardiologist is worried another heart attack would kill him. He thinks we need a quadruple bypass surgery to avoid further issues. He might not survive another heart attack.” Kim stared at Peck with fury. All of her plans just went poof. She’d have to cancel her PPA date. She shifted her anger to Mormon boy. Why was he even here? He was just standing there like a fucking cabbage. The silence grew. Then, Mormon boy decided to snap out of his meek, vegetative state and speak, “Um, uh, Dr. Joh. You’re the best heart surgeon we got. Your record is impeccable. We, uh, you should, uh, be the lead surgeon on this.” More silence. Mormon boy shifted his gaze from hers. “When is this happening?” “As soon as possible, Dr. Joh. Um, I mean, as soon as, uh, you’re ready,” said the cabbage. “Okay. I’ll reshuffle some things. I’ll be down in a few. Let me splash water on my face and I’ll meet you by the lobby.” Kim closed the door and silently tapped her forehead against it. Fuck me, she thought. She’d miss Barbara tonight. Kim let out a quiet yet forceful groan. The headache was coming. She went to her desk and grabbed the flask; it was empty, she already knew, but she just wanted her tongue to taste any residual tequila that it could. She managed to catch a drop. She looked at her father’s initials hand carved at the bottom: ‘T.J.’ She moved her thumb over them, but she couldn’t feel them. They were too shallow. She stashed the flask away. *** After Kim donned her white lab coat and splashed her face with lukewarm faucet water, she walked down the stairs to meet Dr. Peck and Mormon Boy. As they walked, they were telling her some of the details of the patient’s history but she wasn’t listening. The headache was coming and crushed her temple with each pulse. She needed booze. Quadruple bypasses were always a pain in the ass. The heart is stopped and blood is rerouted using a heart-lung bypass machine that supplies oxygen to the blood and pumps it around the body. The blood vessel in the heart that is blocked needs to be bypassed, meaning the blood needs to flow around that blood vessel until the plaque is cleaned out: a slow and tedious process. That’s a bypass surgery. Naturally, it’s understandable why Kim especially hated performing a quadruple bypass surgery.
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*** Kim was in her blue surgical scrubs. She had just finished washing her hands and was ready to enter the operating room. Unfortunately, she felt completely sober, a fact that her pounding headache confirmed for her. She walked in and saw the team around her. She nodded to them, signaling that things were ready to begin. Everyone took their appropriate places. Kim walked over the man who was chemically put to sleep. He was a huge man. A true FAPP. He probably weighed as much as a literal farm pig at slaughter. If she had to guess, Kim would say he was slightly below average height although it’s hard to tell when they’re laying down and it’s even harder with a FAPP. His chest was stained with iodine and underneath was already a large scar running down his sternum. Kim asked the physician assistant his medical history. “The patient has had open-heart surgery before, for heart disease. He was doing well with his recovery before, uh, the cardiac arrest earlier.” This really pissed off Kim. Here is this fucking FAPP who had heart disease before and apparently made no changes to his lifestyle afterwards. He had clogged his arteries again with donuts and milkshakes and hot dogs and whatever-the-fucking-else he eats while he twiddles his fat thumbs. Kim clenched her jaw in rage. “Let’s begin,” she said to the team. Kim took a scalpel and made an incision the length of a pint glass down the sternum. Then Kim asked for the oscillating saw to break through the sternum. This will be a trudge and is always a bit messy but it’s interesting if anything goes wrong. After, Kim slowly spread each half of the ribcage giving her easy access to the lifeless heart. The real operation began. *** Each bypass went without incident, as usual, as always. Another checked box. All that was left was to sew this FAPP up. But before she did, Kim stared at the still aorta, the lifeless veins and arteries. She thought about the FAPP. Wouldn’t he just eat Krispy Kreme to the operating table again? He would just be here again, taking up more hospital resources. He kept her from her gin now. Would he do it again? She hated him. Kim looked around the room. Everyone was exhausted. They just wanted to stitch him up again and go home and sleep. Nobody was paying attention. Kim calmly picked up a scalpel. Her chest shook with each blood-banked thud of her own heart. If she made 52 • Spring 2019
a small incision in the aorta, when they let the heart start beating again, soon the pressure from the blood would cause the aorta to rupture, and, by that point, it would be too late. He would almost certainly die. A FAPP with a long history of heart problems dies of a heart problem after having open-heart surgery to fix a heart problem—would anyone really be surprised? She stared at the still heart. Kim felt adrenaline. *** “Okay everyone. Let’s get this guy out of here,” Kim yelled out. Kim’s headache was gone. They took the FAPP off the bypass machine causing his heart to beat again, sewed his ribs up with wire and stitched him up. As they rolled him out of the operating room, the EKG was sending out steady, periodic pulses into the room. Then there weren’t. There was just a high-pitched whine. Scrambling and shouts followed. Under her surgical mask, Kim smiled. This was new.
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Contemplation ALEXI BUTTS
54 • Spring 2019
Bookmarking the Hate ELENA DYPIANGCO
As I went in for the killshot I decided instead to go in for a nightcap: the parts of my body disperse into darkened corners, regress into patterns that I have not seen for so long that I don’t recognize them as such—until I do. I fucked around, certainly, but—what was it with people wanting me to come through? Through where? Into what? My revolving door of aspirations ensured I was cracked open to invaders, lovers, and the interesting ones who doubled as both! To queue my ire, that was a process that required, it would seem, active reconstruction. A model for good measure: when you click this button, you queue a show so that it is played after the previous one without delay. Had exercises in patience all but gone extinct? I live incrementally. I am always coming through, to use that obsequious phrase. How is it that something like endless rain, once a co-conspirator in name, has been vibrantly abbreviated? My gentle shoulder re-attaches itself to my body. It was when the sun awakened the next morning that I remembered to call it a night.
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Objects in Mirror AYA BURTON
Something quiet now parked car in the cul-de-sac metal glinting silver in the cold snow, stark as the waning moon plunging through midamerican sky our chilled breath fogs the windows, forms slow drips of condensation I trace the pattern on the seats pull my sweater’s loose seams try to wake my sleeping tongue see myself from far away figurine encased in glass wings frozen, feet numb buried by the snow globe’s localized storm that car dead quiet time waxes, year passes we don’t look at our faces, made pale by the windshield don’t dare to stir the air pooled between us setting things into solid place that hand, my hand 56 • Spring 2019
leaden on the handle his key dead in ignition snowfall suspended snow falling still so many seconds the years in a second car parked outside dash light glowing I notice I am breathing self-conscious of the sound he shifts the gear swings open the door and it’s over, that
terrible, ageless waiting.
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An Interview with Sally Wen Mao INTERVIEW BY BECKY ZHANG, POMONA ‘22
Sally Wen Mao is a Chinese-American poet, writer, and educator. She immigrated to the United States at a young age and has published two poetry collections, “Mad Honey Symposium” and “Oculus.” Released this year, Oculus has been critically acclaimed for its exploration of technology and the Asian-American experience in the United States. She won a 2017 Pushcart Prize for her poetry, and her writing has been published or reviewed by NPR, Vulture, The New Yorker, Nylon, and The Washington Post. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. In “Antipode Essay,” you write that “America cannot orient itself / without an opposite.” What led you to that thought? The U.S. operates on an assertive kind of logic. I’ve always found the popular saying “I’m going to dig a hole and emerge on the other side of the earth in China” to be problematic. That kind of geographical explanation of what is the opposite of the U.S. is kind of a lie. The actual antipode of the U.S., the exact geographical opposite of the U.S., is not China but this desolate island in the sea, and its name literally translates to desolation island. That is the real antipode of the U.S., even though the popular imaginarium likes to think of the antipode or opposite of the U.S. as China. I guess that “Antipode Essay” is about thinking about language, and how those idioms and sayings get recycled over and over again despite that they may be factually lies. Your poems in Oculus highlight the ways Hollywood fails to respectfully and honestly represent Chinese-Americans onscreen. Can you share what drew you to the topic of representation and, in particular, to the particular people whose lives you chose to focus on, from the 20th-century Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong to the first Chinese woman to visit the U.S., Afong Moy? I think that we’ve all been affected by representation in varying degrees. It’s a general conversation that’s happening a lot in the larger cultural imaginarium, and Hollywood white-washing is a discussion 58 • Spring 2019
that’s in the ether. I wanted to write about that, but not in essay form. I chose the women in particular who were in the spotlight in various degrees, like Afong Moy and Anna May Wong, who were historical figures and gave a more direct context for the conversation that people are having now about race and representation in media. I knew about Anna May Wong pretty early on. I think I first found her in a museum of Chinese Americans in New York. The exhibition, a thematic monologue describing Anna May Wong, really drew me in, and so I went back and ended up doing some research on her and her life. The Chinese in America by Iris Chang mentioned Afong Moy in only a few sentences, but I was immediately drawn to her story. It should be a more well-known story and yet it’s not, and so I conducted more research on her by looking for archives at the New York Public Library. These two women had a lot in common, separated by around one century, and I was really fascinated by that. Going back to the 1800s and then through the 20th and 21st centuries, I realized it was truly an intergenerational phenomenon. There’s this pattern that emerges, and these two women in particular really struck me. In a recent article for Nylon, “Two Worlds, One Dress: On the Chinese-American Qipao,” you mentioned your stay in Shanghai as a transformative one. Can you tell me more about your trip there and what you were doing? And can you expand on how it tied you to Anna May Wong’s first trip to China herself and the idea of returning home to a place you don’t fully know? I was a resident in an artist’s residency in Shanghai, set in this beautiful hotel, a historic building right on the Bund in Shanghai. I was there to write and do research on whatever my next project might be. Once I got there, I kind of tried to think about history and Shanghainese history in particular, and I did see a lot of relations to Anna May Wong because she visited the city too when she was pretty much the same age as me. With that essay, I wanted to focus on the trip made by her. Most people know her as the Chinese, the Oriental
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actress, but they don’t know how quintessentially Chinese-American she was; Wong didn’t really know China at all until she was well into her adulthood. I traced a bit of her journey and visited the Park Hotel where she stayed. The Peace Hotel, which was right next to me, actually had a museum with Anna May Wong’s portrait. I think she had done some kind of reception there during her stay. I was really drawn to learning more about the history of Shanghai, especially at the time of her visit; it was the 1930s, the height of Shanghai’s glamorous era, and kind of the apex of both the Chinese Civil War and the Japanese invasion. Many of the poems in Oculus are “persona poems,” in which you write from the perspectives and voices of people whom you’ve learned about. How do you reconcile the distance, whether generational, national, or personal, between you and the chosen narrator when trying to yield an authentic voice? Fiction writers have been doing it for god knows how long. It involves really harnessing the elements of story making, character building, and simply thinking about the specific experience of having an Asian-American, feminine body. The feeling attached to that is something that can transcend time and history. Of course, I read a lot of Anna May Wong’s accounts. She actually wrote a lot of her own articles, and her voice wasn’t that much of a departure from what I had imagined it to be. She’s very well-spoken, and she was a great writer. With that, you have to recognize that you’re dealing with a history that might be silenced or erased. Your voice may not give complete truth to that story or that object, but that’s where the imagination comes in. As Asian-American women, we have been the victims of white feminization for so long. Throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, white people have had no problems with taking on a voice or being the authority on the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans. So, you really just have to give yourself permission when you have that experience. That experience of being in an Asian-American, feminine body can never be explained by a white perspective and yet it has been, again and again. Those stories never really reflect 60 • Spring 2019
how it feels. So, of course I’m going to write persona poems. Why can’t I, when other people are doing the same, and instead in an inauthentic way? Tying to the topic of representation in cinema and other popular media, what are your thoughts on the handling of representation in the movie Crazy Rich Asians? Crazy Rich Asians is marketed as this fun, rom-com, feel-good movie, and I think it delivered on that promise. We haven’t seen that many Asians or Asian Americans in these kinds of movies, and so a lot of people were very excited about that. I certainly shared some of that excitement, but I really don’t think of the film as a triumph for representation, just to have that one movie. It’s this event that happens every 30 or so years. Crazy Rich Asians, before that The Joy Luck Club, and then before that Flower Drum Song from 1961. How do we change the Asian-American film so it becomes an actual pattern instead of this anomaly that appears every few decades? I don’t want just feel-good rom-com films; I want films whose plots tackle the deeper complexities of being Asian American, films that tackle the real and nitty-gritty problems. Those are still rare. Your poem “Occidentalism” reflects on history as conveyed through writing and books. How do you define the term “history,” and how do you think creative writing can serve to fill in the gaps of or rewrite the more commonplace and traditional histories that are in place? In conversations about history, the questions are always “who is telling the history?” and “who is recording the history?” Who is telling the story, and from what perspective? Often the answer to that is the people in power. The people in power are usually writing that history. Not until this century have we learned to reckon with that; our critical thinking has not really been the norm. When I was growing up, we were taught about Columbus and how he was an explorer who discovered the New World. On a factual level, this is biased and from the perspective of white leaders. “Occidentalism” begs the question: how can we, the people who might not be in power, record history and reckon with the history
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that is already in the books? How can we reckon with a book that glorifies settler colonialism? With that poem, I was thinking about how we can break that on a daily basis. I think that that’s what’s great about creative writing. In a way you’re recreating a history. You’re tackling history through another lens: one of imagination. Not only can you remap history, but you can also reimagine it. It’s very important to be reading works of fiction and poetry that look at history from a different perspective. You write in “Occidentalism:” “In this life I have worshipped so many lies. / Then I workshop them, make them better.” Can you share more of your thoughts on this idea of lies and reshaping them? Lies do come from that idea of history; the fact that these kinds of narratives were told again and again throughout my youth (that Columbus discovered America when in fact it already existed and had been settled on by Native Americans), one comes to take them for granted and no longer questions them. I guess the process of “workshopping” a piece of work, even a work that you might have spent your whole life working on, means that you can still take the time to revise that—to revise a perception you may have had, one you may have once been set on. Do you have any comment on Sino-U.S. relations as they are portrayed in US media and how they might impact the ways in which Chinese and Chinese Americans are viewed in the U.S.? Today there’s this kind of orientalism—I won’t call it that, because orientalism tends to pertain to overt Yellow Peril. But it harkens to these kinds of tropes that the Chinese are out to get us. There’s this narrative recycled: China is written about as this kind of crazy, uncontrollable behemoth that is hard to understand, hard to control, and inscrutable. I think those words still pertain to how the media treats Sino-US relations. The language is interesting in that it takes away human interaction and lends itself to this behemoth kind of influence, never mind the fact that it’s discussing a country made up of real people. I find it odd, the language that comes with that topic in the media. 62 • Spring 2019
You’ve written that you “don’t believe the false binary between retaining an ethnic culture and ‘assimilation.”’ Could you speak on this more, specifically on the methods you find most effective in combating this binary and embracing both the conjunction and conflict of assimilation and claiming one’s ethnic heritage? There definitely is this narrative: the immigrant comes to America, and let’s help them assimilate. I just don’t think that it’s a one-way journey. What happens, then, when the immigrant does assimilate? What then? Are they going to enjoy the privileges of supremacy? Never. I think it’s a false binary, and people being immigrants are always going to have struggles, no matter how Americanized they get. We should expect that people can exist in more than one world, with more than one identity and more than one way of seeing themselves. How do you think that teaching and writing are complementary and how are they different? How did the courses you taught at Cornell and other academic institutions influence your own work? Teaching is also a learning process; when you’re teaching, you’re also teaching yourself and your students are teaching you. Even though I barely got any writing done at my residency in Shanghai, I still consider all of that part of the writing process—that is, tracing Anna May Wong’s steps and visiting the museums. I view teaching the same way. I taught an Asian-American literature course at Cornell, and because I hadn’t learned about that before I had to teach myself some of the history and activism surrounding it. It was kind of a crash course before teaching the course. Of course, my students were very brilliant and would bring in their own kind of experiences, knowledge, and expertise into the classroom. When in your life did you begin to acknowledge race as a factor that affected how you and others were perceived? I think I’ve always felt it, but in terms of noting a critical mindset around race, I feel like that took a longer time to find. You feel things
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before you are able to understand them and pick them apart. In college I didn’t take that many classes in Asian-American studies or race studies in general—I was more versed in feminist and gender studies, but those kinds of classes usually failed to address race in any kind of meaningful way, and I feel like I recognized that really sharply in college. It wasn’t until graduate school that I really started taking more classes on it and building a critical language and standpoint on race. It’s an ongoing process. Why do you write? I was probably in middle school when I developed this habit of writing poems. I think I’ve always been a writer, though—I can date it back to second grade. The writing workshops were always my favorite part of class; there was a fragment of time devoted to writing stuff, and I remember that being my favorite time of all. I recently found this old notebook from second grade, when I was eight years old, in my dad’s garage, and it’s full of all these book titles for this series I was going to write, as well as maybe 70 pages written of this Goosebumps knockoff. (laughs.) Maybe I wanted to be a horror story writer back then. Who are your artistic influences? Whoever I happen to be reading at the time. When I was writing Oculus, I was reading a lot of poets, Cathy Park Hong and Adrian Matejka in particular, and seeing how other poets approached their writing. The Big Smoke by Matejka is a book with a long running persona throughout, and I wanted to see what that could bring. Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire had a lot of poems about this future boomtown addressing the proliferation of technology. She made up a fictional city, and I just thought that was so brilliant. Reading different writers who were pushing boundaries between genres or introducing the speculative into poetry, for example, was something that I was interested in and really experimented with. Thanks so much for speaking with me today. It was such a pleasure talking to you, and I wish you the best in all your creative endeavors. Do you have any closing thoughts? 64 • Spring 2019
More to my sentiment on Crazy Rich Asians, progress is not just about rising to the top. It’s about diversity within your community. The Asian American experience can never be represented by just one person or one movie, so the absurdity of that is what I want to emphasize. How many movies do we have about a white family? I think that literature right now is really interesting; there have been a lot more Asian-American talent and books coming out in the recent years showcasing the experiences of all kinds of marginalized identities.
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An Interview with Hua Hsu
INTERVIEW BY ADITYA GANDHI, POMONA ‘22
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a tenured associate professor of English and director of American studies at Vassar College. His writing tackles cultural topics, with particular focus on music and immigration. Hsu approaches his journalistic writing in an unorthodox manner, often trying to recreate a certain mood or make his perspective understood rather than convince readers of a particular opinion. What drew you to a career in cultural criticism? I was kind of accidentally a poli-sci major in college, and I think I always assumed a typical kind of immigrant path where I would find a normal job with benefits, and being a lawyer seemed easier than becoming a doctor. I’d done high school debate, so poli-sci seemed like a sensible major, but I didn’t really connect with most of the classes I was taking until my senior year, where I took a course that was basically a political history of American literature. [The professor] was so good at doing these readings, which made me interested in the politics of culture. That’s where it started. How do you carry your Asian-American identity into the cultural criticism that you do? Do you carry it at all? I like reading about Asian-American things when I think I have something meaningful to contribute, but it’s not really foregrounded in a lot of my writing. There are places in every piece that I write where I think, that’s the Asian-American side of me, and maybe the way it manifests is that I don’t ever really feel like I’m coming from a place where most readers would associate with. But I never really write about things from an Asian-American point of view, unless it’s a case where that point of view would help the reader understand. For example, once I wrote this piece about whiteness, and in the first few paragraphs I mentioned these two court cases involving Asian-Americans and how American notions of legal whiteness derived from these court cases around Asian immigrants. A friend of mine said, “Oh, that was totally you holding down this Asian-American perspective.” Most people writing about race would never have 66 • Spring 2019
used those two court cases. Maybe it comes out in ways like that, as reference points. Where do you draw the line between your politics and your criticism in your writing? I think we all bring political sensibilities to bear on things, but I try not to let it over-determine the course of my writing. I want someone to understand how I came to a conclusion, or why I feel a certain way, and so if I can do that without expressly talking about how I feel about poverty or wealth distribution, I think it’s just more effective. On occasion, I write things that are kind of more aggressively political, but looking back, those things always seem very timestamped. I’d rather just have someone understand how I came to a conclusion and follow that thought process. You’ve spoken about how when you started writing professionally you lost your individual voice but gained more clarity in your writing. Was that trade-off for the best in your opinion? Is there a way to keep both? Whenever you enter a professional system, you have to compromise a bit of your idiosyncrasy. Writing is one of those fields where all you have is your voice and your perspective. It’s probably true that my voice is not as foregrounded as it used to be when I was just writing for myself and my friends, but I feel like my ability to convey my perspective is much stronger. I’m definitely the kind of writer where people wouldn’t react as well to my “voice” as they would to my perspective and me welcoming them into the piece that way. I guess I’ve never seen it as a trade-off. It’s a trade-off in that having to do things for money is a trade-off, and entering into a workplace is a trade-off; you’re going to have to make compromises. But to me, I enjoy the challenge of finding spaces in a piece of writing where I can be myself and figuring out how I can get the reader there. Is the cultural criticism that you do more of a creative or an academic endeavor? It’s a little of both. For me, the interaction between creative work
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and academic work is actually teaching. Teaching takes place in an academic sitting, but it’s a very creative endeavor to try and sit with a bunch of people in a classroom and just figure something out. I see writing as more connected with my teaching than with either academia or creativity. I see writing as an extension of teaching. When you’re teaching people creative writing, what do you find to be one of the most difficult things about trying to guide people’s writing? I think the most difficult part of teaching writing is convincing students that you need boring sentences along with the interesting ones, the dazzling, radiant, I’m-trying-to-stunt-on-you ones. All writing is about managing that rhythm between setting a scene—with sentences that you don’t have to think too hard about to understand—and being creative with your phrasing, which you can do once you’re in that scene. There’s a tendency when you first self-identify as a writer that every sentence, every syllable, every word should count—and it should, but it can count in different ways and moments in a piece of writing. A lot of my favorite albums have interludes, like Frank Ocean’s Blonde. A few interludes in that album—I always think I should skip them, but in reality they enhance the overall experience of the album. A lot of my favorite albums—the first Wutang album, or Farside’s, or Blood Orange’s—there are these moments that are really small, ephemeral, and then they lead into these songs that are indelible, astonishing. I see writing in the same way. Some of the writing you do isn’t meant to be showy; it should just get you to the next thing. The reader needs that space to breathe, reflect, and pause. It’s hard to teach that because you’re conditioned to think that you should make everything sing. What other connections do you see between music and writing? A lot of things I try to do in my writing probably are the result of my obsessing over music as a younger person: an interest in rhythm, an interest in giving someone space to feel like they’re part of something like any good song can do. I’m really obsessed with how things begin and end. I grew up in an era when you had a limited amount 68 • Spring 2019
of albums and you just obsessively listened to these albums. I always think of the first song and the last song, how an album hangs together. Maybe that’s one of the big ways in which I see music and writing as related. How does the need to support yourself financially factor into your writing? Is this necessity contradictory to the act of writing, or can they work together? It’s pretty hard to support yourself financially just as a writer. There are ways of making money writing, which often involve things that deviate from why you became a writer in the first place, like ghostwriting The Rock’s autobiography or something like that. Generally speaking, the publishing industry and journalism are just not necessarily growth industries where people can really support themselves the way you could once aspire to be a journalist and pursue a stable middle-class life. Personally, I’ve been incredibly fortunate because first of all, I’ve had very supportive parents, but I’ve also had this full-time job teaching at a college. That’s allowed me to be judicious about the work I choose to do. That sort of created this illusion, perhaps, that I have integrity as a writer. In reality, it’s just that I have the freedom to not have to do everything required to pay the rent. I think one positive thing is that there are increasingly more opportunities for people who just want to tell stories through writing, whether it’s through podcast or radio. A lot of people I know are getting into TV or movie writing—there’s way more space in film or television for intelligent, thoughtful, inclusive storytelling. So there’s still a lot of possibilities open to people who like to write, but the life of a writer is much harder financially than it was thirty, fifty, a hundred years ago. You said in your talk that producing pieces on time can be worth more in the industry than producing quality work. How does that make you feel as a writer? I’m in a fortunate position where I trust my editors, and so sometimes you just need to hand things in on time to get to the process of editing, which in my case can be really collaborative. It really varies for different forms of writing. If you’re writing a novel, you would
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probably want to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be before submitting it. But the rhythms of journalism are such that you just have to get things turned in because the magazine, the newspaper, the website will publish regardless of whether you are a part of it. You’re one of twenty people whose words will appear in it. The lifespan of a book is really different from the lifespan of an article. You said regarding your piece for The New Yorker on Crazy Rich Asians that you were hoping to recreate a certain mood rather than to get a certain message across. Does that hold true for the cultural criticism that you usually do? In each of my pieces, even though they’re not aggressive takes, there are opinions there. My pieces are just a bit looser in how they get to those opinions. I’m interested in playing around and figuring out how to do it stylistically. A lot of journalism is driven by opinion, and mine is too, but I don’t want the opinion to be the thing leading the piece. I just sort of want us [the reader and I] to get there together. I’ve definitely written pieces for The New Yorker that don’t land a punch, and that’s okay. As a writer, I’m always curious as to what anyone can get out of something—I’ve written this because this is just my thing, but I have no illusion that you have to think the same way. The Crazy Rich Asians piece you mentioned, some people read it and found it really stirring for some reason; other people read it and were like, “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.” I think both reactions are equally valid. I didn’t even know fully what I was trying to say, and I’m just thankful that anyone will read anything I write. What do you hope that people will get out of reading your pieces? I think I always try and give people a few things to think about, and I hope they think about them. But I don’t want to tell you how to think, or which things to focus on. I think I always try and have more than one point when I’m writing something. I hope someone understands why I have the opinion I do rather than my being able to convince them of something. I’m not really writing advocacy journalism that speaks truth to power. I write about culture, and culture is pretty ephemeral and individual, so I’m just giving you a perspective. It’s 70 • Spring 2019
not supposed to replace your perspective, it’s just supposed to open up to this space where our perspectives can commune.
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Contributors Addison Kay Aditya Ghandi Alessandra Yu Alexandra Fischer Alexi Butts Amanda Owens Aya Burton Becky Zhang Cameron Tipton Chaelee Dalton Charlotte Morrissey Chloe Wanaselja Colin Adams Elena Dypiangco Emily Diamond Hannah Orrahood J.J. Shankar Jeanne Rasmussen Miranda Sheridan Molly Antell Natalie Ann Bauer Nina Potischman Selena Spier Talia Ivry Zach Miller
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Printed in China