Campus Life

Praise These Lines

“I’ve forgotten how not to hope. We throw open the windows, draw water we do not have, as if wishes are promises, are heaven on earth, and here and now forever safe.” – Shirley Geok-lin Lim “In Praise of Limes”

Write as often as you can and never throw anything away. Keep a shoebox and someday you’ll come back to it. You’ll see a character in someone, find a pattern. Insert and delete as you think of the whole architecture of your piece.

– Shirley Geok-lin Lim

BY HANNAH COBURN

Shirley Geok-lin Lim read her poetry to LACC students and faculty during a virtual session on March 29, 2022 followed by Q&A with the author.

The event transported the audience back to Santa Barbara life in 2012, through Lim’s lens. Her latest poetry collection “In Praise of Limes” follows a spectrum of beauty and enjoyment through nature and wildlife, but also shares how humans can degrade both.

Lim recalled her 12 months of observations in Santa Barbara, wildfires in Los Angeles, encounters she has had with animals on her morning walks and something she refers to as “eco-anxiety.” It is reflected in her writing through representation of climate change.

Professor Can Aksoy teaches English and ESL at L.A. City College.

“I found myself appreciating more of a non-political voice on topics like climate change and Asian-American experiences,” Aksoy said.

Lim is an accomplished writer with 37 published books. She was the first woman and the first Asian to receive the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Her list of achievements also includes the American Book Award, the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) award and the Feminist Press Lifetime Achievement Award.

The event concluded with an open Q&A. Lim offered advice to aspiring writers, poets, and answered inquiring students in the audience.

“Keep on writing, believe in yourself, and find a community,” Lim said. “Behind every writer there is community. Find a mentor, someone to see that you have talent.”

Lim spoke about her personal life as a young writer in Malaysia, her early career as a professor in the Bronx, and the literary journals she created in Hong Kong.

“I quit teaching in 2012 and wrote a poem a day and in 2015 I published three books,” Lim said. “Write daily if you can, as it is fertilizer that will grow a large garden of books for you.”

She addressed coping with instances of writer’s block and told students how to overcome them.

“Write about what is around you,” Lim said. “There is so much to write about that one could live 200 years and still be writing.”

MOVIE REVIEW

‘EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE’

BY CHRISTIAN CHAVEZ

Multiverse movies are all the rage now, thanks to “SpiderMan No Way

Home,” the upcoming “Doctor

Strange” and the “Multiverse of

Madness” (the less I talk about

Morbius, the happier I am).

However, if there’s one movie that breaks the universe that you should see this year, it is “Everything

Everywhere All at Once.”

Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert directed the new A24 film. Michelle

Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant with a failing marriage and exhausting home life.

Wang and her husband

Waymond, played by Ke Huy Quan try to do their taxes. Their IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdra, played by a hilarious and terrifying Jamie

Lee Curtis, gives the worn-out couple one last chance to make sure their affairs are all in order.

There’s just one problem: Evelyn’s universe has literally broken. With two Bluetooth earphones, she instantaneously transfers the conscious of another Evelyn from a different universe in order to stop an ultimate evil that kills all Evelyns from the remaining multiverses.

What follows is a mind-bending sci-fi experience on steroids. Such is the absurdity of its tale, so too is the fact that the multiverse storyline is just the tip of the iceberg, a ruse to have a larger conversation about immigrant parents during moments of transition.

For ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ an immigrant parent who admits to failure is the crux of the drama. How can you admit to doing wrong when you try the hardest under the circumstances?

Being the parent of a child who breaks culture barriers can be as tough as fighting an ultimate evil hell bent to kill every version of you imaginable.

Ultimately, ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ is an ode to parents, cinema, action and absurdity packaged into a two and a half hour thrill ride.

Photo by Louis White

“New Jack City” director Mario Van Peebles (center) and actress Vanessa Estelle Williams (left) and others attend the premiere for an American Cinematheque series, “Perpetratin’ Realism: Black Film,” on the 30th anniversary of the movie on April 9, 2022. The screening marks the kickoff of a yearlong series from American Cinematheque with the support of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Van Peebles’ 1991 film traces the crack cocaine epidemic and the rise of the gangs associated with the drug. From “New Jack City” to “Boyz N the Hood,” these films were popular and profitable and brought Black audiences to movie theaters. They also sparked panic among white neighborhoods and business owners. These same Black audiences became the target of police surveillance and repression, according to film scholar and critic Mathia Diawara.