Descent | Issue #6: Coalesce

DESCENT

For Descent's sixth issue, we present you with the theme coalesce.

With coalesce, we seek pieces that build and fuse identities, lives, boundaries and beyond.

Let us see how you unify a disparate whole. Shiny metallics, chaotic fluids, little things that combine – look towards the inevitable and invite us to a new, coalesced entity.

FALL 2023 THE 6TH ISSUE Ripple meeting shore

butterflies merging into one

let it all coalesce.

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A LETTER FROM THE EDITORS 02 00

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Dear Descent Community, Thank you so much for reading Descent's sixth issue, Coalesce!

We're proud to present an edition rife with citrus and waves, ideas and pieces that flow and coalesce yet remain distinctly unique. With Coalesce, we sought to elevate convergence, to showcase unity among differences and the beauty of intersecting identities.

We're so excited and humbled to welcome many new designers, writers, coordinators, social media managers, and multimedia creatives to our team this semester. This is the longest and most ambitious issue of Descent that we've built so far, and it wouldn't be possible without them. We've been greatly inspired by our new and returning members, and we hope you will be too. We're very proud of them and excited to share their incredible, thoughtful work.

We're also thrilled to witness significant jumps in support for Descent, from readership to general membership. Thank you for giving us a chance to share our voices, for finding our spaces, and keeping them thoughtful and innovative. To the wonderful individuals in our USC community, we thank you for inviting us to meet and create with you. To those we've featured, thank you for sharing your stories; we greatly appreciate your belief and support in our mission. Meeting fellow APISA creatives and brands in Los Angeles and beyond has been both invigorating and inspiring.

We truly appreciate your support as we grow and expand. Let's continue to coalesce into a vibrant community of creatives, showcasing the endless facets of APISA experiences and voices.

Gratefully,

Marissa Ding Director of Art and Multimedia

Isabelle Lim Director of Visual Design

Z Luo Chief Writing Editor

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CONT Ripple meeting shore, butterflies merging into one, echoes that become music – let it all coalesce. For Descent's sixth issue, we present you with the theme coalesce. With coalesce, we seek pieces that build and fuse identities, lives, boundaries and beyond. Let us see how you unify a disparate whole. Shiny metallics, chaotic fluids, little things that combine – look towards the inevitable and invite us to a new, coalesced entity.

00 04

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TENTS best friend 06 your Megan Dang Isabella Murray Lou Just Wants 12 Gracie to Go to Heaven

the car with a boy 32 in Echo Tang Michaela Chang

34 DAWANG Marissa Ding

66 Communion Jimin Hong

Isabella Murray and Ash 72 Waves Sage Murthy

Pia Pelaez Michaela Chang

Isabelle Lim

Grace Wu

for Cold Bodies 14 Liturgy Rui Zhang

Night Hostess 40 One Alice Fan

Together 74 Grow Elianna Gamboa

Stella Vu

Christine Jeong

25 eMERGEnce Jessica Fu

Mix, Match, 45 Identities: Merge

chip, chip 76 chip, Ally Guo

Christine Jeong

Hannah Chu Isabelle Lim

Adeline Chan

i know, love, 22 everyone and see

Stranger in My 46 AHometown

Faces: What's 82 Eating in my Bento Box?

Avana Wang Stella Vu

Jasmine Kwok Prithika Kulkarni

20 Pop Nicole Joseph

Heisei Three 52 Visiting Risa Takemoto

see, land, water 88 touch, Samara Chaplain

Ally Wong

Adeline Chan

Sammie Yen Raina Paeper

to build a perfect 26 How personality Z Luo Isabelle Lim (or, the reason i 30 amrita wait for you) Aahana Chowdhuri Leia Fisher

Nuo 54 Jenny Ariel Cheng Aud Ma

Grace Wu My Fire 92 Light Marissa Ding Leia Fisher

Chen the Ocean 98 Deanie 60 When Marissa Ding Doesn't Meet the Shore Maia Cho Ally Wong

Aud Ma 05

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es

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You’re in the car waiting for her and it feels like she’s been kissing him for hours. The engine’s been running.

That’s not good for the car battery. It’s cold, even with the seat warmer on, and The Christmas Song is on the radio even though it’s only November. Is she coming anytime soon? Like, today? You steal another risky glance out the window. There they are: lips at war, teeth and tongues gnashing, her arms around his neck like a noose. Even from here his nose is huge, swallows her face. It doesn’t look comfortable, but they don’t stop anyway.

Stupid engine, stupid battery, stupid seat warmer, stupid Nat King Cole. You punch the radio off and then, before you can think better of it, you punch your horn too. It gives an emphatic bleat and the two of them finally untether themselves. She squeezes his shoulder and then maybe gives him a last kiss goodnight, a peck on the cheek, 06

maybe, but you’re not looking, whatever.

She’s all huffy getting into the passenger’s seat, like, Couldn’t you wait? And you’re like, I’ve been waiting, I’ve been waiting for like twenty fucking minutes. I could’ve watched Housewives with that time.

She rolls her eyes and is all, It wasn’t twenty minutes. (Felt like it.) Are we getting slurpees or what?

I’m tired. I’m driving home.

She says come on, don’t be a buzzkill, and starts re-applying the bubblegum lip gloss that came off during her slobberfest. That just makes you more upset.

She’s the most selfish person you know, making you watch her kiss her stupid ugly big-nosed boyfriend for five hours and then expecting you to chauffeur her to get a slurpee while she does touch-ups. Who does she think she is? (Who is she?) You look at her in the rearview, the

nauseating artificial bubblegum smell wafting off of her. What a tremendous bitch. What a stupid ugly whore.

I’m going home, you say again, sharper this time. You pull out of the parking lot.

Hey, she says. You’re like, What?

Don’t be mad.

I’m not mad.

Are you mad because I’m seeing him?

I just said fucking mad.

I’m

not

He’s just my boyfriend, she says, and that really pisses you off, because like—What the fuck? Just your boyfriend? Like there are so many things that mean more than that, okay, fuck you.

Plenty of things mean more than that, she says. Like this.

She reaches out and grabs the pendant that hangs from your neck: half a heart, engraved with a cryptic “Be Fri”. The charm around her neck has the oth-

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er half, the “st ends”.

She takes the two warped half-moons, holds them together, then looks up at you through her lashes, gives you this stupid knock-out smile, and you remember suddenly that this is your best friend. Your best friend who’s cheerleading captain this year, your best friend who was crowned homecoming queen two years in a row. Your best friend who shouldn’t even be friends with you in the first place, really, with her looking like that.

It’s a dangerous face, the kind of face people used to start wars over. Maybe you’d start a war for her now.

You take her to get her slurpee, blue raspberry, turns her tongue purple. While you drink yours in the parking lot you let her weave her fingers through your hair, braiding and unbraiding, French, Dutch, fishtail. She tells you you’ve got split ends, and you tell her to shut up. She laughs.

Then she says, You’d look good with bangs, you know.

I’d look like you.

Exactly, she says without missing a beat, and you scoff. No, but seriously—here, look at me.

You look at her. Her fingertips are warm as they brush over your face. She holds your hair over your eyes: mock bangs. Pretty, she says quietly.

Then she looks back at you.

Sometimes when she looks at you you get this weird feeling like something is dying inside of you, an animal or a star. It’s not a bad feeling, just strange, equal parts inevitable and wonderful and horrible. Nobody else looks at you like her.

You barely recognize the sound of your own voice when you ask her the question. Will you cut them for me?

Half-lit by the moon, her eyes glow in the dark. Her smile cuts jagged and beautiful across her face.

She takes to your hair with safety scissors,

and it’s not perfect— far from perfect, actually—but it’s not bad, either, and she was right. They look good on you. When she holds up a mirror for you to see, there’s a brief fraction of a second where you don’t recognize yourself. What a thrilling half-second it is. You could be this person, you could be anybody. You could be her.

Now the bangs are just another thing you share, along with all of the other things you’ve shared for years now.

Secrets and earrings and lipgloss, perfume and ballpoint pens, clothes and beds. Hobbies, mannerisms, turns of phrase. Sometimes you’re in the middle of doing something when you realize you got it from her: tying two strands of hair into a bow when you’re nervous, or pressing your knuckles against your forehead when you’re focusing.

One day you catch yourself tapping your fingers against your mouth the way she does when she daydreams. You’re daydreaming too, imagining your fingers ar 07

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en’t your own as they graze across your lips.

After school, when you’re waiting for her by her locker, her boyfriend stops and does a little double-take at the sight of you. He’s all like, You cut your hair.

And you’re like, Does it look bad?

No, it looks… you look good. You look like…

Yes? you ask him.

I don’t know, he says with a nervous little laugh.

But you’re clinging to it like a lifeline. You ask again: Who? He shrugs, tries to play it off. You look like her.

Then you step forward, and you reach up and put your hand around his neck. There’s a voice in the back of your head that’s all like, stop, what the fuck, like seriously are you joking? But you can’t control yourself, it’s like you’re possessed or something. And then you push yourself up on your tip-toes and you kiss him.

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You were right about his nose. It doesn’t fit no matter which way you turn your head.

But you’re not thinking about his nose, you’re thinking about his mouth. You taste her lip gloss on him: bubblegum.

You kiss him harder.

It’s unmistakable now, the bubblegum flavor. You pull him further into you, your fingers yanking at his hair, your grip steely on the back of his neck, and you’re burning, burning, and everything’s on fire.

And this boy could be just as much yours as he is hers, and if you could have him it might mean you could have her too, and if you could devour him— Fuck! He pulls away, wincing. Ow. What the

hell? Did you bite me?

You take a step back, catch your breath.

He kinda comes down a bit. I mean, not that I didn’t like it. Just— Shut up.

What?

I said shut up.

You can’t look at him anymore. You stumble away, dizzy and disoriented, the taste of blood and bubblegum on your tongue, but you can’t tell if it’s from your mouth or his or hers. You find yourself surrounded by the

I kissed him.

familiar pink tiles of the girls’ bathroom.

Footsteps echo down the hallway. You know it’s her before you see her; whether it’s from the sound of her footfalls or some arcane sixth sense, you don’t know.

But sure enough, she appears in the bathroom mirror behind you. You recall a sleepover where she made you lock yourself into the bathroom in the dark, stand in front of the mirror and try to conjure Bloody Mary. Now you wonder if you were silently trying to summon her the whole time, hoping to draw her closer, to pull her out of a nightmare.

When you look at the mirror now, there are two faces, nearly identical: painted with dark doll lashes and fringe that falls the same way. That one’s you, you think, although you’re not sure.

Maybe the other.

There you are, she says, and you’re thinking, Where? And she’s like, Why do you look like that? What’s wrong?

You don’t have to tell her, but you do anyway:

For a moment she doesn’t say anything, just stares at you. Then she kind of laughs, like, what?

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She laughs at this. No, you’re not, she snaps.

You’re not sorry. You liked it, didn’t you?

I kissed him.

You don’t look at her face, but you can feel the betrayal sinking into her like a dagger.

She’s like, Seriously?

You don’t say anything.

Why? You don’t say anything.

Why? she hisses. She’s angry now. Answer me, you fucking bitch.

No, I didn’t, I like shit, okay?

feel

Did you even think about me at all? she asks, sounding distraught.

While you kissed him?

It’s such a stupid question that you don’t know how to answer. Of course you thought of her. Everything makes you think of her.

Her eyes get all glassy and she goes, You must really hate me.

I don’t know.

Bullshit.

You don’t just go around kissing your best friend’s boyfriend for no reason.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Like, actually?

You don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you.

You tell her you’re sorry.

And you go, You’re my best friend. Why would I hate you?

I don’t know why, she says, and her voice breaks now. But you do, don’t you?

You don’t know how to tell her that some days you hate her more than you can bear, and some days you love her so much that being next to her isn’t enough, you want to absorb her into your skin. She’s your favorite person in the world and she is a monster. Sometimes when 09

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you hold her hand you dig your thumb into her wrist just to feel her pulse, just to know that she’s a living thing, and even that’s not enough, and you want to keep pressing further and further until your fingers gouge into her veins. You want to fall asleep in her flesh. You want to kill her and then make a grave of her bones and lie in them until you rot.

You don’t know how to tell her any of that, so instead you just reach out, silent, and grasp her necklace in your hand. Your knuckles graze her collarbone, and she shivers, or maybe it’s you. You lift her pendant and fit it snug against yours until the cracks align, and you tell her again: You’re my best friend.

She’s like, I don’t know what that means sometimes.

And you’re like, I don’t either.

Writing By: Megan Dang Design By: Isabella Murray 10

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GRACIE LOU just wants to go to heaven

Writing by Pia Peleaz Design by Michaela Chang Gracie Lou’s velcro Sketchers carry her across the Chapel and into its first pew. She shoves down her navy cotton knee socks ripped at each big toe and rests her stiff bones onto the plastic covered kneeler. With a furrowed caterpillar brow, she clasps her sticky hands together, the thin veins of a tangerine buried underneath her fingernails. “God,” she whispers through jagged sugar-coated incisors. “I’m sorry for telling Elizabeth S. to kill herself. I forgive her for saying I look like a guinea pig when she thought I couldn’t hear and for laughing at me with her friends. I’m sorry for making her cry so hard she started choking. I forgive her for calling me a bully and a liar to Mrs. Carol.

I deserved to get in trouble and I’m sorry.” She looks to the cross, longingly. “Why can’t I be you?” her eyes ask the white man with punctured palms and peeling jaundiced flesh. She begins her plea for penance in a single breath: “Hail Mary full of grace thelordiswiththee, blessed are thou amongs women and blessedisthefuofywomjesu, holy mary motherofgod prayforussinners nowandthehourofourdeath, AMEN.” Hell is a fiery place. To prepare, Catholic schools refuse to install ACs. Gracie Lou will never pray for things to change.

She will never pray for Elizabeth S. to be kinder.

She will never pray for her lost dog to come home.

She will never pray for her dementia ridden grandfather to remember who she is. That is, because she could never deserve the Lord’s mercy. She will never pray for the world to change. She, a ten year old with a multiplication table quiz after recess, believes she is respon12

sible for the change of the world. To desire for oneself is to sin. To give oneself is to become holy.

And holiness, after all, is what all humans must achieve.

The girl shuffles out of the chapel, but not before feeling the watchful eye of Christ sear into her tangled sweaty hair. She swears she feels the char. She turns on her tattered sketcher heel and pitter patters back into the kneeler to await her judgment.

“God…there’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Gracie Lou shifts her weight from one bony knee to the other leaving tennis ball sized indents in the kneeler’s plastic. Her clammy hands grasp one another with fervor as she assesses potential damages and braces for impact.

She begins her plea for mercy: “The truth is I

COALESCE looked at Matthew’s test for answers on our social studies test. I didn’t study enough, so I cheated.”

Gracie Lou isn’t exactly a liar. Rather, she has a knack for dodging the full truth. She did, in fact, cheat on her social studies test yesterday, and she does feel the duty to confess her wrongdoings to her all knowing God. She knows she sinned. But a sin, she’s learned, is characterized by the knowledge of one’s wrongdoings. So, she figures, the less she kvnows—or the less she admits she knows—the less she sins. And so the sin that has consumed every moment of her breathing and being is one she claims she absolutely has no knowledge of.

It began the moment her velcro sketchers hit the checkerboard linoleum floor on the first day of the fifth grade. Catholic school students suffer from a special kind of cabin fever that naturally accompanies being sentenced to see the same 20 faces in the same khaki shorts and plaid skirts every Monday through Friday for up to 12 years.

So, a new student is a sort of cultural phenomenon. But for Gracie Lou, this time was particularly different.

Her name was Makenna and she just moved from New York City, a city Gracie Lou thought was a place they just made up in the movies. The two girls had been taught to welcome new people with open arms; Gracie Lou just never had enough luck to get them to stick around.

“Nice to meet you Gracie Lou,” her new seatmate said.

“Let’s be friends!” her new seatmate said, half a proposition and half a command, her eyes pools of sincerity. And to Gracie Lou, this felt like some sort of cruel trick. You can’t make friends that easily, right? After all, in her six years at this school, she considered sister Joan, the 64 year old lifelong parakeet owner and self proclaimed Anarchist, her closest friend.

always invited her to sleepovers; how she made attentive eye contact whenever she asked her a question; how she would eagerly ask and listen to her rambles about whatever book she’d just finished; how she would sit next to her at lunch when she saw her sitting alone.

And then, Gracie Lou started to notice even more. How she never ate her pizza crust. How she always sang a little bit off key. How she had a birthmark under her left eye. How she dotted her i’s with tiny circles. How her hair smelled like strawberries. A poor pigeon was born inside Gracie Lou’s chest cavity, a pathetic bird that rammed against her insides, too stupid to realize there was no way out.

Gracie Lou was utterly and completely and unequivocally humiliated. She couldn’t go on like this—with whatever evil had taken root in her heart.

To outwit the all knowing God, Gracie Lou took it upon herself to bury this desire until it was naturally forgotten—a task as feasible as forgetting the sky is a shade of blue and the sun provides humans with warmth. She will never admit this desire aloud, nor any desire of the like, until her hairs turn gray and skin begins to sag. And so the sweet scent of strawberry shampoo took refuge in the deep recesses of her heart, growing like weeds under concrete, enduring like cockroaches after nuclear fallout. And so now there she kneels in the house of God, cloaked thick in a sheen of guilt and cursed by the ability to transform oxygen into carbon dioxide.

“God, I’m sorry for all of my many sins against you,” she says as she feels the Lord breathe down her neck. “This won’t happen ever, ever again.”

But as the semester continued, Gracie Lou came to the conclusion that Makenna was kinder than any girl she had ever met. Gracie Lou noticed the way she always asked what happened to her when she returned from an absence; how she 13

Liturgy for

Cold Bodies Writing by Rui Zhang

Design by Stella Vu

Brutus as The Righteous Man, The Lover, The One Left Behind.

Caesar as Himself.

Unnamed Man as Inevitability.

I My birthright was heaviness. I was born to carry this name, said like a stone dropping from the mouth. I was raised upright so that I could bear the burden of righteousness.

When the men come knocking, I already know what will happen. Caesar, I will spend the rest of my life pretending that I did not.

I was born heavy. It bent me into the shape of selfishness.

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A man needs a heart to love his country.

He does not need a heart to carry it.

(What is crossed out: I was born a lover. I have borne love all my life.

Love for you. Love for my country. I am afraid that these are becoming the same thing.)

(What else is crossed out: I know I am not a good man. Do you?)

iv ii Forget the hands and the crown for just a moment— the masses would kiss your feet if you would allow it. All of us are looking up at you, but they can still see you in the light. The blind men salivate at the smell of adoration in the air, jaws lolling ready to snap up your seconds.

I know you are a man, but do you?

When the soothsayer opens his mouth, I know what he will say before he speaks it. I know it will fall on stone ears in the mob. I know you too, carved of marble as you are, will not hear it. When that gnarled old man says beware, sounding every bit like the croak of the crow, the men at my side will grow pale in the face, unsettled in the knees. I too shall tremble, wishing I could supplicate you there in the street, to unmake yourself and listen. To be warned of the harm about to come upon you. To realize that I have kissed you on the cheek.

Love invites hate. Hate breeds love. You are my teacher. I am still learning what to make of you. I will not. And you do not hear him. You walk What will you make my country? What will you past with head high, illumimake me? nated in that light. iii I know He is no good man. He wears this look upon him, a complete stillness in the eyes. Can Forgive me, you see your own face, Brutus? The slide of cool Caesar. I do not think I fingers skimming on the wrist. could have No, I cannot.

Everyone knows you are a righteous man / a c h a n g e d your fate. damp breath against the side of the throat, / Forgive me, let me be your mirror. because I am I let him in. unsure.

You know too. v He is a man of too much thought, you say out of Did you know want that wry mouth.

In a man who hears no music and sees no plays is something to be 15 learned? beats no heart.

It is a lesson I have only digested recently. What reason would I have had to want? I was well schooled, well fed, sometimes held. The force that pushed me forward was called ambition, which is what you name want that has been domesticated, diluted, made palatable (which is to say, not want at all).

I don’t know why I keep asking you questions, my teacher. Of course you know.

You turn to ask a question, then. Something like, What do you want, Brutus? This is the obvious choice. But you should know the answer, yes?

Power?

Yes. My power?

Closer.

Me? In a way.

In what way?

I would eat you whole if I could. vi Would you believe me if I said I think I did believe it? I know it was naive. Naivety comes hand in hand with righteousness. Standing upright means you hardly ever see what’s underneath.

The voices of strong willed men speaking in unison can sound like the echo of a god. Perhaps I am tone deaf. Perhaps I simply chose the easiest path.

But there were the letters from the people. I have always believed in hands. Even foolishly so. Ask not of His shadow lurking outside the sliver of open window. Ask not about the script that did not seem to vary despite claiming to come from different senders. Ask not about the turns of phrase that crowded on top of each other, too identical to be just shared sentiment.

(How could you fall for this, silly boy? Is this what you would have said?)

Even falsehoods carry weight. This was all I could hold: We, your people. Caesar, the tyrant. Brutus, the righ-

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teous. Your duty. Your country. Your people. preceding. I simply had the sense Caesar, who will not stop at king, and reach for that something huge was dawning on us, god. Brutus, carry us. as immovable as the heft of the sky. Sisyphus’ boulder rolling back down the hill. That, and You cannot be king. You cannot be a god. You the taste of bile. must be more, Caesar.

(Say this with your mouth pursed in viii the shape of selfishness, and Caesar in the Senate room at home / in “more” starts to sound the marble / Everyone can feel the like the oppressive weight of his power utterpathetic ly / unnegotiable The Romans / cross the room to / kneel / at his feet in false supplication readying their hands for betrayal while / their mouths speak practiced pleas / They are / refused The first man lunges upon him with / the knife plea of stay here, stay here, do not go up without me, do / Caesar bleeds like any other man / not go where I cannot follow.)

vii The morning of that day was crisp and clear, the smell of rainwater lingering from a tumultuous night. Those blank eyes fixed on the heavens, He had preached of omens near and far—lightning strikes, black birds, the bite of citrus in the mouth, visions that could only be born from a man of words. I remember that the weather had not been much different from years before. A sign that this was no plot of the gods, but merely the bloody work of men.

I do not know if I was nervous. I cannot really say any longer with confidence how I felt in the moments

They are animals in that room They are / dogs No gods / rumble in the sky overhead but / they cut his flesh with ritualistic fervor Blood / on the marble Blood / on the marble He is / mostly dead by the time Brutus makes his approach / Nobody can say what look Brutus wore / on his face as he / works in finality Caesar watches his approach pulls his robe over his head and dies in silence

ix The stains never come out. Your body goes unmoved for two days.

Perhaps because you seem as though

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you might rise again at any moment. Perhaps because men who hunger for hot blood on their hands become cowards when it comes to cold bodies. Perhaps because the people adored you too much to touch you.

I am selfish, but you know this already. In the depth of this night, in the stone of this room, your presence is still heavy.

Who pulled your robe over your head, Caesar? I lift it off and there is your face. There, your eyes and your nose and your mouth. I follow the bone of your eyebrow, the shell of your ear. I touch you.

I touch you because I am both the coward and the people and I am neither, because I love you.

This you cannot question, Caesar. There is no

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question of love. I could not have killed you if I did not love you.

I have kept you on the ground.

I made sure you died as a man.

You have gone stiff and cold. I think about cracking you open. I think about crawling inside you.

I think about swallowing your dehydrated heart to subdue you and sustain you within me. I think of joining you on this floor and laying here until our bodies forget

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I will carry you this time, Caesar. And once I have set you down, the stone will hit the floor, and I will carry myself no longer.

I have not succeeded you, Caesar. Yet I have succeeded. Our names will go forever hand in bloody hand. I have made me you. I have made you me.

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PO P

!

Photography by Nicole Joseph Design by Ally Wong 20

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everyone ii everyone know, love, love, and and see see know, sammie yen orange apologies she cut fruit,

so I did two years later. she’s older (therefore wiser) her regret for her red anger enveloped her, sticking to her slippers on hardwood floor putting the concession in front of my blurry eyes she left, giving me time to pay my check I was not hungry yet her slippers had not fwap-fwaped! down the hallway my hands found the peeled orange I accepted the taste of citrus love. she was silent so I too must be silent, sitting criss-cross applesauce with my best friend in the sandbox. her hurt leaks, like sticky ice cream, from stormy eyes. But I am holding a peeled mandarin slice her hurt is nothing an orange cannot patch up the air is thick with a mutual waiting, and I yearn for her to take it, just take it, take the orange from my palm and in only seconds, we can be on the playground swing set, laughing and screaming and beautifully forgetting.

She accuses, You didn’t say it. You should have said it. she stalks off. my fingers turn over the single,

sandy piece, squeezing until it screams out a dutiful line of juice I savor the word in my mouth but Sorry doesn’t taste like a diced mango or like a strawberry without the stem The word is a spiky exhale, and I feel I am riding my bike for the first time over cracked pavement.

I fall and stumble over the crevices of, Sorry, I’m sorry, I am sorry.

I want to practice the word until I can glide without hands, glide without a helmet, glide without the fear of landing in a crash of gears and asphalt and flesh I practice saying the word, this world that I had never been in.

I say it to her, to my best friend, with an orange slice in hand.

Already, the levers in my body shift and groan, and the pedals start to move. She takes it, chews thoughtfully.

I choose to linger, silence.

She smiles, takes my hand.

We go to the swing set, starting to laugh and scream and not forget, but float fiercely above the wood chips.

22 `design by raina paeper

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a blazer he spit fire and the world angered his soul and i envy his words they curl like serpents on tongue in cheek i want my anger to drip down my face to stain my soul in the way his cologne-drenched entitlement attracted compliments that complement his skin don’t you understand me they see you they see a statue they see me they see a bust i just wanna be the topic i want people to look at me like that to talk to me and look at me to i i i just wanna be like like you you you what if my words were red fire what if i hit you over with chipped polished gel words i bet you wouldn’t like it no you think you’re better than me, you think you know everything you think you think you can hurt me you’re just hurting yourself i should hurt you i should i can’t i i won’t

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a woman at the train station I wait alone.

At least, I think I’m alone, until I see a woman sitting down next to me. She smooths over the wrinkles of her gray skirt, then the wrinkles under her brown eyes. Crow’s feet, my mother had told me when I was just a child. The lines are just as beautiful as the birds.

Hers deepened with every joke I made and song I ever sang.

The woman at the bus stop fascinates me, but it might be because my phone died twenty minutes ago and there’s no music blasting in my ears and no book was able to fit into my purse. But it might be because she looks kind. And kind of perfect.

Her papery hands look like they know how to roll homemade pineapple cake dough. Like they’ve folded patterned origami in perfect cranes, perfect swans. They look like they’ve never froze against the hands of another, never picked up the phone just to put it back down. They look like they’ve endured warm summers, cold winters, rainy summers, and sunny winters. They might have caressed the face of a lover.

The glowing veins underneath her skin run over knuckles, palms, fingers. An intricate railroad of boxcars and carriages. I wonder about her route home, if she has to transfer trains twice. She takes the train home, just like me and my cousin and her ex-boyfriend and his professor. I wonder what is home for her. Maybe she isn’t going home. Maybe she wants to feed the birds at the park. Her fingers clench the handles of a Thank You! plastic bag possibly stuffed with bread crusts and peanut butter sandwiches. She’s a kind human to help those poor birds.

I pretend it’s bread crumbs in my purse.

I watch her as the fuzzy intercom announces the train’s arrival. The woman stands up, starting to walk to the edge of the platform.

Then she trips.

It all happened so fast that for a moment, I think it was only my imagination. She stands upright again, a bit of scarlet coloring her cheeks. The woman looks around the empty station, maybe hoping that nobody saw that slip-up, and maybe she could forget that happened.

She looks into my eyes and sees me.

You saw me, her eyes say. So you saw that?

Yeah, mine say. I did.

The moment is suspended in the air. She doesn’t talk. I don’t respond.

Her eyes soften. Those papery hands reach up and clutch her heart. The corners of her mouth turn upward, and everything comes all together at once.

We board the train together.

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Jessica Fu

E M RG En ce

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Design by Christine Jeong

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FREE EXPERT ADVICE

How to build a perfect personality (with pictures!)

Writing by Z Luo Design by Isabelle Lim Fact Checked on October 21, 2023 You need a new face. Stray flaps of skin peel from your jaw and neck, greying like a dead dove. No matter how much wilted lily you douse yourself in and spit you apply, something always comes a little loose and the pungent reek of rot peeks through. Even scavengers flee from you. Angry red marks rage up your arms, attempting to solve the itch as you long to claw away at this fading face. But, without a spare, you cannot scratch the thing away lest you have no face to go out in public.

Sighing, you consult the magical wonder of the Internet, flicking away flakes of umber bone. It’s a good thing you don’t bleed anymore. How does one build a perfect face? This is your fifteenth failed face this month, and you’d really like to uncover others’ secrets to face maintenance. You’ve tried the fad lotions and creams, strange diets (turnips with marrow and carrot skin, fingers pickled in brines of fox tears, drowning in citrus) and routines, but nothing has managed to stick. Literally.

Olive sparks shower as you accidentally click on a result. How to build a perfect personality (with pictures!). How interesting. You suppose perfection is what you’re looking for. Might as well take a look.

3.5 STARS After reading this article, my wife punched me and left. But, she came back the next night, I only lost two teeth, and I’m still married so something was clearly successful.

4 STARS My face feels awesome! Never thought I could smile so much!

-1.5 STARS My ex wrote this after I left him for a younger woman. He’s kinda rich if anyone wants him.

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Step 1: Smile Show off those pearly whites! Smile big and bright for everyone you’ll look prettier that way. Don’t wait for someone to tell ya to smile go for it. Wouldn’t want anyone to miss out on your gorgeous smile now would ya?

since – just

You cackle, bits of bloody spit spraying wildly. What lucky passerby to call your smile gorgeous?

will get

Target spotted. You leer, savoring the stretch in your cheeks as the along them give way to expose your inflamed gums and custom endless hollows of your eyes burst alight with plum flames approach. Before you can even ask your question, the target What a compliment. Almost as wonderful as your muscles, spun from silken tears and enchanted with the songs of valor.

stitches molars. The as you flees.

Step 2: Dress to Impress Clothing makes the man! Well, woman here but ya get the point. So ya gotta dress to impress. Everything should fit ya perfectly off-the-rack, else there’s something wrong with ya and we fix wrong things now don’t we? Starched white, knee-length skirts, cute bows and the like will let ya shine–innocent and such a sight!

Several putrefying ligaments chase freedom from your jaw, leaving it hanging slack off your off-the-rack face. You tuck a couple in a gap between your chipped incisors for a snack.

Some skulls should do the trick. Fresh off the neck with a nice, crisp snap. Crack, snap, snap, and you’ve got a metronome to your music-making, a symphony of shuttered screams, wet thumps and blooming bursts. Dinner is served.

Step 3: The Yes Mindset Say yes to everything. You’ll get so many incredible opportunities! Be it to get a coffee, hold some papers, or buy a gift, ya never know what chance might flit your way and brighten your day! Be useful to others, say yes and let the rest sort itself out.

Butterfly of chance will you fly away? Or keep this decaying flower company?

Perhaps you need a perch for butterflies. A dragon’s horn of sorts? The forehead of your face is rather empty anyway. You pluck teal coral, interlacing it with the purples of your veins and set the structure, teeming with life, to the left side of your face. You can just carry a club on your right side to balance it out.

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Step 4: A Life of Service Service is the greatest joy out there and so approach it with a smile! There’s always someone out there who needs your help! Offer your services to everyone ya meet to be all set. Maybe even be worthy of love.

Serving one’s self does bring a certain type of joy. You can spoil your appetite every once in a while.

Luxuriate in a set of bloodied, mortal eyes. Nothing less than the best for perfection after all. Oh the effort it will be to keep the bloodied state constant, the color and the beauty. It might even add a gorgeous sheen of crimson to your vision.

Step 5: Be Limitless Always strive to grow in quiet ways. Don’t be loud or you’ll get arrogant. Ya can achieve even more personal growth by pushing past your boundaries! Think about it: boundaries are limits and limits are stopping ya from growing further. Push further, but remember not to be overbearingly loud about it so that ya fulfill your duty and don’t inconvenience others.

Ah, yes, duty. Your solemn duty. Indeed, there’s nothing quite as important as saving this world now is there?

Pity you’re not a savior. You’re just tired and a little hungry. The world can wow itself while you’re at it.

Does the maggot deny its duty? It doesn’t matter because mother nature did not make you a maggot. Drawing from the abyss, you borrow a crescent of moonlight to carve yourself a smile, jagged yet joyous. Then, you tease open the earth, coaxing forth a particularly playful tongue of magma. Done.

Step 6: Profit That’s it! Put everything together and you’ll be perfect!

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amrita or, the reason i wait for you

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Writing by Aahana Chowdhuri Design by Leia Fisher

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distance makes the heart writhe onto itself. in your eyes, i see the divine - i was never pious, but i฀ve drunk your incense and swirled it through my teeth, jasmine sandalwood lounging on my palate. what am i to do? the roots of the banyan close upon my throat, and you weave your _____ into mine. i don't have you, but i take your words and affix my own, in hopes that it will bridge the gap. (of bharat to ceylon, of my graze to yours) i take shelter in the mangrove, meri jaan, and i fear you. the way i've been living in fish dreams is antithetical to your kingfisher. (only you know how easily my spine shatters into minutiae, seaborne ribs spilling into the bay.) i have promised to the nebulae that i'd blossom, but they chide me for my naivety, for my blind devotion. the realization that i have become changed for you presses into my breastbone, a fickle fernhead curling onto itself. you haven't seen what the cosmos have seen. and yet you know me so intimately, like the tide awash on my brow, salt encrusted like stardust. the fabric between us is far too vast for an eel like me to traverse. but i can't help but starve for you. even the tender litchi weighing down the boughs of the bodhi tree couldn't satiate the blight that climbs my xylem, my phloem stinging with longing. yet, all i can do is watch the moon's crest and hope that you're watching her too. there will be a day when we'll drop comets in our eyes where the mangroves sleep on the water's edge.

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bharat - india ceylon - sri lanka bharat - india3 meri jaan - my life; my love 4 ceylon - sri lanka bodhi - fig tree, the sacred tree where siddhartha achieved enlightenment in meri jaan - mybuddhism/hinduism life; my love 2

bodhi - fig tree, the sacred tree where siddhartha achieved enlightenment in buddhism/hinduism

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DESCENT MAGAZINE // WRITING CONTEST WINNER

in the car with a boy Writing by Echo Tang Design by Michaela Chang You drove your parents’ old Lexus across town just to see me. We pushed each other on the swings at the park next to my middle school, years-old metal chains creaking under our weight, and you cradled my hands like something precious as we trekked the five minutes to my house, alone except for the chill of the night breeze and bullfrogs serenading us back. We kissed on the front steps, not before getting caught on the Ring camera (rookie mistake), and I thought to myself that finally at twenty-two years old, I know what it’s like to be a girl again.

If I try hard enough, I can still smell your cologne, clean and strong and warm and sweet. I can still taste you on my tongue and feel the warm weight of your hand in mine and gloss my fingertips over the curve of your jaw. I can still hear you whisper to me that you want to stay here forever, in the complete darkness except for the streetlight’s dull yellow halo, with my arms inside the sleeves of your jacket. The “I miss you’s” fell from your lips so easily, like meteorites embracing the horizon, but I never once doubted you because you always hugged me like you never wanted to let go.

(You still let me go.)

No one tells you how once someone’s gone, you see them in every single thing. Suddenly, every other car on the road is a silver Lexus RX350, Everything by the Black Skirts is somehow always within the first five songs to come up on shuffle, Afters Ice Cream is now unbearable to pass by, and I’ll still hunt the sky for the Big Dipper at the Top of the World trailhead. They say that I’m letting you be too important to me.

How can I not? You are now 00 32

part of those places and those things, woven into the fabric of their memories. I am merely mourning the cloth that I’ve lost.

Do you remember the night we both fucked up our boba orders? We slumped together across the soccer field, slightly muddy and torn, with your head under my chin and your hair tickling my neck.

I went quiet, and you asked me what I was thinking about. I said nothing, just that I was happy to be here, happy that you were here with me. You laughed it off, and I felt it against my face, a mixture of mirth and adoration and something else I couldn’t pin down. You laughed it off, but I meant every word. To this day, I still remember what I was wearing, from my hair elastics (one black and one brown) down to my socks (white crew with black stripes). I couldn’t lie, not to you.

I couldn’t lie to you, but somehow it was so easy for you to lie to me. You said you didn’t want it to end. And it was so easy for me to believe you.

I wish I could say that I can pinpoint when it ended. Sorry after sorry rolled off your mouth, and though I waded knee-deep through your sea of apologies and explanations that went in my ear and out the other, you couldn’t even say those words, “I want to end it.” Instead I told you, “I don’t want to spend more time on someone who clearly doesn’t care anymore.” So perhaps I am at fault too, because I couldn’t say those words either. Maybe because I was brave, maybe because I was not brave enough. And what does it matter, since you let me give up on you? Were you really so defeated, so beaten and bruised, that you thought you didn’t

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But what I can pinpoint is when you scrubbed my existence clean. All evidence that we once breathed the same air disappeared on a Friday night. No one could ever tell that we used to huddle together in an old SUV until night dew dusted the windshield, yet I still have the photo booth picture we took, slid between the pages of some book I never finished. I still scroll past grainy selfies under the waning reds and oranges of sunset overlooking the ocean, where you got mauled by the mosquitos from the mustard flower bush because you gave me your hoodie. I’d rather welcome the lump in my throat and feel the edges of my vision blur and warp than feel nothing at the sound of your name.

Then you, we, would have never been here at all.

were my first everything, and you were my first heartbreak.

But you’re still also the person who I fell for in the first place. The person who camped out with me for hours after a hit-and-run, the person who kept count of all my dumb luck hole-in-ones at the mini golf course, the person who on the other end as we fell asleep together trading stories and secrets on Facetime, the person who hurt me on a Saturday and went back to the pews on Sunday.

You will always be that person to me, that person I cherished when our lives crossed for that speck of time.

That capsule of time, pulsing like a star ready to explode, packed into an old Lexus.

You promised me a lot of things. To celebrate when I finished my Masters degree, to help me move into my new apartment, to take me to that famous donut place in Anaheim that opens past midnight, to pretend like we actually understand modern art at the museum next to the concert hall we used to play at in high school. That the last thing you ever wanted to do was hurt me (you broke that one too). But all I remember now is the trips that we didn’t take and not the ones that we have, months and miles of asphalt under tires dissipating like smoke. There are some places where even that car cannot wander.

The only promise you delivered was that you said that you were glad you got to be somebody to me. You were somebody, are somebody. You were my first everything.

You were my first everything, and you hurt me and hid away because you were running from the guilt threatening to crush you. I know that it was suffocating you because I know you are kind. You are kind and young and stupid and scared. We’re parked at a precipice, at the edge of the unknown: a universe so wide that it can’t be named, but so small that it can still fit in the backseat. If I could name it, maybe you could’ve stayed. You would’ve been the person who stayed, but instead you’ll always be the person who left, your cowardice eclipsing the flame that we nursed together. You 33

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In collaboration with DAWANG Clothing by Daisy Wang Photography by Marissa Ding Design by Isabelle Lim 35

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ONE NIGHT HOSTESS

Alice Fan Design by Christine Jeong

It’s not the first time Aoi has stared at that laundry basket this year. Keeping the clothes there seems like one of the few ways to remember that crazy night in Tokyo, a night full of improvisation.

There are only a few pieces of clothes inside the basket: a tainted yellow-green jacket, a pair of black rain pants that are soiled, and a classical, colorful Lolita dress that is either second-hand or has been worn a thousand times because the threads are loose enough to form another layer around the edge.

Aoi hasn’t touched them since she came back from Japan half a year ago. She went on the trip by herself to celebrate her 20th birthday. Aoi knew that Japan was a safe country, but she also knew the safer a place looks, the more dangerous it can be under the surface. And Aoi did not only like this duality; she dreamed of living in such a place where justice is the perfect disguise of oppressed desire. Growing up in a family that restricted everything she did, Aoi always felt a drive to explore the side of the world that she was never exposed to.

One night in Tokyo, Aoi woke up in darkness and stared at the ceiling. It had been three days since she arrived in the country, but she still hadn’t experienced anything that was not anticipated. But tonight, a weird feeling emerged in her head and triggered her to embark on a “real trip”. Without much hesitation, she jumped out of bed and put on the only jacket she brought, a yellow-green one that shined at night, and a pair of rain pants.

After checking herself in the mirror, she left the room in excitement.

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Instead of following a map, Aoi wandered and wandered. She trusted she had the instinct to sniff out where the city was hiding its true self. Following the scent of vomitus that contained Dango, Takoyaki, skewers, and Oden, Aoi walked through street after street under the gentle moonlight and the ghastly pale streetlights. Sometimes Aoi thought she heard sobs of women, but they soon disappeared, as if they were never there. The weeps were like the shadows that enveloped the night before the sun deigns another day of light.

As Aoi was still thinking about the cries, the lights gradually diminished, with even brighter and shinier neon lights showing up in the street in front of her. She arrived at a place where beauty and inelegance abounded, yet she did not know that.

When Aoi lifted her head, she first saw the kanban that said, “Kabuki Cho”, but before she could take a second to realize where she was, a huge face emerged from below and blocked her sight.

“How beautiful you are! An Ojousama like you deserves the best service in the world. Come with me and I promise you will have the best night of your life!”

As Aoi’s brain was helping her to recognize the situation, the person already grabbed her arm and started walking, only stopped by a weirdly sharp voice that went: “You stupid! What do you think you are doing?! Grabbing a girl’s arm so aggressively like that!”

The voice came from someone wearing a Lolita dress that was too tight for the biceps, shoulders, and all the other muscles that were popping off on the body. The person rushed up to her and started speaking in the same strident voice: “Ala ala, such a cute girl! Please don’t follow this guy.”

Lolita dress said this while giving a harsh look at the man who was still holding Aoi’s arm.

“You have such a tiny face and big eyes and long lashes. You have to trust me, you will make real good money with me, without doing anything bad!” An attempt at a wink was made.

As the two were still arguing, Aoi thought to herself, Ah ha, based on my 10 year experience of watching Japanese TV shows, this must be the Japanese version of a red light district… People dressed in suits during the day come here to unleash themselves by drinking and chatting – even at night, they are still constrained like animals in a cage…

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Seeing the two strange faces and funny actions in front of her, Aoi came up with an idea – she will follow them, and uncover the true side of the city herself! Without much hesitation, Aoi said to the two: “I will go!”

Five minutes later, Aoi was inside a three-story building in the heart of Kabuki Cho. The building was decorated with neon lights flickering all over the walls outside, digital screens featuring the top hosts and hostesses of the night rolling. But the moment they stepped into the house; the brightness was no longer flashing; the lights emitted more softness that warmly surrounded Aoi. Soon Aoi was sitting on a leather couch on the second floor. The floor seemed to be divided into two different sections, one for men, and one for women, both filled with dozens of shelves of clothes.

Slowly turning her head to examine her surroundings, Aoi had a strange sense of comfort. The scent, the interior design, and the bustling noises that penetrated every inch of the floors all made her feel lethargic and relaxed. Before fully drowning herself into the space, sharp voiced one spoke, but with a less flattering tone this time, “So… you said you’re willing to work for me?”

“No! She didn’t say that!” Quickly answered the one with the heavy make-up on.

This time, before they were about to begin another quarrel, Aoi began speaking in a voice full of elation but also some hesitation.

“Yes, I do want to work here,” said Aoi as she turned towards the one wearing the lolita dress.

“I know you’re looking for a hostess,” Aoi carefully pointed, “and you are getting customers for your host club!” Aoi said to the other one, who claimed his name to be Kazu.

“And I, I want to try to be a hostess tonight.” This time, Aoi sounded determined with lustering eyes as she looked at the two people in front of her, who seemed somewhat taken aback by her sudden decision.

After a few seconds of silence and multiple exchange of eye contacts, the Lolita-dress-wearing one spoke,

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“Ala Ojousama, I love your idea and your curiosity. My name is Yuta. Let me take you to my club now!” Yuta grinned so hard that his face began to twist into a distorted shape. He happily took Aoi’s hand and headed downstairs. While Kazu, missed the chance to detain Aoi and angrily retreated upstairs to his host club.

“Alright, let me show you what the night looks like here in the heart of Kabuki Cho. Behind this door, you will find one of the best hostess clubs in Shinjuku.” Said Yuta as he opened the door for Aoi, revealing the hostess club where Aoi will be working tonight: Fumin Club.

The lighting was no longer warm like the one on the second floor – it was brilliant like sunlight, flickering every second, as if trying to make sure everyone stayed awake and aroused.

“What you’re going to do here tonight, is to talk to the customers and get them to buy as much alcohol as you can! Since you are only a temporary hostess, I won’t be asking much. Whatever amount of alcohol you get the customers to buy, will get you 20% off the sales revenue. Are you ready?”

Still overwhelmed by the colorful lights, Aoi nodded her head slowly and told herself that this was perhaps the closest she could get to experiencing the most authentic nightlife of this city.

Ten minutes later, Aoi put on make-up that was as thick as Yuta’s, and because she hadn’t prepared any hostess clothes, Yuta gave her the Lolita dress he was wearing, which fit Aoi perfectly.

In the beginning of the night, Aoi was trying to be observant of her surroundings, trying to distinguish the dirty desire of the customers, so she simply quietly sat next to the other hostesses and served drinks as the night went on.

But the more attention she paid, the more she discovered that rather than any deep, dark desire, the customers were merely enjoying themselves, unleashing the stress they accumulated during the day by chatting and binging.

While Aoi was still immersed in her thoughts, other hostesses started throwing her looks because she wasn’t contributing to the conversations.

Dragging herself back to reality, Aoi screwed up her courage and said to herself, “It’s nothing more difficult than presenting in front of a class. Just complimenting the customer blindly…”

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Setting up her mind, Aoi reached out to the customer sitting opposite of her, passing a drink, and said her first sentence of the night:

I

“Ogyakusama (Sir), you look great in this outfit, hope you’re enjoying the night!”

Jesus, that was so pretentious! Aoi quickly lowered her head and tried to retract to her seat, when she heard, “Thanks to you, I’m having a lot of fun!”

Aoi looked up and saw the customer mumbling these words as he guzzled down the glass she just passed to him.

Even though it was nothing but a normal exchange of words, Aoi suddenly felt the joy as if tasting a forbidden fruit. Not only did she take the first step of the night, but she also felt the joy from the customer – it was pure happiness.

As the night wore on, Aoi unleashed herself into becoming a loquacious person.

Going from table to table, she bathed herself in conversations she never had before, talking with men so boldly and drinking in such an unrestrained way. The lights in Fumin Club never stopped flashing, nor did Aoi stop laughing and talking.

The night gradually drew to a close when the day became brighter outside, although inside the Fumin Club, the lights seemed to have an endless lifespan. Yuta approached Aoi after her final drink with a customer, and said to her, “Little Ojousama, it looks like I underestimated you! You earned yourself a great night I hope?”

“Yes yes, I definitely did.” Said Aoi as she was trying to balance herself in the air.

That was a very unique night, Aoi thought to herself as she stepped outside the club. The neon lights were still gleaming, and people were stretching their arms to embrace the first breath of fresh air since the previous night.

Still wearing the Lolita dress that Yuta gifted her, Aoi walked back to the hotel thinking about the night that just passed. It was nothing like she could have expected.

She aimed to unveil the obscenity and disgust of the city herself, but ended up uncovering the most genuine sides of humans. It was true that the customers were paying the hostesses for their service, but they didn’t seem to seek anything beyond that. And the hostesses, they treated their work nothing less serious than any investment bankers!

Holding up the Lolita dress, yellow jacket, and the rain pants, Aoi felt she was inside Fumin Club once again – lights cascading like a waterfall, foams floating in glasses like puffy clouds… That truly was an unforgettable night, Aoi thought to herself.

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M

Identities

Multimedia by

Hannah Chu

Design by Isa bell

e Lim

Mix, Match, Merge

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY AVANA WANG DESIGN BY STELLA VU

A STRANGER IN MY OWN HOME TOWN 46

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RISA TAKEMOTO

VISITING HEISEI THREE

Design by Adeline Chan

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JENNY NUO Interview by Ariel Cheng Photography by Jimin Hong & Avana Wang Design by Aud Ma Styling & Makeup by Isabella Murray & Cici He

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COALESCE My name is Ariel, and I’m a reporter for Descent Magazine. I’m here today with the talented Jenny Nuo. Jenny, could you introduce yourself?

Thank you for having me, Ariel. My name is Jenny. I am a third-year student at UCLA studying computer science and linguistics. And on the side, I’m also a musician.

To begin, can you tell us a little bit about how you discovered your love for singing? And what your music says.

When I was really little I was super shy. My parents would put me in singing lessons, but I didn’t really stick with it because I actually, like, hated performing. And I had a lot of stage fright. So it was hard for me to go up in front of people and to sing as if like, people weren’t watching. But then over time, as I grew older, I was really inspired just by watching like Taylor Swift or just like singers — and I started writing my own. And instead of thinking about singing like it was a performance, it was more just like a diary or a self-reflection of sorts. And it was a lot easier for me to break the fear of performing in front of people in that sense because I feel like I was just being very honest with who I was and what I was feeling at the moment. So over time, I would just start writing my own music and then sing at school talent shows. And I think I like writing music more than singing music. I think I’m a better writer than I am a singer because I never really had any vocal training or anything. But I do enjoy playing the piano and making up melodies and lyrics.

With your most recent release, “Accidental Win,” could you tell us about how you were inspired to write that? What’s the creative process you go through when you’re creating a song?

That’s a good question. “Accidental Win” is sort of about when good things happen in your life without you expecting it at all. On TikTok, people are always like, “Oh, this is how I masterminded my way into this relationship.” And there’s nothing wrong with that, really. And that was kind of like how I was in the past where I would, you know, try to manipulate certain events and circumstances — that I could, like, bump into this person at the right moment, the right time. But I feel like “Accidental Win” is really about the opposite of that. Sometimes you don’t even have to try to do anything and then things just fall into place.

There’s a line in the song that goes, whether it be coincidence or destined from the start.” And sometimes I always think about encounters that that are, I guess, chance encounters. I always like to wonder if it’s something that was predestined that we have no control over or if it was genuinely just luck. And no matter how you look at it, I feel like you end up with the conclusion that you’re a very lucky person to have that thing happen to you.

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DESCENT MAGAZINE And no matter how you look at it, it just is kind of like a beautiful thing that has occurred. So I think that was my main inspiration for writing the song, just like bumping into people at the right time, right place. I think I found a lot of my closest friends in college that way, just without even trying. And then things just like magically fell into place. So it was just like a nice, like appreciation song for things that worked out without you having to do anything.

How do you balance both being a STEM student and pursuing the creative industry?

For me, pursuing computer science and music, there was never really a question of whether or not I would do either one. I think a lot of people ask me, Oh, like, where do you see yourself? You know, ten years down the line? I always thought I would just be doing what I’m doing now. But, you know, more at a higher level. I would want to be a software engineer but also a musician at the same time. And I don’t think like I don’t anticipate that I’m going to become like mega famous where I have to, you know, start choosing between one or the other. But I genuinely do think it’s something that I’m passionate about.

And we really live in a great time where people are able to make music and post it on the Internet and have recognition for it without that being their whole life. I’m really lucky to have that opportunity to do that just by being alive in this day and age.

I have been writing music as a hobby of mine ever since I was really little. And then when I got to high school, I started fidgeting around with more robotics and more computer science. Also, my dad is an engineer, so it was just sort of something that he wanted me to do too, because he really enjoyed it. And I also think, like partly coming from an immigrant family, there is that idea that certain jobs just have more stability than others. So I think becoming a software engineer is ultimately a goal of mine that has been instilled within me, whether it be my own passions, my family’s, or a mix of both. But it’s something that I never really questioned. And that’s kind of the same way with music, with that just being one of my core hobbies.

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COALESCE How do you think you bring a unique fusion to the tech and music worlds?

The biggest thing with my music is that I want to be able to tell stories about my experiences. I know I touched on this a little bit, but it really is important for me to have these voices heard. Sometimes a lot of people in tech are disillusioned, and they kind of believe that the patriarchy doesn’t exist in tech anymore because we have so many, you know, opportunities for women to advance. So many, I don’t know, like, I guess I would say just career-advancing opportunities. Just off the top of my head, there are organizations like Girls Who Code or, you know, Built by Girls, or coders who are dedicated to helping women accelerate their skills and technology. So people are always disillusioned. They think that because these support systems exist, this isn’t really a problem anymore. And I firmly believe that it really is not enough to simply have a seat at the table. It is so much more important for people when they’re sitting at that table, to have their voices heard. To have people feel respected. You know, people are always like, if we, you know, admit equal amounts of women and men into our computer science degree program in a university, then the problem is solved. But honestly, as I’ve moved up the classes, as I’ve taken more and more classes throughout college as a third year, I can almost guarantee you that there are way fewer women in my classes that I see than how many I saw when I was a first year. And I think part of that is just the support system. Artificially creating equal distributions of men and women is, you know, doing something, but it’s not doing everything that is needed to help those women succeed in those spaces that you’re creating for them.

What I wanted to do with a lot of my music, you know, “i’m so tired,” being one really good example, is I just wanted to touch on the fact that it isn’t enough to just artificially create spaces for women to feel like they belong. We have to actually take action and make people feel like their voices are heard, that they’re being respected, and to give them resources that they need, that would help them succeed. With “i’m so tired,” I wanted to underline those things as being the main obstacles rather than like systemic obstacles necessarily. I feel like a lot of times people overlook the social challenges that minorities have to face, but they’re not overly represented.

Who inspires you the most?

This is so cliche, but my mom inspires me so, so much.

And, you know, she’s a really strong woman. And I feel like, I don’t know, like, I don’t even know where to begin because I don’t get this question a lot. And I, I don’t always answer it in the same way, but it’s actually my mom’s birthday today, so I wanted to, you know, answer it in this way. Growing up, I never really thought much of my mom because she is a stay-at-home mom and she didn’t work too much.

So I always felt like, you know, I could do better than that. Like when I grew up, I didn’t want to be a stay-athome mom. But honestly, in retrospect, I think about how much my mother has done in terms of moving with my dad to Canada first from China when they just got married. They were really going through it.

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DESCENT MAGAZINE They kind of just didn’t have a plan. But my mom was like, I know I don’t want to raise a kid in China, so I’m going to move somewhere else. And then making the decision to move from the East Coast in Canada all the way to the West Coast in California is also really insane, especially because they had to give up everything that they built in Canada to move to the United States. And at the same time just so that my sister and I could have a better shot at building a future for ourselves.

My mom is one of the strongest people I know. I would say she’s stronger than my dad because, she is one of the most, like, adaptable and, like, just courageous people I know. Every time a challenge comes up or something unexpected happens to us, my mom is always at the forefront of making sure that everything is okay or finding a solution — despite the odds being stacked against us. She inspires me a lot because even though when I was little, I was like, I don’t ever want to grow up to become, you know, somebody like her. Now, I feel like I find myself growing into her more and more. I want to have, you know, her fierceness and her bravery and courage when she approaches problems. Also, she is like such a fun person to be around. And part of my mom decision to become a stay-at-home mom was also because of our move from China to Canada. Had she not made that decision, she probably wouldn’t be a stayat-home mom. And so, you know, I didn’t really understand that when I was younger. But, I mean, when I just think about, like, the sacrifice that it takes to do all of that — like, would I move from, you know, the United States to a totally different country to raise my children? I don’t know. Like, I honestly wouldn’t be as sure as certain as my mother was at that time.

How do you think your personal growth is reflected in your music?

I think my music is just like a time capsule of how I felt at the time that I wrote those lyrics. So, a lot of times, I look back on my music and I can’t believe I wrote something like that. Not in a way that’s like, Oh, that person is so not me, but it’s just like, Oh, I feel like I’ve come a long way. Especially when I look upon songs like “EXPIRED.” I think when I wrote that song, I was so like just angry and also really excited to leave my hometown. I think a lot of people were, because it was just when COVID ended, when the lockdowns ended. So I was like coincidentally just very, very excited to leave. And then also I was graduating, so I was like pissed off at everyone at my high school. But when I was writing that song, I was like, Oh my gosh, like, I hate my entire hometown. Like, you know, everybody sucks. And we hope karma, like, gets them good in the future. But when I went home after my first year of college, I was like, wait. This place, you know, despite all its negative sides, I also had a lot of positive experiences and I had a lot of people who, you know, I guess like, liked me more than I thought they did.

So yeah, like I had a lot of good friends that stayed with me from high school all the way throughout college. And now I know we’re going to be lifelong friends at this point. I have a lot of people that reached out to me after we graduated. Just like being like, Hey, I’m in L.A., and it’d be nice if we could hang out. And people that I like didn’t expect that would do that. I think, “EXPIRED” has a very unforgiving tone when it comes to reflecting on your high school years. But everything should be approached with nuance. And as I get older, I am more and more grateful for the experiences that I had because, you know, they made me who I am today.

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I think it’s not really a bad thing, though, that I don’t necessarily relate wholeheartedly to the music that I’ve written in the past. I think it’s still one part of me that I will keep with me for a while. Like, I don’t think I had the

COALESCE

best high school experience, but I also definitely didn’t have the worst. And I think that a lot of positive moments are worth acknowledging.

Is there a particular message that you want to convey to the world through your music?

If I could convey anything to the world, or if I wanted the world to get anything out of the music I’m writing, it’d be the idea that nothing is that serious and nothing is that deep. Even though I write a lot about, imposter syndrome and academic validation or serious struggles, I also want people who listen to my music to realize that. This is kind of a universal feeling that everybody deals with at one point or another.

And part of the way that I’ve like gotten over those or like I’ve tried to get over those like challenges in my life is really by thinking like, oh, it really isn’t that deep. And it’s helped me a lot just thinking like, if everybody has imposter syndrome, then is imposter syndrome really real? Because then everybody would just be, I guess, like quote unquote, an imposter, right? Then who who even is, you know, the real imposter, you know? So it’s always like fun for me to think about things in that way because it, like, helps calm my nerves a lot. So I hope people who listen to my music, if they relate, then I hope that they can also receive that sort of message that in the end, everything will be okay, that it’s not that deep.

And I don’t know, I feel like I’m also gravitating towards writing more unserious music now. So this question is a reflection of like my whims at the moment. I hope that people can listen to my music and just feel like nothing really matters. Like nothing is that important and that life-threatening.

To read the full interview, visit descentusc.com.

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O

when the cean doesn’t meet the hore Writing by Maia Cho Design by Ally Wong

Tonight

S

, I dream of drowning.

Like always, I stand on the shore and stare out at the ocean. A frozen mass of glistening obsidian, adorned by a cold, silver moon, high and far from my reach.

I need to reach it. I step out, and the ice bites and burns at my bare feet. The winter wind smothers me, steals my breath, presses me forward.

The moon is so far, so I run. My feet slip, scrabble for purchase. The frigid air sears my throat. My breath, stolen by the fibers of my muscle and the wind, gets shorter and shorter until it comes no more, because the water is icy and still and I am so heavy.

I wake with my throat still raw from cold.

It was a water dream. I slip on my jacket and running shoes and sprint out the door.

Still enough time, but barely. The street is dead silent. I am the only one alive here; my legs pump, muscles contract, and lungs demand more oxygen than I can give. I’ve put my body into a desperate state of want, and it eats me alive.

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I reach the ocean a moment before dawn. I pant, slump against a rock, and watch the colors leak into the sky. My heart slows. I imagine it beats in time with the crashing waves.

Nothing is amiss. The tide stays where it is.

Halmeoni will be relieved.

“You run well.”

I whip around to see a girl. Art class, last year, second row. We were in a critique group once, and her mural made me feel.

Her hair is long. The wind feathers it into her face, and she blows it off.

“Thank you,” I say. I have other words, but the wind strips them away.

Her gaze flits down, back up. “Art, right?”

I nod, and struggle to find something to say.

“Do you come here a lot?”

I nod again. “I run and end up here, sometimes.” The untruth sticks in my throat, and I swallow it down.

She hums. “Then I should come more often.”

A heat burns at my numb cheeks. “Oh,” I say.

Silence between us. The waves crash into the shore.

“Anyway,” she says. “Would you like to join the cross country team?”

A smile, an offering.

I think of Halmeoni. “I’m not sure,” I say.

“Think about it?”

I cannot say no, so I don’t, and she beams. Gentle corals and oranges and blues spill across the morning sky. My heart beats faster than the waves.

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DESCENT MAGAZINE I run home and Halmeoni is sitting in her chair. My pulse thunders in my ears.

“Water dream,” she says.

“I made it,” I say. I straighten myself up, try to get my muscles and flesh in line.

“Mmm.” She reaches out and takes my chin in her wrinkled hands. Turns my face and captures my gaze with hers, dark and wet and flinty, like the obsidian depths of my dream.

I tear off.

Grab my bag and run home, back to the shore. I feel I will collapse any second, but the panic shooting through my veins carries me all the way to the tide.

I collapse onto the rock. My muscles feel like they’ll spill out of my flesh. I think about her smile as the sun sets.

“You met someone,” she says.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I say.

“You do.” Her mouth sets into a line.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I won’t forget what I have to do.”

Halmeoni watches me for a moment longer than usual. But all she says when I come in is, “Good job,” and the praise makes me glow.

“This is bigger than you,” she says.

“I know.”

“We keep this town from going under,” Halmeoni says. “And no one can know.

Every dawn, every dusk on water days.

Remember.”

“I could never forget,” I say. I love her, and the words taste bitter. There is something growing inside of me. *** Tryouts are strange. Everyone knows so much, wants so much. I do not.

I get on the team, just like she said. They have me running the three mile.

She runs the two mile. It’s the end of the week before we speak again, when I test my threemile time.

After warmups, I run three laborious miles, with the coaches and team captains—including her—timing us.

I cross the finish line and she grins.

“26:35,” she says. “You’re improving— great job!”

When it’s done, she smiles. I smile back, sit on the bench with the other girls, and try to catch my breath.

I look outside, and the sun is low in the sky. I scramble to my feet.

She looks at me.

“Sorry,” I say. “I have to use the bathroom.”

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I am high on endorphins.

COALESCE Time falls away with her. My plots scatter to the wind.

I tell her we already feel like friends– oh, she says–and we should hang out at the arcade this weekend. I’d love to, she says, and

The arcade is almost empty. We find a game for two and spend too long there. Just one more! she giggles. Her laugh could melt ice.

I get hot, damp, and I wipe at my forehead. She notices. Asks if I want to go for a walk. A warm coal burns in my chest, gentle and thawing, and I say yes.

oranges blossom in my chest.

“Why do you run?” I ask. “And not paint?”

We’re walking on the pier of this small, watery town, the pier I’ve walked thousands of times before, and this feels like a first.

The snow comes down in flurries. Blankets us in quiet; engulfs us in stillness; alights on her shoulders, her hair, her lashes. I fight the urge to brush it off.

“I want too much,” she says. “Painting makes it worse.”

When I get home that day, I do my best to school my expression into something neutral.

“Don’t get too close,” says Halmeoni.

“I won’t,” I say.

*** The day we meet, I dream. I sit bolt upright, half drowned by tumultuous ocean waves.

Today is supposed to be a rest day. I put on my shoes and run out the door.

Snow—first of the season. My breath comes easier than before, even in the biting cold, but I am dead tired.

I get to the beach before dawn and sit. I close my eyes and plot out the day.

She talks, then, for a long time, and I listen. She grew up in dysfunction and hates that she can’t fix it. She wants out; she wants to make a life; she runs because she feels all her wants will consume her whole.

“I want to create something that lasts,” she says. “I don’t think I can paint well enough for that.”

“I still remember your mural,” I say. Its corals and crimsons seep into my words, and she pauses. “I wish I could make something like that.”

She stops walking. I look at her lips and how they twitch around a smile. “That’s why I followed you to the ocean,” she says. “You want, too. And you run more than I do.”

The wind blows into my face. “You’re wrong,” I say. “I don’t.”

She stops walking. Turns to me. Her gaze freezes my shoes to the icy wood.

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DESCENT MAGAZINE “You have something here,” she says. Reaches up to my face; one of her hands settles on my jawline, the other up to my eyebrow. They’re warm, smaller than I thought. The pad of her thumb runs across my eyebrow, and I shiver.

Silence. The ever-present tide sounds further than usual.

It’s the day of the meet and of course I dream of water.

I don’t sink like a stone this time; instead, I am trapped by the ice, and I drown anyway.

The tears still sting my eyes when I get to the shore.

“It’s getting late,” she says. “Do you want—”

I will not fail.

“I have to go,” I say. “My family—they need me.

Sorry.”

My worries eat away at my nerves. She notices.

She pulls back. I turn around and sprint away.

“Trust me.”

I get to the beach with time to spare, but I know I was so close to losing it all.

I watch her run the two-mile. Her long limbs eat up the ground, take the yards like they’re nothing.

My mile time goes down, I talk to her just the right amount, and I dream of water more and more frequently. I pray I won’t on the day of the meet.

I run to the beach, dawn and dusk, every other day.

I come home from practice and I ache, collapse into a million tiny pieces, and Halmeoni folds her mandu and looks at me like she can see right through. I don’t like it. But she places a big bowl of soup in front of me, orange slices on the side, and that’s love.

I don’t want out, and I don’t want too much. My life is in perfect balance, separated out on the scales. I am not sure how much more I can endure.

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“You’re going to do so well,” she says.

And then it’s my turn, and even running cannot quiet my thoughts: the tide, engulfing my home; Halmeoni, disappointed; long limbs and a warm smile. I run faster, panic simmering in my gut.

I finish, and there is barely light in the sky, and she is there.

My face in her hands, and her smile.

“You did it,” she says, beaming. “You qualified. And beat your personal best.”

I breathe raggedly.

“You’re incredible,” she says. She pushes the hair from my face, so, so close, and I run.

She shouts. I can’t respond. The sun dips below the horizon.

My lungs have never burned like this; I have never pushed my body to the point of wanting this badly. My heart pumps so hard that I can’t hear, and it isn’t enough. The blood sluicing through my veins, over my suffocating muscle fiber, isn’t enough.

I drown in the panic, the

burn, the beat of my shoes on the salty pavement.

I make it and colors have begun to leak into the sky. My legs collapse, and I stare out into the horizon, vision swimming.

COALESCE She kisses me, and the ocean rushes in all at once.

The town will be submerged. The tide will rise until it fills what was empty. The frigid water will freeze everything in place, and a slow rot will eat away at wood and fabric and everything that used to be alive.

“You do run more than I do.”

I whirl, and she is there, panting. I blink my vision clear, claw my breath back. “You shouldn’t be here,” I say.

But in this moment, when the ocean finally meets the shore, and her arms loop around my neck and mine around her waist, it is only us. We bleed together, burnt orange and crimson, sear the surf a fiery red, and color this new world of ruin and water and want.

“That’s what drew me to you,” she says.

“I can’t stop running,” I say. “Please—” “I know,” she says. “I never wanted you to. But you’re tired.

You’re tired and you’re running from nothing.”

The waves approach.

“You don’t have to stop running,” she says. “But, please. Take a rest with me?”

She walks forward. Steps into the surf, and I lurch forward, terrified.

The water and the shore. It was my job to keep them apart.

She turns, looks at me, and the world is going to end.

I step into the water, and it rushes around my ankles, welcoming, and it’s so cold that it feels warm. Like her hand on my face, again; like the burnt oranges and crimsons spilling into the gray sky; my blood from my veins;

her lips on mine.

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Communion

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Photography by Jimin Hong Design by Isabella Murray

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e v s a and W

Ash Writing by Sage Murthy Design by Grace Wu

I haven’t been to the beach for a while now.

The last time I went was on a first date a couple years ago with some guy that smoked too much and smiled too little. Honestly, the odds were stacked against him from the start. The smell of the ocean makes me sick.

My dad always loved the ocean. When I was younger, he would pick me up from school and take me to the beach on a whim. I didn’t like the feeling of sand on my feet, so he would brush the sand off with his hands and lift me onto his shoulders after I complained for a bit.

We stopped going to the beach because his work got busy. Sometimes when I was tucked in for bed I would hear him yelling at my mom and I would pull the covers over my head to muffle the sound. At some point I discovered that when I cupped my hands over my ears it sounded like rushing water. I would wish I was at the beach, even though I didn’t like how it made my hair sticky.

I started finding beer bottles on the coffee table when I woke up for school. When I came home I would hear smashing and shouting and crying and the soft buzz of the TV in the background. At some point the shouting stopped, and that was somehow worse. I didn’t see him at all, except in the jackets and socks scattered on the couch.

When he suddenly died I was living on my own already. My mom had him cremated. He never specified what he wanted, but she told me it felt right. The funeral was small, and I came late because I was still angry at him. She wasn’t happy with me. She told me that I needed to scatter his ashes to make up for it. I took the urn back to my apartment.

Holding the urn on the bus home was odd. People tend to mind their business, which is nice most of the time, but weird when you’re holding your dead dad in your arms and no one gives you a second glance. I contemplated leaving it on the bus, but when I got up to leave I couldn’t put it down for some reason. So I had no choice but to take it with me.

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COALESCE I told my mom that I scattered the ashes a few days later, but what I really ended up doing was putting it in my closet so I wouldn’t have to look at it. That backfired on me when I saw the stupid ceramic pot every time I went to get changed. I tried putting a box over it, but then I would look at the box and remember the urn, too. I started putting my clothes on the couch so that I wouldn’t need to open the closet anymore. A few months later I had a date over who, in her drunken state of trying to get a hoodie from my closet, tripped and fell onto the box-thatwas-not-just-a-regular-box-and-was-actually-hiding-my-dad’s-urn.

The ashes spilled on the carpeted ground and her jaw dropped. When I told her it was okay and that I didn’t care–that he was an asshole–she suddenly switched from crying to yelling at me. I never thought I would get scolded by a Hinge date about an urn in my closet, but I guess no one knows how to mind their own business these days. She stormed out and I just stood there. I vacuumed up the ashes that fell onto the carpet and screwed the lid back on.

I couldn’t bring myself to empty my vacuum for a week. But at some point I just started to get pissed off, because why was I letting some dead guy control me? I thought that the whole point of this was to torture him, in the post-mortemous state he was in, but for some stupid reason I was letting him torture me.

The next day I emptied my vacuum into the trash and decided that I was going to have a beach day. I put a swimsuit on and packed a bag with the urn and a towel, and rode the bus all the way to the beach. When I got there, I laid the towel on the ground and took the urn with me to the edge of the water.

As I stood there, the small waves lapped at my toes. When the tide receded, I uncapped the urn and poured the ashes out on top of my feet, dropping the urn once it was empty. I watched as the tide came in, pulling the ashes away from my feet and mixing them with the wet sand below—dark streaks that became blurrier and blurrier with each small wave. I reached down and brushed the sand off my feet before wading into the water and stepping into a breaststroke.

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a Eli

nn aZ

oa oe Gamb

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s Ar t

ission Subm

DESCENT MAGAZINE

Ally Guo

Writing by Design by Adeline Chan

Once upon a time,

El’s grandmother had given her a cicada in a bottle. Back then, El had screamed and tossed it aside, and grandma had berated her for abandoning a gift. She hadn’t understood why grandma was unafraid. Not when grandma told tales of the chip, chip, chip that swarmed life away. Not when grandma had been there when chittering wings stole El’s mother.

But now, walking amongst the crumbling cicada shells that towered around her, she understood. Monstrous trees loomed overhead, and massive exuviae trembled in their branches.

Some trembled so hard they’d fallen to the ground, lifeless even in motion. The cicadas brought death, but there was nothing to fear from creatures who shed their own lives so quickly.

chip, chip, chip Still, she avoided brushing against the hulking husks around them. There was no point in breathing undeserved life into something abandoned and asleep. They’d already eaten half her family, poised to eat the rest if she didn’t reach her grandmother and brother in time. She wasn’t going to give herself up, too.

Eh, however, didn’t seem to have such hang ups. His arm brushed against the fragile wing of one husk, and it cracked off.

“Careful!” El hissed, spinning around. “Do you want them to notice us?”

Her youngest brother shrugged, foot crunching irreverently upon the wing, sinking it deep into the earth. The children would know their mother had broken, just as El had known when her own mother had cracked. Clearly, Eh hadn’t felt it when his mother had snapped.

“Can’t you hear them screaming?” Eh replied. “They already have.”

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“The living ones have,” El explained impatiently, “but the ones that are empty, dead, abandoned have not.”

“What can the dead do to us?” Eh asked.

“Nothing,” El spat. “But it’ll waste time, and then they’ll take grandma and Ee somewhere too far for us to follow.”

Eh was silent, and then, “You said you weren’t afraid.”

“I’m not.” Gritted teeth. “I want them to be.”

chip, chip, chip Forgotten shells could no longer move, but they could still scream, and El hated the sound of squirming. There were already enough insects underground, squealing in panic as her footsteps drew nearer.

They could scream all they wanted, she thought darkly. They hadn’t cared when they’d stolen her family, and she wouldn’t care when she set them all aflame.

El knew she’d changed since grandma and Ee had been taken. It frothed in the angry spaces in between her face, pulsating from her feet up through her spine and out of her eyes, mouth, and ears. Like a bubble that had forced free from her body, it nonetheless had the gall to burst over her head, leaving her to deal with the glistening aftermath alone. Yet for all the ghosts El had shed, Eh clung on to his.

“Dad would laugh at you,” Eh said behind a mouthful of fruit. “For coming all this way.”

They had sat on a bed of flightless wings to eat. It crunched with every shift and shudder. Eh chewed an apple El had peeled, because he’d never had a chance to learn from their father how to peel it. El chewed an apple that she hadn’t peeled, because she’d had the chance to learn she liked it better that way.

“Dad laughed at everyone,” El argued. “He laughed when you cried.”

El waited for Eh to retort or—even better—to shut up. But instead, he laughed, so shrill it cut through the mutinous chip, chip, chip like a knife. He laughed, and unlike their father, it wasn’t sour. His body shook, and the ghosts woven through his hair twirled lazily, like they hadn’t been squeezed, popped, and gutted like gross bubbles.

“It’s not funny,” Eh choked out. “He shouldn’t have laughed. But it’s funny, because he laughed at all of us. Even mom used to—” “Your mom.”

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DESCENT MAGAZINE “What?” The laughter stopped, guillotined by something guilty and vengeful.

“Dad fought with my mom, but he never laughed at her.” Her mouth felt like rotten apples, but she said, “That was your mom.”

Eh was as faded as the husks lurking behind them. “How would you know? You haven’t seen your mom in ten years.”

“Because they ate her.” A thousand tiny legs clattered across her tongue. “The cicadas took her, and they ate her, just like they’ll do with grandma and Ee. You should know this. You were there. We need to hurry.”

“I know, I know.” He sounded agitated. “But you covered my eyes, and I didn’t see, and I don’t understand how it could’ve happened.”

“I told you. They took grandma, and grandma was holding Ee’s hand, so—” “But that doesn’t make sense!” Eh blurted out. “Because grandma would’ve let go!”

The air stilled, save for the omniscient, unearthly buzzing that burrowed into their flesh and rattled their bones. El was breathing heavily, or maybe it was Eh who was heaving. There was no difference, not when they’d been formed from half of the same breath and raised in all of the same air.

Every gasp passed between two bodies, lost and confused in the absence of the third between them.

chip, chip, chip “I’m going to sleep,” El said. She flopped onto the ground before Eh could respond. “You take the first watch.”

“Right,” Eh muttered. “Because you’re not afraid.”

But he shifted to stare into the abyss around them.

El had experienced one seventeen-year cycle before. She could still remember the chirping of that single smug summer. She’d never liked cicadas, but she was no longer afraid. She was no longer afraid, but…

“Aren’t you going to kill it,” Eh asked, matter-of-fact.

Some cicada broods go through seventeen year cycles. They live underground as nymphs for most of their lives. Once they exit, they molt for the final time and become adults. The exuviae remains abandoned. Most cicadas in a brood emerge together. Nonetheless, some individuals emerge too early or too late and die alone and unfulfilled.

El knew she was not afraid, but that didn’t stop her from being surprised. “It’s big,” she said slowly.

It felt silly when monstrous frames loomed cliff-like around them. But the creature that twitched in front of her was…

“Grandma said the cicadas back home were larger than the ones where we grew up,” Eh recalled.

“Because life and death expand and cluster, spin around inside them.”

“Cicadas don’t bring life,” El said. “Grandma never said that.”

“She did,” Eh insisted. “That’s why she gave you those gifts.”

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Was she going to do it? Was she going to raise a hand both gentle and cruel like her grandmother’s?

A calloused hand that could nurture children from motherless families, yet bruise young flesh with no remorse?

chip, chip, chip “Whatever.” El couldn’t light a match while her hands were shaky. “It’ll die on its own.”

Eh was a picky eater. Even here, he found reason to complain. El was certain that even time and age, stolen grandmothers and swarms of death could never take that from him.

“Ee would’ve eaten this,” she snarled. “He would’ve enjoyed it.”

“Ee was stupid,” Eh retorted. “Of course he would’ve.”

An alien thrum pounded savagely through El’s veins, sickeningly similar to the crawling chip, chip, chip inside her arteries. What did El know? He had been born three years too late, after their lives had already been shattered. He had been born a lifetime too early, before there’d even been a chance to rescue her mother.

“Ee isn’t stupid,” El hissed. “He knows how to survive, and he knows more than you.”

He didn’t open his mouth, but El could hear the accusation in the breeze, urged along by the glee of the cicadas.

“I’m going to sleep,” Eh said. “You don’t have to keep watch.”

El threw the dried orange scraps at his feet.

When Eh woke her from sleep, El stretched to push him away, startling awake when she felt something strange upon his face. She grasped his cheeks, tracing his features with bitten thumbs.

“Sometimes I see her blue car,” Eh said wetly, “driving to come pick me up.” Even in the darkness, El could tell his eyes were searching. “Did dad sell your mom’s car, too?”

El could see plain gray. The fuzzy softness of plaid, patterned seats, so different from the cold leather that came afterward. “He never told you, but he kept the license plate.”

Neither sibling reached out. Children who share too many pieces and too few echoes rarely want to overlap. But El was finally learning to navigate through the dark, and in that moment, it had to be enough.

Eh was silent, and El almost thought he’d fallen asleep, when a sound-sliver carried a question he seemed reluctant to ask.

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DESCENT MAGAZINE “Are you mad I’m the only one left?”

El closed her eyes. She wondered if Eh knew of the minutes, days, months, and years before he’d been born. If he realized she’d hated him until the first time she saw his face and held his little hand.

Around them, the cicadas continued the chirp, the ones above the surface discordant against the ones below. She felt strangely comforted by their presence, like someone was bracing her against the incoming onslaught hungering underground. A click, click, click to match the thump, thump, thump of her heart.

chip, chip, chip “There have been moments,” she said, “where I wanted you to be sad. But there has never been a day where I didn’t want you to be happy.”

Time stretched and melted, interlacing with the darkness like a pair of dripping fingers. When they fell asleep, it was to the rhythm of soft whispers and heavy heartbeats. Around them, the cicadas continued to watch, and even the ancient husks held their breaths.

They were deep in the land of the cicadas when the brood finally stirred. El knew it before she heard it—heard it before she saw it. Perhaps Eh had known for even longer, for his hand slipped into hers as they approached the cliff.

“Are you ready?” he asked. “They’re coming.”

From the ground far below, the creatures began to emerge. They stretched far and wide, burrowing up from the depths of a liminal abyss as one. In a wave of earth and trees, they began to shed their skins.

El gripped her brother’s hand and sprinted down the hill. It was too soon. She had waited ten years, yet how quickly seventeen years were left behind! Nothing but a dried husk to mark a childhood spent in darkness, starving for the moment to rise into the light. She would not be abandoned by time again. She would find her grandmother and brother and bring them back home. She would have her family.

Eh’s words spun around her, something ancient in his voice.

“Are you going to do it?” he asked. “They’re coming.”

The matches in her bag rattled with the force of the world and the jump of her legs. They clicked and clacked, and for a moment, El wondered if they would light themselves ablaze and burn her from the inside out.

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COALESCE As she approached, the cicadas began to whirl. El gasped as the storm consumed her, wrapping her in a chirping, shuddering embrace.

Up, up, through the air the cicadas rushed, a swirling vortex of instance and eternity, immortality and rebirth, stagnation and release, names and faces and everything in between.

Her entire body felt numb, and she could no longer tell if Eh’s hand was in hers. With one hand, she grabbed for him anyway. With the other, she reached toward the open mouths and blinking eyes that blocked out the sky.

I don’t remember, El wept, what you last said to me before you were made gone. The universe whipped like spinning clocks, and the discarded static of childhood shells scattered and swirled in the air.

Life and death expanded and clustered, thrumming inside tiny, crunching, buzzing bodies.

She felt the hum in her own bones, the chip, chip, chip of words she knew had been spoken, yet could no longer understand.

The song of the cicadas beckoned her forward, and El wondered what she was looking for. In this place of stolen mothers, fading fathers, silent brothers, and displaced grandmothers, where dry skins rusted and tender nymphs slept underground. What was she looking for?

I’m afraid I’ll forget even more.

Eh’s fingers reconnected with hers in the center of the noise. His ghosts, previously nestled tightly in the short strands of his dark hair, twirled apart. Or perhaps, they’d never been that tightly intertwined to begin with. Perhaps, like El’s, they’d been desperate to float away, only Eh had snatched them back.

I don’t want you to leave me.

She wanted her mother to draw her silly pictures. She wanted her grandmother to arrive with an armful of tomatoes. She wanted her father to laugh at her jokes. She wanted her brothers to chase her around the house. She wanted her stepmother to drive her in the blue car. She wanted—

chip, chip, chip it’s a gift. don’t throw life away so easily The swarm of cicadas took to the sky, Eh held their ghosts in his hand, and El looked to her family again.

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Eating Faces

What’s in my bento box?

Writing by Jasmine Kwok Design by Prithika Kulkarni

Meal 1: Fingers as snappable as a baby carrot.

Apparently you can break your pinky just as easily as you can eat a baby carrot. I dismissively toss that thought away to unapologetically chow down on the orange stubs. Unfazed, I move on to my pink bento box. The real victims lie inside.

A smile as white as the blank canvas of white milk bread slices, eyes glistening like glass jars of sunkissed grape jam. A turkey mayonnaise sandwich grins. A man cut out from a vibrant tangerine peel spreads his arms proudly. A hardened cookie starts to crumble like shattered glass.

Every day, I would open my pink container to a pair of googly eyes embedded into a slice of honey wheat bread, which was cut into the shape of a heart. A tightly folded sticky note was pressed to the bottom of my floral lunchbox.

Have a great day at school! My mother’s handwriting was always on the spectrum between some sort of beautiful cursive and a doctor’s chicken scratches, but I could always make out the heart she drew underneath the exclamation mark.

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Sometimes, I would open this gift box to a thermos with crab mac and cheese topped with soggy seaweed (an underrated addition), or, on special occasions, instant ramen noodles. Other times, a ziploc bag held a delectable turkey sandwich glued together by mayonnaise that would seep through the edges. Slices of cucumber would be stuffed into a small hippo container, sometimes smeared with a dab of peanut butter.

Sometimes, when I was extra fidgety on my trek to class, the lunchbox would shake violently in my backpack. By the time I took it out during break, the edible characters my mother prepared had become dismembered. ThankMy fully, it always tasted the same, no matter if I was favorites were her cookies, which she turned into eating my sandwich’s leg or arm. hearts or baby animals with the help of a cookie cutter or the steadiness of her own My mother would top each meal with hands. a sweet treat.

One time, she accidentally burnt a batch of heartshaped sugar cookies, but I refused to have a complete lunch without a sweet treat under any circumstances.

She apologized as she placed a cracked heart in a pink polka dot bag and twisted it shut. At school, it was a bit tough to bite down, but I could taste every single sprinkle of love she mixed into it.

Thanks to her, my meals became animated into cartoon characters that rose each day from their baking sheets and hobbled their way into my bento box under the impression that it would shelter them from the world outside.

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DESCENT MAGAZINEMeal 2: Butternut squash soup temporarily

washes away my illness with a warm kiss. I wish the crack in my heart could be filled with the liquid gold of chocolate fudge dripping from my mother’s spatula. Wafts of home make my stomach ache with a hunger for old tastes. Everything I eat disappears into an endless pit that makes me feel emptier. I swim through pools of sticky syrup—each stroke feels heavier than the last.

The taste of home is faint, light like cloud bread. My sandwiches rarely wave back to me now. The tangerine man has retreated to his cocoon, wrapping himself all around the bare fruit to hide his humanity. My cookies have sugar but no oozing sweetness that flows its way into the heart. My refrigerator is lifeless, as it houses corpses of childhood. Homesickness tastes like the stale end of a bread loaf.

Now that my bento box remains empty until I fill it up myself, I either need to make my own faces or steal them. I have to breathe life into my food so that its blood will coalesce all the colorful flavors into one body and make me feel whole. When I open my lunchbox, I crave the embrace of familiarity.

I need food that fights back, that screams in agony when I start to nibble its hand. I need spice to kick back in order to feel its searing heat down my throat. I need my carrots to become fingers again. I need food that looks like the people I want to become, rather than the cute caricatures that mask their pain with a smile drawn out of raisins.

Grocery stores have become aisles of people, as I collect strangers’ faces in my cart to one day assort them into my innocent pink bento box.

Some leave a bitter taste in my mouth, as if I took a sip of black coffee without the silky oatmilk my mother would steam. Others make my cheeks blush like the gentle pink tints on a freshly steamed custard bun. On rare occasions, I feel reduced to a pair of googly eyes sinking into muddy tomato soup only to emerge as a soggy crouton.

I keep trying to find recognizable faces in everything I eat. They flicker in and out of view–I sometimes catch a wink or a smile here and there, but my food lacks expression. It lies flatly in my bento box and waits for a magic touch to bring it to life.

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I search for my grandmother’s face in every bowl of porridge to relive the sweetness of her smile. Every morning, I would wake up to her fresh bowl of oatmeal, the plate on top coated with droplets from trapping the heat inside the bowl.

Now, whenever I eat oatmeal, I find myself inhaling it frantically, desperately hoping that her face doesn’t drown underneath the heap of mush topped with banana slices and a charming spoonful of cinnamon. I don’t want to lose her gaze, but an empty bowl stares back with its blank face and taunting gloss.

When I peruse the local markets in Amsterdam amidst an anonymous crowd of urban dwellers, I find my uncle’s face in the raw herring dangling above the other dead fish. Its eyes bore through my soul as it rests on a sterile sheet of ice. Ironically, eating the herring gives its life back. With every pickled bite, the herring’s face morphs into my uncle’s. He grins behind the camera while he happily records my first bite. Once the camera stops rolling, his face disappears.

My mother’s gaze drifts in and out of bakery shop windows. The bakeries’ curry puff pastries and milk bread buns aren’t decorated to look like sleepy pandas or cows, but they subtly adorn her expression. I grab a pastry with a pair of clean tongs, and we lock eyes, as if I can see through its golden crust and into its custard filling. It tastes as good as something straight out of the second best baker’s recipe book. Too bad my mother is the first.

Just as quickly as they come, the faces vanish, and all I’m left with is the bitter aftertaste of expressionless pickled fish mixed with milk bread and room temperature oatmeal. I don’t even know who I’m eating anymore.

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What’s inside today’s lunch box doesn’t compare to the velvety mac and cheese that my mother would hide crabmeat and broccoli in, or the cloudlike bread of the char siu baos that my father would eat the meat out of, but it does have facial expressions plastered all over.

Googly eyes wink at me, teasing me about forgetting to season the chicken. A mouth drawn with edible marker smiles, either making fun of my lack of cooking skills or encouraging me to keep trying.

The other day, I blended leftover cucumbers, pineapples and frozen bananas for my morning smoothie. I delicately sprinkled some stale granola over it to create a smiley face, even though I knew each chunk would start to be swallowed up by the lime green slosh. I tried to save its face in vain by shoveling the goop into my mouth just as frantically as I ate my grandmother’s oatmeal. I’m starting to learn that the pace at which I eat won’t immortalize anyone’s face. I have to appreciate them while they’re there.

Tonight, I will finish my meal with a perfect sugar cookie with a slightly crispy edge, a soft, buttery middle and an aroma that makes next door neighbors drool. Still, I will never crave for something to be burnt so much.

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touch, see,

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land, water

Samara Chaplain Design by Grace Wu

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DESIGN BY LEIA FISHER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARISSA DING

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THE ENDLESS FACETS OF

DEANIE CHEN Interview by Marissa Ding

Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Photo by Deanie Chen

Design by Aud Ma

COALESCE Could you introduce yourself?

I’m a photographer based in New York City. I guess that’s how I primarily identify myself, but my other side of me is I just graduated from NYU Law, class of 2023. And I’m going to be working as a lawyer soon.

I work as a photographer in everything from live music to touring to fashion and editorial. I mostly focus on live work and portrait and editorial work tied to music, but I do kind of everything.

How did you keep going in college and in grad school while balancing tens of hours of working in photo at the same time? What kept you going through that?

Short answer, a lot of caffeine. Like I have a horrible caffeine addiction so a lot of caffeine and not a lot of sleep. But I think the core of it is how I’m very defined by my commitment to my family, and I am still selfish enough that I have a full commitment to myself as well. I’m an only child of immigrants, and I resented my parents for a long time because they really wanted me to become a lawyer or pursue one of those classic Asian-kid careers. I’m not a STEM girl, so social sciences was the way to go. I always knew I needed to do this for my parents, to go to grad school. This was always the plan.

Photo was a little side quest. When I entered college I really wanted to find something that made me tick.

I had hyperfixations on different hobbies for a couple of months or a year, and then I would lose interest and find something new. When I discovered music photography in particular, I fell in love with it so hard and it was so addicting. I wanted to devote every single minute of free time that I had to it. And so my life was kind of split into 2 halves. I was doing this photo thing genuinely for me. It was the first thing I’ve ever found that made me tick and I was like, “This is something I genuinely want to fight and get better at because I love it.” And then the law thing was always ever present because of my parents. I had a lot of pressure from them, but also I wanted to fulfill that.

So I guess those two motivations, because they were separate, propelled me to get through both of them. And I think it was one of those things where I wanted both really badly for separate reasons. I think if you have enough motivation to get something done, you can do it, and the motivation doesn’t have to be the same. My motivation to be better at photo is definitely stronger, so I got very good at learning how to do the bare minimum in school and still get what I needed to get done and devote basically all that time to photos. So I got very good at shuffling time over from school stuff to photo and still keeping my

boygenius. Photo by Deanie Chen

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Towa Bird. Photo

by Deanie Chen

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MUNA. Photo by Deanie Chen

COALESCE grades up and knowing when I had to give a little bit more time and effort to academics. But I think at the core, if you have true reasons that keep you wanting to do something, I think you can. I think anyone can absolutely balance whatever they need. And there are people who balance things that are much more difficult than what I had to do.

Do you think that growing up in the Midwest and then making your way to a big city – did that shift influence your journey at all?

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s also why I didn’t get into music photography earlier. I was one of the few Asian kids in a class of like 600. I was always really conscious that I was different. I got to high school and I finally could figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I feel like the standard is you go to school in-state and you go get married, ring by spring. And you stay in Kansas and that’s the accepted route.

And in a sense I felt like I couldn’t really talk about my goals because no one believed – like that was just so uncommon. So it was that mindset was that mindset where everyone was like, “Don’t get your hopes up. Like you’re probably just gonna stay here.” But also being very different propelled me. I was like, “I need to leave because I’ve never fit in here. I want something more with my life and this predetermined path isn’t for me anyway.”

Moving to LA was definitely a culture shock.

Being in a place with so much diversity, it was crazy. I thought, “Okay, here I’m just another person. I don’t have to worry about fitting in and then after that I can figure out who I am.” It was wonderful feeling so normal and ordinary for the first time in my life.

beabadoobee. Photo by Deanie Chen

The first show I actually shot though was in Kansas City. I went home for the summer after freshman year and just brought a camera to small bars and got involved that summer with music photographers in Kansas City. But the change from the Midwest to the big city influenced my growth as an individual beyond my career so hugely. That was what propelled me to figure out what I was gonna do with my life because I had no idea. I’d never really thought about it. In high school, the only thing I wanted to do was leave.

Overall, would you say your multifaceted identity growing up in the Midwest and being Asian American plays a role in the space you want to create in the industry?

Yeah, I’m very conscious of being multifaceted. I’m a very proud Midwesterner. It’s really affected how I view the world. What changed is when I was in Kansas, I was ashamed of being Asian. When I was in LA and USC, I was

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DESCENT MAGAZINE ashamed of being middle class and from the Midwest. I think being a photographer was the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me in a sense of giving myself self-worth. Prior, I’ve always felt like, “Yeah, I’m over here doing my parents’ dream, I don’t really know what I’m doing but at least pursuing that gives me some value.”

And then all the other parts of my intersectionality of being a woman and being Asian and being from the Midwest, which is an odd combo when you move to USC, are things I’m really proud of because my background gives me a way of viewing the world differently, even if it doesn’t necessarily show through my art. Being these identities has helped me connect with artists or with other people when I work. I really connect with female artists, I really connect with artists from the Midwest. And I think that has helped me in my art in many ways and in the space that I wanna occupy. I hope that I can just be someone who is very proudly Midwestern or very proudly Asian and a woman doing my job well. I hope I can validate our existence in this space.

Another element of myself – being a lawyer and having done the whole thing for my parents or having done a professional career thing. I also want to give validation to people that because you’re not a quintessential starving artist and you aren’t devoting your whole heart and soul – that doesn’t make your art less valid. I don’t come from a background that gives me a fallback. I’m an only child, and both my parents waited until I graduated law school to retire. And I’m the only income stream now in our family. So if I failed as a music photographer and my parents had a health issue and they couldn’t afford it, I would be absolutely useless. That reality has always grounded me in the fact that I have to have a backup. It may not be the romantic story of being that artist that I always wanted to be, doing art full-time and really committing my whole life to it. But I think that’s reality. You just have to temper your dreams. When you don’t have a fallback, that’s unfortunately something you have to take into account.

Olivia Rodrigo. Photo by Deanie Chen And of course I felt really bitter. I felt really bitter to my parents. I was really angry for a while. And I think that’s a lot of what a lot of first-gen Asian Americans face. Because we usually don’t realize art is even a possibility until later in life. I no longer hold onto that bitterness, a bitterness I view as an essential growing pain of getting older. These choices, while in a perfect world, I may have made different ones, are undeniably things I willingly and actively chose because of the things that matter to me in life.

I hope people just look at me and in the worst case even if they don’t like my art, even if they have no interest in being a lawyer, see me and are like, “OK, I’m valid as a [insert job here]. I’m valid for what I need to do to face the reality of life. That doesn’t make me less of an artist.”

That’s a part that I can play a small role in, I hope. Other than that, I’m just going to keep working as much as I can in music and art because I love it and hopefully someday I can help bring up my friends who are really talented and really passionate and good people and slowly that will build the industry with more good people. That’s the big picture dream.

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To read the full interview, visit descentusc.com.

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Turnstile. Photo by Deanie Chen 103

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CREDITS EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

VISUAL DESIGN

Marissa Ding Isabelle Lim Z Luo

Adeline Chan Michaela Chang Leia Fisher Christine Jeong Prithika Kulkarni Aud Ma Isabella Murray Raina Paeper Stella Vu Ally Wong Grace Wu

ADMIN Kyle Ching Sanya Khattar Susan Tang Justin Wang

COMMUNICATIONS Ariel Cheng Elianna Gamboa Cici He Jinny Kim

MULTIMEDIA Samara Chaplain Hannah Chu Jessica Fu Jimin Hong Nicole Joseph Ryan Leong Alan Phan Risa Takemoto Avana Wang Julia Wang

WRITING Maia Cho Aahana Chowdhuri Megan Dang Alice Fan Ally Guo Jasmine Kwok Sage Murthy Pia Pelaez Sammie Yen Rui Zhang

SPECIAL THANKS TO Cover Model Rui Zhang Editorial Models Kailee Bryant Sophia Chen Fiona Choo Kaitlin Chow Jasmine Ho Mia Juni Praew Kedpradit Diego Lopez Eileen Mou Hannah Sakai Ava Tran Production Design Joyce Kim Featured Contributors Gia Nicole Carillo Elianna Gamboa Jackson Miller Diya Srivastava Echo Tang Featured Creatives Deanie Chen Saina Khvan Jenny Nuo Daisy Wang (DAWANG) Sponsors Nguyen Coffee Supply Sanzo

To view our featured contributors' pieces and extended versions of our featured creatives' work, visit descentusc.com.

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Descent Magazine is a creative collective and advocacy space for Asian Pacific Islander and South Asian magazine featuring creative works by APISA creators at USC. Our mission is to elevate and amplify APISA voic

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DESCENT MAGAZINE WILL RETURN IN SPRING 2024.

STAY TUNED.

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(APISA) creators at the University of Southern California (USC). We produce a semesterly print and digital ces by co-developing a space where they can showcase their artwork, productions, stories and other creations.