Margins, issue iv: Consumption

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We would like to respectfully recognize and acknowledge that we are on the traditional, ancestral, stolen, and current lands of the Catawba Nation and Shakori Tribe. This process is a way of honoring and expressing gratitude for the Catawba and Shakori Peoples who have been and continue to be on this land. Readers, we ask that you reflect on the histories of the peoples of the lands you occupy as the entire United States is built on top of Indigenous communities.

The ability to create this publication here in Durham and at Duke is predicated on the dispossession and genocide of the Indigenous Peoples who lived and continue to live with this land. Beginning in at least 1880 (according to archival records), students from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were enrolled within Trinity College’s special “Cherokee Industrial School.” The federal government offered financial incentives to schools around the country, including Trinity College, to assimilate indigenous students into Euro-American culture and strip them of their culture in the infamous “boarding schools.” At Duke, we fail to support Indigenous students and people through a lack of Indigenous faculty, classes, and administration. In spite of the lack of visibility, reparations, and Duke’s deliberate or ignorant silence in confronting its colonial history, Indigenous students continuously work to decolonize and reclaim their space. Only recently did space at Duke and recognition by Duke emerge, such as Wekit, a space in the Center for Multicultural Affairs in the Bryan Center for the Native American/Indigenous Student Alliance (NAISA) and Native students on campus, and the first Indigenous faculty hire. But this can only be the start.

As settlers and non-native people on Turtle Island, we — the Asian American Studies Working Group and the Margins Publication Team — benefit from the ongoing dispossession and colonization of Indigenous Peoples on this continent. In order to act in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, it is our responsibility to proactively challenge and dismantle colonialist and imperialist thought and behavior in our communities. This year has been another one marked by ecofascism and the surveillance and policing of our communities to follow white supremacist logics of race, gender, and sexuality. The theme for this year, “Consumption,” gestures towards the various ways that capitalism has made us accomplices in the extractivist project of colonization, white settler ideology, and exponentially growing exploitation of people and land. The beginning of 2023 was rocked with various acts of violence like the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio to the murder of nonbinary environmental activist Tortuguita. At the same time, organizing has resulted in victories like the occupation of Minneapolis’s Roof Depot, and continues to rally to grant Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier clemency. We must recognize that we as Asians and Asian Americans are complicit in settler colonialism as settlers on this land and that our struggles for social justice may not align with struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. But because we are settlers on stolen land, the leadership and priorities of Indigenous people come first.

While a land acknowledgment alone is not enough, it is an important social justice and decolonial practice that promotes Indigenous visibility and a reminder that we are on unceded Indigenous land. Let this be an opening for all of us to contemplate ways to join in decolonial and Indigenous movements for sovereignty and self-determination. We urge that you not stop at realization and reflection but actively and continuously find ways to support Indigenous peoples in their struggles for liberation.

INDIGENOUS ORGS TO SUPPORT

INDIGENOUS FOLKS TO

Duke Native American/Indigenous Student Alliance: www.change.

FOLLOW ON TWITTER org/dukenative North Carolina Native American Youth Organization: http://ncnayo. weebly.com Jisu, @dearnonnatives Native Youth Sexual Health Network: http:// Terisa Siagatonu, @terisasiagatonu nativeyouthsexualhealth.com Dr. Adrienne Keene, @NativeApprops Kahea: The Hawaiian-Environmental Network: http://kahea.org Dr. Eve Tuck, @tuckeve Unist’ot’en Camp: https://unistoten.camp Seeding Sovereignty, The Red Nation: https://therednation.org @SeedSovereignty IllumniNative: https://illuminative.org/ Chelsea Vowel (âpihtawikosisân), Support the family of Tortuguita: www.gofundme.com/f/for-family@apihtawikosisan of-manuel-tortuguita-paez-teran C. Ree, @reetown on Instagram #FreeLeonardPeltier: https://whoisleonardpeltier.info/ The Red Nation @The_Red_Nation Navajo & Hopi Resiliency Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ nhresiliency

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foreword.foreword.foreword.foreword Margins is a multi-media, collaborative publication devoted to centering the narratives of Asian Americans and Asians in America. An intervention in the Asian/American community at and beyond Duke, we aim to (re)politicize Asian/American identity and expand the depth of our discussions on the subject. With this publication, we recognize that “Asian American” first served and continues to serve as a political identity, unifying diverse groups of people in organizing efforts. By bringing out voices from the margins, we hope to build solidarities within and beyond the Asian/American community through stories that resonate with you.

In our last issue, Dreamscapes, we explored the idea of the beyond outside of our current reality, unlimited by borders, respectability, and whiteness. We reflected on the dystopian nightmares of our everyday and our collective dreams for a better world. Margins’ theme this year, Consumption, explores how our identities are marked by (re)production and consumerism in material, superstructural, and environmental ways.

Consumption reckons with orientalism, techno-orientalism, and self-orientalism as our cultures are commodified and consumed, especially as Asian/Americans have historically played into or subverted these tropes. We, as Asian/Americans, are also conscripted into capitalist logic, where immigrant laborers are desired and policed at the same time. Consumption means to ask how Asian/Americans consume their own identities. We interrogate authenticity and (dis)connection from our homelands and wonder if there exist real ways to critically engage with our identities. Consumption calls to food and its connection to and connection of our relationships to our families and communities. We are similarly consumed by emotions, as memory and trauma enter our consciousness intergenerationally and metabolize within our bodies.

Racial capitalism has also commercialized our dreams and traumas to make them legible and consumable.

As our unending consumption continues to exploit the land, there’s an opportunity to reimagine food sovereignty, community healing, and revolutionary anticolonial politics. We invite you to see these connections through your consumption of everyday objects and unique positionalities as Asian/Americans, teaching that what we consume and desire can also bite back.

In this fourth edition of Margins, we hope to interrogate our complex relationships to consumption across its forms – overwhelming and nourishing, giving and depleting.

What do you consume, and what consumes you? What do you obsess over, wonder about, or yearn for? What heals you, the land, the communities around you? What emotions, memories, and desires do objects, in whatever shapes or forms, hold for you?

How have you consumed your own bodies, environments, and identities?

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a big thanks to ...each and every person who has contributed to the creation of our fourth edition of Margins. ...the Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program for supporting us and funding the printing of this publication. ...everyone who submitted art, prose, analyses. Thank you for sharing what you consume and what consumes you!

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margins team $3

editing

cover design: marie cheng, elayna lei, rachel qu

editing leads: jocelyn la force regli & huiyin zhou vivian apple | judy chen | matthew chen alyssa ho | david lee | elayna lei miriam shams-rainey | ei ei swe emily wang | celine wang | annie zhang

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design leads: elayna lei & rachel qu

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judy chen | marie cheng | emily dieu aida guo | sebin jeon | vicky jin | aj kochuba miriam shams-rainey | ei ei swe | erika wang ruby wang | celine wei | ellen zeng | nichole zhang

design

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outreach

outreach leads: carina lei & celine wei aida guo | elayna lei | amber park rachel qu | hannah zhang | annie zhang

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table of contents lauren z.

Survivor of the Spring

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alyssa ho

miranda zhong

The Summer Mushroom of Winter Pickers $ Break $

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ashwin gadiraju

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erika wang

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Television Girl

rachel qu

Someone to Have You

49 51 $

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celine wei

theo cai

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carina lei

for sale

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(re)cycle/ 如鲠在喉

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Meditation

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Rhino

aida guo

Sick Woman

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Dancing Around the Truth

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jocelyn la force

nichole zhang &

regli

emily ngo &

Dear Mama

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36 vivian apple

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anh-ton xuan nguyen

sua cho

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Kitchen Litany

huiyin zhou

delivery

marie cheng

wanting...

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elayna lei

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39 41

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23 26

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ruby wang

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Storge

There are No taste buds Mango Trees $ $ Here $

The Dragon Skater

the as/am theater multiverse

Lazy Susan

maanvi chawla

helen xiao

Sari Weaving in South India

emily wang

matthew chen

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Vigil huiyin zhou Statement

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cw: death, covid

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The sudden and unprepared change of Covid policy in China took away my grandpa.

Being on one of the first flights under the new policy back home in mid January, I witnessed a historical moment after three years and counting of death, pain, and absurdity.

After 30 hours of travel from Chapel Hill, I reunited with my grandma in Hefei. She suffered from every long-COVID symptom and the grief for losing her partner of 60 years. I planned shopping adventures to distract her from thinking about grandpa.

A fancy supermarket, 盒马, was one of many stores that immediately opened after the policy turn. There, my grandma wandered between shelves filled with fancy packaged goods, besides thrilled kids who grew up during COVID lockdowns. She relied on my mom to navigate and was confused by the self-checkout system. To save 1 yuan on a plastic bag, grandma insisted on carrying a heavy bottle of beverage all the way home. I was heartbroken for capturing her helplessness.

Then we went to her “natural habitat” — a traditional market — before 立春 (the beginning of spring) to get spring roll skins. When we witnessed an elderly customer failing to pay with a mobile app, I thought about the elders who weren’t able to leave home, order groceries in lockdowns, or even get on buses due to technical problems.

One of the last messages my grandpa sent on WeChat was: “We need to do PCR tests every day [to maintain a green health code], unstoppingly. When will this ever come to an end.” But all of those suddenly lost their meaning.

When the previous customer’s app payment finally went through, grandma paid with cash delightfully. Then she held her friend’s hand, and strutted away.

With the fresh veggies and skins, she made me the best spring rolls.

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Lazy Susan matthew chen Part 1: Fish Eyes Staring Contest Adversary Around a table, huddled eyes eye the arrival. Steamed fish in wine sauce, presented in the same position it died.

Mouth agape, humming sounds only it can hear, with a harmony of chopsticks clicking. Eyes have already devoured the bones, the chopsticks are mining out what’s left. The fish, while frozen, does not mind that it has been hollowed out.

It died two hours ago. In the heat of the kitchen, surrounded by leeks, stored in leaky crates and cloves of garlic littering the floor; a funeral garland.

What is a soul to its corpse. To not only stab, to desecrate. To not only stare, to devour. To not only cook, to incinerate. To feel false satiety from eating the transcendent; Does fish taste better in wine sauce or fried.

Their eyes glaze over as the ritual ends.

Pats on the back for a contest well-finished. Their eyes close for a moment, to rest on what’s been taken.

Realize, that the fish has never blinked.

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Part 2: Untasty Porkchops Fried in Corn Starch Chinese tradition tells us the story of love through the butterfly lovers. Unable to be together in mortal form. Died for love and reunited as butterflies.

America transforms Chinese tradition into Porkchops shared over a tiny metal table in a crowded Woodside apartment.

Passion can be vectorized toward comfort sharing nothing can be an act of meaning for those who come from nowhere.

Part 3: Lazy Susan They stand up and scream pleasantries at our faces, Last time I saw you, you were this high!

Complimentary embraces with unknown bodies.

Communal tea is passed around with secrets and whispers. Did you hear how [ ] married [ ] such shame ah! Familiar floral rug, faint oriental flute, and delicate water falling from a dragon, tiger, or whatever poor animal became a statue.

Silence is one’s best weapon and worst target in this wasteland.

When you get girlfriend!

The Lazy Susan is aptly named for conversing with unconversables. The fish eyes are a staring contest adversary and undefeated champion. Waitresses are summoned with a sleight of hand, magic trick amongst members.

Bring the dishes, wait no those are our dishes, more tea!

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Quotas are easily met with a few lackluster xie xie’s or dui’s but the Lazy Susan is the true challenge.

To navigate the circular ring, in a way that satisfies all is impossible without adept fingertips, spinning the glass plate like a record player, playing its own music of gong bao ji ding and hong shao rou. Hot steam swirls in the air to form a dream. Even to lift up the glass and spin it on one’s finger, to keep spinning it because the sauce has flown away anyways, and the paper lanterns hung on the ceiling are really of starlight, not neon gas, to keep spinning kaleidoscope of light projecting its truth onto them.

Even in the fish eyes.

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Storge emily wang (she/her)

We munch and crunch, slurp and burp.

But we don’t say “I love you”, or “I miss you,” give hugs or kisses. Instead of saying “I love you,” my Mom tucks six handmade 包子 into the pocket of my luggage. Rather than texting “I miss you,” she sends my brother and me a picture of fresh 米糕 that she’s saved for when we come home.

We consume—a lot. But food is so much more than sustenance or bodily nutrition. It’s nourishment for our souls, our histories, our most intimate familial relationships. Food is the way my parents tell me, “I love you.” But beyond implicating those affectionate three words, food in my story represents the histories of the people who came before me. Those generations endured hunger and cold, and now my Mom serves me a steaming 包子 to fill me with warmth.

Food is the way that my parents tell me, "I love you."

Nevertheless, I’m simultaneously consumed by cultural representations of what familial love should be; what it should look like—the idyllic house with the white picket fence, the heartfelt rom-coms that end with an earnest proclamation of love, the storybooks with parents kissing their children goodnight. And I’m left asking, is this how love should be?

Storge celebrates my parents’ and many other Asian parents’ way of loving their children. This piece refutes the idea that there is one way to love or a best way to express care and affection. Here, I invite and demand viewers to consume Asian consumption and our way of loving.

True, our affection may be less tactile or verbal, but it is by no means detached. Now, munch, crunch, slurp, burp. Salivate a little, for the stomach is not so far from the heart.

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The Summer of Winter Break alyssa ho (she/her) The first thing I noticed was that Potato Corner fries still tasted like heaven. I was afraid that they wouldn’t be as good as I remembered, but as I bit into another tangy crisp, I didn’t doubt it for a second. I passed the bucket to my best friend, Miya Matsumune. She was attending Bryn Mawr, another East Coast university, and she had been home for winter break a week longer than I had. I watched her carefully, wondering if she was a figment of my imagination or if I had traveled back in time to the summer before college. I supposed that was the whole point of this experiment… to see how it’d feel to relive the last day I was home on my first day of being back.

June 15th was the day before I left on a cross-country road trip to college. That afternoon, I got lunch with Miya at the Arcadia Mall. We then walked around the Los Angeles County Arboretum across the street. That night, I let my fears out on the page, knowing that in less than 24 hours, the home of my youth would no longer be a constant but a temporary blip in time. I would lose my house to emptiness, my friends to forgetfulness, and my family to formality. Comfort felt distant and as the sun reached its highest point, I had already driven miles down the road, crossing the border of California and the line between home and that place I used to know.

Now, it was December 21, my first full day back as a fallen child in the City of Angels. Yet here I was again, munching on fast food and slurping boba tea on a shaky marble table in Arcadia Mall with my best friend. It was as if I had reversed the last few months and had a chance to start over, deciding to stay this time.

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I knew this wasn’t true, but I also realized that I had been wrong: home was not attached to my youth nor was it something I had lost forever. It sparked on my tongue at the flavors of barbecue powder and honey tapioca, it whispered ‘hello’ from Miya’s laughter and how easily we slipped back into our ways of conversing big ideas with silly words, and it danced in front of me as crowds of non-students enjoyed the holidays as they had for years and years before. Perhaps Miya had gotten a bat tattoo with new college friends, perhaps there was a different billboard at the mall’s exit, or perhaps the Arboretum had moved its entrance to the other side of the park, but in the end, we still walked the same nature path, from the lake to the rose garden to the great magnolia at the top of the waterfall. There, the peacocks roosted, and there we sat on our bench, hidden by low branches and surrounded by carved initials, curse words, and dates that went as far back as 2012. We made stories about them. There were new markings. We made stories about them too.

Miya drove me home, the LA traffic a more bothersome reminder of how little the city had changed since I was gone. After scheduling a Six Flags trip and several movie nights, I said goodbye. I then walked up the newly tiled driveway that my father had landscaped. There was also a wooden patio where there wasn’t one before. It was comforting to see that my father’s woodworking passion had stayed the same. I could always find him in the garage, tinkering and sawing.

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And there he was, working on a new fence that would border the backyard, the old one torn and discarded, a shipwrecked heap by the trash bins. There was always something half-finished, half-constructed in my home. Although the house may have looked different, it was only because my father had not changed. I worried that the house would be empty, devoid of familiarity, but my father’s hands still sculpted and cared for the place. It didn’t need me there to witness it. I supposed that in the end, home was not so different at all.

Then there were the things my mother still did. She brought home Taiwanese takeout, beef noodle soup, and scallion wraps because it was the meal we usually ate on happy occasions. Even the increased price couldn’t deter the joy I felt from the taste of the warm broth, soft meat, and sweet spices from the star anise.

Around the dinner table, she lectured me about getting a boyfriend. I laughed with relief. I was afraid our relationship would go stale after being away for so long. It’d be static, unresponsive, too formal. She’d treat me like an adult, not her daughter. But as we sat on the couch, sharing a blanket and binging TV, it was as if I had never really left her nest. I snuggled underneath her wing. It was interesting how home had the power to persuade me that I too, had not grown very much after being away. Little by little, a home can change, but it is not gone. It is right where you left it.

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Mushroom Pickers miranda zhong (she/her)

Matsutake is a special type of edible mushroom found in Shangri-La, Yunnan China.

Due to its unique growth conditions, Matsutake is rare and more expensive compared to other types.

As one of the most ethnically diverse places in China, Shangri-La is extremely exoticized by tourism. In Shangri-La, the Matsutake pickers, primarily women of ethnic minority groups, put in significant physical effort to find these highly soughtafter mushrooms. As a part of their daily routine, the pickers leave before sunrise to search the forest for newly emerging mushrooms.

The transnational circulation of Matsutake mushrooms exemplifies how commodity fetishism intersects with the consumption of local cultural practices and identities.

One of the mountain ranges where the women would enter and harvest the Matsutake.

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Women in Shangri-La selling Matsutake to a dealer (the man sitting by the table), while another woman holding the phone is live-streaming and reselling the mushrooms online.

The image above is a poignant illustration of the interconnectedness of consumption and production on a larger scale. As one of the tourists in Shangri-La, I was brought to the mushroom market by the tour guide for the amazing Matsutake the place produces.

When I was communicating with the mushroom pickers in the picture, I found that their ability to speak Mandarin was very limited and they were generally unsatisfied by the price given by the dealer. Due to these language barriers, these women are often exploited by dealers and outside tourists. Despite their important roles as producers, their labor and culture, along with their image, are consumed by both Western audiences and Han-ethnic tourists.

I hope these images can invite us to critically engage with food and products we consume on a daily basis, and reflect on how relationships between land, people, technology, and capitalism shape our production and consumption practices.

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maanvi chawla (she/her) cw: racism + language

the quiet Central Park is quiet on Tuesdays. Except for the sweet whisper of warblers and subdued rustle of pages, I’m alone in this verdant pocket of the city. I’d brought three books with me in the hopes that I’d start one—but I’ve been here an hour and a half and my tote bag is still a few feet away, pressed down on the grass haphazardly, untouched.

September sunshine is kind on my shoulders—soft, like a massage. It bends through leaves and oak branches, emerging in aureate mosaic. My phone rings from inside my bag, deflating the quiet around me.

“Hey Ma.” “Hi beta. Just calling to check in—how are you? We miss you,” she says.

“I’m good, just reading outside. How’s your back? Has it gotten any better?”

“Still hurting but it’s okay,” she says, sighing, and I can hear her tense spine in her voice, the tight knots pulled tighter with time. She is perpetually bent over a life that runs and plunges when she reaches down to grab it. Mother is night and poet is shadow and the sun hasn’t risen yet. “I tried a heating pad yesterday—it helped for a little while but the pain will only really stop when I die.”

“Mom! Don’t say that.” It’s quiet for a few minutes. Not a Central-Park-on-Tuesday quiet but an epiphany quiet, a jolt-I-can-feel-in-my-own-back quiet, a quiet that glides from my phone to my spine to the sinew inside.

“Just a joke, shoni,” she says after a while. I’m twenty-two but she still calls me the same sweet nicknames that ring out from behind the camera in shaky home videos of me eating cheerios or playing with my sister. “Only joking.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The conversation is soft, and I imagine I’m still at home. I’m sitting on the couch and she’s sitting across from me, knitting or reading or writing in the handsewn journal we made for one of her birthdays. She used to keep it in her purse, brought it everywhere she went. The whole world was a poem to her: melting ice cream, morning walks, math homework. I’ve only seen a few of her pieces—not because I don’t want to, but because it’s hard to translate poetry. Literal translations don’t carry meaning and literary translations get lost as looping Devanagari straightens into Latin script.

“What are you doing today?” she asks. I almost want to tell her I’m coming home, but I’m seven thousand miles and several hundred bad decisions away from that.

“I’ll probably go get lunch somewhere, maybe watch a movie later.”

“Sounds fun. Be safe, please.” I can hear she’s tired.

“Of course. Bye Ma, love you.” I can’t bring myself to ask her what’s wrong.

“Love you. See you soon.” I let her hang up the phone, then keep it pressed against my ear as I listen to my breath replace hers. The quiet returns: this time, it’s slippery, evasive, like if I close my eyes for too long it’ll disappear and all I’ll have left is the pounding of my thoughts in my head.

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ma’s journal California sun ruptures into garlands of marigold, draped around black ink letters like dupattas.

Persimmon swells, sweetens into mango and trickles from title into stanza.

Juice pools around the byline, stains the unsigned pages gold.

mango street The subway is almost empty. I take a seat next to the door; the plastic is cool underneath me. There are newspapers strewn on the floor, dark footprints covering headlines and an image of a frowning politician. I twist one around with my toe so I can read it.

A man had been arrested for stealing four hundred dollars worth of mangoes from a local Indian grocery store. “Guilty,” he tells the cops as they approach the store, “you got me.” He holds his hands above his head; in his palms is one of the six bags of mangoes. An officer tells him to drop it. He does. Mango Street, they call it in the headline—Man Steals Mangoes, Turns Fifty-Second into Mango Street. The mangoes roll into traffic, bursting open under worn tires and tired feet. As the cops struggle to reach the man through the rolling fruit, he tips the other bags with his right foot and spills the rest.

Mrs. Patel, the owner of the store, watches, motionless, as the last of her mangoes for the year turn into roadkill. She is unable to give the reporter a comment, just points at the orange stains on the asphalt. Taxis and white cars ingest the ambrosia until she can’t tell the difference between the juice and the crack sealant.

I imagine the scene projected onto the walls of the subway tunnel: the road, black and fleeting and smeared a faint turmeric color. Mrs. Patel, bent to gather the tumbling mangoes. Somehow, I think, Mango Street will remind her of India. The irony: a white man unleashes his saccharine wrath on a woman and she watches and dreams of home. She will remember street vendors and cracked-open coconuts poised on wooden crates, plastic straws waiting to be drowned, sipped, cooling the body from the inside out. She will remember how her mother used to carry lychees in her purse like candies, rolling them from calloused palms to fresh skin. She will remember peeling, biting, bursting.

What a great poem, I think, and close my eyes.

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conversation with a man as he leaves the train “Go back to your country bitch. We have enough smart-asses here.” He spits a cloud of vape smoke into my face.

It smells faintly like mango.

salt spills stories I’m so in shock I can’t respond. The three other people in the train don’t even look up. I cough, choking on a smell that, growing up, had been my home. The only thing I can think to do is message my mom. hey ma are you awake. need to talk I realize it’s one-thirty am for her. can call in the morning I put my phone down on the seat next to me and wait for the air to unsweeten.

Everyone else gets off at the next station, and suddenly I’m alone in this metal pocket of the city. My mom calls about six minutes later.

“Is everything okay?” she asks, breathless and groggy. I don’t respond. Everything I want to tell her has suddenly dissipated and there’s something hard caught in my throat and I know if I swallow I’ll cry. I feel like a kid again. It wasn’t even that big of a deal. Stuff like that happens all the time.

“Is everything okay? You’re scaring me,” she tries again. I open my mouth.

Suddenly there’s an ocean on my cheeks and I can taste salt as it runs past my lips.

“It’s okay, beta, you can tell me.”

So I do. I tell her the last five minutes and then I tell her about Mango Street and Mrs. Patel and the way the sun was like a massage and how it reminded me of her massages and how I missed her and I wished that she didn’t move back to India or that I didn’t move away.

She lets me talk, lets me break down in the middle of the subway, drowning in tropical breath and seasick tears. When I’m finished, she speaks; her voice is clear but I can hear the longing I’ve torn out of my body and sent to hers in the way she trails off every few sentences. She tells me, it’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here, I’m always here.

“You know, when I was in college, my classmates would make fun of my accent. They’d mock me behind my back when I asked a question, putting on a show for their friends, laughing as soon as I raised my hand. ‘Curry breath,’ they’d call me, and throw sucked-on mints at my head. I didn’t even bring curry to school.

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“They pulled my braid, too. I cut my hair short before sophomore year but they just kept pulling. They’d say, ‘Do they even teach anything in India?’ The word sounded disgusting coming out of their mouths. Imagine that. The country you were brought up in, the country your parents breathe, the country below your feet and above your head, always rolling right through you like sunlight; it’s perched behind your eyes, coloring everything you see with such vibrance; it’s what you were born into, what your ashes will inherit when you die; it’s house and home and family and beautiful—and for someone to be able to mutilate that, it’s just—it’s sad, is all.”

There’s a catch in her throat and the story subsides. For a few minutes, the only sound on the line is the rush, the metal clanking, of the subway. It’s a comforting soundtrack to imagined embrace.

“We’ll never be truly welcome here. That’s just how it is, and we have to be okay with that because there’s nothing else we can be. Anger, spite—it gets you nowhere. Let them keep pulling, is what I’ve learned. You just push ahead and they’ll have to follow.

And you’re young, darling. Your dreams are still in front of you—reach.”

I don’t know what to say.

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taste buds celine wei I’m told your taste buds change every seven years. Science says they turn over every two weeks. For me, some tastes stay the same, even as they take on deeper profiles. bitter The hot summer day dries our sheets. Right next to our washing machine, a stove sizzles away, sitting where a dryer would. Hot Texas air circulates in and out of our house. It’s a dry heat. The sky is endless and unflinchingly blue while cicadas provide a soundtrack to this afternoon. I look out into our garden where rose bushes line the fence behind vegetables and melons. My eyes track a rabbit darting across the yard while a light wind rustles our date tree and fetches the fragrant scent of freshpicked chives. Inside, my grandma’s knife chops rhythmically. Soon, I’ll help knead the dough and crush garlic with a mortar and pestle. I sneak a bite of cooked pork. My misshaped dumplings snuggle up to hers. Soon after, the steam rises, and a juicy taste fills my mouth. An old bottle of rice wine is opened. My brother and I wince at the smell. My family’s loud laughter fills the room and I’m filled with the white noise of happiness.

Later, when I’m tucked in, my grandpa sits beside me in an old chair smelling of Tiger Balm. He’s coaxing me to drink the medicinal concoction he calls ‘tea’ where dregs of herbs and roots float inside. He laughs when I make a face. It’s bitter like nothing else. He’s telling me an old story. There’s a temple on an old mountain. In that temple is a room. In that room is a table. On that table is a cup. Drinking the cup is an old monk. He tells an old story. That story starts with an old mountain… (you get the picture). He laughs when I complain, but I’m not really annoyed. If everyone’s laughing, I’m okay. I drift away. I grow without even trying.

One day, I brew my own tea, and my muffled laughter becomes someone else’s happiness. I’m in college. I’m just in time for lunch and FaceTime my grandparents a time zone away. All I’ve consumed today is a bitter iced coffee to ward away the sticky North Carolinian humidity. I sit in my room and tell them about the dry frozen dumplings in our dining hall that aren’t nearly as juicy. I tell them about the overly saccharine night my friends and I spent confessing our secrets waiting for the sunrise. I tell them about the testing anxiety and sourness seeing my peers excel without visibly struggling. I’m technically an adult now too, but my grandparent’s lives feel unknowable.

They grew up on rice and rain and knew little beyond the borders of their hometown. But for now, I’m just in time. The windows fog up, becoming 23

dreamy and clouded, the world outside unclear and full of choices. Nothing makes sense looking forward, but I have thirty minutes of no overthinking. We’re going just the right speed. I’m in time to be their granddaughter. I’m in time to have lunch. I’m in time thousands of miles away.

It’s summer again and my older sister just got married, family members flying in from China with heat and laughter in the air. I’m old enough to drink rice wine, but my grandma has lost too many teeth to eat anything but porridge and soup dumplings. My grandpa still drinks the same tea everyday, but can no longer tell the temple story without getting confused.

Later, I get a voicemail from him. He wants to get a meal soon.

I’m too busy studying for the MCAT, but maybe in a week. Days later I’m in the emergency room. There’s a salty wetness behind my mask and a bitter taste in my chest. But eventually, there will be laughter. cold burn what is family if not the first place you run from? a burning house: scorched air, smoke-filled with citrus and sandalwood. i think, the heat is wrong, while cowering in the shade no brim large enough to hide my scarred face. a moon hangs over the planet stuck in a self-destructive spin (debris in the way only daughters can be) and one day, the moon will rotate out of this deadly embrace flinging itself into the cosmos and escaping the inevitable explosion of the Sun. sitting in the ashes of the burnt husk of a house i now own a better view of the rising moon. but drifting through cold space (afraid of losing the peace i worked so hard to achieve), i wonder, is this really the future i was hoping for? and so i split another pear with myself peel an orange without any mental division swallow section by section. sour is sweet’s uglier, more interesting sister. sour has pride in its ability to hurt and spice burns hot while sour burns cold.

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tomato egg “The real issue is that shadow of yours. It’s a bit…how do I put it politely? Faint. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were playing tricks, but in my book, that’s about half the shadow you’re supposed to have.”

I continue tracing a path back along rusted train tracks through the dense patch of forest I found myself lost in, a piece of untouched land that had been up for sale for at least a decade in hopes of enticing real estate investors or city planners. Instead, the sleepy southern suburb didn’t see the same amount of growth it had hoped (and promised), infrastructure aging and opportunities drying at an accelerated rate, especially for those arriving for a fresh start.

It’s not quite a ghost, but certainly not something belonging to this world. I refuse to speak to it, my mother always telling me not to engage with my grandpa’s Chinese opera folk tales from the old country, ranging from flesh-eating shapeshifters to ancestors stuck in limbo. Not when cold, hard science was what brought us to the land of opportunity in the first place. Who had time for ghosts when all fear and anxiety had to go towards putting food on the table?

“Take a page from an elder, we’re all done for if you lose your shadow. Some might see it as burdensome, but how else will you stay rooted? A rich history comes with an even heavier responsibility.”

In the corner of my eye, I see it start to coalesce as it grows angrier, facial features twisting into scorn.

Familiarly furrowed eyebrows and a downturned grimace shared by half my extended family, who I’ve only seen in pictures, come into clarity. I shake my head and start humming nursery rhymes, singing all 50 states in alphabetical order, and reciting a mnemonic for the Declaration of Independence.

“Oh, I know this next one: life, liberty, hirsute happiness. Easy. You hairy Americans love grandstanding about all your hopes and dreams but know near nothing about sacrifice. It’s all rice cookers with cute melodies, what happened to toiling at the paddies and burning your tongue at the canteens?”

There’s another break in the canopy, and I start to feel something rearrange itself under my skin and start to settle. I take deep breaths as the sun beats down on me like temple monks rhythmically bearing down on drums. My heart thumps in unison. I had long shed my down jacket as the sun rose higher in the sky, along with the phone, the compass, the hatchet, the matchbox, and the past. I felt lighter.

“You should consider how your shadow feels about it. It might have a bit of an inferiority complex. If I happened to be a shadow, I could imagine it’d be real crummy to be half of what I should be.”

Blocking out the chatter from the ghost, I walk away from where my shadow points. I pick up the pace, the trees getting sparser, and I wonder if I’m not going in the wrong direction.

“Don’t turn round now, doll face. You know you’d never get home if you only retrace your steps. Vectors point forward, trains travel east to west, even homing geese only go in one direction to find their new nest. Entropy increases, the ten thousand diasporas never coagulate, and there’s no easy way back to the Middle Kingdom.” It cackles.

I finally break my silence. “I don’t want to go back to the Middle Kingdom, I just can’t miss dinner. It’s tomato egg tonight.”

I break past the tree line. So does it. And one day, I’ll succumb to the possibility that I will never be rid of this ghost, sitting in the dark with my glasses off and blasting my mind out with loud music and even spicier food just to drown out any coherent thought, another mark on an endless chalkboard of limitations.

It’s quick to point out, “Apathy is a choice, not a coping mechanism.”

“Why can’t it be both?” I half-heartedly respond.

“To do nothing, according to Lao Tzu, is an activist’s assertion. To do nothing, according to Martin Luther King, is a ticket to our own destruction. You see, moral apathy hides even less than good intentions.”

At this point, we’re old hands at the whole bickering thing. I wave away the apparition while remarking, “Chill out, I’m an American. Don’t you know that an unexamined life is worth living and worth living well?”

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Perhaps as time goes on and when I finally confess to the ghost about my unbearable isolation, how much I’ve given up just for a moment of acceptance, its face with my family’s features will fade away as memory fades. Like glass exposed to sunlight, it’ll take on a duller, yellow tint. All might dissolve into the white cloud-vault of history, blending into the tunes of a massive and eclectic playlist. One day, my shadow would completely disappear, freeing me to float out into the atmosphere, momentum from the Big Bang pushing me to drift in the far reaches of the expanding universe. The ghost would shrug, sighing disappointedly before chalking it up to a lack of filial piety, globalization, maybe even just cloud cover before leaving. And I’d miss the ghost’s presence.

theo cai (he/they) Yeast, warm water. Sugar, salt. Proof of life.

Flour, in, mix. The heels of my palms push out the ache, push it flat, then fold it in on itself. Repeat. They must call bread the body of Christ because he’s the one who worked out the dough on the countertop. Fermentation, exaltation: the breath of steam as the knife saws free. Tell the fear of carbs to just take a look at that crumb: cellular & muscular. In the last decade, my family’s rice bowls have shrunken to half their size, but I still recall my grandfather reading me a poem at lunchtime:

锄禾日当午， 汗滴禾下土。America took my sweat to a perfurmier, & he dripped it into a crystal bottle to sell back to me as a zero calorie luxury.

谁知盘中餐，粒粒皆辛苦。America said I’m singular in my bitterness; he said it’s how he knows me. Amber blows the grain—amber, the scent that encases the oven, then the kitchen, then bedrooms, until I am passing melting butter like our hunger would last forever. Repeat: our hunger would last forever.

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Sari Weaving in South India ashwin gadiraju (he/him) The photographs above were taken in a small village located in Southeast India and serve to showcase the art of handweaving saris (traditional Indian women’s clothing). Despite having once been a national symbol of freedom and self-reliance, today handwoven saris are becoming a rarity in industrialized India. While the artform itself is breathtaking to witness, the vibrant silk colors serve as a diversion for the meager conditions these skilled workers exist within. Working tirelessly throughout the day, it takes these weavers one to two days to complete just one silk sari. Each worker receives about 200 rupees (~$2.5) for each sari, which can sell for up to 40,000 rupees (~$500). The profit-maximizing nature of these businesses coupled with the lack of proper labor-law enforcement often leaves these highly-skilled artisans in a continual cycle of poverty.

These photographs in rural southeast India allow for reflection into the role of consumption in shaping both our lives and the lives of those we indirectly interact with. To begin, the onset of fast fashion and the unsustainable consumption of clothing not only enhances the potential for worker exploitation, but is known to be a cause of significant environmental degradation. Furthermore, the consumption of one’s labor for profit is deeply rooted in our society’s economic and power structures. Without proper protections and enforcements, laborers such as sari weavers may be further exposed to exploitative practices in the workplace. Finally, these pictures shed light on the consumption of livelihood. As technologies advance and dominate age-old industries such as sari handweaving, modern consumers are not only consuming products, but are indirectly consuming the livelihoods of those responsible for production.

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helen xiao helen xiao This work is a functional chair designed from scratch and made with old skateboards, wood, and yarn. The chair’s focus is a Chinese dragon embroidered (cross-stitched) through the chair with yarn.

In making this sculpture, I wanted to intertwine my Chinese and American backgrounds and cultures together quite literally. As a child, I loved spending time with withgrandma. my my grandma.

It wasIt from was from her that her Ithat learned I learned how to how crossto cross-stitch; stitch; my sister my and sister I would and I would sit for sit hours for hours with her, with crossher, cross-stitching. stitching.

As I grew As I older grew and older became and became more immersed more immersed in my in my American, American, and more and specifically, more specifically, Californian, Californian, culture, culture, I picked I picked up skateboarding up skateboarding with my with friends. my We friends. would We skate would around skate around the neighborhood, the neighborhood, and, if we and, weren’t if we weren’t too scared, too scared, occasionally the skatepark.

Historically, I kept those two identities separate. But upon thinking about how Asians and Asian Americans consume their own identities, I have realized that those two identities are not two independent sides of me, but rather intertwined parts that make up my identity. With this chair, I hope to showcase a material embodiment of my identity and two cultures.

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everything is always everywhere – in constant motion, in constant demand.

though having and knowing all can be beautiful, even enlightening – the ugly, the horrors are there too. we carry these with and within ourselves,

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elayna lei (she/her)

s i t i d an . g n i m consu

hould s e w e b may t go. e l o t t r a st

can we?

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(re)cycle/如鲠在喉 huiyin zhou (they/she)

This photo series, (re)cycle/如鲠在喉, shows the process of diasporic Chinese feminists/international students sending much needed medicine back to our families in China.

This series plays with multiple meanings of “recycling”: literally, the emptied packages of medicine piled up in the recycling bin in my college dorm room; some of the medicine was “recycled” from the two times I contracted covid in the US. This (re)cycling is also a material embodiment of the multiple cycles of violence we have witnessed in the past three years. The blurred or loss of focus is a visual representation of the sticky feeling of being stuck between the intimacy of care and the impossibility of being “there”: the struggle to articulate the absurdity of shattered hopes, like a fish bone stuck in your throat – 如鲠在喉.

During winter break, after the Chinese government took a drastic, sudden turn away from “zero-Covid” – from one extreme to another but both were rooted in irresponsibility and disregard for our lives – some of my friends were able to go back to China to stay with their families. None of our families were able to escape from infection; many of them did not have access to basic medicine, such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen. My friends offered to bring back some medicine; so, I used ziploc bags to redistribute medicine to different parts of my family until three a.m. one night, writing down dosage and precautions in Chinese.

While this photo series emerged from a place of helplessness after several of my friends, (including myself) suffered from family deaths, it still gestures towards hope. The same feminist care networks we are cocreating in the US have carried that care across oceans and borders. 徽音 2023/2/4

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Meditation anh-ton nguyen (he/him) cw: imageries of war

In Meditation, I digitally layer American wartime photos to the shape of my dad’s life in Viet Nam, beginning with his parent’s lives in Hue, his birth in Quang Tri, and his childhood in Da Nang. Composing my dad’s flight through the eyes of U.S. empire, I produce a palimpsestic refugee discourse that unsettles, interrogates, and dispels the politics of rescue.

Although the work re/constructs my dad’s experience, I don’t make any direct references to my dad. By inscribing through effacement, I contest the consumptive power of hegemonic narratives of war and wrest agency over our stories. Confusing narratives of soldiers and civilians, past and present, aesthetics and history, colonizer and colonized, I leave behind a hybrid countermemory, claiming our room to mindfully breathe.

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Television Girl erika wang (she/her)

This illustration is inspired by media consumption and how it influences self-image. It explores questions of who decides what we consume and who benefits from our consumption. Through my art, I hope to promote discourse regarding media consumption and tech capitalism.

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ruby wang (she/they)

Ruby Wang is a multimedia artist pursuing a double major in English and Visual Arts at Duke. They create meditative and peaceful art that reflects insightful conversations, identity (in reference to intersectionality and being a queer Asian woman), and other pieces of media. She experiments with what is “realistic” and possible by deconstructing what seems “real” and reinterpreting how the world works. For instance, how do others understand their relationships?

How can intimacy be visually understood? Additionally, what is self-image and self-perception beyond the way we look like? Their introspective works consider these questions, utilizing imagination to answer them.

This piece is based on various Asian American plays upon taking Asian American Theater through the AADS program at Duke.

The pieces depicted in this piece include: Flipzoid by Ralph B. Pena, M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven by Young Jean Lee, Porcelain by Chay Yew, and China Doll by Elizabeth Wong. Content and motifs vary across all plays, but there are consistent themes on identity, immigrant status, intersectionality with sexuality, and national abjection. The playwrights experiment with the concept of “identity”, particularly the exoticism of Orientalism imposed upon Asian Americans.

Through their plays, writers are given a chance to dramatize and critique stereotypes, while also being granted the voice and agency to reconstruct themselves.

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for sale sale for

carina lei (she/her)

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“It’s been more than a decade since ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and ‘Letters From Iwo Jima,’ the last major studio pictures to feature all-Asian ensembles, and a full quarter-century since ‘The Joy Luck Club,’ the last such production to grapple with the puzzle of contemporary Asian American identity. Those ridiculous statistics have saddled ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ with equally ridiculous expectations; that future Asian-led projects are riding on this movie’s box-office success makes it awfully hard not to root for,” the LA Times writes on Crazy Rich Asians.

My father told me about the movie almost a year before the release date, gesticulating wildly with excitement as he described the premise. We have to go watch, he had told me, because the cast is all-Asian! His excitement was palpable and infectious and I couldn’t help but also be swept along with inarticulable-at-the-time anticipation of seeing people who looked like me on the big screen. We went a year later, and I cheered, along with rows of majority-Asian moviegoers, when Michelle Yeoh’s character bought out an entire hotel in response to a snobby hotel receptionist’s racist remarks.

In this scene and many others throughout Crazy Rich Asians, instances of what Cathy Park Hong describes as “capitalism as retribution for racism” – in this case, obscene wealth as an answer to racism – are portrayed. In Hong’s memoir Minor Feelings, she then asks, “But isn’t that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it’s through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?” The feeling that many Asian moviegoers got when they saw representation on the big screen should in no way be discounted, but what does it mean when onscreen Asianness is sold to us as a way to imagine what liberation could look like, but conflates that liberation with wealth? Why does Crazy Rich Asians choose to imply Michelle Yeoh’s character has “overcome” racism through her wealth and willingness to wield it as a defensive tool? Can this be the extent to what we imagine liberation to be? Who are we, indeed, when we excel in a capitalist system that has destroyed us?

Crazy Rich Asians also presents itself as intentional media creation as a means of liberation from side character-ness, cheap stereotype jokes, and, in short, lack of dimensionality in the eyes of the moviegoer. “The media surrounding CRA cruelly encouraged the idea that a minoritized group or person achieves full psychic personhood only upon their recognition as a market—and as marketable,” writes Melissa Phruksachart in The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism: Crazy Rich Asians. “Messianic visibility diverts race consciousness from political resistance into an overidentification with capital.” Crazy Rich Asians, Phruksachart argues, conflates the validation of Asian/ American personhood with box-office receipts, pushing Asian visibility as an untapped market and presenting the movie as the cure.

This movie has managed to bottle Asian/American identity and shake it alluringly at an audience to whom nothing has been sold in a long time – we have to go watch, because the cast is all-Asian! The art piece seeks to make this commodification of identity clear and ask: Why is Asian/American validation of personhood by media dependent on being recognized by a market? What systems do we perpetuate when we commodify identity, and then pass judgment on its validity based on its consumption? What do we imagine liberation to be, when Crazy Rich Asians stands as its pinnacle in the media?

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Rhino

sua cho (she/her)

Blepharoplasty. Skin bleach. Rhinoplasty.

Jaw shaving.

For its high rates of commercial cosmetic surgery, South Korea has oftentimes been called “the plastic surgery capital of the world.” As the Korean entertainment industry has taken global stage, the pressure to appeal to visual appetites has only gotten stronger.

But the aforementioned has only proved to be a losing game, for beauty continues to find its homolog in whiteness — amongst the most popular desired features are a high nose bridge, double eyelids, pale skin, a thin, oval face.

South Koreans have found themselves pinned to boundary spaces, between fetishistic desire and a beauty standard that has, from its very origin, abhorred the Asian.

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Bound to the history of a practice that has enabled Western ideals to prey upon Eastern physiognomist traditions.

Rhino explores how our bodies — our flesh, our embodied race, even our understanding of ourselves as images — end up consumed by the media we produce.

Dancing Around the Truth: Orientalism in La Bayadere La Bayadere, translating to The Temple Dancer, is one of many classical ballets routinely performed by dance companies across the world. However, La Bayadere is inherently rooted in Orientalism and its associated tropes.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: La Bayadere is a ballet based on the short story Le Dieu et la Bayadère by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German literary figure from the late 18th century. Even though Goethe never left the continent, he was obsessed with the idea of Indian culture. Like his contemporaries, Goethe indulged in the idea of a “mystical” East, incorporating (perhaps even creating) some of the most pervasive tropes in media today.

Goethe’s story is as follows: A temple dancer and a warrior are in love while the warrior’s jealous princess-fiancee, the princess’ father the Rajah, and the temple’s High Brahmin watch from the sidelines. Conflicts from miscommunication and eavesdropping result in the female protagonist’s death by snakebite, the cast getting crushed to death by temple ruins, and finally the warrior and female protagonist reuniting in death.

In the 1870s, Le Dieu et la Bayadère inspired choreographer Marius Pepita and composer Ludwig Minkus to develop Goethe’s story into a ballet for the Imperial Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

The ballet debuted in January 1877 and was a smashing success; European audiences adored its exotic plot and characters. But why is this ballet, with an antiquated and inaccurate portrayal of India, still performed today with little to no changes to the choreography or characterization? Why are viewers in the 21st century still consuming the same Orientalist stereotypes from the 18th and 19th century?

BUT IT’S JUST A STORY: To answer this we must venture back in time to the ballet’s setting which is, according to Royal Ballet Director Kevin O’Hare, “a fantastical version of India” (Royal Opera House). O’Hare’s use of the word “fantastical” is an excellent way to gloss over the ballet’s lack of a concrete time period and setting. DK’s Encyclopedia Ballet states La Bayadere is, “...set in the royal India of the past” (Durante 100).

vivian apple (she/her) 46

Post-colonial Studies scholar Edward Said explores how ambiguous time periods perpetuate stereotypes of Asia and the Middle East by falsely suggesting to the viewer that advancement and growth is not possible nor wanted in these regions (Said 1).

Instead of attempting to rectify La Bayadere’s ambiguities, O’Hare asserts, “We’re in a world where [the ballet’s setting]...doesn’t exist, you just need to be swept away with the beauty of the dance” (Royal Opera House). .

The titular temple dancer is portrayed as a beautiful woman who is not capable of enduring heartache and jealousy, a prime example of the “wilting flower” trope.

Interviewee for the film Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded (2011) Amna Sheikh says, “Indian characters, the female characters, tend to be a bit on the passive side.” The dancer’s characterization supports Sheikh’s assertion; throughout the ballet, the dancer accepts the situations she is placed in. When she attempts to stand up for herself against her lover’s jealous fiance, she cannot follow through, accepting that she will never win him back. She accepts her place in society as a temple dancer, her beloved’s marriage to another woman, and the Rajah’s wish to kill her after discovering her relationship with the warrior. The female protagonist’s life is dictated by the three men in her life, and she has no choice but to accept her fate. The Rajah decides whether she is allowed to live; the High Brahmin decides her religious role; the warrior requires her unwavering love. She never questions the control these men have in her life. Instead, she is tossed from man to man, fulfilling their demands and emphasizing the trope of Asian women as demure and dependent.

The antagonist in La Bayadere is a jealous and lustful High Brahmin who covets the female lead. This characterization reveals another aspect of Orientalism: the demonization of non-Western systems, such as Hinduism, as inherently evil and immoral. Cultural scholar Sut Jahally describes this facet of Orientalism as “...a framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and the strange…” (Edward Said). Goethe did not practice Christianity, but was influenced by Christianity and its tenets (Bergsträsser). By creating a vile character “associated” with Hinduism, Goethe portrays Hinduism, and by extension those associated or who practice the religion, as evil to his primarily Christian, white European audience. This juxtaposition between the evils of Hinduism and the morality of Christianity reinforces the notion that the Orient stands as the mystical counterpart to the West.

WHAT’S THE “POINTE”: People attend ballet to appreciate art that features the human body as the artistic medium. Audience members watch La Bayadere to see a story unfold with pas de deuxs instead of paragraphs and chasses instead of chapters. However, behind the costumes and romance lies a darker, grimier message. Works like La Bayadere reinforce Orientalist stereotypes such as the fetishization of a fantastical time period and setting, “wilting flower” female characters, and the homogenization and demonization of non Judeo-Christian religions.

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Akin to the consumption of food, the types of media we consume can either help or harm us; watching a documentary or a TikTok are all forms of consumption that, for better or worse, impact our lives in different ways. However, orientalism is the harmful consumption of ideas that frame Asian and Middle Eastern people and cultures in a derogatory and degrading light. La Bayadere’s historical presentation of India to a white audience exemplifies Orientalist consumption of the Other: India is presented not as a complex country or culture but as an entity to view and fetishize.

CURTAIN CALL: In 2012, the Royal Danish Ballet transposed La Bayadere into Colonial India. In 2020, the Philadelphia Ballet invited kathak performance scholar Pallubi Chakravorty to assist them in correcting aspects of La Bayadere such as hand positions to make the overall performance “...a little more Indian” (Pennsylvania Ballet). The DK Ballet Encyclopedia attempts to contextualize the Orientalist perspective of La Bayadere’s creators by saying, “La Bayadere presents a particular view of India that would make the story and characters accessible to 19th-century Russian eyes…” (Durante 100). By trying to ground the ballet in history, rationalizing the piece by calling it a “product of its time,” and consulting experts on Indian dance forms, ballet companies are aiming to redesign and justify La Bayadere. Although these efforts offer some excuse or redress, the consumption of the idea of India and Indian culture still remains the center of the ballet.

Attempts of reframing La Bayadere show that ballet companies wish to rectify the ballet; however, at its very core, La Bayadere is inherently orientalist. Although La Bayadere can be appreciated as an example of classical era ballet, it cannot be completely separated from its history and story rooted in the Orientalist consumption of an Other.

WORKS CITED: Bergsträsser, Arnold. “Goethe’s View of Christ.” Modern Philology, vol. 46, no. 3, 1949, pp. 172–202. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/435532. Accessed 24 Sep. 2022.

Carman, Joseph. “A ‘La Bayadère’ for the 21st Century: How Companies Are Confronting the Ballet’s Orientalist Stereotypes.” Pointe Magazine, 8 Sept. 2021, https:// pointemagazine.com/la-bayadere-orientalist-stereotypes/.

Durante, Viviana. “La Bayadere.” Ballet: The Definitive Illustrated Story, Dorling Kindersley, London, 2018, pp. 100–103.

Edward Said on Orientalism. Directed by Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, 2002.

Hennigfeld, Iris. “Goethe’s Indian Inspirations.” India-Europe Foundation for New Dialogues, 2016, pp. 7–11.

Kelete, Author Selina. “The Caste System (Brahmin and Kshatriya).” Religion 100Q Hinduism Project, 20 Jan. 2020, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/rel100hinduism /2015/11/25/the-caste-system-brahmin-and-kshatriya/.

“La Bayadère: Ballet Story, Characters, Music & Performances.” The Ballet Herald®, 29 Jan. 2021, https://www.balletherald.com/la-bayadere-ballet/.

PennsylvaniaBallet. “La Bayadère - Professor Pallabi Chakravorty.” YouTube, YouTube, 21 Feb. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1kJegswSC8.

RoyalOperaHouse. “Why the Royal Ballet Love Performing La Bayadère.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 Nov. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI0dZRM-qxs.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978.

Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded. Directed by Elaine H. Kim. Asian Women United of California, 2011.

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wanting...

To view a piece is to distort it; we must extend the violence of translation beyond language to the exchange of intention and understanding between the artwork and the audience, between you and me. I invite you to think about the ways that you, we, can confront the perspective of desire — when does identity become pure? When is the true self in full control when it is processed for perception, for performance? We are so often confronted with ways to consume ourselves, to work ourselves out to be consumed and made palatable — how does one return to the original form when it no longer exists?

And beyond, how do we present ourselves for consumption? When to be perceived is to perform, to distort one’s actions to become more palatable, what is left of the original authentic self after it has been discarded by the viewer?

rachel qu (she/her)

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Mushroom Pickers miranda zhong (she/her)

Matsutake is a special type of edible mushroom found in Shangri-La, Yunnan China.

Due to its unique growth conditions, Matsutake is rare and more expensive compared to other types.

As one of the most ethnically diverse places in China, Shangri-La is extremely exoticized by tourism. In Shangri-La, the Matsutake pickers, primarily women of ethnic minority groups, put in significant physical effort to find these highly soughtafter mushrooms. As a part of their daily routine, the pickers leave before sunrise to search the forest for newly emerging mushrooms.

The transnational circulation of Matsutake mushrooms exemplifies how commodity fetishism intersects with the consumption of local cultural practices and identities.

One of the mountain ranges where the women would enter and harvest the Matsutake

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Someone to Have You marie cheng (she/her)

“Someone to Have You” explores the paradox of self-ownership in transitory relationships–the precarious balance between the owned and the owning.

As the female figure clings to her partner, his silhouette simultaneously carves into her. His crimson contours could almost burn her translucent, living flesh.

Turned away from each other, the figures may only communicate through physical touch.

Studying their disconnected yet intimate embrace, we question the nature of their relationship: Is it desperate? Begrudging?

Women in Shangri-La selling Matsutake to a dealer (the man sitting by the table), while Contemplative? A bit of everything all at another woman holding the phone is live-streaming and reselling the mushrooms online. once?

I felt all of these emotions while navigating The image above is a poignant illustration of the interconnectedness of consumption romantic relationships, from adolescent love and production on a larger scale. As one of the tourists in Shangri-la, I was brought to to university hookup culture. Especially in the mushroom market by the tour guide for the amazing Matsutake the place produces. the modern sex-positive era, being young, hot, and empowered is analogous with the When I was communicating with the mushroom pickers in the picture, I found that their detachment of anonymous, impersonal, and ability to speak Mandarin was very limited and they were generally unsatisfied by the fleeting relationships. This phenomenon price given by the dealer. Due to these language barriers, these women are often births a cruel irony: to consume others is to exploited by dealers and outside tourists. Despite their important roles as consume oneself. producers, their labor and culture, along with their image, are consumed by both Western audiences and Han-ethnic tourists.

I hope these images can invite us to critically engage with food and products we consume on a daily basis, and reflect on how relationships between land, people, technology, and capitalism shape our production and consumption practices.

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aida guo (she/they) In Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva writes that oppressed bodies have been rendered sick due to the weight of trauma they must constantly carry. My 妈妈 is a single mother, cast inferior throughout every space in her life: as a child of ill-tempered parents, as a Chinese immigrant in the American south, as an employee of corporate drains.

Even in spaces where she sought to find comfort and community, she was met with disgust and pity.* People who we celebrated holidays with and carpooled to Chinese school with would attempt to question her reasons for raising me alone or leaving her marriage: “If it were me, I’d never leave such a handsome man.” “I would never let my son date someone who was raised by a single parent.” “You can still remarry.”

But Hedva also discusses how mutual care and community could end the cycle of trauma. I hope I can share this radical act with my own mother. For if we can share our wounds with one another, listen, perhaps we won’t die the way exploitation designed us to. * In Contagious Divides, Nayan Shah mentions how the absence of nuclear families in Chinatown “revealed that the Chinese were at odds with the social structures and classification that organized the dominant white society.” (40) When women and children lived on their own it was described as, “where the family relationship leaves off and prostitution begins.” (41)

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jocelyn la force regli (she/her) cw: racism + abandonment

dear mama, i miss you there are so many things i would give anything to tell you i would tell you of my hopes, my dreams, my accomplishments, and my failures. i would tell you thank you for sacrificing her happiness for mine. thank you for giving me the life you could never have i want to tell your story as much as i want to tell mine. dear mama, it hurts, mama, it hurts. how could you do this to me? how could you leave me? i thought you loved me, this isn’t what love is. dear mama, how can i miss someone who was never mine? how can i miss a life that was never mine? it’s almost like you have died, i mourn your loss in my life as one would mourn the death of a loved one. i miss home, but what is home? dear mama, the homesickness has crept in. a desire for a home i barely had and a home i don’t remember. i don’t remember anything of china. i wish i could still feel the summer heat on my skin, taste and smell the thickness in the air, watch and admire the hundreds of surrounding people who look just like me. dear mama, today, someone told me that you didn’t want me. she asked me how it felt. but you didn’t, right? you had to, right? my mom always told me that you had to give me up i don’t want to be unwanted... “how does it feel knowing your real mom didn’t want you?” i am ridden with shame as I am rendered speechless; i don’t have an answer.

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dear mama,

淦波锦 淦波锦 淦波锦 淦波锦 i want to hear my name, will you say it for me? dear mama, look at the way my pen scratches the paper. look at this character? is it good? is this stroke right? i don’t think it looks right. do you like it? mama, can you help me? mama, my hand hurts. is it enough? am i enough? how can i be enough? dear mama, i had a dream about you last night. you were looking for me, hanging posters up with my birth name on it. and just like a shadow, you slipped away. like water running through my fingers, i was going to lose you again. i ran after you, grabbing your shoulders, mouth open in a silent scream. i fell to my knees with tears streaming down my face, begging for your forgiveness, for you to love me, for you to stay. dear mama, there has been a great act of violence a grave injustice done against you that will never be recognized by either nation china or the united states this violent system and act of injustice bore me at the expense of you our histories of mother and daughter live only in our memories dear mama what do i owe you? heavier heavier i feel weighed down by all the things i owe so tell me, what do i owe you? what was my price? what am i worth? what did it cost? everything dear mama how could you do this to me? how could you let this happen? i am angry, but at who? at you? i am sorry i wasn’t enough and i forgive you thank you

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for the monterey park and half moon bay vigil cw: racism, gun violence

emily ngo (she/they) and nichole zhang (she/her), pictures by huiyin zhou (they/she) so, why are we here? what do we want out of this space? there are lots of reasons why we decided to plan this vigil and what we wanted out of it. first and foremost, and the obvious, we were deeply saddened by the mass shootings. people died and people are hurt and are grieving. we are grieving. we wanted to hold space for that, especially on a campus that is structured to actively hurt you and not take care of yourself and in some real ways, punish you when you do. even beyond the most obvious, we understood the political dimensions of this. we understood that because of the society we live in — a society that is capitalist, racist, sexist, and awful — this society is not made for people like us. people who are of color, who are low-income, who are neurodivergent, people with disabilities, people who are queer. it’s one thing to recognize the immediate tragedy of this event, but another, to recognize that this is not the only tragedy happening in the world, that this tragedy has happened before and that it will happen again, and that’s sad. it’s infuriating. and frustrating. and depressing. and we wanted to give space for this complexity. there is a lot of violence and a lot of sadness. it’s a lot to hold for one person and we knew that we didn’t want to hold it alone and that we were not alone feeling about this. we wanted to hold a communal space in which we could engage with these feelings in ways that are safe and relieving.

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being in aaswg often means thinking about how nonsensical the idea of “asian” is, how we have formed identities around imagined borders or created communities around constructed sameness. when people kill or are killed and we see our own conditions reflected in their stories, even if they don’t neatly align, our own violent categorizations — or those of people in our communities — become abruptly visible. when we grieve their murders, maybe we’re in part grieving our own racializations, our own vulnerability to being twisted or attacked. to paraphrase moten, the same shit that killed them is killing all of us too, however much more slowly. asian and latinx people were killed by other asian people, and so the anemic frameworks of ‘antiasian hate’ we’ve been given by liberal media are insufficient to understand these shootings. we’re grieving not just because they “look like us” or maybe they experienced the stinky lunch or math homework microaggressions we’ve been told are the foundations of our communities, but because the same matrix of violence which ensnared them ensnares us too. systems of capitalist exploitation separate ourselves from our bodies and our minds, patriarchal intervention genders and violates us, the u.s. state demands the sacrifice of parts of ourselves that we don’t have. the immediate tragedy of this event is clear, the mass loss of life during a time of joy and celebration that is supposed to set the tone for the rest of the year. even more broadly, though, we’re grieving for the unfailing tragedy of a national epistemology that has built human relations in terms of violence, the wars and slavery and genocides which are all interconnected and have normalized the brutalization of bodies and minds that are not part of the ruling class. we don’t know what to do about this, what to say or how to grieve, because the frameworks for grief and systems of justice that we deserve don’t exist yet. we’re gathered here together, though, because something binds us together, an unrelenting grief because something is not right with this world, but also an unwavering discipline of hope that something else can be created.

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