Margins, issue iii: Dreamscapes: Nightmares and Fantasies

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 the 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 the internalized colonialism and imperialism in our communities. Watching the state of the world unfurl across our screens every day, it’s hard not to feel unable to stop the tide of white supremacy and fascism, the ongoing dispossession of land from Indigenous communities, and the ever-increasing rate of environmental degradation that has and will one day harm us all. 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 peoples 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 go beyond realization and reflection and actively find ways to support Indigenous peoples in their struggles for liberation.

I N DIGE NOUS ORGS TO SUPPORT: Duke Native American/Indigenous Student Alliance: www.change.org/dukenative North Carolina Native American Youth Organization: http://ncnayo.weebly.com Native Youth Sexual Health Network: http://nativeyouthsexualhealth.com Kahea: The Hawaiian-Environmental Network: http://kahea.org Unist’ot’en Camp: https://unistoten.camp The Red Nation: https://therednation.org Support and donate to Indigenous people directly: https://navajohopisolidarity.org/donate

I N DIGE NOUS Folks to Follow on Twitte r: Allen, @lilnativeboy Ruth Hopkins, @ruthH_Hopkins Jisu, @dearnonnatives Terisa Siagatonu, @terisasiagatonu Dr. Eve Tuck, @tuckeve Seeding Sovereignty, @SeedSovereignty Chelsea Vowel (âpihtawikosisân), @apihtawikosisan C. Ree, @reetown on Instagram The Red Nation, @The_Red_Nation

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foreword foreword Foreword In 2019, we created Margins, a multi-media, collaborative publication devoted to centering the narratives of Asian Americans and Asians in America. This publication is an intervention in the Asian/ American community and an invitation for Asian/Americans to engage in more nuanced conversations about identity. We aim to (re)politicize Asian/American identity, expanding the vocabulary for understanding how we, as Asian/Americans, navigate our experiences. With this publication, we recognize that “Asian American” has been a label both forced upon and embraced by us. We hope to make space for the depth of the Asian/American experience. In an attempt to shout, scream, cry, and dream from the margins, we want to build solidarities within and beyond the Asian/American community through stories that resonate with you.

In our last issue, Ghosts, we learned of ghosts of the past that haunt us, follow us, and comfort us, teaching us how to dream of something better. As we continue to live and survive within oppressive structures, this year’s theme for Margins, Dreamscapes, explores the idea of an alternate world or plane of existence outside of our current reality, unlimited by borders, respectability, and whiteness.

The pieces in Dreamscapes also call to the ways in which dystopia and utopia are deeply intertwined.

While our everyday realities are marked by capitalist nightmares, we keep collectively dreaming of better spaces, places, futures, and times. We are aestheticizing and reimagining this current moment.

The dreamers – our artists and writers – of this issue grapple with the ways in which capitalism and imperialism have colonized our dreamscapes. Dreamscapes liberates us from our day-to-day struggles under capitalism and invites us to radically (re)imagine alternate realities for ourselves, our communities, and our planet. We dream beyond the linear conceptualization of time and see how historical nightmares extend their ghostly presence in our present bodies. We reclaim our imaginative power from an American Dream that has exploited us and infiltrated our dreams with neoliberal anxieties. In abolitionist and anticolonial organizing, dreaming is also a call to action. With these dream stories, we invite you to dream with us to forge solidarities and futures that transcend borders.

What are your worst nightmares? What keeps you awake at night, anxious when you wake up, stops you in your tracks, causes you to spiral in the middle of class?

What are you dreaming of? What worlds, surreal thoughts, fantasies, and meditations ground you? What kinds of alternate, fantastical worlds do we dream for ourselves and future generations?

Welcome to Margins Margins,, Issue iii: Dreamscapes: Nightmares & Fantasies.

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Margi ns team editing Afreen Ashraf Shania Khoo David Lee Jiahui Shen Sydney Wang Nichole Zhang Huiyin Zhou design Sebin Jeon Shania Khoo AJ Kochuba Jocelyn La Force Regli Elayna Lei Rachel Qu Miriam Shams-Rainey Erika Wang Ruby Wang Celine Wei Nichole Zhang outreach Amber Park Rachel Qu Yujia Shen Celine Wei Emily Xu Hannah Zhang front cover Elayna Lei, Rachel Qu back cover Sebin Jeon, Elayna Lei, Erika Wang

than k you !

We are beyond grateful for each and every person involved in the process of dreaming of and creating the third issue of Margins. Thank you for contributing in any and all ways to this ongoing knowledgelearning-creating process that we know and love as Margins.

Thank you to the Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program for supporting us and funding the printing of this publication.

Thank you to everyone who submitted art, prose, analyses, dreams and nightmares! Thank you for being brave and facing your worst nightmares with us, and thank you for sharing the alternate, fantastical worlds that you dream for all of us.

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table of conte nts an invitation to lay / elayna lei

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Tracing Desire and Exploitation of Korean Women: A Cruelty Special to Our Species / Katherine Gan (cw: sexual violence)

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“Butterfly? Butterfly?” / rachel qu (cw: suicide)

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November / Madysen Rufener

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Through My Eyes / Angelo Guo (cw: domestic violence, homophobia)

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“the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” / rachel qu

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burning home / Celine Wei

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humdrum melody / Ruby Wang

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finding time / Shania Khoo

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belief and knowledge / Theo Cai (cw: child abuse)

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various poems / miriam shams-rainey (cw: reference to gun violence, islamophobia)

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No-No Boys and The Issue of Loyalty / Shun Sakai

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untitled / Lindsey Shi

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The 38th Parallel / Siyun Lee (cw: war themes)

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various poems / lia giba

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Call Centers: The Simultaneity of Alienation and Decolonization / Shourya Agarwal

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a narrated dream journal / David Lee (cw: weed)

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a room of one's own / huiyin zhou

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:) / elayna lei

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before we try to dream and imagine, i invite you to take a pause, even if it’s just for a moment.

get comfy where you are, take a deep breath, relax every molecule in your body, close your eyes, and let rest wash over you.

e(lay)na lei (she/her)

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a crue lty special to our speci es Katherine Gan (they/them) cw: sexual violence

The following writing sample includes an abstract and excerpt from my thesis chapter “Tracing Desire and Exploitation of Korean Women: A Cruelty Special to Our Species,” which is part of my overall thesis “Excavating the Afterlives of Empire through Asian/American Women’s Poetry.” I cut several sources in order to fit the word count. The endnotes reflect all sources used for the entire chapter.

Chapter Abstract: I engage with Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poetry collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species (2018) to consider the ostensible colonial past as ongoing in the present for Asian/American diasporic women. Using the collection, I examine how Yoon’s contemporary sexualization as a Korean woman can only be understood through a reckoning with the history of Korean women being exploited as “comfort women” under Japanese colonialism and during the Korean War. Yoon’s grappling with these histories in the present day demonstrates the afterlives of conjoined U.S., Japanese, and Korean empires.

I also argue that Yoon’s poems about the Korean War provide an avenue to understand the role and exploitation of Korean women as camptown sex workers in service of American soldiers. I utilize an interdisciplinary methodological approach that analyzes Yoon’s poems in a historical context with literary and political theory. I scrutinize Yoon’s deliberate literary devices in selected poems including anachronism, numbers, and italics that are paired with respective themes of diasporic reckoning, dehumanization, and haunting.

Ultimately, I conclude with the importance of considering the impossibility of redress and justice for “comfort women” and camptown sex workers.

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Time Vacillating: Vacillating: “An “An Ordinary Misfortune” Misfortune”35 “Comfort stations” from the Japanese colonial period endured as camptowns during the Korean War.36 Camptowns were established via the cooperation of American and Korean governments and local officials, in which working class Korean women served as prostitutes for American and Korean soldiers, serving imperial interests.37 Many of the women who were camptown sex workers were impoverished as a result of the Korean War and Japanese colonization, using sexual labor as a means of survival.38 She walks unwomanned. An American soldier sees her and yells Stop over there! in Japanese. The language they’ve both learned. When she runs, she is unmistakably woman. She falls. He laughs. What is a body in a stolen country. Or whose. What is right in war. What is left in war. War hasn’t left Korea. I have. I fold. I give up, myself, to you. Which one of you said Let’s have raunchy Korea sex to me. Which one of you didn’t. Do you represent America to me. Did those soldiers to her. We didn’t fear war.

We feared the allies, she said.39

This excerpt from Yoon’s collection provides an entry point to analyze Korean women as camptown sex workers and to stress the convergence of Japanese, Korean, and American empires, as the “comfort system” transitioned from Korean women servicing Japanese soldiers to American ones. Next, I engage in an extended close reading of this excerpt.

scan here to read the full chapter!

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Wavering Points of View: Third, Second, First Person Yoon in this poem traverses time and space to conjoin the afterlives of U.S., Japanese, and Korean empires in what I argue is a reference to camptowns. The United States formally established a military presence in Korea in September 1945, transferring power from the deteriorating Japanese colonial empire.40 While September 1945 meant liberation from cruel, domineering Japanese rule, it also signalled U.S. military occupation of Korea that continues in the present day.41 Yoon hints at this with the line “War hasn’t left Korea.” While the Armistice Agreement was endorsed by representatives from China, North Korea, and the United States on July 27, 1953, it is a temporary pause instead of a formal end to conflict; currently, the United States has 28,500 of its own troops and manages around 100 military units just south of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which is paradoxically incredibly militarized.42 I recognize Yoon beginning the poem with third person pronouns — “they,” “he,”“she” — in reference to her outside observations regarding the history of the Korean War. She begins with a U.S. soldier in Korea taunting a Korean woman: “American soldier sees her and yells.” This act of power — a provocation to remind the Korean woman where she stands in sexual service to the American soldier — illuminates the power dynamics prevalent in camptowns during the Korean War. To expand U.S. empire, illogically, required the growth of militarized prostitution and exploitation of working and poor Korean women, a feat only possible with an alliance forged between Korean officials and American counterparts.43 Systematic prostitution and Korean women’s sexual labor was viewed as essential to entertain military officers and often framed as a reward for soldiers’ sacrifice.

Yoon’s onset of third person limited point of view pronouns are advantageous to provide a landscape of what is happening to Korean women during the war. Yoon displays a third person limited point of view with “she” and “her,” who stands in for “My grandmother. A woman. A teen” to “show both how [she] feel[s] and what’s going on around [her].”44A reliance on “she” and “her” instead of the first person “I” stresses the distance between local elites who regulated camptowns45 and the Korean women who were camptown sex workers. Many Koreans saw prostitution as a “necessary evil” to satisfy American soldier’s sexual desires while simultaneously preventing the rape of “innocent” women and girls.46 A Korean national assembly member argued for the sustaining of camptowns: ‘As long as the United States remains our ally and its soldiers continue to stay, we need to recognize that a majority of those military men are single and they naturally desire certain entertainment.’47

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Yoon contends that at first, “She walks unwomanned,” inferring that “A woman” is still untouched and temporarily relieved of her prostituting obligations. The phrase “unwomanned” is also a gendering of “unmanned” and marking the Korean female body in camptowns as vulnerable to prostitution. The power dynamics between the American soldier and Korean sex worker are clear. The American soldier is the only person guaranteed unhampered access to and from the camptown while the Korean man cannot enter; the Korean woman, as a military sex worker, cannot leave and often faces “sanctioned violence.”48 Yoon signifies how camptown women are seen as a “disposable population” and under abuse49 for after taunted by an American soldier, “When she runs, she is unmistakably woman. She falls.

He laughs.” Then, to be a woman in the camptowns means to be forced into fear and shame, facing barbarity, surveillance, and even death. In fact, killing of yanggongjus by American soldiers became frequent in camptowns.50 As gender theorist Judith Butler poses, the “ungrievability” of these women’s deaths and the expendability of the women’s bodies exemplifies how camptown women were dislodged from “who counts as the human” and “whose lives count as lives.”51

35. The following section closely analyzes the particular poem “An Ordinary Misfortune” on page six. There are multiple poems titled “An Ordinary Misfortune” in Yoon’s collection.

36. Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945-1970,” 41.

37. Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945-1970,” 41.

38. Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945-1970,” 52.

39. Yoon, A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems, 6.

40. Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945-1970,” 41.

41. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, 8.

42. Christine Hong, “The Unending Korean War,” Positions 23, no. 4 (Nov 2015): 597, https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-3148346.

43. Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945-1970,” 41.

44. “First vs. Second vs. Third Person Point of View,” Writing, Thesaurus, accessed September 15, 2021, https://www.thesaurus.com/e/writing/1st-person-vs-2nd-person-vs-3rd-person-pov/.

45. Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945-1970,” 52.

46. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, 99.

47. Hyŏng Cho and P’il-hwa Chang, “‘Kunghoesokkiroge nat’anan yŏsŏngjŏngch’aek sigak: Maemaech’une taehayŏ,” trans. Seungsook Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 92.

48. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, 110.

49. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, 112.

50. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, 113-4.

51. Judith Butler, “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” in Undoing Gender, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17-8.

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"Bu t t e r f ly?

Bu t t e r f ly?" cw: suicide

“Butterfly? Butterfly?” is meant to speak to the cruelty in fantasies, particularly to investigate the fantasy of the white man imposed on the individual, and how it becomes internalized in the self, with the title taken from David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. At the center of the play is the relationship between Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer/spy, and Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat. Their relationship is romantic and sexual, in which Song, introduced as an opera singer playing the role of Madame Butterfly (Cio-Cio-san), allows Gallimard to believe he is female, and they begin a relationship. Song is only able to keep up this ruse because of Gallimard's conceptions of the East and his desire for complete devotion. Song understands the fiction Gallimard desires and acts accordingly, playing into his power dynamics.

The play ultimately ends with Gallimard committing suicide after he finds out he has been tricked. He dons Song's “Butterfly” costume and, mirroring the events of the opera, kills himself just as Butterfly does in Madame Butterfly. In the end, the fantasy of his Butterfly (Song), was not enough. His vision of the Orient only exists in his mind, and Song cannot be the pure symbol of the East he desires. The closing words of the play are Song's questioning "Butterfly? Butterfly?" as he stands, dressed in men's clothing, looking over Gallimard's body.

Throughout the play, though not explicitly addressed, is Song's own developing relationship to his identity. When he is with Gallimard, he must navigate the space between gender and sexuality carefully, rationalizing his behavior for a larger goal. And even up until Gallimard's death, it is unclear, even to the man himself, whether Song's feelings for this years-long affair hold any authenticity. Song has taken Gallimard's own delusion and wrapped himself up in it, shrouding himself in a delusion that is not his. This projected fantasy of the individual is intangible like the smokiness of the butterflies because it is not real. It soon becomes impossible to grasp where the line between reality and the projection is - where does the fantasy end and the true self begin? And when it becomes impossible to decide if a personal reality even exists beyond the dissipating projection?

Just as Song does not wholly understand his own relationship to his identity post-Gallimard, there is no real end to the fantasy that society (the white man) projects onto the individual, leaving them grasping at smoke.

rachel qu (she/her)

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nove m be r Madysen Rufener (she/her) 7th November My skin finally cracked today. It always does this time of year. The doctors seemed concerned, but I assured them I was accustomed to it. They told me to take a holiday, preferably near the sea. I told them I would rather stay home. I never go out in November, but William took their side. He always agrees with the doctors.

9th November We leave for the coast tomorrow and will stay for the rest of the month. I have packed all my most precious belongings. This includes my fountain pen, her locket, and the book on childcare I bought when William was away on business. I have birthed no children, of course, and I don’t believe I ever will, but I have always been quite fond of them, girls in particular. They seem so cheerful, their skin so rosy and smooth, but one day, I know, it will crack.

Eventually, it may even peel away from their pretty faces the way mine does.

William and the doctors insist I still have time, but I disagree. I do not believe I will survive this holiday.

10th November We have arrived at the Inn. William thinks it pleasant. He calls it quaint, but I think it rather decrepit. I did not tell him this. Instead, I wrapped her locket around my neck and hid it underneath my dress. It rests against my chest now.

My own silent rebellion.

13th November I woke this morning to blood on my pillow. In my half-dreaming mind, I believed I had been killed. The pain was almost unbearable, and blood had seeped into my eyes, but it was only my skin peeling away. Still, this was the largest piece yet, and it hurts miserably. William gave the cleaning girl money for my bandages and ointment. I had asked him to fetch them, but he is embarrassed by my condition. He assures me he loves me, but I can always tell when he is lying. He lies a great deal, but then again, so do I.

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15th November It happened again. Smaller this time, but the pain was more acute. When I told William this, he did not believe me. Or he did not care, either one. He sent the girl for more bandages, but when I asked for ointment, he told me I did not need it. Ointment is for large wounds, he says.

18th November I went walking on the beach today. Out of the goodness of my heart, I asked William to join me. He said he had business to attend to. I said he had a dying wife to attend to, and should I not take precedence over finances? In truth, I did not say this, but I thought it, and I rubbed my thumb across the locketshaped lump on my chest. I did this to his face, but it was already aimed at his books.

19th November He is ashamed of me, and I of him. I miss her dearly. My skin continues to peel away from my face. It isn’t much longer now.

21st November I opened a window this morning, after I cleaned a new wound and applied another bandage. The air is so fragrant here, like an overly salted stew. I closed it after mere moments. I’ve decided I quite dislike the sea.

22nd November There was a woman outside the window last night. She looked so much like her. But maybe that was only the blood in my eyes.

23rd November William is concerned, I think, but whether it is for me or his appearance it is hard to say. He rarely lets me leave this room, and never when he is with me.

He says it is for my own safety, that he fears me having a fit and collapsing on the shore, but I know this is a lie. I’ve become quite skilled at spotting falsehoods.

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24th November It is nearing the end of the month now. He will be going home soon. I will not.

I will die here, in this teal-colored room, on this blood-soaked bed, and she will come back to get me. She always comes back to get me. I wonder if, this time, I will choose to accompany her.

26th November I went for another walk around teatime. Only four days now. I look forward to seeing her again. If only I had more skin on my face. The top few layers are completely gone, save for a small patch on my left cheek. It is mostly blood now, but that is fine. She does not mind my appearance. I know this because she told me so, during her last visit. She said she only minds that I am in pain.

William never says anything like this, and if he did, I’d know he was lying.

27th November The patch of skin is getting smaller. I keep finding small slices of it in bed. I will need to have the sheets washed in secret. I cannot stand the smell. I feel my insides are rotting. I do not know where William has gone.

28th November His bags are not here. I am only noticing this now. I do not recall when they first disappeared. I think it might have been while I was on the beach. I’d collected a particularly large shell I thought he would like, but he is gone. I threw the shell in the toilet. It no longer flushes. Only two more days until she comes.

29th November I dreamt of her last night. I dreamt she took William, carved off his skin, and threw him into the sea. In the dream, I thanked her. Her long, slender fingers were soaked in his blood, and as she placed her warm hand on my left cheek, my face began to itch. The itch slowly grew, but when I reached up to scratch it, she clasped her hands around my wrists and pinned them to my sides. The itch grew to pain, as though my face were on fire. It burned so much. I might have cried.

But then it ceased, and she let go of my wrists. I reached for my face and felt skin. My skin. It had regrown. She grabbed a handful of seawater from the ocean and held it in her hands, stretched between her palms as though it were solid. I peered into the water and saw my reflection. I said I looked beautiful.

She said I looked happy. I do not know what she meant.

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30th November Today is my last day at the beach. Tomorrow, she will come retrieve me, and I have decided I will go with her. I look forward to seeing her again. I wonder if she will want her locket back. I suppose, once I am with her, I will not need it any longer, but I seem to have grown attached to it. I am sure she’ll understand. I do not know why I refused her so many times before. It was foolish of me. Why, whenever I would die before, did I always insist on coming back? I said it was for William. She said it was fear. She was right.

1st December I can see her standing outside, but I wanted to write one last passage before I go. I removed the bandages from my face this morning. I won’t need them with her. I am not ashamed of the blood, and once I die, it won’t matter anyway. I left the sheets on the bed. I washed them again, but I think they are ruined for good. They stink of rotting flesh and their once white and blue stripes have turned brown from blood and ooze. I feel sorry for the cleaning girl. They will have to purchase a new bed.

She is still waiting outside. I left the door open, but I think she wants me to come to her. I will soon. I left a note on the bedside table for William in case he returns in search of me. I wrote the truth this time. There is no use hiding her from him now. I will never see him again, and I am better for it.

But I don’t want to keep her waiting any longer. She is waving now, her hand gliding through the air like a gentle ocean wave. I think she is smiling.

She must know. I am ready this time.

I will not be coming back to the sea.

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TH ROUGH My Eyes TH ROUGH My Eyes TH ROUGH My Eyes Angelo Guo (he/him)

cw: domestic violence, homophobia

Dream lan d

You ride the train rolling and rumbling Across the flowering earth Forward to the city of wealth and promises Hope flutters within, a new life they said From the motherland with a dream Working, and working, and working You are American now You say, as you look for yourself In this nation that paints over blood, brown, black, yellow, you With a foreign tongue now flitting and familiar in your mouth, do you belong building life with your work, seen and unseen in this land of false promises and dreams.

Houses fall.

Pictures, papers, and hopes in a cardboard box clutched to your chest gold turning to gray you face me in the doorway as I squeal, “Daddy’s home!”

My words do not reach you.

What's i n a Nam e?

“I won’t even try, I know I’m going to butcher it.”

Cracked bones, spilt blood, sinews and tendons for you to chew on. Swallow.

“It’s , like woah” A broken record player’s song of belonging, I inscribe myself onto sealed lips.

“To discuss the deaths of [name all 8 victims] this week” Faceless and beautiful, we bleed our lives staining the periphery of their utopia.

“She was supposed to take my mom’s last name . My dad changed it to .

Hahah!”

Cortex bound by rusted chains so familiar you shackle posterity with your pain.

“Yeah you wouldn’t even know she’s a member of our family.”

A , by any other name would be just as sweet, Sister you are still one of us.

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Transfe re nce

The sound cracks like thunder through the knowing walls to awaken the familiar fingers which constrict my heart, and wring.

This slow burning, aching, I’ve felt it before.

I am breathless in the dead silence that follows, my small body cradled on the top step of the staircase, watching.

Snarling faces, eyes blown with rage, and I am the net that catches your volley of screams.

Did her tired face ignite your shame?

As you see her take that train you no longer ride, as you sweep the floors, tend the garden, care for my sisters and your household, do you yearn for the role you were told you must hold?

Who must you punish until you feel worthy?

Dad, do you know?

The currency of her love does not exchange for more than yours.

Ma, I want to reach out and soothe your red, tender skin, so I can take your burning, your aching.

Dad, I want to take yours too.

Rose Garde n

I used to pull out the roots of the roses that bloom in my veins, day after day.

I pretended that I did not want to be touched by the brush of heavy fingertips, my translucent body ignited and made real, by the breath of a man.

But the fists of shame that yanked on my heart were yours, Ma, when you told me that these roses could flourish in any other garden but that of your son.

Dad you joke and say your blood ends with me but you, laboring to erase yourself and your own, when they painted you a clown, did you believe them?

And when you called me a fag, I remembered, that the first man who touched their lips to mine was you, Dad. I learned the conditions of that paternal kiss.

So let it be that I nourish this soil on my own, teaching amorous petals to unfurl and burst, in your face, with red.

I let the roses in my veins dance, and sway, and feel.

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Sisyph us

I grieve permanently at the site of sacrifice, for that which my parents gave to me, I must repay, and so I lose myself.

My transcript deludes you to believe I will one day have the life you wanted.

Summa cum laude cannot breach the partitions of this melting pot.

I am but a drop, sliding down the rim, grasping for friction.

Am I doomed to push this boulder for eternity, led by your words of conviction?

Ma knows best.

But Ma you were climbing your own amnesic slopes.

Into the socket, your arms retracted like tentacles, the moment I realized the false pull of your grip towards a nonexistent ledge.

I mourn the sweet deceit of your tired hands.

Hom e

There is a day when that burning, aching becomes unfamiliar.

A gentle, sweet slumber, gifts me this: Through cigarette smoked summer air feet prance fearlessly across cobblestone towards that hazy glow where Ma’s shoulders are soft and unbound.

Seeking the tangible, our hands are our own and reach for nothing but each other.

I am there, letting heavy fingertips lace me with love.

I am home.

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qu (she/her) rachel

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Celine Wei (she/her)

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h um drum m e lody ruby wang (she/they) [scene]

A Chinese school rented a local middle school in my town every Saturday. They lined two white foldable tables at the entrance with two metal foldable chairs behind it, where two a-yi’s sat. My ma would make small talk with them. Small talk entailed them complimenting my ma’s dress, mentioning how skinny I was, and then asking what she was doing here. My ma replied with a humble “thank you” to the first two remarks and then answered with how she wanted to apply for a job and to see if there were any classes to sign me up for.

My ma gripped my sweaty little hand while we walked through the hallways. The entire school was poorly lit with ugly yellow lighting.

The floors were cracked and the paint on the lockers were chipped. The classroom at the end of the first hallway had its door open with loud scratching noises coming out of it.

Ma: “How about I sign you up for this?”

I shook my head and tugged her hand for us to go. She dragged me forward towards the classroom, the dreaded string sounds growing deafening. We looked inside. The desks and chairs were in disarray.

Four students occupied each corner of the room, with a parent sitting in a chair beside them. They each awkwardly held their violins and stared awkwardly at their music stands, which upheld sheets with lines of an incomprehensible, bizarre language that I would eventually learn was treble clef. The scratching of their violins filled the room with an unpleasant cacophony. They were either all amateurs playing different songs or playing the same song awfully. Meanwhile, a balding man with expressive eyebrows and an expensive looking sweater paced around the room. He looked extremely displeased and would grunt when he saw or heard something that dismayed him. I stared at him aggressively folding and tuging on each student’s arm, or at him angrily pointing at a particular note on the sheet of music, like it was completely unfathomable to him that these children were making mistakes.

While I stared in horror, my ma looked at the room with glee. I’d rarely seen her that happy. She asked me again if I wanted to sign up for these classes, and in the moment I should’ve known that it didn’t matter how badly I protest taking these god forsaken violin lessons.

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i. the sea A searing sun prods me awake, giant mosquitos gnaw at my skin, waves gently beat against my feet: The sea holds onto me, but I cannot hold onto the sea. The seas in Singapore and Penang, Malaysia are the spaces I feel my childhood and heritage rooted in: Memories of day trips to beaches, folklores of pirates and mythical sea creatures, lineages of sailors who find their balance in the disposition of the tides. Inherent in being part of the Southeast Asian diaspora, my ancestors lived fluid lives, sailing seas, crossing oceans hoping to eventually settle down. I dream of these pasts.

But the seas in Southeast Asia have also been exercises in fantasy for Westerners, both imperial colonizers and everyday tourists. An exotic getaway, an untouched land filled with natural resources, a village of people to exploit and violate. This has been exacerbated by the impending climate crisis and rising sea levels. The sea, which has been our strength and lifeforce for centuries, now threatens our livelihoods. In our current trajectory, the future of Penang, my parents’ home state, is submersion.

ii. plants on a windowsill in my mother’s home Throughout my life, my mother has always nurtured and cared for her own plants. My mother watered the persimmon tree and curry leaf plants, and I would steal drinks from the metallic taste of the garden hose. I was six. It was my favorite drink. As I have grown up, these plants have grown, died, and recovered. Everytime I go home, she is cultivating something new. The garden is a place of reference, a place of return, a place of renewal.

But what of the institution of our colonial botanic gardens in Malaysia, where rubber was first cultivated for planting outside South America, what of the ways the nightmares of imperialism seep into my mother’s idyllic garden. Plants were bought, collected, or looted on colonial expeditions and helped establish botanical institutions during wars. Mass reproduction and capitalist extraction have overgrown. There is a quiet resistance in the cherry tomatoes and bean sprouts in my backyard, one that my mother has grown from the ground up and into me, and one that I worry will wilt away if I don’t learn to cultivate it by the time I’m older.

“And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see.”

— Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

iii. doraemon comics On my bookshelf, even moving across multiple homes, sits the entire collection of the original Doraemon manga series. As a child, I would pore over them, unable to read a single word, but absolutely captivated by all the drawings. My father would often sit with me and translate the words and tell the stories of a robot cat named Doraemon with a four-dimensional pouch in which he stores fantastical gadgets he uses to help Nobita Nobi, a kind-hearted, honest, but also lazy and unlucky elementary school boy. Stories were of a funnier, friendlier world where all dreams, even foolish ones, can come true.

After we immigrated to the United States when I was five, my father no longer had the time and energy to do this, as he worked long hours and came home exhausted. Capitalist exploitation crushed dreams of anywhere (dokodemo) doors, memory breads (anki-pan), and jelly (konyaku) translators.

In trying to exist as an immigrant family in the US, what is given up, what is lost, what is left behind?

Growing up in the diaspora with only immigrant parents and an American-born sibling has had a nightmarish consequence of stunting dreams to form meaningful relationships with my family (extended and immediate), papered over by excuses of me being too “Americanized.”

I dream of a time, space, and place where the cares I saw, felt, and embraced as a child do not just have to be distant memories. Where can I find and create care for myself as an adult? How can I extend that care back to my family and friends? What are the conditions and boundaries that make care and caring difficult and how can we overcome them together?

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theo cai (he/they) cw: child abuse

When I was a child, my mother’s way of comforting me when I cried myself to sleep was to warn that my waking tears would invite nightmares, illusions, private horrors. All that misery, persisting through the night, until I would wake still swollen with my own suffering.

I tried to be happy, but mostly out of fear. At that age, what was most terrifying was a nonsensical world, a punishing world - relentless and inescapable. A world that didn’t make clear where I transgressed, and, on the rare occasion it did, only named the parts of me I couldn’t change. Yes, I was deeply afraid of her, and never once dreamed up anything worse.

To know cruelty, to that extent and so early, drew me behind a veil my peers couldn’t see. I trod lightly, left no marks, and loved others with even less of an impression. My mother didn’t want anyone to find out; I was the secret and the keeper, too. For so long, no one knew. The few who did left me there.

What then, if truth is nightmare and nightmare, truth? No one believed their Sister and Daughter and Wife could do such a thing. Dreams are all about belief. Like all beliefs, dreams can become a way of life - to be defended against outsiders to the family or culture. It’s true that I haven’t been able to remember my dreams in a decade, and it’s also true that the symbolism is not lost on me. But I’m wary of symbols, too: the Tiger Mom, always Wants-What’s-Best; the Midnight Apologist, the Cutter-of-Fruit. The Immigrant-Mother-Martyr who hurt me.

Ultimately, I think horror can be instructive the way (personal) history can radicalize. The abuse broke open the classic maternal promise and revealed it to be a shell protecting something terrible. It gave me different flinches, preoccupations - a different knowing. Crushed under its heel, of course I saw the world on its side, anew. I was right to cry and wrong to feel so damn guilty; the nightmare long preceded my grief. At least I know that, now.

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eleven at night and i want another coffee break, a smoke punch even though i don’t. my throat is sick of the yelling / catching and i’m always ready to jump at the first itch at my diaphragm, the specter with a backwoods shotgun and a score to settle. there’s no cut and run or showdown of brass-armored leviathans or any use for instinct, just stiffed up collarbones and shift-eyed quiet like before a bar fight. stockpile. sit. stutter. start slicing half-moons of sinew into our palms. if there’s ever a time to remember / forget transience, it’s nineteen, wine drunk and insomnia high, too tired to mourn what’s gone still.

. let lark hymns build a home along the balcony iron take the pastures and peachtree twigs long uncut make them a bed. make them a coat. in the vernal months, paper-winged monarchs and painted ladies come floating past gossamer apertures. as auroras rose, miriam i used to hold syrupy cubes of watermelon outstretched on soft palms and gave alms to weightlessness. to call this paradise would be to call the absence of train-whistles and tea kettle whistles and the touching of skin holy. when the vapors lift and we are left with dew pearls on the grass, i undress the tangerine sun, lap candied juice from my forearms and run until i capsize. balmy breaths lift us from stupor, and the prairie gentians and sprawling clover patches smell like your shampoo. honeybee. can you hear the sky as she sings?

shams-rainey (she/they)

do you remember it? the night it snowed stark & we got drunk to a fake disco ball & howled as the too-close train threatened earthquakes &

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everything felt simple & euphoric neon in the night & i wonder, do you think of it now & does your throat catch at the yelling & do you miss the warmth of casual touch & grieve the growth stunted & shivering under all that frost? do you laugh at the tailspins like back then?

(cw: reference to gun violence, islamophobia)

because i dream in immigrant, don’t even recognize my fluency, wake in innumerable generation, but never forget i look like a half-life too many yet few sympathies, judgment rendered but wavering. and does she even remember how long it takes the blood to renew the blood? because i am forged of golden saris and silver crosses, my technicolor blood runs hot when she speaks with the adhan echoing through church walls. because i pray in english, curse god in arabic, stutter. drink the chai tea latte in consolation. because i used to go to bible study, an english class where i never did the reading because all the words, oh god, the words felt anything but holy on my tongue. because the morning news is a nightmare you can’t wake up from. fifty-one and i am holding the gun // and i am in front of the gun. allahu akbar, i am split; a contradiction stirring, settled in one collection of bone. because when the world mourns, they witch-hunt. they vilify. they look for the monster in the empty magazine where my pale skin resides, but my blood waits outside to be spilled. because when i mourn, i mourn in english poetry, my brothers and sisters, mashallah i claim you, but these blood quantumed chasms are galaxies now. because i dream of home and all i see are our stars.

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No-No Boys an d th e issue of loyalty Shun Sakai (he/him) Asian American studies scholar Erika Lee describes Questions 27 and 28 of the Loyalty Questionnaire as “one more insult” among many Japanese Americans were subjected to during the midst of Japanese Internment (Lee 239). Already, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast had been forcefully relocated to internment camps despite no evidence of espionage or threat to the United States (Lee 229-230). The questionnaire was part of the “loyalty program,” a program by The War Relocation Authority intended to determine which Japanese Americans were “loyal” (Lee 238). Question 27 asked males whether they would be willing to serve in the US armed forces if drafted, while Question 28 asked all JapaneseAmericans whether they swear allegiance to the US, and renounce their Japanese citizenship. Many Japanese Americans felt the questionnaire was unfair. However, they also felt pressured to answer yes. The 10-15 percent who answered “no-no,” were deemed disloyal by the government, labeled the “no-no boys,” and transferred to a segregated camp at Tule Lake (Lee 239). They also faced social consequences in their own communities, often being “shunned by a Japanese American community that emphasized loyalty and military service after the war” both inside and outside of the camps (Densho Encyclopedia).

The controversy over this questionnaire and those who answered “no-no” is where this paper begins. As second-generation Japanese American Francis Mas Fukuhara shares, for many decades after the war, having answered no-no had a negative connotation, accumulating in stigmatization even from other Japanese Americans. Gene Akutsu, similarly, a second-generation immigrant who answered no-yes, shares that people “convicted [him] almost” of being an “unwanted enemy alien,” and that many considered him disloyal for answering “no” to Question 27. In

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this way, the “no-no boys’’ were framed as disloyal by the community before any opportunity to share how they felt about their identity or their reasons for choosing to answer “no-no.” Although framed as disloyal draft evaders within history, most Japanese Americans did not choose “no-no” because they were disloyal, but rather to protest the loyalty program.

This misinterpretation of loyalty stemmed from the assumption that all Japanese Americans were the same. However, in the pre-war United States, many different Japanese Americans immigrated from Japan. Norman Hirose and Francis Mas Fukuhara were both Nisei’s born and raised in the United States, while Dan Harada was a Kibei, returning from Japan right before the start of the war. All three answered “no-no.”

Further, the stigmatization of “no-no boys”’ was grounded in a perception of “disloyal[ty]” (Lee 239). During the war, those that answered no-no were sent to Tule Lake, a separate “maximum-security segregation center” (Densho Encyclopedia).

The prison-like environment discouraged many Japanese Americans from imagining a future in the United States, and many started “preparing for a new life in Japan” instead (Densho Encyclopedia). Though Tule Lake was an attempt to segregate the “disloyal” Japanese Americans, ironically, it made many want to leave the United States rather than stay.

However, many no-no boys identified as American or Japanese American and spoke limited Japanese. Norman spoke Japanese at home, only because his parents knew only “enough English to get along” (Hirose). Other families like Francis’ spoke English: “ [My mother] made a huge effort, really, to speak English’’ (Fukuhara). In this way, pre-war Nisei didn’t necessarily hold strong cultural ties to Japan. Many were born in the United States and considered it their homes. While some did speak Japanese at home like Norman, they were educated in American high schools and spoke English there. Others, like Francis, were pushed by their parents to speak English at home. As Asian American scholar Jonathan H. X. Lee writes, many prewar Nisei tended to distance themselves from Japanese heritage and “assimilate to American society” due to the increasing American hostility toward Japan even prior to the war (Lee 224).

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This impulse towards assimilation is further supported by the reasons the no-no boys chose no-no in the first place. As Erika Lee mentions, those who answered no to either of the questions were considered “disloyal,” as the questionnaire was used to “determine which ones were loyal” (Lee 238).

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However, many of the no-no boys chose to answer the way they did not because they felt unqualified allegiance to Japan or because they did not want to serve in the US armed forces, but simply because they wanted to protest the loyalty program, which they felt was unfair. Dan recalls very vividly “it wasn’t a question of loyalty’’ but an opportunity to protest the loyalty program and the government (Harada). Although the real reasons for choosing “no-no” were unrelated, the WRA and much of the American media chose to disregard this by segregating them and framing them as “disloyal” anyways.

Even after answering, “no-no” Dan, Francis, and Norman chose to stay in the United States after the war. Internment and the loyalty questionnaire framed them as disloyal to the US, but after being forced into concentration camps, discriminated against, and alienated, they still chose to call the United States their homes. This fact in itself, should reveal that the no-no boys were not disloyal to the United States. Rather, they used the questionnaire as a way to make the most of the situation they were placed in and fight for their rights. The “no-no boys” should not be considered “no-no” for their answers to 2 questions in an unfortunate turn of events, but “no-no” for standing up for their freedom within the constraints placed upon them. As residents of a country representing freedom and equality, doesn’t this make them the most loyal of U.S. citizens?

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Akutsu, Gene. Densho Interview by Matt Emery. Seattle, Washington, July 25, 1997. https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-1-30/ Fukuhara, Francis Mas. Densho Interview by Matt Emery. Seattle, Washington, September 25, 1997. https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-9-25/ Harada, Taneyuki Dan. Densho Interview by Martha Nakagawa. San Jose, California, November 30, 2010. http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-1000-306/ Hirose, Norman I. Densho Interview by Tom Ikeda. Emeryville, California, July 31, 2009. http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-1013-7/ Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. Simon Et Schuster Paperbacks, 2016.

Lee, Jonathan H. X. Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People.

ABC-CLIO, 2017. ABC-CLIO, http://publisher.abc-clio.com/9781440841903.

Niiya, Brian. “No-no boys.” Densho Encyclopedia. July 15, 2020. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/No-no%20boys.

Takei, Barbara. “Tule Lake.” Densho Encyclopedia. October 16, 2020. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Tule%20Lake.

Tsuda, Takeyuki. Japanese American Ethnicity: In Search of Heritage and Homeland Across Generations. NYU Press, 18. NYU Press Scholar ship Online. https://nyu.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.18574/ nyu/9781479821785.001.0001/upso-9781479821785

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Growing up, I really liked the story of Chang’e (嫦娥). According to this story, Chang’e was the wife of the legendary Houyi (后羿). During this time, it was said that there were 10 suns in the sky, which caused the earth to be scorchingly hot. Houyi was a great archer, and with his skill, shot down 9 of the 10 suns. As a reward for this feat, he was given an elixir of immortality by a deity, which he entrusted to Chang’e. However, when Houyi’s apprentice, Fengmeng (逢蒙) found out, he broke into Chang’e’s home while Houyi was out hunting and tried to force her to give the elixir to him. Instead of yielding, she took the elixir and floated up to the sky. She chose to land on the moon, as she still wanted to be near her husband. When Houyi found out about what had happened, he laid out Chang’e’s favorite fruits and cakes in their yard for her to see from above. Other villagers, who saw the plight of the couple, also began doing the same. This is the origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Legend has it that Chang’e now lives alone on the moon with her pet rabbit.

When I was a child, I admired her for her strength and independence. Like her, I longed to be able to choose my own fate, but my fate was already sealed in a body that would simultaneously be judged too Chinese and not Chinese enough. My Chineseness and my Americanness were two different worlds, and growing up, I had to traverse the spaces between. I yearned for belonging, for home. But home was always out of reach.

Looking back now, I realize that I did have a choice. I could have ignored my Chineseness, to live in blissful ignorance of my culture, heritage, ancestors, and stories. But I chose— and each day, I continue to choose— to lean in, to embrace my skin in a world that tells me it isn’t white enough. In this piece, I imagine I am my younger self. I imagine I am being asked a question, “Well, child, what will you choose?”

Lindsey Shi (she/her)

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Siyun Lee (he/him) cw: war themes

Th e 38th P A R A L L E L

Bullets rip the air, tearing apart my childhood No longer a kid Trekked by foot, by boat— Umma where are we going?

Where they’ll accept us We just keep marching stopping to eat bland white jook My soles are worn thin Appa didn’t come He made sure we went ahead He should catch up soon...

They’re here to save us Chocolates can’t bring him back White smiles glare at us I’m used to war now Explosions ring through the air Time to move again My home is this bag Thirty pounds neatly wrapped up in a dull gray cloth

Bodies by the road White skin painted red with blood under the blue sky Wood buildings charred black That used to be someone’s home I hope that they’re safe These times are long gone And yet, I still can’t go back Invisible wall My stomach is full, I have a place to call home But something’s missing Is appa waiting?

Maybe I have changed too much for him to know me A small girl’s sobbing, reverberates through the air Better than bullets Why does the child cry?

Perhaps she too misses home No, she is too young Scent of hibiscus Carried by the summer breeze Calms the crying child

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A nail is driven into wood, Fissuring it into splinters and sending sawdust into the air.

lia giba

But a tree does not cry out in pain.

It does not cry out in tears, Or tremble in work.

The only way to not feel pain is to not feel at all.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever find peace and extinguish the fire that is raging beneath this skin of mine.

Is it possible to be consumed by something you fuel?

Because blood is filling my cheeks and enzymes are denaturing by the minute and I’m trying to find the roots of my body as I float out into space.

I am simultaneously burning and standing in the rain.

I have to be and do what my nature inherently rejects for the sake of myself. not even for the sake of others.

I have to.

To be soft, To be vulnerable, To feel every emotion to its extreme.

But I can’t seem to look myself in the eye when I’m staring into myself, And I can’t help but Tamp her down, Crush her to bits, And send her back down into the pit of my stomach.

I wonder where the things that you don’t let out end up going.

I wonder where the people you don’t let out end up going.

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When she was smaller and softer, her dreams would extend like tree branches growing out into space.

Her leaves would touch the stars and be swept away by the swirls in the Milky Way and her face would glow bright yellow, something between the sun and the moon.

I couldn’t wait to grow into my bones and limbs and be tall enough to see over the clouds in the sky.

Every day I find myself missing her a little more.

The dreamy child with her mind floating somewhere out of this world.

Somewhere dreams were colored brighter and things tasted so much sharper that all you could do was salivate.

I think about where I’ve been and who I’ve become, Can’t help but sigh, And long for something that cannot be had.

Oh, to be extraordinary.

To be an excellent lover, the social butterfly, an introspective writer, and a computational thinker.

Trying to fill all 24 hours of your day with work and play and of course, you can’t forget the self-care that is periodically mixed in there because you know, you simply do.

When I gather I want to be fuschia and cyan and lavender but I’m azure to the core of my soul.

And all of this pursuit in trying to be everything I want to be is turning me green.

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Green with envy, Sick and pasty, It’s reducing me to a shell.

It keeps me awake in the dead of night, I wake up thinking about it, And it keeps me asleep when the sun is filling the walls of my room with sunlight.

I’m trying to breathe with colorful lungs but the air is flat and gray.

If I was a car, I’d fill myself with premium gas and just. keep. going.

I wish every day could be like this.

My favorite table at the coffee shop is bathed in sunlight and empty, waiting for me.

A chai latte with oat milk and light ice.

The perfect length of acrylic nails.

A smile from a stranger, a conversation with a friend.

The parting “Love you!” that doesn’t really mean much, but it’s the thought that counts, the thought that warms me.

My lungs feel like they are mine and my heart is singing with love that I want to share.

I look in the mirror and smile at the human that smiles right back at me.

I can hear the birds singing and I think to myself, “Have they always been this loud, or have I never noticed?”

Colors seem to be singing, the clouds are dancing in the sky, and the sky is so blue that you lay in the grass for hours, watching everything move.

Your favorite song comes on in the queue.

You feel good in what you’re wearing, you love the body you inhabit, and the space in your skull.

Drunk and heavy and full in love, of love.

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th e si m ultan e ity of ali e nation an d decolon ization Shourya Agarwal (he/him)

Sonali Gulati’s documentary, Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005) offers a comical yet evocative exploration of globalization. With her cinematic lens trained on the bustling call center industry of India, Gulati unearths the dialectic tensions of alienation and decoloniality at the heart of modernity. Unlike other films of this genre Nalini features an affluent workspace replete with employees who come across as nothing but content. The call center workers receive high pay and enjoy a strong sense of community. On closer inspection, we realize that much of their struggle has been relegated to the latent domain of the affective, where workers must embrace a hybrid dual identity to secure their material prosperity. Through a series of brisk interviews, Gulati underscores the quaint double-think that permeates through their every day. As the workers get integrated into the global network of capital, they are forced to yield to the North Atlantic hegemony over English. This essay looks to explore the precarity of their position and argues that it entails a simultaneity of alienation and decolonization.

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The expository animated section of the film introduces us to the predicament of Nalini, an Indian call-center worker who wears the westernized identity of Nancy to earn her livelihood. As the camera pans across continents, it reveals thousands of post-colonial “Nancys”, integrated into the 24/7 of their workspace. From the adoption of the softened dentals of an American accent to completely rewiring their sleep patterns, the “Nancys” completely conceal their ethnicity. Cultural studies scholars have written extensively on the impacts of such elisions on the subjectivities of the workers. In her article, Thinking Through the Diaspora, Raka Shome theorizes how during accent training ‘voice and accent become prime commodities’ (Shome 110). Identifying the call centers as a site of alienation, she argues that the hybridity created at the call center can only be produced ‘through the death of the subject’ (Shome 109). When Nalini becomes Nancy, she is forced to unlearn aspects of her identity. She has to let go of her tone, phonology and emotions to imitate American speech patterns. Hence, within a capitalist framework that commodifies their aural, the workers undergo a Benjaminian loss of the aura. Gulati nuances this understanding of alienation one step further, by recognizing the call center worker as a doubly alienated subject. Without adopting a grim tone, the film highlights how the labor of the workers is ignored by both the customer and the employer. The economics of the call center mandate that the success of the worker be measured by their efficiency in hiding their ethnicity to ‘familiarize’ their clients. Through an interview with ‘Anne’, a worker, we learn that this labor is heavily undercompensated in comparison to the revenue their work amasses. Gulati’s film accentuates how the workers’ double elision constitutes alienation in a Marxian sense with the workers being systemically estranged from the product of their labor.

After identifying the call center as a site of alienation, the film proceeds to expound on the decolonial potential of the space. Through interviews of various call center workers, the film stresses on how language is much more than its accent. Gulati rightly identifies language as a portal to a new culture and as portals go, the culture of global English is transformed by the inclusion of the Indian subjects just as the subjects are transformed by global English. Arundhati Roy, a renowned author, explores this bilateral understanding of globalization in her lecture, In What Language Does Rain Fall Over Tormented Cities. Roy looks at Indian English as a metalanguage that carries sensibilities of various vernacular tongues. For her, language is much more than a set of grammatical conventions, it entails all forms of verbal and non-verbal signs to convey a cultural nuance. By presenting language in Derridean overtones, Roy argues that a postcolonial subject’s English is ‘deepened

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by the rhythms and cadences’ (Roy 3) of their native languages. Even when the call center workers communicate to their clients in an American accent, they continue to convey their cultural sensibilities.

Despite the most strenuous of accent trainings, a subject’s cultural understanding of deep-rooted concepts such as time, nature and money cannot be effaced. Gulati’s decision to make a film on India catering to a Western audience, displays how globalization does not only produce Hollywood loving workers, but also a Hollywood that is impacted by its Indian viewers. By depicting the call centers as a place where such bilateral transformation can take place, the film recognizes its potential to unsettle the North Atlantic hegemony by facilitating global flows.

While the creation of such reverse global flows may seem to pale in comparison to the alterity imposed on the worker, scholars have long acknowledged their decolonial potential. By inserting the alienated call center worker into the domain of global English, the workspace imbues the subject with a strong sense of agency. Prominent theorist Rey Chow has written extensively about such postcolonial agency in her essay, Not Like a Native Speaker. Echoing Roy’s argument, she theorizes postcolonial English as an ‘external graft which confers on the colonized a certain prescience’ (Chow 41). When colonized subjects from different parts of the world interact in global English, they all become part of an ‘infinite series’ (Chow 42) of different ways of using the prosthesis. Chow argues that addition of English only deepens postcolonial subjectivity by giving the workers two languages to understand their experience.

When describing their world, a postcolonial subject has the agency to choose from a ‘multiplicity’ (Chow 59) of registers. Even the enforced accent, only adds to the call center worker, as it does not efface their native language. Moreover, once enough speakers are integrated into global English, they can unsettle the North Atlantic hegemony over the language. We have seen how the ‘accent neutrality’ of English has shifted from Britain to America in the last century and Gulati’s film underscores the potential of the thousands of freshly integrated Nancys to decolonize it further.

Despite its complex theoretical dialectics, Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night does not stray far away from the material reality of the call center workers. Gulati intersperses her eulogy for their aura with vistas of development the call centers have brought in. Through an interview with Mr. Bikhchandani, we learn how the call center employee’s salary places them next to an engineering or an MBA graduate, emphasizing how the workers have the agency to deploy the external graft of English and initiate the reverse flow of capital. The workers’ position as a subject who is physically placed in the homeland while being mentally displaced into a globalized world offers us a new insight of looking at a kind of reverse

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diaspora. By casting call center workers as reverse diasporic subjects who can materially challenge colonization by initiating an inflow of capital into their homeland. As a facilitator of such inflows, the call center becomes a site of tremendous decolonial potential.

In conclusion, Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night offers an extremely refreshing take on contemporary globalization. Gulati presents the worker’s position extremely deftly, identifying them as alienated subjects stressing the decolonizing potential of their workspace. Her work presents the paradoxes of globalization where such seemingly dialectic tensions can coexist. In the simultaneity of workers’ diminishment with their sense of agency we can trace the contours of a globalized space that can no longer be classified in binary oppositions of modern and premodern. Gulati’s piece on Indian call centers does a stellar job in portraying the tensions that permeate through the core of modern globalization.

bibliography Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility:” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, 2008, 19–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1nzfgns.6.

Chow, Rey. Not like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience.

New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Derrida, Jacques, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Judith P. Butler. Of Grammatology.

Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Roy, Arundhati, and Tehseen. July 5. “In What Language Does Rain Fall over Tor mented Cities?” RAIOT, July 7, 2018. https://raiot.in/in-what-language-doesrain-fall-over-tormented-cities/.

Shome, Raka. “Thinking through the Diaspora.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 105–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877906061167.

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a narrate d dream journal

david lee (he/they)

they say that one of the most boring experiences is hearing about someone else’s dreams from the night before. i’m here to prove them absolutely right.

dream one: relive my christian trauma with me alright let me set the scene for you: you’re a 10 year old and go to a southern baptist chinese church* (every single one of those words is necessary). anyway, you’re thrown back into the equivalent of christian olympics for elementary schoolers. your team is one of two nonwhite teams out of twenty, and you’re surrounded by churchmates you haven’t seen in real life for literally a decade. you feel the same anxiety you felt way back then, with your performance in the three-legged race being the only thing holding your pride in check as one of the oldest kids on the team. your youth leader slaps you on the back, saying it’s your turn to run the marathon: six laps around the makeshift circle of tape in the middle of the gym. your team’s chances of winning it all ride on this event. behind the din of squealing cheers, you line up at the ready line. the loudest, most obnoxious air horn you can imagine screams and you’re off to the races. you feel the adrenaline pumping as your velcro sneakers carry your little legs as fast as they can. you’re making good time and lap after lap passes by. you’re about to turn into the circle to knock down the first place orange pin when the inevitable happens. you see the ground begin to approach your face at an alarming pace. you jerk awake in a cold sweat. some traumas never leave you. *the ideal way to enjoy this experience is online, the hyperlinks are here for immersion.

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dream two: music competitions made me what I am today (that is, anxious) okay so the context is that I used to play alto sax and was in jazz band and marching band (you’re encouraged, if not expected, to laugh here). anyway I haven’t played sax in like 5 years. ..... a dark sewer. there’s an odd weight on your neck, and when you glance down there’s the gleam of none other than your trusty sax. you look down and see people from your high school band running full speed towards you. someone mows down a flute player using their trombone slide (it’s okay he was kind of annoying). with hands in position, you jazz run the fuck away without looking back. after running for a while, you find yourself in a music store cornered by shelves of sheet music. someone with a euphonium approaches you, stares you directly in the eyes, and then plays a base note. this is your cue to do something. you raise your alto and the silkiest jazz you’ve ever heard comes out. at this point I should’ve known it was a dream. like the pied piper, you see a throng of band kids form behind you as you freestyle back into the waterway. your groupie joins in, jazz erupts from your sax like you wouldn’t believe. evidently you really couldn’t believe it. the sound of jazz mixes with the same alarm you’ve used for the past seven years until nothing but the incessant dinging is left. you slowly open your eyes, feeling slightly more inadequate than you normally do.

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dream three: going green cw: weed

if you’re my parents, the government, or anyone I knew in high school, please stop reading now. . . . okay for everyone still here, the first time I smoked w*ed I didn’t feel much, I was definitely high but I was in way more control than everyone else there (in hindsight I was totally just doing it wrong, but that’s besides the point). so, come the first time my friend offers me an ed*ble, I was like hell yeah, I’ll be fine.

I was not fine. I threw up and was still high. this dream-like state is the result of giving me a laptop while I was greening out. .....

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..... your thoughts can be typeset. only a high person would understand the amazingness of what’s going on here and that is why it’s a bittersweet feeling. thoughts are weird I can feel the sensation of touch, h o t and c o l d.

– you recognize that you’re out of it – if you concentrate hard enough you think you can pull it together but you actually probably can’t I have thoughts and they leave my mind, you have to hold it in your brain to say it

more people less thoughts but its a double edged sword

those who cannot enjoy are left out in the cold. dreams and right now are the same, but they’re nightmares for everyone else. .....

I don’t really have a moral or theme to all these dreams either, so I hope you are less bored than I was when writing all of this down. thanks for reading I guess.

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a room of

一间自己的房间

on e's own

周徽音 huiyin zhou (she/they, 她/ta) this experimental photograph is inspired by virginia woolf’s proposition that women, or more broadly marginalized folks, need “a room of one’s own.” i interpret it as pointing to how the lack of a material space of being engenders a lack of mental and intellectual space for resting, creativity, and liberation. during these two years of covid-19 pandemic, i have felt trapped inside houses and anxieties, and all the while still yearning - dreaming, in an inexplicable angst, for something beyond this broken system of racial capitalism and neoliberal colorblindness. having parachuted all across the pacific for college amidst a pandemic, homing and home-making have been ever more complicated by transnational politics and border control. these photographs are visual representations of my various struggles: two versions of the same original, a corner of my quarantine room in morrisville, nc, the visual parallels and contrasts between “nightmare” and “fantasy” point to the multiplicity of reality. their mirroring effect shows my multiple marginalities as simultaneous sites of anxiety, creativity, and resistance. as a progressive chinese international student, i am constantly struggling in the overlapping marshes of xeno/ sinophobia, cisheteropatriarchy, elitism, multiple nationalisms, and american leftist politics that weaponizes an orientalist imagination of china as a perfect alternative against western imperialism. as i straddle multiple realities and continents, the neoliberal cosmopolitan dream of “everywhere is home” is shattered by the nightmarish reality of “psychic nowhere,” to borrow from david eng and shinhee han. now, self-quarantining in an utterly unfamiliar space - despite seemingly having “a room of one’s own,” also compelled me to reevaluate my emotional and embodied relationships to myself and the spaces around me, spaces that once felt near but are now distant, spaces that i yearn for, that are in-process, yet to come. and where my body cannot reach, i dream; or at least try to.

徽音,

jan. 6, 2022

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nightmare pt.1

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fantasy pt.2

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:) elayna lei (she/her)

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