Lucid 1: Borders and Belonging

1 2020

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LUCID 1

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a journal of first-generation student composition. no. 1 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITOR DESIGNER PROOFREADERS

ADDITIONAL ART

COVER ILLUSTRATION

2020 Rachael Collins Scott Lerner Stephanie Moore Anita Fischer Sarah Hanson-Kegerreis Derek Moseley Bridget O’Reilly Inez Tan Catherine Winiarski Mayra Sierra

“Imagination” (watercolor)

by Mayra Sierra

Lucid is a publication of the UC Irvine Composition Department.

sites.uci.edu/lucid issuu.com/lucidjournal

lucidjournal@uci.edu Instagram @lucid_journal

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Funding for this journal was made possible by generous support from UC Irvine’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, the English Department’s Composition Program, and the Humanities Center. Special thanks to Kevin Huie and Iliana Zepeda in UCI’s First Generation Student Programs, Jonathan Alexander, Elizabeth Allen, Brad Queen, Sharon Stead, Jason Kwock, and Pichaya Kositsawat. Thank you to the incomparable Stephanie Moore and to our families for loving us. And thank you especially to all the talented and courageous student contributors!

BORDERS & BELONGING POETRY FROM THE EDITORS 4

Rachael Collins

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Scott Lerner

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Spring 2020 UCI Composition Writing Awards

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24 47

PROSE 8 16

26 29 49 68

Leslie Ann Loza-Zamora

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Redefining the American Dream

Francesca Anne Nabong Querol

A Filipino Crucifix from the Bedroom Terrace Bryan Angel

The Cruel Science of Rain Andrea Gonzalez

Mirror Karina Mercedes Martinez

Fumes

VISUAL ART

Kevin Liu

Post-Funeral Back to Chicago O’Hare Scott Lerner

Interview with Mariel Calva Mariel Calva

My Mother’s Migraines Tracy-Han Lam

A Lifelong Struggle Cameron Sherry

Who Eats Last?

23 25 46 48 67

Mayra Sierra

Awakening the Dragon Jorge Káram Padilla

Plentitude Kara Worrells Gutiérrez

It’s 3018, Baby!

Angel Ge

Slumber Jorge Káram Padilla

Reflection

FROM THE EDITORS Dear Readers, Lucid started with a single conversation in which Scott Lerner and I discovered that not only were we both first-generation college students, but we also shared teaching philosophies that reflected our first-gen experiences. To that end, we have included in the inaugural issue and its theme of “Borders and Belonging” short narratives of our personal journeys as first-generation college students and educators.

We hope to bring you this beautiful work for many years to come!

Rachael Collins & Scott Lerner

I

used to lie all the time. In college, I would lie when I couldn’t get my homework done because I was tempted again by the constant cuteness of my four-year-old; when I was in grad school, I would lie when I was too tired or too broke or too indifferent to show up to events.

When the depression kept me in bed, I would lie to avoid getting fired. Always the same lie: “My daughter’s sick. She has asthma.” “Asthma again!”

“Would you believe?! Asthma. Again.”

Twenty years ago, asthma, which my daughter very much did have (just not those times), was still considered a thing to be horrified and concerned about. Asthma diagnoses were already pretty common but mostly among the working poor. Without an internet to tell you how to feel about it, when people heard “asthma” they imagined (correctly) a small child gasping for air, and felt compelled to give you a break.

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I look back at that time now and realize the profundity of my lie: I, too, was gasping for air.

When I transferred to UCI from Long Beach City College in 1998, I quickly learned that opportunity is one thing, stigma a whole other thing. And there were stigmas all around me.

Like the stigma of being such a young mother.

That one wasn’t familiar. I came from a very big Midwestern Catholic family on my mother’s side and a very Mexican Catholic family on my father’s side. My parents were Evangelical converts. I was homeschooled. In that world, having children young (the younger the better!) was a mark of pride, not shame. And I was proud. And I am proud.

But I was afraid, too, because no one at all knew how afraid I actually was.

I learned to hide my fear, my poverty, my ignorance; I learned to edit my relationship to

my own daughter, use her as a prop, trot her out on occasions that would make me seem plucky and perseverant.

Put her in her little red wagon, pull her across campus to pick up another essay with a score of 93 because you’re good, but there’s room for improvement, and hopefully you’ll run into a professor and they will see what you’re up against and next time give you a 97 or a 98.

When applying to graduate school, I ask my professors if I should mention on my application that I am a single mother. One professor mom says yes, another no, two dad professors: nay, nay. A single male professor who makes no secret of his crush on you: yay. When I got accepted to graduate school partly on the merits of my honorable mention, I was told not to bring my daughter to the department Christmas Party.

Before I graduated from college and got a bona fide filing cabinet, I kept a folder marked “My Life: Institutional” that contained a stack of papers, including my birth certificate, my daughter’s birth certificate, my marriage and divorce certificates, and a tiny piece of paper the size of a driver’s license, flimsier than the bond paper I used in kindergarten. Printed on the paper were the letters GED. They stood for General Education Degree. No one ever told me to frame it and hang it on the wall along with my other accomplishments. But from time to time, I would take it out of the folder and look at it.

What is insidious about privilege is that it can claim the triumphs of the underprivileged: a GED is a deficit not a victory; a child is a challenge; a disability an irregularity. Privilege

tells us we are to view our lives as a hardship or an impediment and then it celebrates us for overcoming our lives.

As most do, I derived satisfaction when I successfully “jumped through the hoops.” My grades, my recognition from teachers, was one kind of inclusion—the kind that always placed the burden of change, not on the system, but on me. The fact is that the truth doesn’t always serve us well. If it did, we would all just forget about the constant call to edit ourselves.

Throughout my own journey as an educator, I promised myself I would not make my students feel they must leave their personal lives at the professional threshold. I took my cue from James Baldwin who, in 1963 when addressing a group of teachers about the need to be courageous in the face of systemic racism, said, “The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.” To be the kind of educator that facilitates such courage means taking personal and institutional risks: recognizing that we are not simply here to help students feel included, but to interrogate with them what are the institutional grounds of inclusion, who or what is in a position to include or exclude, and why. And to remember and to keep demanding that education isn’t something that we access; it is something we make.

Rachael Collins

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T

he first wisps of a project like the issue of Lucid you are thumbing through now emerged out of conversations with students.

Such conversations begin in the classroom, take shape in office hours, emails, and comments on drafts. Many continue for years.

One such conversation began in my Writing 39A course in early 2018. In that class we read a novella in which an IRS agent recounts his time in college as a “wastoid,” drifting between schools, majors, jobs, and his parents’ houses and college dorms without direction or purpose. One day after class, Mariel Calva—who is published here alongside another student from that course, Jorge Káram Padilla—told me about a revelation she’d had: she felt just like that character and as a result knew something in her life had to change.

Me too, I admitted. For many years. I didn’t elaborate, though in class I had a habit of teaching by noting some of my own flubs.

Our conversation continued through email or when we’d spot each other on campus and find a minute to chat about the students from our class that she stayed in touch with. We’d talk about work, and stress, and staying the course.

At first-generation student events on campus, we got to talking about things I had never expressed or given enough attention to really understand: feeling like imposters, intimidated by the tasks ahead of us, always a step behind, making a wrong decision that needed to be corrected.

Even though we weren’t in the classroom, I felt like a teacher at those events; students asked me questions about my experiences, and I talked.

But I wasn’t always so open. When I transferred

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from community college to UCLA, I never told my roommates, or anyone. When I made it to UCI for graduate school, I trotted out my UCLA pedigree for its prestige, feeling a sense of inner betrayal as I elided the rest of my story. That editing of my story continued, I began to see, as there was a part of my life that was central to everything I did, but that I’d kept hidden.

In February of this year, as Rachael and I were reading the many superb pieces submitted to Lucid, Mariel sent me the essay published here, “My Mother’s Migraines,” which itself was born out of conversations she and her mother skirted, or never had, or edited. In the essay, physical pain becomes a personal burden and source of shame that leads to her mother hiding that pain she endures. In order to write the essay, Mariel interviewed her mother about her migraines, and in those conversations she learned the extent to which her mother both suffered and faced numerous barriers, from fear of judgement for her limited English literacy to the lonesome fact that migraines are notoriously difficult, if not nearly impossible, to treat.

Mariel’s essay and the two months we spent revising it—I was a teacher here, too—spawned a series of conversations about how we write about our lives, our families, our fears, the things in life important to us—and how to both of us it had come as a monumental revelation that the substance of our lived experience was something anyone else would be interested in reading about.

As Mariel explained it to me, she finally felt like she could add to and even create conversations.

And while having our conversation about all these things, I said, “This reminds me of when I hurt my back a couple of years ago,” and then changed the subject. “Anyway.” That was the extent to which I addressed the injury. I knew it was time that I find a way to engage this thing that had touched and reshaped every part of my life. To write. It’s going to be hard. But I’m going to try.

In March 2016, I herniated two discs in the lumbar region of my spine. Initially, I could stand only under the narcotizing relief of hydrocodone.

I spent most of my time at home, on the couch or in bed, dreading the painful drive to school or walk to class, planning the ways I could address the limp and scoliosis I had suddenly developed without having to reveal much of anything. I still taught, and I had the pleasure of working with many talented students on important writing projects—the kind of engaged compositions you see here, and will hear in our virtual reading. I still wrote, but about other things, like a novel in which back pain makes a cameo. I had a habit of presenting it as an attribute not central to the life of the character, as I had to myself for many years.

Two years later, the quarter Mariel was in my class, the pain had lessened but not disappeared.

I taught three classes back to back, which meant standing for four hours. I wore a heated back brace hidden beneath two tucked-in shirts so as to reduce muscle pain and fatigue, even though the numerous physicians I’d encountered during the back saga dismissed it as unscientific

and potentially harmful in that it could delay the muscular strength I desperately needed to rebuild in order to heal. But for me the brace provided a sense of security. Its tourmaline magnets produced a tremendous amount of heat that relaxed my muscles and mind just enough to make it through classes and back to my car.

After an hour or so of wearing the brace, though, the heat became so intense that my entire torso would be slick with sweat and my skin would feel like I’d been out in the desert sun all day without protection. I’d pace the room, trying to stay loose, wondering if the students noticed the growing band of sweat or the limp that worsened the longer I stayed on my feet. I never asked. I never talked about it, and I never wrote about it.

Then I read, and read again, “My Mother’s Migraines,” and “A Lifelong Struggle,” “Fumes,” “Who Eats Last,” “Redefining the American Dream,” and the nine other pieces of writing and art that, each in their own way, confront these questions of disclosure and identity, as created by things that happen to us, the places we are, the people around us, the voices in our head, the people we want to be, how we want to be seen, and who we think we should be. Each piece published here contends and exposes and teaches in their own way. I was being taught.

Scott Lerner

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Leslie Ann Loza-Zamora

REDEFINING THE AMERICAN DREAM N

ine-thirty am. The light shines now, no longer just creeping in through horizontal lines. I hear my mother’s voice, “Mija, por favor, ya es hora!” I begrudgingly slip off my pajamas and get dressed. Time to brush my teeth. Why worry about making the bed? Breakfast burritos and ham sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, and straight into a plastic Food 4 Less grocery bag, now we’re ready to go. First stop: one bank. Next stop: another bank. Last stop: La Tiendita. The store. A place where I’ve spent my time after school, on weekends, and summers growing up ever since my parents got the store in 2006.

“Ay, ya son las 10:15. Look someone is waiting!” my mother says as we turn to park onto Emerald Ave, same spot as always. Mom greets the

potential customer with a smile and an apology. “¿Y el señor?” “Where’s the man?” the customer proceedes to ask. They never fail to notice when my dad isn’t running the store that day, but all my mother ever responds is that he has something else to do, and he does. The lock comes off, alarm comes off, lights go on.

Time to attend to the job.

Meanwhile, my brother was out helping Dad do the “dirty work” no one else would dare to do in 110°f weather, cleaning country club pools out in Rancho Mirage.

I bet my parents never expected this life to be their American Dream. Or did they?

My parents were not the first in the family to chase after the American Dream.

It all began with my mother’s father as he accepted the Bracero Program† as a means of being one step closer to el sueno Americano, the American Dream. Through him, Mom was “lucky” enough to step foot on American soil, “legally” with resident cards her father arranged for all his children. Mom was the youngest of the bunch to constantly be in and out of Mexico and into and across the United States. It was a life following the peaches, the apples, the grapes, the peppers, the lettuce, anything.

They never settled. †

A United States program for the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement with Mexico initiated on August 4, 1942. It provided the United States with cheap manual labor, typically agricultural work, in order to replace American workers dislocated by WWII.

Figure 1.

My grandfather pictured with five out of twelve of his kids.

1986—the year my father, at 23 years old, decided. He was still, after five years, working at a Bodega Aurrera where he held a price gun, day by day, night by night, putting tiny individual prices on individual items.

He moved to the United States in search of el Sueno Americano; I suppose the imf in La Decada Perdida must have outweighed the 1980s Recession. There was no communication with the ones he loved. Calls were up to $2 per minute at the time; every penny counted. His voice cracks, and eyes start to water as he tells me, “Y si lo logre, porque tengo mi familia.” He believes he achieved the American Dream because he now has his family.

Figure 2.

A Polaroid of my brother and me at the store front, c. 2006.

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I’m now trapped in a dorm room I failed to make Pinterest-worthy. Maybe a grey room palette wasn’t the best option . . . . My phone screen brightens up. “Can you come home this weekend?”

“I don’t think so, I have a midterm this week. I need to study. And I have a paper due.”

I throw myself onto the bed. I wish the soft embrace came from my Mom’s arms instead of this xl twin-sized comforter. The screen brightens up once more. “Okay mija, we love and miss you. Stay focused.” Thank goodness for some light.

Maybe I should have pursued community college to be able to help them at La Tiendita? I could have been studying at the store when customers weren’t around. I could have kept my parents company. I could have been there, but I’m not. Instead I spend my time at this university while all savings slowly diminish. New quarter, new dues.

The lump in my throat never fails to make an appearance.

If only I could pay it myself. Maybe one day. Dad stopped telling me to get a job, but I still feel the same burden I must put onto them every fifteenth of the month.

Why did I leave home? I just didn’t want to be at the store anymore. I wanted to be away from Emerald Ave. I wanted to go to a four-year university. Irvine was perfect.

I remember the terrible feeling of getting home just to prepare to leave for Theory of Knowledge classes from 5–8 pm every Monday. Mom and Dad would take turns leaving La Tiendita just to take me. Not once was I late because of them, but if I was, it was my fault. I was one

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I’ve accepted that I am here because I belong here.

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of 23 out of a class of 500 to want that ib diploma. ib English hl, ib Visual Arts hl, ib Spanish hl, ib Biology HL, ib World History sl, ib Math Studies SL, an Extended Essay, Internal Assessments and May Exams. ib dying. It was all worth it when Mom and Dad didn’t fail to compliment my shiny blue v-stole, perfect against the crisp white graduation robe.

March, 2018. A time in my life where my routine was constantly paused. Checking emails and web portals daily.

“No puedo creer que voy a tener 2 hijos en la universidad” (“I can’t believe I’m going to have two children in college”).

One acceptance from UC Riverside, Dad’s favorite. Close to home. One rejection from SDSU. One acceptance from UC Santa Cruz, Mom’s least favorite. Too far. One acceptance to UC Davis, Dad’s least favorite. Too far.

One acceptance to Cal Poly SLO. Another rejection from UCLA. But that was expected. My hopes remained high.

Wait after wait. Pending . . . under review . . . still loading . . . acceptance. UC Irvine. Running out of my room with an open laptop clutched in my hands, followed by open arms and for the first time, tears.

Now, I’m here. Here at UC Irvine doing the best I can on my own. Aqui estoy, echandole ganas. Midterm scores get posted, and there I am again, at the average mark.

The hours upon hours of studying, nightly reviews, lack of sleep, and still no improvement. Filled flashcards and whiteboards but I guess I only filled myself with confusion. Just my luck. That’s unfortunate. Nice try though.

Better luck next time. That shouldn’t matter.

Figure 3.

A Google Maps street view of La Tiendita’s plaza, c. 2018.

I’ve accepted that I am here because I belong here.

My mother once expressed to me how returning to school at fourteen had her “feeling so stupid” after a halt was put to her education at the age of seven from traveling with the agricultural work her family did. She was too far behind, and for that matter she didn’t know English.

She never went back after that. My father worked from the age of ten instead of going to school, but this was not out of choice. Now, my parents claim they “weren’t able to accomplish anything” just because they didn’t go to school.

I would disagree. They still run that store today, and not once have they hired an employee. That place has changed a lot; it’s a lot emptier than what I remember.

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I wouldn’t say life running the store has been their American Dream, but they’ve let me look for mine at UC Irvine. I came from them, from La Tiendita. I blow up their phones with “Just woke up!” just for them to light my face up with “Have a beautiful day!”; with “I got out of class, I’m going to grab some lunch now” just to see “Que bueno mija. Eat yummy!”; with “I went to office hours today” just to see “I’m so proud of you”; with “Finals are next week!” just to see “You’ve been doing good mija, good luck!” I could have gone to office hours because I was struggling, but they don’t need to know that. It wouldn’t matter. What they do know is that I’m here, almost a year closer to graduating with a bachelor’s degree. Taking baby steps towards becoming a physician.

That’s the dream.

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Kevin Liu

POST-FUNERAL BACK TO CHICAGO O’HARE

A

fter my grandpa’s funeral, all that was left was to take a flight home. The family, dispersed; the plans, made; the pause, temporary.

The road in front of him slowing, my dad turns to me.

“How is school? You get the good grades?”

“Fine.”

“OK, if you need help, ask Richard, ask Celia. They earn a lot of money.”

The Porsche in front lurched forward, recalling his attention.

“Diu this Porsche lou,” he muttered, staring at the car in front of us. “He a bad driver.”

As if he was a safe driver anyway, going 90 on city highways in his dingy 2008 Lexus. While he sits in his

shell of a house, everyone else has been moving forward. There is a distinct difference between him and the rest of the family—clear lines like the lanes of the freeway, separating the successful from the innocently forgotten. Out of all his siblings, he is the only one still surviving at a blue-collar job; the only one living out of state because “Illinois is too expensive”; the only one without the security of a retirement fund; the only one without a child he can brag about.

The Porsche’s brake lights spur him on.

“Don’t drive like him. Better be simple and safe than rich and danger.”

My dad is a strange phenomenon.

Sometimes, I believe that he can change the world through sheer willpower. But his stubbornness is always taunting at something greater: the next gamble, the next spin, the next cash out, the next prospect of life itself.

Nobody is sinless, but some sins are worse than others. My father did not kill a man, nor did he forget to honor his mother and father. But everything else in between?

Stealing? Check.

Adultery? Check.

Lies? Of course. Everyone does.

At the funeral, I watched him look at the coffin with tears in his eyes but refuse to touch his dead father for the last time.

Perhaps it was out of respect for the strange fusion of Catholic procedure and Chinese tradition.

Although he and I are not the same, I have no doubt that we wanted our fathers to be present in our future success. He wanted his father to see his success, however late it was. And I want my father to see mine.

But now the traffic is moving forward; he is looking towards the road, eyes narrowed, mind wandering elsewhere.

At one point, I considered sending him all my ribbons and medals from competitions bundled up in a box from home. A mix of silvers, blues, reds, and whites would have done well to colorize his bland home. But why? Why ask for the approval of a man who’s failed at life? Why ask a man who has only made mistakes the question of how to do better?

I can empathize with his sense of inadequacy. I learned to use a camera for events I wasn’t a part of; I learned to write in perfect academic prose only to hear people say STEM was the future; when I cared to have a hobby, I wrote stories

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about lives that were not my own. Had both of our lives been running in parallel lines all along? Had history been dooming me to repeat his mistakes?

He interrupts my thoughts. “This is why I get Richard to help me,” he says, “Richard, he teach me new things.”

Wonderful. Life lessons that I already knew, and more so, involving one of my most successful cousins. Another reminder of my father’s perpetual losing streak. A losing streak he doesn’t like to acknowledge by continuing to look forward to the future. The future: where he may find his success, his place in the world twenty years after everyone else.

“When that new casino opens in Indiana, I will apply and do interviews,” he continued. “They ask for a lot of skills. Like writing emails.”

The category would be “Management Skills,” but I don’t bother to correct him.

“Mmhm.”

“I need the good English in order to get the job. You know?”

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He interrupts my thoughts.

He paused, probably trying to find the right words in English. No matter how often I speak Cantonese to him, he seems to be unwilling to give up his attempts to speak English to me.

“Money is very important.”

“Mmhm.”

“Good that you know.”

I’ve always known, Dad. Money was important ten years ago when we left Chicago for California in a local reenactment of escaping Chinese Communist influence. Money was important when I asked my mom to go to Sacramento with my Academic Decathlon team. Money was important for the three years of tennis lessons that I didn’t even put on my college applications.

Your debt is almost the sole reason the family is like this.

He pulled up to a parking space near my terminal. I put my second earbud back in. The English version of “Nobody but You” by the Wonder Girls echoed in my right ear.

How ironic, the man I despise is simultaneously the one I see myself being.

“Do you need help?”

“No.” “Okay.”

And into the terminal I went, waiting for my eventual return to the cool California breeze.

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Francesca Anne Nabong Querol A FILIPINO CRUCIFIX FROM THE BEDROOM TERRACE Your calves bulge and glisten Under the sweltering heat As you hang upside down on a log, not unlike A sloth teetering for purchase Being hauled through the parade in sickly sweat Melancholy in the air Melancholy in the audience Melancholy in the men above your head, beyond your feet From the weight of the wood on their shoulders Lugging you to your mercy You know the time is near when they slow to a stop And the gong is the only thing ringing in your ears.

Before you, stand three crosses Larger than you could ever imagine.

Two other men are already stapled against the wood

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Bleeding from their palms Heads hung low.

For a moment, the fear crawls out of you And a scream pierces the dead sky Only to awaken murmurs of the Lord’s Prayer Sputtering past the lips of hundreds crowded around you.

It’s something you won’t forget – not even when They nail you with finality.

They ask me what it means to be Catholic and I Think of the nation that watches your Crucifix from the bedroom terrace On a particular Friday where Good is Capitalized and Good is swallowed A reminder of Who we are and What we whisper.

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A reminder of / Who we are and / What we whisper.

Awakening the Dragon (oil painting) Mayra Sierra

THE CRUEL SCIENCE OF RAIN To fool us all In the shine of An abalone the sky Erased the oceans Reflection stealing its Salt milk all at once Sunsuffocatesthrough Mansions of ice water To barely come out The other end a Beam those born Under it are tricked To believe the other Side is hyacinth Or geranium That manic hue But it’s actually the Minefield of landscape That does it Not knowing how many Yards to tiptoe til the Weight of the ocean Comes down on you.

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Bryan Angel

Plentitude

(photograph) Jorge Kรกram Padilla

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Scott Lerner

INTERVIEW WITH

MARIEL CALVA M

ariel was a student in my Writing 39A course in 2018. Last year, we reconnected at a first-gen event on campus, where we began a dialogue about our experiences as first-generation students. After Mariel submitted “My Mother’s Migraines” to Lucid, we met up at a café near campus to chat about the essay. What started out as a conversation about her essay quickly morphed into a broader discussion about how writing has helped us explore the intersections of academic and personal identities, cultural heritage, family, health and medicine.

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This interview began in person in March 2020.

After classes moved online due to covid-19, Mariel and I continued the interview via Zoom and then followed up with additional questions via email.

Scott: You wrote this essay for a medical anthropology class. Can you talk a bit about why you took the course?

Mariel: I took [the course] because I was always interested in anthro and when I saw that this class had medical in front of it, I wanted to take it. I was very excited to learn that it was a mixture of traditional medicine and Western medicine, and how that affects a human body, or different bodies, like a political or governmental body—which was the focus of another class I took with the same professor. So I guess I was drawn to [the course’s focus] on the holistic approach, on the individual and overall wellness. But I [also] feel like I gained so much more insight on what it is to be well and healthy, and the different strategies—traditional medicine, like herbs, rituals, or cleanses—that people use when they have certain restrictions and barriers to Western medicine or biomedicine in general.

Scott: Can you talk about the assignment that you wrote this essay for?

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Mariel: This assignment was very different from anything I’d done at UCI. I think it was a final project—the professor said that instead of a final we were going to write an illness narrative. I was like, an illness narrative, what is that? And you know my bio [major] brain, I was like, we’re just going to write about different pathologies or diseases. But the assignment was to find someone who has a chronic illness and get to know a day in the life of this person. I was like, who am I going to do it on? I don’t have any friends who have chronic illnesses, and it’s not the type of conversation that you open up when you talk to someone: “Hey, what chronic illnesses do you have?” We don’t do that [laughs]. So it was kind of hard, but then I was like, why don’t I just do my mom? She’s literally had these migraines—they’re chronic, so I should just get to know my mom from that perspective. So I knew about the migraines as her daughter. But as an anthropologist, doing field notes, that’s when I learned so much about her and the things I wrote about in the essay and things about my mom I didn’t even know.

Scott: Will you tell me a bit about your process and how you prepared for doing fieldwork for an illness narrative?

Mariel: It took three or four weeks. I knew I needed to have solid information to

Mariel Calva Professor Fletcher Medical Anthropology (134A) 1 March 2019 My Mother’s Migraines The alarm clock goes off at 6:00 am, and despite the

Now that Mariel has had a chance to consider the process of writing this essay, we asked her how she might revise it today.

In the margins, you will find a few of her notes.

—The Editors

lingering migraine from the previous day my mom Angelica gets out of bed to make breakfast for my dad. Rattling pans in the kitchen echo through the thin walls of our small apartment, and the sweet yet bitter aroma of cafe de la olla coming to a slow boil spreads from the kitchen throughout the house. It is nearly freezing and there is a blanket of snow covering the roof of the apartment complex across from the kitchen window. Even before the true work of the day has begun, she is already enduring a pounding migraine. Still, she leaves my father’s breakfast cooking just long enough to reach into the medicine cabinet for pain killers, which she’ll take that morning with her te de siete azahares. Then she’ll continue her day’s work, without saying anything.

See p. 40

The pain is her secret, she does not want to worry our family.

Every morning my mother cleaned the household, fed me and prepared herself for a day of work as a house cleaner.

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To an outsider, everything would appear normal during the morning rituals, but she admits, “no one asked me how I was feeling, so I would keep the migraine headaches to myself.”

Whether it was a secret or not, she didn’t allow herself to succumb to the pain because like many first generation immigrants with limited work opportunities, she has a strict work schedule demanding her to make ends meet and raise me, all while struggling to control her migraines.

Angelica was faced with Johan Galtung’s structural violence phenomena, hindering her access to healthcare in a country which she mentions “was the land of opportunity” (Farmer 2006:449). As she fell between the cracks of a broken healthcare system, she was forced to rely on a combination of home remedies and meager trips to community clinics in her neighborhood, where she purchased over-the-counter pain medication that claimed to tackle even the toughest migraines. Leslie Charles identifies her coping mechanism as medical pluralism, which originally applied to the medical revivalism observed in South West Asian societies; however, over the last few decades medical pluralism spread to societies in the West (Penkala-Gawęcka et al. 2016:130). Medical pluralism is strongly criticized by

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know what I was going to write about.

So I talked to the TA and professor and asked, “What is an illness narrative?”

They were very helpful. I looked back at slides and tried to pinpoint certain words like “structural violence” and “medical pluralism” and thought about how they fit into my mom’s narrative. It was a process of elimination, thinking about what fit into her story. I went home for the weekend and interviewed my mom, recorded it, and listened back to it, in addition to my notes. I did an outline of what I wanted to talk about. After that I started writing.

Scott: Did everyone write about a personal topic?

Mariel: Everyone did this project and had to write about a person with a chronic illness. But not everyone wrote about something personal, such as a family member. Some people wrote about a friend or someone they met that quarter who was willing to talk about themselves.

But it was nice—not nice, because it sucks to have chronic illness—but that we were not alone, that everyone has something, which, you know, is part of living. I talked to my mom because I always wanted to know more about her migraines but was afraid to ask. It was taboo. So I guess this opened up a conversation and allowed

me to talk to her as a researcher, and not just as her daughter.

Scott: Had you read other illness narratives in the class or seen any models?

Mariel: I didn’t see written models but I did watch an anthropologist collecting field notes and talking about how they were going to implement them in their findings. So I kind of got an idea from that, and I talked to the TA—I’ve never written this, I’m not a good writer, I’m a bio major—but she was very helpful. And I think I did a good job. I hope!

Scott: You’re a public health major. Can you talk about why you were drawn to this major?

Mariel: Even before I wanted to go to UCI I knew I wanted to do something in the medical field. And I was very focused on pre-med. But then once I got to UCI, I was a biological sciences major for almost two years, and I just felt that it was so much about the itty-bitty of bio and chemistry, and wasn’t giving me the full picture of whether I wanted to go into the medical field. So then I took a public health class, and learned about the social determinants of health, and how that affects different populations, and the disparities, and it was just an eye-opener.

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Since I was small I was always my parents’ translator, secretary, different hats I would wear.

And I was like, wow, this is what I want to do; I want to focus on people’s health in the holistic approach and not just the lab. I know this is going to be difficult to weave into my practice, if I ever do that.

I ended up switching in my second year, spring quarter, and it was the best switch I’ve ever done. I really connected with the professors. I took a class with Professor Sami—it opened my eyes to what I want to do with this major.

Scott: Before, when you wanted to be a doctor, was that related to your family and their health?

Mariel: Yes. I guess since I was small I was always my parents’ translator, secretary, different hats I would wear. I remember my mom, she had two pregnancies, so I looked at the experience with her; I would go to the hospital and translate for her. When she had her gallbladder taken out I was the middleman between her and the physician. Since the beginning

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I got exposed to that. There was something about medicine that I really liked.

It was kind of like a game to treat and diagnose [patients]. And my grandma died from hydrocephalus, which is very unfortunate because I wasn’t able to be with her or my family because she lived in Mexico. And I wanted to know why and how that happened, and it added on to my existing interest.

Scott: In the essay, you talk about the language barrier being something that stresses your mom out and prevents her from seeking medical help. Are there explicit connections that you see between the development of your interest in the medical field and these types of barriers your mother faced?

Mariel: After migrating to the U.S., I would feel my parents’ impotence because they weren’t able to express their thoughts or feelings and get the full picture of whatever it may be, not even medical. I knew that if I had that skill I needed to step up and be there for them. Even now, I’m an interpreter for a clinic as well. So I work with the physicians and nurses.

And every time I see a patient, who are mostly Hispanic, low-income patients, and if they don’t know English, I feel like I see my parents in them and it hits home for me.

medical anthropologists, who stress patterns of hierarchy and the dominance of biomedicine in the modern world; the definition of “pluralism” loses its meaning when individuals like Angelica are excluded from acculturation to the American healthcare system and ultimately left to rely

See p. 36

on Mexican traditional medicine to treat a chronic illness (Penkala-Gawęcka et al. 2016:132). In Angelica’s case, she relies on her seven blossoms tea and Tylenol.

On her way to work that morning, migraine still painfully present, she wrapped herself in a winter coat, made sure she turned off the kitchen stove, and tossed her bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength caplets in her purse. The rattle reminded her that she still needed to find a community clinic where she could be seen on her days off, which are few and far between.

But in the meantime she sips her te de siete azahares to calm the source of her migraines, her nerves. By late morning, her migraine is almost unbearable. It punctures her head throughout the day, but because she must put food on the table, she persists. The stench from the Clorox bleach she pours into buckets exacerbates her migraine, intensifying the throbs along the right side of her head. Another pill.

But there is no relief until she gets home to take a quick nap before tending to her responsibilities as the homemaker. As 33

the day comes to an end my mom hopes her migraine does too, but it lingers up until bedtime.With hopes of waking up to no pain, she heads to bed.

The accumulated stress Angelica experiences on a day to day basis in order to make ends meet has had a negative impact on her health. Chronic stress became the root problem of her migraine headaches, which challenges Descartes definition of dualism (Mehta 2011:203). Dualism argues that there is separation between the mind and the body, but in her case the situation contributes to the results of high-quality studies on the role of life stress in the etiopathogenesis of chronic pain syndromes (Houdenhove et al. 2005:238). In other words, the stress and migraines are comorbidities complicating her health and wellbeing.

My mom and dad immigrated to the United States looking for what many claim to be the American Dream. To my mom it meant being close to my dad who would cross la frontera in order to support us. He was a field worker for California lands en la pisca, where he made a living earning less than minimum wage. And even though both were breadwinners, they fell short at the end of every month, leaving them with no choice but to skip a doctor’s visit when the migraines began. This was only temporary, my mom 34

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Scott: You haven’t told me about this before. Do you want to tell me a bit about what you do, where it is, and what drew you to this job?

Mariel: About a year ago I found this opportunity through one of our group chats. This clinic in Orange was looking for volunteers. I was like, maybe I could squeeze it in. I was still very afraid of adding more stuff to my plate because I had such a rough time with bio, but I was like, you know, I should put myself out there. And then I signed up, and got an interview. They had different positions, but the one that interested me most was the Spanish interpreter. For the interview I had to translate the medical jargon and the discussion between the physician and the patient. So I got the position, and I was really fortunate. I go every Saturday, on Saturday mornings from 8–12, and I interpret for four patients. It’s a free clinic, so we mostly serve Latinx community without insurance.

Scott: What kind of medical issues are addressed at the clinic, and what kinds of diagnoses and other information are you translating?

Mariel: It’s just mostly in-and-out patient care. We don’t have any surgical procedures. But we do have a lot of labs that get done, and there’s a lot of lab result

deliveries, so that can be a little stressful.

And I know it was for my mom when I used to interpret for her when she got diagnosed with pre-diabetes, she was very scared. So these patients we are helping are mostly diabeteic, and they have high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, so it’s very important for them to know that they need to take their medications or they’re going to have other side effects, other problems. So it’s mostly lab deliveries, make sure they’re getting the right refills. One of the most important things is that a lot of patients don’t follow up with the referrals because they don’t have the money. So I make sure to tell the doctor, “Can we find anything that’s cheaper, can we please do anything that we can in order to help them?” So it’s not as intense as the ER but it’s important.

The language barrier invites incomplete explanations and the lack of questions on the patient’s side because they do not know how to ask, and therefore leading to low adherence to medications and treatments.

Scott: You’re also becoming an advocate for the patients, too, in addition to being a translator?

Mariel: Yeah.

Scott: You’re not working with that clinic now?

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Mariel: I still interpret them through the phone, through telemedicine.

Scott: What has that been like?

Mariel: Because of covid-19 we have to interpret in a three-way call, and that has been interesting. I feel useful because I am able to bridge that gap between the physician and the patient, especially during such crucial times. We are [so] wrapped around COVID right now that we forget there are people suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes and need to keep up with it. Telemedicine has created a challenge for them as well as myself. I have to listen very closely to them because I can’t see their face, and they have to trust me. They have to trust that I will communicate everything to the physician and vice versa. My awareness [of] cultural and traditional medicine has heightened, because I wish I could tell them my mom’s home remedies for elevated sugar level since she is pre-diabetic as well. But that is not possible because there is no lobby where I can chat with them after they see the doctor.

It is a 15–20 minute call, and that’s all.

I’ve been at this clinic for over a year and my position as Spanish interpreter has definitely impacted my awareness over cultural and traditional medicine.

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Scott: Since we’re on the subject of barriers that patients face, maybe we can return to your essay. Where do you see a disconnect or conflict between traditional and Western approaches to medicine?

Mariel: I’m taking another class on this, global health, and this past week our research was cultural medicine, or cultural practices. I chose Mexican traditional approaches, and in one case there was a patient that had HIV that talked about how using these traditional practices actually reduced the side effects of the medication. I didn’t know that that was a thing—I thought it was just, I grew up knowing that these types of herbal teas or practices helped people . . . but there were these other cases where it did kind of create a barrier between the patient and the physician because the physician isn’t educated on these practices, and they think of it as less, while the patient thinks it’s better than Western medicine.

Scott: Can you say a bit about medical pluralism, which you reference in the essay?

Mariel: Medical pluralism can be defined as the employment of more than one medical system or the use of both conventional and complementary and

would say. She was mistaken, because the structural violence she faced regarding health care at the margins of the state of California corresponded to her lack of insurance (Carney 2015:200). Her obligation of bringing food to the table and her overlapping work schedule with limited hours of clinic operations were merely the visible dilemmas she had to deal with (Carney 2015:201).

With dismay she recalls feeling “like a bird living in a gilded cage,� and because there was nowhere for her to turn for medical treatment she was trapped between wanting to stay in America or return back to Mexico. She rarely socialized beyond necessary encounters at work and at the Mexican grocery store she frequented during the weekend.

A pill here and there, that was her self-prescribed treatment, and the only treatment she had. The healthcare system made sure to stigmatize and discriminate against women like her who lack health insurance and know little to no English (Carney 2015:210). The fear of medical debt, low health literacy, and verguenza, coerced her to rely on her seven blossoms tea and healing naps after her long day at work.

A little over a decade later, she still deals with the

See p. 38

sharp migraine headaches as she prepares for work in the mornings. Her access to affordable health care remains 37

hindered, but she is hopeful that one day there will be a universal health care law that alleviates not just the pain but the burden of being uninsured.

References Cited Farmer, Paul E., Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee (2006) Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine, PLOS Medicine, 3(10): 449.

Penkala-Gawęcka, Danuta, and Malgorzata Rajtar (2016) Introduction to the Special Issue “Medical Pluralism and Beyond,” Anthropology and Medicine 23(2): 129-134.

Mehta, Neeta (2011) Mind-body Dualism: A Critique from a Health Perspective, Mens Sana Monographs 9(1): 202-209.

Houdenhove, Boudewijn Van, and Patrick Luyten (2005) Beyond Dualism: The Role of Life Stress in Chronic Pain, Pain 113(1-2): 238-239.

Carney, Megan (2015) Eating and Feeding at the Margins of the State: Barriers to Health Care for Undocumented Migrant Women and the “Clinical” Aspects of Food Assistance, Medical Anthropology Quarterly International Journal for the Analysis of Health, 29(2): 196-215.

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alternative medicine for health and illness. Like I mentioned before, my mother relied on Mexican alternative medicine and sporadic emergency room visits in order to cope with her migraines. In the essay I talk about my mother’s exclusion from the American healthcare system, Western medicine. She tries to use her resources and practice medical pluralism, but the pluralism is lost because there is a disconnect once there is a barrier between either medical approach. This pushes my mother to rely more on Mexican traditional medicine rather than Western medicine, when a combination of both could improve her health at a faster rate.

Scott: What views do you have now about the home remedies your mother used to cope with her migraines?

Mariel: Before, I used to not really think about it much because it was just in my culture. Taking certain herbal teas, or having these ritual cleanses that my mom would talk to me about, we never did it ourselves, we never went to the curandero, which is like a healer. This one time she cleaned me with an egg, rubbed it all over me, and then cracked it open in a cup of water and said, “Oh look, you see the bad stuff in there?” And I mean, it just went over my head. I guess if my mom says this is what I’m supposed to

see, then that’s what it is. But the fact that this class opened up a conversation about that and made it a topic and a category in the university curriculum, I was like, oh my god, maybe this whole time I knew so much about it but I didn’t even know because it wasn’t part of American life. But after the class I thought that maybe this is something our family and our tradition has that I can bring to the table in other conversations.

This class opened up a conversation about [traditional medicine] and made it a topic and a category in the university curriculum.

Scott: Like, for example, in this conversation.

Mariel: Yes! Scott: So you write about the tea that your mom drinks to calm her nerves.

After studying medicine from the perspective of public health policy and the anthropological, have your views of treatments like te de siete azahores changed?

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Mariel: I think they did, because I didn’t really know how strong or impactful traditional medicine like the teas that my mom would drink was. When I was small I would think, those teas are just old people’s teas. And now it’s like knowing that that actually helped my mom in a lot of ways. My perspective on that is very different. Before I didn’t believe that it helped or had an impact on her life. I thought maybe it was a dietary—just part of our diet. But now I feel like it definitely has an impact. I bring my public health knowledge back, where cultural medicine is also an alternative and maybe a supplement to biomedicine, and it could definitely help mitigate side effects or even reach that full, overall wellness, that maybe isn’t possible with just one single approach. I still try to think about whether getting an MRI or something would have been more effective in some way. It was really hard for me to talk to her about it because, as you mention, it was her secret.

Scott: Can you tell me more about that?

Mariel: It was not until I interviewed her that I figured out, or that she revealed to me, that she didn’t want to worry us, but she was always waiting for us to ask her how she was. But it was taboo to talk about it; it’s this whole body and mind thing that I didn’t understand.

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Scott: Was there shame involved?

Mariel: I guess so. I guess Hispanics and Mexicans in particular never want to be weak in front of their family, or believe in depression. She was very prideful.

Scott: You refer to this shame with the word verguenza in the essay. But verguenza is more than just shame?

Mariel: Verguenza is such a packed word.

And you are right, it does mean more than just shame. It has a mixture of pride, shame, and guilt. My mom was prideful and did not want to look weak in front of us, but after having learned this myself, strong people can also be vulnerable.

She felt shame because she didn’t want to be a “burden” to us. But that was not the case at all. My dad is very supportive, and I think I was too even though I was only a child when she had these migraines. Nonetheless, she felt guilty for being “weak” in front of us and allowing herself to ask for help. I guess this is a trait I used to have, too, but I am slowly unlearning it.

Scott: Does she drink the tea for her migraines, or is it just to calm her nerves?

Mariel: She would say that her migraines were caused by stress, and when she was worried or couldn’t relax, that’s when she

I felt invisible. Like, who would care about what we use, or drink, or our traditions? I was shocked to see that people actually study that. took it. It was to reduce the side effects of migraines, not the migraine itself.

Scott: Before, did you think traditional medicine, or your culture in general, were things that were not studied at the university, or that these were things that you could study?

Mariel: I did. For sure. I thought that we were—as it is, I felt invisible. Like, who would care about what we use, or drink, or our traditions? I was shocked to see that people actually study that.

Scott: When you were reading the theorists you reference in the essay and learning about the things they describe, did you want to challenge the theory in any way?

Mariel: Yeah, I wanted to challenge what they were saying. When I was reading I wish I could have talked to them and

told them about my perspective and experience as someone who is living this. I guess this is because my identity is very Mexican first-gen, there’s a lot of talk in general, not about the specifics of [how] these terms apply to the day to day in the life of someone living this . . . . In order to make change in public health policy you need to really know and understand a community.

Once I become a caregiver, hopefully, I can make sure that I have an open mind and respect not just the Mexican traditional medicine but also Chinese and other approaches.

Scott: Did you have any doubts about how her story would work in an academic context? About how it would be received?

Mariel: Yeah, I did. I used to not feel like anyone cared about what my experience was, or what her experience was, in terms of our medical journey here.

So I was not encouraged to write about [it], because I thought no one cared.

Scott: Even in your medical anthropology class?

Mariel: I guess that gave me a little bit of comfort and a little bit of encouragement to write it. Especially since the professor and TA were like, wow, that’s

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a really good idea, you should definitely write about your mom. But if I wasn’t in the class I wouldn’t ever have written about her, and I would have never thought it was important. And I did have a lot of doubts about how it was gonna be received—not by the professor, but I thought, if this ever were to get published, I don’t think people will read it.

Scott: Were you worried about exposing her?

Mariel: I used to not really think about it. I used to not care. But I guess now in the political climate that we’re in it is a concern to me, and I don’t want to put her in any danger.

Scott: Had you written about her before, or about anyone in your family? In school? Outside of school?

Mariel: I had not. I had never written about anyone. I think both. My research essays were about the various struggles immigrants face, such as inaccessibility to health insurance and language barriers, but I never really brought in personal information about any of our experiences. I always felt like they didn’t want me to talk about it. But this time I was like, Mom, hey, I’m writing a paper, and I would really like to talk about you.

And she was like, yeah, that’s fine.

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Scott: Your focus on public health and your interests are so guided by your personal life, but yet you weren’t really writing about yourself. What helped you shift in this class to writing about your own experiences and making them central to your work?

Mariel: Personally, I was going through a lot as a second-year. I switched my major, and I was going through this really bad mental health crisis, and I felt very invisible. I was not advocating for myself, I was not advocating for my community, I was not advocating for my needs, and I was like, you know what, I’m going to write about it. I want people to know that this is the struggle, this is what we go through, and if I could maybe be some sort of inspiration for someone else, someone that could read my stuff and be like, wow, I’m not the only one, then that would feel like I satisfied what I needed in terms of advocacy not for myself but for others.

Scott: What did it mean, to you, to be able to write about something so personal for an assignment and receive a grade for your work?

Mariel: At first I was like, this is just a paper, this is just another assignment. But after I wrote it and put in so much time and

thought, [and] I interviewed my mom, it definitely felt like, dang, maybe this paper isn’t just like another assignment.

This paper is—I’m telling the professor or TA a part of my life and maybe how this class affected me in a good way. And I was very happy that I did, that I chose her, because I think this assignment shifted my way of thinking and how I approach things in life. Like, my research for other classes, I make it more personal, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or bad thing, but now I definitely make every assignment or project that I have a very personal—I make it personal to me because it impacts me more. This class shifted everything for me. It opened up my mind to so many opportunities that I could take part of, and before I felt like I was so tunnel-vision with bio that I was not letting other things come my way.

And I felt like I was so miserable and I was not having a good time. I asked, why am I having such a bad time, if college is supposed to be fun and you’re supposed to experience things and find out who you are and what your passions are? So this gave me a little bit of confidence as to what I wanted to do.

Scott: And writing about these experiences gave you that confidence? Because writing allowed you to engage with the material of your life for weeks—planning,

researching, writing, revising. Did the whole process help you make sense of all these things floating around in your head?

Mariel: Absolutely. Especially in regards to my needs. I think this goes hand in hand with the interview I did of my mom. Like, it was always such a taboo to talk about her migraines and what she needed. And now I’m very conscious of that. I ask her, what do you need now?

What would make your life better? Is there something I can do? Or can you reciprocate that with me? Can you ask me why I’m having a bad day or why I’m acting a certain way? It shifted my whole mindset. After applying these terms and ideas from this essay to her, I also applied them to myself.

Scott: So the invisibility she tried to give to her illness is what you were doing with anxiety and stuff you were feeling.

Mariel: Yeah. Once I made that visible to myself I was able to make it visible in my work and to other people, my mentors, people that care about me. I’m sorry if this is getting too emotional.

Scott: No, not at all! One reason I was drawn to this essay and to your work is because I encountered something similar in college. I didn’t feel invisible,

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necessarily, but I didn’t believe or understand that the authors we read, and ideas I was learning, related to me. It seemed entirely distinct from my other, nonschool life. I didn’t feel like I was a part of the conversation, but an observer.

Did writing this essay change your relationship to your family or mom?

Mariel: For sure. I guess I don’t want to sound like, oh my god, here she comes with her tea again, but I thought, now that I’m in America, this is the Western way that I’m supposed to think and have my brain work. It was part of my culture and I left it at that. I didn’t make that overlapping connection that culture and medicine or culture and higher education intertwined and could be talked about together. It was just like, these are separate and black and white, but there’s a gray area. But no, I have to be proud of my culture and what my culture brings to the table, and not just about medicine. It’s given me the opportunity to open my mind, even to my own family and my own tradition, and to accept it in its entirety.

Scott: Are there any other examples?

Mariel: One big thing is mental health.

I used to be very—I used to not accept mental health. Like, the culture I come

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from—what’s depression? What’s anxiety? And I guess now that I’m learning so much about it, I’m able to educate my parents, and I’m able to kind of be the middleman again in between the culture and the mental health aspect and tell them, this is a thing. I’m able to become an advocate and educate them and stuff.

Scott: So that’s bringing a Western understanding to a more traditional understanding; has the reverse happened as well?

Mariel: Other than traditional medicine, maybe just, like, superstitions. I know my parents have a lot of superstitions, like with the curanderos. Wearing an amulet is a good example for me. There’s this bracelet that my mom gave me that my godfather got from Mexico, and it’s “blessed,” or it has some sort of healing ritual that they did to it, and I used to be like, I don’t need that, but then I brought it over—I always wear it. I have it on my left ankle and I guess that’s something that I talk about with my friends because they’re like, oh my god, your ankle bracelet is so cute, and then I tell them, well this is actually what it means, and why I wear it.

Scott: You talk about this here, and it seems like with your friends, with a confidence that doesn’t bend to the skepticism you might get from others.

If you know you don’t know a lot of things, that’s a good thing, because I feel like the more I learn and the more I’m able to open up my mind, the more I’m able to interpret my story, and understand other people’s stories.

Mariel: I know there are people that are going to be skeptical, maybe some will agree and maybe some won’t, but I feel like because I’ve learned so much about that, including in academic research, people are entitled to believe if that’s gonna work or not. It’s helped me personally.

Scott: Reading this essay now, is there anything about it you would change?

Mariel: Having these discussions and revising the essay has definitely shown me how much I’ve grown and learned.

Some of the questions you asked me I didn’t even need to look up terms—it just comes out of me now. At the time I needed to do a lot of research for this paper because I didn’t know what the heck these terms were and how they applied to my life. But now after it’s been about a year, after all that reading and articles and research that I’ve done in other classes, I was able to pull from my

knowledge and just write. I think now that I could have written so much more in this essay, but because I didn’t know as much, I didn’t. And I feel like that’s another thing and why I am so dedicated and so motivated to continue my education. Because if you know you don’t know a lot of things, that’s a good thing.

Because I feel like the more I learn and the more I’m able to open up my mind, the more I’m able to interpret my story and understand other people’s stories, and then come together with myself and reflect on what I’ve learned and how I can apply it.

Scott: Thank you for sharing your story, Mariel. Any parting words?

Mariel: I just want to say: I never thought my work would be something that was talked about. It makes me feel visible— and a little scared.

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MIRROR Y Andrea Gonzalez

ou reach your arm, turn the plastic knob to the precise temperature and let the water run, heat up, boil like the kettle of Chinese detox tea that your aunt prescribed to you as a birthday gift, that she claims helped her melt the fat. Thank you Tia! smile and be polite. The water has reached your ideal temperature, you step in, and let yourself steep in the tub. The water stops, your flesh exposed to the cold air. You step out and dry the water that is stuck between the folds of your body. You walk out of the fogged-up room and into the adjoining bedroom, where you are immediately criticized by the glossy mirror that extends itself from one wall to the other. Look: this, this is what you need to cut. To be beautiful. To love yourself, and to be loved by others. You know you’re beautiful, at least that’s what you tell yourself to feel better, but fail, the mirror wins. You lead your hands through your curves, under your stomach, then show it to the mirror as a sacrifice. Breath. Don’t cry. You are beautiful / You are ugly.

It’s 3018, Baby!

(mixed media) Kara Worrells Gutiérrez

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Slumber

(sculpture) Angel Ge

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Tracy-Han Lam

A LIFELONG STRUGGLE S

he felt her heart race, jumping out of her chest. She found shelter under a stack of hay. Suddenly, the soil beneath her shook and a loud, piercing ring shot into her ears. She slowly peeked her head out and saw pieces of rubble fly in all sorts of directions, the dust surrounding her, covering every inch of the land. She heard the unforgettable wails and cries echoing throughout her village. She realized the Americans had dropped another bomb.

She was my mother at three years old.

This was Nha Trang, Vietnam in 1971.

She walked back with her close friend, Gina, and Gina’s mother, Binh. She leaned against the door of Gina’s house, looking far into the distance. “Your mother isn’t

coming back, My.” Those words would repeat over and over again—as if Binh was a broken record. She had been abandoned when she was just three months old; they didn’t know her biological mother’s name, her address. She was half-Vietnamese, half-black, which the Vietnamese saw as absolutely disgusting. Her own people despised her. “Vietnam . . . was never my country,” she longingly sighed to me.

America was never mine. Whenever I was in Anaheim, California, a predominantly Vietnamese area, I felt completely like I didn’t belong. As I passed by Lee’s Sandwiches restaurant with my chubby fingers wrapped around my mother’s finger, I listened to the many ongoing

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I was too black for the Vietnamese in Anaheim, but I wasn’t black enough for the Africans in San Bernardino.

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whispers around me. “What is that thing?”

They laughed. My heart felt heavy. My breathing became unsteady. My legs were wobbly and shaking. I glanced around and noticed there was a little girl my age. She was the typical Vietnamese: snow white skin with straight black hair; her hair flowed down like black ink onto blank paper. I was nothing like her: dirty skin with frizzy brown hair; my hair untamed like an uncontrollable and tangled weed in a garden. “Don’t look at the người mỹ đen (the blacks),” her father whispered as he clutched his wallet in his hand and brought his phone closer to him. I was too black for the Vietnamese in Anaheim, but I wasn’t black enough for the Africans in San Bernardino.

“Waddup, Cuh?” I had an obsession with Hot Cheetos and I couldn’t help it—I needed to go to the liquor store. It was midnight; a life-threatening hour. I remember he was wearing a blue tank top, with baggy and dim jeans—I could see the Calvin Klein logo on his underwear as he sagged. I tried to ignore him, but he kept following me. In San Bernardino, one of the most dangerous cities in the country, anything

can happen. Rapist? Murderer? Both?

I increased my steps and walked faster.

He gripped my shoulder and I expected a bullet to spiral into my body. “You live on McKinley Avenue, right?” I let out a relieved breath and nodded. He was Martin, a well-known Crip in my area.

“Let me take you home.” I was shocked— this gangbanger, this “monster,” asked to assist me home. My tiny house came into view, and he shook hands with an approaching man I knew as De’Shaun.

“You can’t be hanging with chinks on this block. Stay with your n*ggas,” he whispered to Martin. He gave me a sorry look before disappearing into the dark streets.

“I know what it was like being different,” my mom expressed. “It was after Binh died.” Binh had passed away from diabetes and Gina was moving into her boyfriend’s home; my mom was taken in by a family nearby. “I was a slave.” They forced her to wash the huge pile of dishes, prepare food, babysit their children, and travel to the mountains to tend to their cows. She was seven. “They always sat and drank, while I did everything.” She rolled her eyes. She refused to explain her time there—“you can’t even imagine what I had

Figure 1.

My family in Vietnam.

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to face everyday.” Then, Gina fought to boy, and what we had . . . wasn’t enough bring home my mom. They built a shack for both of us. Cabinets were drawn. to call home, composed of mud and leaves. Empty. Pantry was swung open, and a Both Gina and my mom would plant corn cup of Kirkland’s Instant Mac and Cheese and sell it at the market. “You know,” she filled each shelf. I scrunched up my face began, “one corn was worth 2,000 dong.” and quickly shut the doors. Not a chance, I That’s eight cents in America. They would thought. I had eaten that several times, for journey miles and miles away, with their several days—to the point of me throwing feet showing colors of red and purple, up the yellow contents. I had a recurring with the sun beaming down on them. Just nightmare of a terrifying, nine-foot-tall for eight cents. “Gina had eight damn macaroni. Now that’s real fucking intense. kids,” my mom chuckled, “and we had ‘Til this day, I always avoid mac and to feed all of those tiny gremlins.” They cheese; the sight of it churns my insides. had to add water into the milk containers. I’d actually rather starve. Like, actually.

Ration their food. Monitor their spending.

“You’re such a weakling,” my mom It was never enough. teased. “We ate corn all day and everyday.”

My mom found a hobby, through all that t was never enough. I laid on the cold struggle, that she absolutely loved—garblack and white tiles of my kitchen dening. I always hated the garden in our floor. My stomach released a low, deep backyard—it attracted bugs and unwanted rumble—as if there was a thunderstorm animals like rats. But the garden saved within my body. Stop, I said to myself. her and Gina’s family. In the morning, she Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. My BlackBerry began to would pour the crystal water over the violently shake. “Did you eat yet?” “Yes,” I green, glistening plants. She watched her lied. It was 6 pm and I was ten years old. lettuce, kale, and mint grow to incredible I had skipped my meals; I sacrificed my lengths. She was snipping off the leaves, bowl of steaming rice and juicy beef to my one by one, as they gracefully kissed the younger brother, Andy. He was a growing ground. She was listening to the birds sing

I

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their beautiful melody, before they were rudely interrupted. Gina rushed outside, panting, “We can go to America!”

“You’re definitely an authentic mixed person,” the man in the lab coat claimed.

He wiped off her arm, examining the tube of blood, and grinned, “You have American in you, My.” After, Gina sold anything they had: the house, the car they had just bought, the children’s clothes.

They were given plane tickets and were finalizing the papers in December 1989.

Gina’s family could only board if they were related to my mom. Gina lied about her age and changed her relationship to my mom. Gina was now my grandma.

“It felt so great,” she expressed. “Those peasants who bullied me were canoeing their asses to America for days and days, while I was sipping guava on a plane.”

Because she was half-black. Ironic, right?

It was the first time in her life that she accepted herself. That she was proud of her mixed race. Because she was different from her traditional Vietnamese neighbors, she endured so much pain and suffering, but was given an opportunity for a new journey. As she boarded the

"Those peasants who bullied me were canoeing their asses to America for days and days, while I was sipping guava on a plane."

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plane, she observed Vietnam one last time—the country that hated her. She screamed in joy and flipped it off, raising her middle finger high. Something had changed. When she looked down from the window of her plane, she noticed how beautiful Vietnam was: how the mountains complemented the vibrating, evergreen plains. She saw how the ocean waves crashed against the rocks aggressively and how the ocean caressed the sandy shores. She watched the baby blue sky filled with soft, puffy clouds and peacefully dozed off—dreaming of her new life.

They migrated to California; the climate mirrored Vietnam’s humid and

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blazing high temperatures. “I was excited, but reality was creeping on us,” she explained. “I was expecting to have a Louis Vuitton bag or a hot American with abs and light highlights,” she laughed, “but, you know, I guess poverty was great too.” She began to work at a factory; she would leave early in the morning and return late at night. On her days off, she had to take care of Gina’s children and bring them to school, no matter what: whether she was sick, whether or not the bus wasn’t operating. She wanted them to have the life they deserved—they needed to be successful in school to do so. “Why didn’t you go to school?” I asked.

“In Vietnam, I wasn’t allowed to, because

Figure 2.

Mom’s Green Card. “I look like a crackhead.”

I was half-black. On top of that, I was scared to. Children would pull my hair and call me names. They’d use slurs. Plus, I was already eighteen in America and I had to work.” That’s why she would toss my job applications. McDonald’s. Macy’s.

Marshall’s. MAC. Trashed.

“I depend on you. Your little brother Andy depends on you.”

That’s why she enrolled me in a prestigious, mostly-white school.

I graduated from Citrus Valley High School in 2018. I was Top 52 of my class, with a 4.17 gpa. Citrus Valley was one of the most competitive schools in California: five students had a 5.0 gpa, the average ap classes taken was twelve. I was shy, and rarely spoke—scared to open my mouth or speak my mind. “You’re kind of like your dad,” my mom chuckled. “He never stood up to his mom; I had to leave him.” “He was nhút nhát (confidenceless), and a big ass . . . con thỏ (pussy).” That kind of described me in high school.

I was an outlier; I didn’t belong with Sally, Shannon, Sheldon or the Scotts and the Smiths. I had the same four friends throughout my four years there, and they were minorities, just like me. Kaitlyn

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Figures 3 and 4.

My áo dài and Kaitlyn’s vestido.

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Galarza cooked flavorful tamales with packets of corn dough and sweet filling wrapped in banana leaves, while I cooked colorful phố with steaming broth and soft noodles accompanied by slices of beef floating on top. Daniela Gomez celebrated her quinceañera (birthday) by dancing her choreography, while I celebrated giỗ (deathday) by burning cash—the flames igniting the material to offer our ancestors. Mariana Lopez greeted her grandma’s friends with kisses on the cheek, while I greeted my grandma’s friends with a respectful bow. Elizabeth Salamanca praised Jesus with candles, while I praised Buddha with incense. You know, when I visited my first Caucasian friend, Jefferey, he didn’t remove his shoes before entering his home—he left his shoes on. I looked at him, puzzled and baffled, as if I’d witnessed him drop-kick a baby. This sumn white shit. Did I just enter the home of a psychopath? Later on, I realized each race and each ethnicity has their own customs; they’re completely different and unique (yes, even white people).

It was the middle of March, and kids were scrambling to see their acceptance letters. “You got accepted

into Johns Hopkins and waitlisted at UC Berkeley!” my friend Kaitlyn squealed.

It was as if the world slowed down; the voices around me abruptly stopped and a burning sensation crept up the back of my neck—eyes were shifted towards me. Like a script from a cheesy Netflix Original, Jessica Sanders walked up to me and yanked the phone out my hand. “Definitely Photoshopped. I’m cheerleading captain and got a 1590 on my sat. Johns Hopkins would never, in an alternate universe, choose you over me.” On a regular day, I would sit in my seat in silence, taking the blows from her harsh words. Something had changed.

By September, a new chapter of my life would unlock—nothing mattered. She would fade away, her existence erased from my mind. Suck my nuts, Jessica Sanders. I smiled at her. “I got a 1250 on my sat,” I replied confidently. “Maybe they wanted someone with a personality.

I actually denied them. I’m going to UC Irvine.” Kaitlyn roared with laughter, as Jessica Sanders sat down with hues of tomato-like red spreading across her face.

I’d finally destroyed the negativity that engulfed me, spiting me in and out. I finally

I looked at him, puzzled and baffled, as if I’d witnessed him drop-kick a baby. This sumn white shit.

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had control in my life, had freedom. I finally could be who I wanted to be. I was a hoa lan, or an orchid; it takes patience to grow one. It can take from half a year to a decade—you won’t see their beautiful flowers for a while. I saw that my little bud was starting to bloom. My flower began to show its hidden beauty to the world, shedding its once boring bud to show delicate petals and vibrant color.

who are you, really? you are not a name or a height, or a weight or a gender you are not an age and you are not where you are from you are your favorite books and the songs stuck in your head you are your thoughts and what you eat for breakfast on saturday mornings

you are a thousand things but everyone chooses to see the million things you are not you are not where you are from you are where you’re going and i’d like to go there too

Tracy-Han Lam, I signed. “Are you Hispanic/Latino?” No. “Please indicate how you identify yourself.” Black or African-​ American. Asian. I scratched my head in frustration. Black or African-​American.

The Mesa Court worker looked at me in confusion and asked, “Are you mixed?”

“Uh . . . yeah, I think I look too Vietnamese, so I just—” She interrupted with a giggle, “It doesn’t matter how you look—matters how you identify.”

College: a time to discover what you want, who you are. As I observed the new environment around me, there were splashes of different students: different colors, different backgrounds, different styles of clothing. I was given an opportunity; a journey to find myself, find my identity. UC Irvine became a community, a safe haven, and a source of strength.

C

runch. I squished the dry, burnt-​ yellow leaves beneath me as I walked back to my dorm. Beep. Light flashed red.

I rolled my eyes; for paying an outrageous amount, UC Irvine can’t even provide working scanners. Beep. Light flashed

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green. Finally, the door unlocked and I climbed the long stairs to study for my second biology midterm. Loud music filled my ears; I recognized the song as Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.” My knees gettin’ weak and my gun might blow but we gon’ be alright. I could see the empty cups of instant ramen. I could feel the heaviness of the pencil as he forcibly pushed down the lead onto the paper. I could see the pained expressions through the man’s eyes. How they longed to tear up. How he crumpled up his eyebrows when he got the wrong answer. How

he pulled out his hair in frustration, in stress. “I have a midterm tomorrow,” he mumbled exhaustedly. He rubbed his soft brown eyes and sighed, “I just don’t know what to do. I feel lost.” I wished the stranger luck. He pulled out a document and from the corner of my eye, it read: Francisco Reyes. Requesting Withdrawal from University.

That was such a common thing—dropping out. I felt uneasy. What if I was next?

I couldn’t study anymore. I tugged on the left pocket of my Nike jacket and retrieved my phone. I tapped on the neon green iMessage app and texted my close hallmate Jocelin. Fuck it.

Figure 5.

Self-explanatory; I’m pretty dumb for this.

“Damn, you’ve been through hell and back,” Jocelin sighed as she gulped down her sixth shot of Bacardi. I had just unpacked my complex problems, my past.

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I swirled the clear liquid around, disgusted by the lingering smell. “Well, I’m still going through hell,” I replied, while slurring each word. I could barely focus with the pounding sounds of Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” playing in the background.

Everything Jocelin and I said was the funniest thing on Earth—we laughed at a bowl of milk for fifteen minutes. I felt light, like a piece of fluffy cotton candy. I felt like I could do a backflip, even though I’ve never done one before. I felt invincible; I gained confidence and I felt prettier.

I wasn’t thinking of anything that would normally worry me everyday. I was living in the moment—each moment and each second felt great.

I grabbed my journal and turned the slim pages until I reached a blank sheet.

Being around this book has always evoked my deepest feelings—I can confide and record whatever I please. I started to feel a heavy sensation of dizziness and spinning.

I wrote, while intoxicated: “I frickin’ lub errrrrrverybodyy! I hate myself tho aahaaaa.”

I go deeper into my insecurities that stemmed from childhood—from bullying, from failing to meet expectations. Just like

Figure 6.

Drew a bottle while drunk. You should try it sometime.

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my mom, I cope with humor and always try to be optimistic.

Something had caught my attention— a shamrock, faint green sticky note. I followed it and landed on a marked page: A Letter to my Little Brother. I inhaled a sharp breath and read:

Dear Andy, I’m worried. Mom’s education isn’t even at elementary level—she can’t

school. I see your lifeless body, laying

spell my name. She works from 9 am

still on the concrete surround by crim-

to 9 pm then comes home to clean

son blood. As the eldest, I am expected

and cook. She can’t pay all her bills.

to be a good role model for you; I

You love San Bernardino, with your

fought through the bullying of being

memories of riding our bikes down

mixed-race, through the long nights of

the road or buying from the local

crying and studying. I go to college not

ice cream man. I see a different San

for me, but rather for you and Mom.

Bernardino. I see our neighbors give

But, it’s hard. Your grades are slipping.

in to the gangs. I see Daniel, who was

My grades are slipping. Mom was a

four years old at the time, shot and

slave in Vietnam and she is a slave here.

killed by one of these gangs, right

Andy, you and I are slaves here—to the

down our street. I see the twelve drive

American education system. It is our

around, interrogating innocent blacks

owner, our new oppressor . . .

and turning a blind eye to actual crime.

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You see yourself strolling home after

Then, I stopped reading and started thinking, while still intoxicated.

Instead of encouraging awareness, autonomy and individuality, the education system is conditioning children to think, to act in a certain way. Obey authority without question.

Conform to social standards. Complete your tasks, think nothing of it. You will enter into the middle class. You will marry, have children, buy a house, and spend years paying off debt. You will retire. Your voice was not heard, nor shall it ever be heard. Your position in society was nothing more than a mere placeholder for

a job which needed to be done. You never stimulated humanity through innovation or creativity. You were simply a puppet bound by the strings of your education.

Like a commercial for drugs, the education system is selling you a product (a degree), lying about the ingredients, and you can receive deadly side effects (loans, deteriorating mental health). You are nothing more than a cyborg, waiting foolishly and aimlessly to be stuffed with useless information of non-interest.

You’re playing a game you’re destined to lose. America is supposedly a prosperous country that fulfills dreams; but it’s barely

You will enter into the middle class. You will marry, have children, buy a house, and spend years paying off debt. You will retire. Your voice was not heard, nor shall it ever be heard.

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different from my mother’s time in Vietnam. For some, it’s a living nightmare.

Goddamn, I thought. I mean, that’s some dark shit. I’m just wasted right now.

Of course, I am chained by the outrageous amount of loans and interest rates. I am struggling to keep my mentality—each midterm destroys a part of me. However . . . it has been one of the most important bits of my life. I have learned to love myself, to embrace myself, to reinvent myself. I’ve created a circle of friends that support and appreciate me. I love the random trips to nearby 24-hour diners, following Bob Ross painting tutorials at 2 am, and lying down on the grass at Aldrich Park.

I leaned back onto the squishy pillow. As I drifted into sleep, I absorbed and soaked in everything. “You’ve been through so much,

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my child,” my mother desperately cried, “and I’m so sorry.” She shouldn’t be sorry.

Socially, struggle is a negative—there’s a cultural stigma attached to it. Struggling is okay. Struggling is necessary. I truly believe that struggle helps keep me grounded and is a learning opportunity. I gathered strength and reinforced myself.

That, and things like friends and family, makes me strong—makes me the warrior I am today. The world really is my oyster; I can pull anything out of it I want to. I suddenly felt this blackness come over me, like a blanket. It was making my eyes feel heavier and heavier, like they were dumbbells. I had faded into the darkness—but the moon became brighter and brighter through the endless night.

Struggling is okay.

Struggling is necessary.

Karina Mercedes Martinez

FUMES Here I go again Painting Corner of my eyes burning You know That toxic chemical Dribbling down my cheeks /Paint fumes are not unlike the green gases fumigating my home/ Fear is a bug That lives in my mattress I know of its friends They bite while I dream of something better tomorrow I’ll scratch and rip at the rashes on my skin I hate That I lay there stupidly And let them feed No one believes that a bug Lives in my mattress (Not since pest control flipped its home upside down and said trust me you’re good) I can tell by the way people pucker their lips Plus I don’t have photographic proof Just bites in a neat line like hickeys Reflection From my nipple to my ear (photograph) Maybe they think I sucked them myself Jorge Káram Padilla Maybe they think I’m mad

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Few believe me when I say I used to be horrible Tell me one bad thing you’ve done There’s no way to show them the bruised Shins I’ve kicked Arms I’ve twisted Paint balls of hate I’ve spit from across classrooms Bullet after bullet from my raging mouth Burgundy bull’s-eyes right between the brow Of some kid whose hand I never saw raised again But those images are foggy They hang on a line in a dark corner of my mind now, drying No doing anything about them now

Cameron Sherry

WHO EATS LAST? I

sit at the dining room table tapping away on my laptop along to the sounds of the evening that come in through an open window. I exhale as I push away from the table, taking the liberty of stretching my limbs. Crack, crack, crack. I sigh in satisfaction. That’s better! But the peace is fleeting as my stomach begins to grumble.

As if by magic, my mom comes thudding down the hallway to the dining area, sticks her head in and complains about how tired she is from her two jobs, gesticulating wildly as she urges me to get ready to go out to eat.

It’s one of my all-time favorites tonight—Stonefire Grill! I can hear my mom yelling at my siblings a few rooms over, her shouts mixing with the subtle overtones

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Conversations of a new generation overpowering the whispers of the past.

of lagging blue-collar workers exhaustedly driving home. I can make out the quiet shutting of a few doors. My mind becomes lost in the lull of the late evening, the world coalescing into a fuzzy blur.

I can see her running; tears stream down her face. It is only her and her sister, now.

The fire engulfing her home is red, like the evening sun. Like the ground. Like blood.

Gasp! I come back to reality, my attention suddenly routed back into my own head, into my own stomach. Oh man, I must be really hungry. My younger siblings are already trudging to the car, and I pull on my shoes in the middle of a gaze from my mom that says, “why weren’t you ready five minutes ago when I told you we were leaving?!” I smile apologetically as I pull open the door, lock, and close it behind me. I’m the last one out.

70 LUCID

My brother and sister are already arguing about who gets to use my mom’s phone during the car ride. I pull out my phone, exasperated, saying they each get only fifteen minutes before I force them to actually communicate with each other.

They grin gleefully, knowing full well they likely wouldn’t have been using anyone’s phone if they had kept the act up. My mom places a ghost story from YouTube on speaker as we start to pull out from the driveway, and all I can think about as we start to drive down the street is what I did to deserve listening to my brother raging about his new video game obsession as a blood-curdling scream emanates from my mom’s phone.

Screams echoing, then silence.

At the restaurant, our order finally arrives, and my mom immediately pushes the chosen fare closer to my siblings and me, gesturing to take some food even as she begins vigorously slicing pieces of salmon and moving them to my sister’s plate. “Eat more!” “You are skin and bone!” “I need to get you fat!” She seems to have no expression as she waits. But I notice her eyes grow a bit softer while she watches us relish every morsel. She rehearses this routine, without fail, every time we eat out, waiting patiently until we

finish taking all we want before moving a small portion to her plate.

The subdued sound of silverware against ceramic grows in magnitude.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

The sound of gunfire, bullets ricocheting, shadows falling with a soft thud.

I watch my siblings move heaps of food to their plates; they literally breathe in their portions. The younger ones don’t seem to notice mom’s routine. But I notice.

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So, I invariably make a point of asking, “Mom, are you sure you don’t want any more?” and waiting for her “no, I’m okay” or “no, go ahead” before I take anything for myself. Even then, I leave more than what I know she’ll take and eye my siblings to make sure they understand that soon their age of plundering is over. The meal is moderately short, but the conversation that ensues is just as rich as the meal we have finished.

Conversations of a new generation overpowering the whispers of the past.

Recounting my mom’s actions in private always makes me shed tears. She was raised as the spoiled princess of a rich, educated Cambodian family. She lived life gloriously and took full advantage of her status by bullying the local boys. She was happy, to say the least.

Then her parents were slaughtered.

All nine of her brothers came next.

Then two of her three sisters.

The genocide enacted by the Khmer Rouge and instigated by Pol Pot swept through the country, aiming to massacre

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the educated elite in a poorly thought-out, swiftly executed political coup.

She was seven years old.

She watched a starving brother die from parasites after eating an infested piece of raw meat.

She lived for days on a single grain of dry rice.

She went to sleep not knowing if she would wake up.

She fled from her home country and still hasn’t been able to go back.

She came here.

She always eats last at a meal.

Well, she used to. Now I will.

SPRING 2020 UCI COMPOSITION WRITING AWARDS

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Jackie Way, 39B Course Director

Kat Lewin, 39A Course Director Teaching Writing 39A at UC Irvine is one of the great joys of my life. There simply isn’t room to outline everything about this course that I find reaffirming, intellectually engaging, transformative—like, if the human race is about to be invaded by aliens and the only way to save us is to have someone distract the alien leader by talking for a thousand consecutive hours . . . just send me there and ask me what I love about Writing 39A. But since there are no alien emperors to bore to death, I’ve narrowed it down.

The one thing that makes this course unique among every other writing class I’ve taught or attended is the focus on style. Style, as in the how of writing— choosing how to present yourself, how to organize your ideas, how you want to relate to the reader. The art of making choices. Often, bold ones.

When I think about what makes WR 39B such an empowering foundation for our students’ intellectual growth, it is the critical reading we practice that matters most.

Critical reading isn’t just about comprehending what other people have written, but also about responding to it and understanding why we ourselves respond the way we do. It is simultaneously an interpretative and reflective process that demands we get to know how our own minds work on the way to learning that our thoughts about the world matter.

Rachael Collins, 39C Course Director Without Composition’s emphasis on the student’s self-empowerment, 39C could simply feel like an intimidating confrontation with dense and difficult academic writing. But our students come out of the course with an attitude that won’t be charmed by expressions which appear to be incontrovertible because they initially feel impenetrable. On the contrary, students learn to prioritize their own engagement, discovering and developing a style of thinking that finds its home in multiple, integrated perspectives.

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Writing 39A

Semi-regularly, a student will come, unbidden, to my office hours. On occasion, this student will challenge me with an already well-executed draft yearning for further criticism and direction between drafts. Rarely, this student will have done additional reading on his own, supplementing our required class texts with a self-purchased book of personal essays by an inspiring author. Once and only once, will this student compose an articulate argument cleverly composed around, in the judge’s words, “imagined dialogues with the author whose work is being analyzed . . . deftly illuminating the central argument with a case-in-point about the

Bryce Lillmars, Instructor

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effectiveness of dialogue.” This exceptional student, Yaosheng Xu, and his “exceptionally stylish and smart essay,” “‘Listen Carefully! I’m Talking’: Dialogues in Dark Comedy,” stands as testament to the one-of-a-kind contributions of our undergraduate community at UCI. In introducing Yaosheng and his work in 39A, the author himself put it best: “‘Why am I writing? Before the before, I might have said, ‘for a grade.’ Before, I might have said, ‘for fun.’ Now, I say, ‘for me and the world.’”

Published here in Lucid, his words now enter that dialogue with, and for, the world.

Yaosheng Xu from

“Listen Carefully! I’m Talking”: Dialogues in Dark Comedy “When I’m getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say— and two thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say.” —Abraham Lincoln

T

here is a house that appears in front of me, half white, half black, with a plate “Dark Comedy” on the front door. I step into it, go right forward to the living room. Only two chairs and a table are in this room; on the table, two cups of tea are blowing slight hot steam; next to them is a book, I know it, Calypso; behind the table, David Sedaris, the author of the book, sits there: “Welcome, Jonathan, I’ve heard you want to write a memorable dark comedy, right?” I take the seat, looking at the writer of the book, and say, “yes, Mr. Sedaris, how can you make your audiences laugh then cry, back and forth, just like what you did in your books?”

“That’s my superpower, Jonathan,” Sedaris laughs, “but your question is really broad and hard to answer. You can use millions

of techniques in order to make your audiences laugh or cry, but why not focus on one—dialogue?”

“Do you know the comedy was a category of drama, and can be played on a stage?”

Sedaris picks up the tea cup and blows slightly. “Of course, it originated from Ancient Greece. They had a play script for each comedy, right?” “Exactly, play script.”

Sedaris takes up Calypso and opens it: “you can make people laugh using pure dialogue, check this out. It’s from my recent book Calypso, in the chapter titled ‘Your English Is So Good’. It’s about my experiences of traveling abroad”: Cashier: Me: Cashier: Me:

Hello, how are you this evening?

Has your house ever been burgled?

What?

Your house—has anyone ever broken into it and stolen things?

(Sedaris 96)

“What is your first feeling when you see this excerpt?” David Sedaris asks me. I laugh while answering, “a drama in the theater, a real comedy in front of me, two comedians on the stage.”

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Writing 39B

Upon entering my WR 39B class on the rhetoric of fairy tales, students often worry about how to write an original argument on a text that has been read and discussed for centuries. Kate Martin’s paper on Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” wonderfully shows that one’s affective response to a seemingly timeless tale can serve as a gateway to critical reading and argument. Many 21st-century readers might find the blood and gore of Perrault’s tale inappropriate for a child audience, but Kate, closely examining that discomfort, uncovers a sinister motive behind the story’s histrionic horror: she reveals how Perrault harnesses the conventions of a cautionary tale to warn against curiosity, how he partakes in and perpetuates a culture of

Stefan Karlsson, Instructor

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victim-blaming, how he promotes and sanctifies restrictive gender roles, ultimately serving to make uncritical obedience to patriarchal authority seem attractive, or inevitable, to his child audience.

Through her careful analysis of Perrault’s disquieting rhetorical choices, she not only dismantles the power of the “timeless tale,” but she asks us to think critically about how and why we tell stories, lest we fall into Perrault’s narrative trap and mindlessly promulgate harmful values. The stories of our collective past can themselves be forbidding doors to enter, but writers like Kate who elucidate the darkness and give form to difficult feelings should embolden us, dispelling fear with insight and imagination.

Kate Martin from

Because I Said So: Creating the Fairy Tale of Authority

P

arents have used fairy tales to instruct their children for generations, reading tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” to convey the importance of parents’ words to wild or unruly children. With the commonality of such a pastime, it is unsurprising that Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” though seemingly educational and harmless to the unassuming eye, serves as one of the tools by which parents instill order and compliance in children. From the childish characterization of the heroine to the reinforced 17th-century power dynamics and gender norms, Perrault’s “Bluebeard” quells children’s emerging sense of imagination and individualism under the guise of the cautionary tale.

Children reading “Bluebeard” can hardly learn the importance of logic, as regardless of the heroine’s perceived intelligence, no line of reasoning supports her in her circumstances. Perrault places her in a situation where she could either not enter the little room or enter it; not entering the room leaves Bluebeard’s crimes

unanswered for, yet entering it portrays the heroine as foolish for succumbing to temptation. What little critical thinking Perrault does give to the heroine lies solely in frustrating repetition—“‘Just one moment more . . . Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?’”—which is a blatant reliance on luck rather than true wit, though Bettelheim might categorize it as entertaining (Perrault 191). Once the heroine enters the room and drops the key, “The bloodstain would not come off because the key was enchanted and nothing could clean it completely. When you cleaned the stain from one side, it just returned on the other” (Perrault 190).

Perrault likely intends to chastise the heroine’s rashness and lack of forethought.

However, taking into account the futility of the heroine’s situation, Perrault really makes it evident to child readers that independent reasoning is always thwarted by some unforeseen factor. Such a belief contradicts any celebration of wit or creativity that might be evident in this piece; why should children try to think for themselves if, somehow, they are always wrong? Tatar responds that a tale such as this one “really aims to deter children from being too inquisitive about the world they inhabit or deviating in any way from behavioral norms,” postulating that the ultimate goal of the cautionary tale is to promote the beliefs of the past generation (Tatar 30).

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Writing 39C

I submitted Michelle Ly’s essay as an excellent Advocacy Project to the Writing Awards Committee because it embodies the kind of narrative argumentation at the heart of successful academic advocacy. Michelle worked especially well on structuring her argument clearly and meaningfully, introducing a complex thesis and sustaining a logical argumentative thread from start to finish. That includes using argument framework strategies she learned from the Anteater Guide to Writing and Rhetoric as well as a developed counterargument and rebuttal. Michelle also supported each of her points with mostly academic evidence, including well-captioned multimodal evidence, taking care to introduce sources in terms of credibility and relevance, professionally documenting them in MLA format, and rhetorically evaluating two of them to underscore her awareness. Finally,

Anita Fischer, Instructor

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LUCID

throughout the essay, Michelle worked hard at honing narrative techniques she absorbed from our theme text, Atul Gawande's Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, to ensure her readers were engaged by the topic with a meaningful anecdote and using transition words to lead her readers from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph in a meaningful way. While of course no essay is perfect (the word “essay” means “to try”), Michelle’s diligent attention to detail and willingness to implement and revise writing techniques she was learning not only attests to her excellence as a student but resulted in the most persuasive essay in her class. I am delighted that the Committee felt it also stood out among a wider group of her peers’ work and deserves to win Best Essay in this year’s Writing Awards.

Michelle Ly from

Millions Lost in Communication: How VRSMI Will Revolutionize the Healthcare Field

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physician quickly greets her staff as she grabs her clipboard and walks down the hallway to see her first patient of the day. Before walking into the patient’s room, she glances down at the medical chart to review the patient’s clinical data and medical history. Vietnamese female.

Ninety-three years old. Vital signs looked good. Came in with complaints about sharp, radiating pain in the lower abdomen. Last check-up was nearly two years ago. Knocking on the door, the physician announces her presence before walking in. As she enters the room, she pulls the curtains aside and makes eye contact with the patient. Naturally, she reintroduces herself and asks how the patient is feeling.

“Bad,” the patient responds. The physician proceeds to ask her where it hurts and to describe the pain so that she can document it down on her clipboard. Clicking her pen, she glimpses down and awaits for the patient’s response. But to her surprise, the patient doesn’t answer. She glances back up and sees that the patient is staring

back at her with a blank expression. After a moment of silence, the patient finally manages to spew out, “Sorry . . . I . . . no . . . speak English.”

In a healthcare system that is largely geared towards serving English speakers, language barriers hinder clear communication between non-English speaking patients and their providers, making it more difficult for physicians to make proper diagnoses and putting LEP patients at higher risk of adverse events. According to her 2016 article on the hospital experiences of older people from minority communities, published by Cambridge University, Jo Ellins concludes that patients whose first language is not English often “struggle to provide information that might be important to the effective delivery of their care.” In other words, language barriers prevent patients from expressing their concerns effectively and accurately. Although they may know the perfect word to convey their emotions in their native language, they are often unable to come up with the equivalent English term on the spot.

Consequently, the patient may resort to disclosing less information or choosing words that loosely correlate to what they really mean. Inaccurate patientprovider communication often leads to misinterpretations because physicians are unable to acquire comprehensive histories of their patients’ symptoms.

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Ellins’ article further reveals that language barriers “prevent patients and providers from building strong relationships.”

Without a foundation of trust and rapport, patients will be less inclined to follow through with treatment plans or recommendations set by their physician.

This can contribute to lower-quality patient care and, in extreme cases, lifethreatening misdiagnoses which will often lead to subsequent malpractice claims.

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LUCID

Submissions open for

LUCID 2 2021 issue Deadline

January 15, 2021

A platform for the development of first-generation writing identities, Lucid features undergraduate student writing from across UC Irvine.

To submit, visit

UCI undergraduate students can submit up to three pieces of work, written or visual, including:

sites.uci.edu/lucid

creative nonfiction

interviews

personal essays

flash fiction

research

photography

visual art

graphic art

poetry

short stories

For more info, contact us at lucidjournal@uci.edu.

This journal is funded by UCI’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, the UCI English Department’s Composition Program, and the UCI Humanities Center.