post- 03/26/2021

In This Issue

anna brodsky 2

Navigating Nerdiness

Danielle emerson 3

Coffee Grounds Jordan Hartzell 4

Piecing Her Together On Rainbows Joseph Suddleson 6

On Minari Nicole kim 5

postCover by Nina Yuchi

MAR 26

VOL 27 — ISSUE 8

FEATURE

Navigating Nerdiness who am i in college?

By anna brodsky Illustrated by mika ando

Last August, my best friend and I took our usual loop around the neighborhood. As the sun dipped below the horizon, we talked about our hopes for college. She would be leaving in a few weeks. I, like other Brown first-years, would be at home for the fall. But we spoke about the future like it was close enough to touch.

around being unabashedly bookish and geeky.

I joined the debate team, ran the school’s Harry Potter club, and waxed poetic about educational song parodies. Though my classmates cared about grades, self-proclaimed “nerds” were rare.

If I slapped that label onto myself, people usually wouldn’t ask too many questions. I’d heard from

Over the fall semester, I spent countless hours wondering what sort of persona I should embrace.

The edgy philosophy major pontificating about nihilism? The social butterfly who seemed to balance it all effortlessly? The law school-bound go-getter? Obviously, some options were out of the question. Anna the jock or Anna the engineer

“I just don’t know who I want to be in college,” I told her. “I mean, it’s not exactly like the nerd angle is super unique at Brown.”

She laughed. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

Early on in high school, I decided I wouldn’t try to be conventionally “cool,” so I built my identity

older friends and various well-meaning family members that cliquey distinctions like “nerd” didn’t apply in college. Though I know this was meant to reassure me, it worried me instead.

Without the comfort of that persona, it looked like I would have to acquire—gasp—a real personality.

were just…not happening. But the transition to college seemed like a rare opportunity for radical self-definition, and I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to start fresh.

I’m not alone in this mindset. Google “college reinvention” and almost five million results come

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers,

Do you ever think you’ve pulled your butt muscle and then look and see that you actually just have a bunch of deep scratches? Don’t worry, I’m not getting personal with you, this is just a little sampler of the kinds of philosophical topics we at post- take to task on a casual Thursday evening. We’re a rather athletic bunch, as I’m sure you can imagine—if your definition of athletics includes over-vigorous squats and dancing with only your arms on Zoom calls.

Our assemblage of pieces this week is about as eclectic as the daily musings of us post-its. The Feature writer dives into the much-mythologized world of Brown’s Quidditch team and learns more about herself in the process.

Meanwhile, the Narrative writers get retrospective, one about her relationship to coffee and family over time, and the other about lessons she learned from her great-grandmother’s life. In Arts & Culture, one writer shares their empowering

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discovery of Amber Vittoria’s colorful, female-focused art, and the other untangles their complicated relationship to the film Minari and Korean American family dynamics. Lifestyle offers us some springtime entertainment: a quiz about what your ideal spring break destination says about the ‘00s movie you should watch, and a Buzzfeed-inspired rating of what’s Worth It @ Brown.

So, if you’re feeling as ~quirky~ as we are, or if you just need a distraction into the humor-, nostalgia-, and art-riddled land of post- (I promise no hyphens will be harmed during your reading experience), we have just the potpourri for you.

But I don’t recommend doing some squats while you peruse.

Digging my Harry Potter– designated broom out of storage,

Olivia Howe

Editor-in-Chief

Things to Come Back As After You Die 1.

A dog on the Main Green being lavished with attention

2.

Harry Styles' microphone

3.

A little worm in the damp soil

4.

A song played at people's weddings

5.

A cute rock with moss on top (the moss is your friend reincarnated)

6.

The little plastic table on top of pizzas that kids fight over

7.

A tree

8.

A heart-shaped cake tin

9.

A tapioca plant so you can become boba and make so many people happy

10. A drop of water rolling down a strawberry and hanging off the tip of it

FEATURE up. Countless listicles and advice columns detail ways to make a change and realize your “true self ” by the time freshman move-in begins. During the summer and the fall semester, I read many of these pieces, wondering what to leave behind and what to keep. One Huffington Post article advised readers that reinvention means “shedding parts of yourself that you’ve outgrown, or maybe worn as a mask.” I knew that, for me, the general specter of nerdiness had acted as a sort of shield to hide behind. So I resolved to leave the Harry Potter obsession and the song parodies at home in California to find some sort of “truer” and more mature self.

But one September afternoon, I got home from work and saw an email reminder—club fair happening now! I considered skipping it, but the omnipresent voice of FOMO urged me forward. I went to generic pitches, put my name on email lists, asked a few extremely inane questions, and was about to call it a day when a name on the spreadsheet caught my eye.

“Quidditch Appreciation Club.” I hesitated. I had decided against being the “Harry Potter” kid again. But something motivated me to click on the link anyway.

I logged into the meeting and was immediately greeted by the enthusiasm of two older players, who launched into a detailed description of game rules and strategies. Somehow I hadn’t processed that, yeah, the Quidditch Appreciation Club would play Quidditch. The game sounded entirely beyond my capabilities. Running? Catching?

Scoring? All a big nope for a girl whose closest brush with sports was the debate team. But their passion was infectious, and when they shared that the team would be doing Harry Potter Kahoot that Friday night, the old siren song of nerdiness called to me. What the hell? I thought. Why not? I put my name on the email list and said it was the best pitch I’d heard that day. Without missing a beat, the incomparable Kate Cobey said, “Well, we’re the Quidditch team. We know our way around a pitch.” As silly as it sounds, that was the moment for me. Quick thinking and bad puns?

I was in.

That Friday, I joined the Zoom meeting, a little nervous. After months of quarantine, my social skills, especially with new people, were rusty, to say the least. But as the veteran team members launched into introductions, their genuine kindness and sarcastic humor drew me in. As we answered progressively more ridiculous trivia questions, I found myself laughing more than I had in months. Maybe this is the place for me, I thought. Over the next few weeks, Friday game nights became the thing I looked forward to the most. At that point, my friends from high

school were all busy with their first semester, but I knew that at the end of the week, I’d be able to commiserate about readings or utterly fail at Among Us with the Quidditch team. And as the fall stretched on, Dungeons and Dragons sessions with the team joined Friday game nights in the weekly lineup. I even dragged my unathletic self to the park one time to practice throwing and catching with my dad, terrorizing innocent squirrels with my poor aim in the process. Despite my intention to rethink my identity, I increasingly started to think of myself as a “Quidditch kid”—which wasn’t exactly the transformation I’d envisioned.

My investment in the team was most intense during the first few lonely weeks of Quiet Period.

Whenever I felt that old uncertainty about my place in the Brown community rising inside me, I told myself that I knew who I was. I was the nerd.

Done. Simple. I craved the comfort of a conclusive label in the midst of personal upheaval, so I clung to the role I’d decided to inhabit. When meeting other freshmen online, I’d bring up the team within the first few sentences of introduction.

I’d finally done it—decided that this was who I would be on campus.

But as Quiet Period came to an end and campus started opening up, my view of my own identity grew more complicated. Yes, I played Quidditch and would ramble on about it if someone got me started. But I also loved long walks around the city and the 3-5 p.m. Hay slot and Jo’s veggie burgers.

I discussed readings for Political Philosophy and drank burnt coffee and laughed until I cried with new friends. During one semi-delirious latenight conversation, a friend told me that she didn’t know who she wanted to be here, either.

“We all had our niche in high school,” she said.

“It’s just so different here.”

She was absolutely right. And I talked to more and more people who felt the same way. The pandemic exacerbated this, of course. Theater kids couldn’t perform in a typical way. Social butterflies had to weigh safety considerations.

But even without the uncertainties of COVID-19, I started to realize that, as trite as it sounds, I didn’t need to fit all aspects of myself into a coherent narrative. College started to seem less like a time for reinvention and more like a time for self-discovery. I could just take a breath and see where each week would lead.

Don’t get me wrong—a few months in, and the Quidditch team continues to be one of my favorite things about Brown. I still play D&D on Sunday afternoons. If I see you in the Ratty line, I will still try to recruit you. (Sorry.) But I’m starting to realize that I don’t need to conflate what I do with who I am. I can just stick with what feels right, and the pieces will fall into place.

Coffee Grounds comfort against the cold and other biting sensations by danielle emerson Illustrated by elliana reynolds The sound: a soft gurgle, a sharp hiss, followed by a steady pit-pat, like rain from a spout. The smell: dark and bitter, yet warm against my nose—second only to the taste, which bites when black and dances when there’s cream.

It’s difficult to pinpoint my first experience with coffee. It might’ve been when I was 12, sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and aunt, listening to the morning radio while sneaking sips from their cups. It might’ve been earlier—say when I was seven years old, waking up to shimasani’s (my grandmother’s) morning brew. The beginning of my relationship with coffee exists somewhere in my braided memory, knotted and stitched with the patterns of similar comforting experiences. Everyone loves to ask the “coffee or tea” question, pitting two drinks against each other in the ultimate battle of comfort. And while tea is steeped in silken ease and honey sundrops, no matter the occasion, my answer is coffee.

Earlier this month, much to everyone’s surprise, it snowed again. I had planned to meet up with a friend, maybe get through some school work, maybe watch the latest Attack on Titan episode. But then the snow crept in. As I stepped outside, it stuck to my hair and attempted to sneak past my facemask. Providence weather doesn’t usually catch me off guard—not anymore. But this day’s weather—the delicate snow with its low whispers, a hushed blanket pulled over Brown’s campus—tugged at my heart. Whenever I need to be comforted, I rely on two hot (always, always hot) drinks: hot chocolate and coffee. When I don’t feel like a person, I need something warm in my hands to ground me. So, I turn to hot chocolate. It is just scalding and sweet enough to make me feel present.

When I don’t want to be a person, I need something warm to remind me that life is worth living. Coffee gets the job done—warm and filled to the brim with frothy memories. As the snow turned everything still, silencing the rush of oncoming traffic, emphasizing the sound of my breathing, a familiar ache twisted in my stomach: homesickness, loneliness, maybe a tinge of nostalgic grief. To ease these mounting emotions, I entered the nearest cafe and ordered a large hot coffee.

Back home, there’s always a pot of coffee ready.

Whether I’m at shimasani’s, my aunt’s, or my mother’s house, it sits patiently waiting on the counter. Each morning, they all start the pot and leave it running for anyone who wants a cup. Before her death, my grandmother used to drink her morning coffee on the front porch. She would only stay inside, near the

“Please, Mr. Protection was my father, call me Helmet. ” "I guess that's what it feels like to vape milk."

march 26, 2021 3

NARRATIVE fireplace, during the winter. My cheii (grandfather) wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but he’d still sit with her before they had to part for their respective household jobs: shimasani to the field and my cheii either to his homemade workshop or joining my shimasani in the field. Their morning coffee came with a small bowl of sugar, white and decorated with pink swirls. I don’t remember creamer, but I’m sure they used milk as a substitute. In my family, making coffee for others is its own love language. I can imagine my grandparents sharing a pot, pouring each other’s cups, the slight curve of a smile sitting at the edge of their lips. As I sip my own coffee in the morning, I fondly remember preparing cups for my mother and younger sisters, a beloved moment stitched together with warmth and sugar-sweet endearment.

I remember rising to the smell of rich coffee grounds, eyelids tugged open by the soft spitting and sputtering of the pot. My siblings and I would groan and stretch, watching as our mother poured a cup for herself. We were small—maybe seven, maybe ten—and were at that age when older people tsked and shook their heads, saying, “Nope. You’re too little for coffee.”

We all thought coffee was akin to alcohol, another drink we were too young to have. Of course, our family loved to mess with our naivety. So we didn’t get our own cups then, but we’d sneak sips from our mother’s worn mug, enjoying the little rush of doing something you’re not supposed to do but still getting away with it. Our mom preferred her coffee sweet—super sweet. So sweet that it satisfied my ten-year-old sugar cravings, but now, eleven years later, overwhelms my matured tongue. I joke that she might as well be drinking sugar from the bag. I don’t know how her teeth can handle it.

We never stole sips from our Auntie Angie’s cup.

Everyone knew she liked her coffee black, and we didn’t want the bitter taste to stick to our mouths all day. My Auntie Angie has been drinking black coffee for as long as I could remember. The smell of sharp coffee grounds always filled her trailer and lingered on the lining of her work clothes, nearly cutting the tip of my nose. I consider it a physical representation of her maturity: If there was a list of requirements for adulthood, “likes black coffee” would be in the top five.

There is only one other person in my family that drinks black coffee: my younger sister—in fact, my youngest sister—Sarah. Sarah-Raven (as we endearingly call her) just started drinking black coffee recently. It was unexpected. Imagine my surprise when my ten-year-old sister grabbed a mug from the cabinet

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and, instead of making hot chocolate, poured herself a cup from the coffee pot. She sat at the kitchen table, took a sip, and had the nerve to ahhh appreciatively— as if she was remembering the taste from another life. If I had to guess, I’d say Sarah likes black coffee because a certain character (Five) in a certain TV show (The Umbrella Academy) also drinks his coffee black. He snacks on peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, something my sister also does. When I asked, she shrugged her shoulders and looked off to the side, “So what? It tastes good.” And honestly, who am I to judge? I started drinking Arizona Sweet Tea because a kid back in high school said it was his favorite gas station drink. I prefer hazelnut creamer because it’s my mother’s favorite, despite the fact that I can’t actually taste the difference. There’s a soothing and satisfying feeling that comes from sharing in another person’s comforts.

Coffee at Brown has been just as much a comfort to remind me of home as an avenue for exploration.

I didn’t drink iced coffee back home. My first real experience with iced coffee was in the Blue Room. For me, coffee had always been prepared and served hot.

I’d seen iced coffee at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, but we didn’t visit those places enough for me to try it.

Iced coffee felt unreal to me, sort of mythical. When I finally gained the courage to visit the Blue Room a second time, as my first ended with a panic attack (the poppy-seed muffin and hot chocolate calmed me down after), I ordered the mysterious iced coffee with cream and sugar. I was instantly hooked. My sophomore year, I got iced coffee from the Blue Room every day after class. I drank iced coffee so much that my closest friend, Roslyn, would send me iced coffee memes on Instagram. She’d message me with, “Danielle + iced coffee duo is unstoppable (flexing arm emoji),” and, “Hahaha *replaces meals w/ a blueroom coffee* smh (crying laughing emoji),” under screenshotted Tumblr posts. By this point, it’s become a light inside joke. During last year’s COVID summer, I made iced coffee regularly with my roommate, Laney. We’d brew it hot in the morning and store it in the fridge to cool.

But, despite my explorations, nothing provides more comfort than the gentle, creamy, kindheartedness of hot coffee. Whenever I feel untethered and homesick, I brew a fresh cup of coffee or order a random latte from Starbucks (because the complex menu overwhelms me) to remove the weight from my chest. Coffee—both its taste and its long seam of memories—reminds me to breathe. This vivid thread will follow me well through my life because coffee promises to be there, always.

Piecing Her Together

on not losing family stories by jordan hartzell Illustrated by joanne han Sophie’s father invented the chocolatecovered frozen banana. I’ve heard the story at so many Thanksgiving dinners that I don’t believe it anymore. He had a sundry, a shop that sold candy and ice cream, on a street corner in Strawberry Mansion, a neighborhood in Philadelphia. I’m told that at the end of the Second World War, he stood outside with a box of tin whistles and handed them out to neighbors celebrating in the street. I like to imagine jars of licorice and chocolate pretzels, kids on bicycles who didn’t know what the war was about, really. Root beer floats and arm-round-the-waist kisses like a Time magazine cover.

My great-grandmother Sophie arrived in Philadelphia at around six months old. She travelled with her three older siblings and parents from Kiev. On the ship across the Atlantic, she was given her mother’s wedding band to clutch: her cries were grating on tired parents with no toys to keep a wailing baby occupied. Sophie promptly threw the ring overboard.

When she was a teenager, Sophie fell in love with a boy who lived a few houses down. Jimmy took her to see a movie and promised to call her after. She told me about him once when I went to visit her in her nursing home. She was dwarfed by a cushy recliner, her white hair a coiffed halo. She wore big gold rings and lipstick and told my mother to go to medical school. “How smart you are.” We reminded her that my mom had graduated in ‘90. “How smart she is.” When she talked about Jimmy, her eyes widened, all twinkly, the way adults tell you your eyes will when you’re in love. I remember hoping I’d find that kind of fairytale so easily; I wanted to go to the movies and have the starry look she had then.

Jimmy never called her back after the movie.

I think Sophie fell in love again, but I’m not sure. I know it wasn’t the wide-eyed kind of love.

One day, she was working in her father’s sundry when a man walked in, bought an ice cream cone, and fed it to his dog. She married Herb for stability, and because he was a dog person. A partnership of security is not one to take for granted, but there was something disappointing about the way she lacked verve when she talked about her husband.

He worked at a gas refinery by the Philadelphia Navy yards, taking up unpredictable shifts to cover long hours. Herb was a strict man, angry and temperamental. “He worked hard” was the excuse. He made the money and set the rules. She did the rest. I asked my grandmother, Sophie’s daughter-in-law, what things were like in the earlier days. She knew Sophie as a shadow. “Every time I’d call and ask how she was doing, she’d say that she was weary,” my grandmother says. “She kept her mouth shut.”

When Sophie’s son Bill was getting married to my grandmother, Sophie and Herb went on vacation to Florida with the bride’s parents.

Getting time away from the refinery was rare: this vacation was special. One night, they attended a show at a nightclub, a kind of “review of Vegas,” with singing and dancing and a big band. Sophie loved it. But when dancers twirled onto the stage

NARRATIVE

in pasties, Herb grabbed Sophie and blurted, “Soph, let’s get going.” He refused to be exposed to such indecency, even if it was part of an act. She would do what he said. And so they left.

I only knew the version of Sophie that was alone and bright, put-together and expressive. I think Herb’s death set Sophie free. She made the rules or decided there would be none. During the years I shared with Sophie, she was in a partnership with a man named Aaron. They considered moving in together, but Sophie decided against it because he kept kosher and she liked shrimp too much. Aaron’s hearing deteriorated over a few years, and then his sight started to go. Sophie kept him driving though, insisting on playing copilot.

“We only drive around the neighborhood, so he’s familiar,” she’d say. Their relationship slowed after he drove straight through a garage door. Less familiar than they’d hoped, I guess. With neither of them driving, they relied on friends to drive them to one another’s apartments. At my parents’ wedding, Sophie caught the bouquet. I never met Aaron, but I remember what Sophie said when her grandchildren, my aunts and uncles, asked her why they never married: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

This is how I knew Sophie: funny, blunt, honest. She lost her mental acuity as she aged, but it didn’t affect her sense of humor. You don’t need the memories to be in the right order to bring them to life. Her stories bounced back and forth through time and place, the fog in her head breaking as she retold moments from her earlier years.

She told us how she got a job as a court stenographer above all the other women in line for the job because she was wearing a green hat and the judge was Irish. How she used to go to the Jersey Shore every other week to play the slots and eat at the buffet because there was a $25-off deal at the casino. How she spent her entire life lying about her age because it was uncouth for her to be a year and a half older than her husband, so she said she was a year and a half younger. She couldn’t remember all the story threads of her growing family’s lives, but she could tell us about her teenage years like they were playing on a screen behind her eyes. The closer to the present her stories were, the less intact they felt. She told us about the turkeys that were growing under

the windows at her nursing home and couldn’t remember much about my mother. “I need new glasses. You should be an ophthalmologist!

How smart she is.”

I don’t know why I didn’t go to her funeral.

I was young but not too young to know what was happening. Perhaps my parents were shielding us from the sadness, or maybe from something else I wouldn’t have been able to understand. I don’t remember the last time I saw her, either.

Maybe it was that night at the nursing home, when she leaned back into that recliner and painted her childhood all over the room for us to see. I must’ve been around 10 years old and close to her height—gravity had done its thing to her bones over the years. I wish I could remember more of the details: how the room smelled, what she was wearing, what decorations she had chosen for the walls. More of her, not just fragmented stories.

I found out years later that Jimmy actually had called her after that movie. Sophie’s father had picked up the phone, taken a message, and forgotten to relay it. I don’t know when she found out, but I like to imagine that she knew the whole time and had decided to move on by herself. Her own rules.

On Minari

love in the korean diaspora by nicole kim Illustrated by connie liu Idly scrolling through Instagram last December, I came across a post by the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen sharing an article he had written for the Washington Post. The title read, “‘Minari’ is about immigrants who speak Korean. That doesn’t make it ‘foreign.’” I rapidly scrolled past the post, already feeling a swell of anxiety blossoming in my chest cavity. A quick Google search confirmed my suspicions. A film about a Korean American family in the Ozarks in the 1980s? Even that felt much too close for comfort.

For the next few months, Minari floated about the edge of my consciousness. I would catch its scent in passing conversations with Asian American classmates and on social media, but I avoided

following the news around the Golden Globes controversy or watching the trailer. As with other media created about and/or by Korean Americans, I had complicated feelings about this movie being pushed out into the world. People would have free reign to critique the troubled family dynamics, exoticize the “ethnic” food and customs, or worse, package the movie as a triumph of “representation” and a story of the “American dream,” upholding the US’s diversity fetish and erasing ongoing settler-colonialism and systemic racism. I didn’t want to be put in a position where I had to explain these tangled feelings to those who engaged with the movie as outsiders.

Even so, when my sister texted me on February 12 about virtual screening tickets, I immediately responded, “YES.” “BUY.” “WHERE.” Despite my nervousness about the film, the part of me that is always hungering for a home in the diaspora was drawn to Minari, as if on instinct. With only a hint of hesitation, I entered in my credit card information and prepared myself for emotional ruin.

Minari follows the story of a Korean American family in the 1980s after they move to Arkansas from California. Jacob, the father of the family, is determined to build a new life in the Ozarks starting a business farming Korean vegetables. Monica, the mother, is skeptical of her husband’s ambitions, but she does her best to support the family in their new environment, continuing her work as a chicken sexer (the job she and Jacob held in California for a decade) at the nearby poultry farm and flying her mother in from Korea to babysit the children.

The mounting tension between the parents breaks one night during a storm. As rain leaks into the kitchen and “tornado watch” appears on the cubical television, Monica urges the children to run to the car. But Jacob holds them back, refusing to leave. When the television flashes back on after a brief power outage, he sighs in relief. “Look? It’s tornado warning now, not watch. We worried for nothing,” he chuckles to his wife. With a look of horror, Monica moves from where she had been cradling the children and hits her husband with a couch pillow. “당신 지금 미쳤어?!” Jacob shouts. (“Are you mad?!”) “누가 누구더러 미쳤데?!” Monica screams back, her eyes glistening and her mouth hard. (“Who’s calling who crazy?!”)

The following scene felt eerily familiar. The children, older sister Anne and younger brother David, are shown folding paper airplanes, scrawling “Don’t fight'' on them in shaky crayon letters while muffled sounds of their parents’ yelling bleed through the walls. Texting a fellow Korean American friend after watching the film, I told them, “The parents were exactly like my parents when they were fighting ashsidkfmd. Like Word. For. Word. Except u know in the 1980s...in Arkansas.” Their response: “Omfg hold up thats exactly what my sister said.

She was like, I was able to tell exactly what all the korean was because apparently my korean vocab is just angry parents.”

Watching the fight between Monica and Jacob, their faces harsh under the dimly lit interior of the trailer home, was more painful than I’d like to admit.

Some of my earliest memories of my parents are of them reenacting a similar scene in our apartment in Sunnyvale, our first home in America. I remember sitting with my uncle (it must have been summer, since he visited during his breaks from dental school) on our worn leather couch the color of beef marinade as the two of them went at it, screaming without caring that they had a guest and a threeyear-old in the audience. I remember the soft but firm tone of my uncle’s voice beside me, murmuring, march 26, 2021 5

ARTS&CULTURE “누나, 형, 그만 해.” “Noona, hyung, stop.”

These side conversations I had about the film and the memories attached to them made me think of these lines from Minor Feelings, a collection of essays by the Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong. In a chapter titled, “Bad English,” Hong reflects on her complicated relationship to the English language as an Asian American writer: “I’ve always been so protective of making sure that my family’s inside sounds didn’t leak outside that I don’t know how to allow the outside in,” she writes. “I was raised by a kind of love that was so inextricable from pain that I fear that once I air that love, it will oxidize to betrayal, as if I’m turning English against my family.”

Even drafting this article now, I taste a tinge of guilt in the back of my mouth as I translate these experiences. It’s too easy, isn’t it? For my parents’ story to become “proof” of the backwardness of Asian families and the need for white liberalism to save us traumatized immigrant children. For this pain to be taken out of context and boxed up, isolated from love. For their stories to be extracted from the depth and complexity of their humanness. I want to protect my parents in this jagged landscape, but I’m just one person.

Toward the end of the film, the family makes the hour-long trip to the nearest hospital so the doctors can take a look at David’s heart condition. Watching the kids play together in the hallway, Jacob speaks quietly: “Life was so difficult in Korea. Remember what we said when we got married? That we’d go to America and save each other.” “I remember,” Monica replies, not looking at him. “Instead of saving each other, all we did was fight,” Jacob laments. “Is that why [David] was born sick?” The sadness they share in this moment makes it painfully intimate, even as you feel the rift growing between them.

I’m thinking about all of the reasons my parents ended up in what is currently known as Silicon Valley, growing Asian pears and persimmons in our backyard, raising a Maltese (the typical Korean family dog), sending their children to the remote corners of this continent in the hope that the English their tongues have wrapped around will take them places they themselves don’t know. I’m thinking about what my mother said about my dad eating all three meals at work in Korea, how they would barely see each other, how they were afraid he would be laid off when he was 40 and I hadn’t even gone to college.

I’m thinking about how unfair it is that my mother was asked to give up everything she had known for the longevity of this nuclear family. I’m wondering,

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can love survive under these conditions? Under these circumstances that have been rolled up out of the sawdust of war and imperialism?

To be honest, I don’t know, and I’m scared the answer is no, or worse, affirmative. I’m afraid that, like Cathy Park Hong, I don’t know how to allow the outside in, how to let love blossom and fester like a wound. How can I, when the love I was shown was so laced with hurt? When that love feels like an aching hole, like regret and anger and wanting?

Better not to find out, I sometimes convince myself.

Better not to get hurt.

Calling my sister the weekend after the screening, I asked her about the experience of viewing the film with my parents. “Well, our dysfunctional Korean family was being dysfunctional before we watched the movie,” she chuckled. I laughed along with her, imagining the three of them sitting apart from one another on the couch while our dog Mimi napped contentedly on my mother’s thigh, the annoyed noises my mother probably made at my dad’s mansplaining comments, the anxiety my sister was probably feeling at the palpable tension. I can’t say that I would have liked to watch it with them, but I’m grateful that we could share this experience across disjointed time and space.

Minari is not about claiming a kind of problematic belonging that situates Korean diasporic peoples squarely within Americanness. Rather, it’s an interior-facing project, a kind of mirror meant to gently remind us of these intimate, painful moments of diasporic life—as the director Lee Isaac Chung says, exploring what family looks and feels like in Korean America. I’m wary of romanticizing the experiences of Monica and Jacob’s family, my own parents, and my fellow Korean American friends. Their/our stories are not and cannot be claimed by an America that wants us/them to be easily digestible, wants us to function as data points bolstering claims of equal opportunity and the model minority myth. We aren't simply “overcoming” our Koreanness to locate love and safety in Western liberalism. And in trying to find these things in my own fucked up Asian American landscape, I’m not looking to reject the kind of love my parents gave me.

Rather, I’m trying to let it be okay.

*** In memory of Soon Chung Park, Hyung Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun, & Paul Andre Michels.

Rest in peace.

***

On Rainbows the female figures of artist amber vittoria by joseph suddleson Illustrated by mika ando It’s easy for life to become a sort of unending stream—where the distinctions between days dissolve; where the passage of time seems less about possibilities and more about obligations, schedules, humdrum routines; where people become faces and faces become things to ignore or look beyond. Even before the pandemic made us painfully aware of this phenomenon, it was all too easy to drift through the day without actually seeing another human being. Of course, we probably physically see other people over the course of any day, but rarely do we see someone by recognizing and understanding them without doubts, without judgment, and on their own terms.

This is undoubtedly an obvious statement, but as a species we’ve never been very good at beholding people, at recognizing someone else for who they are without consciously or subconsciously forcing them to conform and bend to our particular view of the world.

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia—long and ongoing is the history of humans persecuting and dehumanizing other humans because of their perceived or actual otherness.

But what if I could show you a world of color so effervescent, so full of life and strength and pride, that it not only resists but rejects any such discrimination?

Though one may see color everyday, just as one may “see” other people everyday, there are some things that make colors feel like miraculous, transcendent gifts from beyond the realm of sense and experience—the radiance of a golden sunset, the vibrant pop of fresh spring flowers, the iridescent glimmer of the rolling ocean. Beautiful things that, at least for a moment, demand we apprehend them as they are. The art of Amber Vittoria is one of these things. By melding brilliant ribbons of color with abstract female forms, Amber Vittoria makes us see women as they are, on their own terms: heroic and beautiful human beings.

Whether I’m at home in L.A., at school here in Providence, or travelling to new places, I love spending time in galleries and museums admiring artwork collected across time and space. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been able to do that. Maybe it’s the History of Art and Architecture concentrator in me, but I truly believe in the necessity of art for the positive progression of our societies. The best art engages in a reciprocal relationship with the world; it reflects, responds to, and shapes the culture around it.

Nowadays, it’s understandable for someone to hear the words “art” or “museum” and imagine a sterile, elitist environment far removed from the comings and goings of everyday life. Though I could and would argue that these types of institutions and the art they contain are still places and objects worthy of our attention and appreciation, there also exists art and artists working outside this problematic system.

Amber Vittoria is a New York City–based artist who focuses “on femininity and the female form.” A Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, Vittoria’s clients include The New York Times, Warby Parker, Google, Gucci, and more. But she does more than just work with some of the world’s most high profile brands; she also sells physical prints of her work online and has even begun experimenting with NFTs (non-fungible tokens) so people can bring her art into their spaces and into their lives. In short, Amber Vittoria is trying to be everywhere, and so far, she’s succeeding.

ARTS&CULTURE

Her art is simple, but don’t mistake that simplicity for a lack of emotive power or artistic vision. Vittoria chooses to paint women, but instead of relying on realism or naturalism to render her subjects, she uses a novel and abstract method of smearing lines of paint together on the paper to create a unique figural form that challenges the traditional, classicizing ideal female form that has restricted the representation of women in art for thousands of years. Outlining the stylized faces and extremities of her figures with sketch-like lines of black ink, Vittoria’s focal point is the female body. She doesn’t replicate or even intimate the ideal forms of the Western classical tradition, but elevates an entirely new kind of ideal: her women are bold and beautiful rainbows of color, curved and articulated into marvelous abstractions that catch your gaze and hold it.

It was a rainy day in Los Angeles when I first discovered Amber Vittoria’s art on my TikTok For You Page (no, I’m not kidding and no, I’m not apologizing).

Though I love and study it, I rarely have visceral, emotional responses to works of visual art. Whether it was the somber mood of the rare rainy day in Southern California or the weight of another day under lockdown, I saw Amber Vittoria’s paintings, vivacious bands of striated color leaping into

my mind in unending turns and curves, and I cried.

In these paintings I saw, and continue to see, all the women in my life—all my heroes. I see my grandmothers brave and strong, forging their own paths in this indifferent world through illness and tragedy. I see my mom, rising up like a goddess and making for herself the life she always wanted but wasn’t privileged enough to inherit. I see my sister, making sense of this wild and turbulent age with grace beyond her years as she grows into a mature and beautiful young woman. I see all that they are, all of their inner and outer beauty, all that they’ve taught me and all that they’ve shown this world we inhabit together, reflected in Amber Vittoria’s perfectly imperfect figures. In these paintings I see women of all shapes and sizes, of all races and creeds, pushing the boundaries of societies designed to keep them down, keep them hidden in the margins. Amber Vittoria’s women cannot be hidden; they cannot be silenced; they cannot be ignored.

Delightfully idiosyncratic, each painting expresses an identifiable mood or feeling that pithy titles like “We Are Our Own Magic,” “Too Much, Too Little,” “Barely Keeping It Together,” and “The Balancing Act That Is Womanhood” help to elucidate. But no matter the underlying message of the painting—and sometimes those messages are difficult—I always leave it with an EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Olivia Howe FEATURE Managing Editor Alice Bai

“More than anything, his love had felt like an obligation to me: a shop full of china so fragile it could hardly help crumbling under my bulls’ horns.”

—Kahini Mehta, “Commitment Issues,” 3.22.19

“The liquid was no longer an infusion of herbs but a crossgrounds, a battlefield, melding the natural and the machine, ambiguously pure and toxic.”

Section Editors Andrew Lu Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Emma Schneider Section Editors Kyoko Leaman Maddy McGrath

overwhelming sense of joy and strength. The painting may be responding to issues of gender inequality or mental health, but the figure always radiates off the page in a kaleidoscope of color that demands recognition.

Whether the figure is a single graceful arc or a chaotic, interwoven fabric, each composition celebrates the body and soul triumphant.

Though I am not a woman, I see in her figures the confident defiance of those who challenge the forces of suppression and oppression. As a queer man, I immediately recognized in her array of colors a celebration of the diversity that makes us strong, the individuality that makes us unique, and the common bonds of love and friendship that bring us together.

Her figures—unapologetically resplendent, proud, and dynamic—affirm the truth that no matter who you are or where you come from, you belong and you are enough.

Amber Vittoria’s paintings insist that women can be the subjects of beautiful art without being objects; that women can be beautiful and command your attention without being sexualized.

In a moment where we’re all inundated daily with images that skew our senses of reality and warp our expectations of beauty and self-worth, paintings like Amber Vittoria’s remind us that to be a woman is beautiful in and of itself: period.

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Minako Ogita

COPY CHIEF Aditi Marshan

Section Editor Siena Capone Christina Vasquez

Copy Editors Emily Cigarroa Samuel Nevins Eleanor Peters

LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Tessa Devoe

Section Editors Kimberly Liu Emily Wang

Editors Kelsey Cooper Julia Gubner Kyra Haddad Jolie Rolnick Chloe Zhao

HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Joanne Han

—Tal Frieden, “Cyborgs, Not Goddesses,”

WEB MASTER Amy Pu

3.23.18

CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen Layout Designers Lily Chahine Sharlene Deng STAFF WRITERS Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Dorrit Corwin Eashan Das Danielle Emerson Jordan Hartzell Ellie Jurmann Nicole Kim Gus Kmetz Liza Kolbasov Elliana Reynolds Adi Thatai Victoria Yin

Want to be involved?

Email: olivia_howe@brown.edu!

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