scribbles / the tenth issue
community june ‘15
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A pair of arms, strong, warm; sometimes too stiff, sometimes stifling. But always there to hold you up, always there to welcome you home... that phantom feeling of arms around you that you remember even when separated, I think. / A community is a social unit of any size that shares common values. / Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake ye do them. / A special relationship that a group of people share. / A comfortable space where people can share their ideals and visions. / A social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage. / Community is the people and the things around you that gives you love, support, and something to live for. / A community lets people who share a common interest
WHAT IS COMMUNITY?
Earlier this year, we asked the members of CIS what community means to them. Compiled here are their thoughts (in pink), alongside a sample of Google’s responses to the same question. This spread was inspired by the work of Mishka Henner.
interact with one another. / The comfort of my sisters, even though they are halfway across the world. / Knowing that when everything is going left and the earth beneath has left you shaken, there will always be people there to brush the dirt from your knees and walk you in the right direction. / A comfortable space where people can share their ideals and visions. / A community is a group of people with shared values, behaviors and artifacts. / Community is the feeling of acceptance, knowing that others won’t judge you for who you are; the feeling of trust, knowing that someone will always have your back. / First and foremost, community is not a place, a building, or an organization; nor is it an exchange of information over the Internet. Community is both a feeling and a set of relationships among people. People form and maintain communities to meet common needs. / My building, My road, CIS, Hong Kong.
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CONTENTS 01 04 05 11 12 13 14 17 21 24 25 26 29 30 31 35 36 37 41 42 45 47
River Sound / Evelyn Choi Icarus / Sophie Li A Humid Hymn / Charlene Phua The Switchblade Years / Vanessa Cheok The Raisin / Chloe Barreau They Say We Dream Every Night / Lucas Sin Censorship / Davis Cheng I Have Yet To Hear A Real Symphony / Rachel Lee Kintsukuroi / Bryce Lim Legacy / Angela Yang Invincible / Michelle Teh Music Taste / Kameka Herbst There Is So Much To Say But I Remain Ever Silent / Evelyn Choi On The MTR / Yi-Ling Liu The Circles of Home / May Huang On The Perils of Networking / Kenneth Lee Dancing With Shadows / Cynthia Huang Sprachgefühl / Jimin Kang Sunday’s Song / Charlotte Target On The Common Room / Yi-Ling Liu 20s / Henry Hsiao Community (The Mix) / Nicole Choi
感謝 The Scribbles team would like to extend our deepest gratitude to Mr. Quinn and Ms. Martignago for their continued support, as well as the wonderful Ms. Lee in the Publications Office and Ms. McManus in the Business Office for all their help.
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FROM THE EDITOR After spending their adult lives in vast oceans, Atlantic and Pacific salmon return to their natal river to spawn. This phenomenon is known as the ‘salmon run’. The offspring spend a few months in the same river before they, too, follow the current into the sea. Thus, one generation after next, the river remains a brimming fountain of life, of love, and eventually, of loss. As the water waltzes into greater currents, the salmon, too, seek a world that exists beyond home... whilst the river waits, quietly, for the heralding of a new generation. In our desire to lose ourselves in the kaleidoscope of life, we often forget the humble river. The river, a microcosm in which we are nurtured and loved, never leaves us, although we may choose to leave it. I, alas, cannot talk to fish, but it is likely that a salmon sometimes longs for the warmth and safety of its first home. Where is our river? Undoubtedly, its ripples echo through the corridors of CIS. We are not unlike a community of salmon. We sport different sets of scales, prefer to swim in different ways, but we always come together to create legacies that will flow into wider seas. For Scribbles’ first double-digit issue, we invited all members of the CIS community - students at Braemar Hill, in Hangzhou, teachers and alumni - to come together and share with us a piece of themselves. What you have before you is a collection and a celebration of what makes CIS what it is, and I sincerely hope it will make you proud to belong to such a wonderful riverbed of artistic talent. It has been an absolute pleasure serving Scribbles this year. Watching a quasiprofessional venture bloom into friendship, laughter, and a touch too much of fun has inspired me to appreciate what I’ve learnt in this river. Thank you for all the support Scribbles has received over the past ten months. As the year comes to a close, I have nothing but hope for the all beautiful things that lie ahead. Jimin
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THE SCRIBBLERS EDITOR IN CHIEF Jimin Kang
WRITING DIRECTOR Sophie Li
writers
ART DIRECTOR Chloe Barreau
artists
Evelyn Choi Charlene Phua Rachel Lee Chloe Barreau Lucas Sin Vanessa Cheok Cynthia Huang Bryce Lim* Sophie Li Angela Yang* Kameka Herbst Michelle Teh Davis Cheng May Huang Yi-Ling Liu Kenneth Lee* Charlotte Target Jimin Kang Henry Hsiao
Serena Hildebrandt Ting-Ting Chang Sierra Chiao Michelle Wu Chloe Barreau Kitty Ng Hillary Yee Joseph Kim Letitia Ho Jacqueline Tam Miki Chiu Elizabeth Yeung Christina Shen Tommy Li
OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Cynthia Huang
photographers
LAYOUT DIRECTOR Nicole Choi
deputy layout director Rachel Lee
Haley Wong Zoe Suen Angela Yang* Elena Eu Nicole Choi Lucia Kim Kitty Ng Doroty Sanussi
cover art by: Miki Chiu inside cover photo taken by: Haley Wong back cover photo taken by: Nicole Choi Past Scribbles’ Editors-in-Chief
*
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“I snap the twig to try to trap the springing and I relearn the same lesson. You cannot make a keepsake of this season. Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap, lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft, though for a moment it’s your guilty fist that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this extremity that points now, broken, back at the dirt as if to ask are we there yet. You flatter this small turn tip of a larger book of matches that can’t refuse its end, re-fuse itself, un-flare. Sure. Now forget again. Here’s a new green vein, another clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.” Each year by Dora Malech
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RIVER SOUND Evelyn Choi, 11B2
Some days the birds just won’t shut up but that’s okay, because in this day and age birdsong is kind of a miracle. My neighbour’s cockatoo doesn’t caw anymore, just flexes its sulphur crest and flaps its wings to the beat of the rain. Where I live, all the rivers keep flooding, protesting against their concrete barriers, washing over our curbs and our streets and our feet. This is a kind of sickness, my mother would say, this is what happens if you don’t let go enough. You get angry river spirits trying to make their own banks. In geography, a sound is an ocean inlet, like a bay, only deeper. My sound is something that echoes along the cement coast, smashes into unsuspecting debris, bounces off the dam and flies off with the pigeons. I’m torn between saying, “every raindrop lets me grow,” and “give me floodplains.” Maybe I can say both. Swell and sink like the tide in my chest.
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Zoe Suen Class of 2014
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Top: Ting-Ting Chang, 11G2 Bottom: Sierra Chiao, 11R1
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ICARUS
Sophie Li, 11R2 Icarus, we were falling for hours. A slow scream spliced from a cage of sunlight and the hot wax divorced from our wings, do you remember the long war, the drowning? Icarus, silly me. The sea had our names in her arms already. Just look at our hands, so slippery with sweet blood, and did we think time could scissor our bones from the ground? Did we think pain could return us to our bodies? In faith and in hunger we go looking for a second try. We called it dawn, sweet darkness or light before light becomes light. And what good now is a dream? Only ash, only footprints, and loneliness staining our lips black. Some children flirting with the bottom of the seabed, some hands dissolved by wax. Our tongues old red and sticky with desire. We called it hope, like it wasn’t just freedom with teeth. Icarus, we should have known that some pasts will make a home of your throat, peaceful and on fire.
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A HUMID HYMN (FROM MY SYMPHONY OF DREAMS)
Charlene Phua, 13P1
The summer we left for college, I had the sudden realisation that there were goodbyes to be said. For the first time there was an understanding in me, a weighted present knowledge, that actual words would have to be brought into existence, and not simply left as threads hanging in a fabric of laughing shouts and sly nods. They would have to be isolated and cemented, congealed to be handed off, so we could put a definite stamp on the end of an era we were so close to. It was an end and we were being carried, feet off the ground, buoyed by some invisible current, to the cusp of a new dawn, a shimmering depth we knew nothing of and cared nothing for. It was an understanding that occupied an intangibly expansive part of my consciousness and sat unrepentantly at the forefront of my subconscious. It coloured the summer breeze with nostalgia, which in turn settled and swirled around wooden chair legs and fluttering piles of Chemistry notes, yet to be burnt. I remember the smell of the grasses, the brittleness of the stalks, yellowed in the heat and stabbing through the sheet we’d stolen from Hershlag’s house as we stretched out on gutted fields. I remember the sweet buzz of bees, dancing around Lan’s pale pretty fingers in circles that hypnotised us in the hazy press of the season. We spent mornings chasing butterflies and afternoons teaching them to sit on our shoulders. Those were the days we spent together, a subito inclination for preservation drawing us back to wellmapped paths and familiar hideaways. Those were the days we spent together, inseparable. Other days, even the faintest hint of human contact had me in fits. Of particular note: the day I woke up and murder flashed before my eyes at Aise’s hair tickling my shoulder. The press of her arm had me rigid. It felt incomparably sticky across mine where
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it had been so comforting the night before. Jack’s jacket across the bannister set off a pounding need to extricate myself from the nest of limbs I could not help but succumb to. Toothbrushes, lined up by the sink, made me shudder. I fled the house in a blur. The mist was thin that morning, the buzz of cicadas loud, ringing round and around in my ears. Dirt stuck to and fell from my feet in damp clumps. At some point I stepped on an earthworm and felt my breath hitch in my throat and my heart slam against my rib cage and I couldn’t help but think that if Jack had been there he would have laughed at me. That Lan would have laughed too, but more quietly, and then asked if I was alright. That Aise would have exploded in derision. That Hershlag probably wouldn’t have noticed. I couldn’t help but think that we five knew each other like the tune of Happy Birthday, like the lines of a, b, to z, like the hush of nighttime crickets. I do not remember if this was the day Aise followed me into the cool, endless waters and dragged me, bewildered, her hysterical, into the shallows. Or if this was the day Jack found me by the river, arms wrapped around my knees, toes digging into the moist earth, an ear tilted to the absence of human activity, the void of goodbyes to be said. The ground was cold and inviting; the burble of the water a lullaby. I had wanted more than anything then to converge with the earth and stay there forever in its cold, damp embrace. At peace as part of the green, brown, blue-grey that would never leave me. To hold everything down, to tamp us firmly into a space in time where trees grew but we didn’t have to. Jack, a scorching sun blurring out the edges of his panicked expression.
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Nicole Choi 12G2
“You’ve been here the whole time?” He is artificially calm, my slippers dangling limply from his left fingers. I look up, squinting. “I’ve only been gone an hour.” “You’ve been gone for four, Lís.” “I just wanted a place to think,” I’d told Lan quietly as she towelled my hair. “Then think somewhere you don’t risk giving Aise a heart-attack,” cuts in Hershlag harshly, looming into the memory like the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk, descending from above. “Forty acres of land. Find somewhere else.” Then it’s summer in my mind again, us sprawled out on the field again, drifting between wakefulness and dreams, bergamot and tansies and evening primroses stroking gently against our cheeks. New stalks were pushing through the ground, digging into our backs. We lay there with the heavens, like a cosmic fabric, unfurled above us. The winds, that had rushed past us in the day, now murmured sleepily. I’m curled up into Aise, her fingers running absently through my hair as Hershlag warbles carelessly a silken song in a husky shell that strums the stars in their velvet sets. In the humid hymn of summer, it is difficult to stay mad for long, and Aise’s anger with me, for something or the other, seeps away with every brush against my crown. Lan’s voice joins Hershlag’s, her sweet soprano rising effortlessly above his rumbling baritone. I reach over and squeeze Jack’s hand. “Build for me a castle in the sky,” I whisper, the moonlight pooling silver in his eyes, “in a dreamland far away.”
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“Is that what you think about, when you go to the creek?” he asks, squeezing my hand back. “A castle far away?” “In the midst of dreams,” I say, “where memories are strongest, where they can all fit and we can wander from room to room, seeing Hershlag fall from the rubber tree again and again, seeing Lan win her medals again and again, holding you in the classroom, both of us shaking with laughter the teacher cannot see, and Aise,” I press my head closer to her hand, “seeing Aise. Seeing you. Seeing everyone. Again and again and again without fail in something stronger than wishes.” Aise curls her hand around the curve of neck, comfort in a gesture. “But it’s not about preserving perfect memories,” she says, allaying voice sprawling through the summer air, the winds rousing slightly at her command. The grass begins to rustle. “It cannot be, because perfection does not exist. Let’s not worry about memories, or about accounting every moment. Worry about being here, worry about the people you love. You all are here, and I am content, even with an aching heart. I love all of you, and that is enough for me. I love all of you,” she had said, her voice breaking, and that was her way of saying the goodbye that we had been too scared to utter. “I love all of you so much,” a tumultuous declaration that broke the dam to the next morn, a statement of faith that ushered in the first rays of new light, breaking over the horizon, shooting into the seas of dark sky with no regard for the rending asunder of my heart. In the summer we left for college, I learnt what it meant to say goodbye.
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Serena Hildebrandt 12B2
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Michelle Wu 12P2
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Nicole Choi 12G2
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THE SWITCHBLADE YEARS
Vanessa Cheok, 11B1
spit black cherries on a sunburnt lawn, stems snapped off with a splash of sugar. we carry the heat within us like a horse in our torsos— our brother’s stolen pocket knives popping the tops off root beer bottles. the day rusts off into a dog’s toothless howl, and clouds like mallards swim through the lake’s almond ripple. in our dreams grapefruits fall from overhung branches, smearing our mouths with heat and sweet stickiness. out on the asphalt soft peels catch fire under magnifying glasses, and smoke curls up, in search of a deeper loneliness.
Chloe Barreau, 11P1
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THE RAISIN
Chloe Barreau, 11P1 In fixed, sealed air they breathe a little less. The sun wrapped its warmth around their bellies till they folded and bent to the weight. These natural, seedless, California raisins are still here— just wrapped in the wrong mother’s hands— just a little less aware. Days will fly and oily skin and sweat will be their only remains clinging to the plastic cage. They won’t last, but plastic, man’s proud medallion, will be everlasting toxic and waste.
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THEY SAY WE DREAM EVERY NIGHT Lucas Sin, Class of 2011
gruff heave when we pulled each other up up to the roof sweet rust gold string lights in our hands we lined our home in knots and weaves drape down like a cape or a shawl and we fell onto our backs to hear haze off colour the chit and the chat of a wife and her spouse on a walk at night wisps of wind through fences and the hoarse howl of a hound many steps down the road that, the howl, it rung in the scorched air and as I held the sound in my head it seethed and it could have burst into flames.
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CENSORSHIP
Davis Cheng, 7B1
This is the elegy to all that have been isolated, rejected, denied, suppressed, erased from humanity. This is for the ghosts of reality, the non-existent, the absent, the consumed, the trampled residue. This is for the exiles, the misfits, the glass barrier, the broken mirror. This is an uprising, the return of the intangible, the rise of the perished, the song of the soul. The eagle finally spreads its wings, its feather’s fan, reflecting the sun, cawing, freed, of the weight of the world.
Hillary Yee, 11P2
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Top: Joseph Kim, 12Y2 Bottom: Chloe Barreau, 11P1
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Letitia Ho 13B1
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I HAVE YET TO HEAR A REAL SYMPHONY Rachel Lee, 11G2
I keep multiple recordings of sunrise tucked in the corners of my ear canal so I can play them back on the days the rain takes the shape of dissonance and listen to the sound of pears growing full in the morning light. (The sound reminds me of morning glories crinkling to the shapes of clarinets.) I’ve always wondered where people went to collect white noise… You see, It’s been millennia since I first started trying to outrun the city, but I have yet to find a place where I can light matches and starve all disruptive sound so there is only enough oxygen for me to breathe. I’m tired of slashing at rainbows in the dark and setting up dehumidifiers along the sides of the road to liberate nimbuses of their ill shrouds- I plan on building a ship that sails to the farthest point from the earth’s center. The caterpillars tell me that it’s the only place where the world bends at a frequency of chimes, where I can bury my tapes and listen to them nourish the soil with earthsongs. I’ll follow wherever daybreak points. Until then, I’ll be dreaming of the day When I can focus on being a part and not apart .
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Top: Elena Eu, 12G1 Bottom: Angela Yang, 13G2
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Leftmost: Serena Hildebrandt 12B2 Left, top: Tommy Li Class of 2013 Left, bottom & all on right: Jacqueline Tam 13P1
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KINTSUKUROI Bryce Lim, Class of 2014
all men dream, but not equally [1] have you ever wondered what language they speak in [the] limbo [2] between sleep and awake [3] sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck [4] [where] the dreams of a soul awake [5] prolong the torments of man [6] to sleep, perchance to dream [7] there is always some reason in madness [8] produced by some delicious, fearful dream a state of mingled horror and delight [9] you get tragedy where the tree instead of bending, breaks [10] you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel [11] [but] there is a crack in everything [and] that is how the light gets in [12] [better to] reassemble the fragments [than to take] its symmetry for granted [13] eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it [14] the river is everywhere [15] a cunning and most feline thing [16] the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes [17] it is not the same river i am not the same man [18] 1. Lawrence, Thomas Edward. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. 1922. 2. Gallup, Lee T. 3. Hart, James V. and Marmo, Malia Scotch. “Hook.” Screenplay, 1991. 4. Boyd, William. Any Human Heart. 2002. 5. French proverb 6. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. 1878 (German), 1908 (First english translation). 7. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Jenkins, Harold. 1982. 8. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1891 (German), 1896 (First english translation). 9. Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl. 1937 (Original), 1958 (First english translation). 10. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. 1977
(German), 1980 (First english translation). 11. Adams, Douglas. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. 1980. 12. Cohen, Leonard. “Anthem.” The Future. 1992. 13. Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. Nobel lecture, December 7 1992. 14. Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It. 1976. 15. Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. 1922 (German), 1951 (First english translation). 16. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 1851. 17. da Vinci, Leonardo. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (Volume 2). Ed. Richter, Jean Paul. 1970. 18. Reeve, C. D. C.. Plato, Cratylus: Translated with Introduction and Notes. 1997.
*A cento is a poem that includes passages from a wide range of authors, which are arranged in a new form.
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Haley Wong 12R2 22
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Kitty Ng 11G1 23
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LEGACY
Angela Yang, 13G2 Imagine it is China in the 1920s. You are a sixteen year old girl, leaving home for the first and last time, to marry someone whom you only know of by name. You feel a little trepidation because you are the second wife, but still you dream of a good, comfortable life; you know theirs is a big family and you won’t ever have to worry about money. They will take care of you. A year later, you are counting your lucky stars, grateful for whatever you did in your past life to deserve a son, and him the only son in the whole family too. You know everything the family owns will be his in the future. As your husband guards and protects him, you can breathe easy - but one day, your husband is gone. You are at a loss without him. You start getting thrown more and more chores to do around the house. You notice the family members have stopped talking to you, stopped paying attention to you. Even the maids are avoiding you. And yet all the while you are told to cook meals for the three generations of people living under this roof. You are commanded to sweep the floors, to sweep the grass. You can’t sit at the dinner table, and all you’re permitted to eat are the leftovers. You don’t have anyone to turn to, anyone to help explain your situation; you’ve become merely the shadow of a servant. Around the house you hear whispers, rumors of a poisoned first wife and of an attempted murder of a child. You try to brush it off, but you hear your brother-in-laws speak to each other urgently in hushed tones, always looking over their shoulders. You turn to your daughter, who
sits a little away from the other children, quietly coloring pictures, oblivious to the comings and goings of the world around her. You turn to your son, who looks up at you then and smiles. You don’t know if you are allowed to do this, but you don’t think you can stay any longer. You know you could be making a big mistake, leaving as you are, without notice, support or money. Women never leave. But here you are with all your belongings - belongings that you can count on one hand - packed in one small satchel. You hold your two year old daughter in one arm, clutch the hand of your five year old son, and you walk out the door. When my great grandmother arrived at her childhood home, there was nothing there for her, save for three tiny plots of land. When they didn’t have enough to eat she would go out on the beach to scavenge for small fish that washed up on the shore. As days went by and her body succumbed to the physical weight of the world, spine curled into an almost eternal bowing position, she continued picking up the scraps of her survival on her own. My mother tells me I’m the only one in our family who looks like my grandfather, but I’d like to think that I have a bit of my great grandmother in me: her small eyes, her slender face. Her strength, her quiet and extraordinary fortitude.
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INVINCIBLE Michelle Teh, 7G2
You were always standing on your own. Standing out in the pouring rain, you never cared about getting drenched; out in the blistering heat, you never got tired of being roasted in the sun; out in the biting cold; you never complained, even when you froze into numbness. You didn’t mind. You grew used to it over time. You paid no attention to the haters. Even when the bullets were aimed directly at you, you still stood your ground. And whenever they taunted you with their dirty insults, criticized you with their snarky remarks, tried to provoke a fight, you knew better than to fall into their traps. You didn’t spit back— there was no point fighting a battle you would always lose. Nor did you give in and cower away in fear— there was no point of giving them the satisfaction of your surrender. You simply held your head up high, wore a serene expression on your face and stared right into their eyes, silently rebelling, to show them that they may be able to poke holes in your clothes, conjure obstacles in your path, and mess with your brain but they will never be able to shoot you down.
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MUSIC TASTE
Kameka Herbst, 11P1
Stop. Stop, stop, stop. Look at yourself. Your fingers raw from trying to tear down your walls, your smile wavering—I can see you desperately clench your sanity between your teeth. The drugs worked their way into your system hidden amongst things you loved. If you had your way, you would live solely on dreams and names playing in your mind like broken records skipping, mangled memoirs of once beautiful songs, your heartbeat Stop. clinging Stop, stop, desper stop. ately to Take your headphones off. the beat —and now Read a new book, and now fall in love with a film. and Cut your hair, my girl— now— draw the inside of your head just to feel pencil on paper. Dance smiling in the rain, press your cheek against a cold floor doing nothing, write poetry. Find yourself a better soundtrack to play on repeat.
Miki Chiu 12B2
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Stop drugging yourself. Grab your guitar, write yourself a new song, let yourself b r e a t h e— You are a flower, and you’re growing— beautifully.
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Sierra Chiao 11R1
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Christina Shen 10G1
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THERE IS SO MUCH TO SAY BUT I REMAIN EVER-SILENT
Evelyn Choi, 11B2
i float through these corridors like a wisp of tissue paper, the kind that children use to make sticky paper flowers for their mothers, the kind you use to wipe your tears tell me if there is a way to get back those memories, because i love to wear dresses that leave me exposed to the elements (let the wind chill me, i’m sweating under your gaze) everyone wants a hand to hold but not a rope to tie them down; it’s a fragile balance of giving and taking and some only know how to give but others only take away it’s supposed to be sunny but i’m bringing the raincoat because it’s yellow and it’s all i ever wanted as a child.
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Elena Eu 12G1
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ON THE MTR Yi-Ling Liu, Class of 2013 Doors shut, train rolls on, my world falls away into the backdrop. I forget that I am late to class, forget my heartstrings and what tugged on them that morning, forget all and become spectator to somebody else’s life —my own is on standby. Train rolls on and I become an archeologist, digging in the soil for hidden gems, scouring among the crude grains for diamonds, ruby and amethyst. Digging, I find the middle-aged woman with the clasped fingers, soft frown, hand clutching rails, yellow Adidas jacket faded to mustard after too many cycles in the wash and I hold her with my eyes like I’d hold a chunk of soil in my hands. Chip away at her, unearth a job as hair-washer at the local salon, a broken marriage, a love for Korean soaps, a son who forgets to visit. Pick in one hand, trowel in the other, I wonder what her favorite TV show is, who she loves, what she would die for, knowing that in an hour when the doors open again I’ll go to my desk, find pen and paper and take the jacket, the handrail, the crease between her eyes, the broken marriage, the son, take it all and thread them into words and sentences and stories. She is a gem to me, a semi-precious stone and I cradle her story with my pen like I imagine I would cradle my first child. I cradle her story because I have no stories of my own. I am young and green like a cabbage, with no stories of my own. No scars of trauma to lament upon, no ache of profound love to set four chambers aflame. So I go to the MTR and I sit and watch.
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故鄉的圓圈 THE CIRCLES OF HOME May Huang, 13B2
屏東的聚餐 FAMILY DINNER AT PINGTUNG
阿美族舞蹈 THE DANCE OF AMIS PEOPLE
高山青，澗水藍 A turn of a hand sets the glass disc spinning, Playing out the music of our family dinner: a once A year gathering that puts pepper buns and Rice noodles at the center while we Sit around them in the shape of a circle, trying to connect I know my place around this circumference—a niece, a Daughter, or perhaps a misplaced Coordinate who did not stay Still on the graph of her motherland And now speaks her mother tongue with Oblique accents. I am a foreign point on this continent. But when the propeller begins to turn On the plane ride back to Wherever home is, I remember the glass disc we spun at dinner, the song of shared plates, and I think of myself reaching Across the diameter of our table for every Dish, thinking that if what comes out of my Mouth is not Taiwanese, at least what Goes in Is.
On the high, flat ground of this mountaintop, Men and women are dancing in a circle, their Tribal voices patterning the hills around us And shaping the contours of our hearing. Even the mist takes on the outline of their echo, The shade of their sunned skins, The colors of their bright, beaded robes. Then, suddenly, they beckon to me In a tongue I have often heard, In a tongue I have never learned, Until I, too, am sewn into this dance Like a bead on a bracelet, Strung along a turning thread To the rhythm of moving feet, linked Arms and high voices, knowing that when all the Men, women and children are hand in Hand, like dots connected in the sky, I am suddenly a star in a constellation Whose light I have always looked for, Whose light I always carry in me. 阿里山的姑娘美如水呀， 阿里山的少年壯如山*
Lines taken from the Taiwanese folk song《阿里山的姑 娘》 (The Maidens of Alishan) *
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Doroty Sanussi 13B2
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Haley Wong 12R2
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ON THE PERILS OF NETWORKING
Kenneth Lee, Class of 2013
You are in the basement of a dark crimson bar at the twilight of the evening rush hour. The lights make everyone appear pretty angry. Their heads bob with electricity in the dark crimson air. Your vision blurs ever so slightly, like what your cheap smartphone camera does in dark crimson places.
friendly-friends and not-so-friendly friends. They kiss her. They embrace her. Their eyes widen and glisten in her divine presence. “I can’t believe I’ve only seen you once this year and now you’re leaving Washington!” What great friends Lucy has. “Come on, let’s take a selfie together!” Flash.
“Oh hey, you made it,” your boss, Lucy, flashes a smile at you, her hand searching for yours, in the dark crimson, to grasp for a hot second.
You gape at Lucy. She is now being attacked by an unending assault of hugs, big smiles, and exasperations about missed lunch opportunities. Well, she is the star tonight.
But she will soon not be your boss. Yes, after four years in public service, Lucy is leaving. She created a meeting on the office calendar the other day with all the unpaid, lowly interns—hey, that includes you!—to announce her decision. Where to next? “I don’t know,” she smiles, and mentions this shindig she’s hosting at this dark crimson bar. Ah, the young professional life. Drifting. That’s where Lucy’s going to be when she packs up her office tomorrow morning. You thought the LNATs and SATs from high school or the lesbian pride clubs and roommate melodramas from college were supposed to anchor you in the sea of life. “You still have time to figure out what’s going on.” That is what all the people who have figured out what’s going on will tell you. With a sly smile. And so Lucy melts into her crowd of
But you’ve just lost your sole reason to exist in this dark crimson bar this evening. You could’ve been home by now. Blanket wrapped around your head, in your air-conditioned room, binge-watching Japanese anime on your tiny laptop screen. You die a little inside. You subconsciously, nervously caress the damp patches of your dress shirt just below the armpits, casualties of the unforgiving afternoon passion of summer. You drown in the soft wave of ambient conversation. You take out your phone from your pocket, but you realize that staring religiously at the lock screen clock can only relieve your solitude by so much. In this place where many things are to be said, you don’t have a thing to say. What can you say, anyway? “What’s your name? It’s nice to meet you.”
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How is it nice when you’re going to forget a name in two seconds? “Wait, what was your name again?” How is it nice when you don’t even have a business card to exchange? “Umm, Lucy is my boss at work.” How is it nice when you have no insider job connections that people will lick the soles of your shoes to grasp a hold of? “Oh, you’re her intern.” You are empty-handed. Like, literally, right now, at the bar. That is the clear and convincing mark of the lowly intern. A lost soul transplanted into the young professional whirlwind. You decide to venture something anyway to the stout man standing nearby. “So, how do you know Lucy?” You know you’re having a really bad hand if you’re dealing your only trump card of conversation topics from the get-go. “Oh, don’t you think we should all wear nametags that say, ‘I know Lucy because of this, this and this,’ ha ha ha HA HA!” the stout man chuckles, gesturing to his chest where that hypothetical and rather invasive nametag would be. He rips up your misguided conversational intentions without even sharing anything about himself. No, that man does not want to talk to you. Some network you’re making there.
It’s been twenty minutes. You can endure this transient temple no longer. It is time to bid farewell. End this masochistic act. Regain your dignity. You try to approach Lucy, who is now rapidly disappearing in a dark crimson mob of people who are overeager to smile at her. And now some waiter’s trying to push a trolley of dirty glasses through the crowd. When will you be able to get out of here? “Hi, my name’s Derek. What’s yours?” You see a hand searching for yours, in the dark crimson, to grasp for a hot second. By now, you’ve become so…so frazzled that your parched ego laps up the meager drips of recognition from those two seconds’ worth of words. You want more. You need more. Milk the friendliness. Grin until it hurts. Ratchet up your pitch. Eyes bright, chins up, smiles on. “Hi. It is so nice to meet you!”
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DANCING WITH SHADOWS Cynthia Huang, 11Y2
It’s 11, it’s pitch black outside, and you’re trying to churn out a paper that looks respectable, when You notice—something’s moving outside the windows; You realize it’s a dance between shadows. It reminds you of the time you were six and trying to find shapes in clouds— Deciding between rabbits and elephants and dolphins, but Finally choosing to call them blobs instead—unidentifiable messes. You remember watching as they drifted, then sprinted, by. You remember feeling that single drop of rain on your face. Later, you saw that drop become droplets, become streams, become torrents. But ten years later, the days of your childhood innocence have passed, and Now, in this velvet night, it’s become a matter of choosing a shadow dance that will best fit the Steady drumming of your fingers on the keyboard. So in the middle of a “this essay will examine and analyze,” your mind starts to drift like the Clouds you once obsessed over—is that a jive? Does it have enough spunk to be the cha-cha? Or is it, Dare I suggest, the Salsa? As your imagination soars and you get caught up in this shadow dance, you realize that You’ve finished your essay already, and the shadows are dancing slower now— Have they started the waltz? The gavotte? You look at the clock; it’s getting closer to two— This shadow dance, this evening delight, will cease to be once the dawn beckons, So we shall dance with them until then. We’ll drink a cup of coffee, read a book, do a sudoku puzzle or two— Perhaps we’ll even take naps in between absorbing their chaotic perfections. And at six, we’ll focus and observe these shadow dancers once again with a renewed vigour; We’ll carefully wait as scattered specks of sunlight become rays, and eventually Illuminate the darkness that once was— For that’s when the shadow dancers will take their final bows.
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SPRACHGEFÜHL Jimin Kang, 12P1
The Germans have a word that explains itself: sprachgefühl, or ‘speech-feeling’. Every union of vowels and consonants contains a secret: remember (the closed lips) cold (d, like death.) Your sprachgefühl is the comet as it kisses the meteorite, traveling at 7-digit miles an hour and I, breathless, am numb from the explosion— the shards of glass, the blindness, smother me in their arms. I walk home unseeing. Your speech-feeling burns. At night, I sink into sleep and listen to your sprachgefühl set fire to my veins.
Photo by Lucia Kim, 7G2
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Serena Hildebrandt 12B2
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Top: Elizabeth Yeung, 9R1 Bottom: Kitty Ng, 11G1
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SUNDAY’S SONG Charlotte Target, 12B1
There’s something about how the rain falls oh so softly that makes the pitter-patter on my window sound like a series of quarter notes, dividing your heartbeat in four. There’s music in this and so I pick it up and run with it, across your fluttering eyelids and down the curve of your arm wrapped so tightly around me. I listen carefully to the silence (which isn’t quite silent at all) for a melody to add to my piece, finding it in rustling bed sheets and far off thunder, and in distant conversations leaking from the gap in the doorway. Underneath it all is your constant steady breath, the concertmaster leading the ensemble in a spiralling tune that will undoubtedly be stuck in my head for days.
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Photo by Zoe Suen, Class of 2014
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ON THE COMMON ROOM
Yi-Ling Liu, Class of 2013
April morning. The sky a palette of pale grey. The room is silent. Hollow like a cave until eleven o’clock and the room erupts! Erupts with 100 or so 17 going on 18’s, the opening and closing of doors, the hustle and bustle of break time, the pick and strum of guitars. Red swivel chair sare sat on in a dozen different ways – planked, stood on, straddled – Mahjong tablets clank; the vending machine runs out of coffee. This is the common room at breaktime. On the crimson sofa: big plush shark, sprawled bums, sweat and grime from cross country five months ago. On the wall: a menu from the roadside daipaidong, an imperial costume from the south stand days of Qianlong. On the whiteboard: scrawled illustrations and in neat, black letters Please help yourself to chocolate and biscuits – Veronica although our dear friend Veronica has transformed over the course of the past year from Veronica to eronica to erotica. At twenty-five past eleven, Rooster Breistroff screeches - aliwitt you’re so slow hurry up you’re so slow! florence gets ups in two seconds and you get up in a million! The signal is made, the herd groans and grumbles – eff biology I hate biology another five minutes of struggle on the couches until the room thins out and the last few brave soldiers ditch truancy for another day, sling on their bags and trudge off to class. The doors shut. April morning, the sky is one palette of pale grey and once again, the room is silent and hollow like a cave.
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Elena Eu 12G1
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20s
Henry Hsiao, Class of 2011 We were sitting, crying, and holding each other on a bench in the departure hall of St. Paul International airport, when I told Sarah that I had to go to the bathroom. I went all the way to Minnesota to visit her even though she was just a girl I knew for the last two weeks of term. We had spent a perfect, however you like perfect to mean, few days together before I had to spend the semester in London, away from her for six months. It was a good way to start the give-ortake two years I existed with her, if we excluded the seven minutes I took finding the bathroom, peeing, washing my face, and walking back to her. Fran was my best friend when I went to London. She was in the graduating class of 2014, a year before mine. After she graduated she went back to London for four months and then went to a farm in Florida before finding a steady job in Massachusetts. I wouldn’t know when when the next time would be that we saw each other. Once in a while we would hear from each other to remind ourselves that the world was still a round pale blue toilet bowl so why not have pancakes for dinner and skip breakfast to sleep in? Toph went to England for university and I got lazy about replying to his messages. I didn’t make a convincing case of why he shouldn’t enlist in the British military and instead come to work with me back at our high school in Hong Kong. I would have liked to talk a lot to each other but I could only type so much in a day.
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Elyssa was the girl in Florida. I stumbled in my dorm room one day tipsy and interrupted my roommate’s Skype conversation with one of his friends from high school, and I told his friend from high school that she was pretty. So we had been keeping in touch for three years strictly through the Internet until she came to New York for a summer internship. We only met up four times in the entire summer. It was cool to have seen the International Space Station fly by over Fi-Di, but we each regretted privately that we
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never had slept with one another. One of the reasons I didn’t see Elyssa that much was Sanjana. Her face was that of a Bollywood star and she often said that she aspired to be famous. She noticed that my skin was darker than hers. She was constantly disturbed and unsettled when she was in New York as if she felt her soul was in danger. She didn’t listen to me when I told her that souls didn’t exist and she went back to India just as we started to mean something to each other. “I’m seeking the universal truths,” she wrote back, “so that I can return to New York with strength and wisdom to propel me into righteous relationships and service. Please flourish and fly. In whatever you choose to do. I’m sure we’ll hear from one another. We’re fate friends, remember?” I don’t think about her that much anymore. Lee, Lou, and Steph were some of my high school friends who came to New York too. Lou and Steph in the last year of college stopped being friends with each other, which meant that I had to spend time with them separately. I thought what they were fighting about was so stupid but they insisted that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Then Lou started dating Lee and they actually liked each other. It meant, for me, less time with either one, though I feel that I understand. And Andy was all the way up in Columbia University on his way to become a billionaire with his own private island. He had to focus. He is going to be a king one day and I will be hearing about him in hopefully some prairie where he can visit me whenever he gets tired of modernity and big cities. All of this guilt probably accumulated in my teens. When I was growing up in Hong Kong, I skipped many dinners with my grandparents. I just didn’t feel like it. They were old and an hour’s drive away. I saw my mother’s family in Malaysia much less, which included three cousi-
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ns, an auntie, an uncle, a grandma, and a few dogs that replaced the dogs I knew. They all changed faster than the rest of the world did. Phones don’t close distances. In college I never called my mom though she would call me. I mean, she would only talk about her boyfriend problems, going to yoga, and having lunch with her friend Auntie Annelouise, who was a lovely woman with a screeching voice and disagreeable politics that I didn’t like to hear. Thank god they aren’t friends anymore. But they hung out recently because who else but Annelouise could be there for her bouts of loneliness? My mom would sometimes talk to me about how she reasoned to herself every night in her big bed before falling asleep that she shouldn’t complain so much. My mom sometimes would talk about my dad who lived in Tokyo with his fourth wife. I would see him three or four times a year for a few days. Before the divorce he, for the most part, lived in a different country than we – mom, brother, me – did. He had to work and we had a really nice house in a nice city in Canada. He smoked packs of cigarettes in a few days and thought the lime after a shot of tequila was refreshing. He didn’t cry when we for the final time circled around his dad’s hospital bed. My mom would also call my brother, Paul, who worked in New York as a market analyst to talk about the same things. Paul and I wouldn’t talk about our parents much to each other, because when we did it would be about the banality our mom was going through, whether our dad’s wife is his fourth or fifth one, or how neither of us really wanted to go back to Hong Kong. We also wouldn’t want to share an apartment together. He chewed his food too loudly and I sprawled all of my things and feet in the living room. I realized very early on that I could only love him when we didn’t live under the same roof. I had all these reasons to be calm about not being with the few people whom I care about while I can, while they can. We each had essays to write, jobs to do, futures to secure, and goals to achieve. We don’t seem to mind that our
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psychical connections with other people needed Wi-Fi. But I accidentally saw Sarah after more than a year since breaking up. We went to some school event and she looked at me as if she were indeed angry with me all this time for leaving her alone in the middle of an airport while she was a mess and wasting those seven minutes taking a piss in some public bathroom in Minnesota. I am convinced that none of my reasons were legitimate. W/r/t death, I prefer the view that should be defined not as a ceasing of metabolic activity in an organism, but a closure to all future possibilities for a person. When does a character really die in a novel, when the narrator says that he is dead or when there aren’t any more scenes with him? I wish I could think about death more. Maybe then I’d have a sense of how to handle everything. So now I have been seeing a girl and I don’t know what I’m doing. When I’m with her we tie ourselves up into sticky globular knots to become human. Logistically, her boyfriend will move to New York to resume things with her around the same time that I will be leaving. They have been meaning to spend the time with each other that they have always wanted. We don’t know when will be the next time we’ll see each other, which makes things easier. It means we shouldn’t make plans. We try to stretch the time leading up to getting out of bed to infinity by closing our eyes and rolling around until we disorient ourselves. It doesn’t work though. She knows that too. We give up our alone times but only some of it. But I saw a video of monks using a month to complete a drawing of a complicated mosaic of their god with colored sand guided with funnels with fine tips, only to wipe the image away with a few strokes of the hand. And the fact that I still thought that the artwork was beautiful makes this thing with her okay to me.
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COMMUNITY the mix
1 / Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart 2 / Someone New (Live) by Hozier 3 / vow by SALES 4 / Us by Regina Spektor 5 / Luna by Bombay Bicycle Club 6 / Run Baby Run by Toro y Moi 7 / Travelling by Paper Lions 8 / Waves by Electric Guest 9 / The Sun by Portugal. The Man 10 / No Room In Frame by Death Cab for Cutie 11 / Give Me Something by Jarryd James 12 / Nothing Hurts Like This by SLO 13 / Hero by Family of the Year 14 / Let’s Be Still by The Head and the Heart
youtube: http://bit.ly/1LagPRO
Nicole Choi, 12G2
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I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
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EMAIL scribbles.cis@gmail.com FACEBOOK facebook.com/scribbles.cis ISSUU issuu.com/scribbles.cis YOUTUBE bit.ly/1cVK2kM
Made possible by the English and Art Departments.
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