Review in Review – Spring 2022

IN REVIEW

THE REVIEW

ARTS & CULTURE REVIEWS SHORT STORIES

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www.swarthmorereview.com

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VISUAL ARTS

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS 500 College Ave. Swarthmore, PA 19081

Feature

Reconnecting... by the Review’s Editorial Board p. 4 Personal Essay

Purgatory, Probably by Anonymous (p. 10)

Movies & TV

Death, Demons, Doppelgängers, and Dance: An Analysis of Ballet’s Inherent Horror

by Ellie Tsapatsaris (p. 14)

Movies & TV

Poetry

A Tangled Head in a Ten Foot Ditch by Ayla Radha Schultz (p. 38)

Books

Tolstoy’s Confession: Death, God, and the Meaning of Life by Luke Chen (p. 40)

Don’t Look Up: A Crisis of Shared Knowledge by Tarang Saluja (p. 22)

Personal Essay

Music

Poetry

I Love You, I Hate You by Leo Castillo (p. 28)

Books

Minor Feelings: Reckoning with Asian American Identity in a Major Way by Olivia Han (p. 32)

Everything I've Ever Let Go Of

by Eva Baron (p. 46) to be consuming and consumed by

by Anoushka Subbaiah (p. 49)

Fiction

Cold by A.N. Lee (p. 50)

Arts

Galek Yangzom (TOC, p. 27, 55) Anna Fruman (p. 20, 21, 36, 37) Amelia Brown (p. 52)

BY THE REVIEW’S EDITORIAL BOARD

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t’s been around so long that you probably can’t remember what it’s like to forget about public health. Many of us carry sanitizers in our pockets, wear our masks outdoors, and ask for Zoom links to important meetings. The “new normal” isn’t new anymore.

There was a time—two years’ worth of time—when every article was a mini-referendum on the slipperiness of now. Daily reports inundated us with COVID numbers and statistics in the US and across the world. There was a flood of profiles featuring hospital workers across all counties, states,

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countries, following nurses and doctors swaddled in layers of PPE gear as they tended to the patients that would eventually get most of them sick. There was the American political ping-pong between masks, no masks, virtual, in-person, what counted as an essential business, vaccine, no vaccine; the international scramble as countries poured money into hoarding masks, oxygen, PPE gear, Moderna, Pfizer, resulting in uneven access to treat and prevent the pandemic.

What else was there? An election. The shuttering of many people’s jobs and lives

as the sprawling service industry, which constitutes over 70% of the U.S. economy, was gutted and nearly sunk. There was the world outside: news trickled in about stringent lockdowns in places like China and Australia and New Zealand; surges in various countries that threatened to overwhelm hospitals and flooded morgues; economic devastation everywhere as what couldn’t just be flipped online ground to a halt and then started again, tentatively, shakily, as people everywhere had to make the awful decision between risking a virus or being able to financially stay afloat.

After two years of COVID, our memories of Swarthmore have changed. Now that the disconnect between class years has become more apparent, where do we go from here?

For the past two years, to know or to be informed or even to step outside was actually just to drown.

And now that torrential onslaught of public health hell has all but dried up and drifted to the edge of public consciousness. (To follow a newspaper’s line of thought, if we declare something enough times to be true, then of course it is.) The argument about whether or not COVID is over can, will, and should play out in stages larger than Swarthmore’s lone literary magazine; on that we are no authority. But Swarthmore College’s administration seems to have made the decision that we can move forward, back to a pre-pandemic life: optional self-COVID testing until the end of the semester; that student health insurance will no longer pay for outside COVID testing; that masks have been rendered optional almost everywhere except while in class. (At this time last year it was not yet permitted to remove your mask while outside, unless eating, at least six feet from other people.)

Which leaves us here. What do we remember from before March of 2020—and not just what do we want to remember, but how many of us even know anything? What do we call the year that was fully online? Where do all of the classes stand now?

It took a global pandemic for the world—and, to some extent, Swarthmore’s community—to come together and fall

apart over and over and over. This is hard not to think about or talk about. So we offer you this: our own thoughts. This is how we weave an interweb of community. This is how we reconnect. ***

S

ome might say that we’re the lucky ones, that the freshman class, the class of 2025, is lucky to experience Swarthmore as it is today—with the school’s first completely in-person structure since the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve nestled ourselves into comfortable corners of campus buildings and atop benches under arboretum cherry blossoms.

These spaces are safe for us, reminders of what we imagined college would be like. But we can tell something’s different about the community.

This isn’t the place many of us expected. The quirky admissions emails, the corny website promos, and the busy day-in-the-life videos never anticipated the class year divide that COVID created.

There’s no student-written cheat sheet or almanac that details the old Swarthmore, so the only way we can learn about how these campus spaces have changed is through older Swatties and their oral histories—upperclassmen reminiscing about places, events, and traditions that died with the pandemic.

Following our high school graduations, some of us chose to take a year off from school. We were the class of 2020.

We lived through COVID-infected senioritis and “graduated” virtually on screens, surrounded by lost clichés and the “new normal” of a pandemic. Many of us watched our friends, the people we had been closest to, join their university communities and move forward with their lives, while ours stood still after high school. Sure, we knew where we were going for school, but what were we supposed to do in the meantime?

Temporary limbo is funny like that—you know where you’re going to be eventually, but you need to find things to occupy yourself in the present. Eventually, we found ways to fill the void of high school activities and extracurriculars to which we’d dedicated our entire beings for the last three years. Some of us traveled to dream destinations that opened our eyes to the world, while others stayed home for internships and job opportunities. Maybe we became closer to our families, fell in love with a new TV series, or taught ourselves how to bake bread.

Regardless of our location, occupation, and interests, we all had one thing in common. We grew up. We got to know ourselves better and grew into these adults outside of academia.

It was hard feeling like we missed out, but we built lives away from the restrictions of a college campus. And, though, being here is great, it’s admittedly different. Some days, it feels like we’ve given up pieces of our gap year freedom only to revert into the anxious teenagers we were in high school. On other days, it

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Reconnecting...

feels easy: there’s a comfortability–a nonchalance–in our approach to academics. We understand just how big the world is outside of Swarthmore, the importance of taking the time to have brunch with friends, and that the quiz we failed in CS isn’t the end of the world.

We’re fitting ourselves into the freshman community and finding ways to inspire our interest in academia once more.

Those of us who didn’t defer were members of the class of 2021. Senior year was an entirely digital experience for us.

The whole world collapsed into a 13” computer screen, a caricature of reality that could never fully capture the physical space it was parodying. Sometimes we looked at the previous seniors with jealousy because at least they had been lucky enough to have half of a senior year without COVID-19. Our fall semesters were isolating and sad excuses for a senior year, crippled by the crumbling structure of pandemic-safe academia. Our spring semesters brought even more unknowns (if that was even possible), regarding flattened curves, vaccine boosters, proms, graduations, and college decisions.

We clung to the promise of escape and, when our Swarthmore acceptance letters came in, that promise entered into a countdown. Images of Crum Woods, Scott Amphitheater, and Parrish Beach overtook daydreams, creating a perhaps overly romanticized vision of Swarthmore as an oasis of beauty and knowledge.

But, most of the time, we’re just freshmen searching for pieces of the Swarthmore we met online, the one we were catfished into applying to.

Actually occupying Swarthmore’s campus, we find ourselves tasked with navigating the liminal space between new and old, fantasy and reality. ***

W

e are a small class, and we are a scattered class.

Some of us, in the face

of the pandemic, initially were Class of ‘23 but decided to spend last year doing anything other than eye-glazing classes online; they joined us this fall as super sophomores, the rare members of our class who escaped a freshman orientation on Moodle and a First Collection on Zoom. Many more of us who were admitted in the 2019-2020 school year deferred until last fall, joining the burgeoning class of 2025. And then some of us, who, after the endless headache we call our freshmen fall semester, took the spring off, and are still Class of 2024, or 24.5, or now are 25.

There have been a handful of times when we’ve had the opportunity to gather all together in one space, and none were in our freshman year. They all happened last fall: our second First Collection that barely filled half of the Ampitheatre’s rows, the planting of a class tree and our photo that had so few people we could only stand in the shape of two numbers—24. (We say I think I can recognize everyone in our class by face; but the statement always ends up inflected like a question.) The tree planting and the second First Collection felt quite fitting. We’ve lived through many little substitutes, always waiting for the real thing.

Most of us sophomores—just under 380—and us here on the Ed Board were seniors in high school when COVID hit.

Have you seen movies like Freaky Friday or 13 Going on 30? The protagonist blinks and she’s in a body she doesn’t know but can recognize from the outside, or at an age she doesn’t remember becoming, but everyone around her doesn’t register any change. It’s just like that. We turn 20, 21, and 22 this year, but we don’t feel a day over 17. Ask us what we did last week and we’ll blank, but ask about our senior year and we’ll respond right away.

Somehow we’re almost halfway through college. We’ve just declared

majors after one and a half semesters of classes in-person: What a joke.

What a lie. What a scam. They tell us the Sophomore Plan doesn’t even matter but, of course, it does matter even if we don’t stick to what we write. But we’re used to hearing such lies. Like the idea that last year counts as two semesters to explore and figure out what we wanted to do based off of awkward lectures from a screen. No. Last year was a fever dream, a simulation, an oscillation between the virtual reality we were supposed to call school and the ever-shifting, shut-down reality that was supposed to form our life.

That dream started, of course, in March of our senior year, when, instead of going through the stressful period of opening college decisions with our friends and easing ourselves into the much-vaunted new chapter of our lives, we did it alone. Most of us decided on Swarthmore without having ever stepped foot on campus: we picked based on pictures after navigating through the labyrinthine swarthmore.edu and scouring the Internet for any and all videos or testimonials about student life.

For some of us, Swarthmore was a relief: it was the beginning of college, a new chapter where we could find ourselves and be the person we wanted to present; for others, it was an escape from a quarantine that trapped its victims in place like ants stuck fast in amber; and for others still, Swarthmore was the hallucination trapped on a screen, an academia unbothered by the pandemic that was controlling life outside, where completing a midterm by midnight was more important than anything else. It was like the capital city or rich districts in a civilization that all those dystopian novels liked to have: distorted by the world outside, yet still cut off from all of the troubles within, where worries took on a different quality.

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It feels like we've been snapped, snatched, separated; broken off and isolated from the other classes like a young branch from a tree, cast on the ground, and then, this year, dusted off and told to figure out how to stand up and grow.

Most publications called COVID a pause, or a stopping, as daily life was disrupted and then slowed. It’s more apt to call it a suspension, because that’s what all of last year felt like.

There are seven sophomores on this year’s Ed Board: four spent one semester on campus and three spent the whole year, living in a state of social distancing and reduced capacity. Everyone was assigned their own room, regardless of whether it was designed to hold one person or two, and each dorm was filled to just under 40%.

Hearing voices and movements in the dorm hall was a novelty, passing more than one person in any bathroom was a shock, and being stuck outside any building (for all of them were locked) without a OneCard was humbling to the extreme: even at peak times, no more than one person would walk by every 15 minutes. Chairs and beds (but not desks and dressers) were missing from rooms, and any furniture in spaces public or private that hadn’t been displaced were stickered in black and red and white: REMEMBER TO BE SIX FEET APART. STAY SAFE FROM COVID-19.

LEARN MORE AT SWARTHMORE.EDU/COVID-19.

When they let us eat in Sharples—at least three weeks after the start of each

semester, and only a GET reservation was accepted in order to properly cap the number of students in the building—each table had a max capacity of two diners, which made trios quite awkward. Each table was also marked with a wooden block painted red or white on each side that you flipped over after eating. A wandering Sharples employee would beeline to a red block right away and wipe down the table, reminding us that every second we spent too close to our friends was a liability, a health risk. We didn’t see the famous sharpied trays (as advertised, like many things about the student life we didn’t see, on the website) or the colorful plastic bowls and plates or a full room for the salad bar or even the silverware.

We were unsettled and also apart: starting last year, OneCard access was restricted to one dorm per student; coupled with online classes and the discouragement of face-to-face interaction, socialization became a little dorm-shaped bubble of its own. Then there were the students who were in all different parts of the U.S., at the home they grew up in or in an apartment with other students, connected to Swarthmore through only a screen. And, finally, there were the international students. Some came in the fall, some in the spring, and some didn’t step foot at Swarthmore College until August of 2021. Their freshman year was a separation of time and of space:

attending class at 3 A.M., fighting back sleep as they tried to discuss the Panopticon or practice a new unit in French, calculating the mounting difference between Philly and where they were living, operating on EST and always disconnecting from local time.

Unmoored from the usual rhythm of upperclassmen befriending and mentoring underclassmen, forming a tightly woven cycle of strong bonds essential to preserving a student culture rife with silly and sweet traditions, the class of 2024 was thrust and dropped in blank space. We’ve seen signs for waffles in McCabe, have heard about pizza bar in Sharples, and the website listed things we’ve still not done: Crum Regatta, the McCabe Mile, Worthstock, a Primal Scream that’s not graband-go (oh, how we’ve come to hate that combination of words). Traditions have been scrapped, and due to the disparity in experiences between the upperclassmen and underclassmen, we won’t recover them.

This editorial is a start. It’s a snapshot, and a record. But who’s to say it won’t get lost like the many articles in Voices and the Phoenix? Even so, the upperclassmen sections of this essay contain words we don’t recognize: Hicks. BEP. Swing Tree.

Or that “the Grill” has a full name, a longer name. The sophomore class is the small class, the patient class.

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Reconnecting...

With our departure from Swarthmore inching closer, we've confronted yet another sobering truth: we don't want these minute recollections, these moments, to escape us or those we will leave behind.

The world asked us to pause when we were barely 18-years-old, and then didn’t tell us that when we restarted, we’d skip.

Of course this college changes. It has changed: our culture now is not the same as the class of 1971, 1871. And it will keep changing: if the class of 2055 is the exact same as 1955, that would feel scary. But the changes this school has undergone is unnatural. It feels like we were snapped, snatched, separated; broken off and isolated from the other classes like a young branch from a tree, cast on the ground, and then, this year, dusted off and told to figure out how to stand up and grow. ***

I

came to Swarthmore at an interesting time. I mean, I think every person on this campus came in at an interesting time, but my interesting time was fall of 2019. Campus was still reeling from the dissolution of the frats and everything surrounding that, and once I got a handle on what Swarthmore generally is, all the life was sucked out of it by the pandemic.

Once everything moved to Zoom, you became part of the Swarthmore diaspora. And one thing that sociologists will tell you about diaspora groups is that they have a sort of fictionalized ideal of a homeland, one

that is both temporally and physically displaced, a place before everything became so not-normal. Was Swarthmore ever normal, though? I don’t know. I’d thought that I’d had a pretty normal college experience. I craved being back, even with all the humdrum stuff that it entails, because you could see people’s faces and community wasn’t reduced to quadrants on a screen. And even though quarantine had its moments, I always felt that I was swimming along toward one goal—return.

Now that we’re back, my memories of Swarthmore from before and after are so jumbled that I can’t remember what is after and what is before.

We can go into Singer now, which is nice, even though it’s ugly and overly fluorescent and sound travels weirdly. The bell started working again, which was pretty annoying until you started to tune it out (it still makes you feel you’re in college, though).

Crumb Cafe is exactly the same.

Sometimes you’ll just remember someone and think, huh, haven’t seen that person in a while. And it turns out that, indeed, you haven’t, because they transferred immediately after COVID, took a bunch of summer classes, got their degree, and are now a middle manager already.

One thing I’ve increasingly noticed is that people are hungry for tradition. People want to know about the

“before time.” They wanted to know about Pub Nite (now that it’s back I don’t know if they were blown away); they wanted to know about Worthstock (stop asking me, I wasn’t there).

The thing is: the task of carrying these memories forward was left to people who weren’t totally prepared to do it, between campus leaders thrust into roles prematurely and administration that is both opaque about what we’re allowed to do and out of touch with what we want to do.

It’s fine, though. I’ve seen some of the maintenance work required to sustain something as simple as this magazine, but people have put that work in. Campus traditions have returned, like animals reclaiming Chernobyl or something. ***

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hat we remember isn’t eating in Sharples or attending our classes without masks. Instead, our memories are now informed by a sobering truth: we’re the only class left to have experienced a full year at Swarthmore before the pandemic. In about a month, we’ll walk across a stage on Mertz Field, our memories accompanying us as we descend the steps and drift away from campus. Right now, it’s difficult to imagine what we’ll leave behind, what our peers will remember, and what will

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be known about Swarthmore without a pandemic defining it. There’s a sense of loss in this, one that we’ve carried with us throughout the past few years, and will carry with us.

In contending with these memories, we’ve reevaluated our understanding of what we once considered mundane, what once seemed so immediate and, now, is confined to nostalgia. While the pandemic has left many of us oblivious to the passing of time, impressions of “normal” campus life still resurface: we attend our classes in-person; we laugh over a meal at Essie’s; we enter into the grimy sauna that is Paces. These memories, in a word, are pervasive. And, though these moments maintain a degree of separation from us, we strive to reassemble them, to grasp onto them as we navigate a campus that, two years later, continues to strike us as unfamiliar.

Except this unfamiliarity, for us, extends beyond the pandemic and its external impact upon College policies and the Swarthmore community.

It’s an internal unfamiliarity, too, and it roots itself in everyday gestures, spaces, and traditions, all of which seem to collapse into an inaccessible and distant past. As simple and mundane as it is, overhearing underclassmen say, for example, “I’m headed over to Singer” betrays how disconnected we’ve become to the culture our younger peers are currently rebuilding. Before being named Singer, this academic building received the placeholder acronym BEP (Biology, Engineering, and Psychology).

Despite, or perhaps because of, its absurdity, the acronym quickly became the building’s identity, one that we adamantly cling to as we strain against the limits of memory.

Although it shouldn’t at this point, it still feels surprising—and, within this, lonely—when students don’t remember Singer’s previous name or, more obscurely, its predecessor Hicks.

For engineering students, Hicks was home. For humanities majors, however, Hicks was a sexy and scary adventure. In its basement, there was a dungeon that seemingly doubled as storage for evil science experiments, an impression that was undoubtedly produced by the yellow “KEEP OUT” sign and the chain link fence surrounding the engineering equipment.

The elevator, too, proved disconcerting. Its walls cloaked by blue tarp and its ceiling gauged by a massive vent, the elevator would constantly groan as it scaled the building (at times, it felt slower and more precarious than the elevators in Parrish). To our shock and distress, however, Hicks was demolished in June 2019 in order to make room for the BEP. Though somewhat contrived, it’s easy to imagine the demolition of Hicks and its replacement by thenBEP-now-Singer as reflective of our severance from pre-pandemic Swarthmore. Just as we remember Pubnite not as super spreader events but as a weekly relief; Worthstock not as an unprecedented luxury but as an established fact of the spring semester; the back of Sharples not as a site of construction but of the beloved Swing Tree; we remember Singer not as a study space but as Hicks and, after, an absurd acronym.

In some ways, it feels as though we’ve been waging warfare against forgetting. In tense whispers and in frustrated tirades, in bittersweet sighs and in rowdy laughs, we constantly assert the presence of our pre-pandemic memories. We give them body, weight, the agility to move not only between us, as seniors, but also between those who never experienced them. With our departure from Swarthmore inching closer, we’ve been forced to confront yet another sobering truth: we don’t

want these minute recollections, these moments, to escape us or those we will leave behind. ***

T

he world to a Swarthmore student is small. Although our intellectual world is huge—you can schmooze with the world’s leading expert in late Byzantine history in the morning and learn about particle physics in the afternoon— our social-physical world is small. On this campus, there are maybe 30 different buildings. There are probably around 600 kids with glasses, 300 athletes, and three people who went to highschool with you that you’ve only briefly heard of. There are four places where you can find an apple and exactly one place where you can find a grapefruit (sometimes).

At the same time, though, the small Swarthmore world is a microcosm of the other side of our bubble. We are a part of the statistics on CNN: the 2.8 million cases in Pennsylvania, the 80 million in the U.S., the 491 million across the world. Every one of us is at most two degrees of separation from someone who has tested positive and six degrees from a victim of the pandemic.

The political ping-pong in D.C. affects us.

The debates on the TV screen about vaccine and mask effectiveness are heard at Sharples tables. And as Delaware County lifted its mask mandate last month, so did the College.

It might feel minute to talk about COVID’s effects on Swarthmore, especially since most of the pandemic’s fatalities aren’t college-aged. Even when we hear that our friend or friend’s friend tests positive at the College, we still turn in our assignments, go to classes, and write articles for a literary magazine. But when you’re in college—and Swarthmore does plenty to reinforce this—it becomes part of you, structuring your daily life and carving a piece for itself out of your identity. So when a pandemic changes how everything in the College works, it changes you. ■

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The relationship between the mind, body, and food has always been complex.

But what does it

mean to ascend from purgatory and recover from disordered eating?

By Anonymous

I

never understood spirituality before these patterns began to feel less like predictable behaviors and more like a dissociative frenzy in which my mind and body are at war.

Spirituality is letting go of certainty, but I’m sure of quite a few things: that if I eat more than two meals a day, my body will expand like a bullfrog. That if I satisfy my cravings in the middle of the night, I will inevitably stuff myself to the point with the comforting knowledge that I can just throw it all up. And, when I do throw everything up, I am sure that I’ll have learned my lesson that time, and will tighten the oppressive reins of my dietary regime.

No, I’m certain!

I’ll count my calories like I promised myself. I will deny myself certain treats

that I know will just occupy my stomach as well as my mind; this kind of thinking makes my imagination more potent.

I’ll give it that. In my occupied mind, my stomach becomes a micro-purgatory.

An unwelcome and barren hollow for the guilty intakes of a binge.

Guilty. There is no nourishment here, not even a glimmer of hope for redemption.

These forbidden indulgences will be destined to a dismal fate, wherein they fail to become sustenance and instead must pay the price of impulsivity. And I find myself repulsed by them. Repulsed by myself, really, but to blame something else is a nice distraction from the shame that inescapably proceeds from the private privilege of a binge.

Binging is an intimately visceral experience, one that transports me initially to a

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false reality in which my behaviors have no consequences. Calories? Pfft. A day spent meticulously scheduling my meals and rationing portions is—in my mind, which tends toward polarization—wasted on this sinful temptation. But oh, how scandalous! How otherworldly this experience can be! I realize I’m using religious imagery throughout this essay, but how could I not, when the consequences of such pleasure can be quickly and privately purged by two fingers?

What a blessing to be able to atone for my lust, my gluttony (no, it is gluttony, really.

Totally not my body demanding nutrients).

This is the life I have chosen, I suppose, not one of moderation, but of the pursuit of perfection. Like those who endeavor to achieve it, perfection is stubborn: it is a hurdle that perpetually grows higher to ensure impossibility. We know this. You’re beautiful just the way you are! Nobody’s perfect (my mom lovingly yet somewhat fruitlessly preaches to me)! Well, I damn well try, right? The loneliness—the emptiness—that serves as a loyal convoy to the pursuit of perfection explains to you with presidential rhetoric that you are different from the rest, and what you choose to consume in front of others should reflect that.

Yeah, that’s why I order the scantily clad salad with no protein in sight at a restaurant while you, you GORMANDIZER, eat a steak sandwich (and fries? Mind if I have one? Or two?) for dinner. I don’t do moderation, because I’m able—unlike you—to eat with reserve and shame.

That’s my trick, you see. Deny, deny, deny.

However, at precisely 11:48 PM tonight, I’m going to scarf down three store-bought, nearly flavorless cinnamon rolls, a frosted gingerbread man cookie missing a foot, some handfuls of pasta (binging is too immediate, too frantic, an activity for utensils), and whatever Christmas cookies are left in the desolate carnage that is my family’s post-holiday refrigerator. But don’t you worry, I’ll redeem myself at the altar soon after this sinful rampage. I’ll bend forward to stare down at the toilet whose innocent bowl will soon be decorated with a Jackson-Pollock-esque

Purgatory, Probably

My dedication to the rules of this place is both addictive and fruitless, and as these two qualities cultivate themselves, my home becomes even more oppressive. abstraction of browns and greens and pinks and overwhelmingly acidic remnants of Guilt.

I choke, I heave, my lower back aches. I feel content with the mess I’ve made; it looks and smells wretched, like I’ve really accomplished something here.

The process is difficult, but the more unpleasant, the better. And, like my stomach after what I view as a successful purge, I feel empty: perhaps it’s the brain fog with which my body responds to this strenuous physical labor, but I choose to prioritize the short-term relief from a binge over the long-term effects of self-inflicted physical deterioration.

Empty! Hollow! Of sustenance, of thought.

But I go to sleep soundly. This process is liberating and exhausting, and I’ve earned my rest. My stomach gently groans, and the clouds occupying my brain eventually evaporate to make room for dreams. It’s funny how my nighttime atonement makes for morning dissatisfaction. Redemption used to feel liberating, joyful—at least at the beginning. Now, though, my mind and body are contentious with one another: my mind maintains austerity in its course of governance, and its physical shell becomes its subjective colony.

If the I think, therefore I am of it all is the union between the physical and the mental then I’m in for quite a tug-of-war. A Purgatory, I suppose, where I’m not quite alive and I’m not quite dead. At rest, at peace, in hell, heaven, whatever.

I’ve been to Purgatory (with a capital P!), and get this: there’s no scale where they weigh your heart against a feather.

Not one haloed baby hastily washes your soul with dish soap and kicks you out the door to your next destination, to which you’ll travel on a golden chariot or something (I haven’t gone to my Methodist Sunday school since middle school.

Forgive me). In fact, no one else is there but you! You get to choose how long you stay. And this is the worst part: You start to feel comfortable in Purgatory, grooming yourself for perfection—transcendence from banal moderation—and the process ensnares you.

I’ve been here for a while, and I’ll tell you this: at the beginning, it’s easy to confuse isolation for moral, physical, and spiritual supremacy to those outside Purgatory. The signature loneliness of this place is cyclical and tricky; it’s rewarding and frustrating and upsetting and literally and figuratively gut-wrenching and and and. But it’s aspirational. Cozy, even.

As a gift, Purgatory offers you a self-driving vehicle that you have the pleasure and responsibility of pretending to steer. Visit Purgatory, Where the Destination is the Never-Ending Journey!

My dedication to the rules of this place is both addictive and fruitless, and as these two Purgatorian qualities cultivate themselves, my home becomes even more oppressive. My skin shelters a body disconnected from a kind mind. And instead of feeling anguish from Purgatory’s betrayal, I feel nothing, using food to numb the pain which only feeds my urge to once again chase emptiness.

And thus the simultaneously comforting and debilitating cycle continues: the

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William Blake. “ The Ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory” (1824-7).

transactions between my mind and body and the budgeting of nourishment within the conservative economy of Purgatory.

Nourishment.

It’s curious how the words we use to describe physical satiety can be tossed around in our emotional or interpersonal vernacular. Starved of connection.

Full-hearted. Craving love. Empty. The more I begin to view Purgatory from an outsider’s lens, it becomes clear to me that this is no mistake, and that when I deny myself food, when I binge to a point of unbearable physical discomfort, when I purge the intakes of a binge, I’m defining the boundaries of the nourishment I allow

myself and the nourishment I am allowed to consume. I find myself prioritizing my relationship with Purgatory over pleasure and love and peace.

Sure, this nourishment is physical. But it also includes the love I accept from others and that which I give. Purgatory promotes self-isolation as a survival tactic; if I distinguish myself from others as a denier of gluttony—a transcendent, mystical being—then my goals of having the elusive perfect body will be achieved and I need not fret about negative influences. By rejecting my cravings, I prove that I am on another plane of existence than the rest, one free of mortal temptation. This is the PR campaign that Purgatory funds.

Privately, I give into these temptations, and my shame manifests through purging. If no one sees, though, I have nothing to worry about! My pursuit of flawlessness may carry on in its aimless course. Privately, I allow myself abundance, an indulgence of nourishment and fullness which, in daylight, seems erroneous. I tend to think that these tendencies of mine exist in a vacuum: pathologizing my binging and purging and restricting habits seems like a waste of time. These transactions I arrange with myself are simply the prices I pay to dwell in Purgatory. It’s all fine. I’m fine!

But I’m starting to notice that the metaphysical implications of hunger—not just the movement of ghrelin to my brain—are beginning to creep into my psyche. The more I deplete myself of nourishment, my inclination to limit my interactions inflates. I grow skeptical of the affection others offer: my transactional relationship with food, which Purgatory has so meticulously groomed, now extends to my acceptance of soul nourishment.

All I know is that the absence of it in my life has to do with my preoccupation with Purgatory. Because the Purgatory I know so well was never about food, it was about control and economizing myself. Because excess is terrifying and inappropriate and undeserved and it’s also so damn lovely.

And loveliness, care, and tenderness must be earned—this is what Purgatory drills into your brain and soul. You don’t deserve it, not unless you atone.

I never understood spirituality until I understood my relationship with food.

My erratic phases of deprivation and delirious consumption cause nothing but emptiness, and reflect my tendency to isolate myself not only through the enlightenment of picturesquely healthy eating but through my relationships.

I’m crawling out of Purgatory slowly.

The recovery process, as I view it now, is but a slow reckoning and reunion of a nourished mind and body: when I break free of Purgatory, I don’t intend to reach heaven or hell. I just want to come back down to earth. ■

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hen a ballerina walks on stage, all that the audience sees is elegance and control wrapped up in a sea of tulle, floating effortlessly across the stage.

When a viewer begins watching a horror movie, they’re met with dark, jarring visuals and a sense of looming unease. At first, the pretty, pastel world of ballet seems antithetical to the dim, depressing atmosphere fostered by a typical horror film. Regardless of their outward disparities, though, these two “opposites” are nevertheless capable of coexisting and informing one another.

A testament to this seemingly unconventional pairing, Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan follows Nina (Natalie Portman), a ballerina whose obsession with dancing the lead in the ballet Swan Lake drives her into psychosis. As a self-proclaimed horror film nerd and ballerina of 18 years, it might be shocking to learn that I only first watched Black Swan a couple months ago. The truth is, I was too scared to. And not because of the horror, but because of the ballet. Knowing what I know about the dance community, the balletic aspect of Black Swan felt too close to home, too

By Ellie Tsapatsaris

An Analysis of Ballet’s Inherent Horror

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inescapable. My enrollment in an amazing horror film class last semester finally put an end to my avoidance of this confrontation, and I’ve now realized that when you really break it down, the sights, sounds, and spirit of a ballet rehearsal and a scary movie are not dissimilar.

ACT I The Form & Fundamentals of Ballet magine an expansive room lined with peeled, gray flooring. Mirrors cover the walls, and as you stand in the center of the room, all you can see is yourself drowning in your own reflection. The room is cold, but still stuffy. It’s dreary. It’s dirty. It’s a typical ballet studio. Taken on its own, this real-life mise-en-scène is disturbingly horrific.

When you add dancers to this shell of a room, the horror is only heightened. Ballerinas have a reputation of addressing ballet in a way that’s harsh in juxtaposition to their dainty sport. As an example of this idea for those unfamiliar with the ballet community, the ballet jargon used throughout the rehearsal sequences in Black Swan is surprisingly aggressive.

When Nina is practicing the fouettés for her Black Swan choreography, for example, the choreographer yells, “attack it! Attack it!” This line wasn’t added to the movie for the sake of deeper horrific meaning; this is a phrase that choreographers often use when a dancer is working through fouettés and other demanding turns. “Attack it” is not the only example of a ballet phrase with aggressive connotations: ballerinas

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Death, Demons, Doppelgängers, and Dance

“kill” pirouettes, “snap” into relevés, and “gut” pointe shoes. In Black Swan, Nina’s pointe shoe gutting scene has profusely violent—albeit accurate—undertones. Nina roughly handles her pointes, cutting and puncturing the satin which arguably bears an eerie resemblance to flesh. In this moment, she transforms into a murderer, and the once-pretty pointe shoes which act as a tangible manifestation of dance are her victim.

Despite its elegant exterior, it’s no secret that ballet is a highly dangerous sport, both physically and mentally. About 75% of dancers report struggling with mental health issues, and 82% report suffering between one and seven injuries in one year of dancing. The personal lives of ballerinas are riddled with instances of injuries, blood, and emotional turmoil: Black Swan and other examples of ballet-horror exploit the capabilities of the film camera to amplify this experience. We see tightly-framed shots of broken toenails, bleeding rashes, and extreme instances of pain and physical exertion, all paired with amplified sounds of bone-cracking, skin-tearing, and the screams of abusive ballet directors. Considering a theatrical ballet audience’s typical distance from the stage, the camera lens bridges the gap between the watcher and the watched, offering us a rare glimpse into sensory details that often go unnoticed in real life but become shockingly familiar once they’re brought to the foreground via film.

Mentally, ballet has a reputation of being all-consuming for dancers, just as the horrific “Other” often consumes a horror protagonist’s thoughts. Nina’s last words

in Black Swan are a prime example of this idea: as she succumbs to her self-inflicted wound (a stab to her own gut with a shard of broken dressing-room mirror), she whispers, “perfect. It was perfect.” In her last moments of life, all that Nina can think about is her balletic execution. She’s content because, ultimately, she has killed the version of herself that was holding her back from mastering the essence of the Black Swan. Consumed by the internal turmoil and mental health issues that are so prevalent in many ballet communities, dancers often regard themselves as their worst enemy—or, in this case, scariest Other.

ACT II The Uncanny n horror films, the juxtaposition of the expected with the unexpected often creates a deeply disturbing audience experience. In Black Swan— among other horror films focusing on ballet—the intrinsic beauty of ballet is forced within generic conventions of horror. As an art form, ballet is poised and polished but, much like films within the horror genre, there’s more lurking beneath the surface. It’s this unexpected duality that reflects as well as elevates the suspense and shock so native to horror films.

In his influential essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud understands uncanniness as the feeling evoked when something is frightening due to its departure from familiarity.

Ballet audiences are accustomed to

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As an art form, ballet is poised and polished but, much like films within the horror genre, there’s more lurking beneath the surface. It’s this unexpected duality that reflects as well as elevates the suspense and shock so native to horror films.

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Close-ups from “Black Swan.”

maintaining a degree of separation between the performance and what goes on backstage—films like Black Swan, however, prevent audiences from controlling what they do and do not see. Aronofsky literally “zooms in” on Nina’s spiral into madness, depicting her life both on and off the stage in a way that’s unfamiliar for a theatrical ballet audience. The abundance

of close-up shots throughout the film is upsetting and claustrophobic, and the viewer is met with uncanniness when their existing perception of ballet is changed and horror is suddenly introduced into the narrative.

Beyond the film lens, the more physical aspects of dance can sometimes inspire uncanniness. Especially in films such as Luca Guadagnino’s

2018 remake of Suspiria where the über-contemporary style of dancing reads as a stark departure from the body’s “natural” way of moving, more conservative viewers might feel a looming sense of uneasiness throughout the film. In Suspiria, protagonist Susie (Dakota Johnson) is accepted into a dance company that’s run by a coven of witches.

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Death, Demons, Doppelgängers, and Dance

Body shapes in “Suspiria.”

Rather than moving in the graceful, flowing way that’s typically associated with ballet, Susie’s body creates sharp, jarring angles that simultaneously intrigue the diegetic coven and terrify the film’s audience.

ACT III The Doppelgänger elving deeper into the idea of “self-induced” suffering, another subset of horror tropes that translates well to ballet culture is the horrific doppelgänger. The doppelgänger permeates horror from the genre’s very beginnings with 1920s German Expressionist films to recent horrific masterpieces, such as Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). While Us doesn’t overtly depict a ballerina’s experience, it does include a scene of main character Addy (Lupita Nyong’o) and her evil “tethered” doppelgänger (named Red) dancing simultaneously.

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Just as duality frequently appears throughout the genre, partnership is often present in dance. Much of classical ballet choreography comes in the form of a Pas De Deux, which translates from French to “dance of two.” This partnered ballet demands two dancers in order to be complete, and is essential to the choreography of most famous ballets.

As a film, Black Swan strategically employs the doppelgänger trope by centering its narrative around the ballet Swan Lake. In this ballet, the parts of the virginal White Swan and abject Black Swan are traditionally danced by the same ballerina; thus, the ballet itself naturally perpetuates the idea of a “good” and “evil” persona. Nina falls victim to this trope when she fails to embody both characters at once, and the Black Swan ultimately rises victorious above both Nina and the White Swan. As viewers, we are horrified by this (uncanny!) split sense of self and the ultimate victory of the “evil” half.

It’s also important to note the significance of literal reflections in ballet. Traditionally, a ballet studio is equipped with mirrors lining most—if not all—of the walls, which forces the inhabiting ballerinas to constantly perceive a distorted version of themselves. In some ways, the omnipresence of mirrors throughout a ballerina’s training can act as the most terrifying enemy. While other horrific monsters have weaknesses, mirrors represent the one thing that you can never run away from: yourself. Apart from the more obvious shots of reflections in Nina’s studio rehearsal space, the reflection motif in Black Swan surfaces in subway windows, hospital doors, and dressing room vanities, with an ultimate build up to Nina’s death by none other than a shard of broken mirror.

This recurrence is an indication that even outside of the ballet studio, dancers are burdened by the weight of their own image; in other words, the effects of ballet body culture on dancers is suffocating and cannot be confined to just one room. A myriad of these shots create distorted reflections of Black Swan’s dancers. Again, in reference to Suspiria, Guadagnino makes an even clearer comment about distorted reflections by dressing one of the academy’s main dance studios with a permanently warped mirror.

This fixed warping acknowledges the perpetual prevalence of body dysmorphia and the distorted sense of self worth that plagues the ballet community. After hours of rehearsals where you’re doing nothing but staring at every minute detail of yourself in a mirror, your reflection becomes increasingly foreign, increasingly distorted.

ACT IV The Balletic Body Horror he physical and mental terror that many dancers endure can easily be depicted in the form of body horror.

Nina’s chilling swan transformation, Susie’s inter-cult sacrifices, and Red’s battle with her double self all seem to reinforce

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a rejection of one’s own body, which feels similar to a ballerina’s battle with eating disorders and mental health issues. From a young age, dancers are constantly told that their body is not “right” for dancing.

Ballerinas have to have perfectly arched feet, long necks, slender arms, and chiseled legs. In fact, growing up, I would tell myself that while I felt I was born to dance, I wasn’t born for dance. I rejected my own body because it wasn’t a doppelgänger of the professional ballerinas I had seen and admired.

In the world of film, Suspiria is particularly successful in pairing ballet with body horror.

Ballerinas are trained to be controlled; when all of their body weight is concentrated on their toes and the goal is to avoid acute injury, they have to be. Movies like Suspiria, however, heighten this obsession with control to its highest octaves. Throughout the film, dance is understood as a vessel through which to dominate others—the directors of the dance company seemingly exploit their principal dancers to control other members of the company for their cultish agenda. In reference to Suspiria’s ending sacrifice scene, the dancers create a disturbingly beautiful picture with their bodies. In a similar way, students in elementary choreography classes are taught to make shapes with the performing dancers in order to create evocative visuals on stage. Ideas like these make the line between ballet and horror more and more blurry.

ACT V The Theatricality hough certainly a form of dance, ballet also constitutes a subset of theater. This theatricality is especially prevalent in a text like Suspiria, where the film itself is divided by “acts.” More generally, the structure of ballet performances naturally relies on spectatorship, allowing for a smooth transition to film as a medium. At its roots, ballet is voyeuristic—it was created in 18th century Europe as male entertainment that would display the

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Growing up, I would tell myself that while I felt I was born to dance, I wasn’t born for dance. “ideal” feminine physique. Black Swan pays tribute to this history. Amidst her spiral into insanity, Nina fantasizes about a sexual affair with a rival ballerina from the company. The imagined relationship between these two beautiful women is riddled with sexual clichés, and feels catered toward the heterosexual male spectator (read more about this concept in “Debating Black Swan: Gender and Horror”). Even in rehearsals and classes, dancers are constantly told to pretend that they are being watched by an audience. This sentiment is reinforced by the documentary-style film form throughout Suspiria: on multiple occasions, Guadagnino uses shots with documentary-style zooming and shaky handheld camera work, which is critical in educating the audience about a dancer’s feeling of constant surveillance.

No analysis of theater would be complete without a discussion of choreography.

Although it might not seem obvious at first, most horror films include choreography, even if they’re not centered around dance.

This “choreography” is none other than a typical fight scene. Fight scenes are often accompanied by and synced to music; further, they often look and feel like choreography. They are, in many ways, a literal Pas De Deux. As an example of the similarities between dancing and fighting, we can consider the final moments of Us, where Red and Addy’s ultimate fight is seamlessly intercut with each character’s respective ballet performance. Even the music in this scene is a remixed “double” of the same musical motif that has appeared throughout the film—again, an uncanny callback that is concurrently familiar and disturbing.

The versatility of dance styles can also speak volumes about the message being

conveyed in a film. In Us, Addy’s tethered double (Red) showcases a more modern style of ballet, whereas untethered Addy’s performance is much more classical in nature: while Red crawls around and uses floorwork, Addy dances gracefully on a proper stage. These choreographic choices mirror the tethered’s desire to be current and have their time in modernity, whereas those living in the above world are perfectly complacent dancing (and living) as they have for decades.

ACT VI The Finale allet and horror share countless elements: the uncanny, body-horror, the doppelgänger, and deeper psychological reckoning. Not to mention, ballet and its inherent theatricality translate almost flawlessly to the movie screen.

Made possible by the versatility of film as a medium and the magic of post-production, filmmakers have the tools to emphasize body horror’s organic existence in ballet. Despite a naïve belief that ballet and horror are opposites, the dance form’s fundamental aspects make it a surprisingly fruitful form of horrific expression.

After confronting the inescapable intersection between my ongoing ballet studies and favorite niche of my prospective Film major, I can finally say that I’ve conquered my fear of Black Swan. Ultimately, my suspicions were right: Aronofsky’s accurate depiction of ballet culture was truly uncanny. Like the mirrors I face every day, I saw myself in Nina, and the horror on the screen suddenly became all too immersive.

Ballet is pretty, poised, and polished—the perfect setup for a horror film. ■

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Anna Fruman

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DON’T LOOK UP

DON’T LOOK UP DON’T LOOK UP A CRISIS OF SHARED KNOWLEDGE

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THE MOST TERRIFYING ELEMENT OF “DON’T LOOK UP” ISN’T ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE. IT’S THE ATTACK ON CREDIBILITY.

By Tarang Saluja

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ithin a month of its release on December 5, 2021, Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) became one of Netflix’s most popular movies, and it was followed by a deluge of articles with hot takes on the movie. Among those who claim to be concerned about the climate crisis, some argue that Don’t Look Up captures fundamental aspects of how our country is responding to the impending climate disaster. Others expressed disappointment that the film didn’t represent the essence of the climate change disaster and instead highlighted the sanctimonious attitudes of a too—online liberal-left.

Some—fortunately not too many—are more concerned about telling us that the climate crisis isn’t that bad.

In Don’t Look Up, the existential threat to humanity comes in the form of a huge comet that could cause extinction. While there’s a concrete plan that can deflect the comet with high probability, a tech

billionaire sabotages this plan and pushes for a flimsy strategy which will stop the comet and extract rare minerals to achieve economic dominance over China. There’s a pedantic debate about whether or not the comet and the response to the comet is a good allegory for how we are dealing with the climate crisis. I am not interested in that. A film that perfectly demonstrates the reality of climate change will either be ridiculously contrived, or a documentary.

What matters isn’t how close the film’s portrayal is to the climate crisis, but whether it tells us something meaningful about events wrapped in the concept of “catastrophe and bad response.” From this concept, certain phenomena like climate crisis, COVID, nuclear warfare, or perhaps a comet emerge and solidify.

Whether intentionally or not, I think the film does tell us something meaningful, and I want to focus on what I thought was most terrifying. Don’t Look Up is a

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Don’t Look Up: A Crisis of Shared Knowledge

This void can easily be exploited to create a situation where people no longer have a framework which can be used to determine the accuracy of what is messaged to them. story about how an undemocratic recipe of credentialis corporations capturing academic institutions, the media’s co-optation of the scientific, and the failure to uphold democratic infrastructures (namely, peer review and accountable journalism) creates a nihilistic void of skepticism. This void can easily be exploited by the most cynical actors in society to create a situation where people no longer have a framework which can be used to determine the accuracy of what is messaged to them; that is, a crisis of shared knowledge, an epistemological crisis.

Don’t Look Up starts with Michigan State University professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and graduate student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovering a comet which could cause extinction in 6 months and 14 days. Even after they verify this with NASA scientists, their appointment with President Orlean (Meryl Streep) is delayed due to a sensational sexting scandal. When they finally meet, President Orlean focuses on the cost of intervening with the comet and her popularity to make a quick political calculation that they will “sit tight and assess.” With her self-promoting bookshelf, ostentatious displays of wealth, and pictures with corrupt politicians like Clinton and Cheney, she’s the perfect caricature of a self-interested politician. However, a more subtle and interesting detail in the film is that the White House’s inaction is couched in a credentialist denigration of Michigan State University. Not only does President Orlean’s son scoff “Come on, bro” when NASA’s Head of Planetary Defense says that Michigan State University has an excellent Astronomy Department, but President Orlean also notes that she wanted “Ivy Leaguers” on the project to verify the information. Later, it’s revealed that the head of NASA, who told the New York Herald

(the film’s equivalent of the New York Times) that Mindy and Kate were wrong to say that calculations were definite, was a “former anesthesiologist and President Orlean superdonor.” I’d be willing to gamble that she went to Harvard!

Credentialism again rears its head when Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), the unnerving CEO of a technology company called Bash Cellular which has spread itself across sectors, proposes a plan to break the comet into tiny pieces and extract minerals from them. This is after Irshwell single-handedly interrupts and cancels a fairly robust plan to deflect the comet. In a stinging parody of corporate presentations—full with holographic images, innovation lingo, spiritual language, and ridiculous acronyms—he cites two Nobel Prize-winning professors from Stanford and Princeton for the research used in his company’s plan. Although this research hasn’t been peer reviewed, the mere mention of these institutions and the prestigious prize grabs the attention of government officials and even Mindy. Not only does this scene remind us of the unfounded obsequiousness which is fostered for scientists with “prestige” through media and corporations, but it is also a chilling reminder of how academic institutions are blending together with corporate America.

While it’s already terrifying that Bash Cellular is using credentials rather than peer review to inform their project and the media isn’t reporting on this, the ease with which institutions co-opt dissenters adds to the film’s horror. After he learns about Bash Cellular’s project, Mindy convinces himself that the Bash and White House Team need him in the room to make sure that this expedition doesn’t go too terribly. As he takes this role, Mindy

more fully embraces his recently granted position as America’s sexy scientist, and he intensifies his raunchy extramarital affair with the news reporter who interviews him. Whether it’s because he’s drunk on his fame and affair, bought into a self-indulgent mythos that the flimsy research suggested by Bash Cellular will lead to a good outcome because he’s there, or can find no other option but to stick with this project, Mindy compromises his integrity by uncritically backing the project.

He even appears in an ad sponsored by Bash and FEMA which foregrounds the “jobs the comet will provide,” and emphasizes “our scientists” (referring to the scientists on the Bash Cellular and White House collaborations) as the scientists who the public should seek over others for answers. The moment Mindy started working with the White House and became part of the “in group” after his first high-rated media appearance—even before the original plan to deflect the comet was aborted—he had already demonstrated his role in the credentialist fervor when he called the people in the White House team “the best and the brightest”: possibly a reference to David Halberstam’s account (The Best and the Brightest) of how cocky government bureaucrats and technocrats deceived the public about Vietnam and made embarrassing decisions abroad. The way Mindy continues to defend and promote these people, even after knowing that their work is not necessarily scientifically sound, demonstrates that his subservience to them comes out of something other than scientific integrity.

Sure, Mindy is exceptional because he later turns his back on the alliance between Bash Cellular and the White House

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after many other scientists are removed for asking questions and even Irshwell turns on him for asking questions. But why would anyone believe Mindy now? Even if he hadn’t entirely discredited himself by jumping ship, what’s the public supposed to believe? The corrupt tech companies and two likely dark-money funded, Nobel Prize-winning scientists from Stanford and Princeton who are propped up by a smitten media and subservient government officials, or a peer-reviewed group of scientists with data, evidence, and corroboration to back their claims? Or, should I say, the qualified, Nobel Prize-winning, well-known Stanford and Princeton scientists approved by the White House, or a bunch of wacky, jealous scientists from “second-tier universities” who want a bit of attention? A failing media, like the one depicted in this movie, could allow you to color the credibility either way. When Riley Bina, the pop-star of the movie played by Ariana Grande, sings the lyrics “Look up, what he’s really trying to say is get your head out of your ass. Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists,” the futility and meaninglessness of this plea for the people in the movie is heart-breaking; that’s because you’d be justified to ask which goddamn scientists? The Ivy Leaguers and the Bash geniuses or the other ones?

The film highlights the importance of peer review in research to its viewer, but the point is how difficult it is for a person in the Don’t Look Up universe to understand what’s happening. The journalists are more than happy to simply not give a shit about the importance of peer review when providing “information” to the public. Peer review is, after all, the crux of democratic decision making in academia;

an ideal peer review’s function is to accommodate how everyone can make mistakes when developing and contributing knowledge. This process offers us the hope that we’re reaching our potential in the mission of creating a good approximation of our reality.

Similarly, journalism’s role in a democracy is to empower the public, and the vastly undemocratic landscape in Don’t Look Up is underscored by the media’s failure to give people tools that they can use to understand and assess evidence, including an understanding of peer review. Not only does the parasitic journalism cause both journalism and peer review to fail in their democratic missions, but it’s also autocratic to have a publically unaccountable company influence government decisions and have talons in academia, or allow the FBI to operate like a shadow government which can arrest people who want to reveal information in the public interest, like Kate was after she revealed her distress about Bash Cellular’s terrible plan.

With all these obstacles and a complex of secrecy, corporate control, and clandestine relationships and connections (including the journalist who has slept with two former presidents), journalism—both in this film and in real life—is hopelessly intertwined with the powerful and will often shift public opinion in its favor. Without other apparatuses that inform people based on evidence and foreground the value of evidence, the situation when this powerful complex of media, corporations, and government is right or wrong is more or less indistinguishable. As public journalism has been largely defunded and corporate-owned media outlets ignore facts to “beat” the other side, cater to a shrinking elite base, and launch coordinated strikes

on independent platforms and journalists, our apparatuses of evidence-based criticism and interrogation are actually under attack. The chaos surrounding what people believe about the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates this difficulty to distinguish between reality and deception perfectly.

Much of the script for Don’t Look Up was written before COVID-19, but there is an uncanny similarity between how the media complex treated Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci and Mindy.

Fauci, a man who appeared as a shining beacon of hope after a truly deranged and conspiratorial pandemic response, first framed his prior statement about mask-wearing as a noble lie to prevent panic but then later backtracked to say there they didn’t know mask-wearing helped at that point. Even if he had good intentions, he should have resigned for the sake of the public interest after he discredited his own trustworthiness twice, but instead he decided to go on a ride to media stardom, like Mindy. In fact, in an eerie echoing of how Ariana Grande asked people to trust Mindy in a song near the end of the movie (after he had pissed all over his credibility), Ariana Grande and James Corden actually posted a music video celebrating the vaccines and the end of lockdowns in which Corden sings about “his favorite M.D. Anthony Fauci” while people behind him hold up a cloth with Fauci’s face on it. Fauci went on to further undermine public trust by making inconsistent, declarative statements about what is needed to achieve immunity. Fauci was also vague about his account of funding at the Wuhan lab, and the NIH released a statement which

Without apparatuses that foreground the value of evidence, the situation when this powerful complex of media, corporations, and government is “right” or “ wrong” is more or less indistinguishable.

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some claim implies the US did fund GainOf-Function research in China after Fauci testified that the US did not (and sassily snapped at Rand Paul, probably for the media views). While there doesn’t seem to be any consensus in the research community about whether or not it really was Gain-Of-Function research, and some may have made this claim in bad faith, more mistrust was sowed by the utter failure of the partisan liberal faction of the media to at least properly acknowledge that dangerous research had occurred.

It was soon revealed that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance had worked together to bypass restrictions on COVID experiments.

In parallel to all this, emails showed that he worked with Dr. Francis Collins to suppress lab leak theory, even though some scientists thought it would be stunning for something like this to develop in nature.

At times, it was even difficult to tell whether Fauci was a public health figure or a big pharma spokesperson who wanted to use his position to protect their profits. The public health establishment and media spent months smearing and censoring journalists, scientists, and people for even expressing skepticism of the official narrative before courageous independent outlets were finally able to disseminate information about malfeasance. During this time, Fauci was even narcissistic enough to say “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.” Others in the public health and liberal media establishment have similarly messaged inconsistently and smugly balked at any sort of dissent, often calling for censorship and character assassination. Whatever you may think about the accuracy of specific parts of the narrative (vaccines, boosters, treatments, origins, restrictions, masking, travel etc.) in the COVID messaging sphere, the extent of inconsistency and corporate infection are legitimate grounds for a general skepticism towards chunks of the larger COVID-19 messaging milieu, and some skeptical questions which were previously labeled as conspiracy theories were later shown to be plausible and still open for questioning.

Don’t Look Up: A Crisis of Shared Knowledge

What do we do with this skepticism? Ideally, we interrogate it rigorously for evidence and ground our arguments in facts and documents. We should not quash skepticism and tell people they’re fascists or stupid for not following guidance, but rather ground ourselves in a commitment to democratic forms of knowledge production. This means engaging in our own healthy skepticism and deciding whether something is grounded in evidence, or if it’s wrong and can be improved.

If the appropriate channels to deal with skepticism are not provided, however, where does someone with justified skepticism go? Either they live with the horror of realizing how powerless they’re in making sense of the world, or they latch onto some cynical narrative which gives them a story to make meaning out of their skepticism. When people with justifiable skepticism are caught in a reactionary movement which assuages the horror of not knowing, censorious and sanctimonious behavior only furthers their reactive narrative because they can use censorship and a smug refusal to address their skepticism as “evidence” that something important is being suppressed.

Yes, that’s flawed reasoning, but there’s not much else one can do when trapped in an atmosphere which doesn’t engage with skepticism in a reasonable way.

People who believe in the powerful complex of media, corporations, and government are quick to blame and look down on others who think they’re being fed lies or can’t figure out when this powerful complex is telling the truth. The people who are blaming others, however, also can’t actually make that determination in the absence of their participation in democratic, evidence-based interrogation and engagement. If they’re correct about certain facts without that participation, it’s just a matter of luck, because they would have fallen for the same establishment which deceived the public about the comet. An empty appeal to trusting The Science (or The Credentialed or The Genius) as a transcendent deity, rather than collectively producing and interrogating knowledge, is an argument that works just as well for Bash Cellular as it does for Fauci and other public

health figureheads. The logical conclusion to this situation, and where we might be heading, is a world in which people who aren’t privy to inaccessible information end up with the very nihilistic belief that anything could be true and then just choose what is convenient to them.

Some people are already in that situation! The ambiguity of Ariana’s lyrics perfectly demonstrates how this suffocating, confused situation could kill us all if we don’t change our trends.

The solution to this horrific situation is not easy. It involves dismantling an entire complex of anti-democratic forces which plague our social production of knowledge and science; it means removing corporate influence from research; it means funding journalism which is truly in the public service and based on evidence and documents; it means not giving a cartel of universities higher precedence in scientific decision-making; it means allowing dissent and engaging with it appropriately, maybe even realizing many of us were just wrong. Don’t Look Up not only shows us that we’ll be absolutely screwed if the people making the “wrong decisions” wield the undemocratic levers of power, but it also tells us how people making the ”right decisions” with undemocratic levers of power will also cause a fraught response (mistrust and backlash). We already have such large epistemological fissures around us, and it seems impossible to bridge them now. It feels like people live in entirely different realities, but if we believe in the dignity of each person and their voice as a valuable asset to our democratic structures, then maybe we might be able to create publicly accountable infrastructure that puts people above power and profit and consequently reestablishes trust, engagement, and goodwill with one another. For this, we need to have an unrelenting commitment to civil liberties and the interests of all people above businesses. Don’t Look Up demonstrates how urgent it is for us to act, and we can only survive some catastrophic event if all of us take the responsibility to think carefully about our actions and how to avoid hurtling towards a world with an irreparable epistemological crisis. ■

GALEK YANGZOM GALEK YANGZOM GALEK YANGZOM GALEK YANGZOM GALEK YANGZOM

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hough often criticized as a style of hip hop devoid of substance and “artistry,” trap music has revolutionized popular music culture, providing an aspirational image of freedom and wealth under capitalism for young people who are otherwise excluded from dreams of such success. When Jordan Carter, better known as Playboi Carti, released his 2020 album Whole Lotta Red, fans anticipated a trap project that would surpass the standards set by his 2018 Die Lit—a record considered one of the greatest of its kind.

Instead, they were met with a collection of songs that expressed Carti’s emotional vulnerability caused by years of trying to fit the image of a famous trap artist. While Whole Lotta Red certainly conforms to the conventions of the “typical” trap project—with its themes of drug use, gang ties, and ostentatious displays of wealth—the album nevertheless diverges from this framework in many ways.

In its nuanced treatment of addiction and celebrity status, however, Carti’s “ILoveUIHateU,” a track toward the end of the album, epitomizes his departure from the conventions that traditionally define trap music. Throughout the song, Carti

Ca st by ill o

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opens up about his addiction to codeine and promethazine while rapping over a brash trap beat full of abrasive bass lines and mumbled ad libs. Within this moment of vulnerability, Carti also acknowledges his continued attachment to his luxurious lifestyle, one afforded not only by his celebrity but, and perhaps more importantly, his adherence to certain expectations set for trap artists. While the entirety of the album Whole Lotta Red experiments with the trap genre, “ILoveUIHateU” is unique in its honesty, highlighting the dichotomy between Carti’s longing for help and his desire to maintain his lifestyle.

Despite employing the 808-dominated bass line made famous by trap music, “ILoveUIHateU” is dominated by almost-transparent sounding synthesizers and muted hi-hats, both of which contrast with the patterns of many of Carti’s earlier works and instead emphasizes his lyrics. This emphasis upon lyrics provides an intimate glimpse into Carti’s feelings of being trapped, ultimately demonstrating his desire to be heard rather than glorifying his addiction. At the beginning of the song, Carti’s synthesizer enters the space delicately, straining against the wave of impactful beat drops characteristic of the trap genre. The obviously melodic and flowy nature of the synthesizer is made especially clear when comparing it to the grating, rough synthesizer of choice on Carti’s

I Love You, I Hate You

“wokeuplikethis*”—the artist’s first Billboard top 100 song ever. “wokeuplikethis*” also utilizes much louder and more impactful hi-hats.

These factors combine to create a drastically different listening experience for Carti’s fans as one song is focused on the bassy, bouncing beat, while the other is purposefully more muted. Similarly, since “ILoveUIHateU” is less anchored in loud and impactful instrumentals, Carti has more space to engage his listener with his vocals. As a result of this uncharacteristic focus on his lyrics, Carti points toward the central message of the song—his struggle with addiction to lean and the luxuries of his celebrity lifestyle.

Though the mesmerizing production of Carti’s “ILoveUIHateU” may fool fans into categorizing the single as just another trap song, nowhere on Whole Lotta Red can Carti’s mental and emotional struggle be seen more clearly.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Whole Lotta Red doesn’t adhere to the lyrical mold of Carti’s previous projects. Throughout the album, Carti often sticks to themes of violence, taking drugs, and leading a rockstar lifestyle, his song “ILoveUIHateU” confesses to the listener his troubling patterns of addiction to drugs and fame. These addictions aren’t glamorized or intended to adhere to the lyrical expectations outlined by the trap genre. Instead, Carti mourns the crippling effects that vice has had on his life. In the

chorus, Carti raps about his attachment to lean and how he abuses the substance as a coping mechanism to deal with his various hardships: I’m thinkin’ ‘bout dyin’ my hair red just to look like a pint of red I like all of my cups so dirty, I been sippin’ that Bloody Mary (Yeah) I mix all of my problems and Prometh’ until I roll on my death bed (Yeah) I mix all of my problems and Prometh’ until I roll on my death bed (What?) (Playboi Carti) In these lines, Carti exposes his extreme attachment to promethazine, even altering his appearance to resemble the drug’s vibrant color. Despite under standing the consequences of relying on heavy drugs to confront the stresses of his life, Car ti recognizes the impossibility of breaking free from his vices. As he repeats twice in the chorus, he believes that he’ll die from the drug before he can escape its clutches. Further underscoring the artist’s addiction, the subsequent lyrics “Don’t get too close, baby, don’t get too close, What you don’t know, it won’t hurt, cause you won’t know ” similarly capture the enclosed personality Carti has developed in an ef fort to hide his addiction from the people around him. “ILoveUIHateU”’s oscillation between braggadociousness and despair

While the entirety of Whole Lotta Red experiments with the trap genre, "ILoveUIHateU" s unique in its honesty, highlighting the dichotomy between Carti's longing for help and his desire to maintain his lifestyle.

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We can materialize Playboi Carti's plight as a cultural symbol under capitalism.

Carti is, in many ways, aware of the dangers of the hyper-competitive, dog-eatdog world that his music illustrates and promotes.

mirror the highs and lows he experiences with lean, exposing how vulnerable Carti really is.

Interestingly, in contrast to Carter’s earlier projects, in which his signature ad libs are used to accentuate the instrumentation of the song, the use of said ad libs on “ILoveUIHateU” seems minimal and more complementary to the message he’s trying to get across to his listener. Though “ILoveUIHateU” moves away from patterns of his earlier hits by minimizing elements that would otherwise distract from his words, Carti can’t quite abandon the lifestyle he’s become accustomed to, and remains pinned down by the stringent expectations of stardom. In his first verse, Carter underscores his distaste for the lifestyle he’s been forced into, and yet surrounds this message with typical trap themes of wealth. His lyrics, in a word, demand attention: I got these diamonds they blinkin’, b*tch All of my phones, stay ringin’, b*tch (What?)

She like them n****s that really rich My hands on my stick like a little witch I told her, “I really don’t do this shit”

That money gon’ make this b*tch do this shit (Go) Codeine in my cup ‘cause I do this shit (Codeine) Codeine in my drank, b*tch, I do this shit (Syrup) (Playboi Carti) This lyrical display of both flexing his wealth and popularity while also taking a step back from his image of being a tough rapper who “does this shit” reflects how Carti is stuck between his need to cease his harmful lifestyle and his pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence. In the end, though Whole Lotta Red diverges from the mold of the “typical” trap project, Carter’s reluctance to step away from the spotlight underscores how he, too, is subject to the pressures of fame and celebrity under capitalism.

In the influential essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment

as Mass Deception” (1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno coined the term “the culture industry” as the process by which popular culture under capitalism creates standardized products for its sorted and standardized consumers. Under this model, artistic experimentation and freedom collapse into sterile products, adhering to certain expectations of mass-production and standardization demanded by capitalist profit. In a word, cultural and artistic objects all become the same, providing easy—and predictable—patterns of consumption. By this same token, we can materialize Playboi Carti’s plight as a cultural symbol under capitalism. Carti is, in many ways, aware of the dangers of the hyper-consumptive, dog-eatdog world that his music illustrates and promotes.

Except, despite this, he simply doesn’t feel that he can escape it. It’s clear that there’s a desire for Carti’s lyrics to remain fixed to conventions established within the genre; rapping about and ultimately glorifying drugs, sex, fame, violence, and power seem to all be instrinsic elements of trap’s “culture industry.” Although Carti may want to stop being trap’s newest and brightest star, the luxuries afforded to him by his success within the music industry keep him tethered to the drugs, guns, and money he raps about. ■

Except, despite this, he simply doesn't feel like he can escape it. Although Carti may want to stop being trap's newest and brightest star, the luxuries afforded to him within the music industry keep him tethered.

by by by by

Olivia Olivia Olivia Olivia

Han Han Han Han

Coming to Terms with the Asian American Identity in a Major Way I

only recently found out what my last name meant. Truthfully, I was never inclined to read about my family’s cultural history until it was directly revealed to me. My name, Han, is defined as such: a Korean word that encapsulates all negative emotion—the bitterness, the shame, the hateful desire for vengeance— until it snowballs into a trauma that defines an entire nation. Cathy Park Hong brought this definition to my attention in her collection of essays

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titled Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. A cultural awakening, Hong’s memoir gives a voice to a community that has for too long been pushed to the sidelines.

Published in February of 2020, Minor Feelings establishes itself as one of the most pertinent reads of our time. Climbing to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, Hong’s collection of essays carries a newfound magnitude as violence rises amongst the Asian community.

A seemingly prophetic telling given the times, Hong’s memoir asks Asian Americans to question their identities. What part do we play in this world, one that refuses to accept our racial identities while simultaneously holding us to a standard that is used to put other minorities down? How do we navigate these “minor feelings”—feelings that we are unable to express so we continue on in silent damnation? These questions are not to be answered outright; rather, they

force us to reflect on our lives, our choices, and our actions. In speaking about her experiences as an Asian American artist, poet, and daughter, Hong sums up what it means to be Asian in a political climate that rejects our existence as a whole.

With the Asian American at the forefront of the conversation, the white framework around which all racial identities have been structured slowly chips away. Putting into words a universal experience

amongst the AAPI community, she speaks on the difficulties of talking about race with the white population: “It’s more than a chat about race… it’s proving to a person why you exist.” In the past, I spent much of my youth content to hide my existence; I wasn’t going to make my identity known to others if I could survive by concealing my Asianness. Growing up in a predominantly white, conservative town, I was forced to assimilate for acceptance.

Buying clothes I didn’t like, talking in a manner that wasn’t my own, refusing to eat certain foods—I became a caricature of what the white majority wanted me to be. Stooping so low as to make fun of my own culture with jokes about tiger moms and eating dogs, I twisted their laughing mockery into approval. Over time, I began to realize that masking my Asian identity didn’t make me a better person. I was only fostering self-hatred to be a more digestible

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Coming to Terms with the Asian American Identity in a Major Way

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Cover for Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning” (February 25, 2020).

version of myself—a sentiment that was engendered by Hong’s writing.

She reveals that there is no such thing as unconditional belonging for Asian Americans, or simply people of color in general. It is impossible to assimilate for others’ comfort when people will forever be uncomfortable with authenticity.

But we try anyway. For many Asian immigrants, we blindly follow the American dream, this unwavering optimism

that insists upon the straightforward pipeline of hard work to success. The reality of this dream, however, is far from what we imagine. In school, there is an overwhelming pressure to achieve intellectual greatness due to unrealistic stereotypes that associate Asians with academic prowess. This suffocating burden causes Asian American students to work toward an impossible expectation that ultimately leads to many

suffering from mental health crises.

Like Hong, I am the daughter of immigrants, and I am what would be considered the epitome of the model minority, a horrid stereotype that is ultimately used to criticize other demographics, specifically Black Americans. But what does it mean to have the title of model minority, to be hailed as “next in line to be white”? To be complacent with this racialized ranking, as Hong

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describes, is to be complacent with forever being shunned into silence. In being calm and quiet, in being law-abiding non-wavemaking people, Asian Americans will continually be an exploitative part of the white hierarchy.

Ironic as it is, I expressed my silence in the way I spoke. My parents never taught me Korean, and as a kid, I had no interest in learning it. My mother would brush off my question of why she didn’t speak to me in Korean, giving trite answers of not wanting me to get confused between languages or develop an accent. But the true explanation was glaring—she was terrified that I would have a childhood like hers.

Though living in Florida made me no stranger to being ostracized by virtue of my racial differences, I was lucky enough to never have battled through broken language barriers or fought just for people to understand me. In her years of adjusting to the American way of life, my mother recognized that communication was the key to credibility and, because of it, was willing to sacrifice our culture for a better shot at survival.

My experience as an Asian American and my mother ’s experience exist on two separate planes. We are two parallel lines, destined to never intersect. I will never truly know her pain and suffering, but I believe that Hong’s writing is the closest I will get to understanding her. In her essay “Bad English,” Hong uses poetry as her medium to mold the shame of speaking in fractured sentences into beautiful ineloquence. She erases the shame that accompanies speaking in accents; Asians are no longer the butt of so many ill-conceived jokes, but rather the star of the show. With all

The Asian way is to suffer secretly. Minor Feelings shatters that idea by giving a voice to a community that has been both stripped of its integrity and praised for its adaptation to American life. the times I have seen my mother be spoken down to, all the times that the words “Do. You. Speak.

English?” have oozed out of the mouths of her white colleagues like tar (even though she speaks it fluently), I’ve realized that I’ve been taught to detest bad English. I craved fluency, anything to avoid criticism and judgment from others, and thus I turned my resentment not toward the perpetrators of the mockery, but toward my own people. But Hong flipped the script for me. Bad English isn’t a sign of weakness; no, to say that the bad English speaker is powerless incorrectly places whiteness at the center of the Asian experience. Bad English is strength. It is resilience. It is a symbol that announces to everyone that we have the courage to speak even when the world is begging us to stay silent.

Using our voices to disrupt the comfort of those around us is a step in the right direction, but there is more to be done. The culture of silence that condemns Asian Americans from unleashing their true emotions needs to be dismantled. There is a need to be tame, to be idealized and civilized into the most pristine version of ourselves in order to be presentable to the public eye. But in pacifying the mind with this attitude,

you pacify the tongue, censoring generations and generations with this belief: If something is considered taboo, it must remain unspoken. We cannot vocalize our feelings for fear of burdening those around us with unwanted tragedy. This undefined quiet that permeates throughout the Asian American community brings me back to my name. Han is a grief that comes as a consequence of years of cruel colonization, which is only furthered by a loss of identity once the Asian immigrant makes their way to America. It is a sorrow so deep that it cannot be put to words lest it unearth a trauma that won’t ever go away. We go gently into that good night, holding onto our suffering because, ultimately, who will listen to us?

Throughout her memoir, Hong confronts this question by writing about the brutal rape and murder of artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. During her life, Cha embodied the goodness of the Asian American. She was everything that she was supposed to be, reserved and demure, not instigating any controversy save for her poetry. In her death, she was treated just the same. People were silent. Her murder was very quietly publicized, and, even then, her sexual assault was omitted. Through this story, Hong underlines the horrifying statistics

Coming to Terms with the Asian American Identity in a Major Way

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Anna Fruman.

“Untitled.”

2022. Oil on canvas.

that surround Asian American women and sexual assault. The numbers vary, some showing a very broad range of percentages for physical and sexual violence, and others showing an extraordinarily low percentage. These numbers, however, are rendered unreliable, with Hong

herself stating that she has “a hard time trusting any of these findings” due to the stigma that shames traumatized Asians into silence.

I never wanted to report my own sexual assault, and, even now, writing this feels like a betrayal to the

code of silence I never asked to take. I reported it anyway. I can’t say that I feel better about the fact that I did—maybe things would have been different had I shut up and repressed it. Who knows? The one thing that I can say for certain is that I am allowed to use my voice any way I wish. I don’t have to press my hand over my mouth to prevent words of pain that “would not only retraumatize me but traumatize everyone I love,” as Hong puts it. It is understandable to feed into this facade of protection. I don’t want to taint my family with the shame of my own misfortune. But I can’t just let the words die in my throat, never to be spoken. When stories are not told, they disappear. They go out of publication, their pages are torn, they fade to nothing. Hong gives Cha the justice and closure she deserves—her real story gets told despite the false passivity that outsiders tried to frame her with. Cha was a fighter until the very end.

The Asian way is to suffer secretly.

Minor Feelings shatters that idea by giving a voice to a community that has been both stripped of its integrity and praised for its adaptation to American life. I feel that Hong sums it up perfectly with a line referring to a friend from her college days: “Stronger than her will to die was her will to endure.” We suffer, we watch our parents suffer, but we keep going. Hong’s recounting of the Asian American experience is utterly profound. She speaks with a refreshing honesty about the tension that exists in the space between being Asian and being American. Minor Feelings does not carry with it the shame of silence that encompasses the consciousness of so many Asian Americans. Rather, it bares its existence loudly and shouts from the rooftops: “We were always here.” ■

anna fruman 2022

School Life Fantasy!

a tangled head in a ten-foot ditch

there are no cannibals in london only academics with copper pots he makes no allowance for the undertaking of going to the grocery store a tuesday in the dairy aisle he buys two cartons of milk three of yogurt twenty grains of rice to lie across his doorstep let me pass the checkout aisle pass scanners pass money pass faded faces staring from faded ink home he cooks a steak he eats very little vacancies line his stomach I considered my courses the way the wind bent around my ribbed body a warning a ceiling fan the clanging of a rail in the months of november and december he replaces the soap the laundry basket the telephone wire the bird feeder the echoes in the living room

I prepared myself washed my brain nine times a day lofe after lobe after lobe until my skin burgeoned red in the months of november and december he replaces his eyes his arms his larynx his tendons with a bottle now floating in the thames another year congratulate me on watching the laundry dry on a washing line congratulations the methodology of madness a birthday card two days early

poetry and he stains the kitchen table with the shatters of him —

he plays himself in every other dream his mind floods a drip a pen drops a drop of water skitters across a cracked spine darkness spreads ink to newspaper his radio in a house that never knew how it was to be tangled to be weighted to wear to fissure in places there never were before sometimes he wakes upside down sometimes he never wakes at all

alive the way the wind cuts into his head in the morning innocence drifts and a curtain buries his body enrapture and enrobe rapture rapture and tell him his sins heaven folded cold after the war tell him his sins he sits on a dusty sofa tell him his sins he follows a breath down the beach as human he was born in cut hair and broken chairs breakfast sausage and baked beans a letter an enlistment a signature a mantel of silence enrobing his twisted limbs ■

ayla radha schultz

floating instead in the lost day the lost year of spinning fans and solitary swims on a beach where sand tangled the waves smothered him

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Tolstoy’s Confession

Death, God, and the Meaning of Life

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By Luke Chen

If a man lives he believes in something. If he does not believe that one must live for something, he would not life.

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

A

t the age of 51, after having written War and Peace (1867) and Anna Karenina (1878), Leo Tolstoy reflected on his life and determined it to be utterly meaningless. He believed that there was something rotten lodged within his soul: an inconsolable sense of futility that stemmed from his belief that, since death destroys everything, nothing could possibly matter. The only logical solution to this dilemma, Tolstoy concluded, would be to commit suicide.

But, with his notorious habit of overthinking, Tolstoy doubted himself and couldn’t fully accept the finality of death; in his mind, he needed to at least try to find

some sense of solace. While contending with his distress and possible avenues to reach eventual relief, Tolstoy confronted a momentous and timeless question: what is the meaning of life? Tolstoy’s struggle with this question is laid bare throughout his works of fiction and non-fiction, both of which confront the meaning of life and the interplay between despair and hope.

Anna Karenina, widely considered one of the greatest works of literature, was written and released in installments from 1875 to 1877, with all but the last part published in the magazine the Russian Messenger. The novel has two protagonists, parallel and interconnected stories

of individuals in Russian high society that complement and simultaneously contrast with each other. The first storyline follows the elegant Anna Karenina as she engages in an extramarital affair with the dashing Count Vronsky, leading to a host of complications. The second sees Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin struggle with loneliness and purposelessness while managing his farm.

The novel offers a striking and at times controversial portrayal of 19th century Russia, contending with hot-button issues such as the liberation of serfs, the role of women in society, the PanSlavism movement, and the liberal

For Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, life lacks substance. Throughout his novels, though, he confronts his ultimate question: what is the meaning of life?

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Tolstoy’s Confession

As Tolstoy buried his face in his hands, he managed a labored sigh; it was at this moment that he realized that he had nothing to life for.

reforms of Emperor Alexander II of Russia. After completing the novel, Tolstoy would release an essay titled A Confession, which dealt with his search for purpose in the context of a newfound sense of emptiness once he concluded his Anna Karenina series.

Though one assumes the form of an essay and the other that of a novel, these two works nevertheless mirror and inform one another with regards to their contemplation upon life and its meaning.

Unfortunately for Tolstoy, any meaning to be found in the church was given a bad impression from a young age.

In the opening pages of A Confession, Tolstoy recounts how, growing up, he was frequently tugged along to church, but still showed a striking ambivalence to all questions of God. Russian Orthodox Christianity, which legitimized monarchic power and maintained social order, was almost compulsory, and Tolstoy grew despondent, deeming Christian beliefs as senseless, hollow, and contradictory to his experiences. Tolstoy recalls his childhood and how those religious doctrines collapsed with experience. He states: “So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which conflicts with it (A Confession, 3).

Looking back, Tolstoy found that the seed of his skepticism toward the

Christian faith was planted after the premature death of his parents. In the midst of grief, Tolstoy grew bitter and wild; he didn’t take his studies seriously, and became disillusioned with the Russian high society in which he grew up. The excruciating grief pushed him to find any source of relief, and the hedonism of this social world proved alluring. These aristocratic rituals and social activities lacked any substance and often came at the expense of the common people. Later on, Tolstoy would critique this social world through the character of Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina, who does whatever pleases him, ultimately destroying Anna’s marriage.

Without any backbone to his life, Tolstoy became increasingly aloof over the years, doing whatever was expected, whatever made him feel good, whatever distracted him. He killed men in war, lied, robbed, and committed adultery, all of which were encouraged by those around him. At this time, debauchery was seen as comme il faut (socially accepted) as society was progressing and becoming more liberal under the great reforms of Emperor Alexander II. These experiences turned Tolstoy’s heart to stone, stripping away his hope for humanity. How could he preach the world of God and accept his grace when all he saw was destruction?

This is reflected in how Tolstoy then began writing from what he calls “vanity,” only looking for fame and

wealth. In his mind, why should he care for anyone when no one cared for him?

Eventually, Tolstoy’s life came to a halt. Despite achieving fame and wealth, Tolstoy increasingly felt “lost and became dejected” (A Confession, 13). All those years spent treating everyone and everything trivially finally caught up to him; there was nothing for him to strive for as he already achieved everything he seemingly wanted. Death became apparent to him, infecting the back of his mind.

He became aware that death destroys all, and the world became a wasteland.

In the midst of a deep depression, he couldn’t do anything but fret about his current situation. Tolstoy explains that he “felt what [he] had been standing on had collapsed, and that [he] had nothing left under [his] feet. What [he] had lived on no longer existed; and there was nothing left to live on” (A Confession, 14). Tolstoy sat in deafening silence in his study, the dim orange light of the candle flickering.

As he buried his face in his hands, he managed a labored sigh; it was at this moment that he realized that he had nothing to live for.

In an effort to illustrate this struggle, Tolstoy uses an analogy in A Confession. Imagine this: you are escaping a ferocious beast and running with all your might to find safety. Eventually, you look around and find no other choice but to jump into a well. A second monster, however, lives at the bottom of the well, with its mouth wide open, waiting to devour anything that touches it. You cling onto a feeble branch stemming from the cracked stone of the well wall to survive. Looking over, you notice the branch being nibbled on by two mice, who will eventually snap it. All hope is lost, and it hits you that you will die. In an effort to distract yourself, you notice honey on the leaves and begin to lick it. Writing and his family were Tolstoy’s drops of honey, but neither of them succeeded in distracting him from his existential crisis. Tolstoy

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stared at the morning sun, dreading the day, knowing that nothing mattered and that he was alone. His world had lost all meaning—and he was restless. Everything became heavy: his heart, mind, and legs. He spent his days laying in bed, unable to heave himself up. In the silence of his room, he could hear the frantic beating of his heart and his sharp labored breathing as he stared at the gray cold ceiling. He would see his wife and children, but their presence elicited no emotional response; in essence, they became strangers. Sleep was his escape, a world where he did not have to worry. But each time he woke up, dread and fear struck him instantly with numbing force and it became all he knew; he couldn’t bear it much longer. In his mind, he could see no change in his circumstances andsuicide became an increasingly appealing option. He was, however, still unable to summon the courage to do what he deemed necessary.

In Anna Karenina, the character of Levin, seemingly a stand-in for Tolstoy, struggles with these same existential questions. The novel establishes Levin as a shy landowner who feels out of place in high society and would much rather live in the country. While in the countryside, he manages his estate and interacts with peasants, spending his days mowing the fields and debating how to deal with the newly emancipated serfs. It’s evident, however, that Levin doesn’t have a bigger purpose in his life and instead engages in farming and debating politics to distract rather than enrich himself. He constantly doubts himself and can’t find a sense of stability or comfort, heightening his anxiety throughout the progression of the novel.

Levin’s ignorance, though, is shattered when his brother, Nikolai, announces he is dying. Nikolai lies in bed coughing, slowly and painfully succumbing to his

Portrait of Leo Tolstoy. Nikolai Ge (1831-1894). Painting.

Tretyakov Gallery.

illness. Levin’s spirits are infected by this deathly aura, and he feels the impending threat of death on his shoulders. He contemplates the fallacy of life: “Death, the inevitable end of everything, presented itself to him for the first time with irresistible force … It was in him too—he felt it. If not now, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, then in

thirty years—did it make any difference?” (Anna Karenina, 348).

Levin’s despairing thoughts don’t wane as time goes on, but rather become more persistent. In the darkness of his bedroom, Levin sits alone and dejected, huddling against his knees, completely wrapped up in his thoughts.

It occurs to him that “he had actually forgotten, overlooked in his life one

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small circumstance—that death would come and everything would end, that it was not worth starting anything and that nothing could possibly be done about it. Yes, it was terrible, but it was so” (Anna Karenina, 348).

Unlike Levin, Tolstoy became active and searched for a solution to his despair; as such, he attempted to find the meaning of life through science and philosophy. Although not explicitly discussed in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s research provides a foundation for understanding the novel’s pervading themes. Tolstoy first looked to science for answers. With science, however, he found no success.

According to him, science “simply ignored life’s questions” (A Confession, 23) and instead provided laws of the mind, such as chemical combinations and the laws of light and body. In other words, science provides knowledge, but it does not provide comfort. As Tolstoy turned to philosophy, he certainly managed to find answers, but none were uplifting.

He read the works of Solomon, Socrates, and the Buddha, though discovered that they all reached the same conclusion that he had: “Happy is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one must free oneself from life” (A Confession, 35).

Tolstoy surmised that there are four ways to combat life’s meaninglessness. The first would be to become ignorant—i.e., not to think about the absurdity of existence and to continue as usual. At this point in his depression, Tolstoy felt incapable of doing so as his mind was corrupted. The second approach would be epicureanism, in which one fills their lives with as much pleasure as possible in order to distract themselves—drinking from an endless supply of honey and ignoring the beasts. The same problem remains, however, in that Tolstoy simply couldn’t distract himself from the beasts below. The third way is

Tolstoy’s Confession

To believe in something greater than oneself is to have faith and, eventually, Tolstoy invested this faith in “liv[ing] by real humanity.” “of strength and energy” (A Confession, 37), meaning that when one realizes the foolishness of existence, they have the willpower to end their lives to stop the suffering. Despite suicide becoming more and more appealing, Tolstoy was still hesitant to do so. The final way is that of weakness, which Tolstoy clung to.

He realized the foolishness of life but clings to it anyway because he lacks the courage to end it all.

Mirroring Tolstoy’s interior reflections, Anna Karenina’s Levin moves from one method to another in an attempt to console his despair. Before his existential crisis, Levin was living by the first method, enveloping himself in busy work to prevent himself from acknowledging the underlying meaninglessness of his life. In pursuit of distraction, Levin develops a deep fondness for physical labor because, to be efficient, one must not think. It’s in this detachment where Levin finds peace. Levin wouldn’t have become so despondent so rapidly if his work and politics were meaningful to him. For Levin, as for Tolstoy, the way of living described in method one is no longer possible. With the knowledge of the impending doom of death and the resulting meaninglessness of life, Levin is now corrupted. He was only able to be ignorant for so long. But surely it can’t be all so sudden: there must be some salvation, a way to reclaim the lightness of being that seems so in

reach. Levin attempts to return to his farming and land management, and “he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength” (Anna Karenina, 352), a desperate attempt to find salvation. We know, though, that Levin’s efforts will be in vain, and he’ll only fall deeper in despair.

Despite his predicament, Levin finally succeeds in finding some solace.

Stiva, the brother of Anna and Levin’s friend, eventually arranges for Levin and his sister in-law Kitty Shcherbatsky to meet again after Vronsky had rejected her. The couple reunite and promptly decide to get married.

Levin’s vigor for living is renewed by the imminent relationship with the love of his life. In one particularly striking scene, Levin is wandering the town, waiting for the Shcherbatskys to wake up. As he embarks on his adventure, he experiences a spiritual awakening.

Children walk to school, pigeons fly from rooftops onto the pavement, and bakers create white rolls with flour.

Despite these events seeming mundane and arbitrary, Levin nevertheless finds them moving. As the sun sparkles and the scent of the bakery floods his nostrils, he watches a child run up to a pigeon, smiling as it flies away. All of this together stirs something within his heart, and he “weep[s] from joy” (Anna Karenina, 403). This elation from nascent love, however, is shortlived, incapable of standing against Levin’s pervasive dread, “and what

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Books

he saw then, he afterwards never saw again” (Anna Karenina, 403).

How can Levin, and, by extension, Tolstoy be saved? All efforts ultimately seem futile. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, Tolstoy has a revelation: his worldview was too narrow, and he had never considered how millions of ordinary people live their lives. The fact that these people persevered through anything and looked at suicide as a horrible act shocked him. It’s in these common people where the meaning of life lies. After looking and comparing himself to those common people Tolstoy saw his fatal flaw. Tolstoy states, “Rational knowledge, presented by the learned and the wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind, receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. Irrational knowledge is faith, and I could not help but reject it.

It is God” (A Confession, 43).

Faith drives these people, and their goals extend beyond physical health. The meaning of life is found in the infinite, in that which exceeds a finite physical reality. A purely rational approach cannot and will not satisfy the need to live. Faith, then, is a metaphysical reality that can’t be explained by science and can’t be rationalized. Thus the infinite question of the meaning of life, in this vein, requires an infinite answer.

Tolstoy concludes, “If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live” (A Confession, 47). To believe in something greater than oneself is to have faith and, eventually, Tolstoy invested this faith in “liv[ing] by real humanity” (A Confession, 57).

In the same way, Levin embarks on a similar journey toward spiritual awakening. Despite his marriage and

newfound love to Kitty, Levin realizes that he has not found the meaning he had hoped for. After being a married man for many months, Levin’s view on his relationship changes. In his marriage, Levin, “at every step he felt like a man who, after having admired a little boat going smoothly and happily on a lake, then got into a boat he saw that it was not enough to sit straight without rocking” (479). There exists a disconnect between his image of married life and reality. Levin, moreover, finds that the birth of his child isn’t as glamorous as he expected. Levin watches as his feeble and helpless son is presented to him. He sees this birth as a tragedy; he has brought a soul into the world that will, like him, suffer a meaningless life. Levin finds himself back where he started: in a pit of despair. He can’t help but worry about his existence and purpose. The possibility of salvation through God is evident to Levin, but his mind won’t accept it. Although he isn’t religious, he begins praying to God during the frightening birth of his son.

With a brooding countenance, Levin drifts through his days. In the back of his mind, meanwhile, these thoughts about God strengthen subconsciously. Then, one day, he encounters a muzhik (a serf), who provides him with an answer: life can be found in God. Levin has a sudden epiphany and realizes, “I and all people have only one firm, unquestionable and clear knowledge, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason” (795).

With the context provided by A Confession, we can understand Levin’s increasing belief in the infinite. He states, “Yes, what I know, I do not know by reason, it is given to me, it revealed to me, and I know it by my heart, by faith in that main thing that the Church confesses” (709).

For Levin, life is ultimately found in God, as the muzhik insists. This belief in the infinite is beautifully illustrated by Tolstoy in a scene near the end. Levin looks up to

the sky and watches as flashes of lightning reveal the Milky Way and the stars.

As soon as these lights pass, he can no longer perceive it. And, even though Levin can’t see the Milky Way and the stars constantly, he knows that they exist, providing a parallel to the nature of having faith.

Similarly, in a touching scene near the novel’s conclusion, Levin looks over at his wife, her sweet eyes and demure smile rousing a sense of warmth within him. She walks toward him, handing him their son, who cooes and looks up at him with an innocent smile while grasping onto his fingers.

Kitty sits down next to him, burrowing her head into his chest as he kisses her on the forehead. The three sit on the porch and watch the lovely pines swaying in the afternoon breeze as the sun sets. In his chest, Levin feels a stirring of warm emotion so strong that he’s compelled to cry. For the first time, his mind clears and he can breathe. Though still a bit uncertain about his future and the struggles he’ll have to endure, Levin recognizes, with startling immediacy, that everything will be fine so long as he can love and be loved. It’s at this moment when everything becomes clear to him; it’s at this moment that he finds life.

Interestingly enough, despite finishing Anna Karenina and seemingly finding the meaning of life, Tolstoy still struggled to live. In A Confession, it becomes clear that uncovering life’s purpose isn’t the end of the journey.

Faith is emotional energy that can wane and grow over time depending on our circumstances, even when it provides us with a valuable safety net.

Faith, then, isn’t an inherent, constant, and inevitable guarantee of happiness. If there’s nothing to live for, then there’s nothing to fall back on, and we can only sink deeper until we reach destruction. It was with this faith that Tolstoy was able to live. ■

EVERYTHING

EVERYTHING

EVERYTHING

EVERYTHING I'VE EVER LET GO OF by eva baron

I

n my head, this is how the story unfolds: a girl, the corners of her apron smudged from her thumb, the one that ends up gripping the dirty plates. It’s charming, the fat stains climbing up her waist, and the men at the café where she waitresses tell her this. Hard-working, not afraid to get a little dirty. A year earlier, this girl jabbed the knot in her sister’s back so she’d inch over in bed. At night, she slept with her brother and sisters, the distance between them shrinking the more they grew, the tighter their skin stretched across their jaws. Look—in this way, the ten of them were packed together like the stones lodged in the earth beneath them, the same ones that punctured the crops her father would plant.

As the girl understood, to live over an unyielding land is to invigorate touch. Because beds are sparse when money is, the body beside you feels more permanent than it does fleeting, and skin is as easy to

46

graze as the grass in the woods behind the family’s hovel. Here, inside their home’s one room, the girl shivers against the wooden walls in the winter, picks at the red paint peeling off of the facade in the summer.

When it rains, the crooked shingles clang the way her mother’s tin cup does when she circles its rusted lip with a spoon. As the family eats dinner, the girl becomes a centipede, the legs and feet of her siblings tangling up with hers until a knot binds them together under the table. The only way to escape this, the girl thought, was to carve a gulf with a width of nearly 400 kilometers. The length between Småland and Stockholm, Sweden.

Later, this girl becomes a mother, the son latched to her hip eventually learning to walk on concrete instead of moss. Before she waves goodbye to him at school every morning, she grabs his hands, traverses his palms with a finger. A love like this shocks her, and, when she digs her

cheek into the plump space between his neck and shoulder, she’s able to convince herself that she can keep this, the way a dog stubbornly clings onto a branch.

What she doesn’t know, in these moments, is that her teeth aren’t as durable as she believes. That, when her son is ten, he’ll find her splayed across the floor of the apartment, her eyes glassy and her breath smelling like pilsner. Once the evenings begin to stretch out that summer, the mother will watch the sun fade from the narrow window in an unfamiliar room. She won’t sleep, even when the hospital staff knocks on her door, a small cup passed from their hands and, firmly, into hers. *** Here’s another way the story unfolds: on August 15th, 1956, Dr. Lindström traces the light tremors whirring through Margareta Eriksson’s hands,

47

Personal Essays

the way her pupils dart around like a fish tugging on a metal hook. In between the jerky beats of her voice, she boasts about her son, the high grades he receives in his drawing classes. With his steady gaze, Dr. Lindström can also see the creases in Margareta’s dress.

“Clothed somewhat sloppily,” he jots down in his notes, but, upon noticing the circles beneath her eyes, adds, “no makeup.” Across from Dr. Lindström, Margareta perches in her chair as if it’s a nest, as if she’s a newborn bird trembling against a life she didn’t anticipate cracking into. And, though there’s a certain fragility in her restlessness, the kind that’s coiled tight around the bone, Dr. Lindström can’t coax anything out of his patient.

“Most people are nervous,” Margareta concedes, “Name one person that isn’t nervous in this day and age.”

After a few days, this time to Dr. Lindgren, Margareta complains about poor sleep. She thrashes in her bed, the sunlight returning to the sky quicker than a dream. She firmly denies it, but, as she jolts awake after only two hours, she ambles backward in her memory to the shaky nights during which she swam through beer and schnapps and pentymal tablets.

Nostalgia, in this way, is one of the more dangerous feelings we can experience. At night, the yearning opens up like a boundless ocean, and sailing across these waters is clean and sharp in a way that the present can never be. She indulges in this before she convinces Dr. Lingren that her husband “is exaggerating” the extent to which she abuses alcohol, sleeping pills, and narcotics. He writes this down, though claims, “because of her lively imagination, it’s difficult to believe anything the patient says.”

These notes narrate the first time Margareta Eriksson resided at Beckomberga, the largest psychiatric facility in Stockholm before it shut down in

1995. Now, Beckomberga and its surrounding areas have been converted into a residential neighborhood, lined with rows of homes and courtyards.

Because of this, I can’t figure out how my great-grandmother’s in-patient files were retrieved by my grandfather and, nearly 70 years later, stored neatly in a folder in my mother’s closet. *** I met Margareta on a hot afternoon this past July. A whole life stretched out ahead of me, a life in the shape of a tight document with a crooked staple in the corner.

Flipping through the pages on her bed, my mother read a few lines to me, her voice as taut as a rubber band. Before we studied her life through her in-patient files, my great-grandmother appeared to me as an actress that commanded her own fantastical and unbelievable stage, someone I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

From the childhood memories my mother has since told me: Margareta ate thin slices of toast with a steady hand even after a pack of beer in the morning. She was rooted in the same chair by the kitchen table, tearing herself away only to fill up her coffee cup with cream or beer. Though she had other cats—the fat one she named after Tito, a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and statesman—she skinned her favorite, Prince, once he died. Beneath her in her kitchen chair, Prince’s orange fur rippled, arched as if his heart was still beating furiously against his little chest. When she finally understood that she’d remain tethered to her job as a waitress in Stockholm, rather than to her lofty ambitions of being a famous actress, Margareta eventually moved back to Småland, sharing a farm with her husband. During the summers when my mother and her two brothers visited her, Margareta insisted that they call her neighbors and recite sermons, bellow that, as children, they

sought solace in God. For this, they received candy from Margareta’s cupped hands, the sugar dissolving in their hungry mouths.

And yet I also know about my great-grandmother through the typewriter words of her in-patient files. I know that she was born on October 16, 1915 with the name Göta Linnéa Johansson in Göteryd, Småland. A compact fist in southern Sweden, Småland translates to “little land” in English, a land that couldn’t contain the ferocity that bristled down my great-grandmother’s spine. In Vilhelm Moberg’s 1949 novel Utvandrarna (The Emigrants), Småland is revealed to be what Margareta already knew: a depleted landscape, one that thrust its residents away from its infertile soil mixed with sand and boulders.

Due to the starvation and intense poverty caused by a lack of crops, nearly 64,000 of the 324,000 that emigrated from Sweden in the 1880s abandoned Småland.

From their wagons, these farmers and peasants and families must’ve watched as Småland’s towering forests, its gaping lakes, receded from their view. What they left behind are the stones they dug up and lined into walls, snaking up the dirt roads with their mossy scales.

This history, I’ve come to learn, haunted my great-grandmother. It urged her to shed the “ugliness” of “Göta Linnéa,” to rip off the skin of a name typically reserved for the cows crammed inside farmhouses across Småland. It urged her to harden into “Margareta,” into the royalty that accompanied this name that the Crown Princess of Sweden shared. It urged her to conjure a “lively imagination,” as Dr. Lindgren wrote, to constantly “wield lies” that elevated her from Småland’s poverty, from its confines (she swore, throughout her life, that she was related to Carl Michael Bellman, an 18th century pioneer of the Swedish musical tradition). And it urged her to marry her husband “because he had a car.”

From her Beckomberga files: Margareta Eriksson undergoes insulin

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Everything I've Ever Let Go Of

I've imagined this story with multiple endings. I go through all of these threads until I realize that the sad ending is the only one that's possible. shock therapy to counteract her “restless,” “impatient,” and “sleepless” behavior, even though she complains that “those shots are filled with fox poison.” Over the phone, she yells at her husband and, later, rambles to her Finnish lover incoherently, the same “Finn” that allegedly provides her with alcohol and narcotics. At a café one afternoon, Margareta’s husband claims to have found her and the Finn unconscious from drinking, the police nudging their shoulders.

Another detail: a year later, on May 15, 1957, Margareta returns to Beckomberga again. *** I’ve imagined this story with multiple endings. There are those that conclude with my great-grandmother fulfilling her promise of attending treatment programs and continuing her medication after being discharged from Beckomberga.

There are those in which she sails across the Atlantic, away from these little lands, and instead cuts across a terrain that reveals itself to be limitless. And, other times, there are those in which she becomes a mother again, a grandmother, someone who propels her startling love into one that doesn’t lend itself to her annihilation. I go through all of these threads until I realize that the sad ending is the only one that’s possible.

The way this story unfolds (the true version, this time): Margareta lies in

her bed in her apartment on Västgötagatan, the sheets beneath her “soiled with urine.” Two days later at Beckomberga, Dr. Hullegård veers around the lurches in Margareta’s voice, the eager agility that commands her as she speaks. Within the cage of her chest, her heart races while a tremor yanks at her eyelids and hands.

Later, her husband explains to Dr. Viding how Margareta crawls around on the wooden floors of their apartment, threatening suicide when he squeezes himself through the front door after work. Between her jagged teeth, Margareta jeers about her husband, how much he “exaggerates,” how he’s locking her away in Beckomberga so he can “take women home.”

Instead of insulin therapy, Margareta is prescribed hibernal, an antipsychotic that, only a year earlier in 1956, was first distributed in Sweden to 106 women in Mariebergs Mental Hospital. Though “reduc[ing] the indiscriminate use of electroconvulsive therapy,” insulin shock therapy, and lobotomies, hibernal induced what the surgeon Henri Laborit called an “artificial hibernation” by stabilizing the central nervous system. For over a month, Margareta swallows 100mg of hibernal three times a day, the white tablet plummeting into her stomach and, as her file enthusiastically indicates, permitting her to sink into a “calm and orderly” state within a few weeks.

By the time she’s discharged from Beckomberga, it’s almost August. Before she steps into the cool evening, the summer light still spreading out across the sky, Margareta sits with Dr. Blomqvist and Dr. Viding once more.

She’ll file for divorce with the husband she claims to hate. She’ll move into her own apartment in Saltsjöbaden, a small neighborhood overlooking the Baltic Sea. She’ll begin working again as a waitress the day after. She’ll abstain from alcohol. She’ll say all of this, but, in this iteration of her life, she’ll drink beer, her legs dangling off her kitchen chair, her gaze unsteady as she watches her husband toiling on their farm in Småland. *** Look closely—it’s easy to miss as the car hurtles down the highway. Roll your windows down, the sharp breeze slapping your cheeks, and look.

There, once the birch trees become thinner, their black spots peeking out and confronting you with their own set of eyes. This is where my grandfather pulls over, descends into the woods with us. I’m four, maybe five, but this is a story that can also be told—my grandfather, my mother, and me, the leaves above us a shield against the bright sky.

Her family’s hovel isn’t here anymore. Except, years later, my grandfather still knows the land as if it’s etched into his skin, its valleys and its moss and the stones nestled deep within the dirt. Even though he never lived here, the hovel, too, is marked on his body, its lopsided roof and thin door and one room. This is why he takes us here, points to the ground and says, right here, this is where she lived. Here—everything she ever let go of, every life, every conclusion. Right here, in this earth, her hands open toward us as we cry, her palms exposed and shaking. ■

to be consuming and consumed by

i have once again lost myself in the throat of a bulbul bruising against the light, mournful for something it has never known i try not to think about the hole in the ozone or the pebble-sized lump in your chest small disasters waiting to undress the pink of a cottontail’s underbelly showing in the rough-stalks the drowsy dance of aphids, a mouse family knocking in my walls i don’t understand how beauty devastates but it can, it does ■

anoushka subbaiah poetry

CO s h o r t

I

t is too cold inside the car. I blow on my chapped hands and place them under my thighs, where they sit like icicles, absorbing the heat from my leggings. I can see my breath in puffs of milky white.

Dad shuts the car door and starts it with a growl. Umma straps Soojin in and folds herself into the passenger seat, bringing a blast of icy air with her. I shiver. She taps her phone and winces; the screen is bright in the dark car. I tap her on the shoulder and she wordlessly passes me her earbuds, which I connect to my iPod. It’s really Umma’s iPod, but she stopped using it when she got a phone. It’s one of the old

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s t o r y

ones. It has a square little screen and a scrolling button you press with your thumb.

Dad hints that if I treat it well and don’t lose it, there may be a phone on the way for me when I turn fourteen. When Umma and Dad remember, they sometimes give me an allowance and occasionally encourage me to put it all in the hideously green piggy bank I’ve named Mr. Lump; he contains maybe five dollars and a few coins. I’ve spent all that money on music. I love piano songs, especially ones that go on for so long you lose yourself in the gentle sound of the keys. When I play I always close my eyes. If Umma is feeling good she promis-

es to take me to my recitals, but it’s always Samcheon who picks me up, a battered rose waiting on his car’s passenger seat.

“Umma, chuweo,” Soojin complains, her indignant voice piercing through my music. She holds up her tiny red hands as evidence. She is too little to have figured out the thigh trick, and Umma straps her into her seat so tight I have to fish for her toys if she loses them. Right now she loves Ddalgi, her pink-and-green stuffed tiger, so named for his strawberry color. He sits in her lap everywhere she goes, even to church. He’s tucked in between her

LD by

right shoulder and torso, ears peeking out of the cheery puffs of her heavy winter coat. She’s only had the jacket since November, but there is already a rip by the zipper and Sharpie stains and glitter streaks on the sleeves.

I should take the jacket off. She’ll get too hot like that. If she gets too hot she’ll start to cry and if she starts to cry Umma and Dad will tell me off for making her upset.

“Ask Daddy to turn it up,” Umma says, absorbed in her phone. She bites her lip and frowns. I know she’s checking the weather reports. She’ll look at

A.N.Lee

the Weather app, and then Weather. com, the hourly report from CNN, and then she’ll tell Dad to switch from oldies to KWGRZ 88.1, where the newscaster is beginning his evening weather report. It’s not like the forecast will change; when the snow starts falling, it lasts for days at the very least. I crane my neck to read the reflection of Umma’s phone on the passenger window.

I like it when the world is blanketed in white, but I hope they don’t cancel school. School is cozy, especially in the winter, and it is so easy to hide. I fill out my worksheets as fast as possible and

beg for a library pass, where I linger, reading about dragons and princesses and knights until the bell rings.

“Appa, chuweo,” Soojin repeats. She crosses her arms.

“Ask me again in English, honey,” Dad says without turning around, and then to Umma, so low I can barely hear it: “You have to tell her that I don’t know Korean.”

He says this to her all the time now because Halmoni and Haraboji watch us after preschool and seventh grade, until our parents finish work, and every day it takes longer and longer to convince Soojin to greet Dad in English, or call him

51

52

Cold

Amelia Brown. “Lime Sweet American Cowboy.”

“Daddy”. When I hear their car pull up on the driveway, I rush to the window and watch them get out. Halmoni and Harbaoji’s house is the only place where Dad opens the car door for Umma and holds her hand all the way to the door.

When I was Soojin’s age and Umma

was sick, Halmoni and Haraboji watched me all day. They woke me up and whisked me out of bed and tucked me back in at night. At first they spoke Korean when their English wasn’t fast enough—“Sooyeon, gajima!”—but then I started talking back. Dad used to grum-

ble that I’d forget all my English because I would call him Appa. “Appa, pegopah,” I’d say, and he would hand me Bear, the plush that I still sleep with on really bad nights. Or I’d say, “Appa, Bear juseyo” and he’d find me a snack. He would talk to Umma about it at night, when he

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Fiction

thought I was asleep. We were living in the three-room apartment then, the one in a squat, ugly building with a parking lot that often filled with dirty snow.

Umma and Dad were studying for degrees only Dad would ever get. Umma only shrugged and told Dad that he knew how they were, that she could never just tell her parents no, that it wasn’t that simple. “Besides,” she added, “Sooyeon will pick up English in school.

I know I did.”

“She’s not you.”

“She’s my daughter.” Dad stalked off, and I didn’t hear them talk about it again.

The steady murmur of the radio is interrupted by a loud scratchy static that makes Umma almost drop her phone.

Soojin claps her hands over her ears and Ddalgi bounces to the floor of the car, in between her car seat and the door.

Before Dad and Umma notice, I quickly unbuckle myself and lean over Soojin to retrieve Ddalgi and place him in her lap.

They are already lost in their argument. Umma casts a sidelong scowl.

“You can learn a little,” she retorts, but there’s no bite to her words. “You’ve only been married to me for twelve years.”

I don’t hear what Dad says because I turn up my music and face the window instead. I see an orange blur that might be a streetlamp, and a red glow that could be another car. The only thing that is clear is the snow: little, fast-melting crystals that stick to the glass, white flakes that tumble through the air, obedient to how the wind howls. I long to open the window and stick my un-mittened hand outside. I imagine snow catching and sticking to my bare skin, covering me in layers of icy glitter, forming a soft, achingly cold cast around my arm.

The glow of the dashboard casts a reflection of my face against my window, but it is sharp and distorted; my face seems warped and bent. My cheeks, lit up by the dashboard lights, are ghost-white, while my eyes are lost

in pockets of shadow. Everyone tells me that Soojin and I have the same eyes, round and brown like wooden beads, and that they come from our mother.

They say we all look like our mother, especially Dad’s family, who taps us on our shoulders and pronounces our names delicately, like their mouths are full of marbles. But they are wrong.

Umma’s eyes are so dark that they’re almost black, and curve at the tops; Soojin and I have eyes like our dad: almost square-shaped, but not quite.

Behind me, Soojin removes Ddalgi from between her arm and back into her lap. “Ddalgi-ya, jip-gayo,” she sings. I feel the hot air turn on and blast at my neck. Umma says something and Dad’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. The car rolls forward slowly; out of the whirling black-and-white in front of us, a snow-dusted stop sign appears almost out of nowhere, the marker that we are just leaving Halmoni and Haraboji’s neighborhood. It is not too late to go back and warm up by their fireplace and share a bed with Soojin, have her fall asleep against me, to listen to Haraboji tell us the stories his haraboji told him, about a forested Korea full of tigers and rabbits and moonlight. But Dad makes the right turn without even coming to a rolling stop and we slide into the street.

In the driver’s mirror, Umma bites her lip. She nibbles it from the bottom, just like me. Or maybe I’m like her. I try not to be: I smile at Dad and play with Soojin.

But when Soojin frowns or Dad doesn’t smile back I worry Umma follows me all the same, a gray shadow that fastens around my shoulders and doesn’t leave.

“Slow down,” she insists, touching Dad, “you’re going too fast.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Dad grumbles, and swats her hand away.

Swaddled in my winter coat and the scarf Dad makes me wear, I begin sweating. If I take off my jacket, though, I know I will be too cold. Outside, I watch the

snow fall faster, thicker, harder. I count the number of streets we pass: one. Two. Three.

Halmoni and Haraboji wanted us to stay the night. They have the space; between Umma and Samcheon’s old bedrooms, there are two big queen beds. But both Umma and Dad refused. “We can’t impose,” Dad insisted. I watched him clench and unclench his fist as he searched for a reason Umma would let him say. He couldn’t tell them the truth: that he would be sleeping on the floor. He kept glancing at Umma sidelong, jerking his head when he thought Halmoni and Haraboji couldn’t see. Antsy.

Umma was less insistent but equally firm. “Jason has work early tomorrow,” she repeated, until they let us go, warning that the storm would catch us on the way home. They asked if we had a snow shovel in the car, if we had salt, if we had water and food. Halmoni rushed off to the kitchen and started pulling together a basket of the essentials she could find: flashlight, leftover mandu, cookies for Soojin.

“Don’t bother,” Dad said brusquely, and even I winced from the gaze Umma shot him. I was embarrassed that they would be so openly at odds in front of Halmoni and Haraboji. At church they hold each other’s hands and in family photos they know to pose with one arm around the other’s waist.

They taught me to bury anger deep.

The first time they fought was when Soojin was a toddler. It was a thunderstorm of a fight that rolled in at dinner and struck just before I went to bed: they never got to tuck me in. They argued so loud that Soojin cried . They argued so loud I did too. I picked up the phone and dialed the only number I knew and said, “Haraboji, museoweo,” and let the sobs and the background shouts fill my grandparents in on the rest of the story. When she successfully got them off the phone,

54

Umma made me sleep without Bear for the night. “You need to learn that some things go unsaid,” she explained. The next day Dad wordlessly passed me Bear.

I lean against the window, pressing my cheek to the achingly cold glass, and my earbuds catch on my seatbelt. When I lean forward they are yanked out of my ear and bounce somewhere far within the nooks and crannies of the car seat below. I reach under to grab at it, groping blindly and finding small plastic toys, discarded napkins, a Cheerio.

“Umma, Umma.” Soojin bounces in her seat, straining to reach the back of the passenger headrest. Umma is reading something on her phone. The white glow reflected on her window and her deepening frown tell me it’s probably the news. “Umma, Umma.”

When Soojin makes art in preschool, she draws an unsmiling face with wispy strands of pencil-black hair. She puts it into Umma’s yielding grasp and waits for a “thank you” she never gets. But I understand why Soojin remains in Umma’s pull when Dad chases after her with Ddalgi and bedtime stories and love. I’m trapped there too. We suffer together, her and I. I know Umma doesn’t mean to push us away. She does it robotically, like there’s a little lever in her that flips whenever someone shows her something kind and forces all of her emotions off so she doesn’t hear the I love you. I want her to want me. When I get her to smile back, they will stop fighting because when she stopped smiling it all started.

Dad tells me to be patient. “Umma’s medicine will start working soon,” he promises, but he doesn’t tell me what pills they are or what they will do. Once or twice a year he says that the pills “didn’t take” and they’re trying something new soon.

If I ask, he’ll go quiet for a long

Cold

time. Then he clears his throat a lot. “It’s not her fault,” he’ll sigh, or sometimes he wraps me in his arms and doesn’t say anything at all. He leaves wet stains on my head and doesn’t let me meet his eyes.

“I don’t know when we’ll be home, Soojin,” Umma says dully, in a monotone, without looking up. “Have Sooyeon give you a snack if you’re hungry, okay?”

“I’m not her babysitter,” I grumble.

“Sooyeon,” Dad warns, “you will watch out for your sister.” He makes eye contact with me in the mirror and shakes his head. My cheeks grow hot. He wants us to get along, and I like it when Dad is happy, so I give her snacks and sit at her tea parties. I try not to hate her because it’s mostly Soojin’s fault that Umma is this way. Soojin didn’t start it, but babies make it worse. I Googled it once.

“I’m not hungry!” Soojin shouts, a little too loudly, and Dad winces. On the steering wheel, his hands go white.

“Soojin, use your inside voice,” Dad says, a little too harshly to be chiding and not harsh enough to be a full on-scold, but his voice rises and Soojin’s lip begins to quiver all the same.

“Jason, watch your tone,” Umma warns. “She’ll cry.”

“I have to watch my tone?”

The earbuds still remain firmly outside of my grasp.

“Umma, I want a story,” Soojin says.

Her face is flushed. I lean over and unzip her coat before she can cry.

“Stories are for bedtime, okay?”

Umma sighs and flips open another news report on her phone. I squint, but I can’t make out the words.

I gently try to pry Soojin from the jacket’s fleece-lined sleeves. Her face is flushed but I don’t think she realizes she’s hot. Her gaze is intently fixed on the space between Umma and Dad, and her thumb brushes her cheek, almost at her mouth, so she can suck on it if she gets too distressed for Ddalgi.

Soojin is too easy to read. She bites

Ddalgi when she’s about to break down and swings him by the arms if she’s happy. She makes our parents give him a kiss at night and throws him against the floor when she’s angry. Sometimes while she cries or yells I watch her from the edge of the room and wonder when Umma will take Ddalgi away.

When Umma and Dad sat me down to tell me that I would be getting a sibling, neither of them were smiling.

Umma’s eyes were glassy and bright, but a tear still squeezed itself out of her eyelids and down her cheeks. I was more confused than anything. I knew then that they didn’t want more kids. They didn’t even mean to have me. When I first asked, Dad painted it like a fairytale: he used words I didn’t know like undergraduate and thesis; words that belonged in a Harry Potter book, somewhere in a land far away, with spells and flying and big beautiful castles. He made the world grander each time he told it to me until I turned eight, and then he wouldn’t answer it at all. When I was ten and Soojin began asking me, I realized that for all the time Dad had spent avoiding the word unwanted, he had never said love.

It was one of my many six-year-old refrains: I asked why the sky was blue, why we drove on the right side of the road and not the left, what the story of our family was. Umma left it up to Dad to spin their life into a once upon a time and a happily ever after. Umma had always made it clear: “Your father and I are married because of you,” she’d say, and return to flipping channels on TV. Sometimes she remembered to give me a squeeze.

When I told him what Umma said, he sighed, long and deep, and looked more tired than I thought was possible. He explained to me that I was loved and I was wanted, which were too abstract to be kept fully in my head. He never said that what she told me was untrue.

55

Fiction

“But I want a story!” Soojin bites Ddalgi on the ears and kicks her feet against her seat.

“Have Sooyeon tell you one,” Umma instructs. To Dad, she says, “Jason, they’re saying the storm’s going to get worse.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Dad snaps, but he slows. Snowflakes dance in the darkness around the car.

“They’re saying to shelter in place on the road, that the National Guard will be here in the morning.”

“Unni, I want a story,” Soojin requests.

She reaches over to tug on my arm. “Tiger story.” She holds up Ddalgi and wags him expectantly. She has just begun to learn how to read, in Korean and English, and Haraboji and Halmoni only have the old kids’ books they kept when they were trying to teach Umma and Samcheon Korean. The one Soojin likes best is old and battered and made of cardboard; each page is stiff to turn. It has long sentences I no longer know how to pronounce, but she pores over it anyway.

Umma turns off her phone and looks at the road for the first time since getting into the car. “We should’ve stayed at my parents’ house,” she says mildly, but Dad’s shoulders go tense. I have the urge to crawl under my seat and hide. To slide out of this big bad adult world and back into mine with the music and the snow.

But I am frozen. I could not look away if I wanted to.

“I thought we couldn’t impose.” He speaks through gritted teeth. “Since we already impose enough with having them watch the girls.” Dad gets angry like they do in the movies: red face, puffed cheeks, dark and stormy at the eyebrows. It’s almost like he swells in size, from giant to gigantic, and everything else in the world zooms out to match. But Umma is calm, indifferent.

She cocks her head and regards him like an interestingly shaped grease stain she needs to disappear, like a

Galek Yangzom. “Sketch for Next Painting.” 2021. Marker and colored pencil on paper.

change in the weather forecast. I’ve never seen Umma mad. She folds into herself when she’s upset like a piece of crumpled paper in a child’s fist. Dad’s the only person who knows how to smooth her out, but sometimes she locks the door and stays in her room and doesn’t let him in for days. When Soojin was born, I didn’t see Umma

for weeks. Between Dad’s stories and Halmoni and Haraboji stuffing my head with Korean and mouth with ice cream I almost didn’t notice she had been missing until she reappeared, skinny and washed-out, an Umma unfolded but still creased.

Out of the darkness, a dull red pair of headlights snap into focus and Dad

56

Cold

He made the world grander each time he told it to me until I turned eight, and then he wouldn’t answer it at all. When I was ten and Soojin began asking me, I realized that for all the time Dad had spent avoiding the word unwanted , he had never said love . eases on the brakes until we roll to a crawl. “Jason,” Umma says, “do we still have water in the car?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“We might need to spend the night.” And then there’s a flurry of snow so intense the world seems to disappear: the blizzard swirls around the window, cloaking the beam of the headlights, covering even the darkness of the night. Dad eases the car to a stop.

“I said we’ll be fine.” His voice sounds strained.

“Unni,” Soojin repeats, “I want a story.” She doesn’t know to keep her voice down. She doesn’t know how hard it is for me to keep her living in a world where wolves can be just magically sent away.

She doesn’t know that for all of the drawings and smushed dandelions she dedicates to Umma, it’s really only Dad she’ll ever love.

So many things she doesn’t know.

“Unni, I want a story please,” I correct her, and her face crumbles. It’s too much: leaving her playmates for a cold car and icy parents arguing about things she doesn’t understand. A sister that’s not distracting her like she usually does and is withholding the one bit of fantasy she knows how to find. I can’t help but resent Soojin: she has it so easy. But I don’t want her to be like me either. She knows her world is unstable but can forget it if she tries. Her lower lip, already trembling,

gives way to a stream of tears down her cheeks.

“Because you insisted on going home!”

“I want a story! I want a story!”

“Oh, so it’s my fault,” Dad hisses, as Umma leans over, quiet resentment bleeding into her words: “Jason, don’t pin this one on me.”

“I want a story! I want a story!” Soojin has her hands over her ears. She’s crying.

“Unni, please,” she hiccups. “Juseyo.”

Please.

“Okay,” I say. “Let me tell you about the tiger and the rabbit.”

Umma and Dad continue to argue.

“A long, long time ago, in a woods far, far away, there was a rabbit making his dinner over the fire,” I begin.

Soojin holds up Ddalgi. “Rawr!”

“I’ll get to that.” I smile so she smiles back through her tears. “Along came the tiger—” “Rawr!” Soojin interjects.

“—who was really, really, hungry,” I say. I poke Ddalgi’s belly. “He saw the rabbit and thought, ‘Ooh! Dinner!’”

There’s a honk as Dad slams his fist onto the steering wheel. He’s talking to Umma: “They need you—” My voice quakes. “So the tiger went up to the rabbit and—” “You think I don’t know?” Umma exclaims. “You’ve known me for a dozen years!” She sighs. “It’s hard for me.”

Rage drips out of every syllable. “It’s hard for you? You’re their mother—”

“—and, uh, threatened him by saying, ‘I’m going to have you for dinner!’—” “And you’re their father—” “And the rabbit had to think quick on his feet—” “You were the one who wanted them so badly—” “So the rabbit said—” “Will you be quiet, Sooyeon!”

Umma shouts and something inside me folds and snaps. I can’t take it, the fighting, either. I can’t just take care of Soojin and watch. I think of how Dad asks for me to wait and see all of the time.

“No!” I scream so loud my throat feels sore. “No! No! No! No!” I’m only ever doing what they ask and it doesn’t make any difference at all. I pick up Ddalgi from the floor and tell Halmoni and Haraboji that I’m crying at night because I’m still scared of the dark. I sit in the same pew sandwiched between my parents every Sunday and walk out of church holding both of their hands. None of my friends have ever seen the inside of my house.

“No!” And then my throat is too raw to say anything more.

Silence. There is only the sound of the windshield wipers on the snow.

Of the radio newscaster urging us to shelter in place. Umma and Dad exchange a look I don’t quite catch. I have a catalogue of what their private glances mean: when

57

Fiction

I said something I shouldn’t have, when they don’t know how to tell me something I should know but they don’t think I need to, when they need Soojin to stop crying so there can be peace. This one seems heavy: Dad’s eyebrows are furrowed, and Umma’s lip trembles. I try to tear myself away and look down in my lap, at Soojin, outside, but I can’t stop staring. I’m so tired of waiting for medicine or treatment or something that is not Umma to change her back; I don’t want to keep having to put together the pieces of a puzzle I’m not allowed to see.

Umma sniffles and looks away. Dad clears his throat. “What do you think of the story, Soojin?” Dad finally asks.

Umma’s gaze drifts outside the window.

She opens her phone, flicks through the weather reports. Mutters something about the National Guard. Her restless fingers swipe through her apps: messages to the Internet to photos to Facebook.

I begin hunting again for my earbuds when Soojin takes a deep breath. She stares for a second at the fast-falling flakes outside.

“When you and Daddy get divorced, I wanna live with Halmoni and Haraboji,” she admits, staring at nothing, and hugs Ddalgi tight.

Several things happen at once.

In the rearview mirror, Umma’s face drops and Dad’s turns beet red. He whips around and demands, “Where did you learn that word?” as Umma uncharacteristically snaps, “Soojin!”

It’s all too loud for Soojin, who buries her face into Ddalgi and starts sniffling and sobbing. I don’t know what to do. I want to lean over and leave a stinging slap on her cheeks, but I also want to pull her into my lap and whisper thanks.

“Sooyeon!” Dad shouts. “Did you tell Soojin that?” His eyes meet mine, wild and hunting for someone to blame.

“Nothing she couldn’t see herself,” I answer honestly. Dad glares at me, eye-to-eye, and Umma says, “Sooyeon, don’t say things like that.” And then Dad says, “What have you been telling the girls?” and Umma’s face gains a pink tinge for the first time since summer and she hisses, “What do you mean, what have I been telling the girls?” and Soojin hiccups and asks if we can go back to Halmoni and Haraboji’s house and I still can’t find the stupid earbud beneath the seat and I’ve searched every corner and the car is still too cold so now my fingers feel like ice again.

“When you talk to them in Korean, it’s like you’re in your own little world.” A vein pulses on Dad’s forehead. “You’re trying to keep me out of my own family.”

“You pit them against me when you say that connecting with my family’s culture is that bad!” Umma puts down her phone. “Soojin doesn’t even ask me to tuck her in anymore.”

“No, it’s not my fault they love the parent that likes them back!” Dad roars. He slams his hand on the steering wheel and the car honks.

“Jason, not on the road!” Umma admonishes. But she doesn’t say he’s wrong.

Dad’s words bounce around my head. They love the parent that likes them back! He has never said that she hates us before. There was a time Umma smiled. Sometimes she packed me lunch in kindergarten.

Dad told her that they gave us too much candy in school so I shouldn’t be eating anything sweet, but she always snuck in something small: a tiny Kit-Kat. A bite-size portion of a brownie. A Hershey’s Kiss.

Or maybe it was Halmoni packing my lunches then, because they watched me every day. I try to remember who bathed me, who picked me up when I fell down. Was

it Umma, Dad, or Halmoni? I find that I don’t know.

Soojin’s eyes are wide and glassy.

Ddalgi rests just at the bottom of her chin, squeezed so tight I worry his stitches will rip. That his black button eyes will come out, and that his stuffing will explode, spewing around the car, a blizzard in miniature made leaving us coated in down and fluff. That Umma and Dad will look at us and not look through us.

Dad says, “I don’t know why I married you!” and Soojin is tugging on my arm, saying, “Make them stop!” and begins to wail, and so I say, “Umma, Dad, you’re making Soojin cry,” but nothing seems to work and they are yelling at each other, about Dad’s so unhappy now and how Umma doesn’t seem to love anything anymore and how miserable they both make the family, so much so that they don’t notice the the flashlight bobbing in the front window, not until a man in heavy gray winter gear raps on the car door and makes both of them jump.

“Caught out in the snow, huh?” the guy says. He’s tall, over six foot. He seems to loom over the car, his smile growing bigger by the second, like a Cheshire Cat of goodwill. He surveys Umma and Dad’s frozen expressions, Soojin’s crumpled-up face. “Drives everyone a little crazy.” He chuckles to fill the heavy silence that grows more awkward and dense. “Listen,” he says, “I live in the house over there. They’re saying this snowstorm’s so bad you shouldn’t move.” And then he’s talking to Dad, asking, “Do you have folks nearby so you can stay with to ride this one out?” and Dad says, “Yes sir, my inlaws,” and I stare at the back of Dad’s head as my anger fades and crumples into something I know, something paper-light that I can refold. ■

Editorial Board Spring 2022 Editor-in-Chief Eva Eva Baron Baron ‘22 ‘22

Editor-at-Large Chase Chase Smith Smith ‘22 ‘22

Features

Liv Liv Medeiros-Sakimoto Medeiros-Sakimoto ‘25 ‘25

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Anoushka Anoushka Subbaiah Subbaiah ‘24 ‘24

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Alexander Alexander Del Del Greco Greco ‘23 ‘23

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