Pavements, issue ii: Mythos

2023-2024 MYTHOS

Mythos encompasses the fairytales, lore, and magic that provided us comfort and hope as we have grown up. It is the generational stories that taught us how to overcome personal struggles and served as reminders that we are not alone. Furthermore, Mythos is the traditions that connect our community, the legends of those before us who guide our core values,andthelegacythatwewillleavebehind.

tableofcontents

NewGratitude………………………………………………………………....………pg1

Tiger’sWeddingCeremony……………………………………………....…..pg5

YearofMyGrandma…………………………………………………………....…pg7

WhatisHereisEverywhere;WhatisNotisNowhere…....…pg9

TheTurtleHouseReflection.....…………………………………….…….pg13

OpenLetterfromAmandaChurchill………………………………….pg17

Veni…………………………………………………………………………………….……pg19

⼤⼠爺 …..………..pg21

"Absolutely not."

In frustration, the drawing in my hand crumpled. The vision I had for my room, the idea, dashed.

"Oh, jiejie, it's okay." My mother swept me into her embrace.

"It's the feng shui. Your bed can't point out the door."

These traditions, these superstitions. They ruined everything (or so I thought, as an eight-year-old).

When everything feels like your entire life, every little decision feels like the end of the world.

"Don't open that umbrella,"

"Walk backwards back through that ladder."

And then, eighteen.

"Wait, but this design for the house isn't good. The front goes straight to the back door."

"Wait, yeah isn't it something about the feng shui?"

"Yeah, it's the feng shui. Your parents told you about that, too?"

The end of the world became my comfort.

"Hey, do you want to get boba together later?"

Now, at twenty, the "absolutely not" which once rings not in an empty room, but bring

Family, new and old.

호 식 호 식 호 식 호 식

호 식 호 식 호 식

호랑이 결혼식 (Tiger’sweddingceremony)

In a Korean folktale,

It started raining when two tigers were married; The sun was shining bright and yet it still rained.

In America, this is called a sunshower, This is the version of the story they tell.

There was one day where the sun was beaming down

Upon us and the bruised black Honda Pilot, united as Victims to my father’s carelessness.

Maybe the accompanying rain was God weeping a silent “ sorry ” For the life He had given us.

You had giggled the way small children do when They’re about to get away with something. Maybe two tigers were getting married

As your American child, I thought it was a metaphor.

Being your white child, what right do I have in claiming

That stories such as these can live through us?

How they claw through generations to stay afloat

The War etching these stories deep under your skin

As a way your mother kept you safe

In the dark shadows of Daejeon’s mountains,

Only to enter as a whisper into the ear of your child, A child of no homeland or culture, Whose ears cannot hear

The soft humming of a lullaby

From a place you once knew.

YEAROFMY GRANDMA

CarolineFu’26 (she/her)

“This year is the year of the dragon for the Chinese zodiac, and when I ate dinner with my grandma on Lunar New Years she was surprised that I remembered that she was born in the dragon year.

I was a little shocked that she didn't expect me to know, since I think it's the coolest zodiac -- one that's super unique to Asian culture. To me, my grandma has always been patient, kind, and a good cook (traits of many Asian mothers), but her being a dragon reminds me that she's more than that, that she is also resilient, brave, and extremely funny. ”

Da - da - da

The thunder rolled proudly across the sky The little girl huddled under the blankets

Da - da - da

She wasn’t scared of the thunder, at least not usually. But when the monsoon rains mercilessly pelted the earth, howling gales made the windows rattle, and lightning set the night sky on fire, she wasn’t so sure anymore On nights such as these the thunder felt alive, like an ominous being who carelessly strode across the landscape, shaking the houses like a child’s rattle.

On nights such as these the ancient tales of her land came to comfort her. A brightly illustrated page out of her most prized possession - a large worn-out tome of lorematerialized in her mind’s eye

“When Prajāpati, the All-father’s children had learned all there was to know, He gave each of them a piece of advice“Da.” He told the dēvas, and they knew it meant dāmyata - self-restraint. “Da.” He told the humans, and they knew it meant datta - generosity. “Da ” He told the asuras, and they knew it meant dayadhvam - compassion And ever since then, the thunder, with its deep rumblings of da - da - da, Reminds the three worlds of the All-father’s teachings: Dāmyata, datta, dayadhvam ”

The story’s comforting presence made the world less frightening. The winds stopped howling, the lightning was no longer brilliant enough to light up her room like the morning sun, and the deafening peals of thunder ceased to mock the world’s smallness. It now seemed to her that the clouds boomed like a concerned teacher. The least she could do was repeat their lessons after them.

Da “Self-restraint.” She whispered.

Da “Generosity ”

Da “Compassion.”

And so the little girl drifted off into a calm slumber listening to, and learning from, what the thunder said.

She could always trust the stories to have her back Time-traveling entities, lovingly preserved and carefully passed down from parent to child for millennia, they always appeared when she needed them the most. When dinner felt like drudgery, her mother distracted her with tales of the mighty Pāndava Bheem’s hearty meal before facing off against the man-eating giant Bakāsura (it was only many years later that she realized that Bheem’s meals always, rather suspiciously, resembled hers) When she was home sick for several months, the ancient words of the Mahābhārata and the captivating sketches of Amar Chitra Kathā comics kept her company. Casual conversations, bedtime stories, her bookshelves - they were all eventually drenched in the mythological.

The world, it seemed to her, was but a mosaic of stories waiting to be read. The brown and white stripes running down the backs of Indian palm squirrels carried the memory of Lord Rām ’ s loving caresses of gratitude for the little beasts’ aid in building the bridge that was to reunite him with his beloved. Having cruelly mocked a fellow god, the moon was cursed to a life of fleeting brilliance, waning and then waxing, only to wane yet again

But as the seasons turned, the yellow leaves of myth gave way to the crisp stark white pages of academic debate and dialogue. She pored over volumes that painstakingly dissected her former playmates, dug them up and sifted through the sediment hoping to uncover historical truths by examining their literary strata They all excitedly talked over one another, making claims about the historicity of the tales and the identity of their primus poeta. The works fascinated her. She consumed countless hours laboring over the antiquated grammatical forms of the language that produced the tales, reading about ancient bardic traditions, and holding up a magnifying lens to the seams of the longer myths to learn how they were put together

But even as she examined the stories that populated her childhood under a cold harsh laboratory light and participated enthusiastically in discussions about their origins and writers, she knew that it didn’t change anything. Her stories would always be her stories. It changed nothing if one bard sang them into an unchanging existence in a fit of divine inspiration, or if they grew and evolved as they were told and retold ad infinitum. It changed nothing if the heroes they sang about actually walked the earth or not If anything, she was left in silent admiration for the myths’ resilience In the constant strife between the forces of time and human knowledge, the latter, often deemed too trivial to warrant special attention, is forced to cede victory. Yet, defying all odds, these tales existed, eagerly waiting to be read or listened to

They stretched their arms out across the valleys and hills of time, beckoning audiences of all ages to stop, sit a while and allow themselves to be transported to a bygone era of heroes, gods, and magic. The girl took them up on their offer over and over again. And she giggled at Krishna’s childhood butter-stealing antics, was indignant at Draupadi’s plight, and sniffled at Arjun’s long heart-breaking lamentation for his son ’ s death, deeply feeling the same feelings felt for thousands of years, evoked by the same words

But the myths did more than just transport. They counseled, taught, and comforted. They had made her who she was. Sitting at her desk, staring at the cursor blinking at the top of a blank document, she wondered where she would have been today had a bard, ages ago, somewhere in a dense wood, not sung the words of the tales that would come to live in the hearts of mankind for generations to come.

The warmth of the sun streamed in through the window. She felt the stories she grew up with looking over her shoulder with watchful eyes as she made slow attempts to string words together for her first creative piece in a deplorably long time. She did not know if her work would ever be half as beautiful as them. But all she knew was to write, and it should only be fitting that such a work be an ode to the giants whose shoulders she stands on.

THETURTLE AMANDA CHURCHILL

“I layer the new knowledge with the old feelings. I see how memories and misunderstandings soak through life, like our days are as thin as coffee filters.”

- Lia Cope, from The Turtle House by Amanda Churchill

The Turtle House (Harper Books, 2024) is now available for purchase in stores and online

HOUSE

Amanda Churchill is a writer living in Texas. She is a Texas A&M alumna and has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas. You can find some of her work in publications such as Hobart Pulp, River Styx, Witness, and others. Additionally, she is a Writers’ League of Texas 2021 Fellow. On February 28, 2024, I had the opportunity to attend an inperson reading and Q&A with Mrs. Churchill and other Texas A&M

Author photograph by Thaddeus Harden

students and staff. My attendance at this event gave me a deeper insight into the inspirations behind the novel and the author’s experience as a writer and with publishing the book.

The Turtle House by Amanda Churchill is a beautiful coming-of-age story of healing, love, loss, and family history told in a timeline that switches between a grandmother’s life as a young woman in 20th-century Japan and her granddaughter’s perspective in the modern-day fictional railroad town of Curtain, Texas. Throughout the story, she connects being Japanese and being a Texan, two cultures with a great sense of pride for their heritages, through the lens of these two strong female characters who discover what it means to find home when you feel lost.

Her debut novel was inspired by the life of her grandmother, a Japanese war bride. Throughout Churchill’s pregnancy and her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis, they both connected by sharing stories. Reading about the bond that formed between “Grandminnie” Mineko and her granddaughter Lia is extra-touching as it in some ways parallels Amanda’s real relationship with her grandmother. Churchill described her work as an “intersection between memory and fiction” which keeps the work personal but also intends to empower the characters from harsher realities.

I chose to discuss The Turtle House to support a fellow Aggie and because the work truly reflects the theme of Mythos through the exchange of generational stories that help Lia and her grandmother overcome personal struggles and heal. Moreover, the story integrates significant supporting characters that also represent Churchill’s Caucasian and Japanese upbringing and familial relationships. Amanda felt that her grandmother was able to “face her own mortality” by sharing these untold stories with her because she previously kept them to herself to “protect her grandkids from the sadnesses she experienced.” A resonant experience for many immigrant families. The Turtle House commemorates her grandmother’s stories and eternizes her life through the heartfelt and careful weaving of real life and fiction. I would recommend The Turtle House to fans of historical fiction and Asian American stories. I am not an avid historical fiction reader but Churchill’s compassionate and evocative storytelling has the ability to engage any reader.

KAITLYN TRUONG QUACH ‘25 (she/her)

OPEN LETTER FROM AMANDA

Dear writers and readers of Pavements,

The day I graduated from Texas A&M, waiting forever for my name to be called, my grandmother stood in the stands. She stood from the beginning of the students walking across the stage, stood as I made my way up the stairs and shook hands with the dignitary chosen to graduate us that day – information I have forgotten and I’d have to Google in order to know again – and stood long after I had made my way back to my seat. She stood until the very end. I could tell from my spot on the floor of Reed Arena that my dad wanted her to sit down. That maybe she was embarrassing him. Again. The older, louder Japanese lady, standing up straight, shoulders back, smiling. Bright red lipstick, her hair all the colors of her age – black, gray, silver, white. Flesh-toned pantyhose (always) lighter than her actual flesh and open-toed shoes. A dress from the early 1980s worn in the 2000s. And like my father had infuriated me with his “weird dad stuff” growing up, she could get under my father’s skin in the same way. She was remarkable at it. I liked it, though, her standing. She wasn’t one to show pride often or openly. And that’s how I took it. An enthusiasm for what I was doing that day, what all of us clad in black robes were doing that day: finishing something tremendous, beginning something new. My grandmother was brilliant, but like the women of her time, she had not been able to attend university or pursue what she was interested in. That was a job for the men, for the higher-class, for those with enough money to survive Occupation unscathed. My grandmother’s jobs were those of desperation and of availability. Upon arriving in the United States, she had sorted eggs on a farm. She cared for the forgotten in a state-run facility. She helped on my grandfather’s ranch in north Texas. But she had wanted to build things, to fix things.

had always wanted to see how machines that worked better.

y grandmother’s story that I held onto e turning it into a novel. out to dinner, but I don’t really recall it no longer exists in today’s College what I ate. I have a vague memory of the at it was a brown sundress. Why brown? my grandmother’s favorite color, red. I t (it’s still there, near Wolf Pen Creek, a ts of paint barely hiding its age) and I don’t remember how I felt that

n my memory so little about such a big

of determination on her face, like she m Texas A&M University, I’ll never be emory.

o stand for us. May any embarrassment replaced with pride. May we remember y them in our hearts and heads and ether they understand them or not. And as we stand, not only as APIDA

s, but as humans who need each other hat works better.

CHURCHILL ‘99

if I had to leave my daughter with one gift, a legacy, of our shared history, i’d leave her with my comb

not a brush, with rounded bristles nor a scalp massager, gentle to her flesh; but a comb ploughing the tumultuous fields of her scalp, the same way somewhere in Nagpur my mother’s touch lingered on her grandmother’s head fingernails on skin, a steady movement gathering, weaving, threads of love, strands of hair, into a braid; a veni¹: each tug a sacred act of devotion.

as the tides of time may change, my mother’s touch replaced by my daughter’s; teaching her own children to weave my hair into a veni, i’ll think about the history running through my curls with the same adoration my mother felt while braiding my hair, for a second, uniting our family history underneath the same comb; an eternity only ours to share.

¹veni – braid in Marathi.

Every year, as Ghost Month commenced in Taniao (打貓), an eerie and chilling wind would sweep through the streets.

This wind carried the haunting cries of hungry ghosts, instilling fear in the local population throughout the entire month. At times, a colossal figure, standing at 10 meters tall, with a blue visage, protruding fangs, and twin spiral horns, sometimes adorned in vivid red armor, would appear. This imposing being would flicker its extraordinarily long, flame-covered tongue. Upon its appearance, the winds would cease, and the ghosts would fall silent.

The community expressed gratitude to this deity, eventually named Dashiye (⼤⼠爺). Every first of July, they honored it by crafting an effigy and employing monks to alleviate the suffering of the ghosts.

by LeH ‘25

pavements,issueii