Infinite Prospects by Nassau Weekly

In this week’s special issue highlighting writers and artists of color, the Nass goes to the grocery, likens music to love, and washes with public soap.

The Nassau Weekly Volume 43, Number 7 November 14, 2021 In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

October 31, 2021

Infinite Prospects

Masthead Editor-in-Chief Peter Taylor

Publishers Mika Hyman Anika Khakoo

3 4 6

Alumni Liaison He Watches Over Me

Gina Feliz

By Ayinde Bradford Designed by Melina Huang

Monkey See By Sierra Stern Designed by Cathleen Weng

camelot (2021, elastane) ON WAR AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE By Brittani Telfair Designed by Cathleen Weng

Like Shooting Stars

Ars Poetica with Everything Ending, so Everything Beginning

By Christien Ayers Designed by Melina Huang

By Sabrina Kim Designed by Hannah Su

San Diego Collection

Pilgrimage to Mitsuwa

Rewriting My Story

The CD Case of Alexandria

By Luz Victoria Simón Jasso Designed by Isabel Kim

Managing Editors Dear Readers, We are very excited to release the seventh issue of the semester, which is dedicated to showcasing the work of creators of color here at Princeton. The Nass strives to be a publication that actively welcomes contributors of all backgrounds, and this edition is an important step for our news-magazine to provide an intentional platform for voices that are so often marginalized and underrepresented. This edition follows both our third annual edition for Women*s History Month and our summer edition highlighting APIDA voices, and it will not be the last of its kind. I am proud to share with you this collective creation, entirely designed and written by people of color. Our intention was for this edition to highlight any work by those who identify as people of color, regardless of any relation to their identity. As a result, the contributors for this issue explored a range of topics, from exploring home towns through art to poetic diary entries to reflections of one’s relationship with music. This edition is a celebration of diversity, one of the first of what I hope will be many additions to a history of art and journalism by, for, and about people of color. We hope that this edition will serve to continue conversations about diversity and inclusion in not only literary spaces, but also our larger campus community. I hope that you will take a moment to celebrate with us, and to enjoy Infinite Prospects.

Juju Lane Mina Quesen

Business Manager Jane Castleman

Senior Editors Abigail Glickman Meera Sastry Elliott Weil

Junior Editors Lauren Aung Sam Bisno Lara Katz Sabrina Kim Sierra Stern

Head Copy Editor Andrew White

Copy Editors Isabelle Casimir Noori Zubieta

In Solidarity, By Mina Quesen Designed by Hannah Su

By Kate Lee Designed by Isabel Kim

Design Editor Mina Quesen ‘23 Managing Editor

Melina Huang

Assistant Design Editor Hannah Su

Art Director

20 Cover Attribution

By Gawon Jo Designed by Melina Huang

Drew Pugliese

Web Editor Allie Mangel

Double Consciousness By Sebastian Aguilar Designed by Melina Huang

Social Chair Bethany Villaruz

Historian Melina Huang

David Chmielewski

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He Watches Over Me By Ayinde Bradford

Volume 43, Number 7 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

Monkey See ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHLOE KIM

“They probably thought Evan just smelled like that: nauseatingly floral like Katie Levi-Moretti, the first girl in his high school class to discover perfume and, therefore, the last person everybody wanted to sit next to at assembly.”

By SIERRA STERN

pink splotch bloomed at the widest part of Evan’s back, a sinister spring-bud darkening under heat. The focused pummeling of the showerhead didn’t burn so much anymore, not in the punishing hellwater way of a just-turned tap. The sensation had mellowed, deepened umbilically, and Evan felt viscerally alive in a sleeping-baby kind of sense, a thump and a jerk away from tantrum. He couldn’t see the wound that

the jet of water was leaving between his shoulder blades, yet he was sure of its growth. Evan had grown to understand the organ of his skin better even than the organ of his brain. Far better. He burned more on cloudy days, burned most just before noon, and burned brightest wearing yellow, no matter how muted or pastel or scant. His face went metallic-grease-fire oily unless he showered twice every day, and every time he used the bathroom he washed his face, so he never stopped smelling like public bathroom soap. To be fair, no one could readily identify the smell of public bathroom soap. Sister’s shampoo, was Evan’s quickfire excuse, should somebody ask about the smell, though nobody ever did. They probably thought Evan just smelled like that: nauseatingly floral like Katie Levi-Moretti, the first girl

in his high school class to discover perfume and, therefore, the last person everybody wanted to sit next to at assembly. Evan was up to his calves in water, which was O.K., because utilities were included. Still, he had never swamped up the bathroom to this degree before, and not at midday. It was a terrible, yellowing showertub, with a clear plastic curtain stained with god-knows-what from owners previous and owners previous-previous. Evan could just imagine the mirror, slicked gray with precipitation, and he willed the water hotter so it burned afresh. If only that mirror would gray up, turn stone, come crashing down and shatter, that would be Evan’s sign to get out. That, or the tub flooding. It was one thing to be the roommate that smelled like a girl and (Obi was the first person to point this out to him) whose clothing was

so disproportionately blue as to be kind of a gimmick; being the resident psycho-idiot of the four would make his life completely unlivable. Actually, to be divorced from the showerhead’s steady pressure and forced to face the morning-cold bathroom tiles might kill him sooner, as in instantly. Water was life. Evan was coming to understand this spiritually. For instance, a bug was making laps around the apartment. Kev, who had the bed across from Evan’s, had caught it twice, while through it all Evan flushed his insides with water, lathered his hands and arms in it. He’d even washed his eyes, imagined his body a fired clay ocarina that needed to be soaked and shaken until everything ran clear. Evan avoided the bug entirely. He never felt so much as a tickle.

There was also the factor of Evan working entirely from his computer, primarily from his bed. He did freelance, something like an internet odd-jobs man. Amateur graphic design and tedious technical writing and anything to do with the beastly tesseract that was Microsoft Excel. His meals were fluid. Throughout the day, he drank caffeinated teas and ate quick foods like tortilla chips, hummus, bananas— Obi had pointed this out too, Evan’s highly-competitive-ultra-manic banana selection process. He spent minutes hunched over the fruit bowl, occasionally shooting forth a hand to assess overall firmness, or to investigate a potentially cancerous brown spot. He was green-yellow colorblind, and he reveled in this momentary reliance on his alternate senses. Evan was sure that, were he to spontaneously lose

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his eyesight, he would adapt easily enough. Sometimes he wandered the apartment with closed eyes, constructing a just-in-case mental model of its geography. He knew the bathroom especially well, had memorized the particular shape of his own comb, his soap, even his toothbrush. But today was a shaving day, and Evan was not yet so miserable that he would flail around blind with an electric razor. There was a danger surrounding the bathroom in daylight. Above him, the ceiling sweated. His every pathetic splash and grunt was multi-magnified so that Evan-sounds became outside-sounds—a sonic, inescapable Evanscape. The showertub was getting more difficult to leave—the drain was open, so the water stayed at his calves and would not flood. Stooped against rent-controlled water pressure,

he had the strange sensation of being coiled in the womb, or bent over a watering hole. For when he lifted his head, he would find himself confronted with himself. And he would hate what he saw, and yet his attention would be indivisible. He would slip his fingers, tender from steam, through slick swatches of hair, parting and reparting and looking, sometimes unlooking (and these stretches of unlooking would be an itch just barely endured). And yet, shimmering canisters of Old Spice did not spore and flower at Evan’s feet, birds of prey did not come to rest on the dip of his shoulders. Somewhere in the plumbing, brown blood from under his fingernails slipped through grimy midtown piping, displaced from a scalp excessively, obsessively handled. Evan had never mastered caress, only prod… pick—at people, found ways to touch almost-always for nearly no time

at all. Like a chimp. Someone had said that. Combing their mate for bugs. And the banana thing. They laughed all night, and split up in the morning. He turned off the water. It came as a shock. Evan pressed a hand to his back, found it soft and raw. He reached for his towel. He did not look down. Pruned and pale, he felt wrought with subhumanity. Not quite a chimp (there was pride and purpose in savagery), Evan ascribed himself a member of the hobbling in-between. At the sink, he raised his eyes to meet himself. Actually, it was one of his better days. daylight. Above him, the ceiling sweated. His every pathetic

Sierra Stern spent minutes hunched over the Nassau Weekly, occasionally shooting forth a hand to assess overall firmness

November 14, 2021

PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

camelot (2021, elastane) By BRITTANI TELFAIR luv, u had to hate to forget me like that wot, wiv the fairy lights all twinklin’ dipshit romeo in my eyes, the same way u lacquered the kennedys, gorgeous doomed, gorgeous, a sword swallower slittin’ her throat and dyin’ in a mess of crimson and crystals. fuckin’ true crime, the end of us: plastic bag over my head, the sweet kiss of cherry syrup and hot dog air— my chest ripped open for the brigh’on gulls, the after of my body taxidermied at the bri’ish museum— pure silent spectacle. you were always guinevere and jfk, and i arthur of the cul-de-sac— no merlin, no cassini, no sword, no stone. never even fucking been to england.

ON WAR AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE By BRITTANI TELFAIR “HUMAN” is incongruous with the opaque ziploc bag full of legos that is every person. there’s too much straining against the plastic membrain, stretching circles into the film, to be two syllable simple. what i mean is, the body is body and the spirit wants out, or the world is just blocks of disparate information we struggle to contain, or the human can only know themselves to be human because we condemn the three dimensions of our thoughts to something so flat and contrived as writing, rife with error, image, simplification — it’s so much easier to kill when you’re shooting at an idea.

Volume 43, Number 7 PAGE DESIGN BY MELINA HUANG

Like Shooting Stars Wherein a Nass writer reflects on his myriad relationships with music. By CHRISTIEN AYERS

ike my relationship to many things in life, my relationship to music is a complicated one. There is always a push and pull between diving into new and disorienting music or shrinking into the arms of the music I know and love. Of course, there are benefits and drawbacks to leaning too close to either edge. Constantly pushing myself to listen to what’s inaccessible, circling the drain only on what feels ‘new’, causes me to miss the point of music. I should be engaging with the thoughts and ideas the music is attempting to put forth, allowing it to let me reflect and grow, whether that’s on a fundamental level or a smaller one. I also do the music, its creator(s), and myself a disservice by chasing the high of novelty or inaccessibility (which can often go hand in hand), and this mo’-betta’-blues-way of

consuming music doesn’t allow for any appreciation or understanding. Moreover, sticking with music that is too familiar will have a similar effect—I can’t challenge and expand my worldview in an echo chamber of my own greatest hits. I have started to think of how my relationship with music is no different than my relationship to a lover. There are those that you fall in love with quickly, those that come into your life at exactly the right time, and then there are those that don’t make you feel that certain kind of way when you first meet, but after a while they start to grow on you. So, I tried to make a list, a catalogue of types of relationships and how they relate to both music and people. There’s the first song that makes you realize that music is more than a collection of sounds, a sequence of notes, a backdrop to school dances and Texas Roadhouses. It takes you by surprise, sweeps you off your feet in a very world-ending fashion, and roots itself somewhere deep inside so you never forget

it. Even though you’ve grown older and wiser, armed with new experience and a greater understanding of what life may be about, you feel that slight twinge when this song pops up in your Spotify Wrapped playlist. Full of memories, it just makes you want to cringe at the immature, angsty fool you left behind, but you can’t help but smile at the innocent romantic you wish you still could be. Then there are albums or artists who you appreciate, but you just can’t seem to connect with them. Maybe you found them during a time in your life where you just aren’t ready to embrace them fully for who they are. Or it could be that you just haven’t gone through what they have in order to truly empathize with what they’re trying to communicate, regardless of the quality of execution—it’s hard to get Taylor Swift’s Red if you haven’t gone through a bad breakup. It’s all a journey; sometimes you can’t get a certain genre or artist until you listen to others. There’s a path you haven’t traveled yet where you may cross

the bridge from disconnect to understanding, and you may start to see the merit in a wide array of music. But right now, you appreciate who they are and what their music can be for others, but you’re not ready for them now. You may never be. My favorite kind of albums are those you end up falling in love with. They enter your life suddenly and unexpectedly, but not by stealing your attention or announcing themselves in a grand fashion. These albums operate with mysterious subtlety, making only gentle, firm first impressions within. On first listen, you recognize there’s something special—an entrancing aesthetic, a unique voice, a few immediate singles—yet after, they vanish from memory for weeks, months, maybe even years. Like shooting stars, you thought they’d exist only in a moment in time, never to return, something fresh but fleeting. However, by some Hollywood miracle, you end up reuniting with them in the depths of that disorganized library of music you meant to

listen to but forgot about, and everything suddenly clicks perfectly in a way they didn’t the first time. Every note and lyric seem to impale your gut with an unstoppable force only capable of being produced by that which was made just for you. Each listen uncovers new layers that seem to speak to your unique experience, while also giving you brand-new perspectives to reflect on, and cathartic, emotional wells to drown in. These are defining albums that end up forever shaping who you are, who you want to be, and who you’ll become. Even when you reach the inevitable end, and you stop listening as much as you used to, you never truly move on. You’ll always remember them for who they are, what they meant to you.

Christien Ayers can’t challenge and expand the Nassau Weekly in an echo chamber of his own greatest hits

November 14, 2021

PAGE DESIGN BY HANNAH SU

Ars Poetica with Everything Ending, so Everything Beginning “Let’s try this again. I am one of many people in love. I am a human of being human. Skin like everyone else and lots of heart. Too much music might kill me. Too little too.” By SABRINA KIM

uly 9, 2021—“Let’s pretend I don’t know what beauty is” (Matthew Siegel). Let’s pretend the poem is not about your face. Just kidding. Of course it is. I am the seasonal allergies type, the forgetful type, the tick-bitten type. Your name shows up on my screen. Certainly I feel an itch. If it weren’t for Pennsylvania between us I’d fall into you, you wouldn’t catch me, you’d fall too. My floor at home is carpet

with all sorts of spots from tea and soup I’ve spilled, but yours is hardwood. Ouch. We’re laughing though and still haven’t wiped the melted ice cream at the corners of our mouths. But it’s not really like that: the Airbnb only has a few windows and I’m staring at my screen all day. I’m not good at friendship because I learned unrequited love before god’s. And both have lost their relevance so I bake some frozen sweet potato fries and enjoy the smell of it. Warm orange surrounds me; I become it. My Claritin D stares back at me. I love my Claritin D so much that I obey it. As they say, love and fear are hard to tell apart. My Claritin D keeps staring. It’s not really the wanting I think of, but feeding myself… very little sunlight will do that to you…nibbling on my tail… I crave my deepest self. I crave all my selves.

July 22, 2021—I feel completely ungrounded. Walking down several blocks, I think everyone in Bushwick hates me. I know this is untrue yet my body believes it. The body asks, why do my skin cells die? Why me? Like I am a soft mass accidentally sorted into the wrong world, the one with hardness. In the bookstore, things I don’t know surround me on all sides. I start wondering why we go, if only to be reminded of all that we will never know. Why my period comes when it does. Why my mom has high blood pressure and your dad is in the hospital. At least I have my ugly handwriting. July 29, 2021—I’m sorry, mostly because I want an apology. My body was here before you and it will be here after. A mosquito was trapped in the apartment last night. Itchy itchy itchy itchy August 7, 2021—Home

again. A small photo of you means I snatched your face in that moment, and in your smaller 2D form you lean against my tissue box. Means my happiness. Means I was once safe. Means this existed and exists. Means I was enough for someone. Means you smiled like this. Means I kissed you later, in the car. After the pancakes and the beet salad tucked into a brown bag. Before I passed through all of your state on a bus to New York. Before I took the plane back to California and the sun stayed in the sky three extra hours and I called you to tell you about it. August 9, 2021—If you smell closely, you can smell the kitchen garlic. Something I love so dearly… Likes: not fighting, countertops, pungent things, me as I am a pungent thing. Dislikes: unpacking.

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August 14, 2021—We are one of many Asian families with a small white dog. Skippy’s white fur is white as my grandpa’s tufts. Like my grandpa’s combover, Skippy is delicate—you should see his body glowing under the skylight’s patch on the kitchen floor. He’s loud and yappy, though; I mean, if you can’t be loved, you can at least try to be understood. He’s neutered and bitter. I mean, how does one heal from that. I was five the night we took Skippy home for the first time. Skippy was named not after the peanut butter brand, but for being a Kim; all of our names start with the letter S. Or for the way, years later, I’d skip through Chinatown linking elbows with a friend. Or for the way the sunrise skipped our house and I never saw it creeping up behind Sunnyvale like a fingernail. The night we took him home, he was more piglet than puppy, with a wet nose and beady eyes. A body shaped like a pill. He didn’t cry, just stared at me from over my dad’s shoulder in the passenger seat. When we got home, he peed on a red blanket. We have a photo of it somewhere. August 16, 2021—These days, he walks like a question with his head cocked to the right. It’s because he had a stroke this summer. When he sleeps, I put my hand on his

side and feel it go up and down. I do that too. So do sine and cosine graphs. So does the ocean. August 20, 2021—Maybe We Can Do This. Maybe We Aren’t Ruined. September 5, 2021—Turning 19 in 11 days. A year ago I was so heartbroken. The year before that, too… I am a series of sentience. All softness. Your favorite part of me is my belly. Holding it the way I hold bread before it’s baked. That’s where I crave music. It’s where I crave the guitarist nodding in agreement with herself and curls of light reflected on a sculpture we like. My belly is deep and endless. My body a body of giving—forgiving? I am one of many Asian girls with a white boyfriend. I am still learning how to forgive myself for this. And how to forgive myself for asking for forgiveness. Let’s try this again. I am one of many people in love. I am a human of being human. Skin like everyone else and lots of heart. Too much music might kill me. Too little too. September 7, 2021—I’m holding onto you for dear life. I know this because I send you a photo of an Alfred Lord Tennyson quote: “Stay with me, I am sick; my love is more / Than many diamonds.” “Perhaps needing is

the most whole, beautiful thing we can do,” I text you. There is no question mark, but it is definitely a question: perhaps needing is the most whole, beautiful thing we can do? You are in agreement. Our hearts are wet on the floor. They are so small but still bigger than we’d anticipate. We stare for a bit and then collect them. September 8, 2021— Reading Elaine Kahn Romance or the End. She says, “I look up your nose / as you tell me all your secrets.” Also: “You big dumbbell! Bring me to life!” Also: “The warmth of my heart is hard / and unending.” September 9, 2021—You eat my crackers and pistachios and tell me about your day. You’re angry and I’m sleepy. I am thinking you will never know what it’s like to be in my body. I am thinking you are something I studied in geometry, you are something made of hard edges. My favorite part of you is your eyebrows. (Because I like petting them like caterpillars, but mostly because you like them.) September 10, 2021—We broke up this morning. Feels like having a baby. Or my birthday. People are being so nice to me. I’m made of goodness and I swim in it too. You are made of/swim in something beautiful that I don’t understand because you’ve cried like

five times in your life but mm yes very beautiful. Maybe we can do this. Maybe we aren’t ruined. October 17, 2021—Home again…chasing my tail… October 22, 2021—Last night I made hot pot. I felt like a witch as I stirred the base— miso, dashi, cooking sake, soy sauce. What a lovely garlicky bath for the shrimp and veggies. And that felt like enough life/love right there. Especially with the white rice. Living without you. It’s so strange. Feels like an accident. I want to tell you about all the immigrants in the town I grew up, all the husbands in the Korean market. I place you in a place you’ll never be. Wish you felt as foreign as I did in your whiteness. How that was every day, like the aunties rolling kimbap to sell in the back. Wish you marveled at the supermarket. How I swam in it. How you looked for a word to describe it. When you found it, you wrote it on your hand. You didn’t want to not know it again. November 5, 2021—Love brought me here and love will carry me home. Love brought me here and love will carry me home. Love brought me here and love will carry me home. We are ignorant of the ways we hurt. We are ignorant of the ways we hurt. I am trying not to

be. I am trying not to be. I understand that the way home requires first believing in it. Moving the body requires believing it is safe to move the body. Even if it’s a lie. So I trust the garlic steam rising from the pot. I trust the bodies that hold me before and after today—the lovers, mothers, sisters. The way I pointed to a friend’s window last October— she’d strung lights up in her grandma’s room—and said, It’s not just the lights, it’s also the leaves falling from the trees like snow. Not right now, but the idea of it. The way she wrote a poem about it a year later and sent it to me, tonight when I needed it, when I needed to be remembered for the way I loved future leaves. When the world is ending, I rest with the knowledge that it has more ending to do. Apocalyptic love is deep and sweet. How scared I am to go another day, another minute without saying I love you. I am saying it loud enough for anyone close by to hear.

Sabrina Kim was five the night she took the Nassau Weekly home for the first time

Volume 43, Number 7 PAGE DESIGN BY ISABEL KIM

“Fronteriza” “‘I have grown fond of the sound of the waves crashing and people laughing as they play on the Mexican coast.” By VICTORIA LUZ

ot many people can visualize the U.S./Mexico border wall, despite it being one of the most hotly debated political topics of the last decade. With these images, I invite you to witness Border Field State Park, a unique section of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border located in my hometown of San Diego, California. The Park serves as one of the last remaining

locations where families can interact from opposite sides of the border. In these images, you may notice families leaning on the border wall to see and talk to their loved ones in Mexico. Some families even hold their hands up to the chicken wire to touch each other’s fingertips. You will also see the native flora to the border region, the physical wall dividing the two countries that leads into the ocean, and the Plaza Monumental de Tijuana. Border Field State Park is only a ten-minute car ride from my home, and it is a place that I love and despise. I enjoy seeing the native plants thrive in the arid soil and the monarch

butterflies defying the rusted borders during their migration in the springtime. I have grown fond of the sound of the waves crashing and people laughing as they play on the Mexican coast. I miss sending air-hugs and talking to people on the opposite side of the border. I do not miss the reflection of the bright sun against the windshields of the Border Patrol vehicles or the sight of new barbed wire along the American beach. I detest the park for the militarization and fear it has brought upon my community, but I miss this place every day that I am not home.

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Amor

Kiosko This Aztec and Mayan inspired gazebo is located in Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park, one of California’s most important Chicano/a/x cultural and historical sites. The park’s history began in 1969 when Barrio Logan asked the City of San Diego for the permits necessary to build a recreational park. The city agreed to build a park in the neighborhood, but a year later went back on the agreement and instead made plans to build a highway patrol station. Community members were outraged and disrupted the station’s construction by occupying the land for twelve days. The City of San Diego was so frightened by the community’s collectivism and determination that they kept their hands off the land. The takeover became

a site of community resistance and solidarity from which Chicano Park was born. The Park continues to be a space where San Diego’s Chicano/a/x and indigenous community can come together to practice and preserve our culture and spiritual ties to the land and host political demonstrations. My best childhood memories are from Chicano Park. My childhood home was only a few blocks away. I learned to ride a bike in Chicano Park. I spent many years dancing ballet folklorico there, happily twirling in my long, traditional dresses. Since I was a baby, I attended political rallies in the park, and I was always looked after by the barrio that raised me. My values as a community member and organizer were shaped under the Kiosko.

I spent much of my childhood attempting to emulate the adults in my community who organized and cared for the working-class families in Barrio Logan. These activists were often brown women and sometimes mothers who would unapologetically voice their frustrations with the country’s exploitative and oppressive systems. I felt empowered by their words and actions, so much so that today I recognize those moments as the source of my ability to be an empowered, young Chicana. I created this art piece to represent how I have always viewed the radical women of my childhood. Their ability to be caretakers for their families and communities continues to inspire me to this day. Another source of inspiration for the piece was one of Che Guevara’s most famous sayings; “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

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o t y t i v i t a e r c e Add som ! r e t s e m e s g n i r p s your The Lewis Center for the Arts offers more than 75 courses in creative writing, dance, theater, music theater and visual arts each semester. Whether you are a beginner who is curious or a seasoned artist, performer, writer, designer or filmmaker there is a course for you! Arts courses can stretch your mind in new directions and unearth an unrealized passion. These intimate, hands-on classes fill up fast. Don’t miss the opportunity to bring some art into your life at Princeton! arts.princeton.edu

Volume 43, Number 7 PAGE DESIGN BY HANNAH SU

Pilgrimage to Mitsuwa “Nostalgia is a luxury that I’m willing to pay any price for, and these grocery stores sell it all.” By MINA QUESEN

y birthdays are marked by grocery store visits.

By visits, I mean travels. I mean wandering journeys that go beyond simply picking up a personalized princess cake and a couple easy-to-distribute snacks. I mean an immersion that begins when I cross the threshold of a hot busy street into the cool embrace of familiar aromatics. These visitations don’t occur in Trader Joe’s or Publix or whatever the New Jersey equivalent is. Food is more than personal: It’s love and memory and history. Publix and similar grocery chains are anything but the foods of my

cultures tucked away on dark shelves and limited to a single overpriced, problematic brand. Food speaks; my local grocery suffocates its voice. No, these visitations instead take place in various Asian grocery stores where I can find ten brands of miso but only a single tube of pesto. Nostalgia is a luxury that I’m willing to pay any price for, and these grocery stores sell it all. Over a thousand miles north of my house, on a northbound NJ Transit train where Gawon and I have laid claim to a set of four chairs, I’m turning 21. A few rows behind me, someone else was also celebrating a birthday. “We’re going to Newark for my birthday! I can’t wait to go to Newark!” The little boy cheered. He was on the phone with family members

who’d only just finished singing “Happy Birthday.” “Not New-ark! New York. We’re going to New York,” a little girl corrected in a voice that only an know-it-all older sister can master. I wanted to look back and give the kid a birthday-twin fist bump and tell him that I’m actually the one going to Newark. Instead, I smiled down at my phone for the rest of my trip and shook my head when Gawon asked what I was smiling about. I didn’t intend the pilgrimage to land on my birthday. After a series of grocery trips to surrounding markets with Gawon that happened to occur every other Saturday, I should have been content about the abundance of Asian grocery stores in the vicinity. Maybe I should’ve planned a trip with my friends to New

York City like any normal 21-year-old would. Maybe I should’ve stayed on campus and let my friends dictate the day. Instead, I found myself in every place wanting to go back to the Japanese grocer in Newark. Mitsuwa was a siren sitting on the Hudson shore, and I keep getting called back to it again and again. I first went to Mitsuwa when I was sixteen. In place of a Sweet Sixteen party, I was offered a three-day trip to New York with my mother. It was my first time in the city, and my mother was particularly excited about finding Japanese restaurants. In a primarily white suburb, we rely on our family cooking to bring to life the cultures across seas. In my hometown, there are two Asian grocery stores. We don’t have an H Mart--a Korean grocery chain that spans everywhere in the

country except in Florida apparently--and instead rely on small family-owned Korean businesses to supply us with yakult, wakame, and bags of rice. I learned from my mother to ask the owner for things using the Japanese words. Even in a store that hummed in a language we didn’t know, there was something like home there. We were grateful for a hum, and I clung to it. My mother and her friends made a hobby of going to any Japanese restaurant that opened in town. They’d make their calls about the food like acclaimed critics, their review shaping whether or not the rest of the family would ever go. There were few restaurants that ever passed their test, and my sister and I became snobs about Asian Fusion cuisine. But New York is a city of food. It is a city where Asianness and authentic

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restaurants grace every corner. It is a city of aroma and taste and heritage, and bustles with the home we tried to pack into tiny local grocers in our Florida suburb. I only remember a few things about my first time in New York: the Natural History Museum where we specifically hunted for the Easter Island head because “Dum Dum get me Gum Gum,” meandering walks in Central Park, a Dutch dollar store with cute stationary and mementos. Yet, the highlight of the trip didn’t take place in New York. Down on Jersey’s side of the Hudson, wedged between a river walk and an incline of expensive-looking homes, there’s Mitsuwa. My mother’s friend drove us from Manhattan, through the Lincoln Tunnel, to the store my mother had been talking about for weeks. Mitsuwa is a Japanese grocery store located in a shopping center filled with other Japanese stores, what I still call Jersey’s little Japan. Walking into Mitsuwa was crossing a portal into memories I hadn’t given much thought to in years. My mother is a Japanese immigrant

and my father the children of Latino immigrants. I once spent summers in Japan and soaked up Japanese the way young kids do, but it’s been years since I last went to Japan, not for lack of trying. Covid cancelled the plane ticket I had booked for last summer and butchered my ability to keep in my Japanese language courses. Yet, going through aisles of fruit swaddled in styrofoam nets and bundles of tiny beech mushrooms that I can’t find in a Trader Joe’s, I thought of shopping with my grandmother Baba in open street markets where the vendors would hand me small sweets to munch on as Baba collected the night's dinner. In the bento section that replaces the American Deli, I thought of my mom telling me to pick one of the boxes for lunch and me going for whichever one had the prettiest narutomaki. I thought of hot afternoons in Fukuoka where a PocariSweat was pressed into my hands and of evenings inside building sugar-sushi candy projects. All the while, in real time, my mother would gasp and point out things she hadn’t seen since our last trip in Japan. I

remember more Japanese on this trip than I do in any other moment within the U.S. border. We stuffed our suitcases with canned and dried goods; everyone else wondered why we’d go to a Jersey grocery store while on vacation in New York. I’m on the unlimited dining hall plan, so I have plenty of options for food and absolutely no logical reason to cook for myself other than a desire to. Gawon, both a dear friend and a terrible enabler, provided the perfect opportunity. She’s the one on an independent meal plan, although the residents of Lockhart Hall would debate otherwise considering I practically live in their kitchen. Gawon is Korean, and upon our return to in person classes we grew closer over the lack of Asian food options and jumped on the opportunity to go shopping for the foods our mothers made so well. I’ve created a mental map of the Asian grocery stores in the Princeton area as well as some landmark ones across Jersey. What we thought would be quick trips to buy what we needed became meandering immersions in nostalgia. On

our first trip, we scheduled an Uber for thirty minutes after we arrived. We canceled it twice before finally deciding to just order it when we finished. We started at Woori, a Korean grocery store located near Princeton Junction. We went with two things on the shopping list: miso and vegetables. We left with: miso, yakult, bibimbap, calpico, pork belly, pesto, milk candy, shrimp chips, popped rice crackers, red bean buns, green onion, beef stock, and so many packets of familiar snacks Gawon recommended (a lot of which we still have waiting to be consumed). At Woori, I appreciated how Gawon would point out the things she knew or look to the ceiling as she tried to find the words to describe a food completely foreign to me. We spent an obscene amount on groceries that are not in my budget. The ingredients from Woori weren’t used in distinctly Asian dishes. We made a modified gnocchi recipe I’d picked up from a Hulu cooking show and added pork belly slices. We went into Woori rather blind the first time with little planning and ambition.

It left something to want, and two weeks later we ended up at Asian Mart in Plainsboro. Asian Mart is larger than Woori and specializes in Chinese foods. Although Gawon had been to Asian Mart before, we were both thrown into a sea of characters we couldn’t read and food we could only guess the content of. We strolled down aisle after aisle trying to find something we knew, and grew excited when we started to actually name things. It lasted about three minutes until we realized that we were in the “foreign food” aisle of Asian Mart where they had hoarded together the Korean and Japanese snacks. One row over, a woman overheard us wondering what pandan was. Although she never quite explained it, I bought a case of pandan mochi solely because the woman jumped in to recommend it. Although we repeated our wandering habit from Woori, we didn’t leave without a clearer vision. We concocted the recipes in our head, and it was in Asian Mart that I realized that even some of

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the dishes I made with my Colombian grandmother— like platanos maduros—could be made from the treasures stored in these shelves. At some point I decided I wanted to make dango—a Japanese mochi dish. When the recipe called for mirin—a cooking wine—I noted I could buy alcohol in two weeks. Thus began the pilgrimage to Mitsuwa. After arriving in Newark and taking an Uber to the Hudson, we were into the thick of Mitsuwa’s sea of tight aisles packed with rows and rows of mostly pre-packaged food. This time, it was I who was pointing out the different items. Our list was more robust this time and I even had a recipe from Baba for hayashi rice. I was so excited to be able to take the role of grocery guide and make the recommendations. Between this trip and the one for my 16th birthday, I’d returned to Mitsuwa once. I went on Mother’s Day and curated a list based off of what my family wanted me to bring home in a couple weeks. At the time, my mom replied that she needed nothing and simply

wanted to shop at Mitsuwa in person. She later gave me a couple items to pick up. I couldn’t understand my mother’s desire to be in Mitsuwa before this semester. The ingredients that I picked up at Mitsuwa were not specific to Mitsuwa. I could have gotten my kewpie mayo or mochi ice cream at Woori. I probably could find melon pan or strange yakult flavored liquor at Asian Mart. Practically, there was no reason to make a two-hour journey north for groceries. In her memoir, Michelle Zauner writes about how Asian grocery stores unite pan-Asian cultures, particularly H Mart, and while that’s true, there’s also still a sense that something is missing. The sense of feeling out of place is impossible to ignore. Although I might feel like I am seen in Woori more than I am in Trader Joe’s, I still have to try to associate Korean brands to Japanese ones or rely on Gawon to tell me what was going on. At other Asian grocers, I feel like I am exploring, but at Mitsuwa I feel like I’m coming home. I can find very specific

things that I’ve been craving or feel the comfort of hiragana lacing childhood snacks. I can peruse the restaurants and eat something beyond sushi or ramen. We filled our cart with our ingredients, and at the cashier I got to proudly flash my ID to prove I was old enough to buy the liquor. We packed everything into a suitcase and visited the Daiso and book store next door. We spent most of the day in Little Japan, and I can honestly say I’m glad I spent my birthday in Newark. While reflecting about our pilgrimage and wondering what our other friends had in store on campus, Gawon said, “I don’t know what the others are planning, but I don’t think they can top this trip.” As ridiculous as it seemed, the grocery trips became highlights of my week and something that was once a chore became a new entertainment. I enjoy cooking because I get to share pieces of my culture and home, but I enjoy these grocery trips because I get to reminisce about these memories. It helps that Gawon is a great companion when it comes bouncing memories

back and forth between us. I still haven’t made the dango or hayashi rice (but I did buy the mirin). It’s on the table for the next week or so. I also have yet to visit the infamous H Mart. Maybe I’ll walk inside and realize that Zauner was truly right, maybe it’s something about H Mart that creates a unity stronger than a desire for something more. Or maybe I’ll only schedule another trip to Mitsuwa. In any case, our trip to H Mart in Edison has been planned right before Thanksgiving, just in time for our culture-fusion friendsgiving. We’ll make our list, we’ll over-spend, and somewhere along the way I’ll find something that reminds me of home.

The Nassau Weekly is a luxury that Mina Quesen is willing to pay any price for

Volume 43, Number 7 PAGE DESIGN BY ISABEL KIM

I’m Writing Rewriting My Story “‘This is the story I used to tell everyone, including myself, when asked about writing. It’s the narrative that got me into Princeton as a “writer.”” By KATIE LEE

first said I wanted to be a writer in second grade. It was quite incredible, really. Somehow I knew at age nine what my lifelong dream was going to be. That moment foreshadowed a passion that I followed wholeheartedly for the rest of my life—so far. This is the story I used to tell everyone, including myself, when asked about writing. It’s the narrative that got me

into Princeton as a “writer.” And it’s not entirely wrong. I did say that I wanted to be a writer in second grade, just as I said I wanted to be a basketball player, a fashion designer, a teacher. I had no idea then that it would become my high school “brand” as much as my passion. I would struggle for years between an actual love of writing and finding validation within prestigious competitions, publications, and programs. YoungArts. Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Iowa, Kenyon, Sewanee. These esoteric names were all too familiar to the specific niche of “serious” high school writers. I memorized the guidelines and deadlines and submitted one, ten, twenty poems and stories. The

nature of these esteemed programs, and the college process that loomed over them, meant that I had to define myself as a writer before I even had any idea how to define myself as a person. I found a series of practical boxes: I would be a short story writer. Not a poet, because the judging was too subjective. Not a novelist, because I had no time to write longer works. I rarely experimented with structure, style. I didn’t have that luxury, after all. And I won the awards, got into the programs, made it to Princeton. But navigating this process as an immigrant, Asian writer meant marketing my work as a certain type of racialized writing. I felt that I was given two choices: to write solely

about race or not to write about it at all. The first felt suffocating and scary, so most of the time I chose the latter. All my characters were race-ambiguous, which is to say white. The few times I did write about race, I wrote in the ways I’d seen other Asian female writers my age write and win. I wrote passive, overthinking protagonists. Inserted artistic similes, wrote “lyrical” prose. Fit myself to a certain reserved, poetic style that seemed to be expected of a young Asian female writer. I wrote about my grandmother, or making kimchi, or language barriers. I wrote about foreignness and double-consciousness. This is not to say these topics aren’t good or even important, but they felt

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very restrictive, as if my heritage story was already told from the very beginning. I wanted to write funny, cynical, rebellious Korean characters. I wanted to write different kinds of families, friends, and lovers. I wanted stories that thrilled and challenged. But the rigidity of high school writing followed me to Princeton, and in my first year, I felt like I made little progress even with the great resources of the Creative Writing program. Then, as these stories often go, I took a gap year when COVID hit. I knew that I might never get this much concentrated time to write for a while. So I told myself that I would write with no reader and no ambitions. For the first time in years, I did not regularly scroll

through submission deadlines. Instead, I sat at my desk and looked to writing as an escape from quarantine life. Having no external pressure actually made me crave writing, not the accomplishment of finishing it, but the thrill of doing it. I didn’t show my work to anyone for a year, and I wrote more regularly than I ever had before. At first, I made an explicit goal to write mostly Korean, Korean American, and Asian American protagonists, which allowed me to avoid making race the central part of any of my stories or characters. These were stories about heartbreak, obsession, nostalgia. They were set in Austin, Seoul, the Bay Area. Eventually, I stopped keeping that rule; I

write characters as they come to me. Often, they are Korean, or Korean American. Some are not. For the first time in my writing life, I also started to experiment with style. Writing a murder mystery. A love story. A snarky first-person, and an omniscient third. I took inspiration from Ling Ma, James Baldwin, George Saunders. I still struggle with my writing voice to this day; I often have to remind myself that I too am allowed and can succeed with charismatic, unapologetic style. But being a writer of color has always meant taking risks, devoting yourself to a form of writing that was rarely respected by institutions and awards. It means taking up space in your own right, telling

the stories that people might not care to hear. More than anything, it means that once you realize that no one defines what your art should be, you have infinitely more exciting possibilities. The most important inspirations to me are artists of color who made active choices to create outside of the white gaze, who saw the power of art to not only explain or justify their experiences to others, but to complicate them and bring them to life. I’ve realized that I have a certain duty to them, and to myself, to see myself as an abundant and intricate artist. What matters for me is that writing became fun. Terrifying. Life-giving. My attachment to writing now is first my own. I choose what I

explore. Sometimes I return to my grandmother, or language barriers, or Korean food. But it’s a deliberate decision, one I make with the knowledge that it fits into a larger, more complex story. If I want to share my stories, that is my choice too. A year without any competitions or submissions has taught me that that validation is secondary. What makes up ninety percent of being a writer—scribbling in your room under a dim light with characters you come to know like family—that, I know, is mine.

Instead, Kate Lee sat at her desk and looked to the Nassau Weekly as an escape from quarantine life

November 14, 2021

PAGE DESIGN BY MELINA HUANG

The CD Case of Alexandria Wherein a Nass writer reflects on lost DVDs as artifacts of a past life. By GAWON JO

he only thing I distinctly remember from the whole process of moving houses doesn’t occur during the move or the unpacking. It comes much later, after the brightness of the new place fades away and all the college students who helped us have trickled back to the university. It comes after we’ve organized my brother’s and my room. For some reason the television ends up in his room. The television is an old thing, a clunky modest grey and almost the shape of a cube, but not quite. To give you an understanding of how old it is, the television has a built-in VHS player underneath the screen. It comes on top of a small rolly piece of furniture, which perhaps in its previous life had been a bedside table. Ironically (though I wouldn’t know it at the time) it stands right next to the cable tv wall outlet, from which protrudes a cord that looks like it was bitten off by an over-eager dog. The television,

once it is thrown away, is never replaced, and the days of me and my brother sitting together in front of the television arguing about what to watch grow more distant. I digress. Days (or perhaps weeks—my thoughts have not turned back to past homes in years) after moving in, my brother and I are sitting in front of the television again. We are indecisive, as we always are, and so, as we have done so many times before, we decide we need to be reminded of just exactly how many choices we have. And so we search for the black CD case, a case that fits four CDs on every laminated plastic page. My memories have blurred since then, but back then, it seemed to go on for forever. There must have been hundreds of CDs, maybe thousands—or surely a number staggeringly large to a younger me. But the house is large in its unfamiliarity. We search for hours. Or rather I search for hours, my brother growing tired of the fruitless search after maybe an hour and plodding back to his room. We never find it. Eventually I cave and go to my mother. I didn’t want her

to know that we had been planning to watch a movie but I was getting worried at this point. Maybe my mother had hidden it on purpose to discourage us from watching movies? But no. When I ask her, she also joins the search. The search stretches on for days. It is not an intense hunt, simply an intrusive thought whenever I look at a part of the room I haven’t thoroughly searched. Maybe it’s here— maybe it’s there—I’ve looked there, but maybe I’ll triple check—that box looks like it could hide something. (To this day, I haven’t refined my search methods, and so I’ll go back to the same drawer five, seven, seventeen times thinking I must have missed something.) Nothing turns up for weeks and weeks. By the end of those weeks my mother tells me it must have been lost in the moving process and blames my father. He, in turn, staunchly refutes this but has no other explanation for it. Eventually the house forgets. A few years down the road, I’ll make a comment about the black CD case, but my parents will look at me oddly and tell me that they don’t remember

what I’m talking about. I don’t know why, but I’m left reeling. Am I really the only one who remembers? It must be partly nostalgia, but the CD case evokes the same regret that I feel for the lost library of Alexandria when I think of the CD case. All that media, lost. For a moment, I doubt my sanity. Maybe the black CD case never existed, and I dreamed it up in place of an imaginary friend. But it must be real; there are too many details for it not to exist. Countless memories of closing and opening the case with a little black zipper. The sound of the pages flipping, the plastic so different from the paper. And the CDs enclosed within that plastic. Which include: At least two Barbie movies. Which I remember very clearly because only one of them was any good, and it was the Rapunzel one. Several arguments were had about this, because my brother (even though he secretly liked them, I swear) always protested when I wanted to watch one—and it was always a protest without an alternative

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movie, and it always included something to the effect of “ewww, it’s pink.” Lilo and Stitch, which to this day makes me tear up. Nemo, which does not. Knockoff Nemo. The one that had sharks with lips in it. At least one 뽀로로 (Pororo) CD. When I saw it years later, while babysitting, I wondered why I’d thought the plot was so much more intricate and interpersonal-drama-filled than it was. All (and I do mean all) of Blue Planet. And the not-Blue Planet. The one with Earth instead. I remember that I pitched a fit when my father wanted to take all the CDs out of the lovely book-like case and stick them in the black CD container. And I was right; if he hadn’t done that we’d still have them The Magic School Bus box set. We bought it for my cousins

when they visited but they didn't take it back with them. We used to watch them while demolishing the dried apples that my grandmother sent us. And multiple pirated silver discs. They were always labeled with brown sharpie and they always were written in Korean. I think we had Shrek in there. As well as Howl's Moving Castle. And Totoro. The last two had the option of Korean dub, which is how I fondly remember them. There were so many others, but they slip from the edges of my mind now. Regardless, the pirated discs were from Boston. Which meant automatically that they were seven or eight years old at the time—we'd moved to Texas from the Northeast when I was around six. It always seemed like such a skilled job, cloaked in the mysteries of technology—something I would not

know how to do (personally I'd probably have burned the CDs instead of burning the movies onto the CDs). I remember that it was a whole industry (not really, and for the purposes of evading the law, all of what I'm writing is highly dramatized and basically fiction) and that we were careful with them. At the time they seemed so precious. But they've now all disappeared with the rest of the case. And the children's books have also gone, sold by my mother, and the pink bike I used to ride no longer fits me and has left the garage. I know intellectually that I'd never look at these if I still had them. I'd never use them—the world and I have both moved on. Now I watch movies in the theater with friends or at home on the computer. I read required books for class or novels that I only

half-finish. I walk now, and it's a novel experience to enjoy going more slowly. Even pirating technology has changed: torrenting and other illegal websites have replaced the materiality of a burnt CD. Regardless, a part of me longs for the state of simply possessing the past. A part of me longs to flip through the pages, remembering arguments and opinions. Perhaps it is the absence that I feel most keenly. I would probably not have touched the CD case if it were still in my house, much less rifled through it. But now, in the quiet moments, it is all I can think about. When she saw it years later, Gawon Jo wondered why she’d thought the Nassau Weekly was so much more intricate and interpersonal-drama-filled than it was

November 14, 2021

Double Consciousness By Sebastian Aguilar