SPRING 2017

A Brown / RISD Visual & Literary Arts Magazine Vol. XVIII Issue II

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Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, It is my great honor to present you with the Spring 2017 issue of VISIONS Magazine. As always, it was both a joy and a challenge to select pieces to feature in our newest issue. This semester we received more submissions from our incredibly talented community of artists and writers than we have in my past four years working on the VISIONS team. The growth of our magazine makes me proud, as it signals the strong foundation VISIONS has established in the dynamic, diverse, and talented Asian American communities at Brown and RISD. However, the longevity of VISIONS also signals that the issues facing Asians in America persist, demanding our immediate attention and continued resistance.

Our work is more important now than ever. Therefore, it is my bittersweet hope that VISIONS continues to exist as a publication that uses art as activism, and celebrates and centers Asian American voices, identities, and opinions for many years to come. The pieces in this issue will stir both your emotions and thoughts, and help facilitate important conversations among your friends and communities at home.

Even as we celebrate our diversity within the Asian American community and our campuses, I recognize that there is much more going on in the United States today that demands our attention. As Asians in America, we must also act in solidarity with other marginalized communities, and support movements that go beyond the AAPI label. For that reason, this semester VISIONS hosted Know Your Rights legal observer training workshops, in order to provide our community with the information and skills to safely demonstrate and protect people against unlawful policing. In the years to come, the VISIONS team will continue to develop and engage with our community’s evolving needs.

Finally, at the end of my VISIONS career, I want to thank the amazing VISIONS editorial board and family I have had the honor of collaborating with throughout my four years at Brown, as well as the artists and writers who sustain this publication and perpetually blow me away with their talent and passion. I am delighted to present this final issue, and confident that the future of VISIONS will make me proud.

Thank you for reading, and for being a part of this community with me.

Sincerely yours,

Mia Gold Editor in Chief

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Mission Statement

Table of Contents

VISIONS is a publication that highlights and celebrates the diversity of Brown and RISD’s Asian/Asian American community. We are committed to being an open literary and artistic forum for Asians and Asian Americans, as well as other members of the university community, to freely express and address issues relating to both the Asian and Asian American experience. VISIONS further serves as a forum for issues that cannot find a voice in other campus publications.

As a collaborative initiative, VISIONS attempts to strengthen and actively engage Brown and RISD’s vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as the larger Providence community and beyond.

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family vacation ii

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when the monsoon came

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lotus root soup

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are you coming home for bre ak

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of VISIONS’ sponsors.

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coinflips

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bathhouse

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pl astic royalt y

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direct tr ansl ations

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how ( not ) to boil the perfect egg

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untitled

editor in chief

freshman representatives

Mia Gold ’17

Sophia Meng ’20 Jiaju Ma ’21

managing editor

Andrea Zhu ’17

Lisa Lee ‘17

art & photogr aphy editors front & back cover

Flipside | Digital Jenice Kim ’17 loves to see the world the way children do. inside cover

The City of Providence | Pen/digital Ran Zheng ’17 doesn’t know what to write for an artist byline.

Elizabeth Huh ’19 Eveline Liu ’19

Victor C. Li

Zaiwei (James) Zhang

Nadya Kim

Hilary Ho

my th of the matriarch

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end

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uncomfortable truth

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ginkgo

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enchantée

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containing risk

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cucumber

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cacophony in bangkok

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thai political ephemer a

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stretch !

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salita ng ar aw

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mom is moon and dad is oce an

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i tried to dye my hair blue

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a swimmer stuck in a room

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the composition of decay

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seoul series

Claribel Wu

Theo Lau

Yoon (Sara) Choi

Julie Benbassat

Christine Collins

Tiffany Pai

Zander Kim

Parisa Thepmankorn

copy editing staff

Alicia DeVos ‘18 Kelly Wang ‘19 Zander Kim ‘19 Lauren Yamaguchi ‘19 Celina Sun ‘20

Lynn Tachihara

( appropriated memories from manz anar )

Jason Fujikuni representasian

Claribel Wu ‘19

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financial officer

a very special thanks to ...

timeline of an apple

Yvonne Fong ’18

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molt

Ananya Shah ’17

Kisa Takesue Undergraduate Finance Board Brown Center for Students of Color Contributors and staff

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webmaster

contact

tre vi fountain

Miranda Chao ‘18

visions@brown.edu visions-magazine.org facebook.com/Visions.Brown @VISIONSBrown

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tr affic jam

Sruti Suryanarayanan ’19

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Zak Nguyen

PrintNinja Printed in PRC

risd outre ach

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Kathleen Wu

printer liter ary editor

net working chair

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CJ Park

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editor emeritus

l ayout & design editors

Sarah Im ’17 Ryan Nguyen ’19 Sophia Meng ’20

Suzie Shin

Sarah Im

Amy Wang

Caitlin Takeda

Jeffrey Hsueh

Yuchen Horng

Mim Tejapaibul

Joanna Seul

Laura Garbes

Ying (Bonny) Cai

Laura Garbes

Minsoo Thigpen

Eleanor Kim

Sarah Im 4

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Family Vacation II | Screenprints Suzie Shin ‘17 is thankful for life.

CJ Park ‘17.5 is gentrifying his writer’s block.

when the monsoon came

i remember how she grabbed a fistful of my louder sister’s straight black hair—shaking the head that rooted it with such vigour that every strand pulled loose. family fortune (the little there was) fell out of one ear, a decade’s worth of whispers and warnings dislodged from each canal. everything hit the floor with a silent hiss.

that night i scribbled a series of spells. pulled from sheets of arithmetic: 3×1=3 11 × 2 = UMMA’S DATE OF BIRTH 2 × 2 = HOWEVER FAR THIS GOES

by the end of the hour my sister was as bald as britney would become later that year. this horrified her classmates and teachers alike until britney’s matte grey dome had covered enough magazines. soon, schools of white girls would lose the hair on their heads but had parent’s notes explaining that it was really for “awareness” and “charity” and similarly dignified causes. their fine, fair hairs would be re-purposed. re-rooted. typhoons strike when she wields the power of the master language over our mother like a blade that passes through airport security. much to my sister’s delight, our mother’s foreign inflections once impeded her from distinguishing between bald and bold. what really cut it was when my sister mocked our mother for the state she considered settling in. mother could have settled for saying “CT,” but she let it all out like a frantic jinx: CONNECT TO CUT.

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9 × 12 = DON’T FORGET TO TURN AND LOOK BACK EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE 6 ÷ 3 = YOU AND ME BOTH the melting of our mother’s tongue happened over many slow nights. the searing heat transmuted mother’s tongue into something inescapably viscous. there flowed so much from the creased brim of her sleeping lips that the landlord would wake us for fear of water damage. bedridden and mute, our mother spoke first in gestures, then in glances. she had us scoop and store what remained of her tongue in thick porcelain. until the next monsoon, all we ate was our mother’s tongue.

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Kathleen Wu ‘20 loves chairs and the ground, too.

are you coming home for break | Oil and acrylic on unstretched canvas Zak Nguyen ‘19 is a painter who knits; his life is filled with gamsol and yarn.

Lotus Root Soup The white bowl on the greentile table holds a golden-pink shimmering broth. It is spooned into bowls of hot rice, pooling in clear lakes around the little hills of grain. In each ladleful, thin disks of starchy root float like elaborate round rafts, with wide round holes around their edges like the remnants of a moth’s nightfall feast.

This is the lotus root soup that my dad cooks on weekend mornings, when all the world is a plate of lazy bright cacti and faded lawn chairs. This is the soup we imbibe on Friday nights after school, when the cruelties and absurdities of the day are gathered and mussed upon our heads like short teal, orange, neon wigs of despair. With it we are washed clean again; the hot broth rinses the dye and façade from our faces. This is the soup that we know to be truth.

For truth is simple. Truth is a pot of water, boiled. Truth is the root of a wide pink flowering plant that is planted in the celestial mud of a lake, a lake holding the dirt of two million households’ laundry, of eight million people’s foreheads. Truth is this, cut into slices; truth is this, the peel skinned from its surface.

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My father cures the soup in the crucible atop our stove. Two hours the ordeal, with the ginger and the bloodless pork. With the salt of a chemical sorrow.

He pours it into the white bowl and we partake, we medicate ourselves— drinking the soup of this root grown and abducted from a place that used to be.

When we ask him one day, father where did you learn to cook, he shrugs. “I just ate things in restaurants. At my uncle’s house, in college.” And so I found a better way to find myself. It is a kind of magic, to pack in flavors and embolden them in a pot, to administer them to the people at the table.

The savory flavor that you can taste in the last spoonful was a whisk of the wrist chopping ginger—my uncle, in the kitchen, his smiles wrinkling salt into the steam and water, onto the cutting board, lifting off of the plates and onto the washed-up, greying cylinders of the cement factories outside.

The delicate spade of a dull steel spoon carves out avalanches of rice from the mother hill. They fall in soft clumps into the soup we each take—hot water and pork and

little golden haloes of oil that fuse and sail over the soup’s surface, bubbles buoyant with the melted grease of a winter pig boiled to stew. And the lotuses, in thick, round disks, pink with the bounty of a secret planted deep, a secret as substantial as the morning mud. Unquestioningly, we scoop the islands of rice into the puddles of soup, and all this we dutifully deliver to our mouths.

Unquestioningly, we scrape the gentle slopes of our bowls clean, tipping the ceramic so that the rice and sustenance slip easily down our throats.

It slips down as easily as the cool dusk in New York, the same warm soup warming the lips of someone wrapped in a scarf, wrapped in her faith in the person who came over with her. Those two of ours who left a land of abundance for a city of steel and bright, purposeful faces. They bend over their bowls together, the faint, translucent memory of a home distilled in this shimmering broth they took away. Our mother and father gently cool the liquid remembrance with their breath, buffet it with indentations of their memorized pasts, then let it slide and slowly settle deep in their lungs.

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Victor C. Li ‘17 once gave up creative writing for a world of statistics and sports. Last year, he realized he could have both.

coinflips

they say in poker that you can do everything right and still lose \ but you can do everything wrong and still win / back then they raced greyhounds: winning wagers were just happy accidents but everybody must’ve won just like in kindergarten when we drew apples, coloring two different reds, two different greens i colored mine eggplant black, a bruise; mom thought i was color-blind like dad but no i was just a shit artist and dad is still in macau – to him, all the neon lights shining that red-green blur of brown, roulette tables where you can bet on brown, or brown \ speed freaks me out (not time, in a fleeting sense but locomotion, motility) the kind of fear that makes someone forget how to ride a bike to fall down the slope before getting into skis i want to just walk down Broadway and feel the concrete and gum ashy everything, at my own pace / “don’t be a chicken head, you’re a phoenix tail.” and maybe i am, but trace my blood lines in the pacific – try and find a feather go to the city corner: the jacarandas bloom in may. maybe grab some curly fries, tell me if you see my backpack

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or how about that steep hill? the earthquakes barely shifted the sidewalks; lawns long yellowed you might hear me whistling now head south track my uber, yes i’m headed to the airport most trails end here. when birds fly, they don’t leave footprints. \ although asphyxiating, take variable altitude: a cleansing arena. on: fasten seatbelt light ah. no phone echoes up here, no “we are sorry to inform…” we’re above avalanches and parity exhales like an old friend / 0040 december is hitting the window in sporadic heaves still playing that stupid phone game 0105 hallway ice machine stopped groaning ran out of boxed wine

0210 nash street has been quiet that last email had too many exclamation points 0435 someone knocks on the neighbor’s door 4% battery 0500 a car honks forgot to pack dress socks 0515 (0215 pacific) “you’re missing the first snow” “i’m okay with that” \ take a chance – pre-dawn, post-dusk, can’t we go home now – home, no longer but the trains have stopped / i talk about things in terms of coinflips not usually with fair coins but every possible occurrence of consecutive copper faces or iron, lead, mercury; whatever coins are made of \ buses are only one dollar there but what do we do in the desert with the rest of our money? / she heard of the drought and joked about eating dinners of steaks and almonds maybe almond-covered steak \

“have you smoked before?” secondhand kills but also ignites: weekend trips desert cities a family soundtrack of piercing lights rolling bells shuffling chips gusting cards smothered in marlboro parents’ numbered days together “not yet” she drove quickly running away from the same weekend trips childhood high lights childhood lowlights in the passenger seat, i squint city lights now bokeh, an oil slick with peaches plums “let’s go buy a pack; reds”

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Bathhouse | Ink and collage on paper Zaiwei Zhang (James) ‘17 has a lot of work to do.

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Plastic Royalty | Oil and mixed media collage on canvas Nadya Kim ‘17 was probably a panda in her past life.

Hilary Ho ‘20 actually likes oatmeal raisin cookies.

direct translations

伤心 shangxin; hurt heart

笑容 xiaorong; laugh easy

sometimes that’s really all there is to sadness. between us, only distance and crappy skype calls.

do you remember that time I caught you pretending to be the tooth fairy on that 2am night? do you remember how you tiptoed into that pastel-pink room and slid silent palms under the pillow of a little girl dreaming about waking up to dollar-coins where she’d left her little baby teeth? do you remember how you asked me how much the tooth fairy gave me for my little baby teeth? do you remember how, in that moment, I wished I had more teeth to lose just to be able to see that smile of yours over and over again, do you remember that?

It’s ok if you don’t, I’m just asking.

there is a boy who still thinks of a girl many oceans away. he remembers how she loves the raspy drone of saxophones in a smoky blues bar and the sound of an orchestra tuning up before the show starts. he reaches his hand into the past, fumbling around with parts of a past life, the same way he looks for car keys or a stick of gum in the front pocket of his jeans. when he pulls out the scent of her into the present — the one that lingers on a pillowcase, or maybe the collar of a shirt — he imagines himself holding the last days of autumn in his hands.

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Lynn Tachihara ’17 is an observer + image-maker.

Untitled (Appropriated Memories from Manzanar) | Collage series Jason Fujikuni ‘17 would like to add you to his professional network.

how (not) to boil the perfect egg The egg is a windowless room.

Even if it were to be caressed by the lengthening four o’clock shadows and the spilling pockets of yellow brilliance, the interior of the egg could not bear witness to it. Trespassers are prohibited, entirely ignored or absorbed into invisible pores never to be seen again. We think of our shadows as grey puddles beneath our feet. That is all a shadow needs to be. The egg, the windowless room, does not care for the golden hour display of the sun’s handcrafted patterns upon walls. Nor does it care for the charming chatter between the curtains and the passing zephyr, scheduled for the late afternoon. This windowless vessel keeps its contents in a state of oblivion.

It is Plato’s cave, impenetrable by the glares.

The egg is a stoic that is left in the dark. It exists from one windowless space to another, transported from the warehouses to the corrugated cartons of our windowless refrigerators. I heard 15

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that cold temperatures stunt the development of the windowless room. Windows have a blind spot for the pesky winter drafts that enjoy its late-night sneakins. The egg will not tolerate it. The wall of it is already tenuous enough.

The egg would uphold a 4.5 star rating from the modern recluse we call the hikikomori, whose own skin is washed over with a matching lack of vitamin D. The hikikomori enjoys the seamless curvature of the room’s opaque walls, tastefully paired with its indifference to the commotion beyond its borders. A windowless abode that keeps its peace — ideal for those whose comfort blankets are made of shadows. Also recommended for the zen-master in training.

The architect of the egg took notes on minimalism and sleek package designs. The windowless room demonstrates an elegance that matches that of Japanese poets who spoke of falling cherry blossoms and the dissolving snowflake. But the egg does not need more

reminders of the transience of things. Cherry blossoms and dissolving snowflakes are distractions. The egg alone can testify to it all, without appearing so weak.

My mother once told me that the secret to the perfect boiled egg is a pinprick on the outer shell before it is placed in water.

She promised that it would not break the egg, for an accidental crack on its wall would expose its immaculate interiors to the toxic particles we humans have long accumulated in our bodies.

It is a procedure that requires a most delicate touch in order to preserve the egg’s windowless unity. To crack it wide open into a sizzling pan is a massacre in comparison. Haven’t we been taught that it’s rude to barge into a room unsolicited?

To pierce it would be to transform it. Are we not also taught to embrace change?

Regardless, renovation is always a nuisance.

The new mark formed on the surface is a perfectly circular opening that is still too small

to be defined as a window. A window would mark its end: a death by exposure. Instead, as if to share the empowerment of the sixteen-year old who decides to pierce their own nose in a dimly lit bathroom, the egg, newly punctured, is relieved by its first wound that did not cause its walls to collapse. First emerging as lightning, the pin-pricked hole must have held the blinding glare of a twelve o’clock sun. Like the way I used to look at a night sky as a tattered black cloak, I thought stars were simply the light from

the other side, escaping through the pinpricks of the sky’s fabric.

Would the gap, the momentary absence of the outer wall, invert itself to become an entity of its own?

The enigma of the windowless room flourishes with its new form, punctured yet still intact.

Both sides of its seamless wall were kept symmetrically blind to one another — the way our anonymous rapport is established in the confession booth. But the puncture in the windowless room did not grant

its onlookers any more insight into its interiors, as one could have hoped for. Even if I were to get close enough that my eyelashes were pressing against its cold surface, the egg still would not relinquish any of its private thoughts. I searched for dialogue, a window, but instead, I found myself cast into a darker shade of exclusion.

The windowless room is not accepting any more visitors.

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Representasian | Poster Sarah Im ‘17 is looking for her bobby pins.

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Amy Wang ‘20 enjoys cartoons, sesame paste, and the changing of seasons.

Molt | Archival inkjet print Caitlin Takeda ‘20 is a firm believer in clogs and naps.

Timeline of an Apple

today, seven o’clock p.m.— here i am in the window seat, awaiting touchdown. soon my grandparents will grin and wave and crane their necks to see me. i will do the same, despite my american teeth. together we will try to compensate for all the lost years. in my head i’m thinking apples, thinking fathers, thinking skin and kin. two weeks ago, july— father tells the story again, the one from a faraway boyhood. the one about ye ye—my father’s own father—and the apple skin. we crowd around the kitchen counter and savor each morsel of detail. four years ago, the first day of school— new ninthgrade me: all nerves and exhilaration, arms as skinny as apple cores. after school i pick at dinner. father says eat more. father says finish your plate. father says there are people in the world who never have enough food. a decade ago, on a family trip to china— our suitcases are jammed with dried fruit and chocolate, jars of nuts and coffee beans. in the morning father empties each bag, presenting the gifts to ye ye and nai nai. all of this to compensate for the apple’s white insides. all of this and never enough.

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eighteen years, five months and twenty-one days ago— i am born, weighing a little under seven pounds. they dress me in red: the color of apples, good luck and the chinese flag. father looks at me and only wants the best. little do they see the whiteness at my core. twenty-three years ago—in america, apples are red and ripe and cheap and plentiful. father buys plastic bags full, compensating for a childhood lived in ugly revolution. he bites into one and tries to either remember or forget his family home. some very, very long time ago: before jet lag, before u.s. supermarkets, before china as past and america as present, before airplanes, before children, before saying goodbye— father realizes something he had not as a child: nobody enjoys eating bitter apple skin. perhaps this realization propels him toward jet lag—toward u.s. supermarkets—toward airplanes—toward saying goodbye. forty-seven years ago, seven o’clock a.m.— breakfast in beijing, cultural revolution ongoing. ye ye skins an apple and only eats the bitter skin. my father, still a child, gets the white insides. for the time being, he does not understand why.

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Trevi Fountain | Graphite on paper Jeffrey Hsueh ‘17 is still an orange.

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Traffic Jam | Gouache and ink Yuchen Horng ‘19 is probably asleep right now.

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Claribel Wu ‘19 bruises as easily as a banana in a backpack.

In 1981, Ama and the rest of the family immigrated to Ecuador to eventually immigrate to America.

She discovered Christianity—Ama always begs me to believe in God, because she wants me to achieve salvation. Because my two nameless aunts will greet me at the pearlescent gates of Heaven, because she says I will be there waiting for you.

I ask why she became a Christian. She said that through God’s love, she has learned how to show love for others.

Myth of the Matriarch

阿嬤 “Ama”: Taiwanese term for maternal grandmother.

Ama was born in 1940, year of the Dragon, the only mythical zodiac.

On a sweltering afternoon in Taiwan, she told me the story of her first pregnancy, speaking in the past tense as we sat twelve floors above the smog-filled lungs, sore legs, and sweat-stained clothes of Taichung. She’d given birth prematurely to twin girls, with fluttering baby-bird hearts and creamy skin, identically vulnerable to the heavy existence of this world. And after seven days, they passed away.

At first, I didn’t even notice. I sat across from her, eyes pointed downward at my knobby fingers. At first, I didn’t even notice.

I looked up—It was the first time I had seen Ama cry. Her eyes leaked liquid jewels that tumbled over the precipice of her aged lids, gathered in the canopy of her sparse lashes, and settled into the contours of her facial terrain. Ama’s sharp voice, usually tuned to a more adamant and assured frequency, melted into something softer. I realized then that what I knew of Ama was more myth than material. I called and asked her to tell me more. ~ My grandmother grew up in Taiwan, then a “model colony” occupied by Japan as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War. I asked what it was like to grow up as a Taiwanese woman under imperial and patriarchal occupation. She blinks, “Girls were expected to be nice and obedient.” At 25 years old, a matchmaker came to her home with a man 6 years her senior—my grandpa. I asked if she was in love and she laughed. Girls were expected to be nice and obedient.

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But Ama has a strange way of showing her love, doesn’t she? “Ama knows, Ama tells you, don’t play too long in the sun. You are getting too tan.

Tan is ugly.” I am five, sweating from recess at afterschool daycare. She grips my arm tightly. “Let me tell you, you don’t know, Ama knows! Don’t wear those shorts, you look like the wrong kind of woman, the kind that stands around on street corners.” I am thirteen, recklessly insecure, and impatient with her internalized misogyny. “You are too young to wear makeup. Ama used to wear makeup, and see how Ama looks now? The skin is stained and wrinkled. Ugly. You will look like this.”

I am sixteen, and I am, I am, I—Ama is scared, always scared. She tells me to turn off my lights because she doesn’t want people to see me at night, she tells me to turn on the lights so robbers will know that someone is home. Ama calls my grandpa worthless and warns me against marrying an older man, against making the mistakes that she did. She warns me of men on the street who will pinch my thighs and hurt me, but she is the one hurting me with her words, her fear, her historic anxiety, her love.

who still speaks to me in our native tongue, the one person who keeps the flickering flame of my culture alive.

She told me once that she hates her sign, her cosmic destiny, the Dragon. Her words burn and she guards me with a fierce love, but she is not a dragon because she is human, and painfully so.

I inherit her blood, I inherit her fear, her rattling fear, of cultural erasure, misogyny, the unknowable after-life. I inherit her myth. ~ “Go to sleep, it is late,” she says. Her voice crackles, from old age and bad connection. It is 12:00 AM here in Providence, and 9 PM in California.

Three hours ahead and 58 years behind, I respond, “Yes, Ama.” The phone blips and the connection ends—she is gone and I am still there, left with the residue of our conversation.

Ama is a myth because I will never know her fully, but what I do know helps me know myself, know the abundant past that precedes and defines me. Ama, my immigrant grandmother, who used to pull a napkin-wrapped drumstick out from her purse when she picked me up from daycare because I would forget to eat at school. She would cut aloe vera from the backyard to rub on my wounds. If I slept late, she would check to see if I’d fallen asleep, saying that she could not fall asleep until I did. She is the only one in my family 24

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Theo Lau ‘19 would like iced tea, a money tree in a library stack.

in a smaller sine back towards its origin. The smaller wave, as it approached its homecoming, suddenly found itself drawn deep into the earth as a smooth walled hole opened in the midst of the blacktop, a shadowed angle obscuring its bottom.

The conical opening widened and stretched, as though it were being displaced by a massive multidimensional water bottle, plunged upside down into the heated, glimmering tar.

End e xc e r p t e d

From outside the house, he could hear the Asian grandmothers tracing lines across his front yard, arms drawing sharp lines in the air, yelling in two different languages, the air rinsed of its normal buzzing undercurrent of traffic and smog. A swarm of petulant penguins had been released into his yard, outing each other in Cantonese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese, savaging each other as though it were a polite greeting, accosting each other without regard for the language barrier. The day bowed under the weight of these untranslated (and therefore underappreciated) insults, bloating until it distended onto the pavement, soaking in. Time drew a comatose breath, sucking the urgency out of the sun’s light as its legs lay flat on the tarmac of L A X. The shade now throbbed palatably, tumescent, the air rich with the smell of natural gas escaping in a slow wheeze from the rear left burner of the kitchen stove, intertwining itself around the greened perfume of cut grass and foliage. Israel spread onto the long leather couch that had grown supple and mahogany brown with time, his head facing toward the window, pressure resting upon his solar plexus as he lay on his stomach.

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He lay in silence, taking in the slowly turning world around his vision, populated, it seemed, solely by people who found representation through the shape of their souls, displaying them proudly on their shoulder, as the military does flag upon uniform. The grass outside was brown and had started to uproot itself, its frozen, searching appendages stiff with rigor mortis, waiting for watery supplies to come, to be needlessly dumped on their already waxen bodies. They were gnarled and warped in the heat, skeletons ugly enough to make one question whether their deaths hadn’t been for the better: Israel was determined not to lose his staring contest with them.

The black street stared straight back at him, as it sat there, stretching from white grey curb to curb, the trees standing frozen, terrified of growing a single millimeter, the totality of their existence focused on not allowing a single leaf to sing in the wind. Whether time passed or not was irrelevant, so still everything in the scene remained for a moment, as though someone had decided to take a picture using the physical dimension, rather than patterned chemicals on paper. The asphalt, black and glittering, smoothed with pressure and heat, rippled a deep circular wave out from under the exact middle of the street, which lapped gently against the curb before reverberating

From that morass, the chaos of that improbable hole did she rise, bubblegum pink hair tousled and straggled from overdyeing the first thing visible against the searing light of the sky, reflected against the black crystal of the commuter’s realm. The hair was bleached and dead, an impatient corpse standing on its own, crowning her shoulders like a halo of neon advertising lights or a radioactive lion’s mane. Her skin was doe black, from her forehead, passing down her reptilian eyes which stared through the ozone rising from the street with apathy, to her ankles, thin and athletic, her feet securely battened in the white Chuck Taylors, soles melting on the black tarmac. In her right hand, she held between two fingers a small crankbait, painted with speckled green scales and senseless yellow eyes, black, undilated pupils and silver hooks shivering in the wash of heat, a delicate mimicry of a largemouth bass. The asphalt smoothed over, like a lake without a breeze, and was still once again. She stared right through Israel, stabbing through the corneas of his eyes without mercy, pushing them aside in pursuit of a straight line of vision, toward something that swam quietly behind his head.

Israel awoke, face well buried into the sofa, which was in the process of comfortably suffocating him. He was lying on his stomach, arms behind him, hands cupped into an odd shovel shape at his sides, his back curved outwards, as though he had been trying to roll himself into a slinky.

Peeling himself away from the brown leather’s stranglehold, he made for the television room where he quietly sat down beside his parents, all three mindlessly sweating in the boiling chamber,

three heads of black hair watching images on the screen flash by.

At some point later on, outside the house, a boy stepped out onto the grass of the lawn, a fishing rod draped over his dominant shoulder, a small bass colored crankbait latched onto the largest guide. Effortlessly, he flicked the crankbait out into the middle of the street, where it let out a clatter as loud as his white wife beater in the sunlight. His black flip-flops were slowly disintegrating, thinly softening into union with the curb.

In one breath, the boy lifted his rod from where he had momentarily set it after his last cast and tossed a deep loop into the morass, the houses of the block leaning over his shoulder for a better view. A single drop thrown from somewhere up into the air resonated in the shadow before falling back to the surface of the street, where it broke with an extirpating quiet.

As the trees stared down and the sun peeked over the hills, the boy watched as the lure settled onto the midnight street. He pulled, and the scratched, darted false-fish wiggled into the depths of the wet coal which lay before him.

A bass jumped for a loud topwater, consuming the sun and blotting the light out. The heat remained, undulating out from the absence which had swallowed South Central, the city dreaming sweat drenched visions of the breeze.

r e a d mor e:

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UnCOMFORTable Truth | Hand-dyed cotton Yoon (Sara) Choi ‘20 is a modern dadaist.

Ginkgo | Digital Julie Benbassat ‘19 is a tea hoarder.

소녀를 잊는것 나라를 잃는것: Forgetting the girl is same as losing the country 나를 잊으셨나요?: Did you forget me? 역사를 바꾼 그날의 용기를 잊지 않겠습니다: We will never forget the courage displayed on the day history changed forever 잊혀지지 않는 기억: Unforgettable memory 미안합니다: I am sorry 고맙습니다: Thank you 사랑합니다: I love you 소녀를 지킵시다: Protect the girl 함께 외치는 평화: A cry in unison for peace

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Christine Collins ’19 thinks the world needs more love and puppies.

Containing Risk | Mixed media Tiffany Pai ‘17 is an avid dog spotting enthusiast.

Enchantée

“You’re learning Chinese?

Smart business move.”

It’s really nothing all that practical.

I’m putting in hours of work and practice, but it doesn’t make as much sense as that.

How do you tell people you’re doing it to meet yourself? To get in touch with the you a universe away, the one who never made it out of the orphanage, or the one who was never sent in the first place?

How do you tell people it’s because you felt inadequate as a Chinese person?

One February day in Boston, a frightened man ran up to you, his lips launching rapid-fire Mandarin, his eyes latching on to the first familiar-looking face in a sea of strangers; you knew you were his hope, but the confusion written across your features dashed that hope away.

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How do you tell them you need to know yourself, how do you tell them you weren’t born in this country but you’re still American, how do you explain the need to learn the shape of your first name, the thirst for the language of your birth land?

Transplanted organs will be rejected by the new body without medication.

Transplanted daughters were rejected by their first country because they didn’t have a Y chromosome.

Transplanted Chinese girls are foreign to their new countries, and foreign to their birth countries.

I’m learning Chinese so I can tell an entire country, 认识你们，我很高兴 I’m pleased to meet you.

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Zander Kim ’19, frequent flyer, believes there is always something happening in Hollywoo.

소주 - “soju “ a clear, vodka-like, rice spirit 삼겹살 - “sam gyeop sal” - thick, fat slices of pork - similar to bacon - delicious

Cucumber “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be.”

“You’ll figure that out. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.”

Bob Harris, Lost in Translation (2003) Seoul, South Korea Christmas lights cascade around my head. I wander the neon-lit streets full of college students— men with bowl cuts and plaid jackets, women with dresses and skirts of various colors. A dance battle is in progress behind me. The audience cheers as a man spins on his head to the tune of “Gangnam Style,” a song with a viral music video that has 2.8 billion views on YouTube. A man saunters outside a Korean barbecue restaurant, a pack of Parliaments in hand, removes a cigarette, and lights it. He puffs the smoke into the air, the smoke a purple haze from the lights of a 노래방 across the street. Since I’ve arrived in August, I’ve explored almost every district of Seoul. My friends are in their freshman year of college. I’m here. 노래방 - “noraebang” a karaoke room, where friends and family meet to drink soju and sing songs well into the vibrant night The signs’ lights fill the streets with pinks, blues, and indigos. Street lights highlight the masses of people milling about. If I look up at the sky long enough, the stars appear, the noise fades out, and the light pollution recedes—a singular dot in a lively world.

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A 할머니 shoves a brochure in my hand as she hustles by, trying to lure me into a gun range. The brochure is a small, square paper with pictures of machine guns and pistols and rifles and multiple exclamation points. She doesn’t care who takes them as long as she gets rid of all of them. Four other women on this street are doing the same thing. They offer no smiles or familiarity, just bitter hospitality that makes me shiver. 할머니 - “hal mo nee” grandmother, one who provides love & comfort & security This time off came unexpectedly. At the time, one year felt infinite—to simply skip one academic year after twelve straight years of school I would break the monotonous cycle. So I am here. Here, sarcasm flies over people’s heads. Do not tell them that; they will look over their heads in confusion.

I am, for the better part, alone.

Businessmen loiter on the street. They puff their cigars and guffaw in their suits. They indulge in their barbecue meals and substitute 소주 for water.

In a side room is a pool table—glowing green under the spotlight. Obscured in cigarette haze, a gentleman whips his pool stick back, cracks the cue ball, and shatters the vibrant triangle. I struggle to order 삼겹살. My Korean is passable but not fluent. When people learn of this, I receive many looks of disappointment—looks of disgust, arrogance, and condescendence. Waiters, cashiers, cab drivers, and common folk on the subway all know how to roll their eyes. How can I look like them but not be one of them?

Another! my friend exclaims, slamming his third White Russian on the table. The drink shines bright white under the LED disco lights of Pierrot Strike. A well-known cosmic bowling alley, this is also where I discover White Russians are very good. I love the coffee liqueur—it agrees with my taste, but it does not agree with my stomach; the White Russians come back up in the restroom.

My friend asks me if I’m okay. Yes. He orders me another. Perfect.

Koreans wear big, baggy sweatshirts with random English words plastered on the front in big, baggy letters. Words like “BEACH” or “building” or “CUCUMBER.” I bet they forget, if they ever knew, the meanings of the words they wear. It is like us in America, where we wear shirts or get tattoos in foreign languages. I understand the appeal, but it’s arbitrary and a little off-putting. I am timid in a familiar but unrecognizable culture. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have seen Lost in Translation.

Lost in Translation - a film, released in 2003 Strangers Bob Harris and Charlotte form a quirky, poetic relationship while exploring the foreign streets of Tokyo, Japan.

Bob and Charlotte are wonderful together. Lost in the beautiful world of Tokyo, they embrace their vulnerabilities rather than shy away from them. Vulnerability is beautiful. It can grow your heart to twice its size, but it can also shatter it to pieces, glass against concrete. Often, I find myself melancholic for no reason at all. Lost in Translation fills in the gaps of loneliness. I am reminded it is okay to be lost.

vulnerability noun (plural vulnerabilities) the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, physically or emotionally Seoul International Airport Seoul’s airport is one of the nicest I’ve ever been to. It is also ranked the cleanest airport in the world by more than a couple of sources. The airport has multiple food courts, a spa, and private sleeping rooms for naps and overnight stays. Oh, there are also indoor gardens, a casino, and about one hundred Duty Free stores.

The airport is an attraction all in itself.

It is the day I am departing to go to Hawaii. Home.

I have arrived at the airport five hours before my flight. I buy some small gifts and books from airport shops and a Duty Free store: the only place I can buy Parliaments to bring back to the States. I sit down and order udon at one of the food courts. As I pay the check, the waitress asks me where I’m headed. Hawaii, I say. Oh, lucky.

Hawaii is beautiful. I wish I could spend the holidays there. Enjoy your visit, she says. Why am I only visiting? Seoul isn’t my home, is it?

As I board my plane, I look out the window; it’s weird to tell myself it is over. During my three months in Seoul, I was amazed, inquisitive, confident, hurt, and healed. I will return, but it will never be the same. I miss the beautiful streets, bars, bowling lanes, and pool rooms in Seoul.

I miss the curiosity—the urge to keep learning.

But leaving Seoul does not mean the end of my curiosity—I can be curious anywhere.

“Let’s never come here again because it would never be as much fun.”

- Charlotte, Lost in Translation

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Parisa Thepmankorn ’20 loves mangoes and petting small dogs.

Thai Political Ephemera | Book Mim Tejapaibul ‘18 is a Hufflepuff.

Cacophony in Bangkok

I can only imagine the chaos unravel

from a distance, safe in school, can only imagine it when I’m shielded

by a slick of a desk, surrounded by stale cigarettes, sky blue, hot pavement,

lollipops blooming in my cheeks— in another dimension, my chest is opened

and filled with crows, stuck in a land of smiles that have dimmed, a worn land that’s become

all hard soil, dirty bandanas. Watching muscles be shredded by bullets, seeking shelter

as the ground opens wide, like a hungry ox, trekking past warring crowds, horrified

at all these citizens consuming each other whole. My mother’s calloused hands

soaked: the blood of her people, tear gas, sweat from her family’s backs. We keep thinking

about all that sky above us, pretending as if we’re rich and lovely, with white teeth

and fists unclenched, and yet— our bodies stay grounded, unyielding.

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Stretch! | Intaglio print Joanna Seul ’17 is a sock connoisseur.

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Laura Garbes ‘21 is the real-life, multiracial embodiment of a Cathy comic mid-”ACK!”.

Salita ng Araw

B: Hey, what’s up?

N: Ok, yes hi uh, quickly, do you have time? I am getting a work laptop, what do I need?

B: What do you need…?

N: Yeah ah, what are the things I need to tell this guy to install so I don’t look stupid.

B: Oh umm, Microsoft Office! Word…PowerPoint…

Excel…

N: Why would I need Excel?

B: I don’t know, what do you use your computer for?

N: I don’t know.. Work!

B: So what do you use to work?

N: Ah, yeah Microsoft Office will be fine. I’ll say office? Anything else?

B: Adobee…Adobe? Actually, don’t say that.

I don’t know how to pronounce it so uh I’m not sure if you’ll avoid looking stupid.

She looked at her screen—3:05—anticipated the pass off to Mom. She felt his interest fading from this computer. We all knew he would use it for maybe Microsoft Word, if anything. This conversation was no longer productive.

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N: Ha, ok. Anyway, I figured out the all the mag, um, all the verbs.

B: Huh? N: Mag-aaral is study! But then, all right, say I studied with my friends…yesterday.

B: Oh, this is salita ng araw…

N: Oo!

Dad is ecstatic, brimming with new knowledge about the language he took for granted and willingly left behind. For years, he moved his neck back and threw a formidable side-eye to the other corner of the dinner table as his American daughter lamented his complete disinterest in Filipino language, dramatically marking herself ~irreparably deprived~ as a result.

You don’t need it! Why would you learn when you know English, and you could talk to anyone educated enough in the Philippines? Learn Mandarin. The commercial break would end; Brian Williams would welcome them back.

Dad would return his face back to center, adjust his glasses, and lower his chin; he used a serving spoon to heap more rice from plate to face, some grains landing in his mouth and the rest falling where they may. She looked down and did the same. Once she tried to eat with her hands.

Her symbolic effort was met with a scoff. It was not how they raised her, and reeked to him of disingenuousness.

Her pleas are what brought them to this phone call, a Tagalog quiz-by-phone. She insisted he teach her, at least a few words. Perhaps it was an abstract, well-meaning attempt to “reconnect” with her father’s home language. She is nervous about the prospect of engaging now, for fear of revealing—despite her push to get him to care about passing his language on— how little she has actually worked at it. That she appreciates Filipinxness in theory, not by lived experience.

She appreciates diasporic theory…as a social justice mission. That maybe Dad is right, that sentimentality, while initially motivating within bleeding hearts like hers, is a pointless guidepost and an insufficient engine to actually follow through.

B: Uh, ah what is “to study again? magstudy?

N: Noooo! HinDI— I just said, mag-aaral…

Fuck. Silence on her end.

N: Look, listen…Give me a word. Any word. I will magCONJUGATE IT. Verb or noun.

B: (pauses: rubs head) Ehhhhhh…Grasshopper— N: No, not that one.

B: Spread— N: Dahhh, I’m reaching. I don’t know, choose better ones.

The back and forth continues, until they reach a suitable word out of the “pick a word, any word” exercise. It’s late. They should return to their to-do lists. But they stay on the line until she gets just how to articulate that ngayon, she is shirking study-in-the-present, and how bukas, she will study (in theory).

B: OH is that why you do that thing?!

N: What thing?

B: That thing like, where you -ize things.

N: -ize things?

B: You know, como like, hah, guys let’s “supperize.” Like you make über-American words into…-ize.

N: OH I do! Taglishizing! And it’s, that is Tagalog, that makes -izing so easy. Like I could think grasshopperize because— B: Right, that’s funny! I end up verbizing nouns all the time now.

N: Well, yeaaah, that’s me.

In a pause, she marvels over what Tagalog has done to shape them. He does, too, against his surface judgments of his lingua franca as “impractical” and “useless” in his new home.

B: See you next week!

N: No… B: Yes, you are visiting! At least Ma says you are…

N: Oh. yeah!

B: Or oo, heh!?

N: Ok I am done; here is your mother.

Glancing at the screen again, 3:35.

Apart, but dependently, they smile /ngumiti sila/ they send emails back and forth later, with the word of the day in English, Spanish, and Tagalog.

It’s productive, not frivolous /Tapos/ they get away with this structured, industrious connection to one another through resurfacing his past.

For educational purposes only, of course.

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mom is moon and dad is ocean | Apparel Ying (Bonny) Cai 蔡颖 ‘18 breathes blossoms and blue skies and loves her friends indefinitely.

Dorothy Jiang ‘19 drank however much water was in the glass.

I Tried to Dye My Hair Blue I tried to dye my hair blue Because I had already done purple, which is the opposite of yellow which is an opposite of white I tried to dye my hair blue To imitate the calm of water that is most definitely clear and sparkling from a creek in New Hampshire and not tears stained from soaking mushrooms in little glass bowls on my kitchen counter I tried to dye my hair blue So it looked like I was neutralizing my skin by cluttering my head with philosophies and histories that are only fit for wide-eyed scholars peering up into a sky polluted by nothing but their own supremacy and not my yearning to be a part of it I tried to dye my hair blue Because Erving Goffman’s labeling theory says you are what people call you and think of you, and I want to be hip and carefree and also be able to name-drop Erving Goffman because I can study the words of white men at an Ivy League school and forget my great aunt was illiterate I tried to dye my hair blue Even though I knew it would bleed all over the shared white bathroom floor and the evidence of my heroic transformation would be sprayed on and trampled over and scrubbed at yet still never quite disappear 39

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I tried to dye my hair blue To prove I wasn’t attached to this place, these people, and least of all myself because if no one wanted to claim me, I wouldn’t claim anything either, not this world or the worlds before it but I would take that all back if I were taken in I tried to dye my hair blue But its Brownness was sturdy and resilient So annoyingly so That not even under the closest of scrutiny was there even the tiniest glimmer of anything other than Brown Refusing to wear a different coat to cover its Darkness from the harshness of blonde and hazel and blue and anything that wasn’t my Dark Smooth Mushroom Brown— I tried to dye my hair blue And learned that without bleaching it first And stripping away layers and layers and generations and generations and histories and histories and journeys and journeys over oceans and oceans It would just stay begrudgingly Brown 40

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A Swimmer Stuck in a Room | Oil, acrylic, collage on masonite Minsoo Thigpen ‘18 is a vast middle.

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Eleanor Kim ‘17 is a coffee enthusiast and the biggest cat lady without cats you’ve ever seen.

Seoul Series | Intaglio print Sarah Im ‘17 is looking for her bobby pins.

Composition of Decay 1. and there was a time we hid in the garden because the moon was pulled too quickly

when you laughed at my big eyes I cried across the sky

2. suddenly the act is revealed, stories puddling at our ankles you (enter here) and I drown

we find that we have existed for far too long and I am spilling off the dining room table—

say: this should’ve happened a long time ago

3. that’s how she died: peacefully, and all tied up

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they found her fast asleep, swaddled in a sunbeam

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the family

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Miranda Chao ‘18 would like to live in a bathtub.

Yvonne Fong ‘18 will swipe right for a meal swipe.

Mia Gold ‘17 is still learning that good things take time.

Sarah Im ‘17 is looking for her bobby pins.

Elizabeth Huh ‘19 likes people who smell nice.

Lisa Lee ‘17 doesn’t want to say good-bye.

Eveline Liu ‘19 sleeps with socks on.

Jiaju Ma ‘21 just wants the foundation year to be over.

Sophia Meng ‘20 is always down for some brussel sprouts.

Ryan Nguyen ‘19 sends out more emails than texts.

Sruti Suryanarayanan ‘19 has a date with the lathe.

Ananya Shah ‘17 likes looking through colorful stained glass.

Claribel Wu ‘19 bruises as easily as a banana in a backpack.

Andrea Zhu ‘17 is grateful for her friends.

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