SPRING 2018 by VISIONS

A Brown / RISD Visual & Literary Arts Magazine Vol. XIX Issue 2

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Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, We are proud to present the Spring 2018 issue of our beloved (and newly renovated) VISIONS Magazine. This spring, the AAPI-A community on College Hill contributed to a cohesive and poetic collection, ref lecting their tales and lives - it is our honor and delight to share these works with you. This semester, we are proud to have hosted a screening of Gook, a film about two Korean-American brothers and their friendship with an 11-year-old AfricanAmerican girl during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In addition, we co-hosted RISD Global Initiative’s event “The White Pube Speaks.” The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, under which they curate and write art criticism. As always, VISIONS supports the breadth of stories that are becoming increasingly more visible, so we were proud to participate in events that bring voices outside the pages of our magazine. We ask that you continue the work that has been done by our community for justice, as we at VISIONS will do. It is not yet time to halt our motion—though we may rest between strides, the journey goes on until we reach our destination. We will continue to support those who work towards equity, and oppose those who work against it. Keep showing up, keep listening, and keep responding, for staying quiet is not productive—hold yourself accountable for the change you want to see. Revitalizing our original magazine format, we have restructured our design approach, mirroring our ref lection on the history of VISIONS, and our transformation for the future. Finally, thank you, dear Reader, for your support, kindness, and courage as we conclude our first year of leadership. It is because of our AAPI-A community and our talented executive board that VISIONS continues to succeed. We send you our endless love and gratitude for the strength and inspiration you fill us with. With that, we hope you enjoy our spring edition. Warmly,

Eveline Liu & Sruti Suryanarayanan Editors-in-Chief 3

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Mission Statement VISIONS is a publication that highlights and celebrates the diversity of Brown and RISD’s AAPI community. We are committed to being an open literary and artistic forum for individuals who hold this identity, as well as other members of the university community, to freely express and address issues relating to the AAPI 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 with Brown and RISD’s vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as the larger Providence community and beyond. On the Cover Overglow | Acrylic, pen, marker Vivian Lu ’20: no socks, no hair, no gender, all bad.’

Editors-in‑Chief Eveline Liu ’19 Sruti Suryanarayanan ’19

Editor Emeritus Yvonne Fong ’18 Haley Lee ’18

Layout & Design Editor Sophia Meng ’20

Copy Editing Staff Alicia DeVos ’18 Zander Kim ’19 Natalie Nguyen ’19 Star Su ’21

Visual Arts Editor Elizabeth Huh ’19 Literary Editor Claribel Wu ’19 Treasurer Kathleen Chai ’20 Web Editor Jiaju Ma ’21 RISD Outreach Tiffany Chiu ’19 Brown Outreach Soyoon Kim ’19 Inside Cover Providence: Exit Down the Manhole (v.1 and v.2) | Intaglio Cherry Yang ’20 can’t decide how to feel about speaking of herself in the third person.

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Freshman Representatives May Gao ’21 Hannah Lee ’21 Events Coordinator Hilary Ho ’20

Printer Brown Graphic Services PrintNinja A very special thanks to … Kisa Takesue Undergraduate Finance Board Brown Center For Students of Color Contributors and staff Contact visions@brown.edu visions-magazine.org facebook.com/VISIONS.Brown @VISIONSBrown Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of VISIONS’ sponsors.

Table of Contents 6

Wishing a Long Life Renee Yu Jin Lee

Unsequenced Cindy Zeng

The Laborer Emi Chun

something wonderful Christine Collins

TOGETHER, WE RUN FURTHER Liana Chaplain

Map of the Fish Fawn Tong

cold-brewed conditionals Emily Yang

35 22

Lily Sofa Irene Wei

Chair Form Haojun Gong

Lazuli Claribel Wu

36 23

Textural Sophia Meng

Kay’s Family Legends Kay Liang

38 New Brown America × Cornell Shivani Parikh

Ladder Chest Sisi Zhang

Untitled Katherine Sang

Hahoetal ‘하회탈’ Lamp Sara Yoon Choi

The Uncanny Valley Tabitha Payne

Hungry Ghost Festival Series Adrienne Hugh grandfather, 94 Tiffany Lin Take Care Lina Kang

Kimchi, chopped & screwed Anonymous

Late Spring Good Morning Joey Han tell it in whispers Claribel Wu

Ghost Girl Amanda Ong

Please Be Healthy Vivian Lu

Create Your Own Amy Wang

Heng Ha Jiaju Ma & Yimei Hu

Future Ruins Joseph Echavarria

Satellite Kite Ocean to Sky Minsoo Thigpen

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Wishing a Long Life | Mixed media Renee Yu Jin â&#x20AC;&#x2122;18 wants to be a blade of grass.

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Christine Collins ’19 likes to photosynthesize.

something wonderful in elementary school the musical was the thing in fifth grade at the tender age of 10 i auditioned for the lead anna leonowens in the king and i i ended up one of many wives in the king’s harem

what else was a chinese transracial adoptee to do? white stay-at-home moms painted cat eyes on my classmates’ round snowy lids trying to coax them into a more ‘asian’ shape you’re nice and easy they told me i grinned for the first time in my life everyone else wanted to look like me not the other way around

i thought it was something wonderful never mind that the girl singing to show my white classmates ‘something wonderful’ something of the world i was from was in yellowface something wonderful since siam is in asia at least they didn’t use self-tanner i proudly claimed a piece of it for myself never mind that china and thailand are different countries

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Emily Yang ’20 will have tea-stained teeth.

CAMILLE: We used to live in a cloud of unawareness, in delicious complicity. Your tea leaves and I.

cold-brewed conditionals I could read your tea leaves if you asked me to. I could read your tea leaves which say—in mint condition—NET 11.3 FL. OZ. which say Eat That Up, It’s Good For You, which say Please don’t squeeze me till I’m yours and with my thumb pressed on brown veins I could tease out your cosmos maybe not as well as Cosmopolitan does but I could read your tea leaves. I could taste your tea leaves if you asked me to. I could slide my tongue over LIFE IS NOT BITTER, BITTER MELON IS BITTER and press the part where the meat is tender and red-stained to the roof of my mouth. I could grind up the fruit bruises with my molars my home-grown pestle and mortar and I could get on my knees and lick skeins of golden dust off the empty space between extremes if you asked me to, but only if you asked me to. I could listen to your tea leaves if you asked me to. I could hear them rustle LANDING PERMISSION where is your landing permission, land with a dull thud like too-ripe persimmons against wet earth, and sometimes the world is too full to talk about so I could listen. Your tea leaves tell me of a green spring and of cherry blossom petals that follow gusts into the void, trees bursting with the kind of ripeness that signifies the end of a life and so I listen.

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I could slide your tea leaves into the keyhole and unlock the ramparts if you asked me to. The heavy gates would grate against the ground and kick up the dust, shimmering lozenges tucked into pockets of an autumn breeze. I could remain right here, if you asked me to, like matcha powder at the bottom of blue-white porcelain, sediment of the heart, sentiments of the charred. Our afternoons slipping past blueberry, strawberry, rhubarb pies strewn over the tatami with the ridges of straw pulled tight against skin and the dotted white of crossroads etched into my f lesh. I could dance with your tea leaves if you asked me to. I could waltz across the ballroom f loor along your spine and steep myself in red yellow blue, phantasms dripping at your feet, your freshly painted toenails the color of fires in the mirror. I could evaporate into the sky as I descend the shaft of a bamboo strip, skimming over tile-hugging vagaries, steps leaving trails of red gold rose plum in my wake. Your tea leaves and I, we’d pause for a slow dance number atop a slow-rolling pinwheel until paper roots grow into tall kaoliang stalks and we can dance disco again, your tea leaves and I. Your tea leaves have these little divots brimming with brown rice green Earl Grey white peach oolong, crevices seeping with hot milk trickling out of light linen sacks until the black has made its way into a thick pool of what-hasbeen, and maybe then when the sun bleeds chai or maybe cardamom, stretched over pods of tapioca tilting their heads for a drop, your tea leaves will read me and tell me we were greater than a might-as-well.

Claribel Wu â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19 eats cough drops recreationally.

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Hungry Ghost Festival Series | Pen and digital Adrienne Hugh â&#x20AC;&#x2122;18 is a wannabe tea snob.

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Tiffany Lin ’21 is looking for memories.

grandfather, 94 he still carries candies in his pockets, now cannot count his money, always brings home food for my grandmother— he dresses unsuitably for the weather. his hands are always cold. i want to tell him that he should take care of himself, that i love him; i want to ask him how it is to move so far and live so long, how to make a marriage work, what love becomes through the years— these are the words i have: phrasebook cantonese, the tourist’s i don’t understand what you’re saying, and how much is that? and i’m going outside he once looked at me and asked who are you? then he saw me on new year’s and asked my mother, what is her name?— now he says beautiful, what a beautiful daughter and i trap these words behind a smile, the what else am i? the my name is— because what else could i say, but thank you?

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Take Care | Gouache and color pencil Lina Kang â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19 loves the fresh morning air.

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Amanda Ong ’20 hopes you get better.

Ghost Girl Excerpted

It occurs to me that I could be doing everything wrong. That I could have left no room for forgiveness or future or even regret; that I could be giving too much and thinking too little and doing nothing right at all. But it is too late for that. The world exists, the world is here, and this is the only way it is. My grandmother runs her wooden comb through my hair. The length of it rests on her lap as I sit cross-legged beneath her on the f loor, leaning back against the couch between her legs. “You have such beautiful hair,” she says. I hum. “Thank you.” “Just like mine when I was young. Thick and silken.” I am almost identical to Grandma when she was young, so much so that visitors to the apartment ask if they are pictures of me, uncertain by my face set into the antiquated sepia-tone photographs. Grandma is much different now anyhow than she was when she looked like me. “Your eyes are changing,” she says. “Are they?” She nods. “Rounder now. Your skin shifted.” “Does that happen?” “Yes.” Her fingers walk up my face, creep closer towards the skin near my right eye. “They look nice.” “Thank you.” She frowns slightly. “They’re mine too.” She picks the comb back up and continues to brush in slow strokes. I nod. “I know.” It no longer surprises me when she says these things. She is still a hard-edged woman in her way: she claims that she has only cried twice in the last thirty years. Once was when she found out that her last

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living brother in China committed suicide. The doctors said they gave him his cancer diagnosis and he responded by asking where the restroom was. Someone saw him jump off the building roof minutes later. The other time was a few weeks after Father died. She had been staring at me, her gaze like she wanted to reach out and touch me but didn’t believe she could, her gaze unwavering even as she began to cry. Someone knocks on the door. — She squints her eyes at him and waves her bony arm. “What is it that you want, Mister Landlord?” He sighs, and avoids her gaze, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fine, fine. It’s that I have to raise the rent.” Grandma stiffens. “By how much?” “Enough.” “Enough?” “Enough that you’ll have a hard time continuing to live here.” “Granddaughter, what are you doing here?” She says it less like she forgot I was there and more like I shouldn’t be here, not made to exist in this place and time. “Just leave me for a minute, I have to think.” I nod and stand up to leave. “Thank you,” she says, “I’m sorry,” she says. I nod and make my way out of the apartment. It only takes me a minute to get to the entrance of the apartment building, but I’m not sure how far I should go from there. I look to my side. A few feet away is the Landlord. He has one arm crossed and smokes the last of a cigarette from the other. “You must have known for a while you couldn’t make it out like this.”

I grit my teeth. “It’s not true.” He has leaned in just too close to me and smiles with his tiny ugly mouth on his big round face, baring little yellow teeth. “You know it is,” he says. “You know what happened. You shouldn’t be alive.” I have Father’s liver. No one so young usually gets liver failure, but it happens. The ducts block up, just poor genetics and bad luck. It was almost two years ago now that I was diagnosed. If it weren’t addressed soon, I would have died. The donor list would have been too late. So Father became my live donor. The risk of death wasn’t high, but it was not insignificant or uncommon. And now I am a living girl with my dead father’s liver inside of me, and a family that is still working to pay off the tragedies I have cost them. “The other kids in the building call you Ghost Girl, you know,” The Landlord says. He leaves me then in the neighborhood that isn’t mine anymore, outside the home that is not mine either. Ghost Girl with her dead father’s liver. And on the fifth f loor inside is Grandma, sitting with the burdens I have given her. Or the ones that I inherited, I’m not sure which. These feelings circle in my head, that I have nothing, not even myself, that no one does. There are only individual people, and even then we own none of our own minds or bodies. — The apartment building opens into a standing room where you buzz in. I enter the room and as I thought it is there, a lone pair of scissors in the cup of office supplies. I look at myself in the mirror. I near perfectly see my grandmother’s face, her body, her hair. I take the scissors and wad my hair into a

ponytail and begin to cut just below my ears. I pick up all the remaining hair I can from the f loor and I run up the stairs to the apartment. “Grandma,” I call out. She still sits in her same depression on the couch as she always does, as she was when I left her. She looks up at me. I falter for a moment—I may be tricking myself, but her eyes almost look red. I run to her and kneel on the f loor beneath her legs, and thrust the hair out into her lap. This is the only way things can be right, I know it. “Take it, please,” I try to catch her eyes, to make her see, but she doesn’t look. “Granddaughter, I don’t understand.” “I don’t have anything else,” I plead. “Please, you need to take it. I have nothing else I can give to you.” “You shouldn’t.” I swallow. “Please,” I beg. “It’s yours.” A look of understanding crosses her face, and her hands drop mine. “It’s mine,” she repeats. “I know. It’s yours.” She grips the hair in her hands, and my hands with it, holding them all together. She nods. “It’s mine.” “I know,” I say. “Thank you.”

r ea d mor e:

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Please Be Healthy | Acrylic, pen, marker Vivian Lu â&#x20AC;&#x2122;20: no socks, no hair, no gender, all bad.

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Amy Wang ’20 only writes when she has other things to do.

Create Your Own Create Your Own—

American Girl

1: Create Choose from more than a million combinations to create One of a Kind dolls and apparel

dark hair and eyes you could bequeath that doe-eyed girl (you always wanted for yourself )

2: Sign Up Want to save your creations and build a personality for your doll simply open an account and you can

piggy bank of stif led dreams? —dare to spend all that’s left: your heart for her eyes make it a fair trade

3: Purchase Order your creations because of the extra care we take delivery takes a little longer s estimated shipment timing appears in checkout

and take it easy extra time and you might find almost a year (just pent longing) goes by quickly afterthought only: then she’s yours.

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Heng Ha | Ash Jiaju Ma ’21’s head is a machine that always malfunctions. Yimei Hu ’21 likes the byline “Yimei Hu ’21 can’t think of a byline.”

This pair of hand-carved masks is inspired by 哼哈二将, two fictional Buddhism guardian deities that were featured in a Chinese novel, Journey to the West（西游记） . The first mask represents 哼(heng), who blows wind out of its mouth as a superpower. The second mask represents 哈(ha), who blows wind out of its nose.

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Future Ruins | Digital Joseph Echavarria ’18, Lead ARCHINAUT.

The goal is to make it from one point to the next, extending outwards as a line. As more lines are added, intersections begin to occur, allowing the lines to bend, overlap, and even intercept to form a new connection. The paths generated then begin to create a syntactical relationship with the original characters. The three principles of this ruin extend from the actions the lines are forced to take. The spaces created by lines resemble planes and edges; those planes and edges are the elements left unknown to be occupied and to be explored. The three principles are edges, corners, and enclosures.

Edge—the line where an object or area begins or ends. The edge alone creates a divide between spaces, taking the first step to define space. Corner—the spatial condition in which two edges meet to either create or imply. Enclosure—the element that implies inside or outside space. The accumulation of lines create an enclosure that begins to describe the function of the ruin: what time of day, who is there, or where the ruin is located.

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Cindy Zeng ’20 is waiting for another snow day.

Unsequenced Light handles, love handles, one earbud propped out in a question left unanswered, I look upon your blue-green eyes and majestic tufts of hair and dream that night about a large dog killing me slowly. this is the canine of love and don’t you know those are carnivorous by nature? In my mind we are always in the tropics— juice dribbling down in golden pineapple drops, my eyes watching you soak in the purple rays of the sky, sun crisped and tan, lounging crosshatched across the plank time travels faster you know in the heat it turns blue ink at midnight My arms and legs and I, they obey nothing but the universal exhaust from cars always moving forward, and ambient city life sound. the algorithm that dictates these currents is not the circuitry that draws me through in peeled wet strips, is not the man with black eyes wringing me through a hand dryer, it is the ticking of a stopped clock and candied sultry stuff I hold deep in the pocket of my guts. these I spit up for you in sugar cane licks of red and blue, vein and artery, boiled and brewed. the aftertaste burns in my mouth. my mother always said the rice bits will turn into sesame seeds on your skin don’t grow into something unhuman she said, so when I was a glory butterf ly dancing through the wind she came and pinned me tight to her brown corked bulletin. words I swallowed down in wood planks and nails, thoughts I fashioned into cloudy blue forms, bruises I dared not press, and yet I pressed them, grazing, every day. In my dreams I have a band-aid that I would tie in circles around your waist, shoulders, smooth cut collarbones and all, not to wrap you with forgiveness you don’t demand but to soften the lines of you for myself. Glass doesn’t shatter in the thick of dark it seems so I stand in a dark corridor, your curved wing smile here one moment, gone the next.

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TOGETHER, WE RUN FURTHER | Digital collage Liana Chaplain â&#x20AC;&#x2122;21 knows a good doggie when she sees one.

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Lily Sofa | Foam, plywood, textile (by Talia Connelly) Irene Wei â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s favorite type of wood is maple.

This sofa was designed for a tea house in Beijing, China that serves as a meeting place for adoptees returning to their birth country. Collaboration with textiles artist Talia Connelly.

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Textural | Oil paint on wood panels Sophia Meng â&#x20AC;&#x2122;20 wants to live a softer gradient.

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Shivani Parikh (Cornell University) ’19 has a running list of cupcakeries that are worth visiting.

New Brown America × Cornell “This is New Brown America. The dream is for you to take, so take that shit.” —Hasan Minhaj I paused Hasan Minhaj’s Homecoming King Netf lix special when he said, “And so I actually have the audacity of equality.” I stared wonderingly at the screen and replayed the sound bite two more times, reading and re-reading the subtitles that confirmed I was not mishearing his tenet. For months, I had felt largely alone in my desperate search for validation in joining the cause for South Asian social action and mobilization. In the social spaces I found, I often felt the sharp sting of having my person-of-color-hood questioned, affirmed by people’s entrenched belief in the model minority myth. I learned quickly that radical spaces are rarely open to criticism and self-ref lection on their inherent toxicity. What right did I have to question the culture of those spaces if South Asian people as a whole have been quite deliberate in avoiding discussions about racial and social inequality? So I still ponder, how do we realize Hasan’s New Brown America? In my New Brown America, we center the margins of our communities and celebrate our individually nuanced and contoured relationships with our motherlands and heritages. We name what divides us internally—partitions, religions, and the culture of colorism left by our colonizers and their centuries of exploitation.

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We revel in the contributions of our diaspora here, from television, to science, to political and business leadership, all the while noticing the hurt that comes from fake accents, racial profiling, and stale ideals of what a successful Desi-American looks like. We name the things that affect our community’s safety and success—the bamboo ceiling, Islamophobia, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, caste, and the lived realities of our community members who are working class and are stereotyped to be taxi drivers, Dunkin’ Donuts workers, or 7-Eleven owners. We mourn Srinivas Kuchibhotla, Harnish Patel, Deep Rai, and the hundreds of South Asian folks who have been targeted, assaulted, and killed on U.S. soil because of prejudice, racism, and hate. We become allies to all people of color, and we strive to repay our lasting debt to black folks, whose fight for civil rights established a more equitable America for South Asia’s first professional immigrants. We delve into the implications of brownness and immigration with Latinx folks and ask indigenous folks how we can do better by them, because though we are an immigrant population, we nonetheless benefit from the legacy of settler colonialism. Having the audacity of equality means reckoning with the overlapping and coexisting privileges and oppression of our American diaspora and repeatedly asking ourselves if there’s anything we’ve willing to do to make it known and felt. Log kya kahenge? What will people say? Main kehta hoon, I say, that having the audacity of equality is uncomfortable and messy, but never lonely. My immigrant parents have paid their American Dream tax. I won’t be paying it again.

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Hahoetal ‘ 하회탈 ’ Lamp | Pine and ash Yoon (Sara) Choi ’20 loves and hates bananas.

The lamp is inspired by the traditional Korean The name comes from the ‘Hahoe’ village in Korea; mask worn in the traditional Korean mask dance, ‘Tal’ means mask. ‘Tal’ in Korean also means 탈춤 (Tal-chum). The base of the lamp resembles trouble and harm, and mask play is a ritual act to the mask known as ‘Hahoetal’/‘하회탈’, and the pray for peace in a village. The Hahoe masks are lampshade contradicts the soft, gentle grin on the an important cultural inheritance in Korea. They mask by highlighting the sharp, brittle properties are designated as a national treasure and known worldwide as masterpieces of art. of the wood.

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Anonymous â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19 likes her kimchi fresh.

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Late Spring | Ink on drawing paper Good Morning | Colored pencil, watercolor Joey Han â&#x20AC;&#x2122;22 remains undefeated in Wii Boxing.

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Claribel Wu ’19 eats cough drops recreationally.

tell it in whispers 1. I was born at the end of 5. She walked home and left a trail of mud and a. July. twigs on the steps of the cabin. My father was b. January. inside whittling wood. He looked up at us and c. Genesis. laughed jovially, scooping me into his arms. 2. Mother was walking in the forest when she a. “Quiet, isn’t she?” I furled into myself felt divinity strike at noon. She stumbled like a fern. carefully to the nearest body of water: b. “She looks like me, same nose!” I furled a. a pond cupped by the gentle hands of into myself like a fern. a giantess. c. “Ah my daughter, my daughter.” b. a shallow lake with lotus f lowers and d. I furled into myself like a fern. melancholy frogs that made way as she 6. My mother smiled a tired smile. waded through. a. “Yes.” She took me back into her arms, and c. a slithering, silver river. we slept, just the two of us, for two weeks. 3. I remember it clearly, these moments before b. “Yes.” She took me back into her arms, I came to be, when our souls were linked and it was then that I first understood most inextricably. what it meant to be held. a. I felt her fear, the rush of blood, a blos- 7. When I turned ten, I still hadn’t uttered a sound. soming strength. a. True? b. I felt the weight of expectation descend b. False? upon us, sticky and morose, like humidity. c. Father thought this was something to c. Her loneliness crept into my bloodbe worried about. stream and I wanted to know her. d. Perhaps, I (he) did not know the bound4. Mother f loated onto her back. The stars aries of expression. aligned, and I was swept into the calming e. Father was a carpenter. He was productive. cool of the water. f. My silence was not productive. a. She lifted me from the water b. and held me close, ear to my heart. c. I took my first breath, d. and she shuttered with relief.

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10. Father once said to me, with the taste of pride in 8. In order to speak, you must: his mouth, “I like that a part of me will always a. Heat the words until they are a molten, be with you. Ah my daughter, my daughter.” jewel red. Blow steadily, until they fill a. And to myself, I thought this reed a curse. with your breath and take shape. These b. And to myself I felt a glimmer of guilt, shapes should be pleasing (the kind that “Yes, thank you for this gift.” drift into ears with ease). c. I don’t think father noticed, he never notices. b. But I grew up listening to my Mother’s d. Mother comes and sits, a whispered enhands, the most beautiful hands in the trance. I hear her song of touch, of tenworld. She was often too tired for words, derness, as she strokes my hair. but her fingertips would tell stories along my shoulder and down my arm, 11. I think my teacher hated me. each movement specific and full, of cola. Like every teacher, his voice was resoor, sound, and feeling. I would dissolve nant and silky, and it wrapped around into my dreams, carried by this comfort. the class with the deftness of an otter. c. One day father plucked a reed from the When he spoke, it reached forward river and crafted a very thin, very delin the round. It was the kind of voice icate f lute. He came home and squatted you had no choice but to listen to. The before me. “I think this will help you words whooshed into your ear with a find your voice.” He opened my throat, grandiose violence. So when he heard slipped it in, and carefully stitched me up my chirp, on the outskirts of audibility, with spider thread. I took a quiet breath, he told me louder, and a soft, high-pitched whistle escaped. b. louder, I narrowed my eyes in embarrassment. c. LOUDER. 9. When I was fifteen they ushered me into the 12. But on the eve of my adulthood, after I left Schools. The reed had stopped feeling like a the schools behind, I walked back to the forhair caught between the slippery walls of my est I was born. a. I returned home to Mother, who alone throat, but it was not a native presence. lived on a mystic mountain. Father was a. Schools taught us this: Refer to Quesacross the strait, in a bastion of steel tion 8, Choice A. and glass. b. Try your best, sweetie, try your best b. Refer to Question 9, Choice B. and maybe you’ll be heard. c. I let the woodland damp murmur into c. Refer to Question 8, Choice B. my clothing and my skin, I let the forest d. Do you feel ashamed and small? Is it speak to me with its touch. I stand in you, or them, or them, you can’t tell. the water and let my reed sing quietly, Refer to Question 9, Choice C. quiet, quiet, and I understand what it means to be held.

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Satellite Kite | Canvas, oil paint, fabric, pine frames, paracord Ocean to Sky | Canvas, oil paint, embroidered fabric, pine frames, paracord Minsoo Thigpen â&#x20AC;&#x2122;18 is a secret western painter.

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Emi Chun â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19 doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like the color yellow.

The Laborer I am both Mother and Grandmother My hands and my feet bear Fruit I cannot eat Handed over to both public and private Do you look down on me When I bend my back? My fingers know the ground, the Earth, Its dirt toughens my Sun-kissed skin I am not easily swayed by currents and tides, I stay with what I know, that is to work I toil and struggle for myself, My self is for family Like a shark, If, for a moment, I cease pushing through pressure and wander my gaze, I believe I will sink Pulling the weight of water Down into my own horrid silence But while my limbs are durable and diligent, It is only human As much as it is mine, My energy is borrowed I urge you Steal the fruits you harvest To replenish your body and Remember the sweetness Of the Mother 33

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Map of the Fish | Digital Fawn Tong â&#x20AC;&#x2122;20 is still looking for the perfect Blue Room sandwich combo.

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Chair Form | Steel Haojun Gong â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19 has one look for all seasons.

Metal tubes can be bent freely. Based on this characteristic, I used metal tubes to make an object that captures the space of a chairâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s form, but is unusable as one. 35

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Kay Liang ’19 wants to feel at ease.

Seven

Excerpted from Kay’s Family Legends

She opens the old wooden cupboard, the one in dire need of repair, reaches in for her favorite biscuit and breaks it in half with her worn, wooden fingers. She forgets the grandchild who mailed her this delicious delight from Hong Kong. After all, she has a hundred and twenty-seven grandchildren. It has been a week since she left the house, let alone her bedroom. Therein lies her great grandchild, too small to face the world but still precious and alive. Seven wishes her sons were still alive, and her husband. All the men in her life are dead. Not that she needs them in order to run her family. Just a pity that their names are lost. She misses her second-born daughter too, immortalized against her own will. Seven could barely finish the second half of her biscuit before Little Peace began to cry. “Ai, Little Peace, I’m coming, I’m coming,” she says as she limps into her bedroom. Small, round, and plump like an unripe persimmon. She holds Little Peace against her large, warm breasts. “Grandmother will be home soon, Little Peace,” she mutters. “You must learn to wait.” Like all women do. She grabs the basin of chives near the foot of her bed and begins to snap their ends, the way she snapped her biscuit. On her lap lies Little Peace sound asleep and wrapped in a blanket. Her firstborn is heading back from the market. Tonight, Chastity will be cooking Seven’s favorite dish. Simple and sacred. Seven sifts through the chives with her worn, wooden fingers and begins to count. Five good, one bad, just like her children. She counts away the leftover time and number of toes bound together. She forgets but remembers when she looks at Little Peace. “One day,” Seven thinks to herself, “you will grow up and remember me.”

VISIONS

Internal Jade Excerpted from Kay’s Family Legends

She is sitting at a desk above the cafeteria, writing her last story. She contemplates whether she has answered the imperative of her name. She recalls her Grandpa New Day telling her how the jade in her name was rare and beautiful. “Your father, when he named you, did not want your jade to be bright and blinding. He wanted it to be tucked inside your heart—not to withhold it but to allow others to experience it for themselves.” Did she follow the meaning of her name? She wonders. She feels as though she has become more outspoken and less humble over the years. She must have shocked, must have hurt, must have tarnished. Too bitter. She prefers something sweet with citric tang. She prefers to believe that her inner jade has gained dimension and shed layers. She prefers to think that she is still sincere, if not more, because of her will to share who she really is. Who is she really? Someone who wants to enliven others with her presence? Even when their feelings are beyond her control? She must not be disheartened by her inability. She must learn acceptance from the women who came before her. That is not to say that they did not confront the meaninglessness of their lives but that they still lived it, regardless, with a will to survive and nourish. She realizes, without dependents, her meaning of life must come from a very different place, a familiar place. An internal place where her inner jade would have rested, an empty place. Her jade is nothingness. A nothingness worth polishing for the sake of her name.

r ea d mor e:

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Ladder Chest | Steel and brass Sisi Zhang â&#x20AC;&#x2122;19 binge eats French fries.

A chest to reach by climbing, for you to store valuable memories.

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Untitled | Watercolor and ink Katherine Sang â&#x20AC;&#x2122;21 lives in a (binary) treehouse and loves cobalt blue and music in 6/8.

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Tabitha Payne ’20 loves swing dancing to big band jazz.

The Uncanny Valley In 1970 a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro “I don’t like PC jokes,” said the new friend, beMori theorized that the more a robot looks like tween puffs of her cigarette. Her eyes were a human, the more endearing we find it. But twinkling like the puddles on the pavement, reonce they get too humanoid—like those spooky f lecting the patient yellow of the lights of the Japanese robot women, or Chucky, or zombies, historic New England street. She took a long even—we start to get creeped. A few peoplish drag and told a joke about Native Americans qualities are okay though—make them cute. and Columbus Day. Like Wall-E maybe. Or emojis. Mori dubbed it The Uncanny Valley: It was strange. To see an old friend is to be confronted with the passage of time, and that’s a reunion I could never decouple with regret. The city, and I hadn’t been to a real city in a while, was big and full of buildings, which somehow made it feel all the emptier. “Have you ever heard of the Uncanny Valley?” the new friend asked. What prompted it I wasn’t sure; I had long stopped paying attention. The new friend had no sense for social cues, nor how morose the smog felt tonight. All silences needed to be filled with thought—it didn’t matter which—giving weight to pause as if there wasn’t already. When she talked, her mouth I learned about it a couple weeks ago when vis- pulled weirdly at the bottom corners, just abiting an old friend. She took me out to dinner at normal enough to make you lean in and turn this Vietnamese Restaurant with a new friend your head. of hers, and we ate outside so the new friend could smoke. It was still drizzling. The Saigon Beer was making me nostalgic all of a sudden, the glow of the evening hazy and

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melancholic. The clouds of smoke and wet fog “That sucks,” he said. And then he kissed me. of the city distilled the light in such a way that everything looked a little teary. A car drove It was an insistent kiss, hard pressing like a full past and splashed rainwater at our feet. stop. It didn’t ask any questions. I wanted it, but all I could think about was how clearly I could “A boy on Tinder told me about it.” feel his teeth behind his closed lips. “Do you think any of it’s racial?” he said. He was “I’ve decided to stop dating men,” the new friend smoking a joint in front of a fan in his dorm said. She was on her third cigarette now, and I room window, looking out at the street with swore I could taste the nicotine from her cig in that kind of dazed softness that made it seem the sacs in my lungs. like he wasn’t looking at anything at all. We asked why. I was telling him about how my male professor had called me “precious” the other day, and how that “They make me feel small,” she replied. “I feel made me feel upset for reasons I couldn’t explain. like I should just date women. When I’m dating women, it’s like, I know who I’m up against. I “Because I’m Asian?” don’t have to pretend, you know. With men…” she paused to watch a black buggy shatter a “Yeah.” glass puddle into a cascade of yellow light. “Well, yeah.”

“…they look at you like you’re not really there. And then you need to talk to women about them And that made me feel upset too. I didn’t get it. anyway ’cause they just can’t understand.” I wanted everyone to recognize the fact that I was/wasn’t white, and at the same time never We ordered three more beers and left. We acknowledge it at all. thought about taking the Vietnamese home but my friend didn’t think she’d eat the leftHe turned and looked at me, and took a long drag overs anyway. of the joint I had rolled him five minutes earlier. 41

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The Family Illustrated by Tiffany Chiu

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Kathleen Chai ’20 has a terrible sense of direction. Tiffany Chiu ’19 can show you the world. Yvonne Fong ’18 has nothing left to say. May Gao ’21 remembers cities in color schemes. Hilary Ho ’20 doesn’t agree with her cafe astrology natal chart. Elizabeth Huh ’19 enjoys airplane food. Soyoon Kim ’19 only shares her poetry on Twitter. Haley Lee ’8 wishes it would stop snowing. Hannah Lee ’21 looks most like her grandmother. Eveline Liu ’19 still plays Pokémon. Jiaju Ma ’21’s head is a machine that always malfunctions. Sophia Meng ’20 wants to live a softer gradient. Sruti Suryanarayanan ’19 matches their spreadsheets. Claribel Wu ’19 eats cough drops recreationally.

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