SPRING 2019

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

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Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, It is with great pleasure that we present to you the Spring 2019 issue of VISIONS Magazine.

The VISIONS team was blown away by the breadth and quality of submissions from the talented writers and artists on College Hill. We’d like to thank everyone who submitted this semester and entrusted us with a part of their narrative.

Each year presents a challenge for the VISIONS team as we put together a publication that aims to encapsulate the AAPI experience. This begs the question: What is the AAPI experience? How can we even begin to define something that is so plural and so varied in nature? Is it the content or the creator of a piece that makes it inherently AAPI-centered? It was from these curiosities that we tried to develop an idea of what we wanted the issue to look like.

This spring, we envisioned a magazine that recognized the label of AAPI as being multiple. We wanted a magazine that not just showcased the diversity of Asian identities that College Hill was home to, but also one that acknowledged different aspects of the AAPI experience. Whether that meant writing about the immigrant narrative or focusing on the simplicity of the quotidian, we hoped to acknowledge the validity of each person’s lived experience.

As members of the AAPI community, the burden of representation in art and writing is something that we shoulder time and again. There seems to be an unspoken expectation for people of color to create work that should ref lect and relate to our own experiences as “racial beings.” One question best sums up the complexities of POC representation in art: Who do you create for?

We do not have the answers, but we’d like to leave you with a few hopes before you pore over our Spring issue. Firstly, we hope that you allow this issue to simultaneously challenge and expand what it means for a publication to be AAPI-centered. We hope that you use every opportunity, in your own work, to push the boundaries of what AAPI writers and artists are “allowed” to create.

We hope that the pieces in this magazine speak for themselves.

Lastly, we hope that no matter who you create your art for, let it first and foremost be for yourself.

Warmly,

Hilary Ho & May Gao 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 strives 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 American Dream | Digital Kimberly Wang ’20 loves chubby plants.

Editors-in‑Chief Hilary Ho ’20 May Gao ’21 Layout & Design Editor Sophia Meng ’20 Assistant Layout Editor Christine Lin ’21.5 Jessie Jing ’22 Visual Arts Editor Elizabeth Huh ’19

Inside Cover Thus[0] | Oil on canvas Sophia Meng ’20 likes the butt ends of bread the best.

Literary Arts Editor Star Su ’21 Logistics Coordinator Cecilia Vogler ’22 Special Projects Coordinator Jessie Jing ’22 RISD Outreach Cecilia Yoko Emy ’20

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Events Coordinator Hannah Lee ’21 Editors Emeritus Eveline Liu ’19 Sruti Suryanarayanan ’19 Printer Brown Graphic Services A very special thanks to …

Contributors and staff Contact visions@brown.edu facebook.com/VISIONS.Brown @VISIONS_magazine Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of VISIONS’ sponsors.

Table of Contents 6

Untitled (Photogram Series) Alison Sherpa

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Rising Dream Julie Benbassat

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Whale Fall Matti-Marius Marjolin

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House Warmers Anna Kerber

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Rapunzel, rapunzel Mary Kuan

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Hingham, MA Erin Malimban

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Domestic Love Becki Shu

The Monday After Grandma Liu Does Not Go to America Amy Wang

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Distance Amanda Yang

Ode to New Jersey Monsoon Parisa Thepmankorn

Desicember Damini Agrawal 41

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That night, in between Dhatri Abeyaratne

Translations Soyoon Kim

Hsinchu Christine Lin

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anew Angela Yang

18:23 – On Penning a Eulogy Undelivered Christine Huynh

Thus[1] Sophia Meng

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Think Too Much Becki Shu

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Mal à l’Aise Grace Chen

The Monkey and the Moon Shyaoman Zhang

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Snapshot Emily Wu

oxidizes gray Sandra Moore

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Portrait of a Tree Cherry Yang

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Lonely Tourist Tabitha Payne

Farmer John’s Stages of Samadhi Sindura Sriram

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To My Father Ashley Chen

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Little Self Caitlin Malimban

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Raining Men Bench Cecilia Yoko Emy

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Untitled (Photogram Series) | Photogram made in cyanotype Alison Sherpa ’20 loves youtube.

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Rising Dream | Watercolor and ink Julie Benbassat ’19 is a hopeful pescatarian.

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Whale Fall | Lithograph on paper Matti-Marius Marjolin ’21 is craving butter mochi.

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Whale Fall A piece inspired by the natural phenomenon of whale falls, when a whale dies and sinks deep in the ocean. Its carcass becomes a micro-ecosystem for bottom feeders, sustaining life for years after its death. I used the imagery of whale falls as a jumping off point to explore my Khmer roots that were buried and hidden due to genocide, my family’s immigration, and my mixed heritage. I used whale falls as a metaphor for processing intergenerational and familial trauma, discovering something lost or in disrepair in one’s past, and cannibalizing trauma into something new.

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Parisa Thepmankorn ’20 is searching for ghosts.

Ode to New Jersey Monsoon Mother outside / life vest / for all the gardenias the overripe tomatoes / all the men who kiss once and never again. / Mother stews / on the front porch searching for people / that look like her / wandering like child / after a riot / body full of wilted bruises.

On the streets / jury out for a body / surrounded by the color yellow.

Reused paper bags / over our eyes / so no one can see them their downward slant. / My first language / changes depending on the angle / of the interrogator’s mouth.

Below the tiled f loors / a knife speaks in the dark / always a knife because my mother / is more comfortable / with blade than bullet.

This is all / so our hands don’t have to shake / underneath a storm question marks / accent on / broken English.

In the afternoons / I swing home / drenched in white.

My mother / towel on my hair / knife spreading the threads her mouth puckered rust / your skin stolen / pushes me outside whiplash / against the bubble gum / curse words apologetic softness / I stuck onto my own teeth.

I am apple-sliced into pieces / redness running until finally / I remember / my native tongue / dripping from within.

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Hsinchu | Oil on canvas Christine Lin ’21.5 has lost track of time.

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Thus[1] | Oil on canvas Sophia Meng ’20 likes the butt ends of bread the best.

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Mal à l’Aise | Oil on canvas Grace Chen ’22 likes eating oranges at the Met.

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Sandra Moore ’21 walks around with half a heart and is rounded out by dragon fiction.

oxidizes gray “Here,” she said, her hand outstretched as she dropped it into my hands. Cold and round, with a f lat pleated edge and raised engraving. I rubbed it between my index and thumb, marveling at its shiny copper coating—1996, it read under Abe Lincoln’s eroded head. “Keep it safe.”

We were on our third date at that time, in a stormy little café with a thick Vietnamese accent to its coffee. I remember how charmed I was by the light glinting off her bleached hair, how her eyes f licked down to look at the penny and revealed that her eyeliner was crooked on her left eye. I’d never been much for makeup myself, but I wanted to reach out and smooth my thumb over the snarled line, press the penny to the curve of her f luttering downcast eye.

“What’s it for?”

Her lips curled into a smile veiled by the rising steam of her coffee. “Think of it as, ah, blessing our date.”

I found it charming at the time. I’d never dated anyone before who believed in lucky pennies. After her, I’m not sure I ever will again.

My mother told me that when I was born, I was a cold child, whose body temperature dropped so quickly that I alarmed even the well-practiced— albeit still unprofessional—midwife who hollered for swaddles and more blankets. The bluer I turned, the more horrified she became, until as a last ditch result, she dunked me in a literal basin of hot water.

I f lushed pink and began to cry.

Past partners have told me, usually while breaking up with me, that it was because I was too distant, because I seemed uninterested in their lives and modus operandi. To that, I have no refutation.

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And dating someone whose superstition ruled the house of body and kingdom of spirit was. . .taxing, to say the least. On Friday the 13ths, she was nowhere to be found (much to my frustration—my birthday was April 13th and landed on a Friday in the second year of our relationship, when her idiosyncrasies had wore off their charm. The screaming match that ensued on April 14th was a black and bitter one). I saw her turn ghostly white when a black cat crossed her path and she refuses to carry heavy things near mirrors lest they fall out of her hands and shatter the glass.

On the other hand, whatever game she tried out for the first time, she inevitably won large. We went to Las Vegas a year and a half in and she hit jackpot with one pull of the lever. We treated ourselves to the most expensive bottle of wine that our hotel had to offer, passing it back and forth swigging it like heathens. (Her hair was dyed back to black and swung loose over her shoulders, bare feet tucked under her dress.) I remember laughing and tumbling her backwards into the bed, sleepy and sweet with wine. We whispered secrets in each other’s ears, sighed truths as the night grew starry-dark.

I asked her about it one time. Not about the superstition—about why someone like her would date someone like me: mind squared from practicality and with a firm belief in hard work above all. (“Tinder,” she joked, and I swatted at her.) (“Well, I’d have to wait for a very long time to meet someone as superstitious and gay as me,” was another joke, this one making me laugh until I fell off the couch.) (“I don’t know,” she whispered, sleep-deprived and half-dozing on my shoulder as we took a redeye to New York to visit her grandfather, who was dying of cancer. “I just saw you and I thought to myself, she is as brilliant and as bright as the penny I picked up earlier that week and I want to—I wanted to see.” The answer to the wrong question, I remember thinking.)

So for our fourth anniversary, I went out with a heavy wallet and came back significantly lighter, save a tiny coin caught in a plastic bag. The most expensive coin I could find, the 1923 Wheat Penny.

It cost me almost as much as a new laptop would’ve.

I gave it to her that night, as we dined among roses of pinks and reds, our mouths stained with red wine.

Her face clouded over when she saw it. “Oh,” she said. Not the reaction I wanted.

“I mean,” she hastened to say, “I think it’s lovely?

But these sorts of pennies. . .they’re resentful. Angry.

They want to go out into the world and be used and dropped and found—they want to be ignored because of their value and prized for sentimental reasons. Not thought of as some grand commodity.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I wanted to slam my hands down on the table. I wanted to scream: “Pennies aren’t sentient beings.”

Neither of those would’ve convinced her remotely, but it would’ve made me feel better at the very least.

Instead I said, in my very best journalistic attitude that I affected when dealing with interviewers whose views I completely disagreed with, “Are you really?

Normally, when someone you love gets you a gift like this, you at least feign to like it.”

“Oh don’t treat me like an article,” she said with complete disgust, because this was the woman who knew me best—this was the woman who had loved me for the past four years, pressed kisses to my cheeks and held me when I dissolved into panicked tears. “I know you’re upset, Lily. Scream at me, do what you want, I’m sorry, I can’t help that I’m like this.” She was, of course, referring to the great April 13th debacle.

“It was meant to be a call back to the penny you gave me on our third date.” I was already wondering if I could return a ridiculously expensive penny.

“Forgive me if I didn’t want to just pick something off the street.”

“But you can’t buy luck.”

Boiled water, f lushing pink, infant screams. “Of course you can’t buy superstition! It doesn’t exist!

It’s a construct you created after failing your parents as a lazy teenager who dropped out of college and as a way for you to avoid any real responsibility— what you don’t realize is that it makes you a burden, Jiyoung, because you’re too caught up in fantasizing in a world where every choice you make has consequences predetermined by items that you pick up or come across instead of your own damn hard work!”

She drew in a sharp breath, wet-eyed, and stood up. I expected her to scream or shout, but instead she gave a tight nod and walked out of the door, footsteps crisp as if military-trained. With each thunk of her foot against the f loor, I felt heavier and heavier, and when the door closed behind her, it was as if I was drowning, searing pain in my throat that I realized belatedly, was from muff led sobbing.

Here’s the thing—I love her and I don’t know if I’ll ever stop thinking about her. But I—or I guess, my archetype, a half-Chinese half-Jewish woman with a tongue of fire and a heart of ice—have become her superstition, have been added to her list of things to avoid.

I pulled the penny she gave me out of my wallet, from where I had slid it behind my driver’s license. It came out crumbly. Somehow, in the past four years, kept in that dim and airless place, it had oxidized gray. I pitched it into the street and wished it the best, wished it a landing in the pocket of somebody who would treat it carefully and cherish it not for its value but the—the certain undeniable quality of an experience with a well-travelled penny, for this one was imbued with four years of lust and love and longing and I watched it go with a regretful eye.

The sound of its landing was obscured by the roar of my heartbeat, but it didn’t matter. I had already turned to leave.

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Portrait of a Tree | Digital using CloudCompare Cherry Yang ’20 is seeking tips on how to keep plants alive.

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Housewarmers | Oil on canvas Sticky Squishy | Oil on canvas Anna Kerber ’22 probably doesn’t remember.

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Ashley Chen ’20 already ate all of the pineapple cakes.

To My Father These summer Sundays my dad wakes up early to practice tai ji quan on the backyard porch, his white shoes ref lecting what little light filters through our wisteria-covered trellis. The bees hum around the persimmons and in the background you can see lychee and Korean pear trees, the legacy of the immigrants who lived on this land before we did. Empty-nesters now, my mother and father take ballroom-dancing classes in the evening, indulge in walks around the neighborhood in the warmth of sundown.

But sometimes I think he is only ever really happy when he is back in his motherland. My brother was the first to point it out, and now I can never un-see it—the way he looks at his phone when he takes a cab in the States but befriends every taxi driver in Shanghai, how in China he leans back against chairs like they’re made for him and nobody can take them away. There is an arrogance bred into every person when they’re born, an arrogance blended so perfectly with national pride that they are hardly separable, an arrogance that says I belong here and this is my home. When I watch him sitting at the head of a table with his college friends, when I watch him bargaining down the price of house slippers by two yuan with some street vendor, when I watch him pick up the phone and say hello hello hello in too-loud Mandarin, I think: This is what he cannot have when he is here with me. This is the choice he had to make, and he chose me.

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Little Self | Silkscreen on paper Caitlin Malimban ’21 enjoys em dashes— maybe a little too much.

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Erin Malimban ’19 is finally growing into her power.

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tors – get home. There is a flashbulb moment of banter before they need to go to bed. Then she walks back to her dorm.

There are brief, surreal moments when the suite is clean: mornings when the boys are out of town or sleeping in or getting brunch, when she’s awake and full of empty time, and she walks to the unlocked suite and cleans.

Takes out recycling. Washes glasses. The point is not for it to last long.

I try to tidy my way into belonging. In this house, but also in the world. In your company, mostly, because I never expected to care about you this much.

The three avoid social interaction by mopping the black box theater. There is only one mop. She plugs in her phone; the speakers blast Good Kisser by Lake Street Dive. They dance, loud and messy, the broom integrated in choreography. The dust pan is swinging from an arm. Lyrics are purposefully sung She hears that education is the act of humbling yourwrong. In a shitty black box theater, the three of self. She learns what a proscenium is. What a folio is. them flail and laugh, performing only for each other. There’s a dif erence between outreach, engagement, and publicity. Having dairy before a performance is bad for This is the play I wrote you. Here are the pages, your voice. Settings or rooms or time periods can be rethe hours, the acts. This is the scene-by-scene ferred to as liminal spaces. New York Cityhas boroughs. empathetic heat lamp I built so you two can People can refer to wherever they are as “the space”. be warmer.

There is a science of spaces. That’s an amphitheater.

That’s the house. That’s stage left. This is the round.

Citation: This is a black box, this is a lecture hall, this is Bryant Park, this is the Globe. Sometimes people are allowed to Women of today are still being called upon

sit on the stage. Sometimes there’s no stage. to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and

Tennessee Williams our needs.

Eugene O’Neill – Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Bertolt Brecht Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House Gertrude Stein Arthur Miller The dorm common room is, for the most part, messy Anton Chekhov and vacated. There are crumbs on the futon more con- Molière sistently than there are people. Mostly, the four white Stanislavsky suitemates (3M, 1F) pass through and leave sandwich (I don’t know who these people are.) wrappers on the table. Sometimes they take a beer from the fridge. Sometimes it’s the liminal space between get- This has to be what whitewashing feels like. This ting home and going to bed. is what it’s like to be dissolved and painted over.

She has an open invitation to the suite, and the door is taped down so that it never locks. She’s there almost She walks to the suite to drink their beer and make nightly, waiting in a common room that isn’t hers until jokes about whiteness. They always agree and they althese two suitemates, the boys – the ones that are ac- ways laugh. They would never hold it against her. She 22

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wonders how much she should hold against them. She doesn’t, unless it’s the middle of the day with zero texts and she needs reasons not to be upset that they haven’t asked for company. This kind of thing is easier if she can decide that they’re dangerous.

But it’s okay, right?

There is a plan to go to a party, so first she goes to the suite. One of them – blue eyes, no glasses – isn’t going out: he was rejected for a role, and when she gets there she can tell. (She knows what this feels like.) Instead they lie on his bed looking at the string-light-ceiling and she makes a series of jokes, because this is their strongest form of communication. He says sorry and thank you in several different ways, and then he sleeps, and she goes to the party and dances.

Is it wrong that taking care of you feels like taking care of another me? Maybe that’s a poor substitution.

On a particular night, with vodka and extraneous company, the suite slowly empties out drunk underclassmen. She is the last guest, and she helps sort Solo cups into the recycling. She’s delaying walking back alone and being back alone. One of them – blues eyes, glasses – offers that she crash here instead.

She takes the bed and he nestles on his f loor in a pool of navy polyester pillows. It’s possible this is the only way he knows how to help people. The two drift into separate dreamscapes, still wearing bright party shirts.

It’s not a solution, but it’s a gift I don’t feel worthy of.

She thanks him for the borrowed bed and he says not to.

She asks why, and he says that she’s done so much for him and when she thanks him it makes him feel weird, like things are out of balance.

Here’s the thing about the play I wrote for us, (and it might sound like a lot, but I’m trying

not to diminish when I feel like I accomplished something): it’s really good. It’s really, really good. It has me, and both of you, and the beer and the banter and everything.

When she reads through it once with one of them (no glasses) he says, “I love it. It’s two people who care about each other and don’t know how to express it yet.” They are sitting on the grass, knowing where this came from.

A list of properties, or “props”: A futon A chair A rug A coffee table A mess Oreos String lights Booze Punchlines My shoes Your shoes Laughter iPhones My gender Your gender Irish Catholicism Filipino Catholicism Discussions Silences Whiteness Non-whiteness Acknowledgement of race Avoidance of race The building of tension The release of tension The sweeping of tension underneath the aforementioned rug The play is put up in a shitty black box theater that’s just been mopped.

This is when I feel like I’ve been found out.

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This might just mean that I’m more submissive than I thought.

Maybe I’ve been subdued into teaching you my needs and that this play was a confession. I think about it and shame hallows out my body.

Is it transgression to care about them? These two, of all the twenty-one-year-old white boys that are studying to be actors, these two and their suite? Of all the spaces in the world?

You know what kind of privileges you hold.

You’re scared of perpetuating them. Around me you make sure to be extra comfortable mocking yourselves. Extra aware, extra understanding.

That’s something, right?

That is the bare minimum.

Asian American playwright-slash-poet Sarah Kay says of a man she grew to love, he was described to her first by someone else. Summarized in a way he could not control.

“Oh, he’s definitely gay.”

And maybe that was a confusion I recognized.

– Sarah Kay, Dreaming Boy Japanese American playwriting MFA candidate Julia Izumi wrote a play where a little mermaid loved someone that was nothing like her.

Why do I feel so awful and yet so happy? I want to be in his world.

– Julia Izumi, Sometimes the Rain, Sometimes the Sea It’s unclear whether the girl put on the play to be heard and seen by the world or by the boys. If it’s both, that too is viable. This is what a play is: a demand that others sit in the dark and watch, listen, let a story be told to them. Live in a world they might not usually live in 24

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A therapist tells her, “you see yourself in them. You try to help them because it’s how you want to be helped.”

I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.

– Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House I clean because I speak through acts of service.

It’s possible you don’t ask me to stay because you’re afraid of asking too much. I say sorry when I mean thank you. Thank you for letting me do this, for being here, for accepting the gift. This is all I know how to do. You say thank you when you mean sorry. Sorry that I am myself, that you did all this, that when you gave I took. I shouldn’t have let you.

We worry over movements we make around the other: what if they’re perceived as selfishness?

What if they’re perceived as favors?

I can’t sustain myself like this. I don’t think you can either, but I need to stop making that my problem. /Do you want company ?

– the play Yeah.

Yeah, sometimes.

Domestic Love | Gouache and acryla gouache Becki Shu ’20 kisses puppies.

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Desicember | Film festival Damini Agrawal ’20 revels in spreading her Desi culture.

Desicember For a long time stereotypical representation of South Asians, a.k.a Desis in popular culture, has propagated prejudice. Desicember is a proposal for a film festival that is dedicated to providing a platform for young adults to contribute to the dialogue that artists like Kumail Nanjiani, Hari Kondabolu, Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhaj, among others, have started; to be inspired and encouraged to rethink, reshape and rewrite rigid perceptions; to uplift the American Desi community; and to end the year on a spirited note. The festival would have a series of film and television screenings, panel discussions, creating, writing, and acting workshops scheduled through the month of December; this would culminate into a three-day publishing party to showcase and celebrate films, scripts, characters, etc. created by the participants during the duration of Desicember.

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Dhatri Abeyaratne ’19 knows spirits are real.

That night, in between My mom has a fever, draped on the couch, in the corner of the room. It’s not a fever, it’s a spirit draining her soul from the top of her head, she says. I go to get the nurse. No, not for the patient, I tell her. For my mom. She really is sick. Her head is burning. A spirit is literally clinging, I know it’s weird, but it’s important that you please help, bring the doctor.

My grandma, Ma, is in the bed, across the room.

She’s hooked up to the IV, and some other things.

She seems okay.

Downstairs, my great-aunt, Kumi, has cancer. She is warmest woman I ever knew. Always took my hand in hers like I was the most promising young thing she had ever known.

Upstairs, my aunt, my Lokku Nan Nan, is dying. Really dying. She is rail thin, and bald. She can’t breathe.

Her eyes will still meet yours, but they are yellow.

It’s three in the morning. The family and the friends are pacing in the hallway, chatting about other things over sweet coffee from the cafeteria.

My mom has fallen asleep, and though the spirit might still be lurking, she seems ok. So I slip upstairs to join the others.

They are wondering when it might happen. Everyone seems to agree it’s better sooner, rather than later. And I’m trying to remember when, exactly, we agreed on that.

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A year ago we climbed the sacred mountain Sri Pada, in the middle of the night. We reached the summit when the sun rose with swollen feet, whining in exhaustion. Lokku Nan Nan was hardly out of breath, a week after chemotherapy.

I know her as a feminist, a Communist. Charming, fiercely loving, cussing like a sailor. When we narrowly escaped the tsunami, she managed to save the good bottle of brandy.

Now it’s sooner, rather than later.

A young man with an intense face emerges in the hall. Florescent lights above flick on with his steps.

It’s the medicine man. Not the doctor, the doctor has gone home by now. It’s the man who made some jewelry emerge from the coconut last week, at the ceremony, with the fire, and all those people possessed.

Podis, my other aunt, scowls at this man. As far as the family is concerned, he is the reason Lokku Nan Nan is here. But he’s the one she wants to see, in these fleeting hours. She wants to hear the scriptures, to grasp for an intangible truth. In rhythmic chants he tells the story of our existence. It’s beyond what the family could understand. We are fully in the plane of the living, where we can only see in three dimensions.

He slips past the door, and without thinking, I follow. It’s dark inside, in more dimensions than three. Except for the lamp they keep on, a dim yellow to match her eyes.

Anew | Film photography Angela Yang ’19 occasionally tries her hand at reading tea leaves.

My aunt’s form has been morphing into something unrecognizable. The body that carried her through this life, the one we know, has decayed from the inside out. I suppose this is what in-between looks like. The air in this room is dense and hot. The medicine man’s chants vibrate low. I almost don’t notice my uncle, in the corner, on the couch. We are all so still, as if it would stop time.

this room. Many people have come to see, and it’s all logistics now. Like who is going to get the death certificate, to let the government know, I guess? A couple of aunties have done this before, they are old pros. Thank god, they take care of the paper work, the bookings, the little paragraph in the newspaper that pretty much sums it all up. Who’s who was she? Where did she fit with all of us?

Before the sun came up, but only once we all left the room, she passed. Slipped on out the back door.

Outside in the hall, the nurses brush past us, rushing in and out of rooms. People I’ve never seen before respectfully approach with flowers, and sorryfor-your-losses. I touch the top of my mom’s head, and there’s no heat, just hair. No more spirit clinging.

Morning comes, she’s covered in a white sheet, like in movies. They open the curtains and light floods

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Think Too Much | Plastecine Becki Shu ’20 kisses puppies.

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Snapshot | Pastel on paper Emily Wu ’22 enjoys eating ice.

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Tabitha Payne ’20 cooks a lot of soup.

Lonely Tourist Hanoi is yellow, a jaunty yellow, a star quieted by time, like an old book, left on the shelf, dusted off, and read with wonder at who-must-have-touched-this-last. Hanoi is red too, a scarlet-turned-crimson, from the torrential rain that beat blue and obscurity into the singing hue, like green did to its politics. And oh, the green! A sunnier one here, earth like the color you remember your childhood in, or the inside of a lime, sour and cool on the palm.

And the fog that whitens it all: fog that makes us forget those lovely buildings were built by a brutal colonist named François (fuck vous!), that a world’s war once stained the rice paddies and banana plantations encircling this capital bloodshot. Dear forgiving Hanoi fog: you, dusty water droplets, you, you make all the strong color off-kilter, you marry the delicious scents, you knock the chaos down a rung so it does not overbear the senses.

I am at a loss: from whence did you come? Were you scattered like seed from a hand? Or risen from the soil, the mist filling the glass of the world in undulations, quickly-slowly like the lessening blues of dawn.

Walking around here it’s remarkable to think that this city, where bricks fall out like defunct teeth, and some ghost must be sanding down all the paint, and motorbikes spill out of every orifice, beat the big guns, the Wal-marketeers, the suburb de force: the Yankees. The Yankees! The world’s “unstoppable” uncle! Who no one said could come to your Bat Mitzvah but came anyway—and drunk! And now here we are, peppering the sweet, f lowery lakeside of Hoan Kiem, the capital’s wet, legendary heart, like dazed toddlers, but giant ones, our Goliath bones and bigger mouths noisy like the crunch of cornf lakes. Yet somehow we don’t wander the city like losers. No, to the tourist, poverty is the ultimate cock-block: the one thing keeping us Westerners from staying 32

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here forever (au contraire, only long enough to make it poor). But how romantic are the buckless, how noble, how deserving. Charming is the toothless lady who sells me green mangos for a fortieth of the price I pay for a juiced degenerate of it back home. And tragic she is, like my muse, the beauty giving rise to the sadness, and the sadness the beauty, and neither can exist without the other. If only I were toothless, I project, perhaps there is some wisdom only losing a molar can give you. . .

rious pavements they were! Dodge the crouched noodle-slurping millennials, evade sliver-thick galleries whose paintings pour out into the street like orchids tumbling from a bouquet, wave off the conical-hatted vendors on bike and cart and squat and foot and the moto and cyclo drivers who wave you over like an old friend, and in your avoidance, you’ll forget that sidewalk culture is what this place does spectacular.

But never mind all that: under the watch of heavy trees shedding yellow, and the shadow of skinny f lats that seem to lean forward into the thoroughfare, veined in leaf and chirping with caged vermillion—is this the intimacy I’ve always wanted but never had the courage to ask for? Marry me, pop-up barber shops—I love you just as you are; I love you, because you pretend to be nothing more! Only a plastic chair and a mirror taped to the wall, manned by a stoic, lonely-looking, f lip-f lopped scissor-wielder on the roadside, and the eye-contact I make then, just sauntering past in the street, the cast gaze that fishes an eye, and the eight million vanish, and what stillness: it’s just me and the man in the mirror mid-shave, and his laughable whitefoam beard, like asymmetric Santa, and a sudden communion between us now, the preciousness of face seen-through, and how human is the fallibility of the stranger, who cannot any longer sustain the illusion that we all are moving about, not noticing one another.

Yet somehow, despite us doggone, dogged, doggish tourists, lost and at constant offense at the sheer number of things that can people a square yard, much like the thousand unleashed Chihuahuas I saw on my walk today, even the most touristic part of town, the Old Quarter, survives, staunchly Vietnamese. More staunchly, I’d say, than Ho Chi Minh’s body, which lies in a museum-mausoleum-and-gardens impossibly bigger than anything I could envision for something so tiny. An Uncle Ho themed park paved down the jungle of Hanoi, obelisked with Communist buildings that loom like headmistresses, designed to make you believe you are the tiniest, most imperceptibly red ant, but there he is, embalmed despite his explicit intentions to be cremated—they respected him too much to respect him—and his face I peered into, an hour I waited for eyes I’d dreamed would be wide open like double doors, screaming, “Vive la résistance!”, but they were closed, shut as a casket, a f licker whisked by an impassive finger, his body Oh, nation of ghosts—you, my hustler, you, my far-f lung and bed-posted by four adolescent hamartia, you, my prodigal father, you: Amergreen-garmented guards toting bayonets, and ica, how we could be a house undivided if only so I stole away, and back in the maelstrom of outside we’d stand! Together! And talk. And the winding alleyways, the straps of my back- hawk. And offer rice-balls to strangers like pack pulled me down towards the asphalt like freshly-picked wildf lowers. maybe that ghost was piling in bricks. But glo33

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Farmer John’s Stages of Samadhi | Digital illustration Sindura Sriram ’21 is vegetarian.

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Raining Men Bench | Steel upholstered with heavyweight cotton Cecilia Yoko Emy ‘20 will break up the band.

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Rapunzel, rapunzel | Monotype print Mary Kuan ’19 is an alter-ego of mine who does things I wish I did or I wish did more.

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Amy Wang ’20 would rather fight one horse-sized duck.

The Monday After Grandma Liu Does Not Go to America excerpted

Ever since his death, Zhen-he has mellowed down considerably. He no longer spits nor screams, but instead helps rearrange the photographs along the living-room bookshelf, tucking the older frames behind the newer ones. Gone are the shattered tea sets; in their place lie ceramic dishes from the threestory supermarket six blocks north of the apartment.

He has, however, retained the habit of reading the morning paper while sitting on the toilet. “You don’t even shit anymore,” Grandma Liu sometimes yells as she passes by the washing room, but her husband just waves her away absently, too focused on the headlines he’s perusing.

As dawn breaks on the Monday after she does not go to America, Grandma Liu takes a walk to Tiananmen Square. Overnight rain has rinsed the sky a dusty blue-white; the midday heat hasn’t yet arrived.

The square sits relatively deserted on account of the hour. In New York it is evening, thinks Grandma Liu, the city streets most likely bustling with life.

She passes by a stand selling bunches of miscellany: phone cases and cold sweet drinks and baseball caps monogrammed with the Chairman’s face. Tabloids line the lower shelf. Grandma Liu debates purchasing one for her husband, but he’s never really liked magazines.

“Granny,” the vendor, a puffy-faced woman in a pink shirt, greets her. “Which would you like?”

One of the tabloid covers features a celebrity in a white gown. Grandma Liu squints in vain at the girl’s lineless face. All young people look the same to her these days. Jin-jin is probably sitting in some well-lit bathroom, she thinks, wearing a dress identical to the one on the page, looking impeccably young.

“I don’t need to be reminded of how old I am,” Grandma Liu tells the vendor, and continues on her route, making a mental note to visit the supermarket on the way back. She’s in need of lotus root for tonight’s dinner. Despite the caretaker Jin-jin has forced her to hire, Grandma Liu prefers to do the grocery shopping herself. She plans on making tang ou tonight—Zhen-he’s favorite—in hopes of tempting him out of his frame.

Thus, at 11:30 A.M on the morning after she does not go to America, rather than stepping into some marbled hall, Grandma Liu steps instead into the welcome bustle of the supermarket grocery. It being a summer Monday, the market features a number of grandparents strolling about with their grandchildren in tow. Here a girl in pigtails tugs on her great aunt’s elbow; there a pair of siblings races to spy on the piles of crabs in their grimy tanks.

Grandma Liu makes her way past an elderly couple; the woman clutches a red mesh bag filled with lychee and the man carries a child on his shoulders.

Zhen-he used to carry Jin-jin like that, on good days: the two of them parading about like one giant person, Zhen-he throwing his knees high up in the air like a soldier, Jin-jin swaying back and forth upon her father’s back, giggling in that silvery way that only children can.

To think she, Grandma Liu, could herself have been that woman, holding a pouch full of plump lychee for her beloved daughter’s daughter. To think she could have been a grandmother in practice, and not in name alone!

If only the girl were not so stubborn. For in her mind’s eye, Jin-jin is still a girl—sitting in that 37

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Manhattan dressing room, patting makeup into her skin, looking far younger than forty-two. Her cheeks are f lushed, her dark eyes twinkle, and her beauty blooms pale and unbruised, vast as the sea. She would have had a daughter, Grandma Liu is sure of it—such is the case for all the women in her family: daughters only, generation after generation.

“Wei, Granny!” someone shouts, jolting Grandma Liu from her reverie. She finds that her feet have carried her to the front of the root vegetable section; a mountain of lotus roots looms before her. The voice belongs to a boy wearing f lipf lops, perhaps seven or eight years old, who waves a fist in her face. “Granny, is this yours?”

His fist is waving too quickly for Grandma Liu to decipher what exactly it holds. Ordinarily she would grow impatient and turn away, but the boy has a gap between his two front teeth, and she’s charmed by the way he calls her “Granny”— without the demeaning ring of the woman from the newsstand, and genuinely, as though she were truly related to him by blood.

“Hold still, child,” she tells the boy, and he pauses his arm mid-swing. She sees that he is clutching a small square of paper—no, film. It’s the old photograph of herself and Zhen-he and Jin-jin, the one she knows all too well.

“Yes, that’s mine,” she says. “Where did you pick it up?”

“It must have fallen out of your purse,” suggests the boy. “I picked it up right behind you.” He gestures towards the linoleum f loor.

“Thank you ah,” says Grandma Liu. “You’re a good child. Granny is very thankful.”

As the boy races off, his sandals slapping the linoleum, Grandma Liu opens the clasp of her purse and tucks the photo between her wallet and her reading glasses case. The aging film trembles with resistance against her fingers, as though struggling

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to break loose. She chides herself for not having been more watchful, for failing to check her purse and pockets before she left the apartment. One never knows when Zhen-he will attempt to make a scene.

She plucks three lotus roots from the pile before her, squeezing slightly to ascertain their suppleness and f lipping them over to check for deformities. After placing these into a plastic bag and adding them to her grocery basket, she proceeds to the cashiers.

The woman’s name is Samantha, but she prefers to be called Sam. She is four and a half years older than Jin-jin and it shows in the photos: the telltale lines along her brow and around her mouth, the sagging f lesh below her chin. Her skin is tanned, nearly barbecue-brown: her eyes are blue as the Western sky. Samantha does not speak Chinese, although according to Jin-jin, she’s currently learning the basics through a program they offer for free on the Internet. Also according to Jin-jin, Samantha doesn’t blame Grandma Liu for declining to go to America.

She may not blame me, thinks Grandma Liu, but you certainly do. The last time Jin-jin called her mother was Wednesday morning, to tell the latter curtly that she was entitled to make whatever decision she thought best for her health, that she would be missed at the wedding but they would have a good time without her, anyway. Jin-jin did not mention coming back to Beijing to visit. She did not ask after Zhen-he.

“I’m going to put you on speakerphone,” she said. “Sam has something she’d like to say.”

Then came Samantha’s voice, of the kind of throaty timbre Grandma Liu has come to associate with American city-women. “We’re thinking of you,” Samantha said in the worst approximation of Mandarin Grandma Liu had ever heard.

“Did you hear that?” Jin-jin asked.

“She needs to work on her tones,” answered “You can trade with me.”

Grandma Liu.

“Maybe later,” Grandma Liu tells them. “It’s A pause. In the background, Samantha said noon—too hot to sit outside right now.” She turns something in English and Jin-jin replied. Then Jin- to leave, hoping to avoid the interrogation, but has jin spoke, very close to the phone. “Sam wants you to barely begun to move when Grandpa Chen asks: know she doesn’t blame you for staying home,” she “How’s Jin-jin been lately?” said calmly. “And listen, I don’t know why I even try.

“She’s fine,” Grandma Liu says.

I thought you, of all people, would wish me a happy “Is she still living in—where was it again—New marriage. But I guess I was wrong.”

York?” probes Grandma Lin.

Grandma Liu had hung up then, with intentional “Yes, still New York,” replies Grandma Liu. abruptness. She was tired of maintaining the charade.

“Will she come back to visit soon? I haven’t Let them argue; let Jin-jin’s composure finally seen the girl in ages.” shatter, like the dishware Zhen-he used to throw. Let “She’ll visit when she has the chance. She’s busy Samantha know, at last, the depth and intensity of her with her job; she’s got no time for old geezers future mother-in-law’s displeasure. like us.”

Five days have now passed since that conversation, This remark, uttered in a mixture of jest and and Jin-jin has not called again. Grandma Liu impatience, seems to bear a little too much truth; the shuff les through the thickening heat, plastic bag of table falls brief ly quiet, each old geezer perhaps lotus roots swinging from one arm. She’s made sure remembering their own children. Then Grandma to seal her purse as tightly as possible; she intends to Lin grins, baring her crooked teeth. “Remind me have a serious conversation with her husband as soon how old Jin-jin is? Forty already, no? Has she found as they arrive home. a boyfriend yet?”

The mahjong players on the patio of the Grandma Liu decides to put it bluntly. “What apartment complex greet her as she approaches. you’ve heard is probably true,” she says. “My daughter It’s the usual crowd: Grandpa Zhang with his thick is marrying a woman named Samantha, and I am not spectacles, ugly-toothed Grandma Lin and her attending their wedding today. Enough speculation. husband, and Grandpa Chen, whose crows’ feet It’s too hot for mahjong; I’m going inside.” branch all the way down the sides of his face until This, as she had calculated, ends the they merge with the lines on the sides of his mouth. conversation. “Say hello to Yu Zhen-he for me,” calls Despite their friendly smiles, she feels nosiness Grandpa Chen as the apartment doors slide closed rolling off them like steam. behind her.

“Here, let me help you with those bags,” says Grandma Lin, without rising from her seat.

“Is your back feeling better?” says Grandpa Zhang, adjusting his glasses.

“Where are you returning from?” says Grandma Lin’s husband.

“Sit down and play with us,” says Grandpa Chen.

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Distance | Oil on canvas Amanda Yang ’21 sneezes more times than she can count.

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Translations | Collage and digital Soyoon Kim ’19 has taken up felting for fun.

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Christine Huynh ’21 is no longer a fish swimming lone against the currents to the deep.

18:23 – On Penning a Eulogy Undelivered ONE All I cradle from my formative years are memories that can fit between the breadth of two palms. Often it is that I want to bury the rose-eyed youth of yesteryear’s past in wildf lowers until I am reborn anew—unfettered, unbound—as if any passerby could one day excavate [dig up] and restore [rehouse] and curate [kiss dirt-stained cheeks; comb through a thicket of bur, leaves, decay; warm the dried-up lungs behind brittle bones; bathe the body to strip childhood right from the skin] the stale soliloquies more lovingly than this person daying.

Tendering the past makes me think of the brackish pool, wine-dark with late-night vigils of a man working graveyard shifts, and that alone will make me weep ink for days. His figure yawns into existence, mouth tender and raw at the edges, exhaling in winding paragraphs and breathing in with painstaking stutters one lungful at a time. His frame upholds a strange gait, harboring equal parts amputated leg and enervated organs, buckling, collapsing into himself until he is formless. The darkness shudders, shudders him along with it.

TWO When morning breaks and the sun peels back millennia-old land in the glare of a new dawn, he is gathering a child of noise into his arms and perching

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her onto his shoulders, calloused hands holding calves secure. Her chin leans heavy on the top of his head up until the moment he opens his mouth. Words f loat about like white-winged moths, waiting, stopping the careless chatter filling the air, and, suddenly, she knows he is asking for M ẹ.

She points to the room the three of them shared: the place where she said she loved him—but not really; the bed where sheets did not carry his scent; the mirror where she stood preening, caking her face with cheapish rouge.

Moments like these were when I thought M ẹ was the moon, a young ghost of a cold woman, but he was always the ocean—aloft on a raft of f limsy driftwood as if still f leeing the motherland that rent escapees like him asunder. Maybe there is another universe where she doesn’t reach for stars, and he doesn’t soak in sea foam, and there isn’t a generation and a war and a grocery list of incompatibilities separating them.

How I wished the only thing keeping them together wasn’t a hurried whisper of immigrant and daughter, but I learned early that where M ẹ loved in neon colors, he only saw black and white.

Where M ẹ laid herself parallel to the clouds, he long dreamt of casting his body into algal blooms. Where M ẹ was the moon, he was always the ocean: barren,

water level receding, and already drowning in more ways than I knew to count.

THREE “Was touching the sky worth it?”

I stole the sun once, hid the Mason jar of constellations between my intercostals, bathed [blistered] in celestial fire as I grinned with stars snuck behind closed teeth. Exactly once, I dared the heavens to steal it back before I recalled the way the tides hungered for the lunar eclipse and how brine devoured Icarus whole and that water picked Aegeus’ forfeit bones clean and why Sirens kept adding travelers to that growing pit of detritus.

Even I wanted something to own.

Oceans split up Pangaea. I didn’t need to pay attention in earth science to explain continental drift and how it wrecked this plastic geography, this slacken land: pressure-borne countries falling away, stretching thin, pulling apart, awaiting the great heat-death, overbright, overwrought, until they bled tectonic plates for harvest.

The moon moves away from the earth at 3.78 centimeters per year the same way blood is new blood every 120 days. Not even cells have the decency of staying.

He has limbs built like matchsticks, but when he folds a small girl into his chest as if handling a pile of kindling, their arms intertwine like candle wick.

When M ẹ leaves, he is set af lame. It starts not as a f licker but a conf lagration. At times, he retches words harsh and unforgiving, venom licking f lesh with ravenous tongues, cauterizing wounds from the inside, yet there is something heartbreakingly off about it. His memory slips. His moods often do the same, dipping and churning and swelling helterskelter like waves of anguish, paranoia, anger.

Now and again, light fire to a temple, and be prepared to watch it [us] burn.

FOUR I remember throwing up in public twice. In one instance, little more than a childhood memoir, I am ten. Much else is hazy except for the dregs of mystery meat sitting uninspired on black asphalt and him trashing the frozen l ạp x ưở ng from the previous night’s dinner while M ẹ ’s screeches ring in the forefront. A pot of congee boils on the stove.

It is close to a decade later that I am swallowing grief, swallowing electricity, swallowing blue, chasing with a shot half holy water, half wildfire, smiling with a liquor-dipped tongue, and all that liquid gold is starting to finally taste like copper, and for a moment,

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for all that rotten filial piety is worth, I consider choking on saline and burying myself in gulfweed.

My drinking partner for the better half of the night offers to take me home when she sees me off- kilter, but I am already two heartbreaks past midnight from remembering Bà Nội and from hearing the way his voice came out cracked like he was twenty-two instead of sixty-two.

FIVE He was not ready.

They say it was a cardiac arrest, comment on how he followed Bà Nội not even four months later. I sign the papers for the cremation services from three thousand miles away.

I cannot feel anything.

SIX After the 49th day of your funeral rites, they will toss your ashes into the ocean, returning you to your sunken crypt—so that you will no longer be beached, I like to think. By the end of it all, you were a brokendown, febrile skeleton, withering, but what I hold firm are the memories of crow’s feet that did not come with eyes half-mast, gelled hair, slicked-back, before

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the permanent bedhead took its place, and laugh lines borne deep, full, heavy like the gravity keeping planets in orbit. I have yet to decide whether to cry or scream, so instead, I am returning home in time for the saccharine wet season.

Come the end of March, I will meet the West Coast, taste the edge where water and froth sigh hopelessly against sand, and swallow what feels like creation.

I will wring dreams in nothing but downpours and acid wash seeping from the river’s mouth. When I dehusk the body of pomegranate hearts, molt spines partially half-woven unwoven, and divest the skin of sun-bleached cavities, a baptism in reverse, I will take your hand, but you will let me go.

“What happened to the moon?”

The answer will be the same: it had hung high and rung white before you gripped her too tight and splintered astral sockets, swept up crater dust. Still, she will have cried for you. Storm clouds will pass like sails torn, a leech in the sky, and surfs will crash onto shore in endless hush, murmuring synonyms for what sounds like gunpowder, like porcelain, like glass, and I will continue standing above a thousand reams of salt water, landlocked.

The Monkey and the Moon | Digital Shyaoman Zhang ’21 is trying to find meaningful human connections.

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The Family illustrated by christine lin

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Christine Lin ’21.5 has lost track of time.

Eveline Liu ’19 wants to be a Buttercup but is really a Bubbles.

Hannah Lee ’21 cannot resist binge-watching Korean dramas.

Elizabeth Huh ’19 loves and thanks her friends.

Sruti Suryanarayanan ’19 is grateful for some pavement.

Hilary Ho ’20 can be found on the main green throwing a frisbee.

Star Su ’21 wants to be a better mother to her basil plant.

Cecilia Yoko Emy ’20 will break up the band.

Cecilia Vogler ’22 is thinking about food.

Sophia Meng ’20 likes the butt ends of bread the best.

Jessie Jing ’22 intentionally mixes black and navy.

May Gao ’21 measures the value of an item using milk tea equivalents.

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