what's considered an elegy? on mourning the trans kids "left behind" in my home state
I am six and decaying. The heat’s out, Toronto’s winter is angry, plum-red in its fury, and my dad knocks; he must hear me shivering. I hear the thud of his boots before I see him, all bald and devoted. He glances at me, mutters “Be right back,” and the wobbly house holds its breath as he sprints. He returns not with a blanket but a towel. Kneeling, he drapes it over my feet and tucks the cotton beneath my toes. It’s not soft, not what I wanted, but it’s heavy. “All better,” he says, like he believes it. I think I do too. As I fall asleep, I dream I am falling through the sky, and I feel weightless, free.
I am eight and I just got out of a soccer game. This is back when Texas was beautiful. The sun is dripping nectarine-orange over the field and the other boys are huddled up, cheering, spinning around in a way that makes me dizzy. Mom got me Whataburger to celebrate the win. I’m starving, so I take a bite, wash it down with my milkshake, and grab a fry. Mom snaps a pic of me, grinning wide.
Letter from the Editor
Dear Readers,
It’s been a recent era of new experiences for me: learning to drive, getting contacts so I can finally see(!), and spending 30 hours stuck in Heathrow Airport. As everyone lands back on campus and settles into the rhythms of the new semester, I’m struck by how much everything can change, yet how much things can feel the same. I can see much more clearly—faces, the branches splintering into sharp fractals, classes to drop before the deadline—but what I’m seeing is familiar and comforting. The landscape outside the MBTA window from South Station to Providence. My roommates sprawled across our rug, “Good Luck, Babe!” shuddering over the speakers. And of course, all the lovely, lovely people of
Both of us are. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more free. Maybe this is what America’s all about.
I am seventeen and nude under a hospital gown. The prick of badly shaven thigh hair rubs against the polyester garment. A chill draft from the air vent reaches down, cooling me like frozen putty. The doctor comes in, takes my blood, gives me a smile meant to make things easier. As I leave, holding my mom's hand, I look out at the other children in this waiting room—'the sea of lost souls,' I think, those the state claims are mentally ill and ought to be kept away. A trans girl rests her head on her father's shoulder, his beard enveloping her. Across from her, a trans boy taps his knees— one two, one two—waiting to be called for his appointment. Our lives have been shamed for as long as we've been out, maybe even before too. But we are smiling while we still can.
I am nineteen and stuck. The American Airlines woman's eyes dart between my face and my ID, her mouth tightening with each glance. My
post- around our a-little-too-cramped room on the second floor of 88 Benevolent St.
For our first issue of the volume, it’s fitting that our writers are also thinking about beginnings and endings, renewal and remaining. In Lifestyle, the managing editors are reflecting on first experiences, including first tattoos, a first(ish) intercollegiate competition, first relationship retellings. In Feature, Ivy writes an elegy for the trans kids “left behind” in her hometown of Texas. For Narrative, Joe reflects on a street named after him and changing legacies, while Vanessa remembers moments of enduring friendship through hardship. Then, Emily dives into the musical Miss Saigon ’s history and her new experience watching it with her sister and mom. Before you end your post- reading, make sure you check out
teeth chatter and my legs begin to shake, anger rising hot in my throat. Like acid, poisonous and garish gray, I feel myself bubble. But I swallow it down, press my lips together. All I want is to have my bag checked, to disappear into the crowd of passengers around me. To be unremarkable. Nobody told me that sometimes survival means staying quiet, letting yourself be small.
I am twenty and free, or so I feel. In Dallas, there are no lakes that aren’t man-made (growing up here, that was the rumor). Most people don’t believe me, which is understandable. But it’s never something I’ve questioned. As I told this story to a friend over Ratty brunch in Rhode Island, of lakes made by corporations, he frowned, his eyebrow raised like a broken pencil. “Why’s that?” he asked. I opened my mouth, trying to explain, but the humidity turned my saliva thick against my gums, and dust made its home on the roof of my mouth, jagged and streaked with moisture. I kept quiet. Home needs no explanation. It doesn’t get one. It
a new crossword by Ishan!
I’m glad that there are anchors in my life—these grounding people, places, and moments—even as the rest of life swirls in constant motion. I hope that as the new semester unfolds, you’re able to hold onto what comforts you (our new issue of post-, perhaps?) even as new experiences come and go.
Emilie Guan Editor-in-Chief
just is.
I still sleep with a towel on me sometimes. ***
I close my eyes, thinking of my hands and their creases, how they map a future that others might not get. If I were fifteen now instead of twenty, I'd be among those left behind in Texas, where my old clinic stands empty and providers have gone silent. I think about the children still there, their stories paused, futures hanging like unfinished sentences.
What the headlines don't capture is the weight of absence: empty waiting rooms where children once sat holding their parents' hands, providers who dedicated their lives to this care now forced to leave or change practices, families splintering under pressure or fleeing their homes like medical refugees. They don't show you the text messages between desperate parents asking which states are still safe, which clinics might still help them, and how long they have to wait.
This is what makes an elegy: not just what was lost, but what never got the chance to be. ***
I find myself pondering these questions in a post-Trump 2.0 world. Sometimes, I consider it to be a mourning.
So far, he has signed an executive order that recognizes only two biological sexes—which is scientifically false, has been criticized by medical and legal experts, dangerously ignores the lived experiences of intersex people, and permits statesponsored discrimination based on sex. He has banned trans women from women’s prisons, putting them at an extreme risk of violence; he did so by removing trans inmates from sexual assault protections, effectively making prison rape legal, only against trans people. His Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suspended passport applications from anyone seeking to change their gender marker, an attack on the democratic right to public documentation, effectively leaving me unable to leave the country (unless I use out-ofdate documentation) nor update my passport, even though I am a dual citizen. This has also left thousands of trans people who have been in the process of changing their documents after the election in preparation for this very moment in limbo. The State Department has erased any record of trans people from being able to travel outside the country on their website, now only listing the eerie: “LGB.” All trans people are banned from enlisting in the military via an executive order. Medicaid’s coverage of gender-affirming care—a legitimate, life-saving form of health care as recognized by the United Nations—is now dependent on the
state, leaving thousands of trans kids to suffocate. Even trans adults who use Medicare are at risk, or have to terminate their care completely due to the mass-closing of clinics, which are only expected to increase after Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order. Dozens of major U.S. hospitals (even in liberal states: see NYU Langone) have suspended any healthcare for trans youth (including mental healthcare) after this order when he threatened to withhold federal funding for the entire hospital system.
Scariest of all is perhaps the CDC’s being forced to halt every study with the word “trans” in it. Devastatingly, the very few studies that track trans people’s long-term health are now paused. For decades, trans people have been demonized in the medical community—we have been used as test subjects, abused, all while being understudied.
This retraction means that in-depth longitudinal research about the long-term effects of HRT, as well as social discrimination, on the body will not see the light of day for years. Not just for trans kids, but even adults: 20-year-olds like me, 60-year-olds too, citizens of this country we call our home.
I am terrified for my health, the health of my community, and the fact that our fascistic government is trying to erase us from the rest of society, burning us, treating us as deviants who ought to perish.
I mourn us, though we aren’t even gone.
***
Federally, so much is changing. Too much, too quickly, too dangerously. Yet my day-to-day life feels awfully the same. I go to class, I get dinner with friends, I write, and I sleep. How do I reckon with that? It is almost a deceptive change, and even more so when I ‘log off’ from the news.
I do not have to experience empty waiting rooms where children once sat holding their parents' hands. I have simply been lucky enough to age out and attend college out-of-state.
This new era, this Trump 2.0 world, is not just a political shift—it’s a cultural one, an erosion of human dignity, and it’s terrifying. The world I knew in Texas has already started to evaporate from my memory, but what of those still suffocating in its wrath? Watching from a distance feels like complicity, like a betrayal to the people I love and the communities I belong to.
We can’t pretend this isn’t happening. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of silence in a time when our futures and our lives are being legislated out of existence.
Every time I go home, my mother still hugs me like I'm breakable. My older brother's room is unchanged, the walls sap-green, and the kitchen still smells like cilantro and whatever meal is coming next. This place—Texas—will always be mine, even as it tries to disown me. My family remains here, rooted deeper than any legislation can reach, and so a part of me will always belong to these dusty highways and wide skies that know my name. It doesn't matter that I've 'escaped' Texas for good, because it will always be a part of me, a place I long for and return to on breaks, only to feel fractured and disillusioned with what it is coming to be. Texas is a dinosaur that I keep feeding little pieces of grass so it licks me and hugs me and calls me its child.
I sometimes think about the fragility of my own safety—even as someone of racial and economic privilege. As a young trans person, I grew up in a world that didn’t know how to protect me, a world that saw me as an aberration, a mistake, a thing to be fixed. I managed to survive that, only to step into this new world where the stakes feel even higher. I’ve “made it out,” yes. But what does it mean to be safe when the people I grew up with are not? It’s an ugly paradox—safety comes at a cost, and mine might just be a byproduct of my privilege, my ability to leave, and the fact that I was born in 2004 rather than 2010. But what about the trans kids who can’t? What of the ones for whom leaving is an impossible dream, held back by families, finances, or the brutal pull of home?
I imagine a girl, fifteen and fading. Her clinic walls are cracked, the air thick with sterilized desperation. Her mother presses her palm against her child’s back, the heat of their body a fragile tether between them. The child’s eyes are wide, too old for her age, watching the other kids in the room like she’s seeing ghosts. “It’s going to be okay,” the mother whispers. Because that’s what mothers do, what they must do.
Now, I close my eyes, let myself rest, the jet-black of my lids enveloping me. I can see my future—our future—and it is dazzling: we have access to documentation, healthcare, and we are loved. We have children, we get married; we cook steamy Thanksgiving turkeys and watch our friends wrinkle. Our kids go to college and make lives for themselves, too. The days of discrimination and tyranny are gone. We are no longer the scapegoat but simply a people, united as one—worthy and seen for it. And everything turns out okay. But it won’t just happen on its own. It will take every ounce of fight we have left, and we must keep going until it’s real.
“I feel like pickleball is like Wii tennis.”
“I’ll send you a fax from hell.”
maffa way what's in a name?
by Joe Maffa
Illustrated by Junyue Ma
There is a street in Charlestown that carries my last name. A small bypass that converges Broadway and Mystic Ave into that infamous Sullivan Square rotary, Maffa Way stretches a quarter mile at most. Despite its unassuming length, I would guess that this is one of the most frequently traveled roads in all of Massachusetts. On the edge of the Mystic River, the rotary ports suburbanites straight into the hustle of downtown Boston. Maffa Way, the tiny ramp that shares a calling card with myself, is a fundamental step in any commuter’s journey from coffee-fueled morning gridlock all the way to their twinkling return home.
Take the second exit on the rotary and you’re delivered into the historical heart of the city. The North End is the oldest residential area in the city, the site of Paul Revere’s home, which is just a short walk from the Old North Church. All Massachusetts students know his story well; it is a recurring part of our curriculum from kindergarten through high school, from coloring books and story time to Longfellow’s poem and the realization of William Dawes in it all. Sitting cross-legged on the shaggy carpet of my kindergarten classroom, I consumed the tale for the first time, full of that specific variant of wonder and awe that only five-year-olds can conjure, as my teacher taught us about his midnight ride.
Just a drive away lies the birthplace of our nation, a land of heroes who persevered despite all of the odds stacked against them. High in the bell tower of the Old North Church, Paul Revere looked for a sign—one if by land, two if by sea. On an evening patrol of the neighborhood, he saw two clear signals; thus began the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Racing from Boston all the way to our very own Acton, he alerted the brave minutemen to wake up and get ready to fight. Together, they put their lives on the line and fought for the America that we know today.
A legacy codified in a poem, distilled to students throughout the country. Not all students could say that that ride passed through their backyard, that minutemen roamed their neighborhood, that musket balls could be found when they explored the woods behind their home. As a child, I would pretend I was a soldier during recess. My friends and I would fashion tricornes out of computer paper and use branches as weapons until the teachers took them away. We fantasized about being heroes, that one day we’d be synonymous with a new revolution, that our mark on the world would be admired and reproduced in playgrounds across the country.
In a way, I already had a piece of my history documented for the world with Maffa Way. I like to imagine that, years before his home was known as The Paul Revere House, years before that strip of land would be paved and given my name, Paul Revere took it from the city to the disjoint towns where he announced that the British were coming. It was a source of pride to think that my narrative overlapped with American history, despite the fact that Maffas did not exist in America at that point— my grandfather’s ancestors grew up in Sicily; they immigrated at the turn of the twentieth century. Still, it warms me to think that a house that bears
the name of a hero is just down the way from a street that bears mine.
When we drove my grandparents into the city for our weekly dinner, my dad would often do a second loop around the rotary so I could see the street sign. Back then, not yet old enough to write my name, but old enough to recognize it, I leaned over the middle row of our van and asked my grandfather the story of how that sign came to be.
My uncles shared an F-86. In these jets, the pilot sits in the front—he calls the shots, weaving through dogfights, maneuvering their five-ton behemoth like a surfer on waves. Behind him, the other pilot is manning the weapons, monitoring the aircraft and the winds, calling out enemies in the periphery, UP! LEFT! DIVE! My uncles were good enough that they could do both. They left Somerville for Korea, but they never made it back. All they left me was a pin for my lapel and this street named in their honor. They taught me to fight the good fight, and that legacy lives within us all.
I was told variations of this story countless times during these car rides. I remember drawing pictures of these unnamed Maffas, sitting backto-back in the cockpit, donning aviator glasses, a bomber jacket, and a bushy mustache. They exude confidence, grace, fear, and satisfaction, with smiles that say regardless of how this particular ride goes, they already changed this country for the better. This piece of history, encased in the locket of my name, was a legend to live up to.
The prospect of that, the expectation of it all, excited me as a child. It’s sickening that the same feeling that once inspired me today weighs on me, crushes me under the pressure of what it means to leave a legacy—to leave and have people know that you were once there, that your name means something, that you are carrying on all that it meant before.
All these years later, I find myself amongst a new history, one ever evolving, in a school of innovators and disruptors and leaders. Here, at the top of the ramp leading to the engineering building, sits Newton’s Apple Tree. Tree might not be the most fitting title for this adolescent sapling—limbs not fully formed, skinny and awkward with an uncertain spine communicating an unawareness of all that it might one day be. Its name comes with its own story.
One day, Isaac Newton sits down for a nap under the vast, majestic canopy of a common apple tree when, by a stroke of universal luck, a meaty, ripe, let’s-call-it-Honeycrisp falls upon his skull. Instead of a concussion befalling him, he’s struck with inspiration for arguably the most important scientific theory to ever have been developed since fire, or the wheel, or sliced bread, depending on your preferred proverb. That consequential fruit with a mind of its own tightens all the loose screws in his head, gives him purpose, lays out his life and the fame and the success and the anthologies and research papers to be written about all that he would go on to accomplish.
I look at this tree, the descendant of the one that changed the course of scientific inquiry, and I wonder if it feels that pressure too. How long has it stood like this, crooked, branching at an angle, bashful instead of brandishing its title with pride? Has it tried to grow, to blossom, to bear fruit, and failed? Are the splotches of torn bark scars from its mistakes? Is it in a peak of rejuvenation or a valley of recession? How many students have crossed its path and hoped that it would inspire them, set them straight, and open their minds to that life-changing, world-altering discovery? There’s at least one in front of it right now.
I’m old enough now to write my name, to write essays about the power of a name, to think about legacy and purpose, to craft stories and pass them on like my grandfather did. And here I am, a carrier of a name that graces a street, looking at a carrier of a name that graces scientific history. The two of us are shells of the full stories. How can an apple fall on my head if this tree doesn’t even have any apples yet? When will I live up to the name? Newton was only 23 when it happened to him, and Paul Revere was a Son of Liberty in his thirties; my grandfather’s uncles must’ve been somewhere between the two. I spend my time searching for inspiration, to be all my name wants me to be. These days, I feel further than ever from the future that I used to imagine as a child. I’m an imposter, a sparsely furnished sapling trying to live up to the title of Newton’s Apple Tree. The story that supersedes the name; when will mine be fully written? Who’s going to tell it to the next generation?
anchored where does love sit in you?
by Vanessa Tao
by Tarini Malhotra
Illustrated
tw: suicidal ideation
first night
There’s a choker wrapped around your neck. It’s a pendant, a heavy one—I complimented it before we went out tonight. Now, huddling in the cold with the paramedics, giving them your information, I find myself wondering if they will take it off. Will they deem it a hazard? Will you claw at it with cold, desperate fingers, staring at their neon vests through your horizon-colored contacts? I’m not sure, so I just keep reciting your phone number through the fog of my breath.
“What’s her birthday?”
“Uh. I don’t know, I’m sorry. We’re not that close. I’m sorry.”
I tell them your name and number. I tell them the dorm I think you live in. I tell them what happened, or at least what I remember. That’s all I know. I don’t know your birthday. I don’t know if anything like this has happened before. I just know you want to kill yourself in 22 days. I just know you’re scared that your mom will scream when you do—if you do.
It’s true. We’re not that close. I’ve never even seen your real eyes.
That night though, it didn’t matter. What mattered is that I held you in zero degrees, held your hand so tight I thought it would break. I held you for so long my fingers couldn’t feel my keys when I fumbled for them later that night. I held you for so long I can still see the marks of your desperate hands gripping onto my knuckles, you crying to go, me crying for you to stay.
Every word I was saying to them wasn’t for them; it was for you. Every word I said to them, every inadequate, measly detail about you that I told them was for you. A plea, a plea that maybe somehow, over the sirens and through the fog, I would say something you could hear.
Instead, all I hear is your bone-chilling scream as you’re strapped down in the ambulance. It echoes in my head on the way home.
second night
Four nights later, my friend stands a few paces away, giving my information to the paramedics. I sit in the cold, watching my breath fog up my phone screen as I debate who to call, excited to laugh with someone over the insanity that this was my second EMS call in four days.
I’m giggling, drugged up on nothing but endorphins and the joy of having my friends here to witness the medics gather around me to take my blood pressure.
I know someone in every group that walks by. They all come to ask what’s going on. It adds to the delirium I’m feeling—recounting the story of how my knee buckled while in Taekwondo, repeating, “yeah I can walk on it but not well,” and “I don’t know, I think I was cursed or something this week.” It makes me marvel at the absurdity of sitting injured in front of Sayles, at 11 p.m., surrounded by bright-eyed medical students, getting my second call from the Dean of Student Wellness this week asking if I “need any support from Brown University administration after my latest distressing incident.”
As my fingers start to freeze, I’m still laughing. As I think of my friend in the hospital, I’m still laughing. As I limp up the stairs to my dorm, aware of the plans I’ll have to cancel, I’m still laughing.
What I’m not fully aware of, through
my adrenaline-painkiller-what’s-happening haze, is that my friend left her UTRA applications to walk over in zero degrees and prop my arm up on her shoulder, and my other friend left her original plans to accompany me (under the guise of seeing my dorm for the first time), and my girlfriend left her warm bed to walk alongside us and support me.
They hold my hands in the cold, so hard I’m worried my fingers will break. They find my keys and unlock my door. I struggle onto my lofted bed, and they help bandage my knee, concern and amusement in their smiles.
As I’m falling asleep, their laughs echo in my head, an aching somewhere other than my knee.
third night
It’s been a couple of days since then. Now I’m sitting on my bed doing nothing, and my friend from the first night is probably in her bed too. They never did take the choker, although they did take almost everything else.
My knee is screwed up—how badly, I’m not sure. I’ll find out after the MRI later in the week.
None of that really matters, though. What matters is that I’m here now, warm, with my friends curled up on my bed, my brother is visiting when I need him most, and no one is holding anyone in zero degree weather.
It’s pouring outside. Every time I find I can’t walk, I know I have someone to call. Every time a friend finds themself collapsed on the ground, I know where I will be.
It’s pouring outside. Tonight, everyone is okay, holding onto one another. Regardless of tomorrow, we will keep holding on. Forget the cold. It’s okay that the world fell apart last night.
What I really want to know is: are we still good for lunch tomorrow?
you know i’d give my life for you my mom, miss saigon, and me
Emily Tom
by
Illustrated by Ina Ma Instagram: @1ma1na
The photos are, frankly, grotesque. There’s an uncanny valley quality to them: You can tell that this man, based on the lighting and costuming, is performing. And from how thin and dark his eyes are, he must be Asian. But the skin of his eyelids is stiff and artificial. Even if you didn’t know that this man is actually a white British actor clad in latex prosthetics, you would be able to tell that something’s off.
The actor is Jonathan Pryce, who played the Engineer in the original production of the musical Miss Saigon on the West End, winning a Tony for the same role a few years later. He is also at the center of criticism about the show. In an interview, he describes the “special makeup” he wears for the character. Pryce and the talk show host both pull their eyes sideways as they talk. A young Lea Salonga sits next to them, hands folded in her lap, smiling with her teeth.
Miss Saigon is a romantic tragedy based on the Italian opera Madame Butterfly. It was written and composed by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the same artists behind Les Miserables. The story follows Kim, a Vietnamese bar girl, and Chris, an American G.I. They fall in love and get married just before Chris evacuates Sài Gòn with the U.S. military. Years later, Chris travels to Vietnam with his new, white wife to learn Kim has not only waited for his return, but has also given birth to his child. At the end of the show (spoiler!), Kim devises a plan to force Chris and his wife to take the child to America with them to give him a better life. (Like seriously, major, big papa spoiler.) She shoots herself and dies in Chris’s arms.
Miss Saigon has been criticized for racism since it came out in the 1980s. It’s also one of my favorite musicals of all time.
In the final years of the Vietnam War, my grandma, like Kim, was in love with a white American G.I. Together, they had my mom. My biological grandfather, like Chris, left Sài Gòn and started a new family in America. “He love your mom very much,” my grandma texted me, “but he were married man.” In 1975, days before the fall of Sài Gòn, my mom and some members of her family fled to America. My grandfather spent the rest of his life with his second family; none of us ever saw him again.
I understand, objectively, why I should find the musical offensive—both on a broad and personal level. The writers do exactly what Viet Thanh Nguyen criticizes Western media for: They focus on sensational moments of violence. Such sensationalization is the reason why vivid photographs, such as that of Kim Phúc running naked through the streets after a napalm attack or Thích Quảng Đức burning alive in an act of selfimmolation, are so prevalent in Western memory. They are images Americans can use to talk about their own experience and memory of the war. They have also replaced the more realistic, although quiet, struggle for Vietnamese survival every day. Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “Each of us reaches this moment when we realize that the rest of the world no longer cares, if it ever did, about our memories.”
So when the musical tells us nothing about Kim’s past, beyond the fact that she is orphaned and homeless because of the war, the audience does not question it. When Kim asks Chris, “Do you want one more tale of a Vietnam girl?” it’s clear we, just like Chris, are supposed to say no. Her questions are rhetorical. And when she elaborates, only for a short while (“Do you want to be told how my village was burned? … How my parents were bodies whose faces were gone?”), her memories are incredibly vague and incredibly gruesome. The musical seeks to align itself with the long line of atrocities we already know about. As a result, Kim’s entire personal history is replaced by a very traumatic, very American understanding of the war.
The musical also frames its Vietnamese characters, especially mixed-race children, condescendingly. In their essay on feminist refugee epistemology, scholars Yến Lê Espiritu
and Lan Duong challenge that Western narratives, rather than engage the Vietnamese war experience, flatten their Vietnamese characters. Miss Saigon does exactly that. The second act opens with “Bui Doi,” a song about the children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers— children who, the song tells us, were “conceived in hell / and born in strife.”
The song turns mixed-race children, including Kim and Chris’s son, into helpless objects in need of American assistance. “Someone has to pay / for their chance at life,” the chorus sings. Black-and-white photos of real children are projected on a scrim at the back of the stage. If they could see the production, Espiritu and Duong would probably say the musical evokes the war to elicit pity, and that pity serves as a substitute for an analysis of the geopolitics and empire that led to such atrocity.
I know this—that the show does a disservice to the civilians who actually lived through the war, that its portrayal of Vietnamese people is fundamentally racist. But when I think of those black-and-white projections, I can only think of my mom. I think about the way she told me so many mixed-race children were abandoned by their families after the war because they were proof of association with the enemy. I remember asking her if her mother would have left her on the streets, and the best answer she could offer was: “I hope not.”
I’ve watched the musical a few times now, a grainy bootleg recording (a.k.a. “slime tutorial”) of the 2017 Broadway revival. More than once, I’ve watched it with my sister and my mom. I remember the scene where Chris leaves Kim behind at the end of the war. As the prop helicopter flies away, the Asian actors fall to their knees and scream. “All those people know they’re going to be killed,” my mom told us, as if we were watching a documentary and not a fictional performance.
Because fiction is the closest we have to our lived experience. There are so few stories about the war that centers Vietnamese people at all, and even fewer that mention mixed-race children. The only time I’ve ever seen half-Vietnamese children of the war mentioned in Vietnamese diasporic literature was in Ocean Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments”: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. / Yikes.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. But I also don’t think three lines of poetry, however good they may be, is enough to represent the mixed-race experience of the war. I keep looking for more pieces of art that make me and my family feel seen, and I keep turning up with nothing.
The musical may be rooted in racism, but it’s still important to me. There’s a reason why my sister, who grew up doing theater, says Kim would have been her dream role. There’s a reason my parents saw the show live when it went on tour. It’s because Miss Saigon is, as far as I can tell, one of the only depictions of mixed Vietnamese life that exists at all. It’s the only piece of art that comes close to telling the story of my mom’s parents. Who am I to take that from her? From myself?
In the long run, I know the remedy is to make space for even more diasporic art. But for now, Miss Saigon is the best I have. So I’ll keep watching the musical, and I’ll know it’s a white man’s fantasy, this Asian girl killing herself over her American lover, and I’ll cry over that fantasy anyway.
in the first place
you never forget your first
all roads lead to
by Emilie guan
The first time I’m behind the wheel, it’s midnight and freezing, and my father is explaining which pedal is for gas and which is for the brakes. We’re parked on the side of the road right outside our neighborhood, and the traffic lights cast our features in red relief—or in my case, a burnt film of fear. The wheel is damp beneath my hands. Now, before you pull onto the road, you’re going to press the lever down to signal left, my father explains. I ease up on the brake like it’ll spring back up with clean jaws, so that the speedometer ticks up from zero to a whole two kilometers per hour. I look in the side mirror to see an empty road yawning behind us. No movement except the car’s nervous humming. And then we’re on the road.
Through the warp of the windshield, we pass my old school and the grocery store where we get our imported Philadelphia cream cheese and all the crossroads I’ve only ever seen from the backseat. My entire life I’ve been watching American shows and movies where the teenage main character finally learns to drive. It’s always about freedom, escaping onto I-95, and watching their small hometown strip away like a mottled, molting exoskeleton. I can finally understand a little, even though we’re just driving in circles and someone could probably outrun us at my current speed. The road is open and calling. Maybe even enough to override my fear of colliding with the bulleted body of another metal machine.
But what I remember most from my first time driving is my father in the passenger seat. After I make a right turn (remembering to signal) without taking a chunk out of the curb, I look over to see him smiling. You’re going to be a great driver, he says. The streetlights look like fallen columns of stars. My father hums a familiar song.
nothing about for the small possibility of being considered for a job. They have no idea what the FAFSA is. They get designated time to play and have never had to merge onto a busy highway. They don’t know anything yet— other than toys and lollipops and maybe a U.S. president or two—and it does them good.
What changed? What if I still want to be a kid? I’d be a really good one, I promise. I would never allow my mom to scold you for watching an rated-R movie on the airplane while I’m next to you. I’d practice the best hygiene of any child you’ve ever seen. And most of all, I would savor the opportunity to–even if just for one more day—experience the protection, the safe knowledge that everything will be okay, the moments of feeling small wrapped in my parents’ arms.
Then again, there are privileges to growing up, to standing on the cusp of real adulthood. I’m seeing my passions burgeoning before my eyes and taking classes in cool things, and when I talk to my friends, I get the sense that I am becoming someone real. Plus, what I didn’t mention was that next to my baguette, I had a bottle of wine in my tote bag too.
floored.
by kathy gonzalez
I first offered him my desk chair, then the little ottoman with the oft-forgotten storage space, and finally my bed. But for some reason, he always chose the floor. I thought it was a oneoff—that he was being polite or saving space in case someone else came over. But then as sophomore year progressed and I learned that politeness was never his goal, it became clear that his quirk was actually a preference: my best friend is a floor dweller.
As next-door neighbors in a dorm we were tricking ourselves into loving, we would leave our doors ajar and enter one another’s room with little to no concern for what the other was doing. We had unintentionally crafted a lovely little routine: walk in, sit (or lay) on the floor, talk about the latest minor inconvenience or existential crisis, pause for (and disregard) feedback, exchange Tweets or TikToks, overstay our welcomes. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to living with a sibling.
The floor dwelling remained strong as ever throughout our junior year. The distance was tough seeing as we were one whole floor apart, but we were committed to our debriefs. Nearly every night, he would come home and engage in awkward small talk with my suitemates before laying on my shaggy rug and telling me about his day—about how his lab is falling apart, how he has a tummy ache but is being really brave about it, how not having a friend group is sad but oddly freeing. While we would rehash conversations and dwell on things we had no control over, at least we could do it together.
Nowadays, as we pretend we’re ready to be adults in a few months’ time, our routine has slightly evolved. We’ve traded in the impromptu check-ins for “can i visit” texts and jimmying the door to his building with my ID. We’ve also warmed up to the idea of using furniture— namely, his cloud-like couch that has served as my bed a number of times. As one wall became one floor became three blocks away, we’ve gradually accepted that the floor dwelling is no longer an act of spontaneity, but one of love. I know he’ll laugh at me for saying that the real floor dwelling is the friends we made along the way… but that truly is the case. And with a future filled with uncertainty and limitless possibilities, it’s reassuring to know that there will always be a floor for us to dwell on.
444 girls
by Elijah puente
ILike the ‘444’ inked on my right arm, the memory of my first time getting a tattoo will always stick with me. During Thanksgiving Break 2023, my two cousins and I planned to get matching tattoos (definitely not inspired by a TikTok). Rather than making an appointment at a well-researched shop, we waited until about 5 p.m. to call around and find any reasonably priced tattoo shop with availability. That led us to an infamous shop in the heart of Gary,
IN, known for being Indiana’s first legal tattoo shop, producing quality work, and housing live tigers. However, we didn’t experience this level of quality ourselves. We approached the tattoo shop hoping the questionable man standing outside was another customer, but we were quickly asked, “Are you the 444 girls?” He confirmed that I, a man, also wanted this tattoo and then asked us to Venmo him $60. My oldest cousin went first. After seeing her abstract tattoo, I quickly decided I would not be placing mine in a visible place. As my other cousin took her turn, the shop’s piercer told us stories of piercings she’s botched and recounted a man asking people to take turns “reeling him in” after receiving a fish hook piercing through the head of his penis. Thankfully our tattoo artist had great sterile technique. He went to the back often to “wash his hands,” but returned with hands bone-dry and the smell of alcohol on his breath. He was even gracious enough to check and see if we noticed him dropping a needle on the floor before deciding whether to still use it. I couldn’t tell you why after seeing all of this I proceeded to let him tattoo me. Thankfully, my tattoo came out relatively good (just don’t get too close), but I don’t think I can say the same for my cousins.
first time competing (again)
by Jessica Lee
This weekend, I participated in my first intercollegiate figure skating competition. Now, to clarify, this was definitely not my first time ever competing. In fact, it was my first time returning to the competitive stage since the 2016 U.S. National Championships—an event I had assumed marked the end of my competitive career forever.
Walking into MIT’s Johnson Athletic Center for the event stirred up more emotions than I would have expected. I knew that this competition was low-stakes for the team, as our main goal was simply to have fun, but the smell of hairspray wafting through the halls and the sight of fallen Swarovski crystals all over the arena floor brought back some strong memories. Memories of a past I inhabited about a decade ago, when my life used to revolve around events like this. This competition, however, was different. Rather than competing as myself, against a myriad of cutthroat competitors, I was here as a member of a team, surrounded only by supportive students, all excited for a weekend away from their studies. This competition lacked the intensity and adrenaline that I vividly remember coursing through the air during the biggest events of my career. Instead, I felt nothing but joy radiating from all the teams around us. That was definitely a first for me.
Ultimately, our team came in 9th place—a result that might have devastated 14-year-old me, at the height of my competitive career. But despite the placement, I found myself leaving the arena feeling elated and energized. There was a certain beauty in being able to revisit something so integral from my past, but as a completely different person. It felt genuinely remarkable getting to experience something for the first time, all over again, in a brand new way.
first but not least by
Tabitha Lynn
The first time I stepped onto Brown’s campus, it was deserted. My junior and senior years of high school were swept away by Covid, and I applied to colleges practically blind to what they were really like. My family planned a one-day road trip to see colleges all along the Northeast. No hotels, no rest, just one day starting at 6 a.m. in Maryland and ending in the same place 16 hours later. Brown was the last stop on our trip; we walked through the abandoned Main Green, stopped by Ten One’s grand opening on Thayer, and ordered Vivi’s popcorn chicken for the way out. There wasn’t a student in sight, and yet, I had a sense that I wanted this place to be my home. Four years later, my best memories inhabit every niche of this campus. It is strange to reminisce about the first time that I was here—how innocent, how unaware I was of all that awaited me here in the years to come. It seems that this semester, everything—even the firsts—is a last. Last first day of school. Last first warm day. Last first prod. I am determined to experience my lasts this semester the same way I did my firsts: with wonder and appreciation for all that has happened and all that is ahead.
firsts and lasts
by Klara Davidson-Schmich
My girlfriend and I have been over the chronology of our relationship a million times, to little consensus. “Tell me again,” I’ll ask: when you first knew you liked me, when you first knew you loved me, what your first impressions were. We’ve gone over the instance of our first meeting so many times that the retelling of it is just as much a part of my memory of it as the night itself.
In Lost Children Archive , Valeria Luiselli writes: “New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.” She also describes the idea of linguistic archaeology, that the conversations we have and the stories we tell build the world we share.
People like narrative signifiers, clean openings, and neatly tied-up ends. We like when our movies end with credits, when our books start with prologues. We are obsessed with first kisses, first crushes, first loves, first times. In relationships, we go on first dates, celebrate anniversaries, do everything we can to delineate moments of importance.
Even now, two years later, my girlfriend and I go back and forth on dates, giving our own version of events until we settle on a story we both tentatively agree on. If I mess up the previously accepted timeline, she will jump in, adamant: “You didn’t even like me then!”
by Ishan Khurana
Chase Wu
by
1 3 6 7 2 8 4 5
“The caress of those fingers, dangerously cautious yet curious, lead me to believe that I am undeniably desired. How many moments follow the feeling of first love— that subtle mix of fear and pounding rush to experience everything all at once?”
— Gabi Yuan, “The Delicacy of Firsts” 02.08.24
“To be in the ‘middle of nowhere’—a place that has been an important somewhere all along— I think this action may be more ‘advanced’ than any skyscraper we could ever construct.”
Texas fortress, or a car rental company 1 _____ New Year (the first day of the Year of the Snake)
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Emilie Guan
FEATURE
Managing Editor
Klara David -
son-Schmich
Section Editors
Daphne Cao
Elaina Bayard
ARTS & CULTURE
Managing Editor
Elijah Puente
Section Editors
Shaliz (Lizzy) Bazldjoo
AJ Wu
Section Editors Gabi Yuan
Chelsea Long
LIFESTYLE
Managing Editor
Tabitha Lynn
Section Editors
Daniella Coyle
Hallel Abrams
Gerber
POST-POURRI
Managing Editor
Susanne Kowalska
Section Editor Olivia Stacey
COPY CHIEF Jessica Lee
Copy Editor Indigo Mudhbary
SOCIAL MEDIA
Managing Editor
Tabitha Grandolfo
Section Editors
Alex Hay
LAYOUT CHIEF
Gray Martens
Layout Designers
Amber Zhao
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Romilly Thomson
Gabi Yuan
Lynn Nguyen
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Daphne Cao
Indigo Mudbhary
Ishan Khurana
Sofie Zeruto
Sydney Pearson
Ayoola Fadahunsi
Samira Lakhiani
Ellyse Givens
Katherine Mao Reina Jo
Jedidiah Davis
Zoe Park
Lily Coffman Across Famous boxer Muhammad 1 4 Tossed over the shoulder, as a backpack Black and white mammal (who has a red counterpart) Something that can be marked as read, perhaps 6 Reef material, or a shade of pink
