I left my home in Springfield, Missouri when I was 18 to attend college in Providence, Rhode Island. As the valedictorian of my high school class and recent co-star of a public tragedy in my hometown, my final months in the comforting hollows of the Ozarks were filled with warnings, worry, and a taste of wealth. Certain community members took it upon themselves to remind me what I was getting myself into by going to school so far away from home. Adults who had grown up in the area, ventured out, and sulked back home (a return which became more of a triumphant saunter after years of reinterpretation) would pull me aside at graduation parties to inform me, with raised eyebrows and a tone striving to reach the same heights to say,
Change is in the air. Spring is upon us, the days are longer, and once again happiness can arise spontaneously without cause. Upon us is spring break, after which is a series of packed weekends with various galas, club socials, and warm afternoons on the main green. It’s those 60F+ days, when everyone and their dog is soaking up the sun, that remind me how good the energy here at Brown is, how young we all are, and how much there is to come.
This week in post-, our writers are thinking
“That is not your world.” Fraught facial features would relax and hands would reach for checkbooks as these well-meaning souls realized the only way to prepare me for the unknown was to fatten up my wallet. Try losing an immediate family member before the next cycle of graduation parties—it can do wonders for your wardrobe.
Before coming to Brown, I had been east of the Ozarks only a handful of times, mostly on family road trips to other Midwestern or Southern states, and once to New York and New Jersey on a family vacation designed to give me a taste of the life that academic success could afford. I visited Columbia, Princeton, and NYU and, being equally astounded by all three
about change and about home. In Feature, our writer reflects on moving to the East Coast for college. In Narrative, one writer describes killing ants as a bonding activity; the other reflects on vulnerability and protection. In Arts & Culture, one writer reminisces about days when she painted with her grandmother; the other discusses orientalism in Hollywood. In Lifestyle, our writer has productivity tips, but if you want to procrastinate, we have another crossword!
So there you have it, another week of life experiences distilled to their quintessential essence that
schools, I concluded that it didn’t really matter where I went to college. “Elite East Coast universities” were all identical in my mind. Yes, Columbia had its core and Princeton its campus, but they all held an equal stake in the life I wanted. For me, that life was defined by what I wanted to escape. I felt stifled by the right-wing politics, cultural complacency, and aesthetic negligence that had come to characterize Springfield in my mind. My whole life I had failed to find outlets for my interest in art and literature, and I felt certain I would lose my mind if I had to listen to one more spiel about career-oriented practicality. I didn’t know what I would find on the East Coast, but I knew it would be different from the middleclass, middle-American life I had always known.
approaches Truth tangentially. Time may feel like it passes faster now that we are older, which I’m being told is because we experience less things that are novel to us, whereas as a child, everything felt distinctly different because everything was new. So read on, see what our writers have to share, pass the time.
Brushing up on my memory recall skills for the campus canines, Kimberly
Liu Editor-in-ChiefI applied ED to Brown without visiting, strategically listing my intended concentration as Slavic Studies, the concentration with the fewest graduates in the year I applied. I don’t know if it was fate or guilt, but I did ultimately study some Russian language and literature, a decision which occasioned more quizzical looks from those same family friends. How could I waste such a rare academic opportunity on reading Dostoevsky? My answer: with conviction and vigor.
The warnings from my friends’ parents turned out to be justified. My arrival at Brown involved a series of shocks that I greeted with what might be called bewildered passivity: My roommate was in the Olympics last year? Okay, sure. Over half of the student body pays the full $75,000 cost of attendance? That checks out. On one of the first days of French class during an ice breaker activity, I ended up in conversation with a friend who asked if I’d been to such-and-such restaurant in Paris and oh, I hadn’t? Well, next time I was there I positively had to go and try the pithivier—to die for. Bien sûr, mademoiselle. J’y vais tout suite . I savored the fleshiness of my own tongue between my teeth as I stopped myself from sharing that, not only had my taste buds yet to be graced by the gastronomic glory of the Michelin star, but I’d never even been out of the country. I have come to understand that this person was as naive as I was. We were unaware opposites. She had likely never been to a Walmart; I was shocked by the lump of raw meat presented to me the first time I ordered beef tartare.
My enlistment in the corduroy-clad ranks of the humanities quelled the chaos of those first weeks. This was a decision made mostly on aesthetic grounds, the same way I would make most of my decisions in the early weeks of school. Why take MATH100 in a cramped, windowless B&H room when I could discuss “Art, Morality, and Religion” amidst mahogany and magniloquence in the Religious Studies building? Why study English and spend four grueling years reading Faulkner when the infinitely more charming Flaubert called the Comparative Literature department home?
I got high off aesthetic splendor. I remember watching my professor click through slides displaying the work of great painters and sculptors as he skillfully related them to works of philosophy and literature. My eyes glazed over with awe (okay, maybe it wasn’t just the aesthetic splendor), and I knew I had finally reached the promised land.
Decamping from Springfield was like a fall from Eden. I was spoiled by glimpses of the lives I saw my friends at Brown living. At times, I found myself longing for the time in my life before I knew how enjoyable travel, expensive food, and financial security could be. I told myself I could’ve been so content if I’d just stayed at
home and gone to Missouri State with my friends from high school. I watched this life play out in my head and I couldn’t help but smile. Of course, I always had to leave. The academic promise I showed in my youth was relayed to me as if it were a ticket to a new world. I remember my father carefully instilling the sentiment that, if I wanted to, I could go to a school like Harvard. I could get out of Springfield, away from all the fundamental Christian conservatism, away from the lack of promise, away from incessant worries about money. Both of my parents were the first in their families to attend college. By attending Brown, I had the opportunity to level up.
While living at home during the pandemic, I worked as a farm hand at an apple orchard about 10 minutes from my parents’ house. My peaceful mornings spent in the hills of the Ozarks led me to develop a conviction that my real life was in Missouri. I wasn’t a literary scholar or a social activist, but a farmhand who drove a skid-steer and chopped wood with an ax. Garden plots grew into wheat fields as my suburban, middle-class upbringing morphed into a rural one in my mind. For a few months, I entertained the fantasy that I could do this forever . I could put on my flannel and muck boots every morning and never give another thought to Jaques Derrida or anyone else who claimed their phony writing somehow made them smarter or more enlightened than everyone else. But no matter how hard I tried to embody this felicitous image, there were always gaps between its outline and my real self.
That bucolic image has a history that is perhaps closer to the life of my parents’ old friend Dan. Dan grew up on a dairy farm in the middle-of-nowhere Missouri before attending Brown and studying everything from semiotics to medicine. He graduated in the early ‘90s, married my mother’s best friend, blew a sizable inheritance from said dairy farm, and is now stewing in a substitute teaching job at a local middle school in Springfield. The last time I saw Dan was during winter break of my freshman year. The cunning nature of coincidence led me to believe that our stories were somehow intertwined, so I asked him to get coffee. I don’t know if I was looking for advice, stories, or just to compare notes from behind enemy lines. What I got instead was one bitter recommendation: “Never come home.”
Dan had attributed years of personal missteps on our shared place of origin. In his mind, it wasn’t bad investments or personal irresponsibility that had led him astray, but the simple fact that he was an Ozarker and he would never be anything else. Instead of launching him into a new life, Brown had become an opalescent vision of what should have been. Dan, like everyone who manages to escape the Ozarks, was the valedictorian of his high school class. And, like me, Dan probably thought he was destined for something better
than what he had always known. In disappointment he had soured, the only reasonable response to being let down by fate itself. I left our meeting feeling as though I had just come face to face with a cautionary tale and did my best to forget everything I had ever thought about destiny.
Though its natural beauty is vast—plains stretching for miles uninterrupted by civilization, rolling hills which give way to babbling brooks—middle America can get ugly. In Theft by Finding , David Sedaris called my hometown “hideous.” Springfield is plagued by abandoned strip malls and developers who insist that, instead of rehabilitating deserted areas in town or building up to give the city a more robust downtown, we ought to just build out. My parents live outside of the city in sprawling, unincorporated territory. I used to savor the final mile of my drive home as the last commercial buildings gave way to quaint houses dotted along a state highway. For years, the only business that dared pass beyond the city limit was a mom-and-pop plant shop erected in a tent on a gravel parking lot. Now it seems like every time I come home, I find office parks and banks creeping closer to our house in the ooze of their gentrification. Providence, thankfully, doesn't have the same problem. Of course it has its strip malls and suburbs, but life on College Hill is picturesque. Our springtime is graced by cherry blossoms falling on neoclassical facades; in autumn we find burnt orange foliage scattered amongst preserved colonial homes.
In Providence I found beauty. No, not the rural, innocent beauty of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn frolicking in the Mississippi river. That sort of beauty, I had. What I sought was the beauty of wealth: great art hung on the walls of historic homes into which no son of two public educators could ever reasonably expect to be invited. Regardless of what our most revolutionary peers might insist, Brown is a melting pot. Not just of the American classes, but of minds. It would be silly to ignore the realities of prep schools, social scenes, and easily won admissions biases, but taste always trumps pedigree. I’m asked about who I’m reading more often than I’m asked about who I know. Since coming to Brown, the monochromatic color palette of my life in the Ozarks has exploded into a rainbow of experience. I have friends who share my background, friends who have had an infinitely harder time than myself, and friends who can count themselves as members of the global elite. For some students, earning admission into Brown passed relatively unnoticed in the onslaught of other elite admittees pouring out of their prep schools. Others found a ticket to a new life disguised as a letter of acceptance. No, the elite academic and social world is not mine, but that hasn’t stopped me from finding a home in it.
“You’re such a sheep if you believe in magnets.”
“I thought my grandfather invented skipping”
by Ellyse Givens
My mother used to give my sister and me glass hearts. The ritual was based on the book The Kissing Hand —the story of Chester Raccoon, who is terrified to start kindergarten. Throughout the story, his mother reassures him of the wonderful things he will discover at school, like friends, toys, and books. Then, she goes on to share a special secret that had been passed down through generations, one that will make Chester feel at home in this novel place. After kissing Chester’s palm, his mother tells him, “Whenever you feel lonely… press your hand to your chest and think: ‘Mommy loves you. Mommy loves you. And that very kiss will jump to your face and fill you with toasty warm thoughts.’” And indeed it did. Just like Chester, my sister and I slipped glass hearts—our mother’s kisses—into the outermost pockets of our backpacks to hold close when home seemed too far.
***
I exit a bus to find a place as far from my San Diego home as I could have traveled while remaining within the bounds of the U.S. This time, I don’t have glass hearts in my backpack, but a bottle of wine. My younger sister chose Colby College in Waterville, Maine for its scenery and tenderhearted community, and I have come to love it too. But this weekend would be particularly special. This weekend was “Doghead,” a Colby holiday that takes place on or near St. Patrick’s Day, during which students pull an all-nighter to watch the sunrise on the Miller Library steps. Some students also choose to ingest live goldfish, for reasons I do not know.
I can see from afar as she gallops toward me—her hair is already done, the two front portions woven backward into small French braids lying idly atop her head. It is March in Maine and the sun has arrived gleefully, at least for the day, enough to make me squint.
“Ellyse, why are you so bundled up? It’s warm out!” I wear a scarf, and she a cropped green tank top.
“I thought I was coming to Maine!” I shout, jogging the last couple of steps to wrap my arms around her, letting go of my suitcase handle.
Tumbling up the three flights of stairs, I can already
hear the familiar bounce of Hannah Montana’s “I Wanna Know You” playing in her room. I don’t usually like small spaces, but her clutter feels comfortable today, every charger cord and throw pillow and wall garnish the same light pink hues as her childhood bedroom. I rush to slip on the outfit I had already curated, a cropped green blouse and blue jeans, as I greet Sophia, Julia, Jonah, and Daniel. Apparently, Emily’s room is the place where they “normally pregame,” which elicits just a tiny sense of pride in me.
There’s an a cappella concert and a dance recital and the dining halls are open all night, and everyone is very excited because an official Doghead has never “really” happened since before the pandemic. I hear all of this as I press gold glitter into the inner corners of my eyelids and tattoo a figure of a miniature leprechaun holding a rainbow on my cheek.
We go to the dining hall for dinner, each of us mildly buzzed. Unbeknownst to me, Emily brought a canned margarita into the dining hall. At one point, her friend Sophia swiped it abruptly and held it under the table.
“Emily, the dining hall worker was glaring at us so hard!” But Emily just laughs, dipping a french fry into a ketchup puddle.
I feel free here, almost anonymous, no longer at my own college and thus no longer concerned about what others think of me. There’s a similar feeling of jubilation amongst the Colby students; I suspect differences in age or origin or opinion wither into irrelevance tonight, twenty-somethings drinking and dancing as one in celebration of their tiny college home. Emily and Sophia hold hands and skip sloppily up the sidewalk as we leave the dining hall and I scurry to keep up, a goofy grin smeared on my face.
It’s only 11:00PM and I think we have been to five parties already, all of them blurring together.
I remember jumping up and down to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me.” I remember watching a boy stare at my little sister as she sang. I remember the world spinning.
I remember stomping through snow from one party
to the next; my jeans were beginning to dampen but I didn’t care—the alcohol a shield keeping unpleasantries at an arm’s length.
I remember a boy asking me to make out (I said no); I remember dodging another’s hands as they inched closer and closer to the small of my back. I remember jumping up and down and swaying my hips and raising my arms to “raise the roof, woo!”
I remember a bang on the door.
“Get on the fucking ground!” a voice shouts. “Someone has a gun!”
I don’t remember how we got on the ground. But there was banging on the door and I didn’t know what to do; my sister was in my arms and we were sitting below a window— does that mean I should duck my head down ? My neck aches.
There is banging on the walls from outside and I wince with every strike, my body shaking now. People stand above me and look out the window, and contemplate jumping. Others huddle under a beer pong table . Should we jump ?
“IS ANYONE HURT? Is anyone shot?” A SWAT person barges into the room. His gun’s length stretches from the corner of his left knee all the way up to his right shoulder. My sister puts her face into my chest so that she does not have to look. My brain is screaming; I think of my parents. I think of my boyfriend. I DON’T WANT TO DIE . My brain screams again. The window . I duck my head down. My neck aches badly now.
Suddenly, my sister and I are mothers to each other. Her body is splayed across my crossed legs, and I hold her head. She holds me too. I find myself stroking her hair with my palm, just as our mother would do when we cried as children. But I was crying too. I was a mother no longer strong, covering my baby's eyes while also closing my own.
“We are getting out of here, okay? We are getting out of here and we are going back to your room and getting on a plane back home,” I whispered to my sister firmly, still stroking her head with my hand. But I didn’t know that; I was trying to convince myself, too. In The Kissing Hand , Chester’s mother told him that leaving home was good, that he would be safe at kindergarten. But how did she really know?
“‘Mommy loves you. Mommy loves you,’” the mother raccoon said to her baby. I hold my hand to my chest, and it feels hot. I want to see my mother again.
We stay huddled in our spot under the window for two hours, consoled only by obscure emails from administration saying to “remain in place!” We didn’t know what was happening, only that there was a gun involved, and that the police were trying to detain the shooter. But what if there were more? Finally, there is a knock on the door. A senior speaks to the police before informing us that we can leave now, but only one by one, as the hallway is now a crime scene. I stand quickly and begin to slowly budge through the crowd. I am selfish now. I want us out. It is 3:30 a.m.
“We’re sisters. Can you please let us out together?” The police officer frowns at me, so I exit first. I remember seeing blood on the door frame. I remember walking over broken glass.
Three non-Colby students had entered campus to partake in the festivities, and started fighting amongst themselves in that very hallway I walked down; two shots were fired, barely missing passersby. I didn’t know this at the time, so I didn’t think to look for the bullet holes in the walls.
We run back to my sister’s dorm. I fall to my knees on the carpet, finally sobbing. I understand why Chester didn’t want to go to kindergarten. I understand that his mother, deep down, probably didn’t want him to either. Glass hearts can only protect you from so much.
Bare feet against the bathmat. The mildew in the caulk. The crack in the baseboard, like a hyphen in the wood. And, of course, there were the ants, sliding down the wall like electrons on a wire, into the crack.
My sister and I decided not to tell our parents about the ants. We decided this without speaking, the way we decided everything at that time. We would deal with them ourselves.
We crouched over the crack in the baseboard—the mouth of the nest—and covered it with Scotch tape. A few days later, when we saw an ant travel beneath the tape with ease, we took the plastic cup from the edge of the sink, and poured water into the crack. When that failed, we started killing the ants one by one: rolling them between our thumbs and forefingers, like eyelashes bearing wishes, or turning on the faucet and watching them spiral down the drain. We quickly learned that it is not difficult to watch something die.
It is tempting to say I killed ants because it made me feel powerful. When I told a friend I was writing about the way I used to kill ants, I prefaced it by saying, “I swear I’m not a psychopath.” He asked, “Are you ashamed of how much you liked it?” And I said yes.
But that was not the reason I enjoyed killing them. I think of how I was then, at seven years old: large front teeth, big eyes, crooked bangs, which my mother cut in the bathroom once a month. I was bad at sports and bad at speaking in class. I was afraid of bad grades and bullies. I had nightmares about Night Marchers and doppelgangers. But I loved killing these ants. A little girl who loved a little violence.
What I had enjoyed was imagining myself as the ant being killed. I found a lot of peace in picturing my own death. When I couldn’t sleep, I would think about drowning in shallow water, and it would tire me out. Girls die tragically, and their tragedy is beautiful, and I wanted to be one of them. I knew I would not enjoy dying as much as I enjoyed the fantasy of my own death, so I
just watched other things die instead. And I envied them for it.
I remember brushing my teeth and seeing an ant scuttle across the countertop. I crushed it with my fingertip and stared at the corpse: a mangled black teardrop against the granite. Slowly, the ant untangled its legs, unfurled its body, and limped away. I did not know how it could have possibly survived, but because it did, I let it live.
Once, around the same time we started killing ants, my sister and I were walking through an outdoor mall. She closed her eyes and held out her hands. “I’m blind,” she declared. “Be my guide dog.”
I took her hands and led her into a pole. I thought it would be funny. She bit her tongue so hard that it bled. She started to cry. I stood there like a shadow as my father gathered napkins from the Subway next door and cleaned up the blood. I did not know why I did it. I felt awful. But afterward, when the bleeding stopped and my father threw the napkins away, my sister held out her hands and said, “Let’s play again.”
Like most younger siblings, she wanted to be just like me. When I started ballet lessons, so did she. When I ran for student council, so did she. When I joined the speech team, so did she.
And yet my sister still managed to be my opposite. My sister: who is unafraid of stages and spotlights. My sister: who is younger than me, but always insists on driving us everywhere. My sister: who has always been more than capable of handling life on her own—more capable of handling life than I am—still chooses again and again to follow me.
So as children, we killed ants to kill time together. We killed ants in the morning before school, standing side-by-side, brushing our teeth. We killed ants in the evenings, when we wrapped our sopping hair in identical twisting towels. Sometimes, when we killed an ant, another would find its body. The second ant would touch its antennae to its brother’s body, a strange kiss, and run in circles around the corpse. We would let the ant grieve, then kill that one too.
My sister and I shared a bedroom our entire childhoods. Our twin beds, parallel to each other, like two halves of an equal sign. We would lay there at night, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted on our
ceiling, and joke about how many ants we must have killed. I thought we were in it together, that we shared a fascination with pain the same way we shared a room.
As we grew older, and as my anxiety grew worse, she was the one who witnessed my sleeplessness, my crying every night, my shakiness every morning. I remember, when she wanted to talk to me about it, telling her to shut the fuck up, get the fuck away from me. I remember never apologizing.
And I remember the way she used to wade through our backyard after a storm, puddles up to her ankles, and scoop drowning gnats out of the water with a dead leaf. When I think about my sister after the rain, I am convinced that she only killed ants because she was following my lead. I wonder how many horrible things my sister would have done if I had asked her to do them. I began writing this because I wanted to write about sadism, but instead I found myself writing about sisterhood. Maybe there is very little difference between the two. She wouldn’t have killed the ants if I hadn’t wanted her to, and I wouldn’t have wanted to if she hadn’t agreed to kill the ants. Our partnership fed off of itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. We killed ants all summer. — — —
That was until school started again in August. My sister entered her first year of kindergarten. I started the second grade, which meant I was allowed to borrow nonfiction books from the library. In an illustrated encyclopedia of insects, I learned that all worker ants were female, and suddenly, I wanted the ants to live. If the ants had all been boys, maybe I would have thought differently. But now, when I saw one ant run in circles around the crushed body of another, I saw a girl grieving her sister. I saw my own sister, with blood on her teeth, and myself standing next to her, with the knowledge that I was the one who made her bleed.
When I say I am ashamed of myself for killing the ants, what I mean by that is: I am ashamed of how easily and unquestioningly I hurt something. And what I mean by that is: I am ashamed of how easily I hurt my little sister just because I was hurting. And what I mean by that is: I’m sorry.
After I returned the encyclopedia to the library, I stopped killing ants. My sister, as always, followed.
paints, but her paintings never really leave the apartment. There must be over 40 canvases scattered around, propped up on the floor in sets of three or four so you can sort through them like vinyl in a record shop. I discover six older ones I’ve never seen before when I follow her to her bathroom to grab a band-aid.
She thinks of her paintings as unfinished, but to everyone else, they are masterpieces. You could walk into her apartment and think you stumbled into an art collector’s home—too many pieces and not enough space. Then, you would walk along the perimeter of the living room, squatting low to look at each canvas. When you were done, you would have seen summertime in Rome, reached the summit of rugged mountains sprawling with wild fauna, caught cows lazily grazing under the shade of drooping boughs, and floated at sea just as the sun hits shimmering water.
The first time I was in Korea, I spent four months there. Every time I made my way to my grandmother’s home, I hoped she was busy and didn’t have time to tidy up. That way, I’d walk into the living room and catch her with the easel—paint cans, tubes, and brushes scattered around her. Classical music would be pouring from the speakers and I would catch a glimpse of the painter. I’d tell her I want to watch her work—watch her paint shadows that make me stare for hours wondering how she ever transformed the paint into a photograph, watch her move her brush across the canvas the way she sews the hole in my sock: without much thought, swiftfully and instinctively. But she’d only laugh as if I am just flattering her and don’t mean it (I do).
But whenever I entered, the room was always ordinary and clean: her denim apron folded neatly on the couch, pillows fluffed, and a meal ready for me on the table. It was set for one (maybe two if my grandfather was joining) because 할 never ate with me. Instead she shuffled around the house, sprinkling love from one thing to the next: watering the plants, checking if I wanted more of anything (everything was bountiful so I never did), bringing me cut fruit
regardless. Sometimes, during dinner, I would catch her holding a ripped-out magazine page with dollops of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. She would slip behind the bedroom door, and I’d follow, leaning against the door a few feet behind her, quietly watching her refine something with her brush. Then she would turn around, see that I was watching, and hurry me back to my seat.
My grandmother’s masterpieces stay contained within Apt. #2304. I've always wondered why she doesn't showcase her paintings, why she stays hidden behind the bedroom door, why she doesn't sign her paintings, why she never finishes them.
I want to ask her more. I want to know how she keeps her passion alive and for her to show me her recent paintings and to tell me about the new techniques she’s been using.
What inspires you? How do you begin a painting? Where do you begin? What do you love most about it? Do you love it? Does it bring you joy? Peace? Where do you feel it? In your hands, or chest, or head, or is it all over like water swirling and swishing underneath your skin? What else makes you feel like that?
We call her after dinner. We use Dad’s phone and let it ring on the table as I bring plates to the sink. answers and Dad picks up the phone to start us off. I shadow him as Korean finds its natural rhythm on his tongue and the two bounce questions and answers off each other. I admire it and find myself repeating the sentences in my head, trying to do it without skipping or mumbling over syllables. Calling 할 is always easier when I have Mom and Dad near me, so if I manage to use up all the fluent Korean that I was able to download in my brain beforehand, I can pass off the phone for a minute and try to load a little more.
It’s my turn afterwards. We arrive at the topic of dinner because at least I can say we ate spring rolls tonight and name the ingredients, animatedly and theatrically. She tells me that cilantro has been expensive lately in Korea, but the other day, she was having a good day and felt happy, so she bought a bunch at the store. She’s been eating it every day with each meal, and 할 doesn’t like cilantro but that’s totally fine; she cooks something separate for him and then eats her own thing (with cilantro).
, did you know there’s such a thing as a cilantro gene? Some people are just genetically wired to have an aversion to cilantro—it tastes like soap to them.
Maybe 할 has that. You should ask if cilantro tastes like soap to him. What have you been cooking recently? I crave your cooking. I’m moving into a home next year where I’ll have a full kitchen. Will you teach me some of your recipes? I always miss (your) Korean food whenever I’m not home.
I laugh out loud because Mom is too elbow-deep in dishes for me to explain the cilantro gene to her, and then for her to explain the cilantro gene to 할
I wrap around to Mom’s right side and use one hand to put the camera in her face. I ask her to ask 할 for me if she’s tried growing her own cilantro (I am blanking on what suffix to add in order to form a question). Mom does, and 할 says she’s already tried, but the scent and pungency is weaker so it’s not as good.
니 , of course you’ve already thought to grow your own cilantro. How do you do it? Somehow, with any problem, you always have a solution. Even if I have one of my own, yours is better, more efficient, easier. You work smarter than anyone I know and I wish I could just observe the way you live and take notes. Come to the states and visit us, won’t you? I miss you and love you.
Oh well, says Mom. I guess you do need to buy cilantro then. We move on and ask about 할
She tells me that 할 needs to grow his patience, and patience is an important virtue we should have.
Do you remember when we waited in the car while went inside to grab some CD from inside? We played with the music for a second, made jokes about the people we saw passing by, and then you started talking the way you do when your thoughts just flow out of you like a faucet. You told me: do what you love, be with the person you love. You said things that people have told me before, but somehow I listened as if it was the first time. Every memory with you leaves a scent of sweetness.
I respond with a generous head nod to show I understand.
I ask to see what she’s been working on most recently (my favorite part of every call). She moves her camera to show her recent working canvases and I can’t help but use all the Korean adjectives I know to describe beauty within the first two paintings. I try to get her to slow down, but she darts the camera around quickly and casually as if I’ve asked yet again to see her growing plants that I’ve already seen a hundred times.
That shadow. Wait, stop. Zoom in. How did you add color here to remove space? How did this paint dry and create movement instead? What was this before it was the delicate glow of a summer evening sun poking through the whispering leaves of the tree?
All I can offer are gasps of disbelief. tells me she paints the way I tell her I love her: translated and exact with no uncertain terms. So as we end the call, I say those three words , “ letting it hold all the awe and praise and wonderment and respect I have for her. And she says it back to me.
When I speak to 할 , I fumble through my words, and the ends of my sentences mostly slow down and taper into questions. There is a kind of heartache that stirs deep within me, pangs of guilt realizing that I do not know how to say the majority of the questions I set out to ask.
And yet, I can’t help but feel that we might be okay. I think we can read and write and speak this language: the one where her living room is neat and tidy but passion bleeds into the fabric of the couches and spills all over the floors and the walls, and the one where I tell her that I biked to the store today and bought groceries and that I will cook curry tonight, the one where I will ask to see her new paintings and marvel at how they are beautiful, and beautiful, and that one too, is beautiful.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
The cyberpunk city is nocturnal—buildings that skewer the layer of clouds in the sky with their billboards. Neon Chinese characters decorate dark alleyways with splotches of artificial color. Hovercrafts and other extreme feats of technology layer over a dilapidated urban landscape. And the main character loves to wear a leather jacket.
Wait, is everyone Asian?
Yeah.
Oh. Which country?
Doesn’t matter, East Asia blends together in this genre.
Oh.
Wait, what is Scarlett Johansson doing here? +++
For the past three years, I have been an avid anime watcher. Though I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on “all-things-anime” in the weeaboo sense, last semester, I enrolled in a course called “Global Anime” out of curiosity to understand the theoretical basis of my favorite cartoons and a (not-so) small desire to watch Studio Ghibli for college credit. For the first time in my life, I watched Ghost in the Shell , an iconic cyberpunk anime film by Mamoru Oshii that left me in awe of its stunning visuals and commentary on life in a world of information technology. The plot follows Makoto Kusanagi, who tracks down “The Puppet Master,” a sentient AI.
But the 2017 Hollywood live action remake starring Scarlett Johansson majorly flopped in box office sales and sparked extreme controversy from the Asian American community for its casting choices. Ghost in the Shell is not the only anime that Hollywood has butchered: Death Note, Avatar: The Last Airbender , and more recently, Cowboy Bebop make up my personal list of Hollywood remake disasters.
Why does this continue to happen? Is it only because film executives couldn’t get into the habit of casting Asian leads until they found it commercially viable, or does it go far deeper than that? Sure, there are huge artistic limitations in place when hand-drawn fantastical worlds are translated into a realistic setting, but as each Hollywood adaptation fails, I can’t help but wonder if there are underlying forces at play.
+++
Western media is no stranger to orientalist tropes. However, with the emergence of a new, digitized world that relies on information technology, the orientalism trope has also evolved, projecting the West’s fear and desire for the future onto Asian people.
It is with the Hollywood adaptation of Ghost in the Shell that I particularly think about technoorientalism: an evolved ideology that projects the West’s simultaneous anxiety and fascination for a technological future onto the Eastern Hemisphere. These sci-fi worlds marrying technological innovation with East Asian aesthetics (for example, the large billboards featuring the faces of smiling Japanese women in Blade Runner ) are dreary places to live in. They are a reflection of the
present, but “worse…inhospitable, dangerous, and thrilling,” according to Pam Rosenthal’s “Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberpunk, Marxism.”
Cyberpunk also draws from punk culture to visually represent the nihilism of the public.
In “The Myth of Cyberspace,” Richard Wise articulates that commercial mass media has resulted in the public “[being] seen as media consumers to be manipulated and delivered to advertisers…the media are no longer agents of empowerment and rationality, but instead… promote the passivity of their audiences.” In a world saturated with choices that are presented as equally important, everything ceases to matter. Cyberpunk expresses this attitude with “cool” punk imagery, such as the leather jackets and black sunglasses in the costumes of The Matrix the dark outfits projecting a sense of carelessness and lack of conformity. This nihilistic portrayal reveals anxieties about what it means to be human during late-stage capitalism, harboring racial undertones. As commercialization destabilizes the leveling between “good” and “bad,” cyberpunk represents this as the collapse of racial identity levels. Gibson, the aforementioned pioneer of cyberpunk, is quoted as saying, “Modern Japan simply [is] cyberpunk.” This hyper-capitalist, information-saturated, yet thrilling apprehension for the future is cast onto the familiar exoticization of the Far East based in 19th-century orientalism; this associates the dehumanizing nature of information technology with the dehumanization of Asians.
+++
Orientalism is no relic of the past; rather, it continues to exist as the West closely eyes the Asian continent, commenting on its technological superiority and subpar politics and societal structure. Japan is cyberpunk. China is cyberpunk. East Asia is the West’s dystopian nightmare, symbolic of the collapse of white domination.
Techno-orientalism is alive and well today. A quick Google search reveals the ways in which Western journalists use careful word choice to play into this trope (whether consciously or not):
How China Wants to Replace the U.S. Order (The Atlantic, 2022)—a fearmongering title suggesting that East Asian countries threaten Western hegemony and future survival.
Unlocking The K-pop Machine’s Key To International Fame (Jetset Times, 2021)—an
implication that the Korean music industry is an efficient and formulaic factory, alluding to the tendency to view Asian people as mechanical.
Robot workers will lead to surge in slavery in south-east Asia, report finds (The Guardian, 2018)—an example of the foreignness of artificial intelligence projected onto a subjugated and foreign people, painting a bleak picture of a region simultaneously far ahead of the United States technologically yet societally “backwards” in relation to the West.
And so, we return to anime adaptations, particularly Ghost in the Shel l. When contextualized by concepts like technoorientalism, it begins to make sense why Hollywood continues to recast the protagonist and reinvent the story, stripping the anime of its original charm and appeal. When films like Ghost in the Shell appropriate the cyberpunk aesthetic, they embrace Japan as a model for the future which causes an uneasy feeling for the Western audience. In response, Hollywood replaces the Japanese female protagonist with a white actress, introducing the comfort of white subjectivity and assuaging their subconscious fears of an Asian future. Thus, the message of the film also mutates. The main character is no longer a symbol for female ethnic minorities who perform exploitative technological labor, and the cyberpunk backdrop is no longer a reclamation. So, the movie flops.
+++
Despite this rather cynical portrayal of Hollywood, I am filled with some feeling in my chest that is taking shape—perhaps, it is a precursor to hope. After all, I am writing this article in the wake of Everything Everywhere All at Once becoming the most awarded film in history. Although it is not an anime, the film is vibrant, artistic, and features Asian faces at the center of imaginative worlds. We are in the middle of a grand paradigm shift, where Asian Americans hold a small but mighty stake in Hollywood. Film executives may realize that the stories of Asia and its diaspora are valuable; perhaps, they will no longer aspire to twist and mutate anime for their own narratives.
Even greater, maybe we will let go of Western validation altogether; ultimately, our best work features the exercise of our own agency, determination, and power.
by Sarah Frank
Illustrated by Ella Buchanan Insta: @nanahcube
At Brown, so many of us are doing a lot, all the time, everywhere. We all have limitless combinations of jobs, classes, clubs, and other commitments. We bounce from this event to that interview to that section to the library, and repeat it all the next day.
Personally, my brain shuts off at 9 p.m. and renders me useless any time after. So how do I do all of my work without a need for the classic college nighttime grind? I think it all comes down to strategies and platforms I found on social media (I stand by the fact that it’s useful for more than dissociative doom scrolls). Here are five of my favorite strategies that I use to sort, organize, and analyze my workload.
1. Google Keep
Google Keep is possibly one of the most underrated websites. It’s free, simple, and easy: digital sticky notes that you can customize. I have one box per class, a box for housekeeping, a box for things to buy, and a box for work/ extracurriculars. I can put list-style notes in each box and check them off once done. The app lives on the homepage of my phone and the website is bookmarked front and center on my web browser.
It’s the one thing I keep open on my computer all the time, an easy way to reference what I need to do and what I’ve already done.
2. Time and page estimates
Next to every to-do list item, I write down either a time estimate or a page count for the task. Say I have 20 minutes between classes: I can look at my time estimates, find a task that is roughly 20 minutes of work, and get it done. When my brain is too foggy to read a 40 page article full of words I’ve never heard, I can look for the easier tasks on my list. Visualizing the amount of work each assignment demands helps me more effectively assign time in my day to do it.
3. Physically removing distractions
It is with a bit of embarrassment that I admit that I am addicted to my cell phone. My fingers find their way to TikTok before I even realize I’ve unlocked my phone. By putting my phone physically out of reach, I essentially eliminate that urge to check it. I do this with computer tabs as well. For instance, if I leave American Eagle’s website open, I am tempted to resume shopping. Out of site, out of mind.
This is another free app that helps me with productivity. In the event that you can’t do the above and put your phone out of arm’s reach, I’ve found it helpful to open this app. For a given amount of time, the app “bakes” a dessert that will burn if you leave the app. No checking texts, scrolling through Instagram, or watching TikTok.
This semester, I’m lucky enough to have Mondays off. I spend the day setting myself up for the week: making a list of everything that is due, everything I need to read, groceries I need to buy, etc. In the absence of a free day to do this, I recommend setting aside an hour or two at the beginning of the week for the mundane tasks of setting up a to-do list, answering emails, putting things in your room away, etc.Whatever little tasks need a place on your schedule fit perfectly into an admin hour.
It goes without saying that we are all busy, and it is easy to get overwhelmed as things pile up and breaks become a rarity. I know for me, it feels like I complete one thing just to immediately have another to do. I suppose that it’s better to have a lot to do than nothing at all, though, and using these tips lighten the weight.
“When you are elevated, you leave behind the fear of all those eyes that might weigh your shoulders down. Up here, you are without weight, without a body: pure, bright, blinding light.”
—Mack Ford, “Longing Upward” 03.25.22
“There is nothing quite like watching someone punch a hole in a window.”
—Siri Pierce, “The One” 03.12.21
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