In This Issue
The One
Siri Pierce 4
A Hidden Front
Joyge Gao 2 Siena Capone 5
Personification Therapy
Vinyl and the Pandemic Allegra Friedman 7
Drag Andrew Lu 6
postCover by Anna Semizhonova
MAR 11
VOL 27 —
ISSUE 6
FEATURE
A Hidden Front racism in the pandemic from an asian perspective By Joyce Gao Illustrated by Joanne Han
For the majority of the U.S. population, March marks a year since the beginning of the pandemic. For me, a Chinese international student studying in the States, the chaos began in early January, when news of COVID-19 was still just an internet punchline next to more pressing issues, and the rest of the world went on with their lives as usual. Most Chinese international students tried to suppress our worries and carry on with life as usual. We shut our mouths, lowered our heads, quietly hoarded masks that we dared not wear in public, and curled tightly inside ourselves
so none of our concerns would spill out like a shameful secret. Narratives and surveillance camera footage of hate crimes stick to my senses like stubborn afterimages, imprinted in my mind. Asian-American students were bullied at school for a cough, a Chinese woman was chased and beaten in the New York subway for wearing a mask, the car of a southeast Fresno family was vandalized with graffiti that read “fuck Asians and Coronavirus.” The list goes on. But these reports—of high school bullies who pointed and shouted “coronavirus,” men
who repeatedly struck an Asian woman with an umbrella, bolded curse words that needed to be redacted in photos—are only part of the story. The camera captures the moment of action, then slowly pans away. What happens then? What about the acts that don’t fit such simple narratives? These early-stage pandemic feelings resemble my overall experience in the States. In my small New England prep school, Chinese students and the rest of the community maintained a polite distance from each other. Partially as a result of this distance, I experienced no overt acts of
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Around this time last year it felt like every single conversation I walked past had one word in common. Coronavirus. Colleges across the country were shutting down and when Brown finally joined them, I found myself weeping into a suitcase full of sweaters. We hadn’t even had time to enjoy the Providence spring! This year, March feels entirely different. COVID is still on our minds but vaccines are fast approaching and the warm weather means that social distancing walks will be less of a chore. When I attended class from the Quiet Green the other day, one of my classmates stood up across the green from me and waved. It was almost like sharing a classroom again. The scent of hope is in the air. post-’s writers are also thinking about the virus, remembering the early days of quarantine, and reaching for new horizons. COVID is the inescapable background for our Feature’s writer as she confronts her experiences with anti-Asian racism. In Narrative, TV brings comfort to a writer’s family stuck inside during quarantine and another writer rushes 2 post–
outside to ascribe human qualities to seagulls. In A&C we’re watching TV again and dusting off our record players. Lifestyle gives us the gift of new tools to improve our mostly virtual lives. So whether experiencing the glorious weather, rediscovering the old, or staying safe inside—rebirth, change, and perseverance are on our minds. Tomorrow I’m going on a long walk and I’ll give the birds names in India Point Park. Before COVID I’d have encouraged you to read us in print as a break from the monotony of screens, but we’ve all had to adapt since last March. Read post- on your phone! Happy (or not so happy) Coronaversay,
Emma Schneider A&C Managing Editor
Nice Weather Activities 1. Picnics on the greens 2. Walking around topless 3. Sunbathing! Actually possible! Stock up on Vit. D! 4. Outside run downtown, outside walk back up 5. Melting the icicles midterms put on your heart 6. Sports <3 7. Actually enjoying a cold beverage without your fingers falling off 8. Undiagnosing yourself with seasonal affective disorder 9. Ice cream! 10. “Do homework” outside. Permissible procrastination.
FEATURE racism throughout my four years in high school. But not ending up in the hospital is a low bar. Racism takes many forms. Slurs or being shoved in the streets are obvious, but there is far more that lies beneath the surface. There is the haunting uncertainty, like being trapped in my middle school insecurities again, ruminating over every word and social cue: Are they gossiping about me? Is that a vile joke, or am I just overreacting? Up until the slur drops unmistakably, or the punch smashes solid to the face, anything could be a joke that I am too slow to grasp. In February 2020, after being called “coronavirus,” filmed, taunted, and having his headphones snatched away from him, Pawat Silawattakun, a 24-year-old Thai man in the United Kingdom said, “It didn’t feel like a robbery at that point, it felt like bullying, a bit of messing around.” It was only after he chased his attackers and ended up with his blood all over a traffic island from a heavy punch that he knew it was a violent hate crime. But before we see blood on the pavement, we dismiss all the light nudges and halfhearted jokes as overthinking. Anything from being excluded from a conversation to direct shunning can be the result of non-racial reasons, and jokes such as “How are you not [insert any other Asian’s name]? You two literally look identical” can come from goodnatured ignorance. My mind swings back and forth between a state where everything is about race and a state where nothing is. On the one hand, I replay videos of hate crimes, memories of shunning, and microaggressions in my head whenever I walk into a public space. But on the other hand, I feel reluctant to shatter the self-consoling filter that I too often place upon my surroundings, for it is so much easier to gaslight myself than to admit the heft of race. In the brawl between these two mindsets, a new kind of creature is born: a hypersensitive being that plucks at its own feathers in unrelenting self-doubt. It overreacts to the slightest movement, denies its own instinct, and condemns itself as the source of the problem. This denial is further exacerbated by the predominance of the black-white binary in discussions on race, creating a facade that Asians are not, and will not, be subject to racism. This is a side of racism that Cathy Park Hong tries to highlight in her collection of essays, Minor Feelings. “The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I am overshadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport.” The problem is that “most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle,” she writes. “The white
high school students parading down the hallways wearing Confederate flag capes and the graffitied swastikas. What’s harder to report is not the incident itself but the stress of its anticipation.” In my case, the stress of anticipation manifests as excessive defensiveness. A year before the pandemic started, I attended a high school art portfolio review, an event where students talk to art school representatives and present their work. This was during the peak of my artistic confidence, and I was eager to present myself as a likeable candidate. I even made an effort to compliment the purple pen that a representative handed me to fill out my information. I was just starting to feel like I was becoming a cool, quirky art student when I was struck by one of the first questions the representative asked me: Did I have good grades? It was a reasonable and completely innocuous question, but in my head it rang with the “thrum of fear and shame, a tight animal alertness” that Hong writes about. I became immediately conscious of my glasses, my unstyled black hair, and the various “Joyce is a diligent student, but she is very quiet in class” comments on my report card. At that time, I didn’t realize my self-consciousness was centered around race, but it cannot be clearer in hindsight: I thought she was trying to figure out if I was just another Asian nerd who couldn’t do art. My brain processed these twisted interpretations faster than a jump scare, and I heard myself say, “Yes, sadly,” with a passiveaggressive tone. A pause. She tilted her head slightly to the side. “Why did you say ‘sadly’?” She looked genuinely confused. “I’m sure you worked hard for your grades.” Her puzzled gaze choked me up. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why I was so ashamed about having decent grades, or why I’d braced myself for an insult before anyone showed any sign of launching an attack. The portfolio review was a fiasco. I stumbled through the rest of my portfolio presentation, all the while fighting back angry and embarrassed tears. I couldn’t even lift my head up to look at her face out of shame. When we were finished, she shook my hand and apologized for whatever she did that clearly upset me, then she gave me the purple pen I said I liked. Then she had to apologize again for upsetting me even more with that gesture. While these anecdotes may show my personal tendency to overthink as much as they reflect the subtleties of racism, my fears are still based on experience: walking up to someone with my identity held in outstretched hands and expecting them to twist it into something else entirely.
On my first visit to a therapist, I tried to tell her how hard I found it to open up and be completely honest with myself. As the message traveled across the office, it became something mostly, if not entirely, attributed to the “quiet, reserved” culture I grew up in. Do I feel homesick? Yes, she said, then that might have something to do with the cultural shock that you are going through. You know, it’s very common for Asian international students to find it hard to adjust. My interjections to these assumptions felt as awkward and useless as my attempts to sit upright in her saggy, oversized couch. It’s my own fucking problem and not my culture’s, I wanted to yell at her calmly analytical face—but she was a trained therapist. What if she saw me clearer than I saw myself ? My determination wavered, jumbling my words into a sad, powerless lump of pulp that got me nowhere. I gave up and sank into her sofa. This is when the real twisting happens: when I am no longer certain whether I am being misinterpreted or being seen, when my identity becomes shapeless and hesitant, but obedient to fill in whatever form she gives me. This amalgamation of anger, shame, and doubt is what I think about when I look at the rampant xenophobia during the pandemic. I am not only saddened by the obvious crimes, but also the intensified distrust of both others and oneself that fuels these self-lacerating mental games. Anyone who has seen the recent footage of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai-American, being shoved to the ground must have felt that pound against their hearts as his body smashed into the pavement. What struck me most, however, is how he raised his frail arms to his chest in a surprised motion of self-defense seconds before the impact. It struck me because the act was all too familiar—it is the gesture of someone grasping onto their last hope that it is all a hoax, causing the gesture to linger awkwardly between self-defense and meaninglessness. That meager hope persists until the last possible second, until the fear of misjudgment is overtaken by the fear of death. What more can I say without stumbling over my words again? The hidden impact of racism on the individual mind is obscure but extensive. On this one-year landmark in the long struggle against the pandemic, I ask you to look at the surging number of hate crimes against Asians and look beyond the incidents themselves. Look closely at the shifting glance, the suppressed word, the arm that hangs in mid-air—that is where the action really is.
“Fruitian slips are like banana peels.”
“I love a man whose skin falls off with ease!”
March 12, 2021 3
NARRATIVE
The One
on finding refuge in family and reality tv by Siri Pierce Illustrated by Habesha Fasika Petros There is nothing quite like watching someone punch a hole in a window. It’s the kind of sickening feeling you get in your gut when all of the fireworks explode at the same time on the 4th of July. A pounding, queasy, please-stay-down-fried-dough feeling. The aftermath unfolded before I could process its cause. Shards of glass catapulted in all directions and skidded across the floor. As onlookers swarmed around him, JJ stood in the mosaic of glass shrapnel, wildly shaking his blood-stained knuckles. I was sitting on the floor at the base of my parents’ bed when it happened. I looked back to see their mouths suspended open, and the remote held tightly in my dad’s hand. A few chuckles escaped our lips. Gradually, our laughter accelerated, overlapping and increasing in volume until our cheeks burned and our chests seized. We should have seen it coming. The tense love triangle between Simone, Jacy, and JJ had been building for days. Every insult and sassy comeback erupted like a leaf blower to a flame. Evil eyes and wrinkled foreheads became staples of bathroom run-ins and subjects of gossip circles. JJ wasn’t your typical window puncher. His gangly arms hung by his sides, limp as the robe tie so elegantly strapped around his forehead. Fueled by the power of Jose Cuervo and toxic masculinity, he broke the tension in one window-shattering blow. The window punching scene in Are You the One? represents the lowest of all lows in my family’s quarantine Netflix marathon. While many families were adopting quarantine hobbies like baking sourdough bread, completing home improvement projects, and learning group TikTok dances, we were screaming at Brittany for sticking by Adam. Are You the One? is truly one of the trashiest romantic reality shows on television, and that is coming from an expert. I have soared through seasons of Love is Blind, Love Island, and practically every Bachelor franchise production, including the more obscure spin-off series, Bachelor Winter Games. If these shows are bougie-on-a-budget, Are You The One? strips the bougie and is left with just the budget. There are no champagne glasses and romantic helicopter ride dates, just boozy red Solo cups and beachside Subway sandwich platters. The premise of the show is simple. Ten women and ten men live in a house together in a tropical location. After conducting a “scientific” survey of the contestants, the producers identify each person’s “perfect match.” The contestants have ten episodes to find “the one” and win $1,000,000 (that they collectively split for a total of $50,000 each). Every week, the participants test potential matches by competing for dates, and if the chemistry is right, using the not-so-euphemistic “Boom Boom Room” for “research.” At the end of the episode, contestants pair up and find out how many, but not which, of their total matches are correct. I didn’t mean to corrupt my parents’ souls with Are You the One?. One evening, I was watching the female contestants guess which ex-girlfriend belonged to which male contestant when my parents came into the room. Initially, they snuck glances at the TV in between Twitter scrolling and reading New Yorker articles. Within minutes they had abandoned their phone and magazine altogether. My dad even 4 post–
put on his farsighted glasses to better see the screen. Scali’s New York accent, Kayla’s pathological lying, and Chris T. and Shanley’s forbidden romance had entranced them. Suddenly, the remote seemed far away and each episode rolled easily into the next. Are You the One? dominated our next few weeks. Our dinner conversations were like pregame huddles. Who was doing the dishes? Who was walking the puppy? More importantly, who was going to the Truth Booth (a once-an-episode spectacle that tested a match’s compatibility)? We started watching the show in December at the height of the post-election mayhem and the winter wave of the pandemic. Thanksgiving travel had accelerated COVID-19 cases to new peaks. My parents, both educators, had barely had a break since March. They were busy developing and adapting plans for hybrid and remote schooling. Plan A turned to Plan B and then Plan C and Plan D until they had run out of letters of the alphabet. My family is always able to drown out bad days with Kool & The Gang dance parties and late-night trips to the gas station down the street for pints of Ben & Jerry’s, but no playlist or ice-cream-filled spoon could shield us from the endless flood of bad days. There was always a student in crisis, a teacher in quarantine, a classroom of blank Zoom screens with no certainty whether students were lurking behind them. I watched makeshift standing desks crumble and emails from concerned parents steal hours from sleep. Like most people, we were exhausted, burnt out, and craving reasons to laugh. There was a point when I stopped guessing how many weeks I thought were left in the pandemic. I switched to months, and then seasons, and now I am counting vaccinations. The inching percentage of total vaccinations is only slightly less painful than the slow release of the 2020 election results. There is a kind of numbness that comes with numbers—the number of deaths, the number of cases, the number of jobs lost. I see the numbers and try to make sense of them. I analyze the graphs and maps. I compare positivity rates. But then I realize the numbers are real people’s lives and I feel guilty for looking at them as a math problem. There are moments when I needed to stop counting, to stop scrolling through the endless feeds of doom and gloom. The contestants of Are You the One? don’t count. As much as we beg them to, they don’t pull out a spreadsheet to analyze who was paired up with whom
and how many matches were correct each week. They don’t even write down any couple combinations. They ignore logic and simple arithmetic. Instead, they listen to their heart, or maybe their libido, to try to discern the sacred "truth" of MTV's matchmaking scientists. They are perhaps a statistics professor’s worst nightmare, and it is wonderful. Even more wonderful is screaming at a screen with your parents, cringing at bad sexual innuendos, and imploring MTV reality stars to put down the Jose Cuervo and get out a notebook. I didn’t anticipate that I would spend 10 consecutive months with my family during my senior year of high school and freshman year of college. I am very fortunate to have a good relationship with my parents and sister, but I had watched enough coming-of-age movies to know that at this stage in my life, I should not be spending that much time with them. The pandemic thought differently. Like Are You the One?, our time together was spontaneous, unscripted, and impermanent. We may not have built a garden in our yard or started a family barbershop quartet, but we laughed and got through the dreary, Zoom-filled weeks together. At the end of each day, we craved the predictability of the 40-minute episodes. We knew no matter what, they would find their matches and leave with $1,000,000. In all the ways that Are You the One? was predictable, the pandemic was not. We didn’t have a “coming up next week” at the end of each episode to give us a preview of how the vaccine rollout would go this week, or a cheesy host to reward us when our town did a good job wearing masks and social distancing. But we could cope because we were lucky enough to be together and safe. On a December night, I sat down on the red mat leftover from childhood sleepovers and leaned against the baseboard of my parents’ bed. I had already queued the episode. Several loud yells urging my parents downstairs to “hurry up” and a few frantic toothbrushing sessions later, we were ready. The yellow neon MTV logo flashed and the all-too-familiar bleeping of expletives rang out through the room. JJ with his gangly arms and robe tie headband wobbled onto the screen, and the producers began playing the dramatic music. Huddled around a TV, we laughed at a grown man punching a window.
NARRATIVE feeling small in the face of the sky, there was something so relieving about shrinking down to near-nothing. So freeing that Jen Bervin wrote Silk Poems about it. The book unravels centuries of history on silkworms, from the perspective of silkworms, told in six-character chains to emulate the DNA structure of silk. These trails of words explore the philosophical and historical contexts for the real-life technology Bervin made in collaboration with Tufts. Since silk is compatible with human bodily tissues, she and researchers co-created silk biosensors (chemical detectors planted in the body) so that Bervin’s Silk Poems are really inscribed upon the person who uses it, just beneath the skin: HOLDTHEBODY FREEFROMHARM HERE ISTHISTHING IMADEOFMYSELF WITHOTHERS ALIVEINYOU
Personification Therapy
how to write a seagull sitcom by Siena Capone Illustrated by Haelee Lim The heaviness between my ears is lasting longer than it should, so Ben drives us to the ocean. We like the feeling of going places together, be it the gas station or the abandoned old building we’re seeking out now. Going elsewhere but not alone. When we pull up to Breton Point, we’re listening to violins sing over a Julien Baker song. Both of us feel like the pale landscape in front of us—dark rocks jutting out from light waves, sky crowded with clouds—is like Ireland or Scotland. It’s a simplistic tourist’s perspective, but it brings me joy as we pick through the rain-wet grass. After all, Dublin is where I likely would’ve been this semester, if not for, you know, everything. We turn our backs to the sea for a while to walk down a muddy trail flanked by brambles and weeds. Everything is a glistening green from the rain. We finally find our abandoned building and a looking tower from which to view it. Perhaps I should’ve expected it would be covered in spray paint, but my heart sinks a little anyways while Ben’s buoys. He likes stuff like this. We talk about the merits and drawbacks of a dilapidated, hauntingly beautiful historical building bearing SUCK MY— in neon pink between its windows. We decide there’s a little bit of both, as there is in all things. *** When teaching second graders how to write poetry, the most important thing to remember is that they already know. In every moment of your life, you know poems. They’re in the songs you hear on the radio, in the comparison your mind unwillingly makes between your friend’s blonde hair and the moon. For kids, you’re just putting words to what they already have a grasp on: that imagination is wide and wild, that we have the potential to be anything at all, for better or for worse. PER-SON-UH-FUH-CAY-SHUN. In the Zoom chat, the word causes a fair amount of spelling trouble among eight-year-olds, a sound and a feeling without letters. We read a Shel Silverstein poem about a furniture
fight, the class punctuating his lilting rhymes and twinkly-eyed jokes with laughter. The kids are thrumming with more energy than usual, looking around as if they can see table legs and chair backs stirring to life before their very eyes. Then we write. This is how class always goes. We read a poem, teach a term, then turn the kids loose in their own minds. I used to think it was funny that none of the kids chose to explore the inner worlds of anything particularly extravagant; there were no personified glimmering crystals, arctic foxes, mountain ranges. They always reached for what was closest—the desk they wrote at, the laces on their shoes, the eggs on their breakfast plate, the tears in their own eyes. To turn loose the ordinary things from the routines that keep them. *** After Ben and I finish contemplating the giant ball of roots and brick that was the old building, we return to the beach. It smells immediately like the memory of my Nonna’s beachside house: the stale salt of a cluster of tidepools with rocks coated in a thick shag of seaweed, the wet mops of covered stones scattered about. As a little kid, we weren’t allowed to climb the rocks that encircled the tide pools without a parent’s hovering hands as a makeshift safety net. At least not when it was high tide. I still feel this unsteadiness with me now, grumbling my way over the wet rocks behind Ben until we’re atop the biggest ones and can see everything. We agree that the ocean is just as beautiful on a restless gray day as the dazzling blue ones on postcards. Sometimes more. I think it’s a reassurance I needed. *** Whenever I need an easy anecdote to tell about school during small talk, I bring up Zoopoetics. I like the novelty of the name in my mouth, so certain that the person I’m talking to has never heard of such a class. I hadn’t either. I remember sitting in a drafty corner classroom in Sayles at the beginning of my favorite— and shortest—in-person semester at Brown and being told to write from the perspective of a silkworm. Ben was there. He was all sound in his poem: crunches and squirms, tapping little feet on dry leaves. This is one of my favorite things about him—that he always listens. To him, the world has much to say, and that includes the littlest beings. I think the silkworm exercise made me appreciate that viewpoint fully. Like all of the cliche remarks about
Someday, I want to teach the kids this book. I think they’d get a kick out of it; it’s in turns sassy and smart. Then I think I’d ask them to pick their own being and make it its own book of poems. What could be a squirrel poem? A daffodil poem? A stink bug poem? I think until we figure out our own self poems—if we ever do—this will feel like healing. I’ve been writing horse poems lately. Embodying something other than me: an elongated elegant neck, a three-beat gait, the gashes in the dirt where hooves were just a moment before. *** We stand in the cold on the rocks at Breton Point for half an hour, talking to each other, but not to each other. To animal versions of each other (or more animal than we already are). We are captivated by the seagulls. They are scattered throughout the scene in front of us, speckled soft brown birds bobbing on tide pools, big regal tall ones. We watch the drama unfold as a pair of seagull royalty catch and split a crab on the rocks. We name them Ashton and Mitchell and deem them the power couple of Breton Point. Another smaller bird attempts to get in on the snack and is promptly body checked off the rock, and we laugh—the longest I’ve laughed in a week. We superimpose dialogue on their comical little interactions, and I feel light, able to displace myself onto a bunch of salt-sticky feathers foraging in cold seawater, unencumbered by assignments or pandemics or social mediation. I had also never taken a close look at them before. Seagulls are in that category of animals strictly for avoidance. Their yellow beaks are magnetized to your beach snacks and the slow lasso of their flight patterns over asphalt parking lots is anything but classic beauty. But in narrating their shenanigans we find out they are funny, and compelling, and interesting, and brave as they let the agitated pre-storm waves bowl them over and still pop up on the other side. They didn’t come seeking our validation—but we stumbled upon that affirmation while seeking our own. If it was heavy to hold our human projections, the seagulls didn’t show it. They just turn circles in the same web of pools, keeping their eyes out for something novel or appetizing while the ocean unfurls around them. We descend the rocks and, coming back to my body, I feel lighter. Having webbed feet for a while has made me appreciate my toes and remember how I look as I’m laughing on a soggy rock next to my lover, looking down at the city of other creatures below. ISAVOR GOSLOW IFEELIAM CERTAINLYLOVED
March 12, 2021 5
ARTS & CULTURE
Drag
a love song By Andrew Lu ILLUSTRATED BY Nina Yuchi The first seed of my interest in drag was planted during the summer of 2008, when the Olympics came to Beijing. Between the third and fourth ring of the rippling city, my mother, father, big brother and I lived in a small apartment, burning under a sky that was, at the time, still blue. I was six years old then and did not yet know the heavy burden of gender. I did not understand what it meant to be in love, how it felt to be trapped in a body, or what a pain it could be to attempt escape. These realizations came later, but in the summer of 2008, I was simply a child watching the Olympics in a city lit by fireworks, and China was doing great. Even then, I was not terribly interested in the sportspeople or their athleticism. Only one memory still resonates with me from the 2008 Olympics: the British operatic diva Sarah Brightman singing “You and Me” at the opening ceremony in a white, floor-length Versace gown, rhinestones shimmering at the chest. Sitting on the edge of a couch in striped pajamas, feet swinging above the floor, I wanted to be her. Afterward, as we watched athletes from two hundred countries march into a nest-shaped stadium on our little TV, my father said to me, “you could become a big strong man like them one day.” Sixyear-old me was not impressed. Still hung up on the opulence of Brightman’s performance, I could not see myself as an athlete in a competition, nor could I see myself as a big strong man. If only I knew that, across the Pacific in a poorly lit studio, another competition was taking place that very summer. A competition of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent created by a bald-headed, six foot four (without heels) Black man from San Diego who sometimes wore sparkly dresses and wigs. A competition that would change my life. 2008 marked the first of many “Olympics” in the sport of self-expression—drag. Some trace the origin of drag to Shakespeare himself, whose scripts often required male actors portraying female characters to perform in “drag” (either an acronym for Dressed Resembling a Girl or a reference to the lengthy Elizabethan petticoats that dragged on the floor). In America, drag culture became prominent in the 1970s and ‘80s alongside Harlem’s underground ballroom scene. As Jennie Livingston documented in her legendary film Paris is Burning, ballroom provided a necessary haven for the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ+ community, including drag queens. During this time, drag was still a narrow and exclusive term synonymous with female-impersonation. This was the era when RuPaul Charles, a notorious queen from the clubs of New York City, sashayed onto the world stage with the hit single “Supermodel” and won America’s heart. The rest, as you know, is herstory. Flashforward to the summer of 2008: As Sarah Brightman sang about international unity and Usain Bolt broke the world record for the 100-meter dash, nine queens walked into the Werkroom of the very first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. When the season aired in the spring of 2009, six-year-old me was memorizing poems in a Chinese elementary school classroom, sitting behind metal desks with a red scarf (dyed red for the blood of martyrs who fought for Chinese liberation) around my neck. I would not discover Drag Race for another eleven years, when a massive pandemic devastated my country and spread panic around the globe. I had never known despair before, and perhaps I do not know it now, but in the summer of 2020 I knew it like the back of my hand. The prevailing feeling of that summer is best summed up as a painful detachment. The 6 post–
streets of my city, the walls of my room, the moving faces and sounds of my life became the ambient noise of my distress, the water in which I drowned. It is a dark hole to wallow in, where the mind, once so positive and filled with light, cannot find a single thing that would bring it joy. Throughout the summer months of 2020, I woke up dreading the impending day and went to sleep praying for hibernation. Looking back, the cause of my despair was a disastrous mix of strained family dynamics, the heavy uncertainty of a pandemic-ridden future, and a crippling identity crisis. I was a drought that needed to be broken, and Season 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars came along as much-needed rain. I began watching Drag Race in my grandmother’s living room in Wuhan, where rain poured non-stop from a low gray sky and ran slanted toward the river. I was mesmerized from episode one. Shea Couleé’s flawless fashion execution, Miz Cracker’s infectious personality, and Jujubee’s hilarious commentaries pulled me out of a deep rut of gloom and worry. In the following months, I quickly devoured most of Drag Race’s 12 seasons, as well as all five seasons of All Stars. On Drag Race, not only do contestants create multiple runway and makeup looks each week, they also compete in challenges that range from acting, singing, and dancing to comedy, sewing, and impersonation. To believe that Drag Race is simply a competition where people play dress-up and prance around on stage could not be more wrong. For me, however, the true power of the show lies not in the costumes and talents, but in the hearts and stories of its contestants. It was on RuPaul’s Drag Race where Dusty Ray Bottoms opened up about the conversion therapy and exorcisms she underwent as a child, and it was in the Drag Race Werkroom where Katya and Miss Fame found connection in their shared history of alcoholism and addiction. On the mainstage, the audience sobbed as Roxxxy Andrews told the harrowing story of being abandoned by her birth mother at a bus stop, and Monica Beverly Hillz announced her identity as the first openly transgender contestant on the show. In Season 9, the queens commemorated the friends they lost at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where many of them used to perform, and where 49 people died during a tragic, homophobic shooting. These queens and the art of drag itself struck a chord in my heartstrings and opened my eyes to a world of vulnerability and resilience. It was also on RuPaul’s Drag Race where I first saw Kim Chi, a plus-size Korean queen with incredible makeup artistry who struggled with her Asian family’s approval. I related to Kim Chi’s self-doubt and saw myself in her journey to find love for who she was. Out of drag, Sang-Young Shi was shy and reserved, but Kim Chi gave her the confidence to thrive and unleash the creative genius within. “I am proving to myself, to the world, and my mother,” said Kim Chi on Season 8 of Drag Race, “that all the work and crazy stuff I’ve been doing has not been a waste. I don’t want to be
America’s Next Drag Superstar; I am America’s Next Drag Superstar.” Kim Chi’s perseverance gave me hope, but she was not the only queen to exhibit bravery and resilience. Nothing, I quickly realized, not even hatred and violence and a bad critique from Michelle Visage, can keep a good queen down. By showcasing the strength and tenacity of these queens, RuPaul’s Drag Race saved me from my own “inner saboteur” and dragged me out of depression. Drag, I learned, is about hope. It is about the queer and gay and trans and non-binary people throughout history who have been knocked down, day after day, year after year, and keep climbing up. But this uphill battle toward equality and recognition, even within the LGBTQ+ community, is far from over. Drag, like any other art form, is constantly evolving. Until recently, the drag community has neither accepted nor included transgender/non-binary queens. Even RuPaul himself has made offensive and exclusionary comments about trans queens. But as the concepts of gender and sexuality expand, so too must the definition of drag. It’s 2021, and gone are the days when drag simply stood for Dressed Resembling a Girl. With the rise of talented trans queens like Peppermint, Sonique, and the recent addition of Gottmik—the first transmale contestant on the show—the definition of drag is continuously growing to accommodate greater diversity. As Season 8 winner Bob the Drag Queen said in an interview with Vanity Fair, “if you’re blurring the gender line, you’re engaging in the art of drag.” Today, no matter your identity or style, whether you’re a “look queen,” a “comedy queen,” or a “butch queen first time in drag,” drag is open to anyone. *** There is a picture of me in a photo album somewhere in that cramped apartment in Beijing, taken the same year that the Olympics came to town. The picture, yellowed and fraying at the edges, is of a little boy wrapped in a piece of blue-white gingham fabric, smiling at the camera. At the end of every season of Drag Race, RuPaul shows each remaining queen a picture of their younger self and asks them what they would like to say to that child. Watching the queens reply, I can’t help but think of that little boy playing dress-up with a curtain, prancing around the living room, like a mermaid out of water. I can’t help but think of that boy who grew up in a country where the bullies didn’t know the word gay so they called him sissy. That boy who lip-synced for a seventh-grade music project and had the word faggot hurled at his face. That boy who maybe didn’t want to be just a boy anymore, and who maybe never was. That boy who got knocked off his feet so many times and yet, despite everything that held him down, kept on walking in imaginary six-inch heels. I think of that little boy often. Perhaps one day, dressed in a white, floor length gown with rhinestones at the chest, I will see him again at the Olympics of drag, and have the chance to sing him a love song from the bottom of my heart.
Vinyl and the Pandemic
learning how to listen again in a quieter world By Allegra Friedman Illustrated by Lucia Tian Putting a record on is a ritual: I sit on the floor in front of my turntable, plug it in, and turn the main dial until I feel a “click.” A red light appears, and I hear a small hum. Next, I take out whatever I’m going to play. The liner paper crinkles when I pull the record out of its sleeve, and I hold the vinyl up to the light, looking over its ridges for specks of dust. If it’s dirty, I’ll spray some citrus-scented cleaner fluid on it and wipe with one of those overpriced microfiber cloths. I put the record on the pad, trying to touch only its edges. The next moment, when I put the needle down, is my favorite part. I listen for pops and crackles and wait for the disc to gently dip and then readjust. Sometimes I’ll lay down and close my eyes to listen. Otherwise, I’ll sit cross-legged on the floor and watch the record spin around and around, like when I’d sit in front of the dryer as a little kid, hearing it hum and watching the clothes tumble. It’s hypnotic, perfect for those days in quarantine that seem to repeat themselves over and over and over. Before the pandemic, I hadn’t listened to a record in a few years. Back in middle school, though, I’d perform this ritual almost every day, summoning as much pretentious seriousness as I could muster. I would spend hours laying on the floor in my bedroom playing David Bowie. His lyrics about aliens and the end of the world appealed to me as an angsty, out-of-place pre-teen—life on Mars sounded great if it meant getting away from my parents and meeting the cyborg version of Dan, my crush who barely knew my name. And as a self-satisfied music snob, I wanted to understand each lyric as deeply as I could. I read all of the liner notes and listened for every pop, skip, and crackle. Then high school started, and homework, sports, and ACTs got in the way. My records stayed on the shelf, and my turntable got dusty. When I moved across the country for college, I left it at home and got a Spotify account. Now that I could play almost anything with a quick tap on my iPhone, music demanded less effort and came with less meaning. Phoebe Bridgers and Oliver Koletzki were demoted to background noise for me to tune in and out of throughout my day. Bowie sang about the apocalypse while I did laundry, washed my hair, or played through lecture recordings on double speed, feeling nothing. I heard the music, but I didn’t really listen.
But then the pandemic happened, and there were no more classes to sit through, club meetings to go to, or people to see. I flew home to San Francisco and spent most days alone in my childhood bedroom. I rediscovered the things I’d left behind—old books, journals, and stuffed animals. One day, I pulled my turntable out from its hiding place at the back of my closet and sifted through my old records, their outer sleeves still covered in the doodles I’d drawn as a thirteen-year-old. I picked out a Madonna album and dropped the needle. My world had gotten quiet, so I was able to listen again. Vinyl matched my new, slower pace of life, where I had time to flip through my records before deciding what to play and to actually listen to an album from start to finish. It also gave me a much-needed break from screens. Sometimes, after hours of Zoom calls hunched at the kitchen table, I’d lay in the same spot on my floor from years earlier, stretching my back out against the carpet and resting my eyes. I kept this routine up for the first few months of the pandemic. Then, I left my parents’ house in San Francisco and moved to Austin at the end of August. I brought my turntable with me this time, along with the artists I used to listen to. They’ve since become a regular part of my day again. Bowie’s apocalyptic themes appeal to me now because the world actually feels like it’s ending, not because I’m an angsty teenager. And now that I live alone, I don’t have to fantasize about escaping from under my parents’ roof by blasting off into outer space. But when it comes to love, his lyrics feel even more relevant during the pandemic than they did when I was drawing hearts around Dan’s name in my sixth-grade folders. Bowie sings about how the end of the world affects our relationships, quipping that once civilization rebuilds itself, we’ll have completely forgotten how to be intimate with one another. I think about Bowie’s lyrics a lot when I go on dating apps now, or when I consider what dating will be like after the pandemic. As a generation that is already totally consumed by technology, sometimes interacting more virtually than in person, are we now completely screwed? I play his records and wonder what it will feel like when I can make eyes at a stranger at a bar without guessing what their mouth looks like under their mask, or enjoy live music on a date again. Sometimes it’s too much for me to think about, and I need to put Madonna back on instead. Bowie’s records provide comfort, too, though. When I pull out my copies from middle school, I go back to a time when, even though my feelings went unrequited, liking someone still felt possible. Love was terrifying, but in an insecure, thirteen-year-old kind of way, not a life-threatening one. This music seems made for the pandemic, but it also reminds me EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Olivia Howe
“Because emotions aren’t that simple—Nintendo DSi + struggling college student doesn’t equal being happy. But memories (whether they’re childhood DSi-related or not) + struggling college student does equal something closer to being content.” —Danielle Emerson, “I Bought a Used Nintendo DSi,” 3.13.20
“Today, I stand atop a mountain of flattened boxes. Sisters, mothers, daughters, and lovers, all alike—we stand to reject the boxes that constrained our spirits.”
FEATURE Managing Editor Alice Bai Section Editors Andrew Lu Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Emma Schneider Section Editors Kyoko Leaman Maddy McGrath
that things weren’t always this way, and they won’t stay this way either. As much as rediscovering the records I used to listen to has helped me through this crazy time, finding new vinyl has, too. Since coming to Austin, listening to LPs from local bands has given me a way to get to know my new city. I knew that moving here in the middle of the pandemic meant I wouldn’t be experiencing the “live music capital of the world” at its fullest. Still, I feel connected to the city’s musical heritage each time I walk down the street to Waterloo Records and buy an album from an Austin-based artist. It also gives me an excuse to leave the house in a time when the most exciting part of my week is usually a trip to the grocery store. When I get home from the record store and play “Colors” by Black Pumas or “See You Later Simulator” from Ghostland Observatory, I often imagine how it’ll feel to see these groups perform once the pandemic ends; it gives me something to look forward to. And every album cover, lyric, and shade of colored vinyl helps me to understand Austin a little better and to feel like I might have a place in it. Right now, records don’t just connect me with my city and the outside world; they also bring another presence into my house. John Peel, the longest serving DJ for the BBC, once said, “Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen mate, life has surface noise.’” Through stay-at-home orders and shutdowns, we’ve lost so much of life’s surface noise: an overheard conversation between two strangers at a coffee shop, the traffic noises on a morning commute to work, coughs and frantic typing in a crowded library, feet shuffling in and out of a workout studio. Things have gone quiet, as we experience a flattened version of life through our screens. The hums, crackles, and pops I hear when I put that needle down give me back some of that surface noise. In a time when so many of our experiences have been reduced to virtual facsimiles of what they once were, vinyl has the opposite effect. It inspires me to not just hear, but to listen, as it fills my quiet bedroom with a vibrant buzz that helps me remember the way things were before.
NARRATIVE Managing Editor Minako Ogita
COPY CHIEF Aditi Marshan
Section Editor Siena Capone Christina Vasquez
Copy Editors Emily Cigarroa Samuel Nevins Eleanor Peters
LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney
SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Tessa Devoe
Section Editors Kimberly Liu Emily Wang
Editors Kelsey Cooper Julia Gubner Kyra Haddad Jolie Rolnick Chloe Zhao
HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Joanne Han
WEB MASTER Amy Pu
—Kahini Mehta, “Shaped,” 3.08.19
CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen Layout Designers Lily Chahine Sharlene Deng STAFF WRITERS Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Dorrit Corwin Eashan Das Danielle Emerson Jordan Hartzell Ellie Jurmann Nicole Kim Gus Kmetz Liza Kolbasov Elliana Reynolds Adi Thatai Victoria Yin
Want to be involved? Email: olivia_howe@brown.edu!
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