In This Issue
JASMINE NGAI 2
Tunes and Trailblazers
GAYA GUPTA 4
ROTD?
ANNELIESE MAIR 4
Tenses of the Sky
AMANDA NGO 5
Finding Asian America DAVID KLEINMAN 6
Adventure of a Lifetime
postCover by Anna Semizhonova
OCT 11
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VOL 24 —
ISSUE 5
FEATURE
Tunes and Trailblazers A Brief History of Women in Jazz BY JASMINE NGAI ILLUSTRATED BY AYA ALGHANMEH
W
ho first comes to mind when you think of jazz? Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane? Likely. Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday? Perhaps. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Melba Liston, Maria Schneider, Ingrid Jensen? Unlikely. This trend of thought is rooted in a misogynistic past. The world of jazz has historically been maledominated, and the contributions of male musicians have generally garnered more public recognition for shaping the genre than those of their female counterparts. Although many of these women’s tales remain untold, there exist countless accounts of talented female musicians facing discrimination, barriers, and prejudice while trying to enter (and perhaps even alter) this musical boys’ club.
But these stories don’t have to stay untold. *** The onset of World War II provided American women with new opportunities in the workforce. As the men went off to war, women took over jobs in many traditionally male-dominated industries, including jazz performance. This paved the way for the formation of all-female jazz bands. One band in particular was instrumental in carving out a space for women instrumentalists during this era. Its name was the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. In addition to being an all-female band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm was notable for its racial diversity. The ensemble, established in 1937 as a savvy school principal’s fundraising effort, originally consisted of low-income high school students from Mississippi’s Piney Woods School, many of whom had never even touched an instrument before. By 1941, the
band had begun performing professionally throughout the United States. But its multiracial makeup presented a problem in the South during the era of Jim Crow, forcing the girls to take refuge in their tour bus whenever they weren’t performing in order to avoid run-ins with the law. Soon afterwards, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm rose in popularity and even headlined venues such as New York’s Apollo Theatre. The band performed for throngs of dedicated fans, their name in bold letters on lighted marquees. Their fan base grew exponentially after they toured internationally to perform for soldiers on army bases during World War II, an experience that brought the girls as far as France and Germany. Not much remains of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm’s legacy in the public eye now, aside from a few surviving recordings. They disbanded in 1949 with many members leaving to lead different
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, After a deceptively long summer, we have finally entered the unique Providence vortex. The one made of wind and rain and broken umbrellas and short-lived bursts of sunlight. Schoolwork has also formed a vortex of its own—papers upon midterms upon problem sets pile up so that the only practical way to avoid completing your assigned tasks is to binge-watch the terrible new Netflix series The I-Land, which is sort of like if Lost were written by a predictive text generator and were acted by A.I.’s who had never observed human behavior (not that I speak from experience). And though Providence has settled into its classic gray hues and my socks feel permanently wet from the puddles in which they’ve been submerged, as I approach the halfway point of my last fall semester at Brown, I’m trying to bask in the mundane moments that will soon seem special. Moments like that brief silence before chaotic chords ensue in a music rehearsal, the barista at Blue State asking me if
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I have an h at the end of my name (I don’t), or coming home to my housemates and just sitting around, sipping tea as our rain-soaked clothes dry around us. This issue of post- explores moments such as these, big and small: the Feature asks us to remember the women in jazz who wielded their voices in resistance against dominant power structures that dictate who can create music; the Arts & Culture section ruminates on The Farewell and hyphenated identities as well as on podcasting Dungeons & Dragons; and the Narrative section eloquently reflects on two friendships: a long-distance one that has survived into college and another formed by ResLife that has thrived through senior year. As you flip through this issue, I hope that you, too, can reflect on those moments of light that peek through the whirlwind of the semester.
Happy reading!
Sara
Feature Editor
Things to Do in Providence This Long Weekend 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The Providence HONK! Festival! Go check it out on Monday. RISD Craft Fair 2019, this Saturday! Nothing. Truly, nothing. Like a good, exhausted college student should. Snuggle up with a copy of post- ;) Go for a Haunted Boat Tour on Monday— but try to make it back in one piece. Sleep in. You deserve it. JK. Study for orgo. Scroll through Dear Blueno. Log out of FaceBook. Log back in. Repeat. Go see ABCD, a musical at PW! Cry over your unfinished papers in the SciLi. Get out of Providence.
lives—starting families, finishing school, pursuing other careers. Ultimately, this period of newfound opportunity for women in jazz was brief. After the end of the war, many female jazz instrumentalists found themselves out of work, abruptly replaced by men returning from war, often without even a day’s notice. *** During the final years of the 1940s, the legendary Dizzy Gillespie shocked his big band by announcing that he was bringing a female composer from the West Coast all the way to New York to arrange music for the band. He faced backlash from his dismayed male musicians, but when they heard her arrangements, even they had to acknowledge that she had created something beautiful, something powerful, something special. Her name was Melba Liston. Though she was a masterful arranger of music, Liston was first and foremost an instrumentalist, differentiating her from how we usually think of women in jazz. But Liston wasn’t a vocalist, and she didn’t play the piano. In fact, she played what some may consider a stereotypically masculine instrument: the trombone. Watching Melba Liston play the trombone, even by way of a grainy, black-and-white video recording, is a near-ethereal experience. Despite the immense amount of air it takes to play the trombone and the physical limitations of the instrument itself, Liston plays effortlessly, somehow smiling into the mouthpiece of her horn as she hits each note accurately and easily. The trombone slide simply becomes an extension of her arm. Although Liston’s extraordinary talent gained her recognition in jazz’s inner circles, even (begrudgingly) from her male peers, she was dissatisfied and disheartened by the confines of her career and the lifestyle of an American female jazz musician. In the 1970s, Liston left the scene of professional jazz performance to teach music in Jamaica instead. *** In 1978, the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival was established. This event was the brainchild of Carol Comer and Diane Gregg, two prominent women in the Kansas City jazz circuit. They set out to assemble the first festival completely centered on women in jazz, intending to provide budding female jazz instrumentalists with inspiration and a strong support system. The weekend-long event centered on concerts and workshops, bringing together some of the most notable female names in jazz in Kansas City, a place known for its immense influence on the genre. Coincidentally, the Second Annual Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival in 1979 served as the setting for Melba Liston’s triumphant return to jazz after her stint in Jamaica. It was at this event that her newly-formed, all-female ensemble, Melba Liston and Company, made its debut. After this, Liston continued to immerse herself in jazz, playing and arranging until she was physically unable to. The Third Annual Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival in 1980 bore witness to the reunion of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm 31 years after the ensemble’s separation. The final Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival took place in 1985, but its legacy persists through similar
festivals throughout the country today, which aim to replicate the musically empowered community it created. *** In 1980, an energetic, young college student was studying music theory and composition at the University of Minnesota. Her first exposure to modern jazz came during her college years when her classmate loaned her Coltrane, Hancock, and Tyner albums. Her name is Maria Schneider. Schneider did not attend the 1979 or 1980 Women’s Jazz Festival, but 17 years later, she would lead her own jazz orchestra at a similar event—the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, held at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Maria Schneider is not known for being an instrumentalist although she has classically trained in piano since the age of five. Instead, she is known for her gorgeous, sweeping jazz compositions and for being the conductor of the critically acclaimed Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra. There’s a video recording of the orchestra performing Schneider’s piece “Hang Gliding” at the 2008 Vienne Jazz Festival. It is awe-inspiring to see Schneider standing in front of her jazz orchestra — conducting the almost entirely male ensemble (save Ingrid Jensen, the lone female trumpetist) with an infectious smile and a spirit that can only be described as carefree composure. Her commanding, controlled arm movements and her alternating crouching and straightening posture, paralleling the rise and fall of the music, cause her to resemble a bird ready to take flight. Halfway through the piece, Jensen calmly steps to center stage, seamlessly transitioning into her fourminute-long solo. Her eyes remain closed throughout much of the performance; she skillfully manipulates the trumpet as if it were a keyboard, rapidly producing an incredible range of pitches from merely three valves. Throughout the solo, Schneider smiles at Jensen, her entire body swaying to the rising, swelling trumpet runs. She allows herself to be immersed in the music without ever losing focus; it’s clear she knows how to extract the sounds she wants from her musicians in order to convey her composition just as she envisions. This moment reflects the camaraderie shared between these two extraordinary female musicians. It’s an intimate moment incongruous with the public setting of a jazz festival, made all the more meaningful when you realize they are being watched by the rest of the all-male orchestra. It’s a quiet triumph, and it’s unforgettable. *** My high school jazz band consisted of 13 girls united by a passion for music and an eagerness to learn, incentive enough to wake up for 7 a.m. rehearsals before school. Each day, bold melodies and boisterous laughter cut through the early morning silence. Entering my first year at an all-girls high school, I was ready to abandon the trombone forever after deciding years earlier to take it up in middle school band class simply because no one else was willing to play it. I never considered joining the jazz band in high school; it didn’t have a good reputation in terms of talent, and it didn’t garner much attention from the music department, where choir was the ensemble everyone
“I want someone to cheat on me. I feel like that would be good for me, emotionally.” “I would go to Brown if it weren’t for the school colors.” – Visiting Harvard Athlete
else gravitated toward. I still don’t know what exactly motivated me to join during my sophomore year, but in this band, I found the community I had so desperately needed. We weren’t the best at sight-reading music. We weren’t the most skilled musicians, to say the very least. In fact, after listening to the recording of our performance of Vince Guaraldi’s “Skating” for our music department’s annual holiday CD, there were audible groans and visible shudders throughout the band; the melodies and harmonies frequently clashed, creating a cacophony of brassy screeches, and at any given moment each instrumentalist seemed to be reading a different section of the music. Later, we collectively laughed it off as a learning experience and put it on the CD anyway. Yet even while joking about our own inexperience and shortcomings, we learned to appreciate the expertise of the musicians whose pieces we tried to reinterpret by listening to their original recordings together in hushed, reverent silence. We couldn’t emulate it, but we could appreciate it. In our band, theory and technique were secondary; instead, the focus was on understanding the power of collaboration and confidence, from arranging daring set lists—including everything from jazz standards to funky renditions of David Bowie tunes—to cheering each other on while attempting to improvise on a blues scale, making soloing far less intimidating. Perhaps this is why I associate jazz with camaraderie, with community, with empowerment. *** In the 2018-2019 school year, the Brown University Jazz Band had a single female instrumentalist in their 18-member band. Alexandra Ertman graduated from Brown last year, and as a baritone saxophonist, she sat at the far edge of the band, out of the glaring center spotlight—yet her mere presence spoke volumes. Alexandra is familiar with the importance of having role models in jazz, and she has plenty; her entire extended family is made up of musicians, and she grew up listening to jazz records in her household. When I asked her for music suggestions, she eagerly recalled a name she didn’t think I would have heard of. It was Maria Schneider, whom she first met as a budding middle-school-aged instrumentalist, having taken up the baritone saxophone just a year or two prior. And she was right—I hadn’t heard of her. As for the Brown Jazz Band, their musical arrangements mandate restrictions on the makeup of the band, meaning that although musicians reaudition for their spots each year, a position in the band is generally unavailable until the preceding musician graduates. While this allows for fewer dramatic changes in the band’s composition, Alexandra recognized that this could prevent interested female musicians from joining. And when she gushed over the talents of a female underclassman awaiting her chance to be in the band, I realized that this is exactly what I’d been pursuing in writing this piece: simple instances of women supporting other women in jazz, reminiscent of the support system built into the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival’s celebration of women in jazz, and Maria Schneider’s quiet but public admiration for Ingrid Jensen’s performance of her own piece. *** As the hidden history of women in jazz is gradually unraveled, female musicians of years past and present are finally gaining the recognition they deserve, even if much of this acclaim is arriving decades too late. These musicians are just a small sampling of artists who prove that women aren’t discordant with jazz—and there are so many more stories to tell. october 11, 2019 3
NARRATIVE
ROTD?
Communicating (in) LongDistance Friendships BY GAYA GUPTA ILLUSTRATED BY IRIS XIE
I’ve been in a long-distance friendship for a year now. Sure, such a feat doesn’t elicit as much sympathy or awe as maintaining a long distance relationship; I’m sure you or someone you know is friends with someone separated by coasts or continents, seas or time zones. But still, I find it impressive. We’ve done this before. Anita left for college in Los Angeles last year while I trudged through my final year of high school up in the Bay Area. As I agonized over college apps, she dealt with meal plans and midterms, new friends, partying, and hookups. How strange that a year ago she was in exactly my place now, and how odd that she still knew someone stuck on the other side. But this is the first time we are an entire 3,000 miles apart, the distance between Providence and Los Angeles separating us. The three hours between us feels like it stretches out my day and accelerates hers; when I call during dinner, Anita reminds me that she still has class, whereas later in the night, I sometimes fall asleep before she gets the chance to text about her day. The chaos of my first semester has intensified our disconnect. Two busy college schedules are hard to coordinate, whereas last year, I was very willing (you could even say grateful) to procrastinate on schoolwork to talk to her. Now, I tell her I need 10 more minutes until I’m able to call, but then I have to get to class or pick up something or run all the way to Pembroke campus because I’m late to orchestra, and I end up forgetting. And when I text Anita something that reminds me of her it can take days for her to respond. It’s frustrating. It’s especially frustrating when we do call, and I’m reminded of how comfortable I feel with her—more so than with anyone else I’ve met here. You know what they say: It takes time. It takes time to get to know people—to really, really get to know people, and it takes time to adjust, to get settled. But I feel settled, I am adjusted. When I talk about going home at night, I mean my room in Keeney. I no longer turn my key the wrong way to unlock the door, and I’ve mastered the most efficient routes to class without Google Maps. I found my friend group on my second night at Brown during some fair on Simmons Quad. Introduced to them
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by one of the many fleeting friends I made during orientation, I clicked with my now tight-knit circle immediately. It was easy, finding all these new parts of my life. Harder, though, to figure out how the old parts fit in. Anita and I have a system; we call it ROTD, or rating of the day. No matter how busy we get, we try (really, really try) to remember to send each other just one number, a one-to-ten scoring of our day. No explanation needed. Just a simple integer to somehow capture the vast minutiae of our everyday. Our actual ratings have ranged from 2 to 10 (the latter happening only once or twice). If you plotted on a graph all of our numbers since we started this system, you might be able to guess what happened when: when I fell in love, when she came out to her parents, when I had my heart utterly broken, when she fell in love, too. You could tell by June’s high average I was having the best moments of my life in Europe while touring with my youth orchestra. You could infer when Anita’s three summer jobs were completely zapping her energy—but also when meeting her girlfriend started to turn things around. Though our system sometimes falters, recently we’ve been calling each other more than ever before—in no small part because the walk from Andrews back to my dorm in Keeney is so far that I might as well make use of it. Every time I call her is an opportunity to let my guard down. I can be annoyed and frustrated about the stupid stuff without padding it with politeness. She’s amused at my casual misfortunes and knows when I’m taking on too much and cautions me against it. When I call later and admit that she was, in fact, correct, she’s not afraid to say ‘I told you so’ before helping me figure things out, as she always does. Maybe that’s what differentiates a best friend from a good one: unflinching honesty when you’re being dumb, but also the proclivity to remind you of how much you’re loved when you can’t see it yourself. When Anita and her long-distance girlfriend broke up a few days ago, it was my turn to be there for her. They had been dating over the summer and were happy together, but with the start of school, things started to get complicated. The distance was too difficult, Anita argued, the future too far away. Four years to wait for what, exactly? Eventually getting married or breaking up? I understood her pain all too well, familiar with the seemingly neverending frustration and uncertainty that comes with a long-distance relationship myself. Secretly, however, I was relieved to be reminded that our own long-distance relationship wouldn’t face the same demise. With friendships, there are
fewer expectations for commitment, and with great friendships, there is no end—at least, not one you have to wonder about like in romantic relationships. Perhaps it’s naive and idealistic, like many longdistance relationships may seem from the outside, but I don’t see Anita and I breaking up anytime soon. We are so far from what was familiar—from all the times in high school when we sped down the road in my car to make it back from lunch on time, or cried from laughing too hard in her driveway—but she’s always going to be one of those friends who’ll laugh at my dumb jokes, no matter how old we are. Even at our most distant, we’ll exchange updates on our lives and how we feel, even if they are conveyed in just two numbers.
Tenses of the Sky A Friendship Becoming BY ANNELIESE MAIR ILLUSTRATED BY ASHLEY HERNANDEZ
We sit at the knuckle of Lake Tahoe’s big toe: The shore, covered in pines, bends around the lake’s edge. The land thins into a small peninsula, peaking at the California-Nevada border. Far out on the lake, a boat races through the water, visible only by the faint white trail left in its wake. On the opposite shore, the mountains stand in ragged rows, each a hue of blue lighter than the one before; a light dusting of snow rests atop the farthest ones, barely visible. The air is sharp, dry, and heavy with pine, stretching the skin on my face. Aside from the echoed roar of tires on the highway below and the punctuated chirping of birds, all is quiet. The silence floods the thin air, seeping through the pines, resting alongside sun rays that spread through the needles. It happens in increments so small that they become sudden: As the sun begins to set, it throws its light over our side of the hill, leaving the mountains to rest in shadow. The backsides of the trees before me become haloed silhouettes. Similar to a song, building and returning in repetition, the sun drops through its arc, inching along the circumference of the sky. My friend and I, randomly assigned as roommates in our freshman year—now co-signers on an apartment lease as seniors—sit still and silent as the pines. We sit in a world that is moving so rapidly, watching a star so deceptively still. I squint into the sky and try to watch the indigo hues darken; the gradient, rising and condensing into a deep shade in the atmosphere, shifts all at once, leaving me unable to discern the flux. After what feels like hours have gone by, I nod to myself and quietly decide that something has Changed: It has been changing all along, but only now am I able to perceive it. The darkness accumulates in steps so minuscule that the change ceases to become a verb—at least in the present tense. Without speaking, we watch each other, just as we have for the past three years. Just as we had done in those wordless moments when we felt the weeks dragging, the months slipping, the time accumulating in circles below our underslept eyes. We were firstyears with shitty habits: We stayed up regularly until four a.m., spent too many hours in the Ratty, and showed up late to unit meetings bearing dripping slices of Antonio’s pizza. Amidst the moving pieces and demands of our lives, and despite gradually working through (a few of ) those freshman habits, we often continue to find ourselves tired. But in the convening energetic moments, when either or both passion and anxiety throw us forward, we set aside our never-ending checklists and revel in love, dancing, learning; we’ll disregard structured time entirely in the process of understanding each other.
ARTS & CULTURE The bottom edge of the sun falls below the mountain, casting a golden outline over the peaks. The orange is reflected in a warm glow over her face, lighting a shine in her eyes. They are open wide, both wondrous and expressionless, glassy as calm water, still as everything else which appears not to move. Her expression isn’t sullen, but it isn’t clear either. I observe her relationship with the world as she gently takes it in; I’ve watched her push forward in pursuit of environmental justice, education, friendship. And she’s seen me, in parallel, nudging myself into vulnerable territories, trying to understand healing, learning to ask for help. Over the peaks, a deeper blue settles in, its contrast highlighting the backlit glow. The sun budges downward and disappears behind the rising pines, and everything before us fades swiftly into navy. The trees become shadows of themselves. We have spent these years becoming together, but only over a subtle series of shifts, in abrupt moments of recognition, has she become herself to me. The night sky sinks in, deepening the orange ribbon on the horizon, darkening the mountains, draining all the color from down below. She turns toward me, her eyelids blinking heavily as she draws her mouth into a soft smile. I exhale, noticing only now that I’d been holding my breath. Together we’d been moving so sporadically, so steadily, yet waiting for the world to freeze with us. There are stars sprinkled about the sky, now dimmed to black. Just before all light dips out of the day, it weaves a faint trace over the mountain tops, a jagged line almost lost in the dark.
Finding Asian America
Seeing Ourselves in The Farewell BY AMANDA NGO ILLUSTRATED BY GABY TREVIÑO
“Another Asian movie, ha? What the other one we watched? Crazy Asian, hm?” My mom rarely goes into Boston for pleasure, and even then, it’s only when my sister and I drag her out. Usually, we take her to see the annual movie that scripts at least one Asian actor with more than two lines. This summer, it was The Farewell. Shortly after we pulled out of our driveway, we cruised down streets lined with small, mixeduse properties donning bilingual signs and ads. We passed by paint-peeled barber shops and Chinese apothecaries with flyers plastered all over their windows and doors, then newer businesses like hotpot and sweet soup eateries whose neon signs and lush indoor plants promise A/C and sweet Insta-worthy photo ops. My family lives in the heart of North Quincy, a neighborhood reductively dubbed by outsiders “Boston’s new Chinatown.” According to the 2010 census, 40.9 percent of the city’s population was Asian. Growing up here, I had the opposite of an identity crisis; I was irrevocably, undeniably, and comfortably Asian American. It was a label that held no confusion, just fact.
I grew up in a trilingual household, spent weekends in a nearby Vietnamese school, attended annual lunar moon festivals at my high school, joined Boston’s only all-Asian poetry slam team, and went to a barber who paid a worrisome amount of attention to his Chinese television drama while cutting my hair. It’s not to say that these experiences made me an Asian American, but it was because of my predominantly Asian community that I was able to center these experiences in my life and confidently claim a hyphenated identity for myself without fear of looking like an outsider. On our way into Boston, we sped alongside what seemed to be a completely empty highway leading out of the city. As we drove closer, we saw cones and police cars blocking the entire lane. “It must be someone from federal. Maybe the president is here,” my father guessed. It was definitely not the president. But for a VIP and their motorcade, it’s not all that remarkable to say that the world just stops. A whole city’s worth of gas-guzzlers, droning GPS assistants, and people with intentions put on pause. When I started at Brown, the person I was at home went on a hiatus. My cultural identity, while still something I spoke about, no longer grounded me. I could no longer casually slip into Vietnamese with my friends here—even with the ones who were fluent— because we felt too out of place. With my family and our traditions out of reach, my own gaps in knowledge revealed themselves: In a hypothetical world where I knew how to cook, I couldn’t even fathom making my own phở in the dorm kitchens, as I wasn’t able to name the first ingredient. And on some hazy nights, when friends shared family histories over wine and greasy takeout, I rushed through mental catalogues handed down to me, desperate to find a tale I hadn’t told before. Despite my endless storytelling, I had very little to say about who my family was and how they got to where they were. When we got to the theater, it was nearly packed. My family and I had to squeeze through rows of knees
previously resisted. While Billi does take a drastic turn in her actions, this is not a movie about the triumph of Eastern values. Billi did not so much concede to her family as she did choose them, elevating her conflict beyond questions of what is right. There is a solemnity as the family walks in lockstep, a reminder that there is no correct course to take, no moral squabble to judge, but rather a woman at the heart of it all, needing her children and grandchildren, united and by her side. In the dark, drafty theater, while my mother and sister sat silently appreciating the film, I kept rubbing my palm against my eyes and breathing through my mouth (and not my snot-filled nose) to avoid giving away how much I was crying. At one point, my mother looked over and reached for my hand. “Tội nghiệp,” she whispered. Poor thing. What had beat me to an emotional pulp was that Billi was never a “half-person” at any moment during the movie. It was her Asian American-ness that resisted keeping the secret, and it was her Asian American-ness that finally chose to collectively bear the weight of the secret with the rest of the family. Her role never prioritized one side of the hyphen. Watching Billi, I realized that the struggle with my identity hadn’t come from my efforts to preserve the customs of one culture. Instead, it was from believing that there was only one correct way of living out two different cultures if I wanted to be fully Asian American. On our way out, my mom wanted to stop by the Chinatown gates to pick up some bao from her favorite bakery. My sister and I stood at the back door of the
Sometimes we forget that our hyphenated identities have been questioned and experienced by so many who have lived a life here before us. and overpriced movie food. My mother insisted on sitting in the middle. “So jiejie can explain to me what’s going on,” she justified to my disgruntled sister who would have rather sat next to me. The Farewell follows Billi, a struggling New York creative who goes to China, gathering alongside her family to join her cancer-stricken nai nai, or grandmother. When she arrives, she grapples with the Chinese cultural practice that allows families to withhold terminal cancer diagnoses from loved ones. I was taken aback by how this storyline ran parallel to my experiences. While our circumstances and cultural confrontations were vastly different, the task of learning to balance ourselves and our values on the hyphen enjoining our Asian and American identities was something Billi and I shared. After many scenes of an exasperated Billi trying to convince her family members that withholding the diagnosis is wrong, she comes to a decisive moment: The background blurs behind her as she races down the road to a hospital. When she arrives, panting for breath, she discreetly ensures that the medical files her grandmother requested are doctored to report benign findings as her family wishes. The film then cuts to a shot of Billi marching towards the camera. No longer solitary, she is now leading the loved ones she had
theater confronting the sprawling streets, disoriented from the outside light. To our surprise, Mom pointed us in the right direction. “You don’t know? I used to work here. That used to be McDonald’s,” she said, gesturing at an Unos. I joked to my sister that this was “Mom’s turf,” but I really had no idea she used to come by this area every day. I asked her more about her first years in America, before me or my sister were in the picture. “If I stay in Vietnam, I want to be a chemist. But here, my boss at McDonald’s keep saying he give me a raise, but he does not. Because I always mess up in English. But I had another job. So I left. And my English is okay now.” Sometimes we forget that our hyphenated identities have been questioned and experienced by so many who have lived a life here before us. And just as they have moved forward in their lives, picking up what they can, holding on to what they know, and trusting themselves enough to be whole, I’m learning to do the same. I can’t always find myself at home in North Quincy surrounded by its cultural familiarity, but by listening to those around me, indulging in stories told by these powerful voices, and writing down my own life, I’m starting to uncover that there is no one correct way to be Asian in America. october 11, 2019 5
ARTS&CULTURE
Adventure of a Lifetime Dungeons & Dragons & Podcasts & Lost Youth BY DAVID KLEINMAN ILLUSTRATED BY JOANNE HAN
“It’s not all abraca-fuck-you and what have you. I have a beating heart! I’m multidimensional! I’m a fullyrealized creation! FUCK!" My friends and I first played Dungeons & Dragons right after high school graduation. For those of you who haven’t seen Stranger Things, and even some of you who have, allow me to explain the premise: The essential action of D&D lies in creating characters with various strengths and weaknesses and assigning those strengths and weaknesses to dice rolls, determining whether the character succeeds or fails at the task they’re attempting. These tasks are part of a greater narrative created by the Dungeon Master, the one in charge of all non-player characters and settings. My best friend Becca dredged up her dad’s old rulebooks and begged me and a couple other friends to try out the classic roleplaying game. We were hooked right away. It didn’t even matter that the gang never got beyond three sessions in a given adventure: We were a bunch of theater kids hanging out during the summer when we couldn’t get roles. It was a joy just to act and to still have an excuse to get together after high school. Even during freshman year, at every chance, we’d get whoever we could on Skype and roll some dice together. It became our main method of staying in contact. “Magnus rushes in.” There’s a podcast called The Adventure Zone. Jonah, another of my high school friends, had been raving about it the whole summer between our freshman and sophomore years. According to Jonah, the podcast basically involves three idiot brothers and their idiot father playing D&D together, with one of them playing a wizard named Taako whose goal in life is to invent the taco. Soon enough, I was lying on my bed in Caswell Hall,
sobbing as Magnus (the fighter physically incapable of thinking ahead), Merle (the cleric with a Kenny Chesney ass tattoo), and, of course, Taako faced off against a threat to reality itself. Once again, I was hooked. “Merle follows.” In episode eight, the three players, known as the “Tres Horny Boys,” must participate in a complex trial to prove their worth to join a shadowy organization. Taako is fighting three ogres, Merle is sending him potions via cannon, and Magnus is stopping an army of robots from pressing a button that’ll kill everyone. Magnus can see that he’s outnumbered. Rather than put his full strength into fighting each robot, he decides to neutralize them as quickly as he can by pulling off their arms. Though the group laughs at his grotesque plan of action, the Dungeon Master agrees with Magnus that it’s the best course of action; he has him roll a die to determine his success in mutilating this poor android. He has to roll higher than six to do it, and he rolls a seven. To capture this hair’s breadth success, the DM announces: “You very, very slowly tear his arms off.” It’s as hilarious as it is agonizing to the robot. Twenty-nine episodes later, the THB face off against three deadly robot enemies. Magnus grins. He goes for the arms. The Adventure Zone excels in the art of the comedic callback. I don’t want to spoil any more, though, because these payoffs are what make the story so beautiful. It’s one big joke, and you’re in on it. But the
“Is it over, sirs? Did we win?” When The Adventure Zone ended, the creators were faced with a choice. Sequel rot was a threat, but they had a good thing going and didn’t want to cut it short. So they compromised: the story was over, but the first season would no longer comprise the whole of The Adventure Zone. They rebranded it The Adventure Zone: Balance, and the title of The Adventure Zone became a catchall for multiple seasons of different role-playing games with all-new narratives. The second season, The Adventure Zone: Amnesty, had its finale on September 23, 2019. I didn’t listen. “But that is the limit of my knowledge. You’re all caught up now. Whatever happens next, well… we’ll just have to find out together.” I have a few complaints about Amnesty. For one, the characters were never really fleshed out, which I chalk up to a system much more open to character death than D&D ever was; it wasn’t built into the rules that we’d get attached to them. Moreover, in Balance, there was a set number of magical items to be collected, a set final boss to be fought, a set intention for just about every action. The arcs of Amnesty usually hinged around the central conceit of “stop the monster and save everyone”; a worthy conceit, but after a few monster hunts, you wonder where it’s all going.
The little things the players do to amuse themselves are never dismissed or forgotten; the things that make them happy make them who they are. fun of The Adventure Zone isn’t just in the comedy; the action and the drama are equally important. In fact, this balance holds the entire show together. A joke is never at the expense of the story—it only enriches it. Even when the adventurers decide that they want to assign a silly trait to a non-player character, it’s often given a deeply moving backstory later. The little things the players do to amuse themselves are never dismissed or forgotten; the things that make them happy make them who they are. “Taako’s good out here.” Like all things, good or otherwise, The Adventure Zone ends. The finale had actually come out right when I started working my way through the archive. I called Jonah, and we sobbed for a little bit. I called Becca and told her to start listening. I called Becca and Jonah at the same time and demanded we play D&D again soon. I called someone I knew who was into the show, and we talked about it for so long that we ended up dating. I was sad to lose the stream of new adventures, but the note they ended on was so perfect I wouldn’t dare ask for more. I was, above all else, happy.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo
“I am confronted by my illiteracy.”
Section Editors Sara Shapiro Erin Walden
– Rebecca Buxbaum, “shiru” 10.11.18
Staff Writer Anna Harvey
“This guy can have fun anywhere." – James Feinberg, “don’t call it a comeback” 10.12.17
NARRATIVE Managing Editor Celina Sun Section Editors Liza Edwards-Levin Michelle Liu Jasmine Ngai
But when I step back, I have to ask myself, was it really Amnesty’s fault I wasn’t interested? “Sometimes there aren't good decisions. Sometimes there's just decisions.” Since Balance ended in 2017, my D&D group of high school friends has stopped talking. Jonah’s always busy, and Becca spends most of her time with her girlfriend. I’m no longer in a relationship with the person I met through the show. What do I have to show for the intervening years besides a couple of other podcasts I’ve come to enjoy? Maybe I need to listen to Balance again and recapture the magic. Maybe I need to try listening to Amnesty and accept the future. Maybe I need to write to make sense of my feelings. Maybe I need to leave podcasts behind entirely. Maybe I need to let go of the past. I think the DM put it best when he said: “When someone leaves your life, those exits are not made equal. Some are beautiful and poetic and satisfying. Others are abrupt and unfair. But most are just unremarkable, unintentional, and clumsy.”
Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Grace Park ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Julian Towers Section Editors Nicole Fegan Griffin Plaag Staff Writer Rob Capron
LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Kahini Mehta
SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Camila Pavon
Section Editor Caitlin McCartney
Editor Paola Solano
Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto
HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Rémy Poisson
COPY Copy Chief Amanda Ngo
LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi
Copy Editors Maddy McGrath Jennifer Osborne Mohima Sattar
Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche
Want to be involved? Email: anita_sheih@brown.edu!
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