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upfront
contents
editor's note Dear Readers,
upfront features 3 • croissants at a crossroads Saanya Jain 4 • single or ready to mingle? Alexandra Walsh
lifestyle 5 • the god inside my head Ameer Malik 5 • footnotes on faith Sarah Cooke 8 • rip Monica Chin
This week at production we’ve been talking about the phenomenon of the Finstagram. For those of you who didn’t know, a Finstagram is a fake Instagram. And if you, like many of us, still need a little more detail, I refer you to Anabelle’s piece on page 6, “The Art is in the Artifice: What Finstas Reveal about the Current Tech Age.” A Finstagram is a place where you can put up photos and posts that you would never put up on your real Instagram, for fear of judgments. According to staff members, your Finstagram is like “your tumblr, but on Instagram.” Whereas your Instagram should have only carefully curated pictures of mini cacti and polished brunch layouts, your Finstagram can have whatever incriminating material you want. On Finstagram, it is acceptable to be your messy, unadmirable self. I suspect that the Finstagram seems like a new phenomenon only because, in creating a Finstagram, we actively admit that we curate our identities. The content we put on Facebook is different than the content we share on Instagram, is different from what you share on Snapchat, across texts, and through emails. And in fact, the content we share in your classrooms is different than what we share in resumes, is different than what we share with our friends, and our families. The Finstagram is nothing more than a natural extension of our compartmentalized identities. This all makes sense to me. I’m just too exhausted to create another account. Best,
arts & culture 6 • the art is in the artifice Annabelle Woodward 6 • fanblogging Celina Sun 7 • on american born chinese Pia Ceres
staff
Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Ryan Walsh Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin Managing Editor of Lifestyle Rebecca Ellis Arts & Culture Editors Joshua Lu Anne-Marie Kommers
Yidi Bring back the naked photo. Send us your nudes (to put in the magazine) at alicia_devos@brown.edu.
Features Editors Saanya Jain Claribel Wu
Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb
Lifestyle Editors Claire Sapan Alicia DeVos
Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro
Creative Director Grace Yoon Copy Chiefs Alicia DeVos
Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Daniella Balarezo Tushar Bhargava Kalie Boyne Pia Ceres Katherine Chavez Rebecca Forman
Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Lucia Iglesias Ameer Malik Chantal Marauta Aubrey McDonough Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Jennifer Osborne Spencer Roth-Rose Celina Sun Anany Shah Annabelle Woodward Alex Walsh Joshua Wartel
Staff Illustrators Alice Cao Peter Herrara Jason Hu Beverly Johnson Jenice Kim Emma Margulies Michelle Ng Mary O’Connor Yoo Jin Shin
Cover Jenice Kim
features
3
croissants at a crossroads conquering the final frontier of french pastry
SAANYA JAIN features section editor illustrator JULIE BENBASSAT
I grew up in Tunisia as a transplant from India. I don’t know if it was the flaky desert soil, the Mediterranean breeze, or the legacy of Hannibal towering above me on Carthage Hill, but I matured with a conqueror’s spirit. Unlike Hannibal, however, I conquered lands not with elephants but through food: Brownies were America, cheesecake was South Africa, and most difficult of all, croissant was Tunisia. A proper croissant takes three days to make. When I finally decided to give the recipe a try, I condensed the process to seven hours. I set the timer and settled back to watch the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Part 1 & 2, getting up every hour to unpack the dough and add another chunk of butter, not even bothering to keep count of how many calories I was pressing into the fleshy dough. When it had finally risen, I picked up my four-year-old cousin and deposited him on the kitchen countertop. We both watched intently as Paul Hollywood of The Great British Bake-Off disciplined his dough, yanking it and then smoothly rolling it into the familiar crescent shape. I let my cousin sprinkle chocolate shavings (everywhere outside of the intended target) and roll the triangle, pulling the long end fiercely just like in the video. My dough soon ran out but my cousin hadn’t had enough. I set him to work with Play-Doh. As he sat on the floor, mimicking my moves, neither of us knew that he was participating in the tradition of night-owl bakers, war cam-
paigns, and Ottomans on horses. A sharia committee in Aleppo, Syria, has banned croissants. You may imagine this as a protest of its colonial roots: Archaeological data has shown how “food practices were particularly important in French strategies to absorb the native into the colonial body and protect imperial culture against a constant assault on the senses” by creating a hierarchy of taste that “civilized” local foods through French cooking practices. Or as a costcutting measure because of how much butter (several kilograms) or labor (multiple days) they require. In fact, at the root of the declaration is the croissant’s offending shape, which celebrates European victory over Muslims four centuries ago in another part of the world. In 1683, or so the origin story goes, Vienna was under siege by the Turks. The bakers’ work never stopped, and so they were the only ones awake in the middle of the night, kneading and proofing and rolling and shaping, while the rest of the city slept. They were also the only ones to hear the clink! of Ottoman tools under their feet as the Turks attempted to tunnel underneath the walls of the city. Dusting their hands on their aprons, they ran to alert the city’s defenders. Soon, King John III of Poland arrived to the rescue with an army that forced the Turks to retreat. The next morning, to celebrate their victory, the bakers made a pastry in the shape of the crescents they had seen on the flags of the enemy. They christened it Kipferl, the German word
for crescent. Food has a way of infiltrating places, for reasons good and bad, colonial or otherwise. It becomes enmeshed in an identity to a point where cutting off a bit of “them” is cutting off a part of you. The question of perversion/improvisation becomes hazy. Take for example the recent Carbonara-gate scandal and the problem of the one pot pasta that have swept Italians up in arms ladles against the French and Americans. Croissants in particular are imposters: They worm their way into a culture until they have defined the place so thoroughly that you can’t imagine not having one, steaming slightly, waiting for you in the morning at the breakfast table. What to do about ham and cheese croissants, zaatar-filled concoctions, German “Laugencroissant” with lye, a leaner and meaner version from Switzerland called the Gipfeli, with less butter than its French counterpart, and most obscene of all, the Cronut, a deep-fried, creamfilled doughnut-croissant? At first glance, the ban might not seem like a newsworthy political event. But it does not only concern a pastry. This is history—my history. When I labored over the dough that morning with my cousin, I didn’t just want any croissant—for that, I could have picked up one of the packs of frozen dough at the supermarket. I wanted the one that came in a white paper bag with Délice written on the side in purple, with brown flakes gathered at the bottom
as evidence of the truck ride that had brought them to me and a chocolate bar perfectly intact, magically nestled inside with no exit or entrance wounds to be found. Every morning at seven o’clock they arrived from one of the oldest bakeries in Tunis and no matter how many we ordered, there were never enough to satisfy my school’s appetite. All 300 or so kids and teachers aimed to get out of first period early so they could be in line before the croissants ran out. My French teacher even let us out five minutes early whenever we had him for first period and made a beeline for the store. We didn’t complain. We all had our different ways of eating it—some ate all the buttery, stretchy flakes around the chocolate bar, like eating a fish to avoid the bones, so they could eat the chocolate bar last. I ate mine gingerly, trying not to think about the amount of margarine I was consuming. I might have been the only one thinking about how to make the delicate layers and flaky texture that shattered with every bite. Croissants are made from laminated dough, which means that the dough is layered with sheets of butter. The number of turns—the process of folding the dough and butter layers over themselves—gives the maze-like depths to a croissant. When they’re baked, the dough rises because the moisture inside turns to steam, puffing the layers. You have made a perfect croissant, Pastry Chef François Payard says, when you cut it in half and see “alveoli—a term that normally refers to the bunches of tiny sacs in our lungs. A scene: I see the French colonizers taking over the reins from the Ottoman Beys, the seventh in the long series of Tunisia’s conquerors. The French resident-minister, Paul Cambon, has orchestrated a procession from Ali Bey’s La Marsa palace to the Bardo Palace. Under the ceiling of the Bardo, he invests him as the new Bey in the name of France. Thousand-year old mosaics, remnants of past Roman conquests, and grimacing masks of the Phoenicians surround them. Do they wonder if they will be as transient as those before them? The food they eat in celebration, at least, will not: Cheese and bread are as Tunisian as they are French, so much so that they are the first foods mentioned on Wikipedia’s Culture of Tunisia page, even before brik and couscous. Whether the croissant ban in Aleppo will lead to a wave of bans across former French colonies remains to be seen. I doubt it. The croissant will spring forth in one form or another. Last year, I left my home in Tunis, where I had lived for 12 years, and came to the United States for college. I now had another stop to add to my answer: “I was born in India, grew up in Tunisia, and now live in the US.” Perhaps it was fitting then, that one of the first things I saw as I entered one of the over-priced campus eateries was a croissant lying behind a glass display, the harsh light revealing its frozen dough exterior and hinting at its plastic interior. For better or for worse, a bite of home would follow me everywhere.
4 features
single or ready to mingle? dating do-or-dies
ALEXANDRA WALSH staff writer illustrator SOCO FERNANDEZ GARCIA
You’ve probably heard someone say that college is the best time to meet your life partner. Maybe your parents met in college, or through their friends, or through the people who lived next door to your parents’ friends. Maybe your roommate has been dating someone since first-year orientation. Whatever the case, there’s an inherent excitement in college—and an inherent fear—that you might, at any moment, run into your long-term companion. After all, college is the last time you’ll be surrounded by hundreds of people who, like you, are at prime mating age. I held this belief for a while. Universities are fairly self-selecting, so I figured Brown would be the ideal place to meet my spouse-to-be. But one day, in the middle of a debate about Tinder, my friend expanded my perspective. “College is the best time to be single,” he said. “When else are you going to be living with a wide variety of young, attractive people who want to hook up?” I was stunned. Somehow, I’d never thought of it that way. Why should I settle down in college, of all places, when there were so many options in front of me? I was under the impression that the goal was long-term mating, punctuated by unfortunate bouts of short-term experiences—but what if it was secretly the other way around? I had always thought of the “hookup culture” as a placeholder
for real dating, but suddenly, with that one comment, everything changed. To seriously evaluate the two major options, we turn to pros and cons. RELATIONSHIP Pros: • Built-in study breaks • Don’t have to shave or diet • Constant motivator/self-care encourager • Dates not related to Tinder • Less pressure to go out • Society’s approval • Mom’s approval Cons: • No sleep • Less pressure to go out • New priority to fit into schedule • Fail classes • Run out of cute parks • Harbinger of adulthood SINGLE Pros: • Meet new people • Fewer unwanted obligations • Variety of grinding partners • More time with friends • Better creative output • Sexual tension • No sharing food
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Bed to self
Cons: • Eternal loneliness The arguments for both sides are compelling. Do we want good poetry, or society’s approval? Our food to ourselves, or an excuse to leave campus for dinner? Obviously we want both, and we want them whenever we arbitrarily decide we want them. But most of us don’t have the money to hire an escort, and casual dating is a lie. (One of you will always want to turn it into a real relationship). So what’s a prospective lover to do? Fortunately, my friend and I didn’t end our debate without finding a caseby-case solution. Each year, we decided, brings its own guidelines: First-year relationships don’t count, and since first-years aren’t qualified to date older students, their only options are frenzied hookups and awkward dates with people in their first-year seminars. The first year of college is a discovery year, and rightly so. Sophomores are a different story. They’re old enough that they could date, if they wanted to, but they’re busy exploring their newfound freedom to look upper-class citizens in the eye. Whether you settle for a peer or spend your time chasing hot seniors, sophomore year is about finding out how low your stan-
dards will dip before breaking. Juniors year is the last chance to start a serious relationship without graduation looming overhead. Having finally come into their own, juniors may be tempted to stay single—but it’s a trap! Juniors in relationships are 85% more likely to have their act together. They don’t have time to go out, seek temporary partners, and start planning theses, all at once. Senior year is a free-for-all. If you’ve been dating since year one, congratulations and have a nice honeymoon. If you started dating at campus dance, maybe don’t move into an apartment in the city together. If you’re still single, then either you haven’t met your partner (were you cocky as a junior?), you did and they met a different partner (did you give off too much body heat in bed?), or you didn’t even try to meet your partner, in which case you’ve either beaten or lost the game. Basically, by senior year you can do whatever you want and still be cool, as long as you do it with pride. In summary, college is fun no matter what you do. Get married, hook up twice, never hook up with anyone at all—whatever happens, you’ll be fine. So don’t stress about meeting someone/ meeting everyone/hooking up/not hooking up. Based on my analysis, you can’t go either wrong or right.
lifestyle
5
the god inside my head a merciless tyrant undeserving of my worship
AMEER MALIK staff writer illustrator KATIE CAFARO
It started when I was six, I think. My mind was stung with quick, piercing needles. My psyche was hit with thoughts that horrified me: vulgarities, blasphemies. I believed I was responsible for these sudden thoughts, and I believed that these thoughts were immoral, sinful. Whenever I tried to stop them, they became fiercer, more relentless. So I prayed. I prayed to God to forgive me, to help me overcome my sins. I did not realize this at the time, but in those moments when I frantically prayed, when I sought refuge from the attacks on my mind, I was not praying to God, the God that I learned about during my lifetime, the God I pray to today. I was instead praying to a little god that lived inside my head. I established rituals for the little god when I was very young. One began when I received a present—a wonderful toy. I was so excited to play with it, but I wanted to make sure my hands were clean. I didn’t want to ruin it, so I washed my hands. Whenever I wanted to play with it, I washed and washed. I spent a lot of time washing. I hardly ever played with the toy. As the years passed, the more I prayed to the little god, the more rapid the onslaught on my mind became. I was in a terrible cycle. And I kept washing my hands, afraid that they were dirty. There were a few, brief years of respite— ages seven to nine were peaceful, as were ages
11 and 12. But the rest of the time, my psyche was in a constant frenzy. I was always begging for forgiveness. I wondered why I could not stop sinning. I found flaws in who I was and what I did, and I started to despise myself. I focused on what I now see are minor mistakes and shortcomings that come with being a human: moments of forgetfulness, instances of passion. I used these faults and my distressing thoughts as evidence of my reprehensible character, and I got frustrated when I couldn’t make them stop. I washed my hands for longer and longer spans of time. I thought I was scared of contamination, but looking back, I think I was subconsciously seeking purification. Every time I went to the bathroom, I had to see my reflection in the mirror, which was becoming harder and harder to do. But I told myself that this was okay, that the more I hated myself, the more pious I became. I know now that this was not useful. Hating myself did me no good. Today, I believe God is loving and merciful. I don’t think God wants people to hate themselves. I think God loves all beings, including humans with their beautiful human imperfections. But at the time, I didn’t realize that I had founded a new form of worship, that I had turned the bathroom into a place of prayer, the sink into a shrine. The joining of my hands under the faucet had become a sign of submission,
the reflection of myself in the mirror a negative icon. The god inside my head was cruel. Worshipping it became unbearably difficult. By the time I was 15, I felt as if a dark cloud was forming around me, and it was getting thicker. Then, something miraculous happened. I asked for help and was brought to a therapist. She told me the true name of the god inside my head—OCD—and taught me ways to overthrow the tyrant. She helped me realize that the barrage of thoughts that troubled me was not a sin––it was a symptom. She helped me see that the constant pleading for forgiveness was a result of my psychological condition. I’m grateful to God, to my family, to the therapists and doctors who have helped me and who continue to help me, and to my friends for everything, for limitless kindness, for boundless support. I’m incredibly thankful that I’m in a much better place now, that my mind is more at peace. It used to feel dark and cramped, but now it feels bright and spacious. Yet, there’s still more work to do. Traces of the tiny king linger in my mind and in my actions. I still spend a lot of time washing my hands, but I’m working to overcome my compulsion. I’m optimistic that, as I continue my treatment, my symptoms will lessen. Early on in my therapy, I read excerpts from a book about my condition and learned that
there are other people out there who have experienced OCD with a similarly distressing and warped religious dimension. According to the book, many of these people got better. When I read this, I felt less alone and more hopeful. To everyone who is suffering due to psychological conditions, I want to say that there are people who can help. Things can get better. I hope things do get better, that they turn out well for everyone.
footnotes on faith overheard on amtrak
SARAH COOKE contributing writer illustrator EMMA MARGULIES
1. In September, I was on an Amtrak train to Boston when I realized that the man next to me was calling somebody who was dealing with schizophrenia. So, the people in your head, he said, clearing his throat. What team are they on? Who’s the organizer? Who makes the plays? Talk me through it. Where are you? Across the aisle from us, a daughter pestered her sleeping father: Daddy, we should have taken the bus. This is too slow. She bounced on her seat, impatient, while he nodded and shifted back to sleep. So, what you’re saying is, they’re not so loud today? Through the phone, I could hear the person laugh. I think I might have fallen a little in love with him: Who is that good at talking somebody through a schizophrenic episode? The girl had succeeded at waking her father up; they were now playing thumb war, poking and snapping each other’s fingers. I’m winning, I’m winning! she howled, glorious in her gloating. The phone call ended, and I watched as the man let a soft sigh slide out of him, the one concession he made to whatever had just happened. We got off at the same station and made small talk. I learned that his name was Jean, that he’d recently moved to Boston after nearly a decade
in China and was born and raised in Tennessee. In response, I cracked jokes about New England weather. I wanted to say something about his friend but didn’t. Sixty years ago, this interaction might have gotten us—a black man and a white woman— arrested. It might have led white men to murder Jean. We shook hands, parted ways. One month later, I typed jean china boston tennessee into Google. It told me to look for gene’s chinese flatbread café menu instead. 2. On September 12, 2001, Allen Kay took out a 3 x 5 index card and wrote If you see something, say something. It was his attempt to guard against the inertia of despair that he believed was gripping America after 9/11. Manhattan may have looked like it was collapsing, but we could still do something; we could use our eyes to keep each other safe. It became such a popular sentiment of civic duty that the Department of Homeland Security (which was created in response to post-9/11 security concerns) trademarked it for use in its public awareness campaign about civilian safety. In 2010, Kay told the New York Times that he was inspired by World War II propaganda. “The model that I had in my head was ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships,’” he explained. “I thought it was ironic because we just want the opposite. We want people to talk.” 3. I sing odes to Amtrak on a regular enough basis that it’s no longer embarrassing but expected; Amtrak, a love story is the caption of a recent photo I posted on Facebook. I love Amtrak and Amtrak tolerates me, so we’re basically three plot twists away from being a romantic comedy with some horrendous gender and sexuality politics. Above all, Amtrak lets me lie to myself. I can
stay in one place for six or seven hours (or even eight—I’m looking at you, Northeast Regional ride from hell) but still say that I’m moving. And when I’m writing, when momentum and inertia start to look and feel the same, this ability to believe in stasis that isn’t static means everything. For me, Amtrak gives what Joan Didion calls, in Blue Nights, “faith—another form of momentum.” 4. From the Oxford English Dictionary, one definition of faith: belief in and acceptance of the doctrines of a religion. Another one: a system of (non-religious) belief; a set of firmly held principles, ideals, or beliefs; a creed. Still another one: power to convince. This one’s obscure, though. 5. In October, The Atlantic reported on a trend that occurs along California Zephyr (as Amtrak’s California route is known): Plainclothes police officers will enter trains and accuse, harass, and sometimes detain passengers whom they suspect of trafficking drugs. Two years ago, Samia Hossain of the ACLU reported on the guidelines that Amtrak issued to its ticket agents about how to recognize traveler conduct that was “indicative of criminal activity”: · Unusual nervousness of traveler · Unusual calmness or straight ahead stare · Looking around while making telephone call(s) · Position among passengers disembarking (ahead of, or lagging behind passengers) · Carrying little or no luggage · Purchase of tickets in cash · Purchase tickets immediately prior to boarding Hossain added: “Reporting based on broad
categories of suspicious behavior is problematic because it almost always results in racial and religious profiling, as well as the targeting of perfectly innocent activity.” If you see something, say something—a statement whose vagueness can make it seem universal, even though its impacts are disparate and disproportionately racialized. It makes me think of what Claudia Rankine writes in her memoir Citizen: “Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.” There, it’s shoot first and say something—Sorry, maybe, but rarely—later. In light of America’s perpetual practices and policies of anti-blackness, I’m wondering what it means, exactly, to place your life in the hands of strangers. We do this, implicitly, nearly every day, from taking the train (Amtrak or otherwise) to walking across a street. But seeing a police officer will activate a different set of histories and associations depending on how you identify, what your life experiences are. I used to think that the faith that undergirds our days—the faith, say, to trust that the strangers on your train have your back—could extend and radiate outwards. What contours that faith? What expectations are invited or assumed, and which ones are left by the wayside? Jean, the man who knew how to talk somebody through a schizophrenic episode, was, I would say, “unusually calm.” I would also say that he was unusually compassionate. I want to believe that these are not false choices between communal safety and individual compassion; otherwise, I don’t think that I could believe that people like Jean are not only possible, but also real. So, to say something: I saw a man whose life saved somebody else’s, and he was looking around as he did it, carrying little or no luggage.
6
arts & culture
the art is in the artifice what finstas reveal about the tech age
ANNABELLE WOODWARD staff writer illustrator SOCO FERNANDEZ GARCIA
According to Urban Dictionary, a Finsta is defined as “a fake Instagram account, so one can post ratchet pictures without persecution from sororities, jobs, and society as a whole.” Sure, Urban Dictionary might not be the most reliable of lexicons, but it does do a good job contextualizing the strange movements and obscene slangs that arise within teenage subcultures—of which the Finsta is one. When researching the Finsta, I was surprised to find that the majority of articles discussing them are written by concerned, borderline frantic parents on forum-esque publications like bewebsmart.com warning other parents that their children are using Finstas to “hide scandalous and overtly sexual behavior” and “cultivate alter egos.” At first I was amused by their antics, especially their incredulous assumption that Finstas are seducing their children into devising sinister “alter egos.” Just your typical helicopter parents frustrated by the futility of their efforts to supervise their kids on the web. However, after considering the “ratchet” content featured on my own Finsta, I gradually came to admit that their might be some credence in the concerned parent’s fear that secret Instagram accounts are facilitating unchecked self-disclosure. This summer, I, too, posted something dumb on my Finsta. The post wasn’t horribly incriminating, nothing that could get me arrested or anything. It was just your typical embarrassing video starring a drunken me dancing around a pool with shoes on my hands, something I thought my close friends would get a kick out of. Like most Finsta posts, it was the result of a silly impulse to share with friends, funny only in its stupidity, a slice of the real, uncut edition of my life. I captioned it with an odd combination of emojis and sent it into the world with little fear of consequence. Flash forward two months and I’m at Brown. Whoohoo college! It’s a Friday night, and some girl I don’t know and don’t like is fervently arguing about politics, her convictions in no way hampered by her inability to form coherent sentences. She’s talking about closet skeletons, as in, the kind of secrets pri-
vate investigators are hired to uncover. So I start thinking about my own skeletons. My record is relatively incident free, and I havn’t been convicted of any major felonies. On Facebook I’m just a nice girl who seems to go to a lot of school sporting events. But then I thought back to that video… really my whole Finsta in general… and realized that in the hands of my enemies, my account could fuel a really nasty smear campaign. I was hit by the sudden revelation that everything I put on Instagram is forever cemented in cyberspace, regardless of whether or not my account is private. A screenshot of me doing the shoe-hand Cat Daddy, if circulated, could easily be used to thwart my future political aspirations. Perhaps you are reading this and thinking, “No shit, Annabelle. That’s why most of our high school photo albums are full of suspiciously placed orange juice cartons that cut off people’s fingers.” Sure, we learned not to put incriminating photos on Facebook, but Finsta is supposed to be different. The Finsta account is supposed to relieve us from the chore of managing our “real” Instagram personas. Functioning like the “VIP” section of our publicized lives, the Finsta, or “fake” Instagram, is only accessible to the lucky few whom the user deems worthy of their “real” life. It isn’t uncommon to see a Finsta with 20 followers because of the strict, “no randos, no members of the sex that you’re attracted to” rule, which is supposed to effectively shield the user from judgement. On a Finsta, it is perfectly acceptable to post three pictures of your tabby cat in rapid succession, captioning each with a long, expository paragraph describing the sandwich you had for lunch. Hell, it’s encouraged. So we do. We vent about our petty frustrations and poor decisions, tell long-winded anecdotes about awkward encounters with cute TAs, essentially use our Finstas to showcase the shitshow behind the cool facade. The Finsta’s purpose isn’t just to expose the shitshow but to celebrate its universality. By fostering a community of mutual trust, Finstas allow us to collectively revel in the proverbial Struggle. But if in 20 years
I’m running for the Senate and one of my less-close high school friends gets offered 20 grand for a video of me doing something stupid, I can’t say I’d blame her for selling me out. Will the voluntary exposure of our most embarrassing moments someday result in our undoings? Honestly, it easily could. I mean granted, some people’s questionable social media activity warrants judgement. Take Dominyk Alfonseca, for example, who was arrested in 2015 for robbing a bank only after video blogging about it on his Instagram. Sorry Dominyk, but that colossal misstep will and probably should affect your job prospects. But most of us aren’t Dominyk. Most of us are just trying to reclaim our identities by proudly exhibiting our inner ratchet-ness in a medium that mimics installation artwork. Our impulse to share is clearly symptomatic of the scrutinizing times in which we were raised. In a culture that demands calculated spontaneity at all times, it seems only natural that we should seek relief through confessional outlets. In fact, our need to do so seems indicative of some societal deficiency that should probably be addressed ASAP. So with all of this acknowledged, shouldn’t our future employers pardon us for the silly mistakes of our pasts? And what about those pictures that aren’t voluntarily disclosed but used as ammunition to discredit us? If someone leaked of video of a teenage Hillary Clinton breakdancing in a toga right now, it would probably be really unfortunate for America. But that’s because Hillary’s generation doesn’t understand what it’s like to grow up with camera phones, always knowing that a horrible picture of you mid burrito bite is saved on your friend’s laptop, destined to resurface on your birthday. Unluckily for us, our exposure is imminent and unavoidable. The Cloud knows everything, and one of these days a computer nerd with a grudge is going to breach it and expose us all. I’m fairly confident of this, despite having little to no understanding of how The Cloud works. That being said, it seems that the only time where we can assume full control over
our self-disclosure is through our digital personas. Posting a ratchet picture on Finsta is essentially making a public declaration of self, a shameless admission that one’s existence falls short of society’s expectations. I’d argue that by the year 2040, some kind of campaign will emerge encouraging us to applaud the Finsta, revering it as the conception of a grassroots movement determined to reject soul-stifling social constructs. Instead of judging prospective employees by the dumb posts of their past selves, professional superiors will seek to understand the context within which those pictures were posted. Academics will study the Finsta to dissect the psychological impulses that led to their popularity. Brown will offer an MCM class examining the Finsta’s societal implications. A MOMA exhibit will be dedicated to garnering appreciation for the Finsta, a digital aperture that was indicative of so much more than wanting to be “ratchet” online. And as a result of this campaign, we’ll all reach a breaking point, declare a cease fire and decide to stop frontin’. And I will run for mayor in a quaint, seaside New England town. And no one will object on the grounds that my shoe-hand Cat Daddy renders me ineligible for candidacy.
fanblogging shaking those post-finale blues
CELINA SUN staff writer illustrator CLARISSE ANGKASA
So you’ve just finished a book that shattered your heart and destroyed your soul. You’re still reeling from the plot twists, worried about the characters that the author has left in dire straits, and aghast because you have to wait another twelve months before the next book comes out. All you want to do is talk about the book—the plot, the world, the characters—but of course, no one else you know has read it. You could resign yourself to going about your life and pretending that the book you’ve read isn’t consuming your every waking thought, or you could face the fact that the book is consuming your every waking thought and spend way
too much time looking through the blogs of people whose lives were similarly wrecked by said book. Because the latter option is obviously the way to go, Tumblr is the answer to all your book-induced troubles. A site where users can create their own blog, Tumblr is home to thousands of fan blogs that post all kinds of content—perfect for getting yourself out of an I-just-finished-the-best-book-what-doI-do-with-my-life-now slump. After reading a particularly brilliant book, I’m always left wanting more: more of the characters, more of the story. I usually just need the next book right then and
there, and Tumblr fan blogs provide the next best thing—content about anything and everything else related to the book. Beautiful typography of favorite quotes. Photosets that scream “aesthetic.” Fan art that brings the characters to life. Tumblr fan blogs feature a lot of quality content. Posts range from in-depth analyses of plots and characters that make all your feelings resurface to incorrect quotes that are so accurate they could practically be canon. Adapting generic memes to fit a book’s plot and characters, fans make text posts and gifs that have you, even with your shattered heart, laughing. Book-inspired fan blogs are
also a great way to get through the interim between publication dates, and they ensure that the story stays alive even after the series ends. Fan blogs also keep followers up-to-date on all the latest news. Has the author just announced that she’s adding three more books to your favorite series? The fandom knows and probably has already made a dozen posts about it—complete with gifs and appropriate amounts of capital letters. Additionally, many fan blogs feature fan-made merchandise, spotlighting story-inspired bookmarks, jewelry, scented candles, and more. Many authors have Tumblr blogs as well.
arts & culture
They often reblog fan art and post snippets from their new works. Some even answer readers’ questions and share exclusive content like deleted scenes that didn’t make it into the final versions of their books. Tumblr’s fan blogs cover an abundance of fandoms so they’re great for alleviating TV and movie-induced troubles as well. Just finished a movie with beautiful cinematography? Someone has probably already posted gifs of all the best scenes for your perusal, so you can re-experience the feels without having to re-watch the film. Waiting for the next episode—or worse, the next season— of a TV show? Fan blogs share enough new
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stills, casting news, and interviews to hold you over. Plus, gifs of the original content are often slowed down so that you can greater appreciate the actors’ expressions, or edited so that you can experience the aesthetic in new ways. Because fan blogs are run by fans, for fans, the content reflects what other fans want to see. Spending time on Tumblr is a prime way to satisfy your feels, which lets you go about life without the book you just read, episode you just watched, or movie you just saw consuming your every waking thought. Well, at least until the next thing gets released.
on american born chinese graphic novel tackles growing up asian in america
PIA CERES staff writer illustrator MICHELLE NG
It’s been a frustrating past few weeks for Asian Americans in the media. The #whitewashedOUT hashtag, which gained traction last summer after major American movies set in Asia featured all-white leads, came to a boil again when a leaked script for Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan revealed a white love interest. Last week, the O’Reilly Factor correspondent and perennial frat boy Jesse Watters “interviewed” pedestrians in New York’s Chinatown for his man-on-the-street video segment, belittling Asian people with every racist stereotype he could jam into a five-minute clip. Most notably, two days ago New York Times reporter Michael Luo penned an open letter to the woman who yelled at him and his family, “Go back to China!” Since then, Luo’s letter has circulated the Internet, inspiring Asian Americans to lay bare the racism they’ve encountered since childhood, from microaggressions to slurs spray-painted on their homes. This is nothing new. The struggle for Asian-American voices and visibility in mainstream American culture is rooted in
a longer history of representations that exoticize and subordinate. Those speaking out against Asian erasure and stereotyping often look back to their own childhoods, at the moment of the first confused sting of marginalization. These childhood anecdotes share an essence of shame, fear, and misunderstanding. Luo writes in his open letter that his seven-year-old keeps asking him, “Why did she say, ‘Go back to China?’ We’re not from China.” For many who grew up a minority in the United States, the moment of interrogation often comes in childhood. For me, it was when a first grade playmate asked if I was Chinese, didn’t I pee in Coke? (He asked this in song, no less. And I’m Filipina.) This new, newly noticeable racialized treatment is often the first of unsettling incidents that, insidious, causes a child like Luo’s daughter to question her sense of belonging. It is the beginning of the rude realization that one is, by dint of appearance, generalized and marginalized. “Is it so bad to grow up Asian in Amer-
ica?” pondered the book reviewer for the New York Times back in 2006. Such was the opening line for his review of a story that follows an Asian-American boy who reluctantly moves from Chinatown, San Francisco and is the new student at a majority-white elementary school. Since then, American Born Chinese has gone on to win the prestigious Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. It became the first graphic novel ever nominated for the National Book Award, and author Gene Luen Yang was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant last month. So by its reviews and its gleaming string of awards, it is by all objective measures a terrific book. But it is a particularly refreshing read in a cultural moment toxic with relentless instances of the trivialization of minorities in media, when cries for inclusivity are stifled or ignored. Ten years after its publication, American Born Chinese is a revitalized breath of smart, honest, authentic air. It is one of those rare, nuanced portrayals of childhood encounters with racism that has been popularly celebrated. And for someone who grew up Asian in America, it reads like recognition into the dark parts of my own childhood. It can in fact be that bad growing up Asian in America—but if someone else found this part of childhood important enough to retell it, and can share with people, maybe not all hope is lost. The novel is tripartite, switching fluidly between three disparate narratives until they coalesce at the end, with vibrant artwork throughout. The grounding story is Jin’s, and the reader follows his trials and teenage milestones throughout middle school. In the second story, a mythical monkey king leaves his humble kingdom to demand his place in the world of the gods. The third, and perhaps most painful to read, introduces a hyperbolic, gigantesque, literally yellow-skinned amalgam of Chinese stereotypes. This nightmarish caricature is called Chin-Kee, who visits his white American cousin, Danny, from China, and proceeds to upend Danny’s life. In 19th-century silk garb, Chin-Kee follows Danny to school, excels academically, and urinates in people’s Cokes. Yang effectively crafts Chin-Kee’s exaggerated accent, as when Chin-Kee holds out a take-out box and offers Danny some of his “clispy flied cat gizzards wiff noodle.” The delight of American Born Chinese is its balanced treatment of Jin’s experiences
while coming of age as an Asian American. On the first day of school, Jin is introduced in front of his class by a teacher who butchers his name. This woman goes on to tell the class he came “all the way from China,” which prompts a bully to assert: “My mommy says Chinese people eat dogs.” The teacher, unfailingly chipper, counters, “I’m sure Jin doesn’t do that! In fact, Jin’s family probably stopped that sort of thing as soon as they came to the United States.” During this exchange, only the upper half of Jin’s face is shown while his teacher’s cheerily racist speech bubble dominates the panel, reflecting the powerlessness of knowing one has just been appallingly misunderstood. But American Born Chinese is not “about” racism. Jin’s story is seamless, reflecting both universal American triumphs (Jin’s elation at being noticed by pretty girl) and racist realities (Jin’s pain, being asked by the white, popular boy to stay away from her). It is about real life and finding a place for oneself, a special sort of American bildungsroman. The graphic novel is marketed for middle schoolers, so there is no lack of fart jokes and fight sequences. But the crass humor is a precursor to more sophisticated revelations. Each of the three stories in American Born Chinese shares an element of identity: questioning whether one belongs and what that costs. In an extremely satisfying turn of myth and metaphor towards the end, Yang plays with the complexity of erasure - not the systemic kind, but at the level of a single child. When the three stories converge, it turns out that Chin-Kee is the personification of Jin’s fears about being Chinese American. Jin attempts not only to distance himself, but to vilify his own ethnic identity, manifesting his internalized negativity into a monster. In the end, he must learn to accept that being Chinese is not a deficiency, but a part of his whole American self. (A message that Yang pulls off with subtlety and power.) Back in 2006, the Times reviewer wrote that American Born Chinese had “something new to say about American youth.” It is clear now more than ever that this story is not in fact new, but reflective of shared experiences deeply embedded in Asian American childhood, even ten years later. Revisiting American Born Chinese in 2016 reinstills a careful optimism that authentic Asian American stories can be told—and that they can also make their place in mainstream American media where they belong.
lifestyle
topten ways to breakup with someone
Confession: I’m a fraud, I don’t like death as much as I say. I feel like a Waka Flocka princess.
1. ghosting 2. slow fade 3. pull a gone girl 4. farting 5. unnecessary honesty 6. revealing your second family 7. cheat on them with their siblings(s) 8. voting them off the island 9. signing the papers 10. denying that the relationship was ever real
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You’re like Indiana Jones, but lame.
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hot post time machine
I’m not sure what I’ll do without my daily serving of fries from the various fry food groups -- spicy, steak, sweet potato, WAFFLE.
me jane. you food. • 04/25/11
rip
rest in publicity
MONICA CHIN features managing editor illustrator YIDI WU
On the day of my eighth-grade graduation, I learned just how popular people get after they die. As we lined up in height order to process into the gymnasium, I felt a shudder behind me, and by the time I turned around, one of my classmates was well into her second sob. “He died,” she shrieked, her phone clattering to the floor. “Kaelan. He’s dead.” A shy, unremarkable seventh grader from the neighboring middle school—I managed to gather from among the ensuing chaos, questions, and tears—had, minutes ago, been swept away by a strong current while cliff-diving on the Housatonic River. The joy of our milestone was heavily undercut by harrowing updates on Twitter and our phones, as a rescue became a recovery. The next morning, Channel 5 news was somber: They’d found his body. Kaelan was dead. From that day on, a boy from a tiny farm town, who’d kept almost exclusively to himself for most of his life, became a celebrity. The Facebook posts flooded in, almost all of my friends and classmates extolling enthusiastically that they’d only met Kaelan once at a party, but God, how he’d touched their hearts, and actually, screw it, he was their best friend in the whole world, and they would really appreciate any and all support during this time of grief. A letter in our local newspaper informed us that though the writer had never met Kaelan personally, his “great legacy” (details of which went unspecified) would impact the course of the rest of her life. Once we were over the initial shock, the art appeared. A friend of mine tagged Kaelan in a video of some trees and waterfalls, with the
caption “This reminds me of the time you said hi to me on the bus last year, miss you loads.” 400 likes, hundreds of comments expressing the writers’ truest condolences, and didn’t he touch all of our lives in some way? The summer became a contest of who could make themselves seem to have been the closest to him in life, kept score by Facebook statuses, letters to the editor of the local paper, speeches at his funeral, and the many subsequent memorial events, dedications, and commemorations. “Kaelan was my closest and dearest friend,” wrote a classmate of mine in a poem for his funeral, who I can confirm had never met him. “Kaelan was a light in my life,” said our town’s mayor in a Channel 5 News interview, who I can’t imagine knew of Kaelan’s existence beforehand. Members of the community held a swim meet and a cocktail party in Kaelan’s memory. “He was a great friend,” they all said at the microphones to thunderous applause. “He changed my life.” Kaelan’s family was absent from both events. In fact, throughout the entire 10 weeks of summer, Kaelan’s parents and three sisters were nowhere to be found. I saw not a single status from Shannon or John, no long paragraphs about beautiful memories with Kaelan or how much his loss would make their hearts bleed or whatever. It seemed that their mourning was a silent and personal mourning. They did not speak at the funeral: While community members crawled from the rafters to extol their close bonds with Kaelan and how they’d truly miss him an awful lot, his parents cried silently in the back. But it really hit me in early September, when
I ducked into a bathroom at school and froze at the sight of Kaelan’s oldest sister, shrieking in physical pain, clawing at her stomach as if to dig out something hidden, banging her head against the mirror, surrounded by a group of uncomfortable girls who were clearly unsure of what to do. True grief is not pretty. True grief is not poetic—it does not make us feel good. Perhaps we are unable to admit to ourselves that we could be so ignorant, so cruel by action-inaction distinction, that we let a person slip through our fingers, so we retroactively welcome deceased individuals into our lives to make up for lost time. Perhaps we are unwilling to realize how inconsequential a life can be to us. Or perhaps we will dig anywhere we can to find solvency. Perhaps we will answer the easy questions to death, to avoid having to think about the hard ones. I just did it. I just realized that this whole time, I’ve been
doing exactly the thing they all did—using the death of a slight acquaintance to score myself Virtue Points, when I am just like them. Maybe we cannot make art about death. Or maybe great artists can, but you and I cannot. Maybe it is a weird instinct bred into us by years and years of consumerist immersion that we are required to use what we can to gain social capital. Maybe I am sitting here, a convenient distance from the most tragic event of some people’s lifetimes, waxing eloquent on myself, and oh how sad that an early life was taken, but look how much I learned. How insightful of me to look past the pain of a teenager’s untimely death, to ride the coattails of a tragedy for new commentary and a story to tell. How noble of me to find goodness in a terrible tragedy. Rest in peace, Kaelan. Not that you should care at all what a random stranger like me thinks.