post- 10/23/2020

In This Issue

Places to Go, You to See

Siena Capone 3

For the First Time

Ingrid Ren 2 Liza Kolbasov 4

Hey, What Are You Thinking About?

Nicole Kim 5

"These Everblooming Wounds" Emily teng 6

Emily in Paris

postCover by Ella Harris

OCT 23

VOL 26 —

ISSUE 6

FEATURE

For the First Time trusting myself after cheating

By Ingrid Ren Illustrated by Elliana Reynolds

W

hen I cheated, when I lay next to someone else, all I could think about was my partner and how much hurt he would feel when he found out. In the moment, I didn’t think of myself or my present guilt, I didn’t think of the person lying behind me, hand on my hip, or what my friends and family would think. I thought only of my partner.

At the beginning of the relationship, I told my partner that I would likely hurt him, that I had a history of doing so. Maybe I told him this as a

warning, as if this could alleviate any future hurt.

When I cheated, my relationship was temporarily long-distance. I existed at an in-between of friendships, equally emotionally distant from everyone. I had come to rely on my partner for my emotional needs, and the distance between us reinforced a loneliness within me. I told him that when I feel lonely, I often seek comfort in the temporary but tangible intimacy of hookups.

I said I was telling him this to prevent myself from doing so. I thought I was being honest and

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Last weekend, with a seat reservation and twohour timeslot, I entered the Rock for the first time since March. Besides fewer seats, a shuttered Rock Cafe, and stocked containers of Clorox wipes in every direction, the ground floor’s layout had barely changed. I sat at one of my usual spots, a square glass table with prime visibility.

Before, I might have shared that table with two, three, even four friends on a cramped weekend afternoon between brunch and dinnertime. For those hours until Saturday’s to-do lists turned to thoughts of Saturday night, the tabletop would become ours, crowded with notebooks, laptops, fresh printouts and unopened Clif bars. Focus would settle, but with constant interruptions: water bottle refills, treks to and from the Blue Room, parents calling, or someone leaning across the table to whisper, “Don’t look, but that’s the guy I was telling you about.”

The Rock’s silence last weekend reminded me of quiet weekday mornings, when the ground level was

Gross Fall Candle Scents

clean, mostly empty, barely awake. It also reminded me where we are now, the Rock a ghost of what it would be.

Sitting alone isn’t so simple: In this week’s Narrative, one writer learns to sit with her own thoughts through journaling. Another reflects on her relationship—where they are and where they’ve been, from ADOCH to Michigan state parks. Reflecting on her experience of infidelity, our Feature writer asks questions about guilt and trust without easy answers. In Arts and Culture, while one writer’s anticipation of Emily in Paris turns to disappointment as she examines the show’s shortcomings, another is moved by Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem.

The Rock doesn’t contain the constant contact it once did, but post- is thinking about people this week— and looking for the right words.

Let us know if you dream about pre-pandemic libraries this weekend.

1. Dusty heating turning on for the first time 2. Leaf mold that gives you an asthma attack 3. Sink sludge (pumpkin spice variety) 4. Cheap Halloween face paint 5. The Smarties and Twizzlers no one wanted 6. Wet leaves :( 7. Unwritten midterm paper 8. Genuinely pleasant but too-potent candle that’s been burning too long 9. Sweater lint 10. The ghosts of Halloweens past

Sleep well,

Liza Edwards-Levin Features Managing Editor

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therefore courageous, and maybe I was, but I was also hurting him. He responded, “Break up with me.” I felt confused and refused. Why not break up with me himself ?

I learned that cheating consists of many steps.

There was meeting, a couple years ago, the person I would cheat with. There was lying down at home alone and thinking of our past intimacy, of the possibility of temporarily not feeling lonely. There was talking and texting, planning to meet up; there was excitement. There was telling, or convincing,

NARRATIVE myself that our meet-up would be purely platonic.

There was the knowledge of being in control of my actions but also the desire to feel out of control. And when we met up, there was allowing lust to manifest, allowing myself to be touched. Then there was thinking of the man I was hurting. There was hurting the man I was thinking of. There was stopping, sitting up, and feeling a certain strength in stopping, but so much more weakness in what I had done already.

There was being told by the man I lay down with that I had done nothing wrong, that our touching was nothing, but knowing that was wrong, and knowing how my partner would feel. Throughout it all, there was the constant guilt, present from the start. The guilt of being dissatisfied and not having the courage to express it, the guilt of thinking of and wanting to be with someone else. The guilt of having a someone else to turn to. Guilt should be an indication to take action—to communicate with my partner and work on the relationship, or to let him go and work on myself. But sometimes it’s not enough.

become and lost belief in who I had the potential to be, I thought to myself resolutely but mostly desperately, I will never cheat again. I wonder, if my mother hadn’t come into my bedroom and looked at me, if she hadn’t so openly shown her pain in the red lines of her knuckles, if she hadn’t voiced her hurt and hurt me in return, would I have made this promise?

After I told my partner I had cheated, I saw his heartbreak and pain and avoidance. I felt guilt and shame and love and confusion, but I had done it. When I saw him around campus, my heartbeat would accelerate, and I’d become flustered and heartbroken and heartbroken for his hurt. I cried in my dorm room and I cried to friends and I wondered if I had the right to cry at all. I melodramatically felt like the only relevant label for me was cheater. I recalled conversations with friends who previously said they could never forgive cheating. Hadn’t I become the person they could never forgive?

Who was I in the relationship that I had turned away from, and have I now found a new self? I don’t know that our different selves are so easily distinguishable, or even fully understandable.

When I told my mother I had cheated, she came into my room and sat on my bed. She looked into my eyes and her fingers twisted around each other as she stumbled over words that were incapable of fully expressing her pain.

When my mother is upset with me, she stops speaking in her comfortable, rolling Mandarin and forces herself to speak in my unwelcoming English. When she could no longer find the English words to name her pain, she cried until she gasped. She was so wrapped up in the pain of having raised someone who went out into the world only to hurt someone else, she asked how she could trust me for anything anymore. How could she believe me when I tell her where I am, who I’m with, or who I am? “The most beautiful part / of your body is wherever / your mother's shadow falls,” Ocean Vuong writes in the poem Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong. I no longer felt my mother’s trust in me or her shadow over me. Without my mother’s shadow, was I still as beautiful as I thought I was? This makes me think of the line in Ruth Madievsky’s poem Bridge, Shadow, Hands, “can I just share this theory / that a person can fall down her own shadow.” Sitting in the consequence and hurt of my mother’s reaction, in her belief of who I had

In studying relationships and intimacy, psychotherapist Esther Perel says that people who commit infidelity “are looking not just for another person but in a way they’re looking for another self.” Afterwards, when my friends asked me why, why did I cheat, I’d think about Perel’s statement and wonder if it was true for me. Who was I in the relationship that I had turned away from, and have I now found a new self? I don’t know that our different selves are so easily distinguishable, or even fully understandable.

I told my therapist I had been thinking of a woman who spoke to my high school class about her experience with substance abuse. She said that even though it had been years—over a decade— since she had used any substances, she specifically calls herself a recovering, not recovered, addict.

Every single day, she explained, she continues to consciously avoid substances in order to remain in the state of recovery. Remembering her words, I told my therapist that my past act of cheating is something I will always be working away from.

Perhaps now that is the self that I am turning away from. As Ocean Vuong writes: “The most beautiful part of your body / is where it's headed.” Gradually, turning in a new direction, I am learning to trust myself; not again, but for the first time.

Places to Go, You to See a (mid)western love story

by Siena Capone Illustrated by Anna Semizhonova When my boyfriend came to Michigan from Colorado for a month last summer, he was in for some late mornings. Ben runs on activity, a calendar that looks like a haywire game of Tetris or the kinetic thrum of guitar strings. All of this is to say he does not typically sleep in until noon, but one particular party in the relationship does, especially when outside it feels like the world is ending.

Despite these late mornings, he got me outside anyway. Being outdoors with him put a flashlight beam on the corners of the world where things didn’t feel catastrophic, with his studly tie-dye fanny pack, an app where people review hikes (who knew!), and a bureau of knowledge on hiking etiquette (hikers going uphill have the right of way, which I unfortunately did not register until I was halfway downhill). I’ve lived in Michigan pretty much my whole life, but I’d never noticed the way the streams here are adorned with little white flowers or that the wooden benches are named after old conservationists. After months of staring at the same walls in my house, it felt comforting to know there was always more to see.

No amount of preparation or understanding of hiking etiquette could have steered us through our first hike together at Young State Park. We pulled into the parking lot to see one of the trails sunken in rainwater from last night’s storm, a damp graveyard of fallen fragile trees. We agreed that this wasn’t promising, but pressed onward and parked, eventually stepping down from his electric blue Toyota RAV4 (affectionately and reverently deemed Blueno) into a place that was half-forest, half-aquarium.

It was as if the lake encompassed the park itself, an Atlantis of picnic tables. A park worker in a four-wheeler sloshed through the parking lot; long grasses poked up from under the water with a reassuring wave. Nothing to see here. Yet we stood and observed. I think it felt nice to see an out-of-theordinary occurrence that didn’t hurt or signify the collapse of society asw we know it: this landscape of new shores where a lake could lap on asphalt. It felt like coexistence.

When we got home, I wrote the first poem I was proud of in months. We cooked together, an oft-tumultuous endeavor that sometimes ends in 8 cups of crunchy rice or bread burnt black, but we

“I feel like…his mustache is hubris.”

“It’s a role-playing thing.” (about acids and bases)

October 23, 2020 3

NARRATIVE never noticed. I imagine seeing us sprawled out in the dirt there, our breath rising from us like we’re chimneys, the distance between our fingertips small from any vantage point.

Hey, What Are You Thinking About? learning to talk to myself

By Liza Kolbasov Illustrated by Naya Lee Chang

keep trying anyway. Outside the window, a rainbow sifted up from the blue of the sky. +++ Deadman’s Hill was the second hike we went on together. The air was cool and mossy, filled with the sound of our feet following each other in the dirt. Ben was wearing a tie-dye bucket hat—the one he always wears—a bobbing kaleidoscope I follow around corners and up hills and pretty much anywhere while we talk about anything. We didn’t know about the view at the top of the hill until we reached it and looked out unexpectedly onto what felt like the whole world.

YouTube, I was actually going to put real faces to my future college experience. Ben was the first one I saw. He pointed out the Brown socks I was wearing (a choice I had heavily considered not making because I was embarrassed) and struck up a conversation.

This conversation lasted two sentences before my mom, excited to see me finally relaxing about this whole college ordeal, essentially said “I’ll leave you to it” and got on the plane. With my boarding pass. I then had to pursue her while Ben stood with his suitcase, having no idea what he was getting himself into.

We follow each other through the valleys and knolls of our conversations, silences, songs; this is where I feel safe, the space between a period and the start of my next sentence.

We were seeing Michigan from above, a panorama of summer trees and sunburnt noses.

Our pedestal was a rock placed several yards from a wooden sign telling the story of the man for whom the trail was named—not for his actual name, which was Samuel Graczyk, but for his fate in 1910. He was “a fun-loving lumberjack” who was soon to be married but even sooner became the victim of a fatal logging accident while driving a team of horses down what is now called “Deadman’s Hill.”

The layers of green forest made the world feel plentiful. On the wooden fence blocking off the steep part of the hill—perhaps where Samuel died— names and years and hearts and plus signs were etched in with whatever makeshift engraving tools Jessica from ’88 or Scott + Penny had on them at the time. The green felt like perpetual renewal, yet the impromptu memorial on the fence—an ode to past loves and selves—made it feel like everything stayed the same. Michigan winters had come and gone, thunderstorms had felled trees and flooded parks, but it was still the same place Jessica or Scott or Penny had stood and also let the world remind them it was wide. +++ Ben and I met in a place where people depart to see the world from above. It was Detroit Metro Airport in April of 2018, where I was shifting from foot-to-foot in anticipation of ADOCH. After accumulating months of Facebook anxiety and watching extremely dated room tours on 4 post–

There wasn’t a plane we could board or a rock we could stand on to see what was to come laid out under us; how, when I fly above Michigan, the cars look like scuttling insects and the pools look like scraps of blue felt. But I imagine how it would’ve looked. Imagine the sporadic awkward Facebook messages that summer before first year passing under us like disparate clouds. The bleachers where we sat for a football game the first time we hung out on campus, blinking in the sun. The bobbing sea of people in an overheated tent for ANOCH, in Findy, in Wayland Lounge where his band played.

The outdoor rave we had in the middle of the night next to Blueno (the real one, not the car). The laps we made around town in the middle of the night to talk about everything, the wind turbines patient and steady beyond India Point Park.

How we still talk about everything, be it in a dingy dorm lounge or on the train to Boston to meet someone from his far-ranging constellation of friends. We follow each other through the valleys and knolls of our conversations, silences, songs; this is where I feel safe, the space between a period and the start of my next sentence. Watching that bucket hat bob in front of me with the promise that no matter where I follow it, there will be something new. A drowning park or a lumberjack’s haunting grounds, a new way of seeing things or a bench to set our thoughts on, side by side.

In our first year at Brown, we lay down in front of EmWool to listen. That was the only plan: to discover what sounds we walked past every day but

For someone who calls herself an introvert, I really hate being alone with my thoughts. And really, I don’t blame myself; I am the most exhausting person I know. If I let myself, I quickly slip into patterns of overthinking. My infuriating internal monologue insists on narrating and judging my every action. So I spent four years of high school trying not to let myself think—filling every spare moment with homework, throwing myself into a million extracurriculars, and keeping myself sleepdeprived enough that I’d fall asleep the moment my head hit my pillow.

Then, in early March, everything changed.

Suddenly, I was stuck at home, with nowhere to go and nothing to do. At first, I tried to replicate my past schedule, fending off spare thoughts with every trick I could muster—from binge-watching all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls in just two weeks to swallowing books at a pace that could rival my lonely over-achieving elementary school self to blasting music on my daily government-sanctioned walk. When the inevitable loose thought bubbled up, I forced it down, slamming the door in its face.

I grasped the vain hope that if I tried hard enough not to think, all of my problems would magically fade away.

Strangely enough, simply ignoring the fact that I was living through a global pandemic, that I didn’t know when I would be able to hug my friends again, that I had to commit to a college for the next four years of my life without setting foot on campus, and that reading the newsw every morning made me feel like the world was ending, wasn’t a sustainable strategy. My thoughts were the worst kind of visitor: they didn’t leave quietly when they saw they were unwanted, but instead hid in dark corners, jumping out and calling attention to themselves at the worst possible moments. They left dirty dishes and clothes strewn all over the floor; they blasted the radio at 3 a.m and left endless voicemails updating me on their whereabouts. I found myself crying more often than I ever have in the past few years. I teared up watching Rory Gilmore graduate high school on my screen, observing a family of ducklings scurry along a canal, driving through the California hills I’ve always seen as mundane, and shutting off my computer after Facetiming a friend. Routinely, my heart would start racing, or my legs would turn to jelly—even though, as I reasoned, I had much less to be stressed out about in my day-to-day life than when I had been in school.

As if leaving behind reminders of their existence wasn’t enough, my thoughts began creeping up on me when I was most defenseless. I dreaded going to bed at night because I knew I would have to lie alone in silence. Every night, my worries would prepare a new surprise for me, whether it was detailed scenarios of what would happen if one of my friends caught coronavirus or existential crises about my

ARTS & CULTURE future. They weren’t restricted to current events, either; their creativity extended to embarrassing moments from middle school and conversations I’d had with friends in which I’d said the wrong thing. I also began to dream much more vividly, waking up unsure if I’d really made up with an ex-friend or had imagined it.

Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t keep hiding from my thoughts; constantly thinking about not thinking was exhausting. I needed to find a way to let them in, or they’d break down the door. So, almost involuntarily, I reached for my journal. As a selfprofessed stationery addict, I’ve tried journaling before. In fact, I’ve attempted every journaling fad the world has seen, from bullet journaling and gratitude journaling to your classic “dear diary.” My dedication would last a few weeks or maybe even months, but eventually I’d give up, moving on to a new trend or hobby. Writing, too, came naturally to me—as a kid, I’d written constantly, crafting imaginary worlds and scribbling poems. In recent years, however, writing had stopped being a release for me, and had become more of a chore. I felt that I had to write to validate my identity as “a writer,” and that every piece I crafted needed to be perfectly polished. This time, however, felt different.

I wasn’t writing to fill up time or notebook pages.

Instead, I was writing because I needed to write.

it’s something on my to-do list, but because scribbling out my endless internal monologue never fails to bring a breath of fresh air. In a time of loneliness and isolation, I’ve learned, finally, to talk to myself. In my journal, I can be messy and unpolished—I can express emotions that I try to hide from the world. I’m allowed to be jealous and ungrateful, I’m allowed to say the same thing over and over again, I’m allowed to swear every second word. Looking back at my thoughts, I can understand them, acknowledge them, and move past them.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that a journal is the perfect substitute for another human being. My Moleskine can’t give me advice, it can’t call me out when I’m unkind to myself, it can’t share its thoughts or stories. I’m lucky enough to have amazing friends, and talking to them, whether over Zoom or on a socially distant walk, never fails to make me feel warm inside. I am still far from my favorite conversation partner. Yet there are some thoughts that I’m not yet ready to share out loud with others. Writing them out makes them smaller, less threatening. They’re still there, but they’re quieter now; they tiptoe instead of stomping.

In a time of loneliness and isolation, I’ve learned, finally, to talk to myself. In my journal, I can be messy and unpolished—I can express emotions that I try to hide from the world.

In five scribbled pages, everything I’d been pushing down for months came spilling out. All of my worries, my fears, my negativity stared back at me. And, to my surprise, for the first time in what felt like ages, my annoying visitors— that is, my anxious thoughts—were quiet. For the first time, my introverted heart felt like it was truly alone, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Since then, I’ve found myself reaching for my journal almost every day—not because

It’s easy to view journaling as just another cliche self-care tip, the kind that people suggest when they don’t want to listen to you talk. If you’re rolling your eyes at my words, I understand. I’ve been the cynic plenty of times, and I know that journaling doesn’t work for everyone. But these past few months, it’s helped me—helped me stop running away, even if just for a moment, and get to know this strange person named Liza a little bit better. We’re still getting acquainted, and I definitely wouldn’t call us friends, but I’m learning to listen to her thoughts.

"These Everblooming Wounds" softness and strength in postcolonial love poem

By Nicole Kim Illustrated by sable Bellew I began my junior year at Brown, as per usual, with too many courses in my C@B cart and an overflowing wellspring of motivation––one that has since been siphoned off by weeks of relentless intensity. This year, my two-day shopping spree left me with more than just sleepless nights. On the first day of a Literary Arts class I was shopping, the professor played a clip titled “A Celebration of Natalie Diaz.” In the video, poet Natalie Diaz stands behind a podium in a long-sleeved, white collared shirt. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, and her face is steady and sure. I was immediately absorbed by her quiet yet commanding presence as she read “Catching Copper,” one of the thirty-one poems in her 2020 collection. “My brothers have / a bullet,” Diaz begins, letting the words sink into the room.

“They keep their bullet / on a leash shiny / as a whip of blood.”

There was something unfamiliar in the way Diaz read that made me want to know more about her. Her tone and inflection have an almost playful quality, while her writing is firmly grounded in generous nouns and adjectives. And when these elements come together, her words take on a life of their own, reverberating throughout the room (or virtual space). Even though I was hearing her through many pixelated layers––in a video from 2019, screenshared through Zoom––I felt the power of her voice like a clear channel of energy. She left me awestruck and itchy. I ordered her book off of Amazon that evening and decided not to take the class.

As I immersed myself in Postcolonial Love Poem, Diaz’s second collection and currently shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize (to be announced on October 25th), I was drawn to look more into Diaz’s biography.

She grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village on the banks of the Colorado River, a body of water that appears throughout the collection as an extension

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ARTS&CULTURE

of her physical and spiritual being. I was surprised to learn that she played professional basketball before entering the world of writing. The pieces in her collection are a palette of emotions, sweet and painful at times (“Insomnia is like spring that way—surprising / and many petaled”) and biting and cheeky at others (“I’m not good at math—can you blame me? / I’ve had an American education”).

Her resistance wells up in moments of quietude and confusion.

The book begins with the poem from which it takes its name. “Postcolonial Love Poem” is a single, long stanza, an ode to an unnamed female lover and an emergence from a physical and historical landscape that allows us to gently slip into the world of the collection. The speaker traverses their lover’s body and caresses the desert-scape from which they write with a certainty that tapers off into softness in unexpected moments. “I was built by wage,” they declare. “So I wage love and worse” (1). The speaker’s desire for their lover does not dampen the agency that they establish, but enhances the speaker’s power: “I am in the dirt for you / Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous, / two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash / before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood— / the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea” (1).

The intimacy the speaker and their partner enter here shelters them from the harsh and beautiful world they occupy, like a flood of water that wets the desert. Diaz makes it clear that their being together is not a panacea for the pain and complexity they have inherited. Nevertheless, it is in this lack of resolution, in their thirsting for one another, that they find freedom and relief.

It’s in moments like these—moments that are both soft and powerful—that I find myself lost in Postcolonial Love Poem. Diaz does not romanticize the historical pain or contemporary condition of her people––usually the Mojave tribe, but sometimes Indigenous people at large. She also resists reducing their experience to violence. In this complicated landscape of both haunting and possibility, Postcolonial Love Poem excavates desire. Sometimes, it appears as an unquenchable thirst or a painful yearning, but it is never a weakness. Desire is the source from which the speaker draws their power and the place that allows the speaker to be vulnerable and soft.

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As someone who has spent the better part of their teenage and young adult life struggling to balance softness with strength, I’m captivated by this book. Diaz resists dominant hegemonies—those systems that try to extinguish the speaker’s people, Indigeneity, woman-ness, and queerness—with sturdiness and vulnerability. Her resistance does not just appear as defiant actions and loud proclamations, but also wells up in moments of quietude and confusion. In a world that has always asked me to be strong, Postcolonial Love Poem tells me that it’s okay to be soft and reassures me that my unravelings do not diminish my strength.

Another poem in which the speaker leans into vulnerability is “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You,” the only piece featuring her mother. Riffing off of a Beyoncé lyric, the speaker recalls her mother telling her that “they don’t love you like I love you.”

She reflects on her mother’s deeper intention of affirming her inherent value, writing that she understands now: “what my mother meant by, / Don’t stray, was that she knew / all about it—the way it feels to need / someone to love you, someone / not your kind, someone white” (19).

I almost choked up the first time I read these lines.

I remember a time when I wanted that kind of love, too, wanted more than anything to be seen and loved by whiteness. Maybe it’s a desire I’m still recovering from, even. The speaker’s mother offers these words from a place of deep tenderness. She knows the difficulties her daughter will face in an American landscape that will repeatedly question her worth, understands what kind of desire is tormenting the speaker: “My mother has always known best, / knew that I’d been begging for them, / to lay my face against their white / laps, to be held in something more / than the loud light of their projectors” (19). The poem ends with a kind of homecoming, and the way her mother sees the speaker sutures something inside of me: “[W]hen my mother said, / They don’t love you like I love you, / she meant, / Natalie, that doesn’t mean / you aren’t good” (20).

Perhaps my favorite poem in the collection, though, is a prose-style, lyrical passage called “The Mustangs.” A vivid recollection of a high school basketball game, the piece pays homage to the beginnings of Diaz’s career as a basketball player, while turning the harmful trope of Native mascots on its head.

Throughout Postcolonial Love Poem and in much of her other work, Diaz’s older brother is a recurring figure. In “The Mustangs,” he plays on the court while the whole family watches him from the bleachers.

The speaker describes him and his teammates as they enter the gymnasium to warm-up before the game: “Dressed in Mustang-blue tear-away warm-up pants and shirts, my brother / and his teammates—some of whom were from our reservation—were all / glide and finesse. Their high tops barely touched the floor. They circled / the court twice before crossing it and moving into a layup drill while / ‘Thunderstruck’ filled the gymnasium” (35).

Diaz brings this past moment into the present with her sharp description. Reading these lines, I can hear the AC/DC song ringing in my ears and the thumps and squeaks of the ball and the player’s shoes on the linoleum floor. I can feel the anticipation thrumming through the gymnasium, can imagine my annoyance at the squirming children and proud parents craning their necks to get a better look.

I am overwhelmed by the love and care with which the speaker remembers her brother’s younger self and the gentleness with which she writes him. In this moment before the game begins, her brother is free from all that she cannot save him from, safe from the bullets that haunt him in “Catching Copper.” He is light and unbounded, protected by Diaz’s removal of the scene from linear time that allows him to live forever in this moment. Knowing (from other pieces in the collection) the pain the speaker’s brother has caused her and will cause her after this game, a heaviness colors the edges of the memory. But through her writing and through her remembering, the speaker is able to give him freedom and peace. “I was ten years old and realized right there on those bleachers…that this game had the power to quiet what seemed / so loud in us,” the speaker recalls. “On those nights, we / were forgiven for all we would ever do wrong” (36).

I can’t help but think that this is what Diaz’s poetry, and poetry at large, does for me. Poetry lets me remember, imagine, and grieve without bounds, without the heaviness of the world on my shoulders. It reminds me of all the abundance that has carried me here and helps me to love all the people and memories that I cannot control.

When my desire for some other present feels too hard to bear, poetry makes me possible.

Emily in Paris

confronting stereotypes, fantasies, and my parisian dream

By Emily Teng ILLUSTRATED BY Gaby Treviño I vividly remember scrolling through my Instagram feed when I stopped on a photo of Lily Collins striding the cobblestone streets of Paris in a red beret and checkered dress suit. She smiles serenely at the camera, exuding helpless excitement and infatuation with the city. Caught up in the sudden wanderlust provoked by Lily’s effortless Parisian look, I discovered that she was actually filming a new TV series called Emily in Paris.

No one could have been more excited about Emily in Paris than me—Emily. Ever since I caught a glimpse of the dazzling Tour Eiffel seven years ago during a school field trip, living in Paris has been my dream. This fantasy only grew stronger with scenic shots in films like Amélie and breathtaking imagery in literature. As I immersed myself in the sonic pleasures of learning the French language in a beginner course freshman year at Brown, I felt as if Paris and I had become so close that I could sense the galeries d’art, magasins, and boulangeries within my reach.

Darren Star’s latest series, Emily in Paris, was promised to be the manifestation of my Parisian

ARTS&CULTURE dream, as a fictional Emily in her late twenties takes on the city for a professional opportunity.

Creator and producer of iconic shows such as “Sex and the City” and “Younger,” Darren Star ventures into exploring the Parisian life of a professional businesswoman. As the “American point of view” in a Parisian marketing firm, Emily must navigate both her workplace and her social life, embracing the City of Light with curiosity and a glass of champagne.

My anticipation for the show only increased with the onset of COVID-19. The pandemic forced airports and borders to close and I couldn’t even go back home, let alone think of planning a trip to France, for the foreseeable future. As I saw my distance from Paris grow wider, I needed a fictional Emily to wander the little alleyways and authentic cafes for me. I hoped to find even a glimmer of my future self in Lily Collins’ character—a way to experience a place through another’s perspective, providing comfort amidst the solitude of quarantine.

When the show premiered finally came around on October 2, I dropped all my work and opened Netflix to watch it. My disappointment was palpable five minutes into the pilot episode. I won’t reiterate the harsh words of critics, but Emily was far from relatable. “You come to Paris and you don’t speak French, that is arrogant…let’s call it the arrogance of ignorance.” These words––coming from Luc, Emily’s French coworker––might be blunt, but they are true. Her comment that the city looks exactly like its portrayal in Ratatouille foreshadows that Emily’s experience is two-dimensional and cartoonish—she arrives in Paris with a mission to change the local way of working and living without feeling any unease or self-consciousness in her new surroundings. By the end of the first episode, her only real ties to Paris are her social media hashtags and her attractive neighbor downstairs.

But as off-putting and disappointing as Emily’s character was, it was even more difficult to relate to Mindy, Emily’s best friend from Shanghai who is the only Asian character in the show. A rich girl who escapes to France to avoid her father’s authoritarian parenting, Mindy was another overused “Crazy Rich Asian” caricature that is simply inconceivableimprobable to me, someone who has lived in Shanghai for more than 10 years.

In the show, Mindy is supposed to be fluent in French, English, and Chinese, but as a native speaker, I squirmed hearing her teach Mandarin to the children she nannied. After some research I found that the actress playing Mindy, Ashley Park, is a Korean American who was only briefly trained

by a Chinese dialect coach for the show. Aside from the linguistic inconsistencies in her character, her stereotypical Asian traits are slapped onto her obnoxiously Americanized attitude and outlook.

She yells at her strict father and calls him an “asshole,” a behavior unfathomable to any Chinese person I know. Her character could have been played by a white actor; she even makes some overgeneralized remarks about Emily upon their first encounter—“You look...American,” she says.

And Emily embodies the worst stereotypes of an “American.” She walks into the office with Google Translate ready on her phone. “I did Rosetta Stone on the plane but it hasn’t kicked in yet,” she brushes off her unfamiliarity with the French language.

She sees Paris through the trendy hashtags and witty captions on her social media account, never trying to process or adapt to the surrounding environment.

After barely completing the pilot, I realized that my connection with Emily only rested on the superficiality of sharing a name. I had to take a pause from the show, but I continued thinking about why it bothered me so much. Did I really expect an honest portrayal of an expatriate’s life in Paris? Knowing Star’s previous works, I expected a fantastical, surreal, and Americanized version of Paris before actually watching the show.

But weren’t my own expectations embedded with cliches of the French culture? Part of me had hoped that the show would feature the iconic Haussmannian architecture, chic Parisians lounging outside elegant cafes, and the sound of English being spoken in exotic French accents.

I still remember the night, seven years ago, when a group of friends and I snuck out of our hotel

“The traffic lights at the intersection of Waterman and Brook change despite the empty streets on Saturday mornings, flashing red and green against the usually wet asphalt.”

—Sydney Lo, “landmarks” 10.18.19

“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.”

—Sarah Cooke, “footnotes on faith” 10.20.16

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo a FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin Section Editors Alice Bai Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Olivia Howe Section Editors Maddy McGrath Emma Schneider

to explore Paris. For a group of 14-year-olds who had never really traveled without our parents, the simple act of buying metro tickets seemed like an adventure; we giggled at our successful escapade and reveled in the sweet Nutella inside the crepes we shared. My impression of Paris was forever tinted with the warm yellow lights beaming from the Eiffel Tower on that cold winter night as we climbed down the iron structure with the entire city beneath us.

I realized that I had been searching for cliches as I cringed at the sight of Emily eating a croissant and making a duckface on the Eiffel Tower. I’d wanted evidence that proved my perceptions were, at least to some degree, accurate representations of the city. Instead, Star’s hyperbolic French, American, and Asian tropes in the show made me confront my own stereotypes of Paris. The parody of France’s cultural landscape reminded me of the mistakes and quick assumptions that I had drawn from my memories of the city.

This semester, I’m taking a course about Paris, and I’ve learned that there is more beneath the city than its glamorous visage—the division between city and suburb, the political controversies surrounding refugee policies, the living trauma hidden in the country’s history—all of which are excluded from the show and my previous understanding.

I did eventually finish the rest of the series in one sitting, no longer holding on to that tenuous attachment to Emily. Without any satisfying answers to my questions about life in Paris, I resolved to go myself in order to experience the city’s true nature after the pandemic. What will my version of Emily in Paris be like? Hopefully, there won’t be a need for Google Translate.

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Jasmine Ngai Section Editors Siena Capone Minako Ogita Christina Vasquez LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney Section Editors Kimberly Liu Emily Wang

COPY CHIEF Mohima Sattar Copy Editors Laura David Kyoko Leaman Aditi Marshan Eleanor Peters SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Tessa Devoe

CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Joanne Han Iris Xie Layout Designers Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen WEB MASTER Amy Pu

STAFF WRITERS Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Editors Eashan Das Julia Gubner Danielle Emerson Kyra Haddad Jordan Hartzell Jolie Rolnick Nicole Kim Chloe Zhao Gus Kmetz HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Elliana Reynolds Gaby Treviño Victoria Yin

Want to be involved?

Email: amanda_ngo@brown.edu!

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