Best of Sprout: Issue 2

table of contents editor’s note poetry roadkill - ​dana chiueh​, 3 to the boy who told me it was ‘too bad’ that i had a girlfriend - ​arielle devito​, 8 domestic violence: or, how to pave with intentions - ​emma wilson​, 14 ode to hong kong - ​vivian lu​, 18 recipe for disaster - ​brianna perrone​, 23 heat ​ - ​isabella ampil​, 27 westward ​ ​-​ elizabeth girdharry​, 31 reaction to a misguided facebook comment ​ - ​brigitte jia​, 36

prose

art

brown sugar ​ - ​ananya kumar-banerjee​, 4 thanksgiving ​ - ​daniel karbon​, 11 little girl ​ - ​riley grace​, 16 a dissection of bamboo ​ - ​valerie wu​, 19 stop romanticizing mental illness ​ - ​betsy jenifer​, 24 scatterbrain ​ - ​john osler​, 28 staccato in the symphony ​ - ​mehar haleem​, 33 ally is a verb​ - ​rose xia0​, 37

battle scarred ​ - ​betsy jenifer​, 10 pieces of china ​ - ​megan guo​, 22 & 35

staff a blind model ​ - ​joonho jo​, 40 running with the bull ​ - ​a.a reinecke​, 44 unlearning ​- ​victoria hou​, 49

1

editor’s note Dear reader,

Two years ago on April 15, 2015, Sprout was founded on the idea that students should be allowed to express their sociopolitical opinions, no matter what they are. We've held steadfast to our belief in the importance of the creative expression of political thought, and over the past year, we've seen incredible growth in submissions. We've bore witness to opinions on topics like abortion, the refugee crisis, and police brutality ​— ​all of which are conveyed creatively by young artists.

Like last year, the staff at Sprout have compiled an issue of what we feel are this year's best submissions.

Though all the work published on Sprout are articulate, thoughtful, and bold, the pieces in Best of Sprout: Issue Two are especially powerful in their messages. They are worldly, politically conscious, and beautiful in their eloquence.

This issue is a reflection on the wider culture of extending individual voices to matters of immediate concern. Though the work featured may be of personal significance to the artist, they also act in representing certain perspectives that others may hold. Best of Sprout: Issue Two strives to initiate a conversation through the medium of art. It seeks to blur the line between art as a work for the sake of itself, and art as an act of service to others.

We hope this issue inspires you as much as it inspired us. As you read this issue, we implore you: savor these pieces not blindly, but with an open mind. Explore curiously, but aware, and perhaps you will find yourself itching to create a piece of your own.

Sincerely, The Sprout Staff

2

roadkill by dana chiueh

we talk femicides like roadkill.

like could we have saved the 500 Guatemalan women who turn up every year face down, so commonplace the blood flows like water through the ditches, ravines, sides of the road. mutilation, disfigurement, stab wounds -- don’t you dare tell me your honor is worth their life. and the suffocated Chechen woman found by police during a routine checkup in her father’s front seat on the way to his burial spot

and there are more and more and more women sharing stories of the first time they were raped and it’s a new bond. we get it, because we’re women. so many women saying “you cannot give me back my sleepless nights.” it’s a solidarity they never expected to give us and yet it robs us, cheats us, in women dressing up as ‘rape victims’ for halloween, packaged trauma on our doorsteps, asking for candy.

nonetheless, we prod on. it is all we can do.

3

brown sugar by ananya kumar-banerjee

I grew up alongside pretty white girls with ribbons in their pigtails. When I saw myself in the mirror with friends, I inferred the nuanced difference between strawberry and chocolate milk, but they were both equally delicious, equally worthy. Color had no connotations.

Years have passed. It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m sitting on a polyester upholstered bus on my way to the next Model United Nations Conference. My team members and I are clad in layers of khaki, fleece, and the notion that we’re superior. The bus smells like corn grease and two hundred dollar perfume. My eyes are dry from two days without sleep, and I feel my head spin with each jolt the bus makes down the highway.

It’s strange, the way I fit in here. It is something sour and melancholy, something that is shaking. I am so close to belonging, to fitting exactly, but I never will. I am always off by one hundredth, one millionth, one trillionth. Not enough to see, but just enough to feel.

I am listening at the edge of the conversation, pulled in by the way the aftertaste of the shared chicken McNuggets sits on my tongue, by thoughts on someone’s poor choice in dress shoes. Who wears Sperry’s to a MUN Conference anyway? We are discussing assignments and what we are planning to do on our committees. I am a General Assembly delegate, representing one culture, nation and people.

This time I am the United States.

My eyes lock with Buckley, a crises delegate. He will not represent a nation at our conference, but a person. One person. He is a conservative, a friend.

“Which one, the blue or the pink?

“The pink tie suits you, Buck.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He means well, but somewhere between his brows the concept of line-crossing is lost. He is raised with the promise of two billion dollars instead of an early morning bus driver. He doesn’t understand what real people are like, that there are some things he can’t say.

Back on the bus, he makes a bid for the next round of weary laughs: “I’m gonna get me some brown sugar.” The entire truckful of kids laughs along with him.​ ​He’s got creamy vanilla skin and hazel eyes.

To them, he is a regular Joan Rivers.

The words settle on my head like something sticky in the air, something that is unnatural. I am paralyzed beneath my skin as the phrase echoes:

Brown sugar.

4

It’s Monday morning and I’m looking in the mirror. Eyes wandering across my features, I wonder: what can I do to make myself beautiful?

I turn to my friend. She pinches her avocado green eyes in the mirror, sets a pale gold dust on her lids, and coats her lashes in a thin layer of dark brown mascara. Her eyes are slim and she is beautiful.

But I know she is thinking of a wide-eyed girl with pouty lips and blond hair. “I need my eyes to be bigger,” she says. It’s a chant, an incantation. She recites it by the bonfire behind her eyes like a late night séance, like a Staples shopping list. The makeup is the checkout aisle.

She reaches for her credit card, the mascara wand, but the clock is striking twelve and her tools are dissolving, disappearing, disintegrating. But the perfect girl is still present in the curve of her lips and the cut of her jaw. The perfect girl is still in her sights.

It’s not the same for me.

Brown sugar: With that boy’s words, I am not a girl; I am food. I am the ingredient for chocolate chip cookies that no one ever stores in their cupboard. I am the luxurious element in fifty-dollar Siberian seawater body scrub. I am exotic, unfamiliar. I am an extra, unnecessary something.

But maybe I can be dolled up, redone, refurbished. Maybe I can be reborn through gloss and glimmer into a gorgeous girl. Maybe some concealer for the smattering of scars across my cheeks, some lip stain to lighten the tragedy of my pale hazelnut lips. I am picturing the same perfect girl as my friend, the blond girl with peony cheeks and pearlescent skin. I think of myself as clay.

I will need bleach, contacts, a heart shaped jaw. I will need a whole new, whiter me to be pretty.

Because being brown just isn’t going to work. Thinking of this flusters me, so I put all my supplies in a little suede pouch. Imagining the perfect girl tightens my chest and closes up my throat. This perfect girl is far away, but I squeeze my eyes: I can take care of this.

It’s 7:30; I get my daily cappuccino, reach for the sugar to sweeten my drink. There is only brown sugar, so I ask the barista for simple syrup. The jar of brown sugar is brimming. In the middle of the morning rush the Wall Street walkers arrive. No one uses the brown sugar. It sits on the ledge, a far cry from wanted. There is a logic to it: Brown sugar leaves coffee with a maple-licorice aftertaste. It leaves you with an extra unnecessary something. It refuses to dissolve, disappear, dissemble. It is near impervious to tiny wooden stirrers. I swallow another gulp of my white sugar cappuccino.

It’s 7:45. I rush to the corner of 107th street and Broadway and wait. When I get to school, I go to the bathroom by the photo studio. It’s the most remote campus mirror. I snap on the light and am hit by the smell of industrial axe. Brown sugar is gritty. I glide my hand up and down my cheeks. My skin is gritty with seventeen pimples that have yet to come of age. My nose is round where it shouldn’t be.

The perfect woman appears in my head and I realize that the whites of my eyes contrast a little too much with the rest of me; I am just a little too brown to be beautiful.

I am traveling back, back to a six-year-old me who begged for big-busted barbie dolls and fairy wings.

5

My best friend was Phaedra, a girl with coily blonde hair and bright green eyes. We used to watch Disney movies about girls with long hair and perfect dresses. I fell in love with the idea of being adored like those girls -- we both did. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella weren’t quantified by their blood, but by their beauty. The perfect prince fell for them because of their high cheek bones and heart-shaped faces.

Every Saturday night Phaedra and I sat on the carpet floor with bowls of hot mac and cheese, staring up at girls with big blue eyes. We were impossible astronomers, thinking we understood the meaning of every pixel.

I am trying to understand things, to tell myself that I am beautiful. Every time I try, the boy with hazel eyes is back, singing to me about brown sugar. Reminding me that I am an extra, unwanted something.

My mother tells me that I am beautiful, says that my mast of wavy curls, warm honey legs, lunar eyes make me beautiful. My father says the same. The local barista with dark curls and crooked teeth smiles at me in the morning, asks if I want coffee in my sugar. He says I am beautiful too.

But every time I try to hear them, the perfect girl is back. She tells me that no matter how pretty I am, I will never be the right kind of pretty. I will always be a little extra, unnecessary something.

At 7:31 am, sitting on the stool in my kitchen. The grumble of the coffee grinder spits spiky sounds across the cold hallway, waking my weary ears. I tangle my fingers in my haphazard curls, parting them like a curtain so that I can see properly. My father has two bags like bruises under his eyes and smiles when I look at him.

He fits the hot homemade cappuccino into my palms and waits for me to sip. Keeping eye contact with him, I slide the hot liquid in between my lips, waiting for the punch of two tablespoons of sugar.

He didn’t put sugar.

My father is worried about me becoming a diabetic, thinks the overwhelming sweetness in a daily drink is a curse. He doesn’t want me to accept it as the usual, as the norm. He is trying to protect me from myself.

So I don’t say anything, because I know he thinks he’s doing me a favour. It doesn’t feel that way, taste that way. The coffee isn’t gritty anymore, but smooth. It coats the insides of my cheeks with something bitter that I don’t recognize, something unsettling.

This is how it’s supposed to taste, I guess. I had been disguising it with sweetness, thinking that it was supposed to taste like maple syrup and black chocolate. I had been hoping that it didn’t mean anything, that I would always be bigger than two bolded words on paper.

The coffee leaves a dark aftertaste on my tongue, and I am forced to live with something like two-day old acid inside my gums. But it’s time to get used to it. I have to get used to it. I know that if I don’t grow accustomed to this feeling I won’t be able to walk through my apartment door because of that sinking, burning, bitter feeling. I can’t let the coffee and the boy trap me.

6

My father is waiting: “How is it?”

I want to say, God, Dad. This sucks.

“Anani?”

“It’s delicious, Dad.”

7

to the boy who told me it was “too bad” that i had a girlfriend by arielle devito

“I just feel like guys are missing out, y’know?” you said and I did not know but I half-smiled, anyway, because you scared me a little with your broad shoulders and small eyes and how it looked like at any minute your skin would burst and you would reach for me with barbed words and clawed insults

“That’s hot, though. You should let me watch,” you said.

I will never let you near her​, is what I thought but I half-laughed, anyway, because I didn’t want to make a scene with people all around and I knew well enough that you can’t stop boys when they have their minds set on something

I wish that I had stood up and let the whole room hear me as I shouted Listen Listen to me when I talk instead of focusing on my lips or my chest or my hips Listen when I tell you that my hands were made to weave into hers and my arms to hold her and my words to sing her praises

Her voice is the sweetest sound and I could live off of just her laughter and the sunny days when I lay my head on her shoulder and we talk for hours about nothing at all and the way her eyes sparkle and her hair sticks up when she runs her hands through it too busy concentrating to notice that I can’t take my eyes off her smile.

8

How can you tell me that our love only exists without our clothes on and that we kiss only for your pleasure?

We are more than your turn-on.

I am not your porn category, scroll down to ‘lesbian’ to see women contort themselves and pretend to moan just so you can have a change of pace.

This is my life, and I am so much more than your fantasies I am not here for you I am here for myself I am here for her I am here for us and your voice does not belong in our love.

9

10

thanksgiving by daniel karbon

I live in a brick building. They tell me that it’s part of a school. It’s a block away from a bank and an Islamic Community Center, where an Imam was recently struck in the head by a can of beer thrown from a high rise apartment. There are an awful lot of young people around, and you know how they get. On nights when the rain dances softly around the streetlights, I duck my head out to get a look at all of us, all the young people, huddled beneath lit steel awnings, so absurdly beautiful, and graceless, entirely. I like to laugh at us. I do not know if it is right to laugh at us, but I laugh at us. And the Imam is doing well, thank goodness.

My grandfather has recently taken to asking me whether or not I’ve met a lot of nice girls at college. When he asks, I think of all the faces I’ve passed by. The faces I can scarcely remember, and the faces I hope to never forget. And if he’s still looking at me, I opt for uncomfortable muttering.

There’s one face in particular, though, that’s been popping up in odd places, the way a face will when in it’s on your mind. I haven’t learned the face’s name. It belongs to a young woman, with bright brown eyes, a lion’s eyes, and with the soft, kind smile of nobody in particular. The woman has a brave little dog, and to his credit he doesn’t smile at me like she does. He just sets his teeth and cocks his nose back like a revolver; I keep an eye on him, but he knows I’m cool.

The young woman lives with her dog, in an alleyway behind an old, blue and white hotel. That’s the only place I’ve seen her, at least. She’s got a lot of clothes that she keeps in tied up plastic bags, and recently she’s taken to wearing a whole lot of them, all at once. Some of the people who walk pull their coats and jackets tight about themselves; as if they fear the woman would snatch the clothes right off of their bodies. She wouldn’t do a thing like that, I don’t think. One does not come to have so little by taking what isn’t theirs.

Winter has come, and the night air gnaws on the knuckles and fingertips, ravenous. It doesn’t seem to touch the dog, though, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s got the eyes of somebody who’s been chewed on once before, and I bet the cold takes one look at those eyes and keeps right on walking. It’s what I do, after all, when I catch those dark, dog eyes, staring up from the curb. I smile at the woman, she smiles back, and I keep walking, never quite forgetting about those two little black bullets resting on the back of my neck. A young woman like her is lucky to have found a dog with eyes like that. Still, I can’t help but notice the scarred, wooden bat she keeps tucked in between her plastic bags, and the bright red cut that runs from the corner of her normal smile, curving downward, like the juice from a mouthful of fresh raspberries. In those moments, the ones in which I always walk away, I wish I could sit beside her and wipe the scarlet from her chin with the hem of my sleeve, as if she hadn’t noticed there was anything on her face at all. But I should know better. That dog wouldn’t even let me come close.

So I walk on by the alley on my way to my uncle’s house, hands in my pockets, where they can’t cause any trouble. The pavement is uneven, sometimes if I don’t lift my feet up high enough the 11

tip of my shoe will run straight on into some jagged slab of concrete or slowly curling lift of asphalt, and I’ll stumble. So far I’ve managed to catch myself each time. So far. Across the street from the old hotel there is a park. A lot of people live in the park, and you can hear them laughing, free and rough and barking, while the world hurtles by at ninety degree angles, cars ringing in the plot of green, an unpredictable, lethal river of steel and rubber. How anyone can really see things while moving that quickly, I’m not sure. As I edge closer to its cracked black banks, I wonder how long it has been since the park people had spent time inside of cars; and how long it has been since the car people had spent time inside of parks. I wonder if either hand misses the other. I watch my reflection flickering and shadowed in the passing windows, the smooth, curved panes of glass blowing like leaves down the street, bending and flattening the world as they pass through it. There is the destination, and then there is the rest.

One night a few men came to visit the beautiful young woman who lives with her dog behind the old hotel. I know of it only because I was there, sitting inland upon the isle of desperate city green. The men were large, and they carried guns on their hips, next to their thick black radios.

Their car was painted with the words “Police.” I supposed they thought that word gave them a right to drive up to a young woman’s home uninvited, carrying guns on their hips. They stood over her with their hands on their hips, thick clean fingers inches away from thick clean triggers.

She sat on the curb with her dog, looking up at them. I wondered what they could have possibly wanted from her. I left the park quietly before the meeting of faces could come to a conclusion.

Though my curiosity bid me to stay, my friends and I have picked up certain habits that have made us averse to the sight of cars with the word “Police” painted on them. You know how young people get.

An unorganized crashing of days into nights into days later, I saw two more men with guns on their hips, this at a park only a block away. It was early in the afternoon, and the sun shone of their badges and their bicycle helmets, gleaming off of clean white shirts. Their bicycles, shining too, did not have the word “Police” painted on them, but the shorts they wore cut off mid-thigh, confirming them beyond any doubt as agents of the state. This time they stood over an old, tired man on a bench. He had his clothes tied up in plastic bags, too. One of the men in the clean, white shirts searched through a portable toilet nearby, for evidence, I suppose. A mother played with her children not far away. She watched the scene unfold, frowning. Her children did not frown, but only continued to laugh and play. No one had told them what was wrong, yet.

One evening the men on the shining bicycles came for me. My friends and I were enjoying a hookah, which is an ancient Arabian tobacco pipe that young people these days think is alright.

They rode up quietly, from out of sight. As they greeted us, I noticed how even then, under the pleasant shadow of autumn night, the men had bright white lights on their helmets, so they still found a way to make you have to squint when you looked at them. They informed us that the park was closed, which seems to me a strange thing to call something without any doors or windows. They took all of our driver’s licenses and wrote down all of our names. It kept them busy awhile, so I asked them if any of the parks around the area were open late.

“Well, there is De Anza. But there’s a problem there with aggressive panhandlers, so watch out for that,” the man said.

12

I knew the park. It was across from the old, blue and white hotel. People lived there. They ate there, slept there, laughed there, held each other in weary ragged arms and watched the angry river of black iron roll by. They might even have gone to the bathroom there, had the city not decided to place thick, heavy padlocks on the doors of the park’s restroom. The small, brown shack must have posed a threat to greater law and order, I’m sure. But still the people lived there, watching the sun go up, watching the sun go down; waiting for the men with guns to drive up to where they lived and stand over them, hands on their hips, asking them questions they couldn’t possibly have the answers to. I wonder if the hatred showed in my eyes as I stared back at the man who still held my driver’s license, or if the harsh white light from the top of his helmet drowned it out entirely. So that was the problem, I thought. Aggressive panhandling. The people who lived at the park and kept their clothes tied up in plastic bags were simply asking too much of us.

The man handed me my license. We promised to leave the park as soon as possible, and we said goodnight. That night I went back to my room in the brick building, just one block from the Islamic Community Center. And I washed my face in a clean sink, and had food to eat, and slept in a soft bed with sheets. And I knew as I lay down that no matter what strange phantoms might form in the dark, I would wake up safe, with the sunlight coming in through the window.

I have only said two words to the young woman who lives in the alleyway behind the old hotel. I remember the day. The sky rested beautiful and blue above the island, the only ceiling that place will ever see. The black river was uncharacteristically quiet. Her dog was resting peacefully in the weeds, good boy, I thought, you’ve earned it. She leaned up against a rusting metal fence, painted white. Her smile didn’t look quite so normal that day. It had the sunshine in it. Her eyes, her lion’s eyes, caught mine. They always manage to catch mine.

I said, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“You too,” she said.

13

domestic violence: or, how to pave with intentions by emma wilson

07 you will be too young and the reds of your dress will be too proud to run down your unused thighs in fat rivulets

you will stain the sheets when you melt into the fabric you will spend the next year as quilted fabric

09 the yellow-orange heat shivers that hide deep in your stomach will clench and scream in the sanguine cold of someone’s new living room

when he tries to tune you like a radio you will turn to static

11 you will write cinquains in the dark (dark, spinning, circling) as you scratch at the good intentions crawling up your work- worn thighs

you will fill the cracks in your legs with asphalt you will be told

if you dress like a road you should expect to be driven on

13 you will notice the sun (too late) as it creeps up your quiet strings and it 14

will smirk (too late) the time-strained dust-marked streams of seven years guilt

your leaves will shun its patronizing (too soon) touch

when you are told you are what you don’t throw away you will fall head-first into the trash can pulling threads out from your skin

15 the greens of your fingertips will rot away until you cry hot violet into the arms of your savior

the touch (too soon) of cool plastic and sundown smiles will carve white lines into your nails and with them will come the hope of repair

you will cover your potholes with sequins you will shine in the afternoon sun

15

little girl by riley grace

Little girl, you are eight years old. A sweet innocent age where dancing is not strange, but free, and singing is loud, but never sounds off key. But your shirt flies up when you cartwheel across the gymnasium floor. There’s nothing there. It’s flat, but see those boys staring? Yes, they’re staring at you. Pull it down. Tuck its pale pink sparkly layers into your pants. That is what you must do.

Little girl, you are nine, nine years old. Your body is strong; it dances and goes for hikes. Popular songs have a nice ring, but you like classical music, the way it makes you cry and smile and you turn up the dial and no one can hear every note but you. But you have a red spot on your face.

It’s really big, visible to every eye. Here, put this cream on it. Here, try this nice cover-up. Rub it into your skin.

Little girl, you are ten, two digits. School is amazing; it’s fun to learn. You want to read everything. They said math is hard, and the teacher says you can’t do it. Try English. It will be easier. You are a girl. But now you can’t do English. You can’t do math. It’s weird to like words, and you want to understand numbers. But can’t you see? You can’t read those books or write those words. Math? No. Don’t do math. You can’t. Go ahead, pretend you understand when you don’t. Go write alone instead. Write in private. Don’t read those books, read these books. Write about nice things, rainbows and flowers and friendships, not ugly sick things that the teacher doesn’t want a little girl to write about.

Little girl, you are eleven. Ballet makes you feel beautiful, but looking in the mirror isn’t fun.

Boys don’t matter to you, but so many people think they should. But what about your breasts?

Aren’t they growing? And you surely need sweet-smelling deodorant? Try some different music.

Tight shirts? Avoid them. People will know you are changing. And your body? It is getting heavier. Your leotard doesn’t look so great anymore. Look how she looks better in it than you.

Are you stressed? Put this foundation on; hide your face. Why are you crying? Have you had your period yet? Can’t you focus on school? You used to be so diligent.

Little girl, you are twelve. Dancing is still wonderful but everything else is not. You like researching but it’s weird because the other girls like sparkly make-up. You like to dream, but you need glasses and braces. You don’t know yet that the things we don’t understand, we destroy. They destroyed you, little one, but you got back up. You won first prize, but it didn’t matter. They thought you were weird and told you they hated you and you felt sick day after day. You started to write again, but it felt like a rebellion. You always wrote too many stories, but it didn’t matter anymore. You would tell stories because you couldn’t do math. You hate math and can’t do it, remember?

Little girl, you are thirteen, now a teenager. So many expectations and possibilities and you 16

spend time pumping soap into your pads to hide the smell of your period in wastebaskets. You hate your body and every curve you wish was not there. Your face is awkward, your nose too big.

You like boys but it is shameful; don’t say a word. You think about changing yourself so much that your stories lose momentum and your downward spiral does not.

Little girl, you are fourteen, and you are sick, mentally ill. They tell you that your body is perfect now. Don’t listen, you tell yourself. You think you are not a "little girl" anymore, but don’t fight it. You still are.

Little girl, you are fifteen. Depressed and confused and writing everywhere you shouldn’t. You are supposed to smile and you try. I wish you knew it was cool to be you. But it isn’t, and you easily remember that.

Little girl, you are sixteen, and furious. Furious that you still believe you can’t do math, furious that you have to worry about going out alone in shorts, furious that wearing your hair down is "asking for it." You are furious that it is "out of character" to demand to be a strong woman, "out of character" to demand being called a young woman, not a "little girl," "out of character" to demand your right to express yourself loudly.

Little girl, maybe you should’ve been "out of character" earlier.

17

ode to hong kong by vivian lu

In the language of milky river you stumble into foreign territory with electricity coursing through your veins and eyes too big for your own good. Summer saturated in smog and lemonade sunrises, the city unravels in the bustle of sweltering nine A.M metro stations and air so thick you can cut through it with a knife. You spend nights chasing the bruised edges of a silvery moon, wondering what it looks like from home. ​Home​, the word is heavy in your mouth, like stones. As a child, Cantonese rolled off of your tongue like drops of oolong tea, but years have passed since then and you can hardly find the right words to tell your grandmother ​“I’m sorry.”

In Hong Kong, you swallow phrases that scrape your throat like train tracks, reminding you that you are a foreigner in your own country. And no matter how hard you try to love your city, Hong Kong will never love you back. ​

18

a dissection of bamboo by valerie wu

My skin is an art form: the kind you can see, but can’t touch. It runs underneath the layers of my skin like xylem and phloem. Nutrients and water. Sucrose and amino acids. Cut me open, sugar and minerals would spill out--paint on a canvas.

There’s a tale from tenth-century Japan about a bamboo cutter and his wife, who come across a stalk of bamboo in the woods. In it, they find an infant girl, whom they take home. Each time the bamboo cutter returns to the forest, a nugget of gold is found inside the stalk of bamboo.

The baby girl grows. The family becomes rich, but eventually, it comes to light that the girl isn’t from earth, but from the moon; the gold in the bamboo was merely payment for her stay on earth. At the end, the girl returns to the moon, but the bamboo remains symbolic of earthly material attachment. For years the girl had been an immigrant on earth without realizing it, and the bamboo nourished her in that it provided her with sustenance, a purpose to live off on.

Here is a closer examination of the bamboo plant. Found mainly in China and various regions in Asia, bamboo grows quickly. It is resilient; it possesses a remarkable strength that has enabled it to thrive in less-than-ideal environments. The bamboo is economically and culturally significant in East Asia. It’s used in the construction of many buildings, and has been utilized as evidence of climate change. In Confucian ideology, bamboo represents perseverance under harsh conditions, and for that reason, it has been named one of the “Three Friends of Winter.”

Our second-grade science project was on plants--plants like the redwoods of California, oak trees in the park, and weeping willows in ​Pocahontas​. I wanted to study the bamboo, in all its intricate layers and connotations, but the teacher told me that it wasn’t a plant prominent in America.

The project was, she said, on American plants. So the bamboo became ambiguous. It was Schroedinger’s cat, in a permanent state of limbo until someone​--somebody, anybody--​opened the box. It was Mary the colorblind neuroscientist, who knew color: red, white, and blue like anyone else did, but had never experienced those colors for herself. It knew of America, but it had never been an inherent part of it. I’d seen bamboo, in all its varying forms, in all its identities, and likened it to the color of my skin solely because of where it came from. But now, I looked for adaptability, and found none.

What was the American Dream? MLA citations, quotes from Fitzgerald and Ellison were woven into paragraphs as if they mattered. The abstractness of those metaphors weighed down on me.

Our Chinese-American Dreams weren’t merely symbols; they were real, sitting in front of us in our grades, our recommendations, and our futures. The American Dream wasn’t just a green light across the water--it was our food, water, sunlight, and shelter. It was our purpose; it was what we lived off on. Manifest Destiny flourished within us, its seed having been planted since the beginning of our parents’ migrations from the East. Far from where our parents had grown 19

up in, the concept of success carried us: tiger moms and the right way to “package” oneself.

Cherry-picking season rolled around each fall, and suddenly we became aware of that magical word: opportunity.

So we assumed our bamboo identities. We scored As on our APUSH tests without truly knowing what the significance of Chinese immigration in the United States was. We talked boba and ramen. We played our pianos, violins, cellos. We passed all those exams that you hear horror stories about, with honors. We were good at that: passing. We were good at following the post-Depression way of thought--that maybe if we worked hard enough, things would work out all right. We could accomplish what we set our minds to with a bit of hard work. We studied harder, smarter. We became math geeks and future software engineers. We breezed through our homework assignments and went to our debate practices, our ping pong tournaments. We took our SATs and scored well enough. It was always enough, and yet never enough.

Here we were: yellow and unreal. Others called us the model minority. There were hundreds of Lees, Chens, Wangs. Who did we want to be? Doctors, lawyers, engineers. We grew fast, yes, but there was still room to grow. But maybe if we scored higher, just a little higher--

Our roots were firmly ingrained in the motherland, twisting in the soil as they struggled to find their grasp. But we were crooked, gnarled in the way that those plants that don’t get enough sunlight and water can be. Above us hovered the helicopters of parents. ​What about this leadership position? Don’t you want to win this science fair? Have you finished your Kumon packet yet? ​Our growth was thwarted by the expectations of many, and they pushed us down into imitations of what we could be, and never what we were.

By the time I transferred to a predominantly Caucasian high school, thirty minutes away from home, the reminiscence of yellowness was occurring to me in imitations of what they were. I listened to Claude Debussy’s ​Pagodes​ and found solace in pentatonic scales and East Asian musical technique. The triads sounded like the chimes of Japanese temples, and the simultaneous notes became the overlapping of identity. A biological rhythm of yellowness thrummed within me. You move like a shadow of your skin color. It reminded me of what we’d learned in taiko lessons: the ​kuchi-shoga​ (words) were always representative of the beat. It was easier for me to talk about ​chowmein ​and ​xiao long bao ​(little dumplings) in English terms than Chinese ones. I listened to the music coming from the house next door and found happiness in a minor key.

Bamboo was a friend of winter. Summer, the vacation passed, but summer, the season remained.

French lessons resumed. I’d always had trouble distinguishing between the verbs savoir ​and ​connaître​, but the two became more identical than ever. I memorized the definitions of each term. ​Savoir​ meant ​to know​. Someone had described it as having the instinctual feeling of just ​knowing​, the way you just know your mother’s your mother. You know who your friends are. You know when you’re hungry, when it’s time to eat lunch. The verb ​connaître​, though, was different. It was to be familiar with something, to have a relationship with it on a personal level.

You’re familiar with Sally Atkins, with your house. You’re familiar with the art of baking pastries. The conjugations for ​connaître ​became as familiar to me as the word itself.

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The way I thought about it, being familiar with something was always on a more important level than just knowing it. I was familiar with my home, my neighborhood: its design, its landscape, the way its people moved, the history and newness of it, all at once. I knew that this was my home on an instinctual level. At the same time, home might have been more than six thousand miles away, halfway across the globe. I didn’t know this, similar to how I didn’t know why the bamboo couldn’t be labeled an American plant, or why when I reached out to touch my yellow-ness, I felt nothing but the softness of identity. Yellow was yellowish, but not really.

Art class: I tried to paint diversity, but given white and yellow, there’s only two colors you can make. I was Mary, the colorblind neuroscientist who knew color like anyone else did, but wasn’t familiar with it on a personal basis. Could I paint yellow in the same light I’d known it all my life? Rene Magritte: ​Ceci n’est pas une pipe​. The treachery of images. Yellow was not yellow, at least not in the sense I’d become familiar with it in the country I’d grown up in. I re-read the tale of the bamboo cutter and likened myself to Princess Kaguya. Maybe America wasn’t right for me. I was anchored by people asking me if I was good at math, or if I ate hamburgers in China, when different questions should have been asked. But there was no moon to return to--this was my earth, and I resolved to change it for the better.

There are yellow fingerprints on my skin, but they’re the kind you can’t wipe off, no matter how hard you try. It isn’t paint; rather, it’s the remnants of forensic science, a tiny part of my DNA left ingrained into who I am. It’s the product of years at home. The beating heart of the Chinese zodiac has the same biological rhythm as my own--dragon festivals in Chinatown, boba, weekend Chinese school. I know that my yellowness is part of me, just like I know how pi is always three-point-one-four. Cut me open, my yellowness would spill out--paint on a canvas. I’m familiar with that yellow, just like I’m familiar with bamboo. In a cross section, you’d see that bamboo is made up of vascular bundles, each to its own. Bamboo is perennial. Bamboo is flowering. Bamboo is natural.

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22

recipe for disaster by brianna perrone

Ingredients: 1 cup of money he wastes on the abhorrent after school activities ¾ cup of falsified love letters he found on the internet ¾ cup of ruthless abandonment in times of despair 2 eyes the color of the milky way 1 teaspoon of “love” 2 ¾ cups of gin tasting his lips as the liquor travels all the way to his fists ⅓ cup of writer’s block 1 teaspoon of “regret” ¾ cup of irreverent names that trickle down your spine ¾ cup of suicide attempts ½ cup of insecurity that no one will ever adore you the way he does 7 blasphemous numbers that should have never been entered into his phone

Directions: 1. Heat the oven up to 350 degrees. Attempt to stick your head in before he comes home.

2. When you hear the breeze of the front door be sure to have the cup of gin on the kitchen table, ready to be consumed in one hefty swish.

3. When he hands you the letter he “wrote” pretend it’s not the same one you read online 8 hours ago.

4. When your eyes give your secret away, don’t be surprised if the gin strikes you in the face. His writer’s block has him more on edge and your insolence will not be tolerated.

5. When your eyes look like a galaxy he will apologize in the form of contemptuous name calling and then abandon you.

6. When he calls one of the seven profane numbers in his phone do not bat an eye.

7. When he pulls out a roach and blows the smoke in your face don’t begin to cry.

8. When he strikes the front door against the door frame, do not follow him, let him cool for 10-15 minutes.

9. When he is ready to be served, he will come home.

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stop romanticizing mental illness by betsy jenifer

Last year, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. I realized that it was the revolutionary answer to the questions I've always asked myself: Why am I the way I am? Is there something wrong with me? Am I different from others? Why do I constantly feel excluded?

For those of you who don't know what Asperger's Syndrome is, it is a developmental disorder mainly characterized by awkwardness in social situations, repetitive, obsessive behavior and agonizing finickiness.

When I first told one of my friends that I had this syndrome, she expressed her sympathies even though she had no idea what Asperger's was. After I briefly explained what it was to her, she said, more in an attempt to lighten the mood, "It's cool in a way, isn't it? It's like something out of a movie or something." I was then reminded of an article I had read earlier about the romanticisms of mental illness publicized by films and social media steadily over the past years.

On the internet, there are various articles that discuss how mental illness has been glamorized by social media and many movies. But while there are those who believe this to be true, there are many who disagree with this subject. Angry comments lead to furious arguments in the comment area below some of these articles; some people vehemently expressed how they have never heard of mental illness being romanticized for any reason. A few even think it is total rubbish.

Upon reading these articles, I was not only intrigued but also inspired by a few of those audacious articles that voiced brazen but true statements without fear or hesitation. As someone who's known and felt mental illness and is also rather au fait with films and social media, I do think mental illness has been romanticized.

Although it's true that exposure of mental illness can educate others, social media and films have changed the discussion of mental illness to one that is grossly idealized and misinformed. Our society has become desensitized and even numb to the reality of mental illness from being overly exposed to falsities and romantic exaggerations about it through films and social media.

A character with Asperger's in the movies is made to look like a robot. Their inability to socialize is depicted as charmingly off-beat. Their repetitive behavior is a hilarious hyperbole. A character with OCD is made to look funny and lovably off-the-wall. Their compulsive behavior is a running joke.

They make it look so easy.

Do you know how hard it actually is for people with Asperger's? How the smallest sound is a magnified and alarming noise in their ears? How difficult it is for them to understand what 24

others mean and respond accordingly? How terrifying it can be to be among people and communicate when everything around poses as one great mystery?

Imagine the girl who craves the slash of a razor blade across her skin, just to escape all the anxieties and pain in her mind. Or the boy who has bottles of pills socked away in his drawer 'just in case'. Or the woman who stares down a high bridge everyday wanting to jump but just barely holds on.

In fiction, all these characters somehow magically stumble upon the right person who helps them and sticks with them through every hardship with extreme level-headedness, patience and maturity.

But is it all that easy in real life?

Mental illness isn't something that just comes and goes like a fair-weather friend. It isn't a quirky trait that makes people love you. It isn't desirable or appealing. It definitely isn't something that many people will tolerate with such amazing strength and perseverance like in the movies and neither does it make someone a target for romantic affection.

Mental illness is feeling completely and absolutely hopeless and alone. It's hating yourself every day because of it. It's sobbing and gasping uncontrollably at 2 a.m. on your bed. It's staring at the mirror and not recognizing yourself. Only you know how it feels. Either you save yourself or remain unsaved. It's far from the cute, sugar-coated and romanticized version we see on TV or on sites like Tumblr. I've noticed that young people, specifically some teenage girls, seem uncannily into it. Cutting yourself isn't cool. Neither is puking or starving to stay thin. These people have to know that mental illness isn't beautiful. ​Although someone with mental illness can be beautiful, mental illness itself is appalling and torture.​ We've created a culture that showcases mental illness as something beautifully tragic and romantic. A culture that misrepresents, glamorizes and dramatizes. Most times, the real truth behind what we see on screen couldn't more far away.

I am not against giving realistic problems to fictional characters and unfurling meaningful stories through them but it’s ridiculous and disrespectful when those problems are made to look beautiful, simple and easy to overcome.

If these writers, filmmakers and screenwriters want to use mental illness in their works, they must make it real. They must remind the audience how hard and difficult mental illness is, that every single day is a struggle. A battle fought without rest. They must realize this instead of inflicting eccentric traits related to mental illness in a character to just make them more interesting and attention-getting.

But it’s not just the authors and directors that should take responsibility for this toxic romanticization of mental illness, the audience must take responsibility as well. Young people must also try and realize that this quixotic outlook on mental illness is inaccurate and should deter these distorted views among themselves and others. Mental illness is ​A Beautiful Mind​.

It's ​Silver Lining's Playbook​. It's ​Perks of Being a Wallflower​. It's ​Speak​. It's ​Girl​, ​Interrupted​.

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It's ​Black Swan​. It's ​One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Right now, there is someone out there, just like me, trying in their own way to put right what has gone wrong. They are out there, across the world, speaking the truth through their stories, art, music or whatever it is they do all because they know how it really feels to be misunderstood.

And for now, that is enough.

I have hope that this situation will change. I know there is truth out there. We must have hope this situation will change, so mental illness can finally be recognized not as a romanticized quirk, but for what it truly is.

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heat

by isabella ampil

throats raw and spit flying (scorched earth and sandstorms)

raised fists, ragged and bloody (canyon rivers, running red)

gunfire in white hot flashes (shimmering mirages, with their cruel beauty)

screeching sobs ripped from threadbare lips (hollow vulture calls)

flash grenades skittering along the pavement (tumbleweeds lolling gently, almost cheerful)

panting breaths of thick mist, searing lungs (dry wind whistling lazily)

billowing tear gas, thick as volcanic ash (drifting heaps of soft, snowy clouds)

outstretched palms, pale and vulnerable (no place to hide beneath the all-consuming sun)

a blue-black sky swollen with humidity, salty beads of sweat blooming from bitter skin, the thrumming heartbeat pounding thick underfoot, the tempo of righteousness, centuries-old (silence.)

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scatterbrain by john osler

Cast

ARTHUR: Sixteen years old.

MARISSA: Sixteen years old.

Setting

The late evening of July 21, 2016. Arthur is on a couch, scrolling on his iPhone, Marissa is on a large, squishy chair, looking at her laptop. They’re both limp, with arms and legs hanging down lifelessly, like sedated bodies. Their eyes are always glued on the screens, neither of them ever makes eye contact with the other.

MARISSA​: Did you see this editorial about Clinton?

ARTHUR​: Which of the thousands?

MARISSA​: This one that just popped up on my Facebook feed, it’s about her speech after those police shootings a few weeks ago. The guy who wrote it doesn’t like how she said it’s time to have a national conversation about race.

ARTHUR​: What’s wrong with her saying that? After all that’s gone on, it seems like the least we could do.

MARISSA​: Yeah, but the guy says, and I sort of agree with him, that it’s an empty term.

National conversation never really accomplishes anything, if we were serious about stopping these shootings we’d take action- ARTHUR​: What, like protests? I think there’s already been a couple of those.

MARISSA​: No, I mean making a law that would fix the problem.

ARTHUR​: And what would that law say?

MARISSA​: I dunno… maybe, well, maybe… um, body cameras…

ARTHUR​: Hey, speaking of Hillary, did you ever see that video of Christie’s speech at the RNC? MARISSA​: I got through a minute or so, but then… I dunno, I got distracted, I guess. It was a little bit boring. What was it about?

ARTHUR​: Well, basically he lists all these crimes she’s supposedly committed and asks the crowd to tell him if she’s guilty or not guilty.

MARISSA​: What crimes?

ARTHUR​: I don’t know, I didn’t watch the video either. Just read an article about it.

MARISSA​: Well, what’s the problem?

ARTHUR​: People are saying that it alludes to mob rule and lynchings. Y’know, trial by a group 28

of angry people with no opportunity for the defendant to speak for herself.

MARISSA​: But it’s not like they actually killed her, right?

ARTHUR​: No. Some Trump aid said she should be shot for treason, but no actual Clinton executions yet.

MARISSA​: So what’s the problem? I mean, I don’t like Chris Christie, but he can say what he wants. It’s a free country. What’re you gonna do, call the police on him for making an impassioned speech?

ARTHUR​: No, but… Hey, look here. Some guy literally walked off a cliff playing Pokemon Go. MARISSA​: Seriously? Just walked right off?

ARTHUR​: Honestly, it’s not all that surprising. There are, um, how many people playing Pokemon Go? MARISSA​: Hold on, I’ll look it up… Woah, 9.5 million.

ARTHUR​: Yeah, 9.5 million people playing this dumb little game. Do the math, at least one of them’s gotta be a moron.

MARISSA​: I don’t think that’s right. Maybe he was just really, really into it and didn’t look where he was going. I could see myself doing that, if there happened to be a lot of unprotected cliffs around. Hell, I walked into traffic twice yesterday while playing.

ARTHUR​: Come to think of it, it is a pretty big safety threat, having 9.5 million people walking around zombified, staring at their phones all day, not looking where they’re walking, or even driving. Maybe they should outlaw the game.

MARISSA​: Don’t you think that’s going a little far? Have you tried playing it yet? It’s really, really fun.

ARTHUR​: I’m sure speed is too, and bungee jumping, and getting into drunken brawls. But I’m not in a big hurry to do any of those.

MARISSA​: Still, there’s gotta be some way to make it safer without banning it outright. Like maybe we could- Oh. ARTHUR​: What?

MARISSA​: This just popped up on my newsfeed: RIP Michael Blaszak.

ARTHUR​: Who’s Michael Blaszak?

MARISSA​: A kid a grade below us.

ARTHUR​: What happened?

MARISSA​: I don’t know. All it says is that he died alone.

ARTHUR​: I heard somewhere that “died alone” is an obit euphemism for suicide.

MARISSA​: Where’d you hear that?

ARTHUR​: I don’t remember.

MARISSA​: Oh. ARTHUR​: Did you know him?

MARISSA​: Not well.

ARTHUR​: Okay. Well, still…

[Beat] MARISSA​: Did you hear about this new study they did at the University of Farrand?

Apparently the average American’s attention span is just below that of a goldfish, about eight seconds.

ARTHUR​: The average millennial or person of any age?

MARISSA​: It just says person, so I guess they didn’t test different ages.

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ARTHUR​: Good. Can’t wait to show that to my great uncle Al. He’s alway going on about how kids these days have too many distractions, can’t focus on anything, that our brains are rotting because of technology or whatever. I can’t wait to show him that his mind is going to hell, same as mine, same as everyone else’s.

MARISSA​: The researchers did say that there might be a correlation between the falling American attention span and proliferation of technology.

ARTHUR​: Okay, well these researchers were probably super biased, just old guys in lab coats trying to prove that technology everywhere is screwing us all over, just like every other old person on the planet.

MARISSA​: So you don’t think that constantly flipping through different apps and windows might make us a tid bit less focused in our day to day lives?

ARTHUR​: Okay, maybe, a little. But what’s the other option? Give up all technology? What all these cantankerous old morons forget is that it makes our lives better too. Keeps us connected, keeps us informed, gives us access to information we wouldn’t have otherwise. Without cellphones, we wouldn’t- we wouldn’t be able to call 911 in an emergency, we wouldn’t be able to take videos of the messed up stuff going on. All those black guys shot by police, no one would’ve been able to film it a couple years ago. No one would have cared.

MARISSA​: But maybe if we had longer attention spans, we might be able to finish a conversation without something butting in ten seconds later.

ARTHUR​: Don’t blame our incapacity to follow through on tech. It’s just part of the human condition. No one found a good way to stop violence and death and all that crap in the eons before the internet. I doubt an uninterrupted conversation now would change anything.

[Beat] MARISSA​: Did you see that Kanye West got into a twitter feud with Syria? Seriously what is this world- ARTHUR​: That’s an article from The Onion.

MARISSA​: Oh. ARTHUR​: Hard to tell sometimes, isn’t it?

MARISSA​: Yeah. It really is.

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westward by elizabeth girdharry

Their grocery list is a foreign language quiz.

Sundry refugees, jammed into glass bottles, sit on shelves, arranged by date and time.

Fill the shopping cart with a family of 10.

Hide them between a loaf of white bread and a ½ gallon of skim milk. Plastic bags hold distant galaxies and alternate universes.

Balancing on your head to take up less space, to fill in the gaps between here and there, now and then, east and west.

Opium smoke curls, shiver, a chill breeze.

Yellow cars moving forward and back roads, pushing America as her engine gives out. Pushing America as her engine catches fire.

There is strength in numbers.

Swim westward. Dog paddle from point A to checkpoint B, as swift as thieves. Drowning in galaxies, wading through parallels,

as if America was an Olympic high dive tournament, a kiddie pool, or the seven seas.

Blinking saltwater from your eyes, the border is a circle, not a line.

Prove you come in peace.

Catch pneumonia on the shoreline. Offer them a coughed up lung.

The neighborhood was a barrack housing displaced janissaries, missionaries, visionaries, trading cheap narcotics for placebos;

the hardest drug there is: a false sense of belonging.

Chase the high down unpaved roads, falling into open manholes, into black holes,and disappearing from existence.

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Push your shopping cart up the overcrowded street as your newborn howls. Listen to her clear her lungs,

belting out the national anthem in a foreign tongue.

Sigh even if you can’t understand the words.

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staccato in the symphony by mehar haleem

Looking across the sun baked field, I could see two gigantic road rollers, looking like weapons of mass destruction and irony with its revolving barrel of metallic vulgarity. It's not even the sight of them that's so disturbing, but the thoughts that haunt your attention following the obscene visual- the possibility of being a centipede, crushed in the course of its grotesque rolling. It's thoughts like these that make me feel fortunate.

I was dragging my parched corpse across the desert sands of the day, mopping the floor, when the head of staff barged through the door, which swiftly flung itself open without a creak. "They've come to see you again. Get dressed and enter the room with your science textbook."

She spoke with the leftovers of the accent that she used when talking to promising prospects - prospects with green pockets and incomplete families.

I nodded. She left. I sighed.

So I put on the best shirt I had, which wasn't saying much, opened my science book to the only chapter that I had highlighted and left the room.

On my way, I went through the drill in my head, not for revision but just for a personal mockery of it all. They would ask my name, what all I studied, probably ask me to recite a poem or two, want me show them my drawings and then they would wave and leave and never adopt me. That's how it always was. And I had no reason to believe today would be an exception.

Others had the same interview stretched for about half an hour. Mine only lasted ten minutes, maybe fifteen if the people were feeling sympathetic. But being heartbroken by rejection has become so mundane that my only defense mechanism to this doctrine of endurance was to amuse myself with it.

My few friends, now all scattered in neat little households, were better looking than me, fairer than me, taller than me, and seemed to have it a bit easier.

They ate the same soggy meals and wore the same secondhand clothes and read the same tattered books as I did, but at the end of the year they landed full- fledged families and I got their share of the chores when they left. I was now as much as a part of this place as the brick and mortar that it was made of. To imagine an existence beyond it... well, those were things I could not afford to think of in broad daylight.

So I concerned myself with the things that I wasn't supposed to be concerned for.

Like if I would get slapped for taking advantage of sitting in front of prospective adopters by eating more than two of the biscuits being served. If the couple in question would be married or gay or both.

If it would be a single mother or a single father or a foreigner making a documentary on mud larks, 33

slums and all things unfortunate within a third world country. Or if it would be a sterile woman just an adoption away from feeling a bit more of a mother.

Anyways, I went. Sat down. Smiled the smile Anil told me to smile. Talked about the love I had for my teachers, the head staff, and to the couple. We talked about my studies, my dream occupation (which was predetermined by the staff) and the movies I had seen. They seemed to really like my drawings which even with my little experience, I knew were above average.

Almost immediately, the staff in charge, in her warm version of a cold voice, started listing my achievements. The salesperson of a damaged product. Achievements a bit inflated, a bit exaggerated, a bit not mine. But I knew she was trying her best. But it didn't really matter to me anymore for who that effort was for. You see, intention matters to only those who can afford to see it, the rest of us concerning ourselves only with the tangible. Because there is nothing poetic about poverty. There is really nothing poetic about it no matter how much you try to squeeze one out of the circumstances, much like the toothpaste I am currently struggling with because we are only given a miniature tube on the of fifth of every month.

But maintaining pearly whites is not a priority of mine right now. It's to impress the couple sitting in front of me, so that we can live like the families they show in the advertisements. Nice smiling families with washing machines and dinner tables. Movies on Sunday and pocket money once a month. Dad’s sarcastic remarks and mom’s pancakes. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to recite my Robert Frost poem with zest and show them the charcoal sketches I made back when I lived with my friends. I'm going to talk with enthusiasm and smile at everything they say. This is it now. I’m going to do it. I’m going to get myself a family.

Two days later I saw my friend, my only remaining and last friend of this place, being picked up by that same family that I had talked to. Apparently they didn't want a disfigured boy.

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35

reaction to a misguided facebook comment by brigitte jia

Asians aren’t people of color​, she posted Righteous in her role as society’s victim With all due respect, you all are viewed just fine. It’s us who has life rough No one denies that we’ve all been oppressed except you, honey What shade of white do we look like to you?

Why are we ‘privileged’ all of a sudden When we were treated the same as you Beaten, ridiculed, human donkeys Worth less than a nail in those transcontinental lines?

I tell you what, we aren’t born with it We dug through layers of horse-dung and cow shit Resilient, bent on a better life till it breaks our backs And you have the nerve to call us ‘privileged’

We’re smart, we’re polite, we’re hard-working And they think we’re all doormats they can wipe their shoes on You don’t get to tell me that my parents had societal leverage When my dad chopped fish in the back of a supermarket to keep me fed

We’re still here ‘cause we’re stronger than the ocean But the water’s been cold since 1849 I’ve never seen a Chinese woman on the cover of a magazine And the waves aren’t getting warm

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ally is a verb by rose xiao

I remember when ​HeForShe​ started in September 2014. I remember Emma Watson, once the bushy-haired heroine of my childhood, standing at a podium and declaring that, regardless of our gender, we need to fight for equality.

I don't remember what I thought at first — whether I was impressed, or indifferent, or whether I thought it seemed to subtly cater to men. I was busy with the beginning of the school year. I wasn't on Twitter too much, but when I was, #HeForShe was trending, filled with pictures of people like Matthew Lewis and Harry Styles and Aziz Ansari declaring that they believed in gender equality. What I do remember is a hovering discomfort with the movement in the back of my mind. Men (celebrities and average citizens alike) holding "I need feminism because..." signs tweeted endlessly, attributing their feminist awakening to their mothers or girlfriends or sisters or daughters. I wondered what had prevented them from achieving a feminist awakening on their own.

They seemed heartfelt, for the most part, but my discomfort grew anyway. I started finding articles with titles like "HeForShe or HeForHe?" and "Where Emma Watson's HeForShe Campaign Went Wrong" and "Emma Watson's HeForShe Movement Is a Perfect Demonstration of Mainstream White Feminism". Articles like these summarized what I was feeling — that #HeForShe pandered to (white) men on a subtle and yet potentially damaging level. But they failed to put a name on it, failed to prescribe a solution.

In mid-March 2015, a friend of mine shared a list that was something like "10 Rules of Allyship", written by women of color, intended for a conference in which both white women and women of color talked about feminism within the bigger picture of race, class, sexuality, and other factors. It included things like "As an ally, you are not the central focus — part of your job is to give a platform to the voices of oppressed peoples", the very simple "Listen", and my personal favorite: "Ally is a verb, not a noun."

My friend — let's call him Jack — calls himself a feminist ally. Not a feminist, a feminist ally. When Jack heard about #HeForShe, he was moved. He sent me several Facebook messages and texts with links to videos and tweets and articles; Aziz Ansari's declaration that he was a feminist, Simon Pegg's support of the campaign, and the White House's endorsement of Emma Watson's hard work.

"I'm glad she talked about the man-hating thing," Jack told me. "The angry feminist stereotype is so damaging. Feminism is about equality, not anger!" His newfound comfort with feminism was centered on his revelation that it was ​equality, ​not justice, that feminists were fighting for. He, too, was protected by the movement. And because of that, it was worth fighting for.

I ended the conversation then, afraid that I'd get angry at him, and angry at myself for being afraid of that. Feminists ​are​ angry. They have every right to be. I love Jack, but I was furious that his feminism was so cultured and so tailored. His feminism was what he wanted it to be: easy. Jack didn't ask himself hard questions. He followed the white mainstream feminist gospel of figures like Emma Watson and 37

Taylor Swift — women who I love dearly, but whose feminism, like Jack's, is one of passivity.

Ally is a verb. Ally is not an identity. Ally is not a part of the LGBTQ+ acronym. To ally with a movement is to give it your vocal, active support. To ally with feminism is to fight side-by-side with women, not to magnify your own male voice. #HeForShe is a movement that, unfortunately, is characterized ultimately by its failure to address the fact that men like Matthew Lewis cannot simply take selfies and hope to make an impact on the feminist movement. I do not dismiss their importance as celebrity example-setters, but their allyship is an identity they have assumed and crafted, not an active tool for feminism. Like the celebrities that tweet about Martin Luther King Jr. but won't say #BlackLivesMatter, or the straight allies of the LGBTQ+ movement who come out as "allies" on National Coming Out Day, male allies of feminism — though they undoubtedly mean well — have a lot to learn.

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staff section

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a blind model by joonho jo, ​managing editor

Section I—September 2006

i come home from mackay elementary school and ask umma* what does chink mean. she sighs, and tells me not to talk back to the other boys. i ask her again, umma what does chink mean.

*umma - "mom"

Section II—May 1869

The transcontinental railroad—tracks that extended 1700 miles—was built in 1869. Before its completion, a trip from New York to California cost over 1000 dollars and six months. After May of 1869, it cost 150 and one week. It was this railroad that enabled the growth of westward expansion. It was this railroad that created the America of today. ​From California to the New York islands…

It was also this railroad that was built by Chinese hands. West Evans, a railway contractor said that 1 without the Chinese workers, "I do not see how we could [have completed] the [railroad.]…"

Section III—October 2007

today my legs ache so i collapse onto the scuffed white paint of the school basketball court and wait, eyes shut tight, hoping that everything will mist into quiet. the silence never comes and the bickering of boys and girls in the swings crowds my ears like it always has. they are not bickering at me, i think. they hardly ever do to my face. it was usually at Garvy. yes it has to be at Garvy.

if you ask me why i collapsed, i could not answer you. i would not answer you. sorry, i am just not used to it. Hyung* tells me to always say what i believe but mother and father tell me to keep quiet. do not stir. do not instigate. there will be more trouble then. just stay out of trouble.

Garvy is always in trouble. i can hear Jace and Alec push him against the rope swings until the chains clatter against his brown skin. did he ask for this. did he start this. he started this. he started it all. i can hear it all from the basketball court. but i keep my mouth shut. as always. and my eyes. according to Jace and Alec, they are always shut. *​hyung - "older brother" without those chinks. Without those cheap, dirt-poor chinks, there is no way in hell we could have completed that railroad. Thank God for the chinks.

1

Chen, Jack. ​The Chinese of America​. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980. p. 74.

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Section IV—May 1882

13 years later, the USA government prohibits Chinese immigration. The same hands that pinned down the tracks of the Transcontinental Railroad are forced to let go of those of their wives and daughters and sons.

➢ 1873, October 3, ​Los Angeles Daily Herald Location: Los Angeles, CA "In a word Chinese immigration is as fatal to the country as the leprosy which they 2 promulgate, and the pests they breed amongst us."

➢ 1876, May 17, ​Los Angeles Daily Herald Location: Los Angeles, CA "The presence amongst us of the hordes of servile Chinese [is] 3 inimical to our advancement as a nation."

➢ 2016, October 4, "Watters' World," Fox News' ​The O'Reilly Factor Location: Chinatown, NY. "Am I supposed to bow to say hello?" i do not think so.

"Do you know karate?" i do not.

"Is it the year of the dragon? Rabbit?" i do not know.

4 Speak! Speak! Why don't you speak? i do speak. just quieter.

➢ ➢ ➢

Section V—November 2016

our nails are too short to claw​, we whisper, against the leprosy that is our weathered skin.

2

translation: I do not want chinks near me.

Chinese Immigration," ​Daily Los Angeles Herald​, October 03, 1873, Vol. 1 No. 2, p.2 3

translation: I do not want chinks near me.

News of the Morning," ​Los Angeles Daily Herald​, May 17, 1876, Vol. 6 No. 44, p.2 4

translation: I still do not want chinks near me.

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/05/watch-fox-news-jesse-watters-heads-to-chinatown-for-incredibly-offensive-oreilly-factor-segment/

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we whisper ​there is no control. we cannot control.

maybe it is the year of the red dragon, but an Albino Beast feasting on rabid weeds ruins our baby pests, holding them in its slithering embrace, like a gun.

Section VI—December 1941

when kamikaze jets crashed into hawaii on the morning of december 7, 1941, japanese americans did not celebrate. they did not celebrate because they understood not what had happened but what was going to happen.

they did not celebrate because suddenly their names had been translated from casey and sophia and richard to jap and jap and jap. they did not celebrate because they were forced to find new homes in old internment camps. they did not celebrate because they understood that internment was just another word for concentration.

Section VII—June 1982 (In Memory of Vincent Chin)

It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work. you do not recall that the drinks from earlier were red against your yellow cheek, but now all you see is red and then black and black and black. wife, wife where are you is what you ask but she and your friends are not close because they scattered when they saw him and his bat. He is not your friend. is he.

He is not like you. is he.

It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work. since when did we become such targets, since when did the weeds of racism haunt our gardens you ask but you are not answered before his fingers clasp against your cheeks and your chin falls cracked onto the pavement. how did you get here. how did we get here. how did our chins crack open onto the ground like jets.

your wedding guests become funeral guests. how did we get here they ask.

Section VIII—June 2010

when you are thirteen-years-old and your crush says that you are smart, you smile. when she tells you that you are a genius and that you should help her with her math problems, you smile. you do not ask why you.

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you do not ask why not Jack or Sarah or Derek who are all smarter than you. you do not ask. instead you smile, you nod, and you help her with algebra. you tell her yes, x does equal 15, y does equal 2, and it is her turn to smile. She pats your head and leaves the table. She sits with Cory at lunchtime. you sit quiet.

Section IX—February 2017

when Hyung was in fifth grade, he auditioned for a chorus. He was terrific. He could sing as high as a soprano and as low as a bass. He played instruments so he understood rhythm and beats. mom taught him to sing from his stomach and not his neck so his sound was free and gorgeous.

He didn't make the chorus, unfortunately. apparently, it had turned into an all-girls choir. maybe you should've read the sign more carefully mom said. I did he said. I promise they said I could make the group. it didn't say all-girls before. the poster changed yesterday. They said if I was good enough I could make it. well clearly we just have to work harder next time mom said. we've always had to work harder.

Section X—September 2016

so the chorus of termites know to infest the yellow wound of your silent Acacia, with weeds that dig further into bark than pickaxes of a railroad. yesterday you cried umma umma umma i do not want to go to his funeral, i do not want to see death, i do not want to see anything. but still you hear it all.

You must, still hear the noise of pain that you think you cannot control or heal. then, You cannot wait, You must not wait since their bickering will not stop as long as you stay blind.

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running with the bull by a.a. reinecke, ​poetry reader

We had a poster in our Spanish class that had emblazoned on it the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He had a sharp nose, the kind of nose a classmate in my year at school had—a sand-haired mien which had been captured in a series of onyx-backed, beautifully rendered photographs in the literary magazine I run—and which I envied, and thin calves, and a back which slanted in great symmetry around the tomato colored curve of a cape. Though I hardly slid by with borderline A’s all four semesters of my short-lived stint with the Spanish language, the words printed at his feet were ones I understood; September 5th, it read, a bull-fight, followed by the man’s sonorous share of syllables.

The text on the poster was the color of a rhubarb crisp overdone and the paper that of the accompanying crust and thought it was set in a wooden frame which appeared almost fake—an imposter of an imposter—the poster had to it the same honest and archaic charm whose presence in a similar poster had earlier that week turned my family’s favor to a certain dark salmon walled apartment on Airbnb.

My sister is writing an essay this week on Ernest Hemingway, a man whose works she has not cared to read. Finding her apathy and my passion for such assignments a convenient intersection, I sit posed with an old copy of ​The Sun Also Rises​, and proceed to marvel at the parallels I discover as existing between the scenes unfolding within and without the novel’s tangerine-colored cover. “We often talked about bulls and bull-fighters,” I read to myself as across the table my sister scrolls mindlessly through an Instagram feed on her i-Phone. She has a document open on her laptop titled ‘Hemingway report’ in which she has capitalized the H in Hemingway and not the ‘r’ in report, an asymmetry whose evasion of Microsoft Word’s militant typographic scrutiny strikes me somehow as remarkable.

“I had stopped at the Montoya for several years. We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls. These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full.

Montoya introduced me to some of them.”

I think as my sister proceeds to write some choppy and carless sentences along the lines of “Ernest Hemingway was a famous writer who wrote about the post-war uncertainties following the first World War,” about our upcoming trip to Spain, what my father has said about bullfighting having been outlawed where we will be staying, which is Barcelona, but mostly I think about the word ‘bull’ itself.

While Merriam Webster defines a bull as a noun connoting “a male bovine,” the phrase has long been linguistic shorthand for ‘bullshit,’ a fact Urban Dictionary confirms. “Short for “bullshit,” or “bullcrap, “meaning rubbish,” the listing on the site, posted by user KerrAvon on October 10, 2003, reads, offering the following example: “That’s complete bull.” Returns for search of the longhand, 44

bullshit, prove clearer. “Bullshit,” says Wikipedia, “is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism BS.” Urban Dictionary offers up, “A blatant lie, a flagrant untruth, an obvious fallacy. Or, the excrement of cattle,” and the similar, though vaguer, “Something far from the truth.”

I think, as she attempts and fails to decode Hemingway’s use of symbolism in ​Hills Like White Elephants​ without the consolation of Shmoop.com, why it is that this phrase should sound to me imperative. The answer to this strange and sad question proves the same as have the answers to many similar such questions posed in the wake of this past November. That answer, of course, lies in the realm of the many and varied moral transgressions of then Presidential candidate and now President Donald Trump. It lies, specifically, with his apparently limitless capacity for deceit, his most recent exercise of which proved to land with all the grace of a hydrogen bomb at the yearly shamrock ceremony this past Friday.

“As we stand together with our Irish friend,” Trump spoke this Saint Patrick’s Day, “I’m reminded of that proverb—and this is a good one, this is one I like; I’ve heard it for many, many years and I love it—“Always remember to forget the friends that proved untrue. But never forget to remember those that have stuck by you.” Followed by cordial statements by visiting Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Trump’s comment about his personal connection with words from the Emerald Isle seemed a diplomatic and out of character display of tact. The only problem? The phrase wasn’t one to which he has, or even could have, a personal connection, and, yes, you’ve guessed it: it wasn’t even Irish.

This so-called ‘proverb,’ internet sleuths have uncovered, are actually lines belonging to a poem by a man CNN identifies as “a Nigerian banker who wrote the poem in college.” The irony for Trump? Not only is the poem, posted by Alhassan in January 2013, too young to merit use of the description as something with which he’s been familiar for “many, many years,” better yet, is a sentiment expressed by a Muslim, a member of the group Trump has systemically targeted both on the campaign trail and into his stay at Pennsylvania Avenue.

The irony of Trump’s usurpation of his speech was not lost on Alhassan, who told CNN, “I have heard a lot about Trump. Especially the fact that he victimized some of my people, some Muslims.” Many were quick to take to twitter to rebuke not only Trump’s fake proverb but also the heavy helping of bullshit with which he presented it, among them Irish-Americans bewildered at so blatant a disregard for their holiday and culture. “Have literally never heard this in my entire life,” tweeted Dublin-based​ ​journalist Christine Bohan; “With all due respect to the president's reputation for scrupulously checking his sources,” said @theirishfor, “I don't think this is an Irish proverb.”

While my sister grapples with Hemingway’s symbolism-wrought landscape, I come to the full and frightening realization that Trump’s lies, unlike those of the rational sort, are not well-intentioned, or even calculated fabrications, but rather blatant and dangerously careless utterances with no regard whatsoever for their mendacity’s purpose.

I decide, as I reacquaintance myself with the hooves beating on Hemingway’s cobblestone-bedded Pamplona, that like the running of the bulls, the triumph of deceit has been a stampede, that Trump’s time on the political scene has been “a spectacle with unexplained horrors” alongside which we long have been jogging. Birtherism, statistics which jump their calculated upper 45

bounds by thirty million and the preposterous claim that Americans in New Jersey cheered on September 11, 2001 as the Twin Towers collapsed to rubble stomp on in a sickening crescendo of hooves.

That Trump’s falsehoods venture far into the realm of what one Urban Dictionary user calls a place “distinguished from a lie . . . [which] simply does not care whether it is true or false,” is a fact which has left few contented to stand behind the avenue’s barriers. Whether it is in absolute terror of or in riotous celebration at the barbarism which for decades has, at least in American society, been forced under wraps, liberals and conservative alike have joined in observance of the macabre sport.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner pointed to this phenomenon in the New Yorker’s February 20 live stream, where, agreeing with novelist Salman Rushdie that Trump is, indeed, a spectacle, he said, “That 77 minute press conference, you couldn't turn it off. You wanted to—you wanted to die—but it was mesmeric."

As my sister continues her essay, now a page double-spaced on a Word document, I find new relevance in the following passage: “Outside the ring, after the bull-fight was over, you could not move in the crowd. We could not make our way through but had to be moved with the whole thing, slowly, as a glacier, back to town. We had that disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight.”

That the New Yorker recently published an article entitled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” in which various studies were plucked from Harvard and Stanford studies of the 1970s to demonstrate that it is emotion and not the presentation of facts which sways the mind for or against a position or cause is far from surprising.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once said that “No amount of fire or freshness can change what a man will store up in his ghostly heart,” and my friends, who on the steps of the Cal engineering library earlier today agreed that it was not any set of numbered reasons that had led them to fixations with certain selective colleges, but rather a “feeling,” which had inclined them so, confirm what is a conclusion at which most liberals would balk: that our choices are encouraged and reigned not through the presentation of facts, but rather through the less calculable and more unpredictable influence of personal emotion.

Across the table, my sister has finished a second paragraph, having interjected a string of sentences where she speaks to Hemingway’s metaphoric mountains and in which she uses the word ‘white’ three times where I would have varied the descriptive with its synonyms such as ‘eggshell’ or ‘ivory.’ I think about November as I watch her type, about how loyally we liberals clung to our facts and figures from the primaries' start through election night's finish.

I think how, as liberals, members of a group to whom facts are important, we believed facts would save us. We believed in such a theory full stop, with no reservation. What we failed in was not a weak conviction in such a belief—journalism and protests both within and in response to the election season prove as much—but rather blindness to the equal and opposite conviction held by the right: that theory, none the weaker and probably the stronger, that emotion was their lifeboat.

I think how the presentation of facts to a group which deals not in fact but in emotion was, 46

despite its seeming logicality, as hopeless as presenting Hershey's kisses as casino chips or Mexico's translucent butterfly-stamped bills at gas station counters at home in the States. Anyone who has tried to appeal to a friend’s reason on the topic of a boyfriend or spouse’s character, I think, has experienced on a micro scale what has on a macro scale proved responsible for the Republican usurpation of our nation’s governmental trinity.

I read another paragraph from my softbound copy. “They [the Spanish] were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion [passion for bullfighting]. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it.”

The scene seems to paint an allegory for the incredulity other nations feel towards what has proven our not only recent acceptance of, but our recent passion for rhetoric; the captured incredulity, I am aware, will, along with brown stone architecture and superior seafood be a force present where a year ago my math teacher, who returned with two Picasso pigeon prints for his daughters respective rooms, managed to vacation undisturbed. It is shocking to the world that we, the simultaneous parent of and posterchild for liberty should have fallen so low as to condone such a sport.

My sister stands from the table. Offers me a cup of coffee, which I decline. My mind is buzzing already, an effect produced of what has been upwards of six months' reverberation of the pounding of hooves. “It’s fine,” I say, after having perused the document, though it is not. The hooves make a sharp sound, like splitting wood, or tap shoes on a hollow black-box stage on which their dance falls dense.

“It’s an abortion, right?” she asks me. “The operation.”

“Read the story,” I say, because now I am sad, sad and not angry because anger, which is an individual thing, has fled to leave behind an emptiness, the kind of solemnity reserved instead to empty trenches and silent soccer fields.

"Shmoop says it is," she says, having acquired the website's confirmation.

She has titled her essay, corrected the lowercase 'r' in 'report,' and I am remembering, because of the hoove-sounds, a Wikipedia page I came across last week which chronicled China's instillation of a brass bull, a sculpture birthed from the same set of hands, similar, though ruddier metal than that responsible for our Wall Street standard. I return to the page as she compares what small familiarity she has acquired with the story with the plot supplied her by Sparknotes.

The sculpture, which stands in Shanghai’s Bund Square, became so popular that guards and ropes were established at its perimeter to dissuade those who wished to touch the instillation. These efforts proved futile. “Eventually,” explains the report, “the cordoning was discontinued due to the strong public desire to be close to the bull,” and I think how the reporting seems, as reporting sometimes does, to mean a good deal more than is printed.

The sound of the hooves continues, but it is the weekend, and my yellow legal pad is upstairs on my desk, and I am tired at this point, as even the journalists with more retractable high school mile times must now be. Though I am certain that for much of the crowd “the fiesta was going on,” I find myself flipping to the place in the novel where Robert Cohn, a lanky, intellectual character who once 47

boxed at Princeton, a character whom the other characters vehemently dislike but who I find moral and so quite admire, retires himself from the buzz of the procession to a cool and dark hotel room.

The phrase “discontinued due to the strong public desire” hums in my head with the intensity the cognac must have hummed with Cohn as he laid on the cool low bed, nursing, or trying to nurse his mind in that room where the shades on the terrace were open to the street sounds below. The printer is also humming, and humming loud, but it is cool in the place Cohn retires. I stop to catch my breath.

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unlearning

by victoria hou, ​editor in chief

When I was in kindergarten I told a black girl in my class that one day somebody was going to come kill her. Her name was Betsy. She had neat little pigtails that were tied off with those cute pink plastic ball hair ties. I thought she was so stupid. Why is she crying doesn’t everybody know that black people get killed all the time. I didn’t know what the problem was.

“Baby girl, you can’t say those kind of things,” Momma sighed during dinner that night.

I didn’t know what the problem was. I thought everybody knew that black people got killed. “Daddy said black people are killers and killers should get killed.”

“Baby girl,” Momma said.

✷

When I was in second grade I didn’t really think that black people should get killed anymore because Betsy moved away and at that time I didn’t know any other blacks besides Betsy. When I was in second grade I learned about Harriet Tubman and how she was like Moses leading the Jewish slaves out of Egypt but Harriet was actually a lady and the slaves were actually black and Egypt was actually the South. When I was in second grade I learned that white people killed black people and although I didn’t really think black people should get killed I knew they did. When I was in second grade I learned history hated black people.

✷

When I was in fourth grade I learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and his speech. ​I have a dream let freedom ring free at last. ​I learned that he marched peacefully and I learned he was a good guy. A good guy who fought for freedom. A good guy who wasn’t a killer. A good guy who got shot in the head.

“Why’d he die,” a classmate asked. “Why’d they shoot him if he was good.”

“People didn’t agree with him,” Ms. Brown said. “They didn’t like him because of what he did.”

But I knew the truth. I knew people didn’t like him because he was black. Not because he marched for peace. I knew people didn’t like him because he was black because I knew other people don’t like other black people because they’re black. I knew black people got killed. When I was in fourth grade I learned that black people got killed not because they’re killers but because they were black.

✷

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When I was in sixth grade I took a social studies class about how our world came to be and our textbooks were filled with ​James Edward Mark. ​I looked around my classroom and saw that it was black brown yellow. I looked through the pages and saw that it was white white white.

“Where is everybody else,” I asked. “Why are we only learning about England France and Rome.”

“We are learning about world history,” Mr. Regan said patiently. “They are world leaders.”

“Where are China and Egypt,” I asked.

“They are not world leaders,” Mr. Regan said.

When I was in sixth grade I already knew that history hated black people but I didn’t learn until then that history belonged to white people. When I was in sixth grade I learned the the world belonged to white people too. When I was in sixth grade I realized the world was killing black people.

✷

When I was in eighth grade Trayvon Martin died.

✷

When I was in tenth grade I learned that Betsy died. I found out from Facebook. I learned she got hit by a stray bullet from a gunfight out in East Oakland. I didn’t go to her funeral because by the time I found out she was dead the funeral had happened two months before already on May 2nd.

Every year on May 2nd I think I am so stupid. Why did I tell Betsy someone was going to come kill her.

Betsy and her pink plastic hair ties and bright teeth. Betsy and her problem of the world being against her from the day she was born. Every year on May 2nd I hear my mother in the back of my mind sighing, “Baby girl,” and I think to myself, “Baby girl,” for Betsy. Baby girl. She was sixteen.

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