Io Y. Gilman ’25, Ciana J. King ’25, Sage S. Lattman ’25, John Lin ’25, Graham R. Weber ’25, Sam E. Weil ’25
Jem K. Williams ’25, Sazi T. Bongwe ’26, Ellie S. Klibaner-Schiff ’26, Adelaide E. Parker ’26,
Dina R. Zeldin ’25
FM DESIGN EDITORS
Julia N. Do ’25
Olivia W. Zheng ’27
Xinyi C. Zhang ’27
FM MULTIMEDIA EDITORS
Briana Howard Pagán ’26
Lotem L. Loeb ’27
COVER DESIGN
Xinyi C. Zhang ’27
PRESIDENT J.Sellers Hill ’25
MANAGING EDITOR
Miles J. Herszenhorn ’25
ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITORS
Claire Yuan ’25
Elias J. Schisgall ’25
Dear Reader,
In a blur of a few months, we have arrived at our last issue for this semester. Yet ironically, our pieces aren’t centered on closing doors. Instead, they’re focused on our theme this special issue: revival.
The ever-prolific JKW opens our issue with a piece on “Challenging the Right to Read,” an exhibit at the Harvard Law School about banned books. Through her visit to the exhibit and her conversation with the curators, she delves into discussions of free speech and book banning, a practice that has resurged in recent years. Next, in a funny yet profound introspection, AXN reflects on how shaving her head in high school taught her what attempts at starting anew are — and aren’t — about.
Coming out of FM retirement — a revival in itself! — BWF examines how Disney’s rendition of “Percy Jackson” does and doesn’t respond to the ways the original books are really a narrative of Western expansion. It is incisive and critical and will absolutely make your brain gain more wrinkles. Speaking of wrinkly brains, OGP talks to Zoë K. Hitzig ’15, an economist and poet, about her interests in algorithms, economics, and poetry. The conversation opens questions about what it means to broach the boundaries of a field while using its traditional modes of exploration.
Finally, writing from Rome but soon to return to FM (another revival!) MG blesses us with another yearly installment of her reflections on the past year. It is tender and genuine, a story of what it means not to grow from, but around, grief and its cold haze. Wrapping up our issue as always is one of our beloved creative writers EMK and her beautiful prose. This time, she reflects on translation, what is lost in it, what it means to be untranslatable, and what a name carries. Profound and poetic, this piece invites you to think about language and what it means to express the untranslatable — to revive it, perhaps — through one’s life.
Big thank yous are in order for this beautiful issue! Thank you SET, LJPE, XCZ, JND, and OWZ for another beautiful glossy! You never fail to amaze. Thank you LLL and BHP for the portraits you got for us this issue and for being proactive with checking on pieces. Thank you MJH, CY, and EJS for proofing despite delays and the boatload of news on your plate. Thank you IYG for taking in stride a piece we assigned to you last minute and for being the diligent and steadfast editor you are. Thank you AEP for so quickly churning out an awesome crossword. Thank you JL and YAK for the editing and emailing and planning help. And thank you HD for problem-solving and crisis-managing with me this issue (and every issue).
Sincerely Yours, HD & KT
RIGHT TO READ — “Do we, as a society, have an ethical obligation to create safe spaces and boundaries for particular groups of people?” asks Jocelyn Kennedy, one of the curators of the Harvard Law School library exhibit, “Challenging Our Right to Read.” SEE PAGE 4
BIG BANGS THEORY — As I felt pounds of my hair slide off my head, I cast my mind wildly for a positive spin on my new reality (Wigs? Homeschool? House arrest?). But I could latch on to only one thing: At least this would be the beginning of something new. SEE PAGE 8
ZOË HITZIG — Poet and an economist Zoë K. Hitzig ‘15 talks about algorithms, privacy, and the function of poetry. SEE PAGE 16
DEAR JUNIOR YEAR — It’s funny, the way these things go. One year I expect the best and get the worst, the next I expect the worst and get the best. SEE PAGE 18
PEOPLE’S VEGETABLE — I hesitate to call “Dictee” anything but an autobiography. It is nothing if not a lifetime condensed into pages, a reclamation of all that is lost in translation: wooden chopsticks clinking against metal forks, recipes with no measurements passed down through blurred Korean, a daughter failing to look up when called by a name that’s not in English. SEE PAGE 22
AMERICAN GODS — Percy Jackson tries to outrun the shadow of the country. SEE PAGE 12
Do We Have the Right to Read?
BY JEM K. WILLIAMS CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Let’s talk about sex — or at least its literary depiction.
From Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” to George Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” many books haven’t shied away from the topic. But as book bans have surged over the past few years, many people may have found these books pulled from the shelves of their local library for “obscene” content.
For centuries, the law has struggled to define obscenity, with most operational definitions focusing squarely on sex and sexuality. Under this umbrella, books dealing in these topics have often found themselves being “challenged.” At the Harvard Law School library’s latest exhibit, “Challenging Our Right to Read,” those books, formerly resigned to the shadows, are once again on display — right beside the objections raised against them.
The exhibit traces the history of censorship in the U.S. back to 1637, when Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan” became the country’s first banned book due to its critique of Puritanism. The exhibit then moves into the display of a text by Black abolitionist David Walker, which was prohibited by Southern antebellum state governments at the time of its production. But the centerpiece of the exhibit’s historical side is an exploration of early American censorship through the history of the 1873 Comstock Act and its namesake, Anthony Comstock.
Comstock, a fervent “anti-vice and anti-obscenity” activist, started his censorious campaign with the postal service. Once his act was passed, Comstock reigned over the Post Office, enforcing penalties for the distribution of any information pertaining to sex, birth control, or abortion. His crusade against obscenity was motivated by the belief
that exposure to certain information could break down fundamental moral values, particularly in children.
Comstock was not a fringe figure. His organization, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was supported by wealthy donors in New York City, and the Comstock Act passed with no dissent. According to the exhibit, subsequent legislation largely “removed the teeth from Comstock’s Law,” but mailing “obscene” material is still technically illegal.
Continuing past the 1800s, the focus of the display cases shifts from government-sponsored censorship to private censorship, centering books that have been removed from library and classroom shelves in recent years.
“They have a right, in some respects, to come in and say ‘I’m concerned about this book.’ So you have to have an organized system to address that.”
— Lesliediana Jones
Touching for a moment on the 1982 landmark case in the history of book removals, one of the display cases contains a caption summarizing Island Trees School District v. Pico. The case found that book bans in schools violate students’ First Amendment rights when they are conducted in a “narrowly partisan or political manner.” But this decision was far from the end of the story.
Censorship is harder to define when it occurs within private institutions,
which have different guidelines and imperatives when it comes to choosing what does and doesn’t get distributed through them. That’s where challenges come into the picture.
Challenges against books are often levied in schools or public libraries.
Someone, often a concerned parent, comes in and expresses discomfort at a certain book — or sometimes multiple books — on the shelves. Libraries have a system in place for this very scenario. They ask the person to fill out paperwork, formally challenging the book, and the challenge is evaluated by the library’s staff to determine whether the book will be pulled from circulation.
Not all challenges result in a ban. The forum can, at times, even open up room for a conversation between concerned parents and libraries wherein the parent comes to an understanding and rescinds their challenge before formally filing the paperwork.
“The public has a right to come in. It’s a public library. They have a right, in some respects, to come in and say ‘I’m concerned about this book,’” says Lesliediana Jones, one of the curators for “Challenging Our Right to Read.”
“So you have to have an organized system to address that.”
Jones tells me all libraries have a “collection development policy.” It’s impossible for any individual library to house all the books in the world, so they have to make choices about what they have on their shelves. Libraries often take the communities they are located in into consideration during this process — which can lead to literary omissions, not out of malice, but out of practicality.
“Let’s say it was an elementary school. An elementary school is not going to have certain books that are at the level of high school or above, or on certain topics,” Jones says. “And that
speaks to the professionalism of the librarian, and the staff.”
It’s about having a set of guidelines to inform decisions about book removals rather than an “ad-hoc” method that might be more prone to manipulation.
“Are there going to be books that they’re just going to pull simply because a couple of members of the community have said they’re concerned about those books being there? Yes, that’s going to happen. Might you call that censorship? Yes, you could call it that,” Jones says. “But it’s a reality that we know is going to happen. That’s why we encourage libraries to have policies in place so that you aren’t doing things as a knee jerk reaction for fear of retaliation.”
But there’s a wide gap between community-conscious curation and government-enforced censorship.
According to Jones, the removal of books from libraries does not rise to the level of a “free speech issue.”
However, that doesn’t mean book bans are harmless.
“That’s not a First Amendment issue because the First Amendment only protects you from government censorship,” says Jocelyn Kennedy, the exhibit’s other curator.
Kennedy says of libraries, “They’re private actors, so they should be able to do whatever they want to do. However, I think there’s an argument that they have a cultural and societal obligation to behave in certain ways.”
It raises an interesting question for Kennedy. “Do we, as a society, have an ethical obligation to create safe spaces and boundaries for particular groups of people?” she asks. She compares this responsibility with the rating systems found in comic books, music, and movies designed to keep explicit material out of the hands of children.
(Kennedy notes this model of parentled content regulation might not even be sustainable in the age of the
internet.)
Not all forms of censorship censor the material in totality. A book being unavailable at one library doesn’t mean it’s not available everywhere.
There are even times when censorship may be deemed necessary. National security information is often redacted from letters that soldiers send home. There’s self-censorship, whereby an individual makes a choice about the kind of information they want to engage with and what they say. Even social media platforms have debated whether forms of content moderation should be considered censorship.
But regardless of the question of societal obligation, it is evident
“Do we, as a socieety, have an ethical obligation to create safe spaces and boundaries for particular groups of people?” — Jocelyn Kennedy
that these efforts at moderation and curation are coming, oftentimes, from private actors with concerns about the wellbeing of the community. Should this private impetus change the way we view the issue?
The American Library Association, which has been tracking book bans since 1982, reports that 2023 saw a surge in book bans compared to the previous year (during which they also reported “record” numbers in comparison to 2021). A total of 4,240 books were targeted by censorship attempts.
Kennedy witnessed a book ban herself at a young age. One Friday when she was in the 10th grade, an ambitious English teacher of hers distributed the book “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker to the class.
Kennedy was enamored instantly with the text, finishing it over the weekend. But upon returning to school, the teacher promptly collected all the books. Due to a parent’s complaint, she removed “The Color Purple” from the class’ syllabus.
“The Color Purple” has been challenged a significant number of times throughout history. One year after winning the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, its inclusion in syllabi was challenged at the Board of Education in Oakland, California for its sexually explicit content and blunt depiction of race relations.
“Part of human nature is to suppress and censor the things that we don’t agree with and the things that make us uncomfortable,” Kennedy says.
This encounter with book challenges sparked her interest in the First Amendment and free expression. She went on to study these topics in law school and eventually became a librarian — a position she describes as being “at the frontline of putting information into people’s hands.”
Kennedy saw the importance of free access to banned books and decided to participate in Banned Books Weeks, a celebration that serves as part of a national awareness campaign, at the libraries where she has worked.
But restrictions on the type of media available to children aren’t limited to book bans. There are age ratings on films and explicit content stickers on albums. What makes these restrictions acceptable, while book banning is deemed dangerous?
According to Jones, explicit content labels on books are exactly what some people want. There was even a bill proposed in Texas, House Bill 900, that
would have mandated just that. And a new law proposed in West Virginia is attempting to make it a criminally punishable offense for a librarian to check out explicit content to a minor.
“There are people who call themselves First Amendment auditors who are going into public libraries and looking around to see if libraries are violating people’s First Amendment rights,” Kennedy explains. She says these “auditors” will walk around the library and try to catch patrons
“A lot of my colleagues are afraid. They’re afraid, and they’re tired, because we have to be hypervigilant.”
— Jocelyn Kennedy
utilizing the facilities to view explicit content, such as pornography.
“They’re really trying to catch libraries in positions,” Kennedy lot of my colleagues They’re afraid, and tired, because we have to be hyper vigilant.”
The legislative push criminalize the accessibility of explicit content to minors becomes even more treacherous in light of how malleable the definition of obscenity remains. The lack of terminological clarity has been used to further the same political ends the decision in Island School District v. Pico tried to prevent. This is evident in
the thematic patterns of frequently targeted books.
“There are 13 books what they call the top 10 challenged book list — but there’s actually 13 because some of them have tied. But of those, seven of them have LGBTQ plus content and themes,” Jones says, referring to the list from 2022.
Books bans are taking on a distinctly political tone. According to Jones, individuals, backed by organizations, have at times entered libraries and challenged hundreds of books in a coordinated attempt to systematically undermine books with politicallycharged themes. And it’s easier than
“These book challenges and book bans have helped fuel political careers,” Jones tells me.
She adds that it’s not just books with LGBTQ+ content that are frequently challenged. Books on critical race theory are also disproportionately likely to end up on the list of challenged books, too — all under the guise of “protecting children.”
But denying people of marginalized identities access to literature that reflects their experience changes the scope of the issue.
“What’s happening right now is very much a civil rights issue, and a civil liberties issue, more than a
The Big Bangs
PAGE DESIGNED BY OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
Bangs Theory
BY ANGELINA X. NG CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
One Saturday in ninth grade, I sat on the stage of a shopping mall in Singapore as a man I didn’t know stood behind me — electric razor buzzing — ready to shave all my hair off. In front of me, a motley assortment of friends, family, and strangers cheered, their phones clicking away. I kept a smile plastered on my face, even though I was quickly realizing what a colossal mistake I had made.
One month before, a friend said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we all did Hair for Hope?” She was referring to the annual fundraiser hosted by the Children’s Cancer Foundation, which involved participants shaving their heads to raise awareness for childhood cancer. Laughing, I’d agreed. Wouldn’t it be meaningful, raising money for a good cause? And wouldn’t it be a laugh, doing something memorable with all my best friends?
No, it really wasn’t a laugh, I realized as the razor sounded dangerously close to my head. I would soon be painfully familiar with the fact that human hair grows just half an inch every month, no matter how much tugging or rosemary oil one massages into their head; the fact that I relied heavily on my hair to conceal
Homeschool? House arrest?). But I could latch on to only one thing: At least this would be the beginning of something new. ***
Reinvention’s becoming a corporate term now — a quick Google search brings up buzzwords like “growth model,” “technological disruption,” and “business trends.” Like most business buzzwords, they’re devoid of any actual technical meaning, but that desire to change it up feels indicative
“I was very much the same person, but with slightly cuter shelves”
— Angelina X. Ng ’26
of a larger societal impulse for a clean slate.
I’m skeptical of how useful these reinventions actually are. They feel like PR gimmicks, creating nothing more than a more marketable, more appealing facade. Yet I wasn’t immune to the allure of it either. “This is the week,” I swore to friends on weekends, “that I’m getting my shit together and
stemmed from a desire to fix some issue I’d identified in myself. The inability to care for myself, for instance, or feeling shitty about my exercising habits, or my general disorganization. But the consequent changes I made — a new running routine, or new skincare products, or increasingly complicated ways of arranging the various knickknacks on my desk — didn’t manifest in a brand new identity any more than they manifested in new ways of hiding what I didn’t like about myself.
I treated myself as a palimpsest, plastering over the things that I didn’t like with a shiny new bumper sticker. Meanwhile, all my existing tendencies accumulated below the surface, hidden under layers and layers of superficially built habits and artificial declarations of becoming a new person.
A friend recently taught me about the Big Bang Theory’s counterpart, the Big Crunch, which is the idea that the Universe could eventually collapse just as quickly as it was formed. I’m not a science person, but the notion that everything that we create can be destroyed in less than a second made sense. All my reinventions tended to collapse within days of being instituted, because — as I was well aware — I was very much the same person, but with slightly cuter shelves.
Maybe that was why shaving my head was so crazy, because it meant,
“When it came down to it, what I really loved about the idea of a reinvention was the notion that I could turn my whole life around.” — Angelina X. Ng ’26
the pimples on my forehead; and the fact that some people could pull off a bald head, but I, alas, could not count myself among the blessed few.
As I felt pounds of my hair slide off my head, I cast my mind wildly for a positive spin on my new reality (Wigs?
cleaning my room.” Then I would go home, do my laundry, make a Spotify playlist, and then lie on my newlymade bed for three hours to read a book, foolishly proud of the new me that I had just invented.
Most of my frantic reinventions
OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
literally and figuratively, that I had nothing to hide behind. You can’t cut bangs when your hair is gone. There was nothing I could change about my appearance to rectify the situation. For the first time, I had to face the world un-reinvented, bumper stickers
“For once, I had nothing that I could hide behind — and nothing, fundamentally, had changed.”
— Angelina X. Ng ’26
peeling slightly for everyone to see.
Two days after The Event, I had an ultimate frisbee tournament. On the train I found myself tucking phantom strands behind my ear, grasping at nothing. A woman offered her seat up to me, and I felt too embarrassed to decline.
I loved my teammates, who were friends that I’d known since elementary school, but we shared a brutal honesty born from years of insulting each other. As I walked across the field, my flip-flops crunching the wet grass, I doubted whether I could trust them with this — if these people whom I’d known longer than I didn’t would understand how vulnerable I felt. Goosebumps pricked my skin as I approached.
“Nice head shape,” someone said. Everyone laughed, and then we moved on, as if nothing happened, as if I was the same person I always had been. And I guess I was, but it felt like a miracle that that was true.
When it came down to it, what I really loved about the idea of a reinvention was the notion that I could turn my whole life around. Don’t we all think that? That there is just one thing that’s been holding us back, and that making this tiny change will fix everything else that’s going wrong in our lives?
Shaving my head was the first time I realized that the reverse was true. For once, I had nothing that I could hide behind — and nothing, fundamentally, had changed. The bumper stickers — those tiny attempts at reinvention —
weren’t actually what was holding me together. The very thing I was trying to re-invent, after all, was my self.
In the coming months, my hair began to grow out. First, a soft fuzz covering my head, the length where I would debate whether to use shampoo or soap. The worst period, I came to realize, wasn’t being bald, but rather the months following it: too short to properly style, but long enough to
“For the first time, I had to face the world un-reinvented”
— Angelina X. Ng ’26
unattractively stick out in multiple directions.
Others agreed. “I’ll never shave my head,” a friend said to me. “It’s not even about being bald, but how bad it looks when it’s growing out.” As she talked, I stared at her, my hair standing up on end.
But I let it slide, like how I learned to let so many comments slide. I had to, for the sake of self-preservation, because not every encounter was as happy as the one with my frisbee team.
On vacation with my parents and sister, we were seated for dinner with an older couple we had never met. “What a beautiful family,” the woman cooed. “So perfect, having a girl and a boy!” I laughed, because the alternative was
to get upset and scream.
Sometimes, though, I loved being bald. I had made my peace with being imperfect, rather than burying myself in an avalanche of reinventions. Each little lifestyle switch I made, I began to understand, didn’t have to signify some bigger cosmic change. And in a way, that realization was freeing.
My hair took two years to hit my shoulders, and when it finally did, I took to cutting my own bangs, whenever I felt like it. I would try to emulate whatever hairdressers do, angling the scissors vertically to layer, or pinching my hair between two fingers like chopsticks, but I suspect that the method had little bearing on the result.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. My hair is no longer a symbol of some seismic shift in my character or personality — it’s just something that I alter out of curiosity, or even boredom. Because I am not the Universe, and this isn’t the Big Bang Theory. I wouldn’t become a new person, for better or for worse, the instant I cut curtain bangs.
Recently, I’ve made another bad hair decision. Emerging from a shower, I stared in the mirror, took a pair of Fiskars scissors, and cut my bangs again. I didn’t realize my error until I woke up the next morning, hair dry, and stared into the mirror again. My new bangs covered only half my forehead. I looked like Daphne in Bridgerton, except without the fancy gowns and demeanor to pull it off.
But it was all right. I was calm, even as I texted a friend a picture accompanied by a text in all caps: “SEND HELP I MADE A MISTAKE.”
Because, as she replied: “It’ll grow back.” And she’s right. It always does.
OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
American Gods
BY BEA WALL-FENG CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
In Disney’s version of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” the Empire State Building is the tallest building in New York. This is no longer true in real life — the Twin Towers were taller until September 2001, and One World Trade Center inherited the distinction a decade later — but it’s true in this show, or has to be, because that’s where the gods live.
In fact, all of Mount Olympus has relocated to the (fictional) 600th floor of the Empire State Building. This is the central conceit of the show, which is based on Rick Riordan’s immortal children’s book series of the same name. The first season adapts the first book, “The Lightning Thief,” which was published at the height of the Bush era. Percy Jackson is a troubled 12-yearold living in New York City. When one of his teachers turns out to be a monster and tries to kill him, Percy discovers that he’s a demigod: the son of a Greek god and a human. Percy flees to Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp on Long Island where demigods are protected from monsters.
Right before he gets there, his mom, Sally, is killed by the Minotaur, and he spends the rest of the book trying to get her back from the realm of the dead.
At camp, Percy’s father is revealed to be Poseidon, god of the sea.
This gives Percy incredible powers, primarily the ability to control and breathe under water; it also makes him a person of interest when Zeus’s master lightning bolt goes mysteriously missing. He teams up with his friend Grover (a satyr) and maybe-crush Annabeth (a demigod daughter of Athena) to go to Los Angeles, where Hades lives. The gods tell our heroes that in the Underworld, they can recover Zeus’s lightning bolt and bring back Percy’s mother. So they embark on
a cross-country quest, meeting gods and fighting monsters, trying to unravel the mystery of who is behind all this.
Whether the show is good is beside the point. “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is part of a slate of recent revivals — see Netflix’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender” or Max’s upcoming “Harry Potter” — aiming to upcycle Gen Z nostalgia into high-budget television. They do not have to be good, only faithful to their source material. Like many adaptations, Disney’s “Percy Jackson” knows what the books did but not always why they did it. As a result, Percy’s quest is a sequence of places and encounters strung together less by logic than vibes. Even this may not be a problem, since what is nostalgia except vibes? A better question is what, exactly, it is that the show is missing.
Most of the series’s enduring fandom revolves around Camp Half-Blood. Wouldn’t it be cool to have superpowers and hang out with your demigod friends at summer camp forever? This focus obscures the fact that “The Lightning Thief” fundamentally belongs to the genre of the American road trip novel. Percy and his friends do not just happen to live here; the United States is the beating heart of their journey. Their progress is measured by the landmarks they reach, from the St. Louis Arch to the Las Vegas Strip to the Santa Monica Pier. The books’ signature sense of humor comes mostly from the juxtaposition of mythic Greece and mythic America: Hermes owns an iPod, Medusa owns a burger joint, Hephaestus built Water World. In fact, most of the major players in U.S. history are revealed to have been demigods. George Washington was a son of Athena. Harriet Tubman was a daughter of Hermes.
All of this raises the question: Why are the Greek gods the ones pulling the
strings here, anyway? Why not any of the gods Americans believe in today, or any of the gods Americans have ever believed in? In Riordan’s book, Percy asks this of the centaur Chiron, who runs Camp HalfBlood. “Come now, Percy,” Chiron replies. “What you call ‘Western civilization.’ Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force.” The West began in Greece, then moved to Rome, Western Europe, and the United States. America, the centaur continues, “is the heart of the flame.”
Wait, what? This argument would have been easy to make in 2005, as U.S. media closed ranks around not one but two imperial wars — in fact, it probably didn’t even register as an argument. If someone came to you now and claimed that America was the direct inheritor of Greco-Roman “Western civilization,” though, you’d be forgiven for thinking they might be a little fash. Indeed, when you return to the source material, all sorts of nasty things crawl out of the woodwork. Someone who read “Percy Jackson” a decade ago might not remember that Hitler is implied to have been a son of Hades, or that the American Civil War was canonically fought between Greek and Roman demigods — the Union and Confederacy, respectively — over what amounted to a family rivalry.
Well, that’s what happens when you get too close to history, and wisely, the show doesn’t even try. Disney refuses to explain exactly what it is the Greek gods are doing here. This is a difficult position, since it strips the story of its fundamental momentum. But it is also an opportunity: Severed from the yoke of historical imperative, the showrunners have the chance to make something new.
The first glimpse of what a different “Percy Jackson” could look like comes in the third episode, when our heroes are being chased by a Fury through the New Jersey woods. They stumble upon Aunty Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium, a burger joint with a lot of scared-looking statues in the yard. Unlike in the book, Annabeth recognizes immediately that “Aunty Em” is really Medusa, and instead of trying to trick them, Medusa invites them in for lunch. “Percy, don’t,” Annabeth warns him. “She’s
a monster.” “We all choose who we make our monsters,” Medusa responds. What she means, literally, is that she was once a human woman. In the myths, Poseidon rapes Medusa in Athena’s temple, and Athena punishes her for it by turning her into a Gorgon. While the book ignores the specter of rape entirely — there, Medusa refers to Poseidon as her “boyfriend” and Athena as merely “jealous” — the show comes as close as it can to saying it outright. Medusa calls herself a survivor. She tells Percy that she and his mother were “targeted by the same monster”: Percy’s father, Poseidon. Over lunch, she tries to convince Percy and Annnabeth, the children of her two worst enemies, to disavow the gods. They can save Percy’s mom without running errands for Olympus in the process. In any case, what
Who can be saved? With what tools are they permitted to save themselves?
have the gods done for them?
Her suggestion is persuasive because it is nakedly true. The gods are spiteful and reckless. They kill with impunity, abandon their children, and turn sibling rivalries into intercontinental war; it’s hard to argue that any of this makes them better than monsters. Reckoning with this dissonance is a way to reach a fanbase that has largely grown up, and at first, it seems like the show is really going to try. In one of the very first scenes, Percy remembers his mom taking him to the Museum of Modern Art’s Ancient Greece exhibit years ago. Gazing at a statue of the ancient hero Perseus — Percy’s namesake — beheading Medusa, Sally tells him: “Not everyone who looks like a hero is a hero, and not everyone who looks like a monster is a monster.”
Medusa’s arc is clumsily written and, more to the point, extremely dumb. It’s not quite that she looks like a monster but isn’t — it’s that she doesn’t seem like a monster but is. At least, she dies like one. This version of Medusa gets to be beautiful, sympathetic, and visibly traumatized; none of that stops her from being decapitated by our heroes, or even, the show would suggest, from deserving it.
“Percy Jackson” is at its best when its protagonists learn that they can reject the terms of the world they’ve inherited. In the final book, Percy defeats the titan Kronos and is rewarded by Olympus with the chance to be turned into a god. But Percy refuses. Instead of helping me out more, he says, stop treating your other kids like shit. Identify yourself as their parents and give them a home instead of leaving them to be eaten by harpies and hellhounds. Zeus concedes, and when we return to Camp Half-Blood in the sequel series, it’s bursting with new cabins dedicated to minor gods and their previously unrecognized children. Percy’s is a selfless act, and an instructive one: It demonstrates for us that you don’t have to be a god to reshape the world. So I am arguing that Medusa should be saved. But I am also arguing that she should be able to save herself. ***
Saved from what? It depends on the direction you look. In the book “Facing East from Indian Country,” the historian Daniel K. Richter makes this argument by way of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The Arch opened in 1967 as a monument to U.S. expansion — the gateway in question leads to the West. But Richter identifies a flaw in its design. It is meant to be viewed “facing west, from the Illinois side of the river. But unless they can walk on water, all who actually visit must approach it the way I looked through it, facing east.” This reorientation lets us see a different America, one whose Native
Indeed, the showrunners and writers — as well as Jessica Parker Kennedy, who plays Medusa — have framed her portrayal as a correction to the record. Medusa is not evil but damaged, struggling to move through a world that has sent dudes named Perseus to kill her for thousands of years. This is necessary, even compelling material. But after a few minutes the showrunners give up and revert to the original plan: Turns out, Medusa is just evil. When she cannot convince Percy to turn on his friends, she attacks him, and the three of them kill her, keeping her severed head for later.
inhabitants discovered Europe when its strange, barbarian people fled to their shores in search of salvation. Unfortunately for Richter, though, we do know someone who can walk on water.
The son of the Sea God arrives at the Gateway Arch on the run. Echidna, the Mother of Monsters, has chased him and his friends there from the train they were on. It turns out the Arch is a monument to Annabeth’s mother, so our heroes take cover in the visitor center. “This is how you show Athena your love,” Annabeth says, enraptured. “A monument to the power of perfection.”
“It’s a monument to some other stuff too,” Grover mutters, looking at the rows of buffalo skulls mounted in the exhibit.
The camera lingers awkwardly on a huge painting of European settlers slaughtering buffalo herds, next to a plaque that reads MANIFEST DESTINY.
This exchange is jarring, a tonal shift that’s absent from the book; the writers failed to plan ahead. In Riordan’s novel, the Arch has no mythic significance.
Annabeth wants to check it out because she’s an architecture nerd, and Percy is ambushed by Echidna at the top when his friends take a different elevator down. In the Disney version, they’re already running from Echidna, so the show jumps through a series of hoops in order to allow the Arch fight to happen. Now the structure is sacred to Athena, so our heroes flee there; on the elevator up, Annabeth remembers that Athena is mad at her and probably won’t protect them after all; as Annabeth and Grover go back down, Echidna confronts Percy at the top; she burns a hole through the floor and forces him to jump out of it, rendering the whole excursion pointless. Having contorted the plot thusly, the show now has to explain why the Gateway Arch — a monument to westward expansion — is also a monument to Athena.
“You’re talking about what some humans want this place to be about,” Annabeth tells Grover. “I’m talking about what it actually is.” This distinction sounds nice and means nothing. What is a place about, if not what someone believes it to be? Whatever. Percy explains to Annabeth that as a satyr, Grover just “doesn’t like it when people mess with animals.”
Well, what about messing with people?
Strangely, the show offers us the painting and the buffalo skulls but makes no effort to contextualize them. After the Civil War, the triumphant Union Army hunted the American bison to the brink of extinction. They did this not to mess with animals in an abstract sense but as part of the larger project of Native genocide, in an attempt to annihilate Plains Indians’ food source and economy. But this would be a hard detail to include in a version of history whose Union Army was led by demigods from Camp Half-Blood. Better not to ask which side of the Indian Wars the gods of Western civilization stood on. This puts the writers in the unenviable position of having to justify U.S. history without being able to describe it, since description would reveal some things as unjustifiable.
The Gateway Arch is a useful example not because it is exceptional but because it is everywhere, once you look. Like the guys in the painting, Percy is moving across America by divine mandate: The prophecy he receives in Camp Half-Blood foretelling his quest literally begins with the line, “You shall go West.” The show’s set design often feels lonely, drifting between CGI landscapes that are dimly lit and sparsely populated. As the demigods get closer to Los Angeles, they get farther from civilization, hitchhiking from an abandoned water park to a liminal casino to the underworld. Even Hades’s realm does not look like conventional depictions of Hell but rather like the vast, open desert. I do not mean to suggest that anyone involved with “Percy Jackson” meant to tell a story about the frontier. But they wanted to tell a story about America. Some stains, Medusa would tell them, are hard to wash out.
For all its talk of good and evil, the book’s most convincing moral argument comes after the quest is over and Zeus’s lightning bolt has been returned. Percy goes home to Manhattan and tries to explain where he’s been to his furious stepfather Gabe. When his mom tries to defend him, Percy realizes from her body language that Gabe has been beating her: Turns out there’s still one monster left to deal with. Sally pulls Percy into his room and he hands her Medusa’s severed head. Weeks later at camp, she
sends him a letter. Gabe has mysteriously vanished, his mother writes, and as it happens, she just sold a life-size statue of him to an art collector.
Percy’s stepfather is a cartoon villain: coarse, ugly, and smelly. That he meets a similarly cartoonish end does a good job of hiding that we have just read a story about a woman killing her abuser and getting away with it. Not only that, we have read a story about a woman who does so by literally wielding the body of another survivor. It’s the darkest, most revelatory moment in the book — hard to believe it could have been smuggled into a work for children, unless you are willing to give children more credit than many people do. Disney certainly isn’t. The show’s Gabe is annoying but not explicitly abusive, and he is spared the indignity of dying by his wife’s hand. Instead, he opens the box with Medusa’s head in it out of nosiness, is turned to stone by mistake, and that’s the end of that.
To put it gently, this is a baffling change. Sally has been an object for the entire season, suspended in golden light by Hades at the moment she is killed by the Minotaur. Now that she has been liberated, why not have her act on it? Well, as she told her son, not everyone who looks like a hero gets to be one; anyway, Medusa was a survivor too. Of course, Medusa drew this comparison explicitly, but the pilot episode makes it as well. We see the two women for the first time together, when a shot of the statue of Medusa’s severed head in the MoMA cuts to a shot of Sally from the shoulders down, headless. If one of them gets free, the camera seems to suggest, so should the other. Or so should we all.
The questions the show wants to ask about who is or is not a monster poke at a deeper, fundamentally American concern. Who can be saved? With what tools are they permitted to save themselves? By design, these questions have no answers, which is to say that “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” cannot risk real vengeance. Too much is at stake: the fans, the shareholders, the past, the country. But it is still worth considering what form such a risk would take. It might look like Echidna burning a hole in the Gateway Arch, or Medusa cultivating her garden of statues. Viewed another way, it might look like freedom.
Zoë Hitzig, Poet-Economist
OLIVIA
Iarrive at my interview with Zoë K. Hitzig ’15 prepared to audition for the role of “person capable of thinking anything worthy of being processed by Hitzig’s incomprehensibly large brain.”
Much like a large language model, the Hitzig available by Google search is
so prolifically published that she seems capable of writing something about anything, almost instantaneously. Her poetry has been published in the likes of the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the Harvard Advocate, and she also serves as the poetry editor of the Drift. “Not Us Now,” her technodystopic, second collection of poems set to be released in June, was awarded the final Changes Book Prize judged by the late
Louise Glück.
I also learned from her personal website that Hitzig, a former Crimson Arts editor, happens to be a professional economist with special interest in privacy and algorithms. Her research papers bear titles like “Opaque Mechanisms” and “Contextual Confidence and Generative AI” that are as poetic as they are cryptic. Hitzig, who completed her economics Ph.D. at Harvard in 2023, is a Junior Fellow with the
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BY EMMA A. LUCAS — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
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PHOTO
BY
G. PASQUERELLA CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Harvard Society of Fellows, which supports the studies of 36 early-career academics. Fellows, the Society’s website reads, “should be of the highest calibre of intellectual achievement.”
And so, I knock on the door of the part shed, part whimsical cottage owned by the Society. I am underread in the many forms of Hitzig’s work and already overly impressed.
The Hitzig who greets me at the door does not fit my formula for frigid academic. She’s just chill in a regular way. Before I know it, I have a blackcurrant tea in my hands, Hitzig is regaling me with her battle against an eightperson athlete blocking group for the Quincy Belltower Suite, and I am taking in the cut-out photo of a ripped Carmy from “The Bear” above the room’s printer.
With a sprinkle of vocal fry and a smattering of cool rings, Hitzig’s presence makes the word “vibe” almost reenter my vocabulary before I — so literary, I am — boot it for the cliche. And Hitzig is perceptive to cliche.
“I have started to become a little bit annoyed about people being shocked that I do these two things,” Hitzig says when asked if she feels that economics and poetry occupy separate sides of her brain. “That’s just not that different from anyone else. Everyone’s code switching all the time. Everyone has many talents.”
“There’s this guy in the Society of Fellows who’s a math professor who was in the NFL. I’m like, okay, now we’re talking,” she adds.
Hitzig’s poetry and economics often explore similar themes. In her economics, Hitzig worries “that people don’t fully have the tools to understand what’s happening in the information sphere and how it has massive effects on them.” For example, in a 2020 paper, she analyzed Boston’s school choice algorithms to argue that normative choices are embedded into algorithms employed by policymakers and the way the public interacts with them. In her poetry, especially “Not Us Now,” Hitzig is also concerned about algorithms, imagining a future where they dictate human narratives to the highest degree.
But when I ask her how her interest in privacy influences both her economics research and her poetry — if the cryptic and even withholding
nature of poetry is itself an expression of privacy — she buffers momentarily.
“I’d never thought about it that way,” she says. “But I do think that — this is a leap — yeah, well, you’re very smart.”
Well, shit. Now I’m a pseudointellectual tryhard. But for as much as Hitzig prefaces that her brain hasn’t woken up yet, her responses to my questions — and her understanding of her form — seem consistently calculated.
“I don’t necessarily see it as hiding meaning. I don’t think that what poets are doing is saying, like, ‘Oh, I have this precisely articulated feeling, but I don’t want to say it so clearly, so I’m going to give you a poem,’” she says. “What poetry is, is, ‘I have this feeling that’s so hard to describe, but it’s real.’”
The problem for the poet, however, is to translate the hard-to-speak parts of inner life to those who stand outside it. At least on the surface, Hitzig’s work can seem inaccessible, even disinterested in relating the inner privacy of its language to an outer audience.
The publisher’s description of “Not Us Now,” for example, calls it “vertiginous,” but the description itself only gave me vertigo from an assortment of buzzwords so frenzied that I wondered if they were detailing a collection of poems or a fun-house mirror impression of the humanities.
“Hitzig delivers an astonishing act of ventriloquy in reverse” voiced not by “a singular, lyric ‘I’” but “a consciousness that seems to have amassed itself out of the detritus of human life,” the description reads.
Hitzig tries to decode her vision for me in our conversation. She likes to think about her new collection as “reporting the results of an imagined excavation” of “a few little artifacts from an imagined world that looks like our world, but it’s not quite our world.”
“I want it to feel like someone just found it,” Hitzig says.
The “scraps” that compose the collection are not told from Hitzig’s voice — she didn’t even want her name to appear on the front cover for that reason — but from the perspective of algorithms.
The “Greedy Algorithm” seems to binarily blame its human creators for its existence —
“Is this or is this not/what you tasked me with” — while “Zero-Regret Algorithm” marches on, either helpless to the consequences of its programming or uncaring – “full of rage and rope I am not us yet but/soon there will be no place left to go.” The central poem of the collection, also called “Not Us Now,” is a pageslong explication of the apocalypse told through the perspective of variables p̄, ŝ, z*, and more.
Like the most advanced algorithms, Hitzig’s style can feel encrypted and obfuscated. This is a feature and not a bug.
“There is a kind of encryption that is happening in the poem. But I don’t think that it’s an encryption that’s aiming to hide something that exists. It’s an encryption that’s making something new possible,” she says.
Academia itself speaks in self-encrypted language. Hitzig’s background is in economic theory, which she likens to “a little tiny toy sandbox,” a field that is both “very constrained” by its language and enabled by it. But whether the discipline of economics is invested in improving the reality outside the sandbox — or if the sandbox is forever assimilating the conditions of people’s lives as data to power publications — is not a question Hitzig answers.
Across mediums, Hitzig is primarily interested in new possibilities. At the risk of sounding like “one of my undergrads,” she divulges her classically Gen Z niche microinterest: Allende’s experimentation with a cybernetic economy as a possible response to the socialist calculation problem. Socially, she wants to surround herself with “people who have a positive vision and a commitment to experimentation that can lead to better ways of organizing ourselves.”
Underneath prose that can sometimes feel password-protected, the core of Hitzig’s work is hopeful experimentation for our collective future.
“I do prefer things that have a positive vision,” Hitzig says about “Not Us Now,” rejecting my characterization of it as simply dystopian.
“I think it can be too easy to be dystopian,” she adds, explaining that she hopes that even if readers find the poems grim, it will make them realize everything we have to lose — “beauty and hope and play.”
18 | PAGE DESIGNED BY OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
Dear Junior Year
BY MICHAL GOLDSTEIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Dear Junior Year, I didn’t want summer to end. The season away from school returned the color to my face for the first time after a seven-month winter. Your invitation back to campus in August felt like a punishment.
I’ve never been as nervous to meet anyone as I was to meet you. Sophomore year, tainted with grief and loss, threw me to the wayside. I didn’t want to go back there. I couldn’t go back there. But that’s what you asked of me — to live in the same house where I’d been the worst of myself, to walk in a straight line through the place I’d received my worst news, to return to Mass Ave. and the Charles and the Yard like they held only good memories.
And then you surprised me.
It’s funny, the way these things go. One year I expect the best and get the worst, the next I expect the worst and get the best. Of course, you didn’t seem like “the best” as your first semester was unfolding. The greatest moments don’t always present themselves so clearly. Because it wasn’t magic or euphoria that you had, but ease.
sense to me.
My grief didn’t shrink — I don’t know that it ever will — but my heart expanded.
“It wasn’t magic or euphoria that you had, but ease.”
— Michal Goldstein ’25
I committed myself to this new life I was living, my life after loss. I committed to finding joy in it and to fighting for better.
settled, even amid the waves of emotion that absence always brings.
Then, of course, just as I had finally gotten accustomed to you, I had to bid my goodbyes for the rest of the year.
My plan to study abroad had been in the works for a long time. I had made my decision in September before I’d realized how comfortable you could make me feel. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve made a different choice about you had my deadlines been delayed. Part of me is glad I’ll never know.
“My grief didn’t shrink — I don’t know that it ever will — but my heart expanded.”
Freshman fall was a whole new world, sophomore fall was tumultuous, and yours was just… there. Simple and calm. Totally my own. I knew who I was, I knew who my friends were, I knew campus, I knew, for the most part, how to “do” college in some way that made
You came with me. You joined me as I ran and walked and fundraised for mental health care. You dressed me in blue shirts, his color, and adorned me with purple beads, my color, the color of those who have lost a friend to suicide. I wore my grief on my body, unashamed. I spoke openly of my loss. I shared stories I loved about our friendship. It kept him alive, to me. Maybe it would keep others alive, too.
You were comforting. You didn’t give too much or too little. I felt strangely
Naturally, your second half was entirely different from your first. In January, I landed in Rome with a singular familiar face, approximately two memorized words (“grazie” and “ciao”), and four months to go. I’m not opposed to change — I typically jump at it — and at times I worry that this is a flaw I’ve falsely interpreted as a strength. Like I’ll never let myself stay comfortable, never let myself relax into a place I know. I catastrophized about this fact I’d come to recognize in myself, spiraled about its implications. I had, for some reason, chosen to move 4,000 miles away from school and 6,000 miles away from home, and now I had to actually do it.
You didn’t always make me feel better about it. There were moments you caused me to doubt studying abroad: when I felt like a baby trying to communicate, when I became more homesick as time went on (I thought it was supposed to be the opposite), when I missed out on the solar eclipse and the Boston Marathon. But then there were moments you assured me, in striking clarity, that I couldn’t have done
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAL GOLDSTEIN — CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
anything else.
I liked Italian you. Open, friendly, unafraid. You brought me to Tivoli and Florence and Bologna and Naples. You fed me authentic carbonaras and heavenly tiramisus and new types of mozzarella. You sat with me through eight hours each week of Italian class, one hour a week of oral language practice, and an indeterminable amount of time each week of using my skills in the wild. Eventually, we figured out our way around town, learned to hold conversations long enough to get to know people.
Rome was welcoming in all the right ways. Strangers invited me over for dinner.
Store cashiers helped me find ingredients I couldn’t pronounce. Baristas let me
play charades. Local university students invited me to crash their lunches and slowed their pace of speaking so I could be in on their jokes. My language professor bought me flowers on my birthday. A teacher at a Roman high school, where I’d started tutoring in English, always offered me coffee for free. A waiter I’d only met once remembered I was from California the next time I went to his restaurant.
You showed me I could Do The Thing. You taught me lessons I’d forgotten — that most people in this world are kind and patient, that most mistakes don’t matter, that most efforts pay off. You illuminated what I cared about back home, who I missed, what I wanted. You prepared me for a life after graduation that I know will come eventually and
“You illuminated what I cared about back home, who I missed, what I wanted.”
— Michal Goldstein ’25
convinced me I could muster it.
Junior year, I’m glad I took the chance on you. I’m grateful you were anything but static. I think I’ll remember you forever, and I think the memories will always be good.
Yours, Michal
“In January, I landed in Rome with a singular familiar face, approximately two memorized words (“grazie” and “ciao”), and four months to go.”
OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAL GOLDSTEIN — CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
“Junior year, I’m glad I took the chance on you. I’m grateful you were anything but static.”
“Rome
was welcoming in all the right ways.”
“I knew who I was, I knew who my friends were.”
DESIGNED BY OLIVIA W. ZHENG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAL GOLDSTEIN — CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAL GOLDSTEIN — CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAL GOLDSTEIN — CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
22 | PAGE DESIGNED BY XINYI C. ZHANG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
People’s Vegetable
BY ELANE M. KIM CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
My name is Elane, and I like to cry when I read. The thing is, when I cry, I can usually pinpoint a reason for the tears, the sting in my nose, the stuffy feeling that takes root in my chest. In the film “Minari,” home is a grandmother’s tight pinch as much as it is a warm meal, Kathy and Tommy are in love and still unhappy in “Never Let Me Go,” and St. Exupery’s little prince never makes it home to his rose. And so when I cried while reading “Dictee” by Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, I found myself at a loss — for reason, for memory, for the tissue packs I always forget to buy in bulk.
At first glance, “Dictee” does not check the same boxes that many of my cry-reads do: It does not involve a pair of star-crossed lovers, hopeless fates sealed by an infinite time loop, or a narrator imbued with temporary, childlike wonder.
Instead, “Dictee” is as bald as it is literary: a collection of lyrical poems, fragmented narratives, letters to a mother from an unspeaking daughter. It is an autobiography about absence, about everything that gets lost in between languages and in between identities.
Writing interchangeably in English, Korean, and French, Cha explores what it means to be the native speaker of displacement, of forced assimilation, only to reimagine the immigrant narrative through a second language: her own voice.
GRAPHIC
BY
Beyond the confines of language and geography, the body is established as both communicative and political: a site of interruption, whether at the sentence-level or in a warzone. Yet Cha persists in her own language, persists in untranslatability, persists in simply being. For a Korean American writer like myself, it is a solemn, personal, and deeply intimate revolution. It is so close to home that it feels like remembering.
I hesitate to call “Dictee” anything but an autobiography. It is nothing if not a lifetime condensed into pages, a reclamation of all that is lost in translation: wooden chopsticks
“Dictee” is as bald as it is literary: a collection of lyrical poems, fragmented narratives, letters to a mother from an unspeaking daughter.
clinking against metal forks, recipes with no measurements passed down through blurred Korean, a daughter failing to look up when called by a name that’s not in English.
My Korean name is 민채 . Romanized: Minchae . If you call me by this name, I probably will not recognize it as one.
민채 , according to my Appa, means people’s vegetable . There are many
XINYI C. ZHANG — CRIMSON DESIGNER
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ways to interpret the characters, many options for translation: snowdrop or quiet grace, droplets of light or boughs of ripe jade. But of all the choices, Appa chose people’s vegetable .
Funnily enough, sometimes, the only person who calls me by my Korean name is myself. At home, during class sections, even when my grandparents’ voices echo from across an ocean, I am Elane.
Sometimes, I like to interpret my name as harvest or a full stomach or limbs heavy with bounty. I imagine an alternate timeline in which I am gleaming jade in a rising ocean or a snowdrop that only blooms once every century, fleeting and lonely. I imagine myself unhyphenated, my name calculus-smooth.
But I think twice about calling language broken. I think about what it means to be built from these unwanted fragments, about whether fracture can be inherited, a trait that dominates. I think about what it means to find myself in a language that is simultaneously alien and intimate. To lose myself, too.
My name holds many meanings like I hold many selves, each impossibly possible. In Korean, the word 성 means surname . Appa tells me one day that 성 also means castle . That 성 is gender and 성 is holy . It is a word with so many translations, so many simultaneous lives, that I find it hard to choose just one.
Romanized in English, it sounds like the word sung . And so in this language, I find that the names that follow me are castles of memory. I collect them like lost coins, loose teeth — things worth finding for the sake of joy, however small.
I am reminded of how we name cities after heavenly places, children after virtues, as if to predicate their sublimity. A few hours from my hometown rests Paradise, California: quiet light, fresh air, an indistinct conglomerate of green. It is lush and bright in my mind, and then it burns. This great weight of a name, and it still bursts into flames.
***
Reading and re-reading Cha, I find
myself thinking about language as something internal, like how cells hold instructions for their own death or how birds always know the way home. It is in the meals we prepare, the stories we tell, the names we carry: language as both refuge and battlefield, prayer and war.
At times like this, I think there is nothing wrong with being a vegetable, a tiny piece of a people’s republic. I collect steaming mugwort, sweet chard, the tender greens of chrysanthemum flowers. My mouth stumbles around bracken fiddleheads — toxic in the wild, bitter death sucked
I think about what it means to be built from these unwanted fragments, about whether fracture can be inherited, a trait that dominates.
out only by a mother’s careful touch.
I think I gravitate towards Cha because her work is so difficult to condense into one interpretation. She embraces narrative difficulty and leans into that which cannot be pinned down, that which cannot be defined.
Cha’s narrator goes unnamed, the sole citizen of an unspeakable country. Yet still her voice echoes: she tells herself that “if she were able to write she could continue to live.”
I think I understand what she means. I think that when I cry, I am learning to be untranslatable. To be a mouthful of bitterness and enough warmth to tide the night. To be a language of stars, destined to wobble and precess, to shed light off in great skins.
머, meaning harvest , meaning bounty , meaning fullness still. 민채 , meaning here
C. ZHANG
“It’s
Sick Day
such a shame that Professor So-and-So had to cancel our last class of the year! I really hope he’s feeling well...”
SICK DAY
LDOC —“It’s such a shame that Professor So-andSo had to cancel our last class of the year! I really hope he’s feeling well...”
ACROSS 1 Elane's unconventional cry-read 7 Sings 17A
Dutch humanist
Catalog giant
7A singer
5*14 19 The ___s of March
20 Where Michal lived this spring 22 Turn over a new leaf
23 Could help you navigate the ocean 25 Student council electee
Manor
Penalty
___ de cologne
Hand-held water propulsion device 32 Opposite of "superegos" 33 Big name in small planes 35 The Quicker Picker Upper
Snug as a bug in a ___ 40 Atlanta suburb
Suffix with ranch
43 Where it's at
Evolves
Departs quickly (but how a middle-aged dad would say it)
51 Professor's goal 52 20A is its capital
53 Angelina Ng donated hers 55 Something you'd do when 53A gets too long 56 Salt and ___ chips
Consoles
Colombia's national airline
Believer in spirits
Most trim
Handles
Concoct
Decrees
Attacked
Recipe meas.
Fancy airline 6 One who lives in 20A or 52A 7 Blog feed letters 8 High-brow entertainment
Dispossess
Coral's home
"Don't mind that"
Prepare
Gods' home
Coming to an end
Danish shoe compeny
The state we're in 26 First floor of a hotel
Moisten a turkey
Healing
No lack of self-confidence
Graduation deliveries
Situated beneath
Indian flatbread
This issue's theme
Netlike
Elegantly groomed
My brother's friends (they all have the same name)
