FALL 2022

Letter from the Editors

Dear Reader,

We are honored and excited to invite you into the Fall 2022 edition of VISIONS Magazine. Our publication would not be possible without the contributions of the AAPIA community here on College Hill, and we would like to thank everyone who submitted to VISIONS this semester for entrusting us with your work. We were, as always, blown away by the wonderful art and writing that has been shared with us, and we are endlessly grateful for your vulnerability and courage.

In putting together this issue of VISIONS, transformation emerged as a central idea in many of the pieces we encountered. We were struck by the strong sense of movement, intimacy, and metamorphosis these works embodied, and we’d like to ask you to consider these themes in earnest as you make your way through the magazine. What does it mean to change? What does it mean to make transformative art? What is it like to represent such processes for others? How can we take the messages imbued in these creations and use them, transmute them, for our individual development and collective growth? We’ve let these questions simmer with us throughout the making of this edition of VISIONS, and we encourage you to seek your own answers within the pages of our publication and in the world around you.

Our thanks go out once again to the VISIONS community and all of our supporters for the assistance and inspiration you’ve provided to us over the course of the semester. We’d especially like to highlight the hard work of our entire Editorial Board, without whom this issue would not have come together. Most of all we thank you, our readers, for whom VISIONS has and always will exist to uplift and delight. We hope that you’ll find something exciting, funny, entertaining, strange, intriguing, unfathomable, eye-opening, or simply beautiful inside.

With love,

Michelle Yuan and Christine Jeong Editors-in-Chief

On the Cover

Touched By A Star | Rage At My Self | Digital Drawing Nancy ’27 has resolved to get lobe piercings before the end of the year.

Mission Statement

VISIONS is a publication that highlights and celebrates the diversity of Brown and RISD’s AAPIA community. We are committed to being an open literary and artistic forum for individuals who hold this identity, as well as other members of the university community, to freely express and address issues relating to the AAPI experience. VISIONS further serves as a forum for issues that cannot find a voice in other campus publications. As a collaborative initiative, VISIONS strives to strengthen and actively engage with Brown and RISD’s vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as the larger Providence community and beyond.

Editors-in- Chief

Christine Jeong ’24 Michelle Yuan ’23

Layout Editors

Angela Chen ’25 Anjali Shah ’25

Visual Arts Editors

Jo Ouyang ’26 Katherine Fu ’25

Literary Arts Editors

Rachel Ly ’25 Cameron Le ’25

Web Editors

Caitlin Rowlings ’24 Tabitha Lynn ’25

Graphic Designer Robin Swann ’24

Social Media Chair Kenneth Kang ’25

Brown Freshman Rep Praewprach Lerthirunvibul ’26

RISD Freshman Rep Celine Huang ’27 Kristie Lee ’26

Printer Allegra

A very special thanks to Contributors and staff Center for Arts and Language Department of American Studies Department of East Asian Studies

Inside Cover

On the Move | Welded Steel Naya ’24 is stuck behind a slow walker.

Treasurer Emily Tom ’25

Events Coordinator Caterina Dong ’24

Contact visions@brown.edu facebook.com/VISIONS.Brown @VISIONS_magazine

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of VISIONS’ sponsors.

Table of Contents

Hot Pink Subway Jo Ouyang

ted williams parkway Johnny Ren

The Green Chair, the Red Chair, & Chairchair Jo Ouyang

Kathmandu (Delphinium himalaye) Pranav Gundrala Floating Mia Cheng Dance, Robot, Dance! Jo Ouyang

Self Portrait Lucy Du Home Taste Emilie Guan 见我应如见观音 See me as immortal Sitong Liu rest in pieces Jessie Jing

OH I WAS GLASSY THE NIGHT I WENT TO HELL Angela Chen

OH I WAS GLASSY THE NIGHT I WENT TO HELL Angela Chen

A Foregone Conclusion Nancy Yao Mystic Forevermore Nancy Yao Immobile No. 2 Yingshuet (Celine) Lam

I wish you were never born Caterina Dong

The Night I Watched the Moon Run Away Cameron Le Teahouse Haimeng Ge i am human Sue Sima Chiromancy Rachel Ly Fish Kaitlyn Stanton On the Move Naya Lee Chang pillowtalk Joel Yong Lovelorn Kenneth Jiang GODDESS Emilie Guan

Breasts, Stirrup Katherine Fu Tradition Allie Heffner

My Mother the Deer Hazel Zhang Paradox Kenneth Jiang the finishing Caterina Dong Afterthoughts Rachel Ly Just Apples Jo Ouyang

A Drag Manifesto Disco Amber bump Mayuko Kobayashi two californians discover winter Johnny Ren interactive art exhibition Robin Zeng Lights Out Kaitung Yeung

VISIONS

Hot Pink Subway | Acrylic on Canvas Jo ’26 is sitting in hot pink.

ted williams parkway

along which dirt hills germinate only to wilt into deadend streets asphalt soon to blacken bare soles and the spare dust of sunlight sight smearing, he presses his nose to the glass under it a foggy cell blooms into meiosis fading, fading, splitting, in two each gifting the other with itself. so is it any wonder why the child of a runaway wants to jump out the car? road rash searing skin into stripes as he tumbles raw, reborn, past the divider the fence the hills seeking new lungs not these soft bellows deadened but still heaving in his chest breathing life-cycles short-lived onto the car window.

Johnny ’23 is in love with an egg.

The Green Chair, The Red Chair, & Chairchair | Oil on Masonite Jo ’26 is sitting on a chair.

VISIONS

Pranav ’25 is dreaming of Delphiniums.

Kathmandu (Delphinium himalayae)

For a prussian spike of sky-blue butterflies, I would do anything. Bunny ears and little snout stamens

Ask me if I could ever go back to that place, those meadows where the larkspur were and where grass turned glaucous —you: cobalt heart in my hands, aching from love or rain.

That place where I planted flax to weave into little nests

For blue jays and diffused sunlight atmosphere ocean deep.

You couldn’t stand that color after you learned that some trees bleed blue. But your basket was always full blue things for me: A pair of dolphin-like stems they look like pieces of the skyblue irises, juniper berries, violets.

I smile blue like a dying dragonfly, honeydew nectar under my tongue.

[...] I stayed behind, getting drunk with the bees on pollen and pheromones, and I made you love all of those blue things. The flax began to bloom.

[...]

In September, that place burned down. Who knows if the delphiniums survived. I only returned to see the ashes shaped like you.

Floating | Digital Mia ’26 is trying to organize her life on Google Calendar.

Dance, Robot, Dance! | Oil on Canvas Jo ’26 is romanticizing everything.

VISIONS

Self Portrait | Charcoal Lucy ’24 needs to buy new shoes.

HOME TASTE

bristling fatal ferns and skin flaps; sallow, sagging. I am my grandmother’s apothecary: miraculous in disappointment, mastery of feeding the supple, the supine, the scarred flesh.

i am the numbness creeping up the vines of her varicose-vein arms, tasting of flax-haze and mountain-fog and the brain-kind, too; filling wash basins, empty.

i am the flagging paw of an unlucky porcelain cat, splendid, spleenful. pain swings like psychic fronds still fond and spiting the wilt.

like an unlearned lesson, relearned myth: i believe i owe nothing to wounds of ancestry yet loathe medicinal modernity. which is to say: i am pathetically ill and refuse shallow water, like swallowing concedes my body’s impermanence. like the tarot tea is not for drinking, never mind healing.

Emilie ’26 could eat about 5 scallion pancakes right now.

见我应如见观音 See me as immortal | Oil on Canvas Sitong ’25 an anonymous cat bear in Ener World.

rest in pieces | Alpaca, Merino, Nylon Jessie ’22.5 can’t believe she’s still here.

Angela ’25 is listening to the rain in the early evening.

OH I WAS GLASSY THE NIGHT I WENT TO HELL

Luckless moonrise. Limp shiny lips. Ancestors fluid over the face. There is FM 105.9 staticking in the car before it skids into a silent bird from god. The bird is alighting on the world’s lowest hanging awning. Idly washing itself of exhaust. Another Wednesday maybe. We are praying all the time but never the right kind. Solvent froths on the planet Venus. My wife is by the kitchen counter soaking a blot with milk. She is smiling slow and etiolated. My dreams are always punisher soirees. Trill in E minor. I am

aliquoted into three separate skies. Foiled faith over there in the wilderness, aerosolizing in adagio. My toes press pinkly against the patio. If there was a call for it I would go into the backyard. Think hot railing. Think heavy jars of pickled cowpeas. Think little parings of lack. Think tip of tongue against a venule just to touch what may be touching my home. Think my naked sun-sedated arms. There are omens gliding out the garden drain in oxidized warbles. Secrets of eternal maintenance. It is that

space into the latening afternoon where the sick automaton shows teeth of its own. I am taught in grade school: at the center of the person is the place of eating where I was spooned by the soft pendular swirl of my mother’s placenta. Now I cry thinking even of fruit cores. You and I grow up watching oil dance against water. Pure-form sex of the hypothesis. Touched and untouched. I am all my eyes closed on a congee plain. I am all my eyes closed in a big black sublimation. I am all my eyes closed reaching into what does not reach back. In a lecture hall I am saying,

Every single poem is about pitching into primordial stress and coming out unclean. An intense agitation, maybe, I think. Of course she’s come to tell you I’m evil. Yawning out the brick like some fucking gas, irrigate. Irrigate! I see you my turbid darling purity and your wet little feathers, oh god. Wings in a still struggle against hipbone, the frenzy blinks. I invite you down onto the patio. Give me this arpeggio and watch me cry the dark out of myself. Feel: it is all over your forearms and still hot with the inside of the world. It is searing itself into the porch. I want

to put my mouth around your neck and live in your body. Bit much? Forget fretting. We are only two backbones in a yard. Dams rendering into thighs of the lowland. You are bent over marbled bamboo shoots mattering violently to me. Porcelain starting between our arms. A voice from the Ming Dynasty glissing from the balcony. I map onto your dancing epitope. Could you feed me bits of what you see in the sky? You believe that god washes our hands before we wake up every morning. Like how ease grows in wet air. Like how history necrotizes into myth. Like how we circle verandas and search for the next thing that looks like it can burn our mouths. While I am ever kneeling on the paving thinking about the god-damned way love ferments. Think Penglai temples wavering past a concourse of five salt oceans. Put your ear up to the eulogies whistling out from the eddies. Scales curling up the coccyx. Fern in a flirting foam with liver. I am rusted over the banister gasping it out gathering it all back my breath paling into the torrid massacre of the early night. Think my city in 1937 expecting a salvo from heaven and getting one from Imperial Japan. Think my mother at thirty pregnant with my brother. All the birds come from god; they scream out of it in moments of true knowing. Disease sighs down on white hometown mountains. Tiny slick barbs. I look past panes at the thing particling behind the eyes, these paths are so wide and lead nowhere. I’m sorry I confused you. I am about to slip but you say be still and take my fingers and put them in your mouth. The fact of my death rains tenderly over me. God wheels through my arms; he is cleaning my hands. How much I love you I truly cannot say.

Angela ’25 is listening to the rain in the early evening.

OH I WAS GLASSY THE NIGHT I WENT TO HELL

Luckless moonrise. Limp shiny lips. Ancestors fluid over the face. There is FM 105.9 staticking in the car before it skids into a silent bird from god. The bird is alighting on the world’s lowest hanging awning. Idly washing itself of exhaust. Another Wednesday maybe. We are praying all the time but never the right kind. Solvent froths on the planet Venus. My wife is by the kitchen counter soaking a blot with milk. She is smiling slow and etiolated. My dreams are always punisher soirees. Trill in E minor. I am aliquoted into three separate skies. Foiled faith over there in the wilderness, aerosolizing in adagio. My toes press pinkly against the patio. If there was a call for it I would go into the backyard. Think hot railing. Think heavy jars of pickled cowpeas. Think little parings of lack. Think tip of tongue against a venule just to touch what may be touching my home. Think my naked sun-sedated arms. There are omens gliding out the garden drain in oxidized warbles. Secrets of eternal maintenance. It is that

space into the latening afternoon where the sick automaton shows teeth of its own. I am taught in grade school: at the center of the person is the place of eating where I was spooned by the soft pendular swirl of my mother’s placenta. Now I cry thinking even of fruit cores. You and I grow up watching oil dance against water. Pure-form sex of the hypothesis. Touched and untouched. I am all my eyes closed on a congee plain. I am all my eyes closed in a big black sublimation. I am all my eyes closed reaching into what does not reach back. In a lecture hall I am saying,

Every single poem is about pitching into primordial stress and coming out unclean. An intense agitation, maybe, I think. Of course she’s come to tell you I’m evil. Yawning out the brick like some fucking gas, irrigate. Irrigate! I see you my turbid darling purity and your wet little feathers, oh god. Wings in a still struggle against hipbone, the frenzy blinks. I invite you down onto the patio Give me this arpeggio and watch me cry the dark out of myself. Feel: it is all over your forearms and still hot with the inside of the world. It is searing itself into the porch. I want

to put my mouth around your neck and live in your body. Bit much? Forget fretting. We are only two backbones in a yard. Dams rendering into thighs of the lowland. You are bent over marbled bamboo shoots mattering violently to me. Porcelain starting between our arms. A voice from the Ming Dynasty glissing from the balcony. I map onto your dancing epitope. Could you feed me bits of what you see in the sky? You believe that god washes our hands before we wake up every morning. Like how ease grows in wet air. Like how history necrotizes into myth . Like how we circle verandas and search for the next thing that looks like it can burn our mouths. While I am ever kneeling on the paving thinking about the god-damned way love ferments. Think Penglai temples wavering past a concourse of five salt oceans. Put your ear up to the eulogies whistling out from the eddies. Scales curling up the coccyx. Fern in a flirting foam with liver. I am rusted over the banister gasping it out gathering it all back my breath paling into the torrid massacre of the early night. Think my city in 1937 expecting a salvo from heaven and getting one from Imperial Japan. Think my mother at thirty pregnant with my brother. All the birds come from god; they scream out of it in moments of true knowing. Disease sighs down on white hometown mountains. Tiny slick barbs. I look past panes at the thing particling behind the eyes, these paths are so wide and lead nowhere. I’m sorry I confused you. I am about to slip but you say be still and take my fingers and put them in your mouth . The fact of my death rains tenderly over me. God wheels through my arms; he is cleaning my hands. How much I love you I truly cannot say.

Blacked out by Alina Y. Liu

A Foregone Conclusion | Digital Drawing Nancy ’27 is seriously considering going blonde.

Mystic Forevermore | Digital Drawing Nancy ’27 prefers vanilla ice cream over any other flavor.

Immobile No. 2 | Oil on Wood Celine ’23 has a special love for white clothes.

I wish you were never born

For once, we agree on some thing. The car is no longer a kayak and the shore no longer a half-made bed. Bed made half-creased, half-unseen, as all good children are. I learn to enjoy the little things — salt stabbing my skin, scrubbing dishes to the tune of another life. Afterwards, I never forget to wipe down every surface, especially the coast so no one asks what happened here. They will insist it is simply love misguided, as all good parents are. If I drive off this wave, will the heartbreak end or free her? Is there even a difference?

Caterina ’24 is now lactose intolerant.

Cameron ’25 is watching the storks learn to fly.

The Night I Watched the Moon Run Away

By dusk, you had spent your years steeped in the same bitter phrase. Tái Sinh— Rebirth.

It has been a lifetime since ‘46 but that liquored angel of Vietnam still trenches behind you—his cowed jacket and the wet-black of his hair, the cigarette courtship and Sabeco slurs—like sickness, he is not aged. (in secret I wish you were as immortal as him), but instead you were born with your slakeless skin and salted eyes.

So of course that phrase poured from your mouth—you drank it more than water.

You were a shapeshift—matriarch here, drowned womb there—but the ocean would always be one body heavier than you found it. now I pour you a word: dis-aster. “It comes from ill-starred,” I tell your blank teeth. (do not run to the stars—they are not to be trusted)

Yet you are here, you are leaving, and the dining room air is bitter with love. the table is silent—ignorant, as if constellation. We, unblinking, talk only with parting gifts: a cup of week-old tea that splashes onto my hand, still burning. sour longans you cannot crack open. a rib torn from above my left lung. lullabies I know but do not remember.

A picture of me, curly-haired in your arms; you ask if this boy is my son.

Your midnight train is inbound to station. 8 minutes late—the tracks lie still. the platform is mostly me, only partially you. Now, you bend your carcass over mine, your mouth waxing open like the moon.

You whisper into my faithless eyes and

I lean into your words—they are half-empty and half-lie. and like each time before, Here I am, pretending to learn of reincarnation.

Tea House | Mixed Media Haimeng ’25 eats dinner in bed.

i am human | Video Sue ’24 is slipping off the pole.

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Rachel ’25 is feeling small.

Chiromancy

Long

life line and short love line

I want to put a blade to your palm— brand a scar that might change fate.

Fish

Paper

VISIONS

| Oil Pastel on Construction

Kaitlyn ’26 is a devout follower of Bauhaus, the band.

On the Move | Welded Steel Naya ’24 is stuck behind a slow walker.

Joel ’25 wonders what’s for dinner.

pillowtalk

there are four stages of rem sleep:

stage 1 eyes closed, easily awoken. quiet crush, easily denying. this phase may last 5-10 minutes. for me, it lasted three weeks.

stage 2 light sleep. heart rate slows and body temperature drops. light commitment. wounds open, labels define. we keep seeing past each other. this phase can last 10-25 minutes. for us, it lasted 94 days.

stage 3 deep sleep. the brain and body repair and strengthen. deep love. our hearts and bodies choose feeling over logic, sometimes (often) to detriment. doubt lingers. this phase lasts usually 20-40 minutes. for you and i, two months.

stage 4 rapid eye movement (rem) activity in the brain often leads to vivid dreams. it is when we let go of the walls we built for ourselves did we see light peek through. in time, we learn understanding and selflessness because we no longer have only ourselves.

you told me that talks of our future are nothing more than hopes vivid dreams but if my days on this path are intertwined with yours this phase can last around 40 minutes but i hope it lasts forever.

Lovelorn | Digital Kenneth ’26 is sleeping through another THAD lecture.

GODDESS

Let us not talk about the trivialities of splintering because the moon dissolves all wounds, even flightless arrows. Even his split callouses dragging across your swollen eyelids. Yes, even this body. You owe nothing to this earth. Realize storied harvests only satiate like spoiled rice wine. Altars crumble, like myth-chewed mooncakes. And remember that he can cheat flesh but you can cheat death. Do you think there is space, in this furious handscape of dreams, for guilt? No, here nothing can touch you if you do not beckon first.

Here history begs at the lunar gates but the Rabbit God gleefully digs moon-pebble graves to bury it alive.

Let us eat wild mouthfuls of forget while the burning suns drop down around us, soft and crude.

Emilie ’26 could eat about 5 scallion pancakes right now.

Breasts, Stirrup

| Terracotta Katherine ’25 was in his first corn maze.

Tradition | Mixed Media, Linoleum Print, Photograph Allie ’26 loves baking then forgetting to bake it.

Hazel ’25 continues to make work about mommy issues.

TW: Verbal/emotional abuse, mentions of suicide

My Mother the Deer

I’ve never seen my sleep paralysis demons, but I don’t fear them any more than I do my mother.

The scent of nostalgia smells vaguely of sesame paste.

My nose stings like it’s weary, like when it's stuffed and I can only breathe through one side. How could I know what I’m smelling anyways? Both my nostrils are clear and I am far from home. The hammering outside keeps me awake. The phantoms hammer in tangent.

Lillyanne shifts in her sleep. She coughs.

The air conditioner is too loud. Sherya flexes her hand. Like central air at a hotel.

How could I still want to sleep? When I close my eyes, I can feel the hammering begin again inside my head. The headboard does not rest my head.

My blanket and rug that are both too short. I’ve staggered them to cover both my feet and head. Underneath I am not warm, just room temperature. I am waiting for the phantoms to leave.

My nose is sour — not like when I feel like I’m about to cry, but in the accumulation of lactic acid, a muscle flexed for too long.

I tell myself that winter break is just around the corner. That I will endure. I'll be able to go home.

Right now I’m overwhelmingly homesick. Will I want to leave immediately once I'm back though now that I’ve had my first taste of agency? I feel nostalgia for things that may have never been, like Santa Claus.

There was an aunty that could make dancers out of Lindt chocolate wrappers, with long, slender necks and billowing skirts. I don’t remember her face, and I’ve lost the dolls she made me. My clumsy fingers could never reproduce their magic. Or maybe it’s that I did in fact recreate them but I didn’t realize. Some things lose their magic

when you realize how easily attainable they are, or that they were never what you thought they were in the first place. I collect beautiful candy wrappers, hoping that she could make them for me again.

Mercedes was shocked to hear that so many children wished that their parents were dead. I thought that a doppelganger had taken the place of my mother. I covered my head with my pillow and waited for my real mother to come back.

My real mom spilled soup on me once. She had just taken it out of the microwave and knocked it over. The liquid, shimmering with oil, travelled across the table to land in my lap. It was only warm.

I'm sorry, Sorry Sorry Sorry

I think I changed when I saw the reality of generational trauma thinly veiled by familial pride. It had always been there and will persist until the end of her life.

Sorry, not sorry for my awful attitude.

I don’t feel sorry for yelling. I don’t feel sorry for “playing games all day.” I don’t feel sorry for my resentment.

Our house is so big yet my mother’s voice can fill all of it. Even across several hallways and with the doors shut and with my blanket over my ears I hear the screaming matches.

I can never think about Tokyo Godfathers without remembering hearing my sister cry over dumplings about how she wanted to kill herself at the stroke of midnight. Happy New Year. Out with the old, and in with the old again.

We both believed in a false reality of each other. And perhaps we still do. She was not a deer. She was not a deer any more.

She was no longer a deer and perhaps never was.

Paradox | Digital Kenneth ’26 is sleeping through another THAD lecture.

the finishing

It has been a hard two weeks but not a hard life. Sometimes I still crash on the rug thinking of your smile but I’ve started to kill the parts of me that loved it, among lighter things. I’m putting up new pictures on the wall, slicing ginger, dining on spoken love, waiting for no one. I have learned to love the sun peeking through bright autumn-frayed leaves, tittling my burnt journal pages, kissing my rain-clobbered window, onto my delicious skin. A hug from the world around me, wisping my hair to the side — something I thought only you could do — to whisper in my ear: You are not alone. You will move through this, and we will move with you. Let us guide you home.

Caterina ’24 is now lactose intolerant.

Rachel ’25 is thinking of warm hands.

Afterthoughts

If yearning were so poetic, would it not be inextricable with words? And yet it breeds silently carelessly inappropriately—

My dear, there is so much that I want to tell you but I want to wait until my words can accompany the warmth of my breath and the cold of my hands [but they never will]. It is unfair, this feeling of being outnumbered by the number of thoughts I have about you every day. I have never wanted a person to know me more — do you remember the way I romanticize the sound of longing, the feeling of lukewarm, the genre of Monet and Debussy, the letters I write to you that are filled with nothing except the off-chance of you responding, the idea of you being well, the silence that I practice in the way my mother and father taught me, the fluency I have in a dying language, the trailers I watch of foreign films [love stories], the made-up lullabies I recall to pressure unconsciousness, the dreams I have, the nights that are cold, the recurring nightmares, the elastic in my hair, the taste of five years ago today, the poems I write about things that I’ve never experienced [sans love, sans parts of you], the yellow traffic lights, the cadence of secrecy, the white noise, the tint of lust? Did you know my room at home is 100 square feet, painted the color of white on top of a pink that was supposed to be blue? A third of my room belongs to a hand-me-down queen-sized bed that I am not allowed to replace because the lifetime of a mattress is equivalent to the stay-at-home sentence ventriloquizing my motions. Did you know I am younger than my favorite fruit tree, who shares a mother with me? It is too bad these are things for me to know and you to forget.

I even romanticize the feeling of my five fingers becoming a permanent extension of yours. If my eyes shut for too long, the jade-lemon overcast of my once-lived, twice-forgotten mem-

ories of you tend to creep in like an intrusive thought. Why can I suddenly not stop thinking about how there is nothing as somatic as the texture of your skin? Your fingertips used to be edged like soft, twilled corduroy — they had the same tendencies as my favorite jacket. Constantly wrapped around my skin yet mindless of the gaps at my waist, my collarbone, the nape of my neck — but with the awareness that is inevitable of anything that is temporary. Like my favorite jacket, you did not keep me warm, but I liked the way I could call you mine. Still, I loved the oscillation of the pressure underneath your fingertips in, the way they moved, the way they pressed. When our thumbs touched during the tango of promises, the identification of our beings ran against one another in parallel lines. I wish your hand was made of silk instead, or perhaps cold porcelain — then, I wouldn’t be infatuated with our friction, I wouldn’t loathe the absence of heat.

You do not have to remind me that our meeting was only the beginning of our separation. I understood that when only your shadow consented to my presence and how the closest I could get to you lived in the remnants of your scent hanging in the air. I did not want to tell you this, but my mother, the same mother of the persimmon tree I use to measure time, banned me from loving someone who did not love me more. It was something about getting hurt. I have been acquainting myself with the fact that love is never really a matter between two people and recently discovered that my arms cannot wrap around myself enough times to make me feel safe. My dear, I am sorry to myself that I have not outgrown my habit of calling you that. My dear, that is what those who love me most call me. My dear, do not forget that you have ten fingers on your own. My dear, my dear, I hope you’ve been well, it seems we haven’t talked in forever.

Just Apples | Oil on Canvas Paper Jo ’26 is peeling oranges.

A Drag Manifesto | Video Disco ’23 can’t walk in heels, but at least she tried.

VISIONS

A Drag Manifesto

我曾看到巴黎在燃烧，

如今我游回家乡。

一路上我看到火焰在江面上，

随着水体传播，

不只是长江主体流经的城市，

还有几十条支流和地下河所触及的，

那些被遗忘的小巷和墙角。

正在暗处独自生长的树被点亮，

这些火焰是对远方同伴的启示。

在很长的一段时间里，

我们的人性也被政治化了，

我们的身体，被撕裂，解剖，学习。

我们不得不成为一座存于岩石故障间乌托邦的堡垒，

去解构霸权施以我们的名字，

然后重新组成自己的语言。

我们没有能力去砸碎每一面压抑我们的砖墙，

但我们要在墙的另一边聚拢，

用激进的爱在土壤上重建属于你和我的花园。

Once I saw Paris burning. Now I swam back home.

On my way I saw fire on the river, spreading along the body of water, not just through the cities where the main stream of Yangtze River runs across, but also where the tributaries and underground rivers touch, those alleys and corners that were forgotten.

The trees growing alone in the dark are now in the light, the flames are omens of companions in the far.

For a very long time, Our humanity is politicized.

Our bodies, torn apart, dissected, studied. We have to become a utopian fort between the glitches of the stone, To deconstruct names the hegemony had given us, And form our own language.

We are incapable of breaking down every brick wall, but we need to come together at the other side of it, On the soil we will rebuild a garden with radical love, a garden that belongs to you and me.

bump | Video

Mayuko ’25 is serving and slaying and bootsing the house down.

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two californians discover winter

it fell not in flurries but like dandruff shaken from the scalp of a shy god in muted flutters wished to go unnoticed but we did the snow so faint it left us licking lollipops of thin air our tongues spooling out from our smiles what we tasted: something better than ice as we danced twirling on the lawn skating pirouettes of mud in our sneakers as if the world was sugar-dusted white everywhere everywhere encrusted with crystal glimmering the prismatic sheen of delight into which we plummeted

Johnny ’23 is in love with an egg.

interactive art exhibition | Oil on Canvas Robin ’24 is looking for shiny things.

VISIONS

Lights Out | Fashion

Designer, Editor, Photographer: Kaitung Yeung Models: Vaughn Burger, Oscar Tangen, Loki Peng

Lighting, Assistance: Catherine Xu, Marc Stier

The Family

ILLUSTRATED BY ROBIN SWANN

Angela ’25 saw the past go by in a late-night Brown shuttle.

Anjali ’25 is using that brush thing on her matcha.

Caitlin ’24 is smoothie-ing smoothies.

Cameron ’25 is seeing new faces in old photographs.

Caterina ’24 is now lactose tolerant.

Celine ’27 is changing her intended major for the fifth time.

Christine ’24 is ordering her weekly Pokeworks.

Emily ’25 is complaining about the cold.

Jo ’26 is weaning off of caffeine.

Katherine ’25 misses morning deer.

Ken ’25 is a breakfast burrito.

Kristie ’26 is on her second latte today.

Michelle ’23 is thinking about it.

Praewprach ’26 is napping on her rug.

Rachel ’25 had a dream she was home.

Robin ’24 is drinking hot soup on a warm sunny day.

Tabitha ’25 is playing Bananagrams on her Ikea rug.