Wheaton Pub Fall 2012

The Wheaton College Independent Literary Journal | Vol. 8, Issue 1, Fall 2012

THE PUB

Wheaton College’s independent literary journal, encouraging interdisciplinary discourse through the written word. Visit www.wheatonpub.org or email at wheatonpub@gmail.com

Letter from the Editor When I was a little girl, I read Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Ever since then, I have been unable to escape the power of words, of story. Many readers have had the fully immersive experience of reading a good story—where you are so entranced by the words that you are transported in time and place and, for a little while, inhabit the tale you are reading. An avid reader, I often felt this out of body experience, but Bradbury gave me something even greater. When Jim Nightshade and William Halloway went running through the dark October streets toward the town library, I was not only running alongside them, I felt I already had in the past. I was given a memory, and it is more vivid to me today than “real” memories from that same time.

What is a “real” memory? I can still feel the cool autumn air rushing past me as I run through the rustling leaves that blush the air with their bitter scent of decay. Is this not a real memory?

The power of writing, of words crafted in some narrative, poetic, or other structural form, is incarnational in nature. Images, ideas, and feelings are embodied and brought to life through words that become tangible. Writing presents and crystallizes particular aspects of the embodied world we inhabit, and in doing so, draws the reader into an experience in a new and powerful way. I have seen the illustrated man, tasted the golden apples of the sun, and traveled to planets out-

side our solar system all while sitting on a couch in my living room. What’s more, I have learned about people groups outside of my immediate culture, I have had my beliefs shaken and refortified, and I have learned to value the basic dust from which we were made as something more complicated and intricate than I could ever hope to create. In writing—in any creative act—we image our God, who spoke each minute detail of the world into existence, and in taking time to craft story out of words, we affirm the inherent value of embodied life that Christ so beautifully redeemed through the Incarnation. If he saw our embodied existence as worthwhile, so ought we.

The poems, narratives, essays, and review published in this Fall issue of The Pub demonstrate respect and passion for human existence and seek, through words, to better understand our intricacies, our brokenness, and our hope for redemption. As you read, I challenge you to be fully present both physically and mentally. Your perceptions about immigration, selflessness, and American ideals of beauty will be challenged, and I hope your reading and subsequent discussion of these and other topics will be both edifying and worshipful. May the following words draw you in as they did me, embodying little pieces of our world and begging you to interact with the images and ideas presented as if with a tangible reality before you.

Read, discuss, and enjoy this issue of The Pub.

Debbie Knubley Editor-in-Chief Special Thanks: We would like to give special thanks to Student Government for their financial support; and to the wonderful staff of the Student Activities Office for all their help.

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CONTENTS Relearning the Alphabet HIJK

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Lauren Ramer

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Margaret Kim

Poem At the Greyhound Bus Stop

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Nathaniel Nelson

Wither and Bloom

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Marisa Tirado

Dichotomy

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Melanie Williams

American Beauty

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Lauren Ramer

Station V

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David Stephens

Born of DaTang

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Brooke Phipps

A Scholar's Parrot

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Linnea Peckham

Life in Transit

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Yaphet Tedla

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Essay

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Photo Essay A Right Relationship

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Jeremy Petersen

Coexist: E(xx)ploring Atmosphere

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Anna Li

Review

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and Sound

Cover Photo: Campout by Michal Ann Seeland. Digital Photograph. Wheaton, May 2012.

Michal Ann Seeland is a junior studio art major from Wheaton, IL. She has two brothers...and eight sisters.

Michal.Seeland@my.wheaton.edu

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At the Greyhound Bus Stop Nathaniel Nelson

The blind man’s dog is pregnant.

Her low-hanging teats sweep the floor, stealing kisses.

The rocking sway of her head and hips beckon the blind man to follow.

I wonder if he knows he’s become a family man.

On the bus I sit sandwiched between a warped pane of plastic and the quivering mass of an old lady’s bottom.

The blind man remains with his dog at the station, to sojourn among vending machines and the husk of a week-old pretzel.

The bus groans, strains against tendrils of heat and breaks free, lurching across the sun-blasted asphalt.

I think of the blind man, of his dog’s secret burden.

Longing for folds of wrinkled skin, a place between my squirming brothers, the taste of warm milk on my tongue, I reach for the low-hanging teat of my God.

Nathaniel Nelson is a sophomore English writing major from Chattanooga, TN. He walked across the stage at his high school graduation wearing a fake beard, which his principal then proceeded to snatch from his face.

Nathaniel.Nelson@my.wheaton.edu

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the parrot in the poem, we may sound intelligent enough—until we run out of vocabulary.

When we describe a person as selfless, then, Linnea Peckham we really mean to say that they are acting selflessly.

If we are unable to literally be “without self,” perAll this is flashy rhetoric about loving you. haps we can at least display the virtue externally.

I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

Yet when we explore this possibility, we find it to I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through [. . .] be a catch-22 once again. Truly selfless decisions aren't decisions that just put others' interests above I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin: our own (though, certainly, they are that as well).

I talk of love—a scholar's parrot may talk Greek— Selfless decisions, by definition, are those we make But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin. without even taking ourselves into account. I don't think I've ever actually acted in such a manner. In my experience, there is no such thing as an unmixed he above excerpt is from a poem by C.S. Lewis motive. I resonate deeply with the second line of called “As the Ruin Falls.” Now, it's no great po- Lewis's poem: “I never had a selfless thought since etic feat, at least by literary standards (calm down, I was born.” The verse in Isaiah (64:6) comparing Wheaton; I love Lewis too, but there’s a reason he’s our righteous acts to filthy rags suddenly makes known for The Chronicles of Narnia more sense. Even our very best efand not as a poet). Nevertheless, it forts stem from impure motives. is a beautiful and sophisticated exPerhaps some of you would pression of an ultimately human protest this allegation. You are sure Self-less. frustration: the impossibility of you have done something selfless at selflessness. With the unique comsome point in your life; if not you, Without self. parison between a parrot’s linguisthen someone you know, or someWhat a novel one you heard about on the news tic abilities and his own capacity to love, Lewis makes a provocative or read about in a history textbook. idea. assertion. Do we, as humans, really Jesus called us to be selfless, you just fake sentiments such as selfless might argue. Why would he give love in the same way parrots babble such a command if we are unable with no true understanding behind their speech? to follow it? Allow me to make a suggestion. Go Just thinking about the word “selfless” for a to a concordance and look up the word “selfless.” few seconds reveals what a contradiction it is to our Whether you check the NIV, ESV, KJV, NLT, or every instinct. Self-less. Without self. What a novel NASB, you will not find a single entry in any of the idea. For we have been created as beings, physically major translations. Surprised? So was I. Why is the embodied, and with hearts, souls, and minds to concept of selflessness so ingrained in the Christian boot. How then can we be selfless? I would argue worldview when the word doesn’t appear in the we cannot. We are, as Lewis writes, “self-impris- Bible once? oned” inside our “proper skin,” and have no way What we do find in Scripture are verses of extracting ourselves from . . . ourselves. Even like Philippians 2:4, which commands, “Let each linguistically, we are going around in circles. Like of you look not only to his own interests, but also

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to the interests of others” (ESV, emphasis added).

Here we see Paul instructing the Church to consider others, not in place of, but in addition to ourselves. Or take Luke 6:35, smack dab in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus charges his followers to “love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High.” Christ requires us to love, not without regard to ourselves, but in the knowledge that we will gain a great reward. There's a reason why Jesus didn't just tell us to “love your neighbor.” He had to add the qualifier “as yourself.” The concept of loving someone just to love them is, tragically, something foreign to the human race. We may love because we are loved in return, or even because it’s “what good Christians do,” but never solely just to love them. Not only do we have to be commanded to love others, but the very command has to be explained in terms of self.

This seems to be a fairly dismal view of humanity. If even our purest acts are born out of mixed motivations, what are we left with? Maybe in the purest sense of the word, selflessness is unattainable. Perhaps the best we can do, as fallen people, is not to eradicate selfishness completely, but rather to ignore it—to be like the scholar’s parrot and pretend we “talk Greek.” In other words, to do “selfless” acts in the full knowledge that the quotation marks are absolutely necessary. God is perfectly capable of redeeming our tainted motives.

In a way, it means more that we must forego our own desires for the sake of others. If we were able to completely remove ourselves from the equation, we would, in doing so, also remove the ele-

ment of sacrifice. By comparison, the word “sacrifice” shows up somewhere in the vicinity of 300 times in Scripture, depending on what translation you look at. The writer of Hebrews instructs his readers, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God” (Hebrews 13:16). This verse says nothing about doing good or sharing selflessly; it tells us to do these things sacrificially.

Christ demonstrates this concept in the Garden of Gethsemane. He, being fully man, felt the selfish impulse to escape pain and death. He prayed that the Father might “let this cup pass from me.”

Then he added, “Not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). And then he went to the cross, and bled, and died. His sacrifice was not selfless in the sense that he gave no thought to himself, but was full and complete because he chose to subject his will to the will of the Father. So we are commanded in Ephesians 5:2, “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” When all is said and done, perhaps we are all like the scholar’s parrot. As the parrot seems to be able to talk coherently, in Greek nonetheless, so we seem to be capable of selflessness. As we have seen, however, in neither case do appearances reflect reality. But if we really are parroting through life, let us parrot the greatest “scholar” we could choose—our Lord himself. As he gave himself up for us, so we also are called, not to eradicate selfishness, but to sacrificially overcome it. Let us not cripple ourselves by constantly questioning our motives. Instead, selved as we are, let us be fragrant offerings and sacrifices to God.

Linnea Peckham is a senior English literature major from Milford, PA. She knew Charlie Kwak before he played the guitar.

Linnea.Peckham@my.wheaton.edu

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I grow things on my wall.

Glossy prints are planted, sinking deep into cork soil. Each week I find scribbled penmanship blooming. Crinkled words from yesterday bud and blossom in my mind today. They sprout like the crisp flyers and dried flowers once did, remnants from bright nights and dance floors. Strands of beads and bands hang long like vines, nailed to the wall under flying paper cranes, now stagnant in the afternoon air, wings clipped.

The tips of my grandmother's photo are curling.

She has become a picture browning each day, withering under my ripe Rio postcards.

I prune around from time to time, pull off receipts, snip ties and sow new thoughts.

I'll unbury a forgotten birthday card and carefully readjust friends from home, replacing some photos with more accountable smiles.

Marisa Tirado is a freshman undeclared major from Countryside, IL. Her name was legally changed when she was two months old. It used to be Lorena. Marisa.Tirado@my.wheaton.edu

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the Pub Dichotomy Melanie Williams

Satin covered toe boxes patter then pose in the fifth position splayed.

Like temple statues, they stand flawless, immutable.

Muscles, sculpted by his careful fingers, hold a tense stasis.

Then, life.

Snaking cylinders of skin explode into flexed fingers, angled joints and extended necks.

Feet bow in the starched slippers rendering the body weightless.

Tulle trembles above balanced sous sus and developed arabesques.

Opuses animate the ivory figures, narrate the myth in which created beauty breathes.

But as the curtains fall, applause and tossed roses mask the mirror cubical of unforgiving criticism, the floor jaundiced with rosin and sweat.

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In the backstage dressing room, cluttered with empty coffee cups and overflowing ash trays, those cast with smaller roles shoot fuming glances toward Pygmalion’s prize, and quivering hands with skinny fingers paint makeup on broken faces

Melanie Williams is a junior English major from Cincinnati, OH. She has an eardrum that was reconstructed with skin from behind her ear.

Melanie.Williams@my.wheaton.edu

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the Pub The Relearning of the Alphabet

Face painting taken to a whole new level: She tells me the things every woman should know about make-up. Lip liner, blush, how to care for dry hair.

Eyebrows: Pluck so there’s a little shape under, never tweeze the tops. I start doing this at home—the baby skin above my eyes gets a little red, tears well up—and wait for my mother to notice. Someone else’s mom says something first, when we’re in Mexico in the back of a pick-up truck, and it’s dark outside.

an excerpt Lauren Ramer Alone I board the plane, an unaccompanied minor Alabama-bound to visit my aunt and uncle. The flight attendant watches me as I watch the ground drop out from under us.

Gulf Shores, with her, is paradise. White sand, oyster shells, salt sticking to my bare legs. The wind flirts with the skirt of her suit. I do not want to leave.

Beautiful is the way we all see her. Blonde hair, cotton candy mounds of it. Blue eyes that might laugh at the corners, if you could see them through those long lashes. She gives me an autographed publicity photo from her modeling days. I could swear she’s smiling only at me—this mesmerizing woman, looking out, not down.

Hospitality is inherently Southern. Her house is filled with pineapples, the sweet yellow fruit of welcome.

Identification means she is who she says she is. Maiden name, modeling name, hyphenated tribute to a married name. The face won’t change very much even if the facts do.

Child at eleven years old. I’m used to being by myself in groups. But in Alabama, there is no group, no siblings. No children, just one child. Just me.

John Details structure my microcosm. All my details point to her.

is my uncle’s name. He watches professional boxing on TV, where men with muscles so big they look fake pound the shit out of each other for fun.

I can’t tear my eyes away from the shine of their sweat, from the violence so real and undisturbed that it must be okay. It’s horrible.

Egyptian cotton. Quality, she explains. The bed I’m sleeping in is a throne of it. She tells me to look on the tag to find the thread count. The higher the count, the softer the sheets. I need to tell my mom about this. My bed at home is made up with cheap Minnie Mouse sheets, white with pink polka dots.

Minnie Mouse was my favorite when I was little.

But now, I’m eleven.

Kids are what she wants. But he keeps changing his mind every time she tries. It’s cruel, teasing a woman like that. She’s running out of time. I wish I could be her daughter, sometimes. I pretend.

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N Lulu’s is a little shack of a restaurant off the bay where we eat dinner one night. They order shrimp and fried okra, telling me I haven’t tasted real Southern food until I’ve tried this. I taste it to please her.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Princess Diaries, both of which we already have at home, are the first of too many things she buys for me.

It makes me nervous.

Nipples bother me. I don’t wear a bra yet, but from the pictures, I should. My lime green one-piece hides nothing from the camera; I am all awkward angles and tips of breasts I don’t want. I hate this swimsuit, this uncomfortable, uncontrollable transparency.

I want to exist and not know it, like her.

Rolls of film go into photo albums she compiles just for me, with captions under each picture. She is like me, more of an observer than a participant. Her lens devours my every move. Me in that teal dress sitting on tree roots the size of a couch. The two of us on the boat, hair in my eyes. Those model poses on the bay. These pictures tell the fairy tale she wants to see, a tale I’ve come to believe in with the unquestioning faith of a child.

Storytelling enraptures me. I want to write a story all about her life. I want her to keep talking to me.

Two people, married, should mean one unit, one workable whole. But when that whole fractures, there is room for others, and you have the dilemma of three: a wife and a girl looking in at a husband who doesn’t fit the picture anymore.

Objections fill their marriage. He talks to other women with his Palm Pilot while he and my aunt are in bed together, and calls it work. He doesn’t clean up after he cooks, like she does. He didn’t keep up his end of the deal: She pays for his law school, he pays for her med school; he is a lawyer, and she is far from healing anybody. He doesn’t love her anymore. He is ruining her.

Upset

Pixie Stix she buys just for me, in case I get hungry at night. I get hungry because she did this just for me.

Voids

Questions she obsesses over—Can she trust him? Does he love her?—become absolutely paramount. I need to find the answers.

is her go-to explanation when I catch her throwing out her dinner, a piece of pizza, untouched, slid straight into the trash can. She tells me when she hears people saying unkind things about her it upsets her, and she can’t eat. Upset is how she lost so much weight, how she got her figure back. It’s how she deals with the hurt.

I start to lose my appetite.

leave us vulnerable, exposed. She leads by example, needing me to need her, so that she might justify her need for this child, this eleven-year-old nothing who knows only what she’s told.

Wedding him was the best day of her life. They held the ceremony on the beach. Her colors were peach

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and green, gentle colors. The shoreline behind them blends with the sea with the sky, and there is no end in sight. Miracles happen here. This is what the photos say.

XOXO is what you write on a card when you don’t know what to say. His love for her is superficial, because she is capable of real love, because that’s what she shows me. And if there is something wrong in their relationship, the fault must be his.

Yes is suddenly just a word, three letters, black lines on a piece of paper. I hear my family lump her

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name with the term “compulsive liar,” and I don’t want to believe that her yes was a no was anything she needed it to be. I don’t want to believe that I was a yes was a no was whatever she needed me to be.

Zebras tease. Are they white with black stripes, or black with white stripes, or are they merely striped creatures with no dominant color? Two sides to a story, black and white, his and hers. I am left weighing reasons to trust the presence of all colors over their polar opposite, that absence of all color so empty within itself that it almost looks full.

P American Beauty Lauren Ramer

No one wants ripples, the girl from Peru tells me.

We have curves in all the wrong places.

Her doctor prescribed thinness based on numbers made for me.

Someone had to roll him off me, the girl from the Philippines whispers.

I don’t understand.

She says I’m his type, tall and slim, skin weightless, white.

But my numbers don’t fit and the men never stay.

I splinter from The Mold with this heaviness of flesh and bone, alone among so many girls with bodies torn from magazines, girls advertising hearts that merely bend when they should break.

Lauren Ramer is a junior English writing major from Mundelein, IL. She has a brown stripe in her eye at seven o’clock.

Lauren.Ramer@my.wheaton.edu

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the Pub A Right Relationship

and turning my inward gaze all the more inward was enough to transform my vague frustrations into an inexplicable despair.

Jeremy Petersen God eventually reversed the direction I was heading through a passage in Mark. At a time when he is in a boat with his disciples, Jesus warns have a need to be right—not in an aggressive, them to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees. The argumentative way, but in a quiet, internal worry disciples quickly determine he is referring to acregarding almost anything. Although there is noth- tual bread, leading Jesus to become incredulous. ing necessarily wrong with wanting to be right, Though they had done nothing particularly wrong, when left unchecked, this desire can become a they had completely missed the point. Despite havpainfully stagnant fixation that is difficult to resolve. ing witnessed Jesus pull food out of thin air twice, This past summer, I had a nagging hunch that I was they were worried about what they were going to not relating to God in the right way. eat. Despite having had an experience of God, they When I traveled abroad as a part of Youth listened to their own voices instead. I had spent the Hostel Ministry, I realized I had been seeing life majority of my life missing the same point. through a series of lenses shaped by my environWe have a tendency to think the explanation ment and upbringing: American, suburban, pri- justifies the answer, often being required to demvately schooled, church-going, and Christian. Most onstrate how we arrived at the conclusion, to show of my life had been lived in submission to the con- the work that led to the solution. Although there is ventions of Christianity—the prayer before meals, value in this, it is easy to forget that what is right is hour-and-a-half service, homegrown theology, right regardless of our reasoning. Our explanation apologetics, and so on. In the midst of what is true does not make it true of this, it became apparent that my any more than our explanation of intellectually inclined mind often the color green makes it green. Up split things into theories and pracMost of my life until my experience this summer, I tices solely for the sake of underbeen balancing truth and, ulhad been lived had standing them. I ultimately began timately, the Truth, on a series of to wonder if I had been treating in submission to self-constructed scaffolds, forgetting the Gospel in a similar manner the conventions what they were trying to uphold in by reducing it to less than what it the process. By the grace of God I of Christianity. learned that the Rock is the founclaimed to be.

Although this was a healthy dation on which everything else time of reflection and evaluation, stands—not the other way around. behind it all was an unhealthy As intellectual Christians, questioning of the way God had made me. It we are typically not satisfied with what we know seemed as though unchangeable aspects of myself in our heads to be true. We want the why. We want were keeping me from him. In addition, the way I to know how to respond to skeptics. We want every engaged the process of introspection and contem- imaginable argument to bolster our beliefs. The plation placed the burden of finding the answers on fear that our framework is incapable of holding me. The combination of relying on my own ability the weight of God himself sends us into a fury to

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Inward by Jeremy Petersen. Digital Photograph. June 2012

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Outward by Jeremy Petersen. Digital Photograph. June 2012

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P E find another plank to shove into our support system. Though Christianity offers enough theology, philosophy, and thought-provoking material to accommodate these obsessions for a lifetime, we need to be reminded that there is no perfect assurance in questions, doubts, answers, or explanations, especially when our environment encourages us to immerse ourselves in such things. When we find ourselves dissatisfied or disconnected, it may not be a matter of what more we need, but, rather, that what we already have is getting in the way.

When the disciples chose to listen to their reason rather than what they knew to be true, Jesus asked them, “Are your hearts still hardened?� With a simple question, Jesus demonstrates how faith and reason are not matters of disposition or personality, e.g. whether we are more inclined to think-

ing or feeling; rather, they are a matter of priority.

True faith is choosing to believe God despite what our heads or hearts may say. True reason is choosing to build our scaffolds on the Rock, allowing it its proper place of upholding our knowledge and experience. Faith and reason find their necessary unity only when we pursue God above all else.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with wanting a right relationship with God until that desire subverts a longing for God himself. When we seek God first, everything else will follow in its proper place, including the need to be right. Our heads and our hearts are meant to primarily pursue neither answers nor explanations, neither what is right nor what is true, but rather the One who upholds all truth, and ultimately is the Truth.

Jeremy Petersen is a junior communication media studies major from Fair Oaks, CA. He has yet to have a white Christmas.

Jeremy.Petersen@my.wheaton.edu

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the Pub Station V

David Stephens

I don’t know what it was like, but it wasn’t like this: a porcelain Christ draped in velvet, pacing upright alongside warrior-strong Simon, the cross braced easily, through swelling pastoral landscape, two or three onlookers maintaining a respectful distance along Golgotha’s road.

Rather, dark heads cursed a figure collapsed in the dust, no longer able to drag the cypress shafts.

The tint of his skin, striped red with gashes, dripped sweat that stank in its effort. Harsh and shallow breaths rattled in his throat like the tambourines that celebrated David’s procession into the Holy City.

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Simon saw Christ, spent and denied in the dirt, the cross fallen at his side.

So Simon stumbled from the edge of the mob into the open glare and felt the hot sand burn his skin, the heat slick his hands.

He bent to brace under the beams.

David Stephens is a senior English major from El Paso, TX. He lives in the middle of the southwestern desert, and some of his favorite activities include writing tweets and voting. David.Stephens@my.wheaton.edu

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had not expected to yearn so much for my return to America after my semester at Jerusalem University College because I did not consider the States my home. I was born and raised in Ethiopia, located in the horn of Africa. During high school, I constantly struggled with assimilating into American culture. In a white majority college, “home” and “fitting-in” are not words I would use to describe my experience.

I assumed that my identity and personality would be the same as any other Ethiopian in Jerusalem, but I was wrong. My attitude, thoughts, and priorities were very different. I felt much more comfortable with my American friends than I did with my Ethiopian counterparts. Had I lost my Ethiopian identity? Had I assimilated into American culture so much that I had let go of my core?

Comments were tossed around by my classmates such as, “You are just like us.” I would have loved this observation a couple of years ago in high school, but now this only raised tough questions of identity.

My thoughts about race, immigration, and assimilation were enriched as I discussed with other Ethiopian Jews their experiences in Israel. While they lived across the Atlantic Ocean, we seemed to have gone through a similar experience. They had to process what it means to be Ethiopian in a Jewish society. In their experience, their Jewish identity had overwhelmed their Ethiopian identity, leaving only fragments. We seemed to find ourselves at a crossroads.

I felt lost. Where was my home? An answer that I struggled to articulate was answered simply by my heart in the form of nostalgia. My heart

longed for my return to America: from the snow that was once foreign to me to the endless lakes of Minnesota. For the first time, my patriotism came to light as I took pride in my state, city, and region.

I was willing to point out America’s flaws while defending it from foreign criticism. This conclusion was bitter-sweet. If I take up my American identity, will I have to forgo my history and heritage?

A couple of months after my return from Jerusalem, I found myself back in the land of 50 stars. My study abroad experience left me with many questions. It brought forth the questions of my identity and that of other immigrants. However, it also left me with a better understanding of the dilemma, including the unending pressure to assimilate and the never-ending voyage for home.

After arriving in the United States, the issue of undocumented immigrants began to surface.

My experience abroad made me think of the issue in a new and different way. Many of our conversations regarding immigrants, documented or undocumented, are concerned with politics. Depending on what political party we are affiliated with, we will often defend our party’s policies until the end. Some argue that we cannot allow illegal immigrants to reap the hard-earned benefits of the American people. Others defend their position by arguing that illegal immigrants are marginalized people who live their lives without any benefit of being recognized residents of this country. Depending on your view, you will probably take one position or the other. Or you may find yourself in the middle, able to sympathize with both arguments and wishing there was a politician who could combine the two sides. During this whole conversation, I believe we neglect a crucial part of the discussion: the identities of the immigrants that are at stake.

Many of the things that define us are outside of our control. Our origin and place of birth, for example, determine so much of who we become.

Children sometimes complain that they should be

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E able to choose their parents, and I’m sure those allegiance and loving fireworks, hot dogs, and evparents sometimes wish the same thing about their erything that makes America “America.” For many, kids. But without our consent we are born into their lives have been shaped in and by the United the world, into a family, a community, and certain States. The way they see and understand the world cultures, ideas, and beliefs. I did not choose to be is defined by America. born in Walita.1 But I was. I did not choose to be We must be willing to understand that, like Ethiopian. But I am. The Ethiopian community us, many immigrants are American from the inside marked me without my permission. I was formed out even if their legal status says otherwise. If this by a culture I inherited, a heritage, history, and set is the case, as we reflect on our own identities and of philosophical beliefs that I the identities of the immigrants did not choose. For the rest of around us, maybe we should my life the Walita, Soddo, and not hastily assume it is “us” verEthiopian communities, which sus “them,” when in reality it is Immigrants might are things outside of my con“us” versus “us.” Immigrants trol, will mark me. My body will might be Americans in every be Americans in long to dance like a Guragea2 at of the imagination except every color of the color the beat of the drums my ears the one that affords them rights. are so familiar with, and I will I am writing these things imagination except rejoice when I hear the sounds in an attempt to help people the one that affords enter the mindset of an immithat I have grown up to. My tongue will water at the smell of grant. For many of us who have them rights.

Tibs.3 My heart will melt at the never had an encounter with an sight of plateaus. These all are immigrant, we forget how simitrivial things, and yet they have lar they are to the rest of the marked the empty canvas of my identity.

American people and how their lives are so interIn the same way, documented, undocu- woven with ours in this ever-connected world. They mented, or migrant workers are largely defined by are not that different from us. Many of the values conditions and settings they did not choose. In the American society holds dear are shared among imcase of undocumented children, they are brought migrants, regardless of their legal status. The many to the USA without their permission. Just like any immigrants who come to this great country every American child, they grow up saying the pledge of day truly live out the “American dream.”

Endnotes 1 Walita is a region in Ethiopia.

2 3

One of many tribes in Ethiopia, they are known for their tribal dances.

A traditional meal in Ethiopia.

Yaphet Tedla is a senior economics major from Woodbury, MN. He loves RomComs (don’t tell anyone)!

Yaphet02@gmail.com

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the Pub Born of DaTang Elizabeth Brooke Phipps

Raw hands stitched me together, in the belly of an iron cage, where sweat stained the walls sweet, and chemicals choked lungs dry.

Here I was knit whole, starting from my single toe, upwards, as skeletal fingers pushed me along the line of hollowed faces.

Inspected and deemed worthy, I was fit for sale and shoved into a box with others like me and we soared across the wide Pacific.

Our cardboard induced darkness wrenched apart with abrupt force.

Laid upon a shelf of chilled steel, lashed together with plastic.

Five weeks we sat, unmoving under gaunt and glaring lights.

Human blurs rattled by us, and cash registers tolled.

Soft, pale hands fondled us as bright eyes ogled with their scrutiny.

Unblemished thumbs pressed down, assessing claims of “one size fits all.�

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Approved for purchase, basket wires clang with our arrival.

We cost exactly 6 dollars and 37 cents.

All six of us together.

Elizabeth Brooke Phipps is a junior communication theater major from Mechanicsburg, PA. She has fallen asleep on trains in over 10 different countries, and has never missed her stop. Brooke.Phipps@my.wheaton.edu

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the Pub HIJK

frame started dwindling down around the age of 50; his elongated face remained in a perpetual Margaret Kim state of stubble. He was stoic, subdued in speech and manners. We communicated through funny instances and short comments in Korean. Living in the same house provided jokes, story telling, walks, stood there defensive and proud, eyes blinking, and silence. We usually combined the last two. and small limbs as sturdy and straight as I could More often than not, we loved a quiet walk. extend them.

It was warm that day, so he took me in the “H I J K,” I said. stroller for a walk through the hilly neighborhoods The policeman looked at me as if I had just surrounding our house. The dandelion sun I was spoken in Korean, which in fact I had according so fond of rapidly faded to dusk, and my grandto my three-year-old mind. “H I father’s legs started to hurt. My J K” was the only bit of the alstroller came to a halt, and I phabet that had stuck with me saw the shadow of his spidery from early-bird lesson time in legs bend into a right angle. He The dandelion Miss Bonnie’s classroom that auturned the stroller so that we sun I was so fond faced the tall eucalyptus trees, tumn. For what my parents were paying and for the amount of a valley of collected leaves and of rapidly faded sheer concentration I was willing cigarette butts at our feet. His to dusk, and my to offer at that sponge-like age, I hands kneaded his joints and believed I was learning Korean, grandfather’s legs calves. As the evening fog and not English. cold crept their way into the started to hurt.

The three of us sat in an hills, I made my best complainoff-kilter triangle in a coffeeing noise and squirmed in my scented cubicle at the Palos seat. The angles of his concenVerdes Police Department. A man in uniform trated face softened. looked like the cold metal Statue of Liberty paper“Alright, Heajin-ah, should we start heading weight on my father’s work desk. My grandfather back?” sat beside me in frustration, like a gargoyle perched From the left, a car pulled up and parked on a stool, complete with hunched shoulders and along the street where we sat. A rigid-looking man withering gaze. I experienced tart, sweet sensations stepped out to greet my grandfather. The man was on my tongue as I put the blue Blow Pop back in not smiling. My lips parted in blank expression, and my mouth after having spoken. It remained unclear I squeezed my five fingers together, engrossed by why we had been brought there in the first place; the shiny, silver circle below his left shoulder. he and I had simply been sitting on the side of the “Sir, is this your house?” street called Avenida de las Tortugas.

Silence.

I turned to my grandfather. Glancing up at his cap and down at his Reebok shoes, I was sure it My grandfather was a Korean War veteran and was his turn to say something. lumberjack. My family tells me his tall, stocky “The resident of this house noticed you and

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N this child on the property. Perhaps you’re unable to make it home. Why don’t you step aside from the sidewalk and come with me to the car?”

The man gestured for us to stand and proceeded to point to the black and white car. I looked at my grandfather. I waited for his mouth to open, to speak.

“Heajin-ah, you’re going to be successful when you grow a little older. If I had learned English—I don’t know where I would be! I know it would be somewhere good.”

I laughed, and we kept our eyes glued to the rising 27-24 score.

My grandfather’s silence back then, in front of the I realized much later that my grandfather and the policeman and at the station, was the silence exhibpoliceman were simply unable to communicate. ited as he patiently sat while I talked my mother’s My three-year-old mind couldn’t ears off in English about my grasp the concept that words project in painting class, the were like currency—equal but silence that accompanied us at only when converted. I thought the doctor’s office as I filled out My three-yearthe differences between their his paperwork while he fixed his old mind couldn’t eyes on the TV, the silence that words were solely resonant and rhythmic. According to my grasp the concept strolled with us as I took him grandfather, I came to distinin his wheelchair up the hill to that words were guish the two languages much Robert E. Ryan Park in his last later in the year as I began to days. So as we sat in the tight culike currency— notice words in my vocabulary bicle at the police department, I equal but only to which he was unresponsive. took it on myself, the small but when converted.

In kindergarten, I learned brave Korean-American with a that Korean was the language voice, to speak on his behalf. inside the house, and Eng“H I J K.” I repeated it lish was the language outside with less bravado than the first the house. But the limited conversational Korean time. I tried to put the blue raspberry lollipop back phrases I had collected from home whittled down in my mouth, shortly missing it by an inch. significantly in grade school. By middle school, I The Statue of Liberty man chuckled; he had avoided the language altogether. It was for speaking given me the lollipop to lighten my all-too-serious and writing English that I received compliments. disposition and soothe the static tension in the Plus, I loved the way it sounded in song, in my most room. The sweet and sour raspberry taste on my treasured movies, and when I chattered maturely lips and inner cheeks caused me to swing my legs with my friends on the blacktop. and deny my curious eyes the right to rest on any My grandfather and I often watched the object in the cubicle for more than a second.

Lakers on our living room TV set. He taught me My mom, at home, noticed we were not back the rules of the game and the strengths of each despite it being almost 10 o’clock. She phoned the player, and I interpreted the commentators. As I local police department, reporting her toddler and did this, he nodded, accepting the information I her 67-year-old father as missing. Among her regave him. port was the fact that her father was prone to stroke,

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for which she blamed his reckless chain smoking as a youth and his nonchalant way of eating meat.

She knew it hadn’t been wise to let her father go on a long walk with a child in a stroller, especially with his vulnerable health.

In the cubicle, my grandfather and I continued to wait until we received her comforting call at 10 o’clock. She swiftly arrived to verify identification and take us home. My grandfather, in Korean, expressed to her his frustration and to me his gratitude. I nodded and chewed on the Blow Pop gum, which did not taste as sweet as the candy coating, but certainly lasted longer.

It was hard to push a 180-pound man in a chair with wheels up a hill that was already difficult to

climb in a car, gas fully pressed. He didn't speak for the duration of the walk except to say teasingly: “You can do it, Heajin-ah! I taught you to be stronger than that, come on!”

I sensed the irony in his voice. He was always pushing me around, or maybe I was pushing him around. Quiet, hour-long walks became drives when I got my license at 16. He endured the loud bass of my music; I attempted to stay awake despite the droning voice of his favorite Korean radio personality. A kind of playful accommodation remained regardless of the number of years that stacked up or the disposition of our fierce but limited bodies. His lasted until the age of 85. “H I J K” is still my code word for police, and I have been using Korean inside and outside the house, as much as possible, ever since.

Margaret Kim is a senior English literature major from Rancho Palos Verdes, CA. Her “default” is cleaning, organizing, and rearranging anything, followed by a nap. Margaret.HJ.Kim@gmail.com

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R Coexist: E(xx)ploring Atmosphere and Sound

liquid guitar that slices absorbed silence, drips of percussion that pulse along each song’s spine in low beats. Spaces of silence are carved into the tracks, manipulating negative space to enhance each note’s pure sound. All the fluff is cut away. With these sharp tools, the xx build their infinite atmosphere.

Anna Li Minimalism spreads into lyrics as well. Croft and Sim meditate on simple themes of love and light and dark imagery. Yet ambiguity by no means he vanishing act is a refined illusion: A band creates isolated distance; when Croft’s airy vocals surfaces from an abyss of anonymity. The al- ache out with such honesty, the lyrics feel intimatebum becomes critically acclaimed. The energetic ly close. Metamorphosis is another illusion the xx hype dies down, they dip into obscurity for a short have perfected. In the opening verse of “Angels,” stint, and then—from nowhere—they emerge back the lyrics feel plain. When Croft sighs them into into the spotlight with a shiny, new album. motion, it feels like catharsis: “You move through The xx’s resurrection feels less like calculated the room/like breathing was easy.” At the zenith disappearance and more like the texture of their of “Missing,” amid sleepy guitar and Croft murmusic—ghostlike, spectral. After releasing their muring, “How did I,” in swirling mantra, Sim’s raw self-titled album in 2009 while still in high school, voice rasps into a poignant ache before releasing in the xx garnered significant attention, boasting the a gasp of guitar.

2010 Mercury Prize and selling nearly 400,000 This is the captivating enigma of the xx’s copies to date.1 But after the concert tours and pro- music. It builds and builds and builds, and instead motional fillers, the xx evaporated back into their of combusting into climax, it blooms, pools, and quiet horizons. exhales in a smooth breath.

And then—from nowhere—Coexist appears.

That being said, there’s not much variety Coexist maintains their roots of distinct minimalism, in these 11 tracks. Fans hoping to see a shift in but develops very differently from sound will be disappointed. The the debut album’s youthful conbuoyant vibe from steel drums in ception. The trio, comprised of Ja“Reunion,” is as dramatic and exmie Smith, Oliver Sim, and Romy perimental as the album gets. Each …it blooms, Madley Croft, has come a long way track exudes the same aura—same since sending lyrics through instant pulses and pauses, hushed lyrics, pools, and messaging or singing into their echoing drum tracks that release exhales in a computer speakers to avoid waking into shimmering guitar. “We were smooth breath. just making songs that were comup their parents.2 Now in their early 20’s, Coexist reaches toward mature ing out of us. There wasn't a huge, complexity. While the second alset goal for what we wanted to do,” bum expects words like “growth,” Sim said in an interview. “We're and “different directions,” Coexist is an extension still the same band. I'm glad it sounds like us.”3 of the first album’s barely-there texture—and strips While this album is not as diverse as the debut, it it down even further: ambient vocals that yearn, gives Coexist a fluid motion. The audience can stand

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in its wake and let the sound roll over them in easy tides.

It’s a known challenge going into the second album that bands are approaching an audience already familiar with their music. The freshness of the xx’s debut hinged upon its correlation of space and sound. It was a new, unique approach to music; it billowed like a veil between hemispheres of open space. Thus, the sophomore album feels more “whole” than the refreshing openness of the debut. But the xx still have their unique ingredient that sets apart their music: shape. Listeners can still

slide into the geometry of the space built in Coexist’s porous tracks. While most songs today are buried beneath polished vocals and excessive layers, the xx experiment with subtraction of sound to eliminate any interference. It’s this ethereal nature that leaves the deepest impressions. With the carefully constructed ether they weave, the xx shed new light on what music is: That even silence has volume; that even empty space can be lovely and dark and filling; that landscapes of music can be both incredibly close and immensely vast.

Endnotes 1 Abede, Nitsuh. “Abede: On Coexist, the xx Stay Intimate by Getting Grander.” Vulture. New York Media LLC, 2012.

Web. < http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/music-review-the-xx-coexist.html>.

2 Dombal, Ryan. “The xx: The London trio on their barely-there sound, Sade, and new album Coexist. Pitchfork.

Pitchfork Media Inc, August 21, 2012. Web. <http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/8927-the-xx/>.

3 ibid.

Anna Li is a sophomore English writing major from Little Rock, AR. She sometimes dream-writes songs when she sleeps.

Her top hits are: "Water, Water Fountain," and "You are my Dinner Bell." Anna.Li@my.wheaton.edu

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Growers First Spring Break 2013 Honduras Learn about ethical consumerism, just business models, environmental concerns, cultural influence, and of course, coffee!

Email for an application or to ask questions at growersfirstwheaton@gmail.com

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ff OuritoSr-inta -Chief

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