Search Results for: The Nation

I’ll Be Loving You Forever

Richard E. Aaron, Jason Kempin / Getty

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,077 words)

 

“You are not wearing that shirt right now.”

Even in this establishment’s near-black 4 p.m. lighting, the bartender, a guy about my age dressed in the Portland Gen-Xer uniform (“Henry Rollins, but a dad”), has made out the faded names and visages adorning my bosom: Donnie. Danny. Joe. Jordan. Jon.

“Oh,” I tell him. “Not only am I wearing this shirt, but I’m about to go see these very motherfuckers. With Gretchen, my best friend from middle school. Who I haven’t seen in years. She was on my gymnastics team, and she flew in from Wyoming. Just to do this.”

When I’m excited I tend to overshare, but I do not admit that the pint of Kölsch I’m ordering is for Gretchen and me to split. I am 42 years old, and if I drink more than half a beer I will sleep through the “rock concert,” as we used to call them, which I have paid $162 to attend.

I can attempt to explain, using human language, the extent to which Gretchen and I were fans of New Kids on the Block. I can explain that my room was a four-walled decoupage of Tiger Beat pin-ups. I can explain how I had the bed sheets and comforter. The trading cards. The marbles (why?). The comic books. The bubblegum (a bit too on the nose). How I had, God help me, the dolls, which my little brother took great pleasure in arranging in flagrante and placing on my bed. I can explain all of this in words, but it’s the kind of thing best expressed in scream — specifically, the scream of a 13-year-old’s terrifying nascent sexuality, sublimated in real time into something safe in its simultaneous unattainability and ubiquity.

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‘Horror Is a Soothing Genre … It’s Upfront About How Scary It Is To Be a Woman.’

Head of Medusa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Photo by Araldo de Luca/Corbis via Getty Images)

Laura Barcella | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,597 words)

 

In her acclaimed 2016 debut, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear … and Why, feminist author and cultural critic Sady Doyle dissected the ubiquitous American pastime of simultaneously idolizing and vilifying female celebrity. Her new book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, also looks at how the morass of misogyny poisons everything — including our psyches, our popular culture and our everyday lives. But this book focuses more intently on … horror.

Not the horror genre — though plenty of those examples are included — but about the horror of living as a woman in a violent patriarchal society that fears you, despises you; even wants you dead. Pulling from a broad range of cultural references, from Freud to Aristotle to the second-wave feminist theories of Dorothy Dinnerstein to obscure slasher films like The Mutilator, Doyle examines the myriad ways that the world is monstrous to women — and how the world has made monsters of us. “Women have always been monsters, too, in the minds of great men; in philosophy, medicine, and psychology, the inherest freakishness of women has always been a baseline assumption,” Doyle writes in the introduction. “A monster does not merely inspire anger, or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear.”

The fantastically smart book that follows is broken into sections covering the monstrousness associated with the entire socially-prescribed female life cycle, from the spark of adolescence; to marriage and motherhood (with their attendant domestic indignities); to the solitude of old age. Read more…

The Young Man and the Sea Sponge

Original sketches by Stephen Hillenburg

Darryn King | Longreads | August 2018 | 13 minutes (3,214 words)

In January 2012, Eric Bettanin, an Australian Army officer, took his brother-in-law’s Jet Ski out for a spin off the coast of Victoria. About 10 minutes in, the engine failed. As night fell, he drifted away from the beach and out of sight of family and friends. He spent the night bobbing around in the Southern Ocean, battered by large waves and howling winds.

Fortunately, Bettanin was wearing a pair of bright yellow SpongeBob SquarePants board shorts. He had picked them up for five Australian dollars, thinking they would get some laughs over the Christmas holidays with the family. As temperatures dropped, he took the shorts off and wrapped them around his head.

The next morning, one of the search boats fruitlessly trying to locate Bettanin was on its way back to shore. They had all but given hope when they spotted it — a telltale speck of SpongeBob yellow on the ocean.

That’s what the internet said anyway. If the headlines that week were slightly overblown, they were in keeping with the upbeat and outlandish spirit of the Nickelodeon cartoon. “SpongeBob SquarePants saved my life.” “SpongeBob Saves.” “SpongeBob SavePants.” Read more…

Won’t You Be My Neighbor: An Anti-Hate Pop Culture Syllabus

Sony Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 | 8 minutes (2,156 words)

The closing fight scene of the 1988 martial arts movie Bloodsport has the Muscles from Brussels (Jean-Claude Van Damme) growling prehistorically, flexing his pecs, and kicking like Nureyev as he beats his Asian opponent while blinded by dust. A bottle blond cheers from the stands at this homoerotic display of outdated, pumped-up white masculinity and, surprisingly, it’s not Donald Trump. This corny alpha-male fantasy, one of the president’s favorite movies, is loosely based on the life of U.S. marine Frank Dux, who — fittingly — made it all up. Trump watched Bloodsport on his private jet because of course he did. Apparently, he fast-forwarded to the action scenes because of course he did. It’s since been spliced into a video game because of course, of course, of course.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace,” said the Bloodsport fan-in-chief after two mass shootings earlier this month. “Cultural change is hard, but each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life.” In case you inadvertently bought that, remember the guy reading those words has based his popularity on denigrating virtually every human life that is not his own. Because Trump appears to continue to reside in the ’80s, it makes sense that he never got (read?) the memo that studies have failed over the past three decades to show that popular culture incites violence. But even a stopped clock is on point twice a day and as much as it pains me to say, Trump is inadvertently semicorrect: We do need a change. Certainly, individual games or movies or shows or songs don’t have the power to pull a trigger, but put all of them together and it’s a slightly different story. Popular culture has been defined predominantly by the white patriarchal society that also formed Trump, and all too often shares his xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny. It established an assumption in which, while it may be frowned upon to shoot a movie theater full of people, it is also a man’s God-given right to bear arms, to dominate, to express himself with violence. So, sure, find comfort in the fact that including two accused rapists in a major international film festival will be unlikely to directly cause another man to behave the same way; perhaps less comforting is the realization that this perpetuates a climate in which it wouldn’t be so bad if he did.

Earlier this year, race scholar Ibram X. Kendi published two antiracist syllabi, one of which included a sprawling list of books “to help America transcend its racist heritage.” He cited titles like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Langston Hughes’s The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, works “that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that ‘I’m not racist’ is a slogan of denial.” (This month sees the publication of Kendi’s third book, How to Be an Antiracist.) His argument is that it is not enough to just claim you are not racist, you have to actively oppose racism. That gave me the idea of a syllabus for pop culture that is anti-hate: that doesn’t merely claim it doesn’t hate, but actively opposes it. These are the works — the movies, television, music — that don’t just offer representations beyond white male dominance but actively foster community and inclusivity, that normalize forms of gender and sexuality that don’t conform to tradition, that make space for anger while providing alternatives to its violent expression against the other. Individual shows or albums can’t kill or save us, but a critical mass either way shapes our cultural foundation.   

* * *

In the wake of last year’s Toronto van attack, I wrote in Hazlitt about how Mister Rogers imbued children’s programming with empathy — initially in the ’60s in Canada — by making feelings “mentionable and manageable.” The underlying mission of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was to encourage a sense of attachment and the idea that not only were the kids who watched cared for, but that they should care for others too. His was a guide to self-actualization within the context of community. As Karen Vander Ven, a psychology professor who went to school with Rogers, explained to me at the time, “When you don’t feel strongly attached then you try to find another way to be significant which is often to take the upper hand.” While there isn’t a strict profile for shooters, this is part of the primordial stew out of which they tend to form their pinhole worldview, which leads to some of them lashing out violently, often against women and people of color.

These men are the fullest expression of a cultural (and political) landscape we created, an extreme form of the everyday violence — from catcalls in the street to racial disparity in executive suites — that owes its normalization to this toxic marinade. The attackers at Dayton and Isla Vista and Toronto were misogynists, while the shooters at Poway, El Paso, Christchurch, Pittsburgh, and Charleston were racists, too. The reigning narrative of our time is the godlike hero, usually white, usually male, the embodiment of antiquated machismo, trouncing his enemies alone according to a combat-and-conquer plot, his personality and his emotions only significant insofar as they feed his weapon-fueled revenge. This is a story of male dominance, of white supremacy, of raging violence, told again and again and again. And this is the story of mass shootings. The hero wins the recognition he has always craved by emulating his chosen gods, men like him who use real guns to kill the real people they take for the fictional enemies inside their heads. Men who come from a place where the number one film of the year (so far) is Avengers: Endgame, which touts toothless representation while failing spectacularly to go beyond standard-issue good and evil. 

The stories we need, the ones that promote inclusivity, have begun to arrive — they’re just less pervasive. Though it made significantly less at the box office, last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the rare anti-hate superhero movie. The electrifying animation revolves around a 13-year-old superhero, Miles Morales, with a black father and a Hispanic mother, who is unsure of how to get a hold of who he is. This is a story that supplants a fictional moralistic binary with a more realistic take on the elasticity of identity. It shows how family and friends — in this case, a bunch of misplaced Spider-Men from parallel universes — form who we are, but also how the strength we pull from them allows us to create our own narratives, making us more valuable to our community and vice versa. “I’m Spider-Man,” Miles says, “and I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot.” Outside the world of genre, the storyline is reminiscent of GLOW, the Netflix series based on a group of real women wrestlers from the ’80s. This motley crew of various races, classes, and sexualities — and in one case, species — establish a loving community nonetheless. The violent torching of a drag show that happens toward the end of the latest season — “Die Fags Die,” reads the graffiti left behind — is a counterpoint to the safe space that the women provide for one another to self-actualize and that the drag community itself offers to Sheila the She-Wolf, who ultimately becomes closer to the group after throwing her disguise into the fire: “It was getting in my way.”

That sort of collective boost is reminiscent of the Tik Tok community that danced their Wranglers off to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” The viral country rap star was rejected by Billboard’s 75-year-old country chart — because it did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music” — only to have his twangy hip-hop tune become the longest running No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single after a bunch of suburban kids turned it into a meme. What must it be like for a fan of country radio to hear a gay black man, side by side with Billy Ray Cyrus, doing it better? Earlier this year fans also assembled online after Netflix canceled One Day at a Time, one of the rare series to explore the complexity of being Latinx, which, considering the administration’s continued dehumanization of Hispanic immigrants, was a definite choice. “There’s so many people that the story resonates with,” cocreator and showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett told Vanity Fair last year, “about just being the ‘other.’” (CBS’s Pop channel eventually picked it up for 2020.) A growing number of black filmmakers has also been laying bare America’s history of white supremacy, from Jordan Peele’s social thrillers about the many ways the black community has been marginalized to Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America on the many ways they fought back. Meanwhile, Donald Glover’s “This Is America” single and his series Atlanta, play on the absurdity of your own home rejecting you. The FX series subverts tropes around black fatherhood, which, despite the main character’s shortcomings, constantly has him striving to provide for his daughter. 

A more fully formed expression of anti-hate masculinity is Shoplifters, one of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s many films about the various configurations a family can take. The husband in a poor household of six provides all the support he can — through shoplifting, but still — without claiming dominance, without being cold or sexist or violent. He chooses instead to be emotionally available, reinforcing the harmony the adults scrounge together, and setting an example for the kids despite also teaching them how to steal. As Kore-eda told the BFI, “Crime is something that we, as a society, own collectively; I think it’s something we need to reclaim and accept as our responsibility, rather than the individual’s.”

* * *

“Don’t send in a man to do a woman’s job” is the kind of cheesy line I would expect to hear in a remake of Bloodsport (which is apparently happening). But it does make sense that if you want pop culture to be anti-hate, that if hate has notoriously been embodied by white men, you go to the women. And it’s true, the women have been kicking ass in a way that Van Damme could only dream of. From Phoebe Waller-Bridge dismantling the power of the self in Fleabag to Janelle Monáe fucking up sex with Dirty Computer so much so that sexism can’t even get a handle on it anymore to Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, cocreators of Pen15, using surrealism to expose the most realistic depiction of racism a coming-of-age show has ever seen to Charlotte Madelon’s The Rose Garden, a zen antidote to first-person shooter video games that softly encourages you to wind down instead of loading up. And then there’s Rebecca Sugar, who rolls all of this anti-hate into one for the children like a latter day Mister Rogers. Steven Universe, the first animated series created by a woman, has been coined the “most empathetic cartoon” ever made. Miss Sugar’s Cartoon Network series dismantles the idea of the lone powerful white male hero before it has the chance to take root, replacing it with an open universe that lets everybody in, including actual aliens. “We need to let children know that they belong in this world,” she told Entertainment Weekly last year. “You can’t wait to tell them that until after they grow up or the damage will be done.”

The Anti-Hate Pop Culture List

Movies
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)
Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, 2016)
Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018)
Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
(Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018)
Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, 2018)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Television
Atlanta (FX)
The Chi (Showtime)
Derry Girls (Netflix)
Fleabag (Amazon)
GLOW (Netflix)
The Good Place (NBC)
One Day at a Time (Pop/CBS)
Pen15 (Hulu)
Pose (FX)
Queer Eye (Netflix)
Russian Doll (Netflix)
Steven Universe (Cartoon Network)

Music
Against Me!, Shape Shift With Me (2016)
Björk, Cornucopia (2019)
Childish Gambino, “This Is America” (2018)
Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (2018)
Kendrick Lamar, Damn (2017)
Lana Del Rey, “Looking for America” (2019)
Lido Pimienta, La Papessa (2016)
Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road” (2018)
Lizzo, Cuz I Love You (2019)
Michael Marshall, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (2019)
A Tribe Called Red, We Are the Halluci Nation (2016)

Games
Celeste
(Linux, Mac OS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One)
Don’t Starve Together (Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox )
My Child Lebensborn (Android, iOS)
Please Knock on My Door (Windows)
The Rose Garden (Google Play)
Stardew Valley (Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox)
Super Mario Party (Switch)

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

When Friendship Fades But the Images Linger

Photos by Cody Doherty & Barron Roth, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

It started with pictures of Alice. She didn’t mind being put in awkward situations or uncomfortable positions for the sake of a photo. That made her a good friend. I put a tangled Rapunzel wig on her head, a plastic gun in her hands. I had her stand in the middle of the road, wearing a plaid bathrobe. Straddle a highway median in a tulle skirt and sneakers. Swan around the woods in a feather boa. She had a classically pretty face that could suggest everyone or no one. I blazed through rolls of black and white film, which I developed in my high school darkroom with clumsy chemistry and a pounding heart.

On the strength of those pictures, I was accepted to a summer photography workshop in Rockport, Maine. A small group of us — mostly but not entirely college students and recent grads — paid reduced tuition in exchange for doing odd jobs: hosing down vans, painting picnic tables, moving furniture. When we were lucky, we got to pay our dues in the darkroom, turning around contact sheets and prints for students who attended the pricey weeklong workshops, many of them taught by famous photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, Eugene Richards, and Joyce Tennyson. For those more typical students, relationships and revelations were fast-tracked. We watched their tentative arrival and swift blossoming, the compressed intensity between introductions and teary-eyed goodbyes. Our own seven week stretch wasn’t all that long, really, but measured in units of other people’s personal growth, it felt almost permanent.

It was summer and I was 19, living with a bunch of other young people who had stepped away from their fledgling lives to devote time to some version of art. Maine was dreamy, with quiet stretches of woods full of swimming holes and rope swings, lobster traps stacked in pleasing geometries. There was a glass-blowing studio in the ground floor of the house where we lived, and an old cemetery just down the road. I liked to walk around and take pictures of elaborately carved headstones memorializing wives and mothers, running my fingers over their names and honorifics. I was never without my camera. I spent hours in the darkroom but still found time to get sunburned.

When I wasn’t out shooting or cooped up printing, one of my favorite places was the library. It was a hot, lofted area in the small campus’ main building. A sign posted at the base of the stairs gave me solemn shivers. “Enter with respect for the knowledge that resides herein and with honor for those who are about to share with you their secrets and wisdom,” it read. “Maintain a serene presence.” I sat on the floor and pored over monographs: Francesca Woodman’s pictures of herself crouching in corners, hanging from window frames, a wild blur in an abandoned house. Nan Goldin’s pictures of herself and her friends all tangled up in each other, the color shots suffused with adulation and danger. Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, feral despite their polish. Judy Dater organized her images by gender; portfolios of men, of women.
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Losing My Religion at Christian Camp

Illustration by Homestead

Katy Hershberger | Longreads | August 2019 | 25 minutes (6,207 words)

“Will you pray with us?” It was my fifth day as a camp counselor; I was 17 and the three girls who asked me were probably 12. The five years between us was a teenage lifetime, though now as adults, we could be classmates, colleagues, barflies on adjacent stools. Then, we were children. I pushed myself up from the cool summer ground. “Um, yeah. Do you — ” my voice cracked, “ — want to be saved?”

It was July 2001 in rural Virginia, the last night of Christian summer camp. A hundred girls sat in a circle around the campfire, the smell of embers and bug spray permeating our clothes. We sang praise songs, lifting our hands toward the Virginia stars, toward God. The camp director led us in prayer. Then she implored the campers: If you want to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, ask a counselor to pray with you.

A week earlier, I had graduated from CILT, a three-year counselor prep program. The acronym stood for Camper in Leadership Training, though Caring Imaginative Loving Teachers was printed on our t-shirts. I collected songs and games in a “resource file,” I taught a daily drama class during the week-long camp sessions, and I stockpiled readings and Bible verses for daily devotionals. I did not learn how someone becomes a Christian.

I don’t remember what the girls wanted to ask God that night, but it was, blessedly, not to be saved. We huddled away from the crowd, holding hands, and I stood above them, just barely the tallest. I prayed, my voice husky with uncertainty, and stared at the grass, glancing at the girls’ faces to see if I was doing this right. I asked God to help and guide them, and I silently asked the same for myself.
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Heartbreaker

Illustration by Brittany Molineux

Beatrix M. Rooney | Longreads | August 2019 | 7 minutes (1,544 words)

Mom and I stand hunched over The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. She holds a box cutter in her hand as she flips a few pages into the book. The poem on the page is “Poetry is a Trestle.” She starts to carve, but quickly stops.

“Lock the door,” she reminds me. I do, and she relaxes.

Her fingers press into the pages, turning white as she cuts through inches of book. The pages’ centers slowly disappear, in their place a deepening rectangle. I quickly gather the scraps, putting them in the trash. From this point on, I am to keep my money in this book — my brother Liam discovered the old water bottle I’d kept in my junk drawer.

I have a lot of secrets to remember when I’m home. 0000 is the combination of the lockbox where Mom hides over-the-counter medicines like Advil and melatonin. The box is in the very back of the kitchen cupboard where we keep the cat food. Mom keeps a wad of cash in her wardrobe, buried underneath her underwear and socks. I’m not to open the drawer when Liam is around.
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Such Perfection

Longreads Pick
Source: The Believer
Published: Jun 1, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,695 words)

Finding My Father

Illustration by Homestead

Natassja Schiel | Longreads | July 2019 | 41 minutes (7,527 words)

I’ve admired Natassja Schiel since we met at a writer’s workshop on the Oregon Coast nearly three years ago. Her crisp sentences move with warmth and certainty, and her gentle courage with difficult topics pulls a reader in. 

Schiel’s essay “Finding My Father,” is a layered coming of age story about a woman who turns to sex work and creative writing after a difficult upbringing. Opossum, a small literary journal based in Oregon, originally published the piece in November, 2017. According to Schiel, the editorial process was pleasant enough, until the lead editor, John Blanton Edgar, sent her numerous unwanted emails, texts, and calls outside the bounds of their working relationship. She began to hear similar stories from other women writers who’d interacted with him, so Schiel asked for her piece to be removed from Opossum’s site. Edgar complied, then reversed his decision before sending emails claiming responsibility for her career’s success. When Natassja took her story public in May 2019, she heard a resounding chorus of support. Edgar took down the piece the following month. 

Longreads reached out to Edgar. He told us he believed their interactions post-publication were borne of a growing friendship. “I was under the impression that we were friends and that the publisher/writer relationship was in the past. We exchanged many texts and had a small number of phone conversations during the next year or so.” He also expressed regret that Natassja’s experience had been so challenging. “I am sincerely sorry that Natassja feels this way and that I ever made her or anyone else feel uncomfortable.” According to this statement, Edgar shut down publication of Opossum in June. 

Longreads is thrilled to re-publish “Finding My Father.” It is Schiel’s second piece with us—Danielle A. Jackson

* * *

I’d often lean into an older balding man, when I worked as a stripper, grazing his shoulder before bracing myself on the plush leather chair that he lounged in. I’d stand between his legs, undulating my body, my torso inches away, but never touching him, my right breast lingering over his nose. When he exhaled, the tickle of his breath would stiffen my semi-erect nipple even more. “You’re so sexy,” he’d whisper over the loud music, redirecting his gaze to my face. I’d look him in the eyes and think, You’re old enough to be my father. Are you?

I didn’t know my father. I’d never met him. He could have been anyone.

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Towards Chinatown

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Melissa Hung | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,316 words)

Two days after I learn that my mother has cancer, after my sister tearfully tells me over the phone, “This might be mom’s last Christmas,” I go to San Francisco Chinatown.

I didn’t grow up in a Chinatown. It is not my home. Yet when I think of my mother in Texas, I feel pulled towards Chinatown’s tightly packed stores and no-frills restaurants.

So, leaving an appointment on a December afternoon, I board a bus heading east. The bus is an electric one, powered by cables strung above that guide it down a one-way street through a quiet residential neighborhood. Tidy three-story buildings line the route, their bay windows jutting out. When the bus crests over a hill, I catch a glimpse of San Francisco Bay between skyscrapers in the distance, a little over a mile away. The water shimmers like a mirage even though it is real.

Then, we rumble downhill and we’re in Chinatown. The bay windows are gone. Instead, laundry hangs out to dry on fire escapes and from clotheslines threaded across open windows. Children walk down streets holding the hands of their mothers. Older women dressed in purple and pink puffy jackets, sun hats, and sensible shoes tow hand trucks with bags strapped onto them. Elderly men in gray jackets and baseball caps wait at bus stops. Everyone seems to be carrying something: a backpack, a tote bag or two, a purse worn cross-body, a pink plastic bag in the crook of an elbow.

I step off the bus and walk to the Chinatown YMCA for a swim. Most of the pools I frequent are harshly chlorinated. Open your mouth while submerged in them, or worse, accidentally swallow the water, and you realize immediately your mistake. But here the pool is saltwater, soothing on the skin. As I swim freestyle down the middle lane, joy rises through my body like a buoy. This surprises me — that after two days of feeling terrified about losing my mother, I am capable of joy. I swim for 35 minutes, then listen in on the chatter of aunties in the locker room as I change. Technically, I am eavesdropping, but I don’t think of it that way. They are talking loudly enough for everyone to hear, the way my Po Po used to talk.

In Chinatown, I manage in my clumsy Cantonese. I speak the language and I don’t. My pronunciation is decent, but my vocabulary is stunted. Some words come easily. Others I grasp for. They exist just beyond my reach the way the details of a dream tease the waking mind.

With my hair still damp, I walk around the corner to a bakery with a yellow awning to buy a cha siu bao. I favor the baked ones with a glazed crisp exterior over the fluffy white steamed ones.

“Yāt go cha siu bao,” I say to the woman in an apron behind the counter. One pork bun.

“Baked,” I add.

I know the word for baked in Cantonese. Guhk. I’ll remember it later, but in the moment of the transaction, I can’t retrieve it quickly enough.
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