Search Results for: New York Times

Notes on Citizenship

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Nina Li Coomes | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (3,609 words)

A month after Donald Trump is inaugurated president, my mother visits me in Boston. I have lived in the city for only a month, and my apartment is furnished, but barely. During the day, while I sit in a windowless office, my mother drags a suitcase down snowy Commonwealth Avenue to TJ Maxx, where she fills the rolling bag with comforting objects: a teal ceramic pitcher; a wire kitchen cart; a swirling, blue-and-white rug. She makes at least three trips down the hill to the store and back again.

When she is not buying knickknacks, she scrubs my buckling apartment floors. She wrings a rag in warm water, palms it over the wood, her posture and form impeccable as usual. Though I’d beg her not to do this, her actions make sense. For the 20 years we have lived in the United States, my mother has made a ritual of scrubbing the floors of all of our homes. In our first American house, in the unwelcoming cornfields of Illinois, I would know that all was well if I came through the front door to see the warm gleam of freshly scrubbed wood. In my parents’ house in Chicago, if I ever walked across the kitchen in my shoes by accident or, more likely, in a careless hurry, guilt would course down my back, the memory of her hunched by the radiator busily scrubbing flooding my mind. After college, when I lived in New York, she visited me there and insisted on getting down on her hands and knees again, though my roommate had a dog who shed constant, ungrateful clouds of black fur, making a clean floor impossible. In each place we have lived, no matter where we are, my mother has labored over the floor to make it home.

* * *

I was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a white American father. After my birth, my parents sent an application the U.S. consulate for my American citizenship. The application included my Japanese birth certificate and an accompanying English translation, proof of their marriage in both languages, as well as proof of my father’s U.S. citizenship. My mother’s status as an ethnically Japanese national qualified me for Japanese citizenship upon birth. I have always been a dual citizen of both the United States and Japan.

As a child, I bragged about this status to my peers. I had two countries I could claim as my own, I would crow, two places to call home. My parents often chided me for this bragging, but my willful girl-self ignored them. Though my status as mixed race was most often confusing and other times painful, this was one place I found pride, a jolt of pleasure pulsing through my hands as I touched the spines of one blue and one red passport, both with my name emblazoned on the inside. At the customs kiosk in airports, I liked the momentary juggle my parents did, swapping out our U.S. passports for Japanese ones in Tokyo, and back again in Chicago. All of the coming and going resulted in my American passport looking like an absurdist travel log, appearing as if I left the country and came back a month later without ever entering another country. Though I was only ever just shuttling between the same two nations to visit one set of grandparents or another, childishly I imagined my dual citizenship as a secret mission, a doorway into which I could walk and disappear, existing in secret for a short while. Other times, my passports felt like a double-headed key, easing the pain of leaving one home with the improbable solution of arriving at a different one. My passports — their primary-colored bindings, their grainy texture and heavy pages, these were magical tokens of my childish belief in my double-belonging.

This was one place I found pride, a jolt of pleasure pulsing through my hands as I touched the spines of one blue and one red passport, both with my name emblazoned on the inside.

Dual citizenship is technically only legal in Japan until the age of 22, at which point an individual is required to make “declaration of citizenship,” effectively asking dual citizens to give up their claim on at least one of their countries of origin. There are, of course, ways around this. There are an estimated 700,000 dual citizens past the age of 22 living in Japan, though this number is probably skewed by the willingness of illegal dual citizens to come forward regarding their legal status. Some dual citizens choose never to declare, trusting in the inefficiencies of a labyrinthine bureaucracy to forget about legal technicalities. Others make their declaration in remote locations far from metropolises like Tokyo or Osaka with the hopes that less-urban officials will not take the time to ask for a renunciation of non-Japanese passports. Some, like me, renewed their passport on the eve of their 22nd birthday, effectively buying another four years to weigh the choice, hoping that laws might shift to allow for legally sustained dual citizenship.

* * *

In Japan, a person obtains citizenship not by birthplace but by blood: This is called jus sanguinis citizenship, or citizenship as defined by the “right of blood.” It does not matter if you are born in the country or out of it. You are only a citizen if you have at least one parent whose blood can be classified as Japanese. (There are some exceptions based on naturalization and statelessness.) Requiring Japanese blood as a tenet of citizenship implies that there is such a thing; that Japaneseness can be traced back to one, biologically determined race. In 2008, conservative lawmakers proposed that DNA testing become part of the process necessary to determine Japanese citizenship, suggesting that biological markers could identify Japanese blood over foreign blood. Though the proposal was ultimately thrown out on grounds of logistical and financial impossibility, it lays bare the use of Japanese citizenship to promote a Japanese ethnostate. Simply put, to Japan, an ideal citizen is someone who is 100 percent racially Japanese.

In the United States, people become citizens through a combination of jus sanguinis, “right of blood,” and jus soli, “right of soil.” If you are born within the boundaries of the United States of America, or born to a parent who is a U.S. citizen, you are granted U.S. citizenship. This idea is introduced in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It is tempting to say that the U.S. is egalitarian, that it is not founded on ethnocentrism, but the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was written only as a result of the Civil War. It granted citizenship to Black Americans nearly a century after the nation’s founding and in many ways did so in name only.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Though Asian Americans were granted citizenship in 1898, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 insured that immigrant laborers were not given easily accessible avenues to permanent citizenship. By the same token, Supreme Court cases in the 1920s (Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind) established a further precedent barring Asians from naturalizing as citizens on account of their not being “free white persons.” The “free white persons” clause of naturalization in U.S. law was dissolved in 1952, but strict immigration quotas continued to be official policy until 1965. Before 1924, Native Americans were only considered citizens if they could be taxed, if they served in a war, married a white person, or disavowed their tribal allegiance. By the time the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 passed, most had already followed these alternate paths to citizenship, and even then, states with large Native American populations refused to grant citizenship to their population for fear of the Native American vote. It took almost 25 years for the Indian Citizenship Act to be adopted by all 50 of the United States of America.

No matter the intention of our Founding Fathers or the text of the 14th Amendment, citizenship in the United States is complicated, fraught; at once given and taken away, fickle and traitorous, seemingly color-blind and yet in service to a majority of “free white persons.”

My passports — their primary-colored bindings, their grainy texture and heavy pages, these were magical tokens of my childish belief in my double-belonging.

This duplicity isn’t unique to the United States or Japan. It is the nature of citizenship to uphold humanity while simultaneously denying it. For the Roman philosopher Cicero, one of the first to consider the idea of the citizen, this duality was best explained as a trade-off between citizen and state. In return for completing certain civic responsibilities (say, paying your taxes and following road signs), citizens are offered rights: protection from the state, the ability to claim nationality, and the like. More than a thousand years later, German-born American philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt echoed this same sentiment by famously calling citizenship “the right to have rights.” In her view, citizenship was a necessary vehicle to deliver human rights. Simply being human didn’t give you access to things like life and liberty. One needs a state to fulfill them. Taken backwards, this implies that without a government’s acknowledgement of citizenship, a person can be stripped of the rights inherent to their existence. In other words, if you’re not a citizen, you’re not fully a person.

* * *

At the end of my mother’s Boston visit, her busy homemaking and floor-scrubbing now at an end, I take her to a donut shop for breakfast. Inside, a Cambodian family slips rings of hot fried dough glazed in honey into paper envelopes, handing them to construction workers, police officers, and university students. Behind the counter, on the other side of the kitchen door, no English exists. Instead, Cambodian wafts, punctured by laughter and sighs, tossed by the woman pouring coffee with her hand balled at her hip, the smiling man behind the counter, the surly teenager bussing half-finished plates of buttery scrambled eggs. Above the cash register proud signs hang declaring the store a “Boston Favorite,” a “Chosen Community Partner,” and the recipient of numerous other local awards.

At our sticky table, I find myself unexpectedly moved. Passing by the donut shop on my daily commute, I assumed that the curly pink neon signage, a relic from the ’50s preserved on a triangular storefront, was surely the property of a white family. Instead what I found was a family of South Asian immigrants, making a classic American food and serving it in their own fashion with aplomb. The donut shop seemed unconcerned with assimilation. Months later, I’d take my sister to the same donut shop and she’d say that she was confused. The decor inside made her feel like she should be eating some sort of noodles but instead she was eating a chocolate glazed cake donut.

As a rule, I am skeptical of the American Dream. I’m suspicious of what it sells and at what cost. What does it mean to believe in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” when the state reserves the right to take it away at a moment’s notice, to inter you and your family for looking like the enemy? What is freedom if it is a specific, circumscribed kind of freedom? A labored freedom? An unfair freedom? A tilted, volatile, violent freedom?

But at the donut shop, picking apart a vanilla-and-chocolate twist, I see a glimpse of what this country might offer: a promise of evolution, integrity, and acceptance. Perhaps this is what belonging in this country might mean, at its best: that something as classically American as a 1950s corner donut store could be taken over by a family of refugees from South Asia without pomp or angst. That the store and the family that run it can exist without concerning themselves with assimilating to a white American standard, but instead remain rooted in their own traditions and languages. Sitting in the corner table with my mother, I feel as if happiness, freedom, equality, these are hard to come by and elusive. But change, the potential for newness and its embrace, these might yet flourish. These prospects feel solid, somehow, steady and unconditional, vivacious in comparison to the pale two-faced promise of a passport. A hint that perhaps making a home for oneself actually has nothing to do with the cold detachment of a customs official, and more to do with the warmth of feeding your kin on a cold morning.

* * *

Here is how I once passed through customs in Tokyo:

After 14 hours of sitting in an economy class seat, the overhead bin bumping precariously along to turbulence, sleep evasive and slippery, I am greasy and dry-eyed. Everything feels dreamlike. Time moves in stilted seconds, late afternoon sunlight pouring in through pristine panels of glass when my mind is clamoring that it ought to be night. Passengers are herded like badly behaved cattle along moving walkways, the robotic woman’s voice telling us to please watch our step. The path curves, and soon the windows are replaced by gray walls and fluorescent lights. I continue to trudge forward, dragging my stubbornly lagging suitcase. On the walls are signs advertising caution about various strains of influenza.

Sitting in the corner table with my mother, I feel as if happiness, freedom, equality, these are hard to come by and elusive. But change, the potential for newness and its embrace, these might yet flourish.

At customs, placards hang from the ceiling, directing the flight crew to the right, followed by foreigners and tourists, with Japanese nationals and permanent residents filing to the far left. I take my place in the line to the left, feeling at once indignant and like an imposter. An anxious, scrambling feeling chases its tail under my collarbone. As I approach the sunken booth, I try to sound as local as it can get, hoping that the country bumpkin slur of my words will score me a point in the invisible tally of Japaneseness I imagine each customs official keeping. I answer questions about where I am staying, why I am here. Images of the kerosene stove in my grandmother’s front room, my grandfather’s furled fists, their unruly garden — these blossom in my mind, a talisman of home to hold tightly under my breath. Believe me, I pray, believe that I belong here. Inside my backpack, I can feel my other passport, my other citizenship, pulsating like a treacherous living thing.

* * *

It is not lost on me that the language of citizenship traffics in metaphors of life and death, but delivers on promise and rumors. We are given weighty, destiny-scaled ultimatums, discussions of blood and soil evoking images of birth and death, sustenance and longevity. Identification implies belonging, our membership to a country playing on notions of larger, state-bound families. The nation is our mother. The nation is our father. In giving us the gift of citizenship, it has labored to give us life and will lay us weeping in the ground.

But in delivery, citizenship becomes elusive and hard to pin down. It is promised to us with outstretched arms, then snatched away with ease. We are assured home and kinship; we arrive to find an empty house. We are drawn to the visage of a guardian — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — but we are greeted by a ghost.

* * *

 

After finishing our breakfast at the donut shop, my mother and I take a cab to Logan Airport so she can catch her flight home to Chicago. When we arrive, I help her check in and walk her to the TSA cordoned security area. She waves me away at the mouth of the line, the oblong maze of tangled tape empty at this apparently unpopular time to fly. “Go,” she says. I shake my head, watching her hoist her navy canvas bag over one shoulder, taking mincing steps through the open line in front of her. This shooing-and-staying, like the floor-washing, is another one of our family’s traditions. Whenever one of us leaves their home, whether it is in Japan or the U.S., whomever they are leaving staunchly refuses to leave the side of the security line until they can no longer see them. This staying put is an act of loyalty, of love, of claiming each other as our own. We are stating that no border crossing, no officialdom, no distance or space can slice its way through our bonds.

That day I watch my mother’s small body turn even smaller in the distance, and I feel a familiar animal anxiety dig its claws into my chest. Earlier that week, crowds of people poured into U.S. airports, protesting Donald Trump’s travel ban. Scenes of lobbies filled with protesters flooded televisions, mouths moving in angry unison on muted screens. Reports of families separated at customs, of loved ones canceling plans to visit their relatives in the U.S., patients unable to access American hospitals — these are the stories that dominated the news cycle.

Suddenly, as if someone had passed a transparency over my eyes, I see the TSA agent taking a closer look at my mother’s green card. I imagine his voice, meaty and rough when raised. I imagine my mother’s English, flattening as frustration crept into her voice. I imagine what I might do if someone emerged from the wings of the security booth to grab her by the arm, roughly escorting her to a private room. I imagine if I would shout, run, or stay rooted to the spot. At least she would be OK in Japan, a small voice, at once guilty and relieved, says inside me.

My mother passes through the security checkpoint without incident. She waves from behind the metal detector, her hand cleaving a wide, swinging arc in the air. 

* * *

Citizenship comes into sharp relief at the most important junctures of life. Two years after my mother’s visit to Boston, my now-husband and I go to the Cook County Clerk’s office, in Chicago, to obtain our marriage license. We are presented with a list of appropriate documents to prove our citizenship — driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates. Above us, a looming sign proclaims: COOK COUNTY CLERK | BIRTH MARRIAGE DEATH. Birth, marriage, death: To be acknowledged, all these require proof of belonging to a nation. Plunking down my own driver’s license, I wonder what one does without the proper identification. A man ahead of us in line is turned away for not having the correct paperwork to claim his infant daughter’s birth certificate. Without the necessary government-issued credentials, no matter how strange it seemed, he could not receive proof that his daughter now existed outside the womb. Without citizenship, could you be born? Without it, could you die?

This staying put is an act of loyalty, of love, of claiming each other as our own. We are stating that no border crossing, no officialdom, no distance or space can slice its way through our bonds.

My wondering is of course borne of a certain kind of privilege. Undocumented and stateless people know exactly what it is like to live without citizenship. People dear to me have struggled for acknowledgement in the eyes of a mercurial state, granting and revoking rights with the turn of an administration. In many ways I am lucky to be presented with the conundrum of citizenship after 22 years of dual citizenship. I have had not one but two homes.

* * *

On my most recent trip home to Japan, this time to celebrate my new marriage with my family, I exited the plane groggy and barely awake. I followed the familiar corridor, the paneled light flickering, the woman’s voice telling us to mind the gap. Passengers plodded on, all of us filing forward to customs, noting the warnings for newer, more varied strains of flu. This time, I did not take the far left lane. Instead, I entered the country for the first time on a U.S. passport, my lapsed Japanese one tucked in my backpack, safely away from questions of allegiance, loyalty, and citizenship. A small part of me was relieved to filter through the droning line of tourists, no need to prove my worthiness of entry to a stony-faced official. A larger part of me wallowed in a shallow sadness, as if a pale premonition of grief, suspecting that this might be the first step toward exile.

Why do you speak Japanese so well? the man at customs barked, suspicious. Because my mother is Japanese, I answered, the image of her running a rag over my Boston floors, the homes she has created the world over for us, blurring my vision. Is this your only passport? he jabbed a finger at my solitary blue book. Yes, I smiled, three red booklets pulsing against my back.

* * *

Nina Li Coomes is a Japanese and American writer from Nagoya and Chicago. Her work can be found in The Atlantic, EATER, Catapult and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Editors Thinking About Editing at the AWP Conference

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2019 | 12 minutes (1,878 words)

 

The 11,000 people who attend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual Conference & Bookfair (AWP) come for professional advancement and to build community. They come to attend panels, to stay motivated after graduate school, to promote their magazines, book presses, and graduate programs and to choose magazines to write for, books to read, and graduate programs to attend. For many attendees, AWP is a chance to talk shop deep into the night. I came this year for many of these reasons, and also to improve my editing abilities.

Even though I work as an editor, I have a lot to learn, and the editors on the panel “Editor-Author Relationships: How Should They Be?” offered tons of practical wisdom. Jennifer Acker from The Common magazine moderated a group that included John Freeman of  Grove/Atlantic, Freeman’s, and Granta, One Story editor Patrick Ryan, and Catapult managing editor Matthew Ortile. Freeman is a quote machine; his  mind moved so quickly I could barely write down what he said.   Read more…

The Anarchists Who Took the Commuter Train

A matchbook ad for Pennsylvania Railroad, 1940. Jim Heimann Collection / Getty.

Amanda Kolson Hurley | An excerpt from Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City | Belt Publishing | April 2019 | 19 minutes (4,987 words)

The Stelton colony in central New Jersey was founded in 1915. Humble cottages (some little more than shacks) and a smattering of public buildings ranged over a 140-acre tract of scrubland a few miles north of New Brunswick. Unlike America’s better-known  experimental settlements of the nineteenth century, rather than a refuge for a devout religious sect, Stelton was a hive of political radicals, where federal agents came snooping during the Red Scare of 1919-1920. But it was also a suburb, a community of people who moved out of the city for the sake of their children’s education and to enjoy a little land and peace. They were not even the first people to come to the area with the same idea: There was already a German socialist enclave nearby, called Fellowship Farm.

The founders of Stelton were anarchists. In the twenty-first century, the word “anarchism” evokes images of masked antifa facing off against neo-Nazis. What it meant in the early twentieth century was different, and not easily defined. The anarchist movement emerged in the mid-nineteenth century alongside Marxism, and the two were allied for a time before a decisive split in 1872. Anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin rejected the authority of any state — even a worker-led state, as Marx envisioned — and therefore urged abstention from political engagement. Engels railed against this as a “swindle.”

But anarchism was less a coherent, unified ideology than a spectrum of overlapping beliefs, especially in the United States. Although some anarchists used violence to achieve their ends, like Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, others opposed it. Many of the colonists at Stelton were influenced by the anarcho-pacifism of Leo Tolstoy and by the land-tax theory of Henry George. The most venerated hero was probably the Russian scientist-philosopher Peter Kropotkin, who argued that voluntary cooperation (“mutual aid”) was a fundamental drive of animals and humans, and opposed centralized government and state laws in favor of small, self-governing, voluntary associations such as communes and co-ops. Read more…

It’s Tennis, Charlie Brown

Comic strips by Charles M. Schulz

Patrick Sauer | Racquet and Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,896 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 9.

In May 1951, seven months after a new comic strip called Peanuts debuted, an extremely roundheaded Charlie Brown is shown trying to return a tennis ball. He whiffs, then walks to the net to discuss a rule change with his pal Shermy, a once prominent but since forgotten character. The last panel shows both boys to be a half foot below the net as ol’ Chuck proposes, “One point if you hit the ball, two if you get it over the net!”

Throughout its 50-year run, tennis was a leitmotif in Peanuts. It wasn’t quite as prevalent as baseball or ice hockey, but forehands in the funny pages weren’t uncommon; the sport was shown or mentioned in a total of 236 Peanuts installments. The heyday of tennis in the beloved strip coincided with the tennis boom of the 1970s, which is when Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz was hitting the courts most frequently, thanks to his tennis-loving wife, Jean, as well as a close pal with 39 Grand Slam titles to her name. Read more…

The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez

AP Photo/Matt York

Aaron Bobrow-Strain | The Death and Life if Aida Hernandez | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 2019 | 28 minutes (5,637 words)

 

Since the move to Douglas, Arizona, Jennifer had spent less and less time at home. She was distant and irritable. Her anger encompassed her mother, her mother’s abusive boyfriend Saul, American schools, and the whole United States. At the nadir, she started lashing out at her sisters Aida and Cynthia. And then, in 1998 or 1999, she left for good.

The morning Jennifer ran away, Aida was the only other person home. She watched her sister dump schoolbooks from her backpack and replace them with clothes. She knew what was happening without having to ask and figured it was for the best. On the way out, Jennifer said that a friend would drive her across the border. After that, she’d see what happened.

Read more…

‘I Don’t Think Those Feelings of Self-Doubt Ever Go Away.’

Heather Weston / Henry Holt

Amy Brady | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,627 words)

The truth has never been a universally agreed upon concept. As most psychologists will tell you, a shift in perspective can alter how a situation feels as well as what it means. And most historians agree that the “truth” of any significant event changes depending on who’s telling the story.

In her astounding fifth novel Trust Exercise, Susan Choi plays with both perspective and narrative structure to tell the truth, or “truth,” about a group of suburban performing arts high school students. The book begins with Sarah, a fifteen year old in deep lust with her peer, David. Their friends, Karen and Joelle, and outcast Manuel, round out the teenage cast. Martin is a theater teacher from England who spends a couple of weeks at the high school, and Mr. Kingsley is their beloved theater teacher who makes the students participate in trust exercises usually reserved for older, more experienced actors. His questionable teaching style and Martin’s over-familiarity with the students are clues that the adults view the teens as both children and grown-ups, as needing guidance to navigate the professional world of acting but as also already possessing the emotional development needed to withstand the cruelty it bestows upon them.

As the novel unfolds, Choi captures the rage and lust of teenage life with thrilling verisimilitude. Who hasn’t felt the devastation of unrequited love as a horny fifteen year old? Or felt mistreated in a friendship? Or held a secret from a parent? Choi’s descriptions of her characters’ psychological interiors are equally adept: The teens walk assuredly into a classroom one moment, only to feel crushed by self-doubt the next, their self-confidence ruled by roiling hormones.

The novel’s authenticity is what makes both of its structural shifts, when they arrive, so shocking; the lives of these teens feel too real to be anything but the truth. But after each shift, everything in the story that came before is changed — changed but not entirely undone. It’s as if we had been reading the novel through a telescope only to be handed a kaleidoscope to finish it; the story’s pieces are all still there, but now they are arranged in different and surprising ways.

The shifts bring revelations about what the students endured from their teachers and parents and each other. Some of the revelations are amusing in their familiarity. Others are heartbreaking for the same reason. Trust Exercise is a novel that resonates with the #MeToo movement, but it’s also a story as old as time — it’s about those in power taking advantage of those who are powerless to stop them. Read more…

The Curious Tale of the Salish Sea Feet

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kea Krause | LongreadsApril 2019| 16 minutes (3,905 words)

They come by way of similar discovery: A beachcomber, perhaps gathering shells or out for some exercise, spots a flashy, nonpelagic lump that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a human foot still nestled in its shoe. The feet, both lefts and rights, come in all sizes — sometimes wearing New Balance or Nike, occasionally a hiking boot, and sometimes still attached to leg bones, a tibia sticking out like a stake in the ground.

To the intrigue and often horror of Pacific Northwesterners, in 2007 feet began washing up along the shores of the Salish Sea, an inland ocean spanning nearly 500 miles from Olympia, Washington, the state’s capitol, to Desolation Sound, in British Columbia, Canada. Today the tally is 21 feet and counting (15 in BC, six in Washington). So prevalent are the gruesome discoveries that the BC coroner’s office has a map marked up with each new find: Foot #1 — a right — found in August 2007 floated up to Jedediah Island in a generic white sneaker with navy blue accents; Foot #5 in a muddy Nike; Foot #13 wore black with Velcro. New Year’s Day 2019 delivered the most recent foot, number 21, to a beach in Everett. It tumbled ashore in an aging boot, its condition indicating it had been out to sea for “some time,” according to local police.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon. Earned or not, the Pacific Northwest has a haunting prestige — the home of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, and Ted Bundy, and now also the land of Twilight’s Hollywood vampires in Forks, out on the peninsula. Some morbid element of the region has arrested our imaginations. It could be the skies: So gray and responsible for all the rain that keeps everything perennially damp. Or perhaps it’s the abundance of old-growth timber — plenty of dense and protected woods for stashing bodies. Rivers, branching across the state are another nature-made means of evidence disposal. It is rumored that Ridgway discarded the bodies of as many as 70 women around the Green River, 65 miles long descending from the Cascades and entering the Puget Sound just west of Seattle. In Washington State, geography and meteorology conspire to creep us out. But perhaps most lurid is the ocean itself, not just because it continues to spew body parts to its surface but also because of its infinite and perplexing nature. Its unknowability, though alluring to those in the script-writing business, has puzzled scientists and casual observers of the Sound for generations.

The southern portion of the Salish Sea is more familiarly known as Puget Sound, a body of water servicing the Seattle metropolitan area, home to about 3.8 million residents and plenty of industry — Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, among others — all luxuriously settled in one of America’s most beautiful and diverse oceanic ecosystems. Seattle is rainy and weird, a place for artists and musicians to brood beneath weather-pregnant clouds, an offbeat city for both the creative and outdoorsy, resting in a hammock between two mountain ranges. But recently the area has seen changes out of its control: The tech industry is expected to expand the population of the Salish Sea region to 9 million people in the coming decades and has wiped away many of the city’s distinctive traits. The former home of Kurt Cobain and birthplace of grunge now has a median home value of more than $700,000 and mostly functions to accommodate well-compensated tech workers. It’s still weird though — after all, feet keep floating ashore.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon.

Last fall, I went looking for a foot. More specifically, I went to Crane’s Landing on Whidbey Island — a refuge in Puget Sound just north of Seattle — where a foot had been found, looking to see if the beach would tell me anything about why the sea had dropped the foot there. Off the ferry, I drove a narrow roadway so starved of sunshine that moss grew along its centerline. It wound through a collection of homes that petered out down by the water in a dead end. The pebble beach comprised of mostly smooth skipping stones, was lined with a row of ragged pilings, head-high with rotted bases, the remnants of the landing that had been the beach’s namesake.

When you’re from Seattle, it’s almost routine to be dazzled by the macabre sagas of the sea. As a child, my favorite story was one my uncle told about a body floating up behind his live-aboard sailboat on Lake Union. The idea of that bloated body floated into my imagination and from there on out, when visiting my family on their sailboat, I would keep my eyes glued to the water in the event another poor soul should bob up to the surface for my discovery. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Win McNamee / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Irin Carmon, Joe Bernstein, Robert Sanchez, Amanda Feinman, and Lois Beckett.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Other Rachel Lyons

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rachel Lyon | Longreads | April 2019 | 23 minutes (5,849 words)

 

I signed up for Gmail in 2005, a month after graduating college and outgrowing my .edu address. Technically the service was still in beta testing. It was early enough that I could claim my entire name, beginning to end, no numbers or crazy characters. The simplicity of my “OG handle”speaks to its vintage. I have to admit I’m rather proud of it. It also means I get a lot of correspondence not actually meant for me. Since I joined Gmail, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion active users: 20% of the world’s population. Since I joined Gmail, the world’s population itself has increased by 1+ billion! There are only so many words in the English language. There are only so many variations. Social media handles are stolen and sold like Uranium on the black market. IP addresses are finite.

I am included on the timesheet of a Melbourne store, Boost Juice — scheduled to work the closing shift on March 24 — and on the agenda for the 64th annual general meeting of the Citizens Advice Bureau in a small town outside of London. World Vision UK writes to thank me for my “donation of 10” (ten what, I don’t know). Kid to Kid Utah thanks me, too, for a donation of $9.32 worth of used children’s items. I am notified that my job application to teach at primary school in Leeds, UK, has been received. The school is rated 2.6 out of 5. One review reads: “Want your child to be bullied then send them there.”

One November I receive a note from Matt, who thinks he knows me from East High. “You Freshman Scum! A belated happy birthday this week. Hope all is going well.” (My birthday is in April, and no one would have called me “scum” when I was a high school freshman. I would have blushed. I might have cried.) December, I get a photo from Zoe — subject line: “SNOW,” body copy: “Happy Winter!” — of a courtyard, stone walls, and iron grate, blanketed in white. Adam sends me a photo, accompanied by no text at all, of three men in a lush, walled garden, one holding a Smart Water, the second holding a Starbucks cup, the third showing off three tickets to a Colts game. An American flag is stuck in a flowerpot.

Sophie writes to say how proud she is of my daughter, who “was such a sweet leader in the classroom today.” Marci tells me she signed up her son Cameron for the Abundant Life Garden Project, an after-school program at St. Philips Episcopal Church in Durham, NC, and she thinks my son Jack would have “a fabulous time” there, too. An automated message arrives from a public school in Cherryvale, KS, notifying me that my son Gary is failing English 11. His grade is 39%. What can you do with a kid like Gary? His future is looking bleak. I write to the school to let them know that the email address they’ve got on file for his mother, a different Rachel Lyon, is actually mine. They apologize and I don’t hear from them again — until the following year, when Marla writes to say she’s collecting pictures for a senior slideshow on graduation night, and will need photos of Gary no later than April 19. So Gary’s graduating after all! I’m glad he turned himself around.

One reason for all this misdirected correspondence is there are at least a few hundred people around the world who share my name. According to the dizzying website howmanyofme.com, there are 186 Rachel Lyons, Rachael Lyons, Rachel Lyonses, and Rachael Lyonses in the United States. The consonant-rich website uknames.gbgplc.com approximates 45 people in the UK, including spelling variations. (Canada — not known for its big egos, really — doesn’t seem to have an equivalent site; a search for an equivalent Australian site yielded suggestions for the following “related searches”: how many Daniels are in the world? how many people are named Mitchell? how many people in the world are named Humphrey? Apparently Daniels, Mitchells, and Humphreys are peculiarly given to egosurfing.) We Rachel Lyons are a not insignificant population.

Another reason I get so very much email, I suspect, is that when people are prompted to enter their email addresses to get something they want — free samples; access to 30 days of unlimited whatever — but don’t want to get all the spam that comes with doing so, they enter something else. What’s an easier address to think up than one’s-own-name@gmail? Given the number of digital receipts I get for things I didn’t buy, I know many Rachel Lyons have put my address down to misdirect their spam. If you’re a Rachel Lyon and you’re reading this, please know: I am here, I am real, I am receiving your correspondence, and I don’t want your spam any more than you do.

I do, however, very much enjoy the non-spam correspondence. An email is a glimpse into another life, a fragment of a story. Maybe I love getting other people’s mail because I am a fiction writer. Maybe I’m a fiction writer because I love getting other people’s mail. Chicken or egg, I do not know. All I know is it gives me a little rush. I read my misdirected correspondence carefully. I read it nosily. I read it with a little voyeuristic thrill and odd surprising pangs of envy. Rationally I know that to share a name with someone is a simple, random thing. Irrationally I can’t help but feel connected to the other Rachel Lyons of the world.

Read more…

The Unreliable Reader

Aditya Chinchure / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Wei Tchou | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,983 words)

“I write this while experiencing a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that they are dead,” the novelist Esmé Weijun Wang writes at the beginning of “Perdition Days,” an essay from her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) “What the writer’s confused state means is not beside the point, because it is the point,” she continues. “I am in here, somewhere: cogito ergo sum.” The passage moves swiftly, from first person agency (“I am writing”) to distanced third person (“the patient,” “the writer”) to the famous Descartes assertion, in Latin, “I think, therefore I am.” As a reader, it’s astonishing and a little unnerving to consider the immediacy of the prose, your intimacy with a speaker searching to find the correct vantage from which to narrate the strangely drawn, difficult-to-map districts of her mind.

That same authorial compulsion to navigate and survey pervades the book, which is notable for its subject matter alone: a first-person investigation of “the schizophrenias,” as Wang describes the four overlapping classifications of the mental disorder listed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, often shortened to DSM-5. (Wang was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, in 2013.) Wang approaches the work of writing about her mental illness as if she were reporting from a foreign place, returning to it diligently, pursuing dark corners as if to case the joint. She publishes email correspondences between herself and her physician, written in a period of psychosis. She considers her desire for motherhood through the lens of her time as a counselor at Camp Wish, a bipolar youth camp. She recalls scenes from her three involuntary hospitalizations, describing the trauma of those stays, as well as the slippery interviews on which those hospitalizations were based. Read more…