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All Mom’s Friends

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Svetlana Kitto | Longreads | February 2020 | 6 minutes (1,503 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

My parents sat us down on the edge of their bed to tell us they were separating. There was a shimmering hologram sticker of blond-haired and blue-eyed Jesus in a white robe on the door of my dad’s bedside table. I had put my fingers over it many times, trying to take Jesus into my heart like I had seen on TV. Everything I knew about America I learned from TV. Please make sure my mom and dad don’t die before I wake up. Please make sure I don’t get kidnapped like the kid on Growing Pains. Thank you, Jesus. My dad also had pictures of Hindu gods all over the house and a small Buddha statue on top of his dresser, but there was nothing about them on TV. My mom was Latvian and Jewish, but none of that was on our walls. She deferred to my dad’s New Age Englishness, and that was that.

While my parents talked to us, holding our hands and being uncharacteristically gentle, my sister cried, and I felt something inside me warm up. I stared at my mom’s pink suede and snakeskin heels on the shoe rack at the foot of the bed. She didn’t wear them anymore because they “destroyed” her back. I wanted her to wear them so badly! I didn’t want them to hurt her back and I didn’t understand how a back could hurt. My dad’s back had a hurt too, both of them had “bad backs.” I thought this had to do with them being more like old people than young because of all the drugs they had used before getting sober when I was 5. I didn’t understand that my mom was really young. She was a really young person who wanted to be with her friends. 


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After my parents separated, my mother moved my sister and me into a tiny one-bedroom on Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood. Down on Sunset Boulevard there was the Laugh Factory and Greenblatt’s Deli and the Coconut Teaser, a place for grown-ups I knew. What did grown-ups do in places? Up the street the other way was Fountain Avenue and the mouth of Laurel Canyon where I went to elementary school, just on top of the hill. After school, I rode my bike up and down our block, and one day, on the corner of Fountain and Laurel, I had my first existential crisis. I looked up at the sky and thought, overwhelmed and slightly horrified: I am me. I was 9. 

It was a Los Angeles childhood so a lot of our time was spent in the car — a beat-up gold Corolla with a Die Yuppie Scum bumper sticker on the back. My grandmother had given my mother the car to help her start her new life, separate from my father. If it was hot, the windows would be rolled down and the AC on. My mom would either be smoking or rolling a cigarette, which she could do with one hand. We would drive all over Hollywood running errands and visiting her friends, many of them sober, some of them still using, almost all of them gay men. All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men. 

My mom’s best friend, Al Babayan, was the first person close to us to go. He was Armenian and had spent most of his childhood in Glendale in Los Angeles. He had slept with Stephan, who everyone knew had HIV. Al loved the Smiths; he was very sensitive. The first thing he would do when he visited us was check on our German shepherd Maya and make sure she had water. 

* * *

I was very concerned about my mom’s romantic life. On the phone I would hear her say, “I’m just so fucking lonely.” I’d seen her break down in traffic, in the gold Corolla. “Your fucking father. Your fucking selfish father.” And it was true that my dad seemed to be fine, as the months went by piling on the girlfriends who looked nothing like my blond Jewish Latvian mother — women with names like Theresa Sullivan, Shannon O’Donoghue.

All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men.

Still, I couldn’t understand my mom’s loneliness because she had so many friends and so many people who loved her and, as a result, loved her girls. Eeda and her girls had many places to go on the weekend. In the summer, my mom’s friend Tracy invited us to swim at her parent’s mansion in Santa Monica Canyon. It belonged to Tracy’s mother, who was the famous Hollywood actress Jean Simmons. She was never there when we were so we could play hide-and-seek in all the bedrooms and eat Chicken McNuggets by the pool.  

All of my mom’s friends had a different car to ride around the city in, looking out for meters that had leftover money in them, windows down and air-conditioning on at the same time, music blaring. If it wasn’t classical music, it was Massive Attack or Prince, whom my mom and her friends loved the most. He can play every instrument, Mom said. They were the same age. He’s a genius. You can’t tell if he’s gay or straight and it doesn’t matter, she said. Everyone wants to have sex with Prince. I would rewind the tape to play “Little Red Corvette,” “Kiss,” “I Would Die 4 U” over and over, and we would all sing. I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand.

One day, my mom and I were driving to our bank in West Hollywood when I had a brilliant idea.

“Mom!” I said. “Why don’t you just be with a gay man? There are so many that you like!”

My mom paused. “Sleeping with a gay man would be like blowing your brains out with a shotgun right now,” she said gravely into the rearview mirror, shifting the car into park.

* * *

The year Ryan White died, my mother moved us to a new apartment in a gated community called Park LaBrea. She had been promoted at the production house, and we were driving around in a newly leased Volkswagen convertible. Now, Tim or Tracy or Joelle would pile into the car and we would drive to the beach with the top down and the AC on. Al came over to our new place once before he died. He and my mom got into a fight. She knew he had fixed by the burn mark he left on the toilet. “No junkie wants to be told they can’t use,” she said. I remember going to see him in hospice care in Studio City. My sister cried and I thought about our dog, Maya. I wanted to cry so my mom knew I cared.

There was Daniel, whose rich parents bought him a house in Laurel Canyon with a beautiful pool that was like a dark lagoon with jets that pumped warm water. My mom had told me that Daniel’s parents bought him lots of things because they felt guilty, because they had never accepted their gay son and now he was going to die. Daniel’s skin was pocked, which I associated with his HIV, but I later learned they were actually acne scars. Daniel took lots of pictures of Eeda and her beautiful daughters by the pool and told me I looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. 

There were people who were friends of both my parents. Tim McGowan was one, and with him my mother’s relationship was a little rockier, probably because it was too much based in a shared bitterness toward my father. There was Bruce Almeda, a pastry chef from the South who called my dad Ma Bell because he was always on the phone. There was my dad’s friend Jimmy Drinkovitch who planned to commit suicide before he got really sick. He made a promise to his lover that if he killed himself he would tell him first so that they could go together. But in the end he didn’t tell him.

With the deaths of Al and Daniel, my mom had lost her two closest friends. When she was working as an editor on the movie Mo’ Money, she met a successful music supervisor, who was also her boss. She wasn’t interested in him at first. But he wouldn’t leave her alone, she said. And eventually: He has nice calves, and he’s nothing like your father. He wanted her to quit her job and let him take care of all of us. Soon we were living with him and his two sons in a big house that wasn’t ours in Santa Monica. My mom started drinking again in secret. I was a teenager so I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. I started drinking too.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang

* * *

Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in NYC. Her writing has been featured in The Cut, Hyperallergic, New York Times, Guernica, and VICE. She’s currently working on a novel called Purvs, which means “swamp” in Latvian and is the name of the country’s first gay club.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Telling Stories In Order to Live: On Writing and Money

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | January 2020 | 14 minutes (3,866 words)

I made the decision to write full time in the summer of 2008. I was leaving a teaching position in Beijing, and moving back to Oaxaca, Mexico, my husband’s hometown. I said I was going to “live from writing.” I had no idea what that really meant, but it was a leap I wanted to take.

We lived in a $150-a-month apartment in a scruffy colonia on the outskirts of the city. The financial bar I had set for myself was around $500 a month. I met this at first by grading practice TESOL exams online. This meant hours upon hours of listening to nervous Koreans analyze Harry Potter or explain worm digestion. I was so bored I pulled out enough of my own hair to give myself a bald spot.

From here, I moved on to writing practice TESOL exams, then practice SAT exams for a Korean contractor who worked for the Princeton Review in Asia. This took less time and paid more, leaving hours of the day free for me to write overwrought and purplish essays about my travel experiences. Nights, Jorge and I ate tlayudas in a nearby señora’s garage and drank forties of Corona. A few months into my full-time writing life, I got a gig as a blogger and editor at a travel site. I learned WordPress and basic HTML and got to publish my overwrought and purplish essays on a platform for an actual audience. In the meantime, I started my second personal blog, named for — cringe with me here — a Julio Cortázar short story. My blog allowed me to publish experimental essays in Spanglish and wax philosophical about the old man at the market who carved wooden airplanes. It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

My writing sucked for a long time in diverse ways, with the occasional sentence or paragraph or maybe even mini-essay that was half decent and resonant with the promise of the actually good. In late 2009, I went to a goat slaughter at an old hacienda in Huajuapan de Léon, a dry and dusty city a few hours from Oaxaca. The slaughter was an annual event in which local herders brought their goats to be killed en masse, their meat and skin and blood and bones all put immediately to use.

It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

The scene at the hacienda seemed straight out of the 1700s. The killing was more humane than I’d expected; one swift knife in the throat and the animal died instantly. Hundreds of goats were killed simultaneously so that none had to anticipate suffering. In courtyards around the hacienda, women carved the skin from the bones and hung it like underwear to dry, men etched out internal organs and tossed them in blue buckets. Kids raced around playing tag in bloody huaraches. I took notes nonstop in my little notebook. We returned to the city late at night, and the next morning I woke up at six and started writing.

It took me three days to complete a narrative of the experience. I wrote with a concentration, intensity, and focus I’d never had before, but for which all the sucky writing of the past year (and the previous decade, in bits and pieces) had prepared me. On a whim, I applied to six MFA programs and submitted the goat essay as my writing sample. One by one the rejections rolled in, until only one school was left. I not only had to get in, I had to get funding, which wasn’t guaranteed, so I figured it was probably all over. Then one day I returned from my run and opened my email and there was an acceptance from the University of Pittsburgh, guaranteeing me full funding for the duration of the three-year program. I screamed. I jumped around the apartment screaming. I dragged Jorge out of bed and we ran down the street to our friends’ apartment and we all drank shots of mezcal at nine in the morning. I would have three years to write, full-time, funded.

In 2010 Jorge and I moved back to the U.S. for my program. The following year, I got an internship at Harper’s Magazine and started Vela, my own magazine of nonfiction writing by women. The idea of the magazine was to counter some of the frustration I’d felt in New York at the narrowness of what might be called the legacy literary world, its white, male Ivy-Leagueness. I invited five women writers I knew and respected to participate, and the concept was for us to have a collective portfolio of our skills. I was idealistic in the way of the clueless outsider. I just wanted our small group of women to show that we could write. We published stories about abusive relationships. About the Zapatistas. About stepparenting. About chronic illness. About gold mines in Peru and gangs in Ecuador and the lingering impacts of genocide in Cambodia. None of our work was paid. Our crew put in hours and hours of writing, of editing each other’s work, of copyediting and designing and promoting and participating in epic rambly email threads. All of us had day jobs: grad school, teaching, editing. We wanted to prove to ourselves and the gatekeepers that we could do it. And we did.

One by one, we grew more successful: We published in major magazines. We won grants. Some of us went on to write books, others got teaching jobs. Meanwhile we opened the magazine up for submissions. Had we been a standard literary journal, pay would’ve been a nonissue. Literary journals rarely pay and if they do, they pay enough to subsidize, say, a new pair of jeans. But we operated in a liminal zone — most of us didn’t consider ourselves journalists and we didn’t define our magazine or its mission as journalism, but most of our work wasn’t in the more academic or highly “literary” essayistic style either. We were somewhere between literary journalism and travel writing and essay writing and narrative, and this ambiguity of genre had been part of the point in the first place: to push on the boundaries of those categories. It seemed clear that journalism had to be funded and well-compensated. Literary writing, less so, although why wasn’t exactly clear. I got hundreds of emails after we’d opened to submissions from writers who demanded to know how much we paid. Many of these emails consisted of semi-belligerent offers to write “guest posts” about personal travel experiences for a certain fee. When I said we didn’t pay, I often got angry rants in response, once from a woman who had no significant bylines or books, but who charged upward of $2,000 for her writing workshops. She called our magazine a scam. Meanwhile, I read the explosion of think and opinion pieces on paying writers. I was about to graduate from my MFA program and become a full-time freelancer. By this point, five years into “living from writing,” I wanted to be paid for my creative work. I knew I wouldn’t write for my own magazine if it didn’t pay. And so we ran a Kickstarter exclusively with the point of paying writers, and we raised $28,000. With that money we were able to publish some extraordinary work from writers we might not have gotten otherwise: two essays led to major book deals, others led to grants and to longer, more in-depth journalistic stories with bigger magazines.

Ultimately, our biggest mistake was not budgeting any money for ourselves: We’d been bombarded with commentary about the importance of paying writers, but not editors. The latter worked for a paltry stipend or no salary at all. None of us had the time or the desire to take on a full-time business role. Instead, we put the magazine on hiatus while we tried to figure out future funding and plans. In the meantime, dozens of other magazines sprouted up, all in that space between journalism and the literary essay. Most of these advertised boldly and proudly that they paid — but upon investigation, the pay was $50. Maybe $100 or $200 for a long-form piece. The conversation about “writing for free” continued, now focused on the insult of being asked to write “for exposure,” with the usual rants on Twitter and think pieces making the rounds. The idea of an experienced writer being asked to do her professional work for a major media corporation for “exposure” is ludicrous and insulting. But all the bombast and pressure and rhetoric around writing “for free” ignores a few key realities: Many professional and experienced writers are being asked to write for very little, which is somehow celebrated as “payment” but is in fact nowhere near a functional wage; and many inexperienced and early-career writers might not be doing work that merits payment. The latter is a reality not many people want to discuss. My early work sucked. No one would have paid for it, and I wouldn’t blame them. I wrote hundreds of thousands of pages that would, were I to print them out, fill an entire room of my house. Little snippets of them ended up published. The 70,000-word book I wrote for my MFA thesis ended up as a 7,000-word Harper’s Magazine story. Bits and pieces of work I’d written about Spanglish and Mexico and my marriage ended up as an Oxford American essay. But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line. It wasn’t simply that it sucked. It was also that I wrote it for myself: to find out how I saw, what I cared about, how I strung my ideas and scenes together. I wrote it for the basic purpose of trying to figure out what mattered and how to convey that it mattered on the page.

But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line.

I believe — I stake my existence on believing — that art should be compensated, and compensated with a living wage. This is not a given, which is why I live in Pittsburgh, why I have a part-time job that miraculously provides health insurance. I no longer write “for free.” I have started, in fact, demanding more pay for almost every piece, knowing that as a woman I’ll likely be offered less, and knowing that if I don’t ask I surely won’t get it. At the same time, writing with money as the end goal and predominant measure of value changes the nature of the game. Maybe this isn’t always negative; commercial pressure can work as a valuable creative restraint, forcing writers out of solipsistic indulgences. But thinking only of where a piece will sell, what I can write to make the money I need — urgently need, right now — to pay for our roof, also makes me wonder why I am still doing this. Why live this life of a writer, so poorly compensated in money and acclaim, so uncertain, so competitive, so crazy-making, if I’m not even doing it because I believe in it? If I’m not doing it because I’m writing something I have to write to figure out what it means to be human? Why do it if it’s just a job?

And yet at the same time, of course it’s just a job — this is the secret I didn’t know when I began. It requires the same grind and tedium as a job. The same negotiations for pay and promotion. The same boredom and frustration. But sometimes I need to remember that if it is just this, the meaning can bottom out — then I wonder, why do it at all. There has to be some risk, some leap that may not necessarily be compensated. That is uncertain and scary. Writing that matters is often risky — its saleability may not be immediately obvious, its style may be unconventional, it may break with standard forms and narratives. It does what it has to do to figure itself out. Certainly, there is phenomenal writing that doesn’t necessarily follow these rules, that may pop up within very familiar genres and categories. There is also plenty of writing that flaunts convention and fails to achieve anything of importance. Yet writing for a living often means writing, ultimately, what the market will bear. It means internalizing the stylistic and rhetorical and intellectual underpinnings of the literary behemoths, then shaping one’s work in their image. It means putting the cart of audience — and the style of “high magazine-ese” — before the horse of the idea, of the struggle to make sense of the intractable. It can shrink the work into manageable and predictable frames, and this can explain why so much of what is published and shared feels so familiar, and fails to generate that feeling of the whole world having been rattled and made new.

The other day, I went to a talk by a well-known writer who has become a guru on the business of writing, and she talked quite a bit about audience: She hinted that writers who don’t consider their audience aren’t savvy enough businesspeople, and maybe even self-centered or obsessed with prestige. But I wondered how it is possible to create authentic work, with that essential spark of the urgent and the curious, that is centered first and foremost on an audience’s imagined desires. Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

I Skyped the other day with my little brother, a fellow artist who lives in Sweden and works as a barista and reaps all the benefits of the Scandanavian welfare state while flailing around trying to make a career out of music. “I know it’s bad when you’re Skypeing me at 1:30 p.m.,” he told me, meaning productivity, career-obsessed me, normally squeezing every last drop of potential wordage and progress out of the day, must be having a crisis if I am sitting in slippers in my backyard at 1 p.m. talking to him. He grinned through a mouthful of frozen pizza. I went on one of the flights of what-is-this-life fancy I can only indulge with him. I talked about Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and how after I read it I had that uncanny feeling of both how limited my work and life are and how profound and big the true mission and scope of art can be. It simultaneously made me want to give up — if I can never do that, why bother? and to forget all my woes and keep going, with a realigned compass focused not on publication but on that feeling I had each night I put The Overstory down. Why live this life, why embark on this madness of writing full-time, constant rejection, constant financial stress, the constant tug of pettiness and ego, if I’m not doing it because I’m trying to get at that essence of connection or meaning or mystery that makes a reader put down a book and just sit for a while and stare, or cry, or call her mother? Why do it if not for that? That, at the end of the day, has very little to do with money.

At the same time, when I have finished a piece of writing now, I am fully aware of the skill and the expertise required to create it — I cannot imagine publishing it for free. It is my livelihood. I need it to be recognized with adequate pay. I need the pay to fund my existence. The pay becomes the recognition and validation that reinforces the meaning of the work. The job and the passion blur in confusing ways, helixed so tightly it’s hard to unwind them. The irony is that the further I get into my career and the more I really need and demand money, the more I come to question what this means for my writing, what I believe and care about as a writer, what I am exchanging for what. It becomes harder and harder to write in that pure void of ideas and perseverance without knowing when the money will come and from where, trusting that eventually, if the work is good enough, it will come. Trusting that if and when it does, it means I’m doing it right. That it’s “worth it.” Eventually, the money has always come, but it has always not been enough, and I have always kept at it anyway believing eventually it will be, and on and on.

Recently, I started a newsletter. I did it in part because of all the pressure to kick off the promotion process for my second book, but also because for years now I’ve been wanting to write the kinds of essays I used to write: introspective, heartfelt, unabashedly Midwestern in spirit, with guest appearances by my dad and Annie Dillard. I didn’t write them and didn’t start the newsletter for years because I wouldn’t be paid, and I thought I should be concentrating only on what I could sell. Yet in starting the newsletter I rediscovered the joy of writing as a fundamental way of being in and moving through the world. It felt so unexpectedly good. I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

No professional writer or artist should be working for free. But neither should they be writing for $50 or $150 or $200, or for a paltry monthly stipend. Instead of painting a stark dichotomy between paid and unpaid work, I wonder if we could think of artistic careers as moving along a spectrum or timeline, from early work that might be funded by other means — MFAs, day jobs — to beginning work that might be paid a small amount, to professional work that should be paid a living wage. A publication offering $50 for an essay can’t announce “We pay!” as a sort of uniform accomplishment; the mere act of paying doesn’t necessarily make the work more valid nor does it properly compensate the work. When the focus becomes so much on the act of payment as a type of validation, not only do other metrics of value get lost — creative freedom and exploration and support — but what it means to pay meaningfully and fairly gets lost as well.

I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

I don’t regret writing for free all those years when I was figuring out how to write. But I have more complicated feelings about writing full-time now for what amounts to barely a living wage. I find it much harder in the early middle of my career to sustain and justify this work — I’m not a 28-year-old graduate student who can live on the same pizza for a week anymore. I have a child. I have a freaking mortgage. I went out for a beer the other night with a friend, also about 10 years into her writing and editing career, very accomplished and very financially unstable, and she said, “We’re too far in now to back out!” It’s true. It feels like we can’t give up. But the path forward is so uncertain — success looks so distinct for each particular artist and may not have any correlation with money. I was whining and moaning with my husband the other night about my career and when I would “make it” and he said, “Maybe you have made it,” and I realized that yes, maybe I have. Had anyone told me in graduate school I’d be writing for the magazines I write for and publishing my second book, I’d have let my head fill with self-congratulatory fantasies of greatness. Now, I spend most mornings writing at a plastic table on our front porch with a fitted sheet as a tablecloth. I am constantly hustling. Sometimes I am fulfilled in the way people can be fulfilled by a single word: writer. Often I am keening anxiously toward the future. This is an object lesson in the human condition of forever wanting more and never being aware of what is going on right here right now, but it’s also a lesson in the improbability and uncertainty of “living from writing” or from any art, of how really going at it with passion and dedication offers no guarantees or certainty or promise of stability. Yes, many artists and writers accept this as common knowledge — perhaps even as a badge of honor — starting out, but there is a very big difference between knowing it at an idealistic 28 and knowing it at 36 with a child, uncertain health insurance, and a house. I am fully aware now of the precise contours, dimensions, nooks, crannies of the gap between my ideals and financial and commercial realities. Much time is spent navigating that gap, possibly as much time as I spend writing.

Writing for free, or for very little, is something I would not and cannot do now — and yet at the same time, I long for the inhibition of that time when my writing wasn’t so hitched to my ability to pay for childcare or buy groceries. I have found it the most difficult to sustain my belief in the larger purpose of what I am doing when I am also desperately trying to get it to pay me and pay me enough. Yet at the same time, I do see progress: I am making a living. I am living from writing, my writing, still the writing I want to do and also writing I sell. But the balance is delicate and fragile. It is not so much between writing for free and writing for pay: it is between writing that makes the act of writing worthwhile, that feels somehow essential to deeper human understanding, and receiving sufficient money for this writing — between the very solitary act of making something I need to make out of a personal urgency and the needs and desires and economic whims of thousands of other people. This is the cost and the meaning of “living from writing.” I keep doing it, because I don’t know what else to do, because I am not qualified to do anything else, because I have come this far and I don’t want to give up now. I keep doing it in the hopes that someday that elusive balance will be struck between financial stability and creative freedom. In the meantime, I try to keep my compass as finely tuned to the north of what troubles me, moves me, confuses me, even as I draw up Google spreadsheets, as I write the tentative notes to editors asking for just a little more, as I cling to that ledge of living from writing and keep trying to peek over the top.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America, forthcoming from Pantheon in April 2020. Her first book, Homing Instincts, (Pantheon, 2017), was long listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has been featured in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Guernica, Oxford American, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a 2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellow. Follow her on Instagram @familiasantiago. Visit her website at http://www.sarahmenkedick.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2020

Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat (Photo by Sean Drakes/LatinContent via Getty Images)

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

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For many years now, I’ve been posting short stories on Twitter. It’s a habit now: Before sitting down to write — my Hindi language ten-part Audible Original Thriller Factory is up and running, written and directed under series director and presenter Anurag Kashyap’s stewardship with narrators including Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Tabu — I look around for a story, read it, then share it. I end up reading almost every day, irrespective of whether I am able to write something or not.

Starting with Kristen Roupenian’s The Good Guy, to Etgar Keret’s Pineapple Crush, I posted 297 stories in 2019. Here are ten that I enjoyed the most: Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Science and Nature

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in science and nature.

Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and publisher of Undark magazine.

‘We Have Fire Everywhere’ (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine)

Our Secret Delta (Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith, The Post and Courier)

One of the most interesting trends in climate change reporting is the way writers now quietly and deftly weave its effects into the background of natural disaster stories, from the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic to the increasingly explosive wildfires in the west. I’d like to pay tribute to two outstanding examples of this in the past year.

One is environmental writer Jon Mooallem’s stunning narrative portrait of last year’s devastating Camp Fire in northern California, which killed at least 85 people, burned through nearly 240 square miles, and destroyed almost 20,000 buildings including almost all of the small, wooded town of Paradise. Mooallem’s story “We Have Fire Everywhere” is a vivid, terrifying, edge-of-your seat reconstruction of desperate attempts to escape a literal inferno. It moves so beautifully and is so well-paced that you almost don’t realize that he’s also slipping in a lot of very smart fire science, exploring the ways in which climate change is making wildfires exponentially more dangerous. Describing one harrowing moment in a line of burning cars, he writes, “Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a car; she was trapped in the 21st century.”

The other is “Our Secret Delta,” a haunting exploration of South Carolina’s threatened Santee River delta, published this September in the Charleston paper, The Post and Courier. It’s a real pleasure in these days when we worry so much about the fate of local journalism to see this paper shine in so many important ways. This project, led by Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith, is visually gorgeous and told with the grace of an old-time Southern story, allowing the delta, its history and culture, its fragile waters, to gradually unspool like the winding path of a river itself. The writers create a memorable portrait of an old and essential ecosystem under new threats. Perhaps the most ominous threat is the rise of coastal waters as they reshape the state, yet another reminder that climate change stalks our present as well as our future.

Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and instructor of creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Climate Signs (Emily Raboteau, The New York Review of Books)

When Emily Raboteau’s son becomes obsessed with extreme weather events after a family outing to the “Nature’s Fury” exhibition at the natural history museum in New York, she wonders how much she should shield her five-year-old from conversations around climate change. It is a query she carries with her as she embarks on a city-wide pilgrimage to visit each installation of a public art project called “Climate Signals” wherein the artist hijacks highway traffic signs, rewriting their commonplace warnings with uncanny proclamations of new hazards ahead. In Saint Nicolas Park in Harlem, the sign reads: CLIMATE CHANGE AT WORK. At Hudson River Yards, the yellow lettering spells out an even more dire threat: CLIMATE DENIAL KILLS. In this expertly rendered essay –– gracefully weaving between the personal and critical, the scientific and political –– Raboteau attempts to make sense of what it means to raise a child in a world that is coming apart. It is a question many have but that is all too often addressed in reductive, late capitalist logic in which our human hearts are not taken into consideration.

Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau is a professor of creative writing at the City College of New York, and the author of several nontraditional longform essays, including a year-long Twitter thread on climate change, @emilyraboteau.

After the Storm (Mary Annaïse Heglar, Guernica)

Mary Annaïse Heglar’s “After the Storm” stood out to me as a knockout personal essay on climate this year. Heglar is building a body of important work marrying climate awareness with social, environmental, and racial justice. In this piece, which ran in Guernica in October, she frames her harrowing experience of Hurricane Katrina, along with her family in the Mississippi River region, as the lens through which she now sees the climate movement as an activist and director of publications at the National Resources Defense Council. She weaves together the overtly racist news coverage of that storm, the fact that it made landfall the day after the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder, and the inequitable suffering of New Orleans’ Black population to illuminate the layers of historical injustice magnified by the climate crisis, “covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It’s what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically ‘left out,’ but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers.” This should be required reading for those interested in how equity and equality are pivotal to successful climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Mary Annaïse Heglar
Mary Annaïse Heglar is a climate justice writer and communications professional based in New York City.

The End Times Are Here, and I Am at Target (Hayes Brown, The Outline)

Perhaps the most perplexing paradox of climate change is its ability to be both overwhelmingly terrifying and mind-numbingly ordinary. Especially in the past few years, as denial has become less of a viable option and even delusion has slipped from our fingers, the climate crisis with its alarming headlines and horror stories has become… normal. The steady drumbeat to the banality of our lives. Hayes Brown manages to capture that drumbeat in this masterful essay, isolating its sound out of the symphony with surgical precision. As he runs regular errands in a regular Target on a regular, if unusually hot, summer day in Brooklyn, the climate crisis reverberates in the back of his mind, filtering into every choice of every item, if he allows himself to think of it. As someone who exists as a bonafide “climate person,” I love the fresh eye that Hayes brings to the subject. He gives voice to the haunting bewilderment, the guilt of surrender, and the uncertainty that lies within the cracks of the certainty. His essay reminds us of the dullness of our collective heartbreak as we stare into our manmade abyss.

Mikael Awake
Mikael Awake‘s work has appeared in GQ, Bookforum, ArtNews, The Common, and most recently McSweeney’s 58: 2040 A.D. He teaches at Lafayette College.

Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries (Malcolm Harris, Pacific Standard)

This piece by Malcolm Harris has stuck with me for a few reasons. It came out in Pacific Standard, which was an important outlet for environmental writing before it was shut down this past August. (How the crisis in media has interacted with the climate crisis is a subject for another day.) The essay is an elegant synthesis of entomology, economics, and colonial history that places indigenous knowledge at the foundation of the climate conversation — not as ornament, but as central anti-capitalist critique, as timeless technology. Such a piece could inspire the allotment of more time and money — in academic, political, media, and cultural spaces — for deeper dives into indigenous environmentalism and systems of knowledge. It made me dream of a 1619 Project-style series devoted to un-suppressing those narratives, and made me think about Standing Rock and Mauna Kea and how the violent suppression of indigenous activism works hand-on-musket with the suppression of indigenous thought. Harris is a sharp and funny writer, which is why this story seemed something of a departure in approach and tone, and I appreciated it. I wasn’t familiar with the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who posits the crucial idea that what we call climate change is not a new challenge, but one as old as the New World, “part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based society.” The piece resonated with my feeling that imagination is a function of collective human memory, or as Harris says, paraphrasing sociologist Nikitah Okembe-RA Imani, “[t]hose who study what has been suppressed can see the future.”

* * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Tar Bubbles

Melissa Matthewson | Longreads | November 2019 | 9 minutes (2,451 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

I used to play with tar bubbles on the pavement in the Missouri suburbs when I was just 5 while my mother watched, or didn’t, from our two-story home. I spent a wealth of time alone as I recall. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing, except that now, as an adult, I love to be solitary in abundance — walking through tall reeds on a lake shore and reading the sky for colors of rose and peach at the edge of night, crouching on one knee, measuring the pronounced shifts of the purpling dark, or surveying the birdhouses for bluebirds, perhaps a few feathers as testimony. In memory, as a child, my mother couldn’t be bothered with me, and so the hours turned. My mother must have thought, Give her a soda and the Beach Boys, her dolls, the second-story window, tar bubbles, she’ll be okay. Now, my daughter asks me when I depart for work or play, “Why do you always leave?” My mother never went away, but she was always absent. 

I was consumed with the bubbles — my favorite thing was to pop them, one by one, just off the sidewalk. There were differences between the beads of tar. Some were more satisfying to burst than others: those that had sufficient air rose firm unlike the already diminished bubbles that had no depth. The heat gave rise to the tar and on the hottest days, the tar bubbles multiplied to my thrill and captivation. Imagine the precision in directing fingers toward the condition of collapse. Such particular attendance to one thing. I’d lay there for hours hoping to find the one that would make me feel less deflated. Less alone. I think I might have gleaned a film of toxic glue in the creases of my skin, but you can’t have back those hours as a child when all that circled in your imagination were the stories of princesses perhaps and orphans and seahorses and Persephone and the quiet boredom of popping, over and over until the afternoon went.  

 It’s quite technical the variety of cracks that break on pavement, and necessary then to fill them with tar, at least it was in 1980: fatigue cracking, reflection cracking, edge cracking too. These terms have definitions, but I’d like to name my own — what is a crack but a split between two things, a fracture, a rupture? Gaps as in the seed head, the space between kernels, the pores of grain and chink of light underneath the doorframe, the interlude of two bodies making love, the burrows in dirt where vermin go, in a field mowed for a path, the separation of wake and dream, the break of keys on a piano. We always want to fill the cracks, seal them with something, anything, to perhaps ease the discomfort and the realization that we are always alone. Maybe to hide the loss that ascends from melody or sad stories. There’s always something that wants to grow in the gaps left behind. A filler: conversation, a weed, music. A way to save ourselves perhaps, but what if we left the gaps open, ajar? What would happen then? 

What is a crack but a split between two things, a fracture, a rupture?

Our Missouri home had Midwestern appeal, the American Dream, on the edge of a wood that to me, at the time, was enormous and churned forth with witches and ugly things, but also beautiful with ochre hickory and ground litter I liked to crunch over with my boots. I liked our deck, with the barbecue and hamburgers and the orioles with a patois of chatter. The long avenue of our staircase ascended to my bedroom where I hid in imagination and play, or where I’d sit at the top of the landing and listen to the adults in the kitchen laughing, whispering, smoking, maybe dancing. We sold the house after a few years — my father wanted the West where he had been born and grown into a man, so that home with its slanted roof and tar bubbles is now nothing but a distance. A longing.  

* * *

I have a daughter of my own, Ava, 8, who is delightfully imaginative and kind, and we spend time together often, so she asks me what happens after you die. Ava, for bird. For life. In Persian, Ava means voice, sound. As sky, heaven, opening. “Do you dream,” she wonders. “I think you return to the earth,” I reply. “Like what? Like a tree? I want to be a tree that doesn’t get cut down,” she answers, not waiting for me to respond. Later, we sit at a pond waiting for her brother and she takes a stick to a dead fish, bloated from the top of the head to neck (say, if a fish had a neck), overwhelmed with water. “Strange,” I say. “I’ve never seen that.” Blue dashers skitter across the pond, dizzying asymmetry and I can’t keep up. It’s hot here. She becomes frightened soon when the fish splashes and jumps suddenly in the pond as she pierces it — and in this unexpected action, she deteriorates, becomes all raw. I’m alone with her, and the breeze is so sudden and lovely on the hot afternoon, that I shush her. “Ava, the wind. Feel it.” Why should she cry — it’s just a fish, but she goes on. “I don’t want nightmares,” she says, and I become galled by her whimpers. I do not soothe her.  


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There are other such times that my daughter enchants me (or impels me into tangents) with her wisdom, and I pay attention, cultivate an awareness and try my damnedest to listen and at least share in her spellbound fascination with the universe. I try hard not to be my own mother (not to be bothered, but oh, how I do it, and oh, how I hate myself for it). My daughter tells me she wants to live in Alaska during the summer. She was born on a night of heavy rain and loves storms and cold and bitter wind, watching out the window as the deluge saturates our farm, the world, covers all the oaks and orchard grass. She says to no one in particular, but maybe me, “The rain shines like diamonds.” 

She spends hours on the sidewalk one afternoon spreading petals from the cherry tree, making up titles for her installation: The Path That Never Ends, but Fades, or A Heart Exploding. When we live together in our small living room set up against the mountain, she listens to the stories on the radio and I ask her questions, but she’s distracted and not attending to me. She says, “I get lost in my land of over and over again.” 

* * *

When I’m away on one of my trips, the trips Ava complains about, the trips I tell her are important to me, something she’ll understand as she grows older (though, will she resent me for my absence? Even as she stretches her heart thrum through the phone on evenings when I call and we talk and she recites spells and rhymes she’s composed about words and the lines of their path), I watch two girls play by a fountain. 

I try hard not to be my own mother (not to be bothered, but oh, how I do it, and oh, how I hate myself for it).

They are without their mother, or father, or any guardian at all, which is unique and interesting, and they are eating cherries, discussing Montreal and underwear and miniature figurines. The precocious girl explains divorce to her friend in the unicorn helmet, “They are together, but not anymore. It’s like they had me and then —” she breaks and it makes me think of the way we talk to one another in threaded spontaneous associations and how one person will occupy the space more than another, and how we feel inadequate in our own selves because of this. The sky widens into purple as I observe the girls (they could tell I was snooping, but I pretended to look at my book every now and again) and I wonder how a small child understands separation. She is smart, this girl, already beautiful, with dark skin and big eyes, facial gestures that will change every man, every woman’s notion of attraction. Here now at this fountain, can she ever know the other girl in a way that isn’t contrived somehow? How can she reach across the grass and meet her friend? The sky becomes a strange color then, of shadows and gray, and I wonder how to escape the divide between us? Not so these little girls. They seem close enough tonight. As I watch the girls take off across the grass toward home, cherry juice on their lips and cheeks and hands, the fireflies arrive, popping incandescent in the night air. 

I think, I’m everything to my little daughter. The day before I leave for another trip, she follows me around the entire stretch of day and asks that we play her favorite game, the one where she lays on top of me in the side yard on my reclining chair and we listen to the sounds and count all the things we hear. We do this for several minutes until she speaks up and tells me what she has gathered: a scrub jay rustling above in the plum tree, the wind like a tender breath, a car racing by, the boys talking down in the field where they pick greens for salad. “What do I hear?” she wonders. I say, “The same.” Later, she asks that I take her for a walk to the mailboxes and talk, not about anything she says. Just talk. She clutches my hand and tells me about Paris and asks me, “What do you love?” I tell her, “This. I love this.” Upon return, she constructs fairy houses in the garden I tend out front with the sage and rudbeckia, oregano, bee balm and lavender. Little ladders and barns and Playmobil figures. I liken the fairly dwellings to the tar bubbles. I think it is the same attention for those gaps of time when time is everything and nothing at all. I leave them where they are when I sprinkle the garden with water and watch, as over time, they fall apart and she builds new ones. I don’t think my mother was everything to me. It was a consistent wandering away from home that I recall: into the woods, up the drive to the scary homes big with ghosts, places of mystery and riddle, through the Greenbriar to Bethie’s house. Away. Even now, a range I don’t want to cross. 

It’s then I have a terrible dream that wakes me at 3 a.m. I’m at a gathering in a barn loft with lengths of wood as the floor with spaces in between, many large openings revealing the floor beneath. The barn roof slants sharply to the ground. I’m drinking wine and my children are with me, playing, though I don’t seem to have any concern for their safety as they leap around the barn, peeking through the slats into the interstices and cracks. There are women at the party, dressed in elegant garments, but they are unaware of me as they speak to one another. I say, “I’m here, What now?” As I turn my back on the children, the night collapsing into indefinite contours, and raise my glass to the air, there ruptures a shriek, a few I think, eclipsing the tenor of celebration. I turn to see a child, I don’t know who, reach forward to grab my daughter as she slips and falls to the ground and is gone. 

It isn’t long after the dream that Ava discovers I’ll die and there is nothing to stop the tears. She’s young — this will all change — so I hold her, say, “We all die, but not too soon. Not too soon.” We continue to collect our time together in the expression of this new awareness — she sings to me lullabies, tells me stories, and dresses me up in tutus and glittery vests. I go with her when she asks, and if there were tar bubbles on the gravel road, I’d pop them with her. I let the things I don’t know about her stay fastened inside her until she will let me into her secrets, if ever a chance for this. 

On a warm day, I sit with her at the table out back and watch the new season come in like a deep breath: the grass laid out upon the earth, the geese streaming across the sky, the blue heron erupting from the pastures. We lay out a picnic in the yard with a quilt patched in pumpkins and goldenrod and sip lemonade together. I tell her of a time I took her shoes with me on a trip, by coincidence, a pair of pink Mary Janes. I found them stuffed into the pocket of my tote bag, having somehow missed them through packing, airport security. They were small. Shoes for a 3-year-old. I remember I was leaving for two weeks and when I arrived at my destination, I put them on the shelf near my books in my temporary home and consulted them every day as a reminder of who she was and who I was, should that ever disappear. While studying the shoes, I remembered a distant morning when I had come upon a cattle drive in the early reaches of winter near the township of Wisdom, Montana. Men on cow ponies drove the herd over the two-lane road covered in Angus muscle and sweat, the cattle’s highway to winter range and fresh grass, the sounds of thuds and hooves on pavement, the low moos of livestock and an occasional “Haw! Haw!” from the lead. A woman followed behind them all and with her, a bundled baby on the saddle, a pink face poised against the 30-degree wind. Tough and weathered, the woman and baby drew close, calm behind the herd, like a dream. I wanted to ride with them toward the Anaconda-Pintlers across the great plains of Montana and never look back. With them, I wanted to rinse my hands in the Big Hole River and kick my boots against the chutes and fences of the grazing pasture. I wanted to hold onto them forever, reins and sweat and grit and all. I wanted to preserve their fortitude, their fragility. I wanted to preserve their extinction.

I turn to Ava where we mingle in the grass and tell her all this and see the gaps in her teeth as she smiles, like open invitations, and think, maybe there’s something here that tells of our future circumstance, a distance we can’t know until tomorrow.  

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes

* * *

Melissa Matthewson’s essays have appeared in Guernica, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, River Teeth, and The Rumpus among other publications. Her first book of nonfiction, Tracing the Desire Line, is out now from Split Lip Press. She teaches at Southern Oregon University.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Cross Talk

Photo Collage by Homestead Studio

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | November, 2019 | 34 minutes (9,431 words)

To get to Kamp in rural Missouri every year, I flew from Jakarta to Singapore to Tokyo to Minneapolis to Springfield. There, my mom rented a car, picked our trunks up from storage, and drove my brother and me up winding roads to drop us off first, always first. The welcome party was a horde of college-age blond-haired, summer-tanned counselors jumping around in costumes: ballerina skirts over basketball shorts; children’s floaties tight around biceps; the beleaguered orange hair of a synthetic lion mane worn too many times. Without other kids there yet, a product of our early arrival, the party seemed surreal. I slouched in the back seat of the car. Maybe I could disappear.

“I can’t do this,” I moaned, though I knew deep down that I would. After all, I was the one who had discovered Kamp. A popular older boy on my swim team in Indonesia, one with crew-cut brown hair and a glistening set of abs, had bragged to the other kids about how much fun it was. I begged my parents to let me and Erik attend, so they logged on to our family’s dial-up internet. Years later, a search for Kanakuk Kamps would render a list of news articles rife with reports of sexual abuse and molestation, but back then it led you to its website, which only featured pictures of clean-cut kids splashing in the pool or standing on a kelly-green soccer field, their arms around one another. My parents signed us up.

“You say that every year,” my mom said. She turned from the driver’s seat to look at me, her green-blue eyes unblinking. “Come on, get out.”

“But this year I’m serious,” I whined. Though I liked Kamp for the lake swimming and kickball tournaments, it felt like a test of identity, one I never passed: to prove I was a good, Christian, American girl.

“Come on, Jaggin’,” my brother said. The counselors rushed toward the car, the chant of howdy y’all, get rowdy y’all growing louder as my brother opened his door. We said a quick goodbye to my mom, and Erik and I followed our counselors into the cavernous dodgeball gym.

“You gonna be OK?” Erik asked. Though I was 12 and he 11, he often took on the role of an older sibling in how he cared for me. Lecrae’s Who u with? Are you in it to win man? Are you livin’ in sin reverberated from stacked speakers. LED lights flickered a kaleidoscope of colors over the walls. Without Kampers, the scene felt depressing, like a birthday party no one had bothered to attend.

Mungkin,” I whispered. I shrugged. My use of Bahasa Indonesian was a ploy to make him feel tethered to me, though he was confident enough not to need me at Kamp. When we were in America, the language felt like a set of tin cans and string no one else could touch.

“Please try to have fun,” he said, and walked to the boys’ side of the gym, where he pantomimed skateboard moves with his counselors. I wrung my hands and waited.

One by one, the other Kampers came in. They separated by gender, the way we would remain throughout Kamp. Boys’ and girls’ cabins were on separate sides of the property, our dining hall tables were on opposite ends of one long room, and parties were divided by an unmarked line on the gym floor. The only way I would see my brother throughout the week was if he passed my cabin on the way to somewhere else.

Girls began to populate my side of the gym. To me, all of them looked like my American Girl dolls at home, their noses perfectly freckled, skin like shimmering bowls of cream, hair wild and undone. They danced politely around me in their oversize basketball shorts and baggy T-shirts, all modest enough to meet the Kamp dress code. They talked about soccer tournaments and complimented hair braids.

‘Mungkin,’ I whispered. I shrugged. My use of Bahasa Indonesian was a ploy to make him feel tethered to me, though he was confident enough not to need me at Kamp. When we were in America, the language felt like a set of tin cans and string no one else could touch.

“You’re from Kansas City, too? No way!” Two girls hugged, as if the proximity of their neighborhoods was a sign from God. I knew it was just coincidence. Girls came from the same hometowns every year: Knoxville, Naperville, Dallas, Fayetteville, Wichita, St. Louis, Tulsa. The city names sounded so American, especially prefaced by a suburb of. I often wondered what it would be like to say I had been raised in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family home on Ashley Spring Court or Savannah Hills Drive. During summers in America, I had seen the miracle of glittering, planned streets, and I wanted them as my own. Instead, my family moved frequently. Before Jakarta, we’d lived for four years in Balikpapan, Indonesia, in a home we deemed the Vitamin House because B-12, our address, was sprayed yellow on our driveway.

I stayed away from the other girls, hoping they wouldn’t ask me any questions, especially about where I was from. I knew that my body — a gangly array of tanned limbs and blond hair cut to my chin — looked like the Kamp girls, but I felt split in half, like I didn’t belong. My vision of America came from the filtered peek I received each summer on our two-month trek through grandparents’ living rooms, the Mall of America, and cousins’ lush backyards. I fell in love with the silky green grass I was allowed to touch with bare feet. But I didn’t know the country well, not at all. I felt like a tourist in a land that everyone else said was mine, and though I’d been coming to Kamp for three years, the initial night always felt shocking, like a full-body plunge into ice-cold water.


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Smile, I reminded myself. Kamu orang Amerika.

Eventually, in the gym swollen with the noise and heat of nearly 300 campers and counselors, the Kamp leader who went by the initials of something like JP shushed us all over the microphone.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he crooned, like a poorly paid late-night radio host. “How are we all doing tonight?”

The Kampers cheered. I raised my voice in a half-hearted yay while scanning the boys’ side of the room for any sign of my brother’s freckled cheeks or the white-blond spot on the back of his head that marked him like a fawn. My counselor shot me a glare.

“Let’s play Who Traveled Farthest to Kamp!” he yelled. I twisted the edge of my T-shirt in my hand. “Stand up now, and when I name a state, you’ll sit down if you get eliminated.”

We all stood up. I tried finding Erik again. Most of the counselors were new each year, so maybe we could lie about where we were from. The bobbing sea of boy-hair left him camouflaged.

Half the crowd sat down at “anywhere outside Missouri.”

Another chunk crumpled to Kansas.

Texas.

Oklahoma.

Soon, I could see my brother, one of only five or so of us left standing.

JP, wearing a bandana around his balding head in an attempt to look hip, dragged the cord of his microphone behind him into the crowd.

“Which one of you thinks you have it?” he asked. I shot my brother a glance, hoping my eyes would say we could pretend to be from Illinois? He gave me a thumbs-up, not understanding. He didn’t mind the attention; somehow his status as the Boy From Indonesia earned him extra credibility.

A boy with scruffy brown hair raised his hand. “Virginia,” he yelped into the microphone.

“Ooh,” JP sang. “Virginia. How long did it take for you to get here?”

“A day,” the kid said. I looked around. The girls in my cabin flitted their eyes at one another, impressed. Two of the other kids sat down. My palms began to sweat, and I rubbed them on the tie-dye I LOVE TABLEROCK LAKE tourist T-shirt my mom had purchased for me at the local Walmart.

“Anyone from further than that?” JP murmured. He swaggered toward me, and I again eyed at my brother: help. I was the one who struggled with words under pressure. On a family vacation to a different island, a man had approached me asking, “Where’s the slide” in a British accent. I’d responded “Disana, disana,” before he backed away, saying “SORRY” slowly and loudly. Sometimes even my tongue got tangled between lives.

“Where are you from?”

I wasn’t from anywhere, I wanted to say. I wasn’t allowed to be from Indonesia; no matter the fact that I had lived there for five years — longer than anywhere else in my life — no matter that I spoke the language, no matter that I no longer remembered what America was like, I could never be from Indonesia. I’d always be a white foreigner, the daughter of parents wealthy enough to live on the compound, holder of a passport from the USA.

“Jakarta, Indonesia,” I whispered.

The crowd went silent.

Is that in California? someone behind me whispered.

Probably, a different voice whispered back.

“That’s near Bali, right?” JP responded. I nodded yes, though I wanted to him to know the difference between the tourist resort town and where I lived. People went to Bali for a pristine beach, trinkets, and the idea that they were somewhere foreign, without ever actually experiencing the realities of the country. I wanted to believe that my years in Indonesia had been different. I learned to squat rather than sit while waiting for the bus, watched the snake man wrangle a spitting cobra into a cage, and woke each morning to the wail of a mosque, the prayers a soothing cadence. I wanted to tell him that I came alive in the rhythm of a place where I could never belong — but I didn’t.

I wanted to tell him that I came alive in the rhythm of a place where I could never belong — but I didn’t.

He adjusted his bandana before making the hang-loose sign with his free hand. “Rad.”

***

The first days of Kamp passed in a haze of chlorine and a crackle of bonfire. One afternoon our cabin trekked from the soccer field to the volleyball court, where we had been told we’d get to play against a boys’ cabin. One of the girls walked next to Melissa, who was secretly my favorite counselor. Melissa was blond, tan, and wore a small purple sport watch on the inside of her wrist. Kampers and counselors alike were drawn to her intensely caring and exuberant spirit. Melissa was who I dreamed I might turn out like someday, when my braces and glasses would finally come off, when my hair would grow past my chin and cascade down my back, when I would move to America and change not only my appearance but also the part of me that grew anxious whenever I was around too many other people. I wanted to give tight-squeeze side-hugs like Melissa instead of turning away. I wanted to be able to love others without abandon, without worrying that who or what I was would never be enough.

I wanted to be able to love others without abandon, without worrying that who or what I was would never be enough.

Boys waited at the volleyball court. The other girls, out of earshot of our counselors, had whispered throughout the week about biceps and dimples and hunky hair. I wanted to participate, but even speaking about the boys seemed like a sin. As girls, we were supposed to view the opposite sex as brothers, protecting them from our preadolescent forms by wearing one-pieces at the pool, long shorts, and baggy T-shirts everywhere else. Plus, when I scanned the lineup, my actual brother was there. Only 13 months younger than me, he’d been assigned to my partner cabin. I raised my hand in acknowledgment. Without him around, I’d been able to pretend my life in Indonesia was a distant dream and that my small attempts at being social were equivalent to a queen bee rallying a hive.

“Melissa, you know we’ve got a star on our team?” the boys’ counselor teased. He and Melissa had been flirting all week in the way that only Kamp counselors could. They’d pass notes filled with scripture and make fun of each other’s college mascots. Sometimes Melissa left her long hair down after illegally drying it in our cabin, and she’d flip it over her shoulder.

“Is that right? I’ve got some stars, too,” Melissa said, her voice light.

“This kid,” the counselor said. He grabbed my brother by the shoulders. Erik raised his hand in a fist pump. I could tell he’d spiked his hair with water from the bathroom sink, and he was wearing the same shirt he had on two days before when I’d spotted him at the dining hall. “He’s a two-time I’m Third Award winner.”

“Wow,” Melissa said, her voice suddenly sober. The I’m Third Award was the highest at Kamp. As we were told at every meal, chapel session, Bible study, and worship time throughout the week, the award was named after the life motto of Captain Johnny Ferrier, a man who drove his fighter jet to the ground — and certain death — rather than risk killing others by attempting a safe landing. I’m Third meant God first, others second, and yourself third. By winning twice, my brother had earned a spot as a near-saint. “Well I’ve got his sister,” she added.

I’m Third meant God first, others second, and yourself third. By winning twice, my brother had earned a spot as a near-saint.

Melissa came toward me and I flinched; I hated to be touched by anyone. My face grew hot. In previous years, for my immobilizing anxiety, I’d won the Meek and Humble Certificate, an award allocated only to girls, because I had managed to spend a full week speaking only a few words.

“You must be pretty awesome if you’re this legend’s sister,” the boy counselor said to me. “And you guys are from Indonesia? Pretty cool.” I stared down at my white tennis shoes, the curly pink elastic laces erupting from them like confetti. I kept my head down, not wanting my cabin to suddenly gain interest in where I was from. They’d left me alone after the opening ceremony, and my international residence had evaporated overnight, the immediacy of what flavor Kool-Aid was available with lunch and who launched furthest from the blob in the pool reigning supreme as conversation topics.

But now, if the girls in my cabin realized, the questions would start: What is it like there? Do you live in a hut? What do the people look like? Whenever I was asked about Indonesia, I stuttered at the impossibility of what felt like describing another life. I didn’t know how to compare countries. As I’d left Alaska after kindergarten, my memory there was a blur of moose roaming the backyard and fields of fireweed coloring the mountains hot pink. Indonesia was complicated. I could describe my life as a child: To get to school, I scootered past monitor lizards poking their prehistoric heads from the drains; at recess I whacked my wrist against a taut tetherball, a crowd of caged gibbons behind the school chirruping me on; and in my backyard, I pulled ribbons of gray fading skin from the base of a eucalyptus tree to reveal streaks of pastel oranges, purples, and greens. But to describe who I was there and what that meant — a white American girl on a compound in Balikpapan, and now a girl in a gated, walled-off home with rotating security guards in Jakarta — seemed too big of a task. Usually I stopped at It’s different. In the rare times I did explain, people responded with remarks like, “They really live like that?” or “Whoa,” which made my stomach feel like it was ballooning toward my throat, all of me taut with failure.

Looking back, I realize now that at the age of 12 , it was difficult for me to navigate the glaring privilege of the life I led. Even now I feel reticent about my time in Indonesia, as I still feel like an outsider, someone whose words fall short again and again and again. Though I want to consider myself different from the tourists who collected trinkets and memories of time spent on beaches, was I? Am I? I spoke the language, yes, learned the customs, respected cultural norms, consumed local food, was invited into the homes and weddings of Indonesian friends, and tried to remain aware –– as much as was possible for someone in second to eighth grade –– about the privileges I was afforded. But I was also someone who attended exorbitantly priced international schools with other expatriates; lived in homes with marble floors and gated walls; flew to Singapore every other month to get my braces tightened; and, with my passport and family’s financial resources, could leave at any time. My memories of Indonesia are dual in nature. Sometimes I remember myself with compassion: I was a child who remained sensitive to the workings of the world, who tried her best to let love and respect lead her through the thorniness of privilege, place, and power. But other times, I remember myself with disdain: I did not deserve –– and still do not deserve –– the privileges I had and have access to; I am saddened that I, with my presence in Indonesia, contributed to a legacy of colonialism. But there is also this: I was a child. What agency did I have during those early years of my life, when I didn’t have the chance to choose where or how I lived? What grace can I give myself and my family, all of us wanting to respect the communities we landed in during our many moves, all of us seeking to nurture those around us in different ways? Now, it seems possible to hold an array of truths in my mind –– I was a source of harm and also did my best to make a home –– but at Kamp, I only felt a complicated tangle of emotions, with no way to parse them out.

Looking back, I realize now that at the age of 12 , it was difficult for me to navigate the glaring privilege of the life I led. Even now I feel reticent about my time in Indonesia, as I still feel like an outsider, someone whose words fall short again and again and again.

At the volleyball court, the game started with the crack of a first serve. I positioned myself in the back corner, half-heartedly lunging for the ball when it soared my way. After the boys scored a point, I watched as my brother clapped backs and received noogies; he could speak the language of physical affection. The longer I watched him, the further away I felt. Was I the strange one for not belonging to both worlds? Here, he was revered for his awards, his ability to stir a crowd into laughter with his movie impersonations, his athleticism. And in Indonesia, he was a laki-laki, nomor one, praised because he was male, because he was blond, because his skin was porcelain. The men in our lives would ask Erik to help drive the car, give him candy, ride their motorcycles. I, on the other hand, was pinched and prodded at the market for showing my bony legs and tan arms, an anomaly in a predominately Muslim country. I was only a perempuan or gadis, a girl or virgin. My only wish was to belong somewhere, fully and completely, as I could in my bedroom: hair down and bobbing, my voice singing a made-up song in whatever language emerged, my legs and arms swinging with a rhythm I composed.

Comp-e-tition! Woop! Jesus is number one! a girl with French braids and freckles in my cabin began chanting. The thwack of the volleyball from the boys’ side only made her louder, and a few of the other girls chimed in.

Awesome! Awesome! Hit ’em in the head with a big ole possum! the boys cheered back. Sweat trickled down my brow, and I whispered Jesus is number one just in case He was listening, realizing, even while I said it, that the reassurance was just as much for me as it was for God; in Kamp, surrounded by reminders that I should be proclaiming my faith, I felt even more compelled than usual to try believing. Both cabins grew louder, but when someone served the volleyball into a thicket of nearby woods, we all moved to sit on the wooden barrier separating the edge of the court from grass, tired. The chants quieted down. Some of the boys moved close to the girls in my cabin, a proximity Melissa didn’t notice because she’d run to help the boys’ counselor find the ball.

One of the boys, a mop of brown hair framing green eyes, turned to a girl in my cabin. “Ba-gus … sek …” My body froze. “Hey, Indonesia, how do you say it again?”

Erik leaned over from his spot on the barrier. “Say what?”

“You know, what you taught us.”

Bagus sekali!” Erik said, and gave the boy a thumbs-up. I glared at them both, especially when the girl in my cabin giggled back.

“What’s that mean? You speak another language?”

“Kind of,” the boy said. He shook his hair so his bangs swayed to one side. “Erik has been teaching us Indonesian.”

I felt like taunting the boy, asking anda bisa berbahasa Indonesia? You think you can speak my language? The way he spoke the words made me angry, using them only to impress a girl. He didn’t know the cacophony of cicadas screaming high in the rainforest trees, the clucks of a dusty rooster, the high whine of motorcycles straining uphill that turned the language to music. And toward my brother, I felt something I hadn’t before. In my eyes, he had everything: the right clothes, Kamp awards, friends, and the ability to belong anywhere. Why had he given away a language that felt like ours in a country that didn’t?

When Melissa called us to go, I left without saying sampai jumpa to Erik. I was angry without fully understanding why. Usually my brother felt like a kind of home, somewhere I didn’t have to explain my past or present, but watching him give away part of what had tethered us together, our words made me feel further unmoored, as if I didn’t belong even with him. I felt like the long snakes that sometimes hid on the concrete wall near our home, only their flickering tongues peeking out from behind lush leaves of ivy.

***

A few afternoons later, during Flat-On-Back hour, Melissa called my name.

“Wanna join me outside?” she asked. I sat up in my bed, sentence half-finished in my diary, and nodded yes.

From attending Kamp so many years in a row, I knew that I’d been summoned for my Porch Talk. These special sessions spent one-on-one with counselors were designed for Kampers to share their testimonies or deepest struggles. In the past, I’d been so tight-lipped that my sessions had lasted only 10 minutes at most. A couple of the counselors had drawn me a picture of a cliff — me on one side, God on the other — and then filled the gap in with the arms of the cross, telling me that if only I accepted Jesus Christ as my One True Lord and Savior I’d be saved forever, lifted up to Heaven, forgiven for the sins I hadn’t been brave enough to confess to them. Usually, I took whatever paper they gave me, let them place their hands on the back of my head or shoulders as they prayed for me, then shrugged off their touch as soon as I could, returning to my bunk to write in my diary or read the Bible.

This year would be different. I had never told a testimony before, but I had heard enough at church services and Kamp to know the general outline of the narrative — doubtful sinner experiences a dramatic event, feels God’s presence, lays down life for Christ — and so I’d begun to devise one during the hours spent on the soccer field or swimming. If I could tell a good enough story, maybe I’d belong here as much as my brother did. Maybe Melissa would think I was special.

“How are you?” she asked as soon as we were outside. Another counselor and Kamper sat at the other end of the porch, their heads bowed together in tears or prayer.

“Good,” I said shyly. The wood slats of the porch beneath me whorled in what looked like fingerprints. I traced the grain with my pointer finger before realizing that I was supposed to be a girl brave enough to tell a testimony. A good American girl. I looked up and offered Melissa a smile.

“Do you want to tell me a little bit about your faith journey?” She sat cross-legged and leaned forward.

“I don’t really know where to start,” I said cautiously, which was true. I was supposed to be a Christian. I had been baptized in the Catholic church and served as an altar girl at mass for four years in Balikpapan, our parents watching us from the pews. The priest, an elderly Indonesian man, mumbled at the podium, so mostly my religious experience was knowing when to ring the bell, recite my prayers, and try my best not to laugh at Erik when he pretended to swig the chalice if no one was looking in our direction. My parents took my brother and me to church on the compound sometimes too. Church there, some sort of unitarian service, was more fun than the rigid kneel-sit-stand-pray solemnity of the Catholic mass, but I didn’t learn to distinguish between Catholicism and other types of Christianity until I was in my early 20s. To me, God was God. And as a child who took comfort in following rules, in knowing the “right” way to live and love, God was not only God, but also community. Believing in God — and adhering perfectly to every rule set before me — meant in my mind that I would finally find solid footing in terms of identity. The part of me that felt unmoored by moving so often during childhood took solace in the idea that I could be a Christian: something definable, something unchanging.

When we moved to Jakarta, we didn’t attend church because of a series of bombings that had happened a couple years before, but I tried my best to believe on my own, to quiet the voice in my head that said, How can you know for sure that there’s a God out there? In many ways, on the outside, I seemed like a Christian. One of my favorite books was Rachel’s Tears: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine Martyr Rachel Scott. After my fifth or sixth time through the book, I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom and tried to convince myself that I too would stand steadfast in my love for Christ if ever a school shooting happened, that I would die for Jesus. I wore a cross necklace to school, chastised a popular girl when she told me my T-shirt had a “condom pocket,” and wrote worship songs of my own: You surround me, but with clarity or love? Do your arms wrap around me like the wings of a dove?

But my diary from the time wasn’t one of a steadfast believer. I flip-flopped enough between belief and disbelief that I had a codeword, “tnm,” that I would use to differentiate between my entries written by my sinner-self and “the new me.” Looking back, I realize that I learned the language of “new” versus “old” from Kamp, where they preached a fundamentalist version of being saved. While as a baptized Catholic I had technically been freed from original sin, the allure of Kamp was that I could choose to commit myself to Christ. In my mind, in the black-and-white thinking I often reverted to, committing myself to Christ meant not only that I’d be a Christian, but also that I would be “pure,” and that, if I prayed hard enough, I might eventually shed the shell of fear that kept me from wanting to be close to other people. I also believed that if I was Christian, my family would better be able to love me because I was “good,” not trusting fully at the time that they would –– and do –– love me unconditionally; I think I didn’t love myself enough at the time to be able to recognize that. If I believed in God and tried hard enough, as I was taught at Kamp and in sermons, I might be comfortable with greater levels of emotional intimacy, be able to articulate the complex struggles I experienced with identity, or be happier. When I look back at myself from where I am now, I see my fears –– my fear of emotional intimacy, physical touch, my desire to have someone at Kamp tell me I was “good” –– sprang from a lack of self love. I internalized so much guilt about who I was as a foreigner living in Indonesia, about not being able to believe without doubt, and about my shortcomings as a person, that I was afraid to be close to anyone for fear they would see too much of me and dislike me as much as I did myself. I thought religion could save me, give me worth.

For these reasons, I tried my hardest to believe. But “the new me” entries in my diary only lasted a few days, sometimes a week after Kamp, and then I would unravel and make a mess of my newly-saved self. I would still follow the rules of Christianity I’d been taught like modesty and no physical intimacy with boys, but the pulse of true belief often faded away, leaving me feeling muddled. I began to hate myself for not being able to believe like everyone else at Kamp and church seemed to, as if my lack of faith was just another personal failure. During one of these confusing periods, I wrote: I guess you could call me Christian, although if writing solely for myself, I only read the Bible in hopes of making a connection in my life, trying to see the way out of my lonely Friday nights, trying to let my parents love me. Right now I’m stuck, like when you’re driving in a car through a long tunnel and you can’t see the light on either side. It’s the place in tunnels where most cars crash, I think.

“That’s OK,” Melissa said. Her pen hovered over the blank page of her notebook. “What do you struggle with most in your faith?”

“Doubt,” I responded honestly. Whereas I aligned myself with Thomas of the Bible, needing to see something before believing it, my brother believed in the unseen. He’d once claimed to see the cherry red of Santa Claus’s suit disappearing into our bathroom in Alaska, and he would keep his belief until he was 12, my mom breaking the news to him in tears. I, on the other hand, had questioned Santa’s existence at the ripe age of 5. On a piece of computer paper, I had calculated the route for my mathematician dad, telling him that it was physically impossible for a Santa to fly around the world, especially if he stopped to eat cookies.

“Why do you doubt?” Melissa asked. Part of me withdrew, not wanting to give any more about myself away; I had not told any other counselor that I doubted, because I wanted to be a good Kamper. But something about Melissa made me want to talk. If she kept my secrets in her notebook, maybe I would mean something to her. Though I shied away from physical affection, my story in her notebook would seem like a kind of closeness, an emotional intimacy I could handle.

“It’s complicated,” I said, and I twisted a chunk of my shirt between my fingers. How could I explain something that I hadn’t been able to put words to in my own diary? The doubt itself was complicated, a gnarly-rooted plant taking hold somewhere deep within me: How could there be a One True Christian God if outside my home every other person believed just as fervently in Allah? How could Christianity be the only thing that was right and real if another set of people sang their own beautiful prayers? I felt like Thomas; I couldn’t believe without seeing a scarred palm. During those years, I often begged God to show me a miracle, a form of proof that He existed, something like a meteor flaring across the night sky. I had heard testimonies from visiting pastors about dramatic moments in their lives –– God showing Himself by saving them from drowning after a fishing boat capsized or sending them a friend when they were at rock bottom in their life or putting their cancer in remission after doctors said it was incurable. I wanted a sign like that, but I’d been met with silence, which I interpreted as a message from God that I needed to trust Him, even in the absence of a miracle. I tried my best to dampen my own misgivings, for my faith wasn’t just a means of community or identity; it was also a form of absolution. During a time when I felt perpetual guilt –– over my inability to believe fully in God, my presence in Indonesia as a foreigner, the sadness I saw in my mom’s eyes when I winced during our rare hugs, and my inability to understand why physical touch was so impossible for me though I’d only ever been treated with love –– Christianity offered a salve. I could be pure, no matter how often I stumbled through the complexities of life. I could be good, no matter how often I internally berated myself for not being good enough. This is why I kept trying to believe: I wanted the feeling of salvation to wash over me again and again. I wanted to be clean.

A few months before Kamp started, I woke on our usually quiet street to the sound of motorcycles chuffing down the road, voices shouting, and the familiar crackle of a morning prayer vibrating over a loudspeaker. I left my bed and padded over to my brother’s room across the hall.

“You want to see what’s going on?” I asked, shoving him awake. He opened his eyes and looked up at the broken ceiling panel above him, one that had collapsed in the middle of the night weeks before from the weight of a dead rat and thousands of maggots, all of them raining onto his bed.

“Mom said to stay inside,” he mumbled. Usually he was braver than I was, not afraid to break the rules if he was sure he wouldn’t get caught. He drank Coca-Cola from the fridge while Mom was gone and threw the empty cans into a construction zone next door.

“Come on,” I said. “I wanna see.”

He slouched out of bed and the two of us made our way to the front room of the house, where a balcony on the second floor overlooked the neighborhood park. The park was nothing more than a dusty patch where no house had been built, but that day it was to be transformed into the local site of slaughter for Idul Adha, a holiday celebrating Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his own son and Allah’s subsequent grace in killing a sheep instead. Already, this early in the morning, throngs of people milled about, and goats brayed loudly. Some of the animals had plastic bags tied over their heads. I pinched my wrist to keep my eyes from welling up.

“Whoa, they’re gonna do it,” my brother said, nudging me to look toward the edge of the park, where a long knife glinted in the sun. A group of people flipped a goat onto its side and it wriggled in the dirt. They chanted a familiar prayer while they tugged limbs into place and steadied the head. The man with the knife aimed toward the throat, and soon bright red blood seeped from the goat’s neck and into the ground, the crowd voicing praise. I watched as the goat was hung with a rope from one of the park’s feeble trees, blood dripping down.

I watched as the goat was hung with a rope from one of the park’s feeble trees, blood dripping down.

Later that day, our doorbell rang. One of our security guards, a man with a face that looked not much older than mine, was waiting outside. Usually he joked around with Erik, the two of them throwing wiffle balls at each other over our tall gate, but that day he was somber. In each hand he held a steaming bowl of meat, rice underneath.

“I share goat with you,” he said slowly in English. “As Allah waters ground, may he bless you.”

My mom took the bowls in her hands. We thanked Effrianto and told him to have a happy holiday. When he’d gone, we put the meat on our dining room table. My mom and I, largely vegetarian at the time, didn’t care to eat it, and it went untouched by my brother and dad as well. We left it out on our dining room table the rest of the day, I think as a sign that even though we didn’t partake in the meal, we respected it, communed with it at our table. We all seemed to recognize that it was far more than just food. In a sense, it seemed like a moment representative of inequity that roiled under the surface of our lives. There was something I couldn’t name, at 12 years old, about the stark differences in not only religion, but also in class and race that unsettled me while living in Indonesia: a child roaming the streets barefoot while the heels of my feet kissed cool marble; the stooped older women hawking meager vegetables across the street from machine gun guards who stood stiff outside the gates of my school. My whiteness and wealth perturbed me the older I grew, and I begged always to move back to America, as if that would erase the world’s disparities, as if that would absolve me of my guilt.

On Idul Adha, with the goat on my family’s table, I felt stronger than ever the notion that Christianity couldn’t be the only acceptable religion. According to my Bible, Effrianto would perish in flames because he didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, but how could that be when his act was more generous than any act I’d seen in my own religion? In that moment, I felt torn between believing in a Christian God and admitting to myself that I was stuck in some kind of limbo. But with Melissa in front of me, two hair ties around her wrist, a pearly white smile, blue eyes that looked at me searchingly, I wanted to be a Christian, to forget about all the confusion and adopt what I thought might be a normal, easy identity: a girl who believed in God, a girl who might one day live on Enchanted Crossing Lane in a suburb of some American town.

“Have you accepted Christ as your savior?” Melissa prompted. I was aware that long minutes of silence had passed between us, but I never knew how to articulate the storm of identity that raged in me whenever I left Indonesia behind.

“Actually, I have,” I lied. Though I’d tried over and over to commit myself to Christ, using the language I’d heard others use, writing a contract in my diary and signing my name, I didn’t actually believe.

“I’d love to hear your story, if you’re willing to share,” Melissa said. She flicked her pen between her fingers.

“On Christmas Eve we were on a flight from Jakarta to Thailand. When we landed, everyone in the streets were gathered around television sets in the windows of shops. There was footage playing that looked like a horror movie — waves taller than buildings smashing into land, houses crumbling, streets turned into brown rivers, people screaming. We watched with everyone else, but we couldn’t understand Thai so we walked to our hotel, not knowing what had happened or where, not knowing if the scenes were a movie or real life,” I said, all of the information true. We had been flying that night, we had landed and seen footage from the tsunami, we had received dozens and dozens of phone calls from family members calling my dad’s work cell phone to see if we were alive.

“Wow,” Melissa said softly.

“We had planned to go to Phuket for Christmas, a town that got hit hard, but my dad had picked Chang Mai at the last second,” I said, as my last truthful statement. “For months before the tsunami, I had prayed and prayed for a sign that God was real. Show me, I begged. I wanted to know that He was real. In that moment, in the hotel room, with my dad receiving phone calls from people wondering whether we were alive or not, I began to realize that God must have saved me and my family for a reason.”

I began to cry in front of Melissa, though I hadn’t planned on it. Part of my sadness probably did come from the experience of the tsunami, an event I hadn’t really processed. To hear my grandmother’s voice warble into tears over the long-distance line when she heard my voice, alive, was unsettling. Later, to write letters in school to survivors in Aceh felt like a cruel trick, something to remind me of how useless I was in helping anyone actually heal. What could the words of an American girl with a life, a school, a home, and a family do when so many tangible walls and meals were needed? I felt terrible that I, of such little faith, had survived a storm for no clear reason. And the idea that I’d just used such a devastating event as a lie made my shoulders shake harder with grief.

Melissa, of course, took my tears as relief that I’d finally told someone my testimony. She rubbed my back with her palm and scooted closer to me. I didn’t move away.

“God kept you alive for a reason,” she said. “You’ve been blessed with a servant’s heart and an opportunity — there’s an entire country of nonbelievers around you. You are a light.”

I nodded and tried to smile through my tears. Wasn’t this what I had dreamt of when I read Rachel’s story? That I would save others from damnation and defend my faith? In that moment, I wanted so desperately to feel as though my life had changed, as though I could be absolved of my guilt and my failings. I wanted some sign that I was moving through the world in the right way, as Christianity seemed to promise would happen if I believed fervently enough. Instead, my stomach churned with the ghost of greasy meat gone sour.

At Kamp’s last supper, the entire dining room was silent. No kitchies stood on the counter to stir batter and belt Disney songs, no one squabbled over the last hot limb of fried chicken in our basket, no one broke into the familiar cheer don’t gimme no pop no pop don’t gimme no tea no tea, just gimme that milk moo moo moo, just gimme that milk moo moo moo. The only sounds in the room were the crinkle of oily parchment paper in the chicken basket, the squish of jelly as I swirled my knife to make a sandwich, and the tap of an anxious Kamper’s foot against the floor. We were all supposed to be quiet in order to prepare our minds and hearts for what was coming next, an event called Cross Talk. I nervously glanced at the boys’ side in an attempt to find Erik, who I hadn’t seen since the volleyball game, but his small frame remained hidden.

JP entered the room, unadorned. He looked smaller or wearier somehow without a bandana on his head or microphone in hand. “Let us bow our heads. Lord, we call upon you to descend upon this place, to enter the hearts of each and every one of these Kampers,” he said. I wasn’t used to an earnest, sober JP. Usually he spoke in his own form of Christian slang. He referred to his wife as “Wifey” rather than by her name, which all of us girls found titillating, and called new believers “baby C’s.”

“Tonight, Lord, we have the opportunity to come to you, to lay down our sins and failings and ask you into our hearts. I pray that each Kamper here receives you,” he said. I clenched my eyes shut tight, feeling that he was speaking only to me. “I know there is doubt in this room, Lord. I know there are souls heavy with wrongdoing. This is the night to give those burdens up to You, because You alone Lord can save, and You alone Lord can heal.”

He closed his prayer. As we did every year on this night of Kamp, we followed JP down the main road, stopping every so often to watch different scenes from Jesus’ last days on earth. In one, two female counselors had wrapped sheets around their bodies as dresses. One woman, playing Martha, busied herself by clanging pans and pots from the kitchen. Mary sat by Jesus’ feet, listening to his every word. Do not be distracted by many things, Martha, Jesus said. There is only one important thing, and Mary has chosen it. Mary began to wash Jesus’ feet and I was struck by the intimacy; I hadn’t seen anyone give affection at Kamp besides same-sex side-hugs, and the moment between Mary and Jesus felt tender. What if there had been an actual Jesus? What if I had been denying his dusty feet? His stories? I was surely Martha, worrying about whether or not I’d get to shop at Limited Too or not during prayers, comparing the lush blond and silky brown hair of my middle school crushes during worship. As we walked along the road to watch the Last Supper, I realized I was probably Judas, too. I had betrayed Indonesia to get a foothold at Kamp, and I had betrayed my supposedly Christian faith by lying to my counselor. I had been jealous of my brother, coveted the clothes of my cabin mates, and harbored a false belief in Jesus. As Judas turned away from the table, clink of heavy coins in his cloak, I began to cry, suddenly overwhelmed by my transgressions.

Dusk settled in over the tallest limbs of trees as we made our way to the kickball field. The night was quiet aside from siren songs of cicadas and the low rumble of a generator. A spotlight illuminated a wooden cross that nearly reached the height of the tall backstop fence. We filed in and took our seats on the dewy grass of the outfield. No one spoke.

From somewhere in the dark, I heard the sound of skin being slapped. Thwack. Thwack. Crucify him, a man yelled, and a chorus of voices joined in.

Away with him. King of the Jews? Thwack.

Messiah? Thwack. Save yourself.

I crumpled my shirt in my hand. From somewhere near the front, I heard soft, low sobs.

Jesus, surrounded by a pack of angry, shirtless men, was brought to the front of the kickball field. His chest was ribboned with red welts that looked too realistic from where I sat. As Jesus was kicked and beaten by the other men, I cried.

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing, Jesus said. His head slumped to one side as the other men lifted him to the cross.

If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself, the men yelled, slapping him once more. I heard myself in their jeers and began to shake with grief. Here, now, after telling a testimony, sitting in front of a life-like Jesus, shouldn’t I finally feel as though I could accept Christ in my heart?

Jesus’ body crumpled on the cross, his arms extended. Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, he whispered, and the spotlight was shut off, leaving us all in the dark. I heard the murmurs of sadness around me: sniffle of a nose, choked gasp of a sob. The counselors weren’t supposed to comfort us during the ceremony, so we all curled into ourselves, hugging our knees and wiping our tears with the backs of our hands.

A few minutes of silence passed, and the spotlight kicked back on. Jesus, wearing fresh white robes, stood blood-free and smiling on the cross. “Tonight you have the opportunity to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior,” Jesus said.

JP rolled a whiteboard onto the field and left it by the cross. On the other side of Jesus, a few counselors gently set a towering bell on the ground. “Confess your sins. Lay down your life for Christ. Ring the bell of salvation,” JP said. Soft worship music began to play — guitar chords, humming, and the song of Jesus we need you — and Kampers began a mass migration to the front of the field.

I could guess what each of the girls in my cabin was writing. A few evenings before, at Campfire Night, we had been encouraged to voice our sins. Some girls wept when they confessed what they perceived to be wrongdoings: having a crush on a boy who wasn’t Christian, posting pictures to MySpace that weren’t Kamp-approved, wearing immoral clothes to school, or dancing to “Genie in a Bottle.” One girl’s story has stayed with me through all these years. The whole week, I thought she had everything. She was beautiful, had a steady Christian boyfriend, and lived in Kansas City. On Campfire Night though, she wept as she told us about how her boyfriend had sprinkled rose petals on her bed for their first anniversary and begged to touch her. He had pawed at the button of her jeans until she complied, telling her they’d break up if she didn’t submit to him. Our counselors responded by asking if she was wearing makeup, or if she’d thought about her clothing choices, and the girl sobbed even harder as she described her short jean shorts.

All of us were harmed in some way by that circle. I realize now that the identity I so longed for — that of a simple American girl — was only a mirage. The actual lives of my fellow cabinmates, if only I had stopped to listen, were filled with grief and complication. I wish now that I could return to that place. I would tell each girl that their worth came not from men or God or what they kept hidden, but from the innate and fierce beauty of their independent hearts and minds.

The night of Cross Talk though, they penned their wrongdoings on the whiteboard. They knelt by Jesus’ feet and raised their hands to the heavens.

I sat frozen on the grass. I felt like I would burst with the impossible decision in front of me. To stay seated in my spot would mean that I wasn’t a true believer; I might go to hell, and Melissa might sense that my testimony had been a lie. Jesus’ bodily sacrifice on the cross — a violence that had just played out in front of me — would be wasted. But to walk to the front of the field, to list my sins and ring the bell of salvation felt fraudulent. To do so would be to claim a Christian God as being the only one true God, renounce other people’s beliefs as false, and reduce an entire country to the category of “nonbelievers,” elevating myself in not only race and class but religion as well. I did not believe in Islam, but I did believe in the earnestness of the daily calls to prayer, the immense, undeserved generosity shown to me, and the footage of hands raised to sky or heads bowed toward the ground after the tsunami.

I sat and wept into my knees. Years later, I would want to reach out in time to hold that young girl’s hand in mine, lead her away from the dramatic, manipulative ploy unfurling on the kickball field, and tell her that her worth as a person — as a girl, a daughter, a citizen of any country— did not depend on whether or not she rang the bell that night, on whether she believed at all. I would let her know that Indonesia — all of its immense beauty, its complications — would remain with her, blooming in strange turns of guilt and desire. Some mornings, before dawn, she would ache for the melody of a long-gone adhan, and her tongue would speak the language of a place she never belonged. She would grow up to assert herself in the world as a woman. She would become someone who made her own thoughtful decisions about who to love and how, someone who settled for nothing less than equality and respect in relationships. She would find her own church, one where the footfalls of a long run became prayer, birds chittering in the trees a sermon, the dappled sunrise above a form of miracle. But there, in that moment, my only options were to ring the bell or not.

She would find her own church, one where the footfalls of a long run became prayer, birds chittering in the trees a sermon, the dappled sunrise above a form of miracle. But there, in that moment, my only options were to ring the bell or not.

A figure stepped gingerly across the dark grass toward me. Erik squatted next to me on the grass.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked. His cheeks were shiny with the residue of tears. I nodded yes. When he wrapped his arms around me, I was reminded of how small he was, how young still. Despite his ability to make friends, despite the show of bravery he put on to prove to me that everything would be OK wherever we went, I realized he must feel some of the anxieties related to identity that I did. Though he was pak and nomor one and a boy at Kamp, those labels came with their own outrageous expectations of what it meant to be a man. None of them involved crying on his sister’s shoulder when he was supposed to be accepting Christ into his heart.

Apa kabar?” I asked.

“Sad,” he whispered. He looked around furtively for a counselor. “I don’t know what to do.”

Saya juga,” I said in agreement. “I’ll go up there with you if you want.”

He nodded, and we made our way to the whiteboard. I couldn’t think of any sins that I wanted to confess to all of Kamp. Was confusion a sin? Doubt? Mistrust of this choreographed night? Because I couldn’t see any options other than believing in Kamp’s version of God or eternal damnation, I hated myself for not being able to believe. The bell began to ring, cheers rising up after. Another one saved! Hallelujah! My stomach turned.

Erik wrote on the board and asked me to come with him to the bell. We stood in a line as Kampers, one by one, often guided by their counselors, pulled the worn rope. Too many people were around for me to ask Erik if he actually wanted to, but years later, far enough away for us both to probe the past, he would tell me that he thought if he rang the bell, it would mean he belonged to something. It was only then that I remembered his struggles with friendships in Indonesia; he had one good friend at school, but other boys made fun of him because he was not aggressive enough, didn’t wear Quicksilver shirts, and cried too easily. At Kamp, he was a hero, his sensitive heart elevated by counselors who saw how he took the trays of other boys after dinner or the way he ran across a soccer field just to make sure I was doing OK.

When my brother made it to the front of the line, his counselors appeared and prayed over him. I slunk back into the shadows, where I held my arms around myself and looked up at the night sky. Constellations usually covered by Indonesia’s smog began to emerge from memory: Orion’s belt blazing bright, Lyra’s lines transforming into imagined chords. I tried to lose myself in the rigid boundaries of ages-old light. Around me, Kampers hugged one another, inconsolable. Even after being saved they wept, and I couldn’t tell if their tears were those of relief or anxiety. I listened as Erik rang the bell, one note within the music of other repentant hearts, a song of salvation that I couldn’t bring myself to sing.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

As Impossible and Imperfect as Translation

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In this beautiful and poignant essay at Guernica, the writer Crystal Hana Kim considers how translating her grandmother’s poems from Korean to English helped her appreciate the imprecision of language not as barrier to be transversed, but as an opportunity for new connection between herself, her mother, and her grandmother.

Last month, my mother recited Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” to me on the phone. I stopped in the middle of Washington Avenue in Brooklyn as she stumbled over the word prairie. I imagined her tongue working to shape those foreign sounds. My mother immigrated to the United States more than thirty years ago, but she has always felt self-conscious about her second language, with its hard r’s and supple l’s. “My friend suggested reading poetry in English to improve my vocabulary, since I write poetry too,” she explained in Korean.

She asked me how to pronounce words she didn’t know—despair, prairie, unrelenting. I repeated them after her, slow and then fast, with definitions and without. We talked about rhythm, image, the deceptive simplicity of Mary Oliver’s lines.

I wanted to weep. My mother and I primarily communicate in Korean, and we rarely talk about literature. We have a complicated relationship, but in that moment, I felt a new closeness—rooted not in the inextricable tie of family, but in choice. I have an immediate affinity for others who have committed to the impossible act of writing.

The more I tried to translate the poems, the more intimidated I became. I wanted to be exact and precise, but inherent in translation is interpretation, the translator’s own agency. I worried. Should I adhere to the words or the rhythms, to the sound or the meaning? Should the poem feel smooth in the translated language, or retain some of the syntactical markers of its original?

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Paul Kiel & Justin Elliot, Andy Greenberg, Mary Heglar, Katherine Miller, and Kyle Chayka.

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The Link Between Hurricane Katrina, Emmett Till, Racism, and Climate Change

This is a photo taken of one of the many homes damaged by hurricane Katrina in the lower 9th ward. (Getty Images)

As Mary Heglar remembers the chaos, human suffering, and racist radio coverage in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — which hit the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till — she considers how racism, discrimination, and climate change are inextricably linked. Read her beautiful essay at Guernica.

The other thing often forgotten, but which I can never forget, was that Katrina descended the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. If you are black, and especially if you grew up in the South, the name “Emmett Till” brought immediate, arresting, gruesome images to mind. The name sank to the bottom of your stomach like a bag of rocks—or like the cotton gin fan that weighed down his barely pubescent body to make it surrender to the Tallahatchie River.

I remembered the meteorologists explaining how hurricanes start off the coast of Africa and gather strength as they cross the Atlantic, following almost exactly the route of slave ships.

I wondered if Katrina was really a 14-year old boy named Emmett.

I never thought that I’d see the Mississippi my grandfather had known when he was my age, or even the one my mother saw. The Mississippi that brutally murdered a 14-year old boy for a wolf whistle that we now know never happened. But Katrina revealed things that I could never unsee.

I didn’t know it then, but that vision formed the lens I would bring to the climate movement a decade or so later. I can’t help but see the layers of injustice that led to our current situation. The climate crisis is covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It’s what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically “left out,” but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers. I can’t help but see how those same layers complicate and exacerbate the crisis. Who is saved and who is abandoned. Whose bodies litter the road to the “greater good.”

Like my grandfather, New Orleans became more fragile, more tenuous. I saw the things that made them both—the pressure that made the pearl—in a way that I never had before. They became more beautiful, more precious. And I couldn’t unsee it.

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Location, Location, Location: Six Stories on Moving House

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 In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion muses on how her perception of New York City –– and who she is as a result of living there –– has evolved over the span of eight years. When she first arrives in New York City she describes herself as “twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.”

Didion’s exquisite sentence brims with a preemptive nostalgia, one that I have experienced often but struggle to put into words. When I was a child, I used to look forward to moving because it meant for a brief period of time –– during the miles that unfurled between the sticky heat of Louisiana and the crisp blue summer sky of Alaska, for example –– I could suspend myself in the allure of who I might become in any new place. I would often dream that I might shed my tendencies toward introversion or that I would find my true self reflected back to me in ways I didn’t know existed, not realizing that I had to do the work of growth on my own. Before I learned language for any geography and before I sullied the dream of myself with who I was in reality, I could exist as a figment of imagination passing through an unfamiliar world. 

Like the shine of any silver exposed to too much air, the idealized version of myself –– and any new place I came to –– was inevitably tarnished the longer I lived anywhere. But then my family would move again, and I would be free to once again imagine that a place would be enough to change me. My childhood was one of moving boxes and beige walls; divide my age by the number of places I’ve lived, and the answer comes to 2.25. And I have not stopped moving: I attended college in North Carolina, graduate schools in Oregon and Oklahoma, and now live in Pennsylvania, where I hope to put down roots. But even here, I live in an apartment with unpainted walls. A hallway downstairs is stacked with plastic bins and boxes I keep telling myself I’ll unpack soon, though it’s been months since I moved in. And I still use a GPS to get to the grocery store, some sign I’m scared of committing to knowing this geography, the many circuitous routes that point toward home.

What does it mean to always be leaving a place –– and the sense of self created there? What does it mean to have the privilege to move? How do we idealize locations –– both where we are and where we hope to be? What effect does perpetual transition –– both desired and undesired –– have on a person? A family? A community of people? 

1.  This Hell Not Mine: On Moving From Nigeria to America (Kenechi Uzor, July 7, 2017, Catapult)

After Kenechi Uzor leaves his home in Lagos, he wonders if the opportunities advertised about the U.S. –– opportunities, literary magazines, freedom, safety –– are really what they’re made out to be. Uzor bears witness to injustices against “brown souls and unknown bodies, and trans and cis and more. All suffering from the other” and weighs the cost of a life lived in the U.S.

So we sought escape, convinced that to leave was to live. We fled for dry eyes, for a sigh, for firm handshakes and raised heads, for two closed eyelids, we fled. For our babies and grannies. For light.

2.  Two Moms Share Stories of Migration and Breastfeeding (Sarah Mirk, August 5, 2019, Bitch Magazine)

Realizing that stories about migrating across borders during parenthood are underrepresented, a group of Portland-based Latina and Indigenous immigrant parents created a bilingual exhibit, Amamantar y Migrar, to share their stories through audio narratives, videos, and photographs. Sarah Mirk curated two narratives –– one from Minerva, whose mother made the difficult decision to leave her in Mexico for a time, and Maria Elena, who was taken to an immigration center even though she was breastfeeding –– for this multimodal piece. 

I tried to breastfeed, but since I didn’t get enough to eat, I didn’t have breast milk to feed my baby. We arrived here, I gave birth to my third daughter, and nine months after she was born, immigration agents showed up at my work. I was still breastfeeding my daughter.

3.  Location, Location, Location (Jeannie Vanasco, October 15, 2017, The Believer)

Part personal memory of her upbringing in an uneven saltbox house, part reflection on the significance of a moveable dollhouse her late father built for her, and part history of the house moving industry in Chicago –– and the violences that accompanied such an industry –– Jeannie Vanasco explores what it means when the stable walls of a home become transportable, and what types of grief exist in both the construction and loss of a place. 

Pressured to accept food, whiskey, and cash, they signed the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, agreeing to move west of the Mississippi River within the next two years. The wigwams and wooden lodges would be replaced with thousands of new homes for white people. White men would become rich moving them.

4. The Barriers Stopping Poor People From Moving to Better Jobs (Alana Semuels, October 12, 2017, The Atlantic)

The percentage of people who move within the U.S. has been cut nearly in half since the 1950’s. Why? As Alana Semuels reports, factors like zoning in certain states, lack of incentives for low-income workers, and proximity to family affect people’s decisions on whether or not to move, and have led to shifts in the populations of cities across the country.

The supply of workers isn’t increasing fast enough in the rich areas to bring wages down, and isn’t falling fast enough in the poor areas to bring wages up. Why is this? Why have people stopped moving? The reason, economists believe, is that while there are good wages in economically vibrant cities like New York and San Francisco, housing prices are so high that they outweigh any gains people stand to make in earnings.

5. They’re Fed Up With America’s Racism. So They’re Moving to Africa. (Mark Beckford, May 20, 2019, Narratively)

When Lakeshia Ford decided she was going to pack up her life and her budding career and move from New Jersey to Ghana, her family could not understand why she wanted to make the trek to a country thousands of miles from home. Even more surprising, to some, was Ford’s reason: the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Ghana’s fast-growing economy and “Year of Return” initiative in 2019, under which the Ghanaian government hopes to encourage people of African descent to move to Ghana, have attracted many African-Americans to the country. As Mark Beckford reports, Lakeshia Ford is one of a growing number of African-Americans relocating to Ghana in search of community, job opportunities, and freedom from the violence prevalent in the United States. 

6. Keep Moving: The Nomadic Life of an Assistant Basketball Coach (Michael Croley, November 12, 2014, Sports Illustrated)

What does it take to be a Division I head coach? What sacrifices is a person willing to make –– in regard to uprooting family, turning down other lucrative career options, etc., –– to vie for an elusive spot? Michael Croley, in this profile of assistant coach Gus Hauser, who has moved six times in 11 years, seeks to answer these questions and more.

Like their colleagues in academia, they give up nearly all control of their life in order to move where the jobs are and more often than not, like Gus, uproot their families every two or three years. The sight of Brown, the success he’s had and the stir his presence caused, leads me to believe every single coach, except for a handful, is always working for his next job, and that next job will be dependent upon who he can sign, how many of those signees he steals from the other men in the gym that day, and then if they can turn those guys into players within their system.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.